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Thursday 26 March 2009

Friday 20 March 2009

Fire in the Sky -- by Mimitig

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Winter grim, dark, cold, wet
Occasionally snow relieves the boredom
Months with little hope

Early March, Spring shows early shoots
Purple and yellow crocus flowers peep
Afternoons eke out into evening
As the sun stays higher in the sky

Days are ever longer, mostly more rain
Then suddenly
Skies clear

All day is fair
Bright blue
Sparkling blue
Just fluff for clouds

Then sunsets start
Before, it was a nothing
Grey fades to dark, no colours
Now all at once the world has colour

Showers of rain
Bring luminescent rainbows

Evening becomes a joy
Fire in the sky
As a sinking sun
Builds castles in the clouds

Vivid colours allow vibrant dreams
Red turns to orange
Clouds that were grey
Take on electric colours

The palette changes
From the dark to
Utter light

Spring has arrived.

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Friday 13 March 2009

Celebrating Elephant Day

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The international Green Elephant movement is growing apace... there are more of them in the Annexe...

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Wednesday 4 March 2009

Prosaic -- by Ringo37

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Poetry nudges me: you know, poetry says.
You know all of this is irreducible,
Unmanageable, unwieldy, and unfit for prose
(“How about for amateurs?” I want to quip –
But know that poetry, though she loves her puns,
Would fail to see the joke).
Poetry’s relentless: what you feel, now, and what you see –
They’re mine, poetry insists. Where beauty is concerned –
Bandit-masked magpies bounce and glimmer verdigris
In tumbling March light, and clouds, reflected in many-angled windowpanes,
Are copper, now, and cobalt, now, and now the colour of clear tea –
Poetry is proprietorial.

“And what about - ?” – but poetry’s ahead of me.
Yes, all that stuff, too: what’s awful, what’s deep-sunk –
What rolls through you like ocean-currents, riptidal, cold, bonegrey,
Roll through an ocean: over wrecks and bones –
These things that make you (“Me?” I ask – yes, you, she says)
Not weep or sing but, rather, summon something more:
That make you want to answer in a manner consonant in scale with
The way the world expresses things –
These have a sort of beauty too, she smiles – that is, if I say they do.
I smile back at poetry. “And do you say so?” Poetry says she does.
And if they’re beautiful, these things, then poetry
Will take them for her own.

“It’s all the same,” I argue. “Prose and poetry: neither’s real,
Neither’s true, and each is only compromise, is humbug, is a sham,
And furthermore,” I say (for I am drunk and not articulate), “they’re both
Just words, is all they are. Life does not have words –
And nor does life need all that scaffolding
Of scansion, stanzas, rhythm, rhyme and tone – no, life has a high style all its own, and words aren’t worth a damn.”
I fall silent, then, feeling like that Cromwell-era poet who (though Godly) railed against his God,
Until, with gentleness ineffable, rebuked: “Child!”, God says. But poetry
Says nothing –
So I again declare: “Life has no words, and has no need of words”, and poetry says, “Nor has poetry.”
I (being drunk and not articulate) have no quick reply – but think (as I have thought before) that this
Is just the sort of damned confounding thing that poetry often likes to say.
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