Spring/Summer Issue 2009

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Editorial

Poetry has been much in the press recently with the inauguration of Carol Anne Duffy to the Poet Laureatship and the controversy surrounding Ruth Padel’s ascent to the Chair of Poetry at Oxford.  If you believe that all and any publicity is worth having,  then the good, the bad and the ugly in all this are plusses in raising poetry’s profile and bringing it to the attention of a wider audience.  Although I suspect that, just like yesterday’s news, it will soon resume it’s place as just so much chip paper in a world which prefers clever jingles and soundbites to literary depth. Still, poetry had its fifteen minutes of fame, and then some. The BBC have recently had a series of poetry programmes and discussions, but seem to have adhered to the ‘establishment’ rather than take any risks with the more grassroots or even underground stuff which you can find in the small press publications. It was all very enjoyable, but it would have been more interesting had they not played so safe.  However, it was fun for a while and definitely a step in the right direction.
In the four months since the last issue appeared, we have been deluged with poems and, to my delight, many of them have been of exceptional quality.  There is a wealth of talent out there and Aireings has been the recipient of a great deal of it.  Thank you all very much. 
I was recently asked to be the feature poet for Erbacce poetry magazine, edited by Alan Corkish and Andrew Taylor.  Erbacce has some outstanding work in it, from all over the world, so I was very honoured to be asked, and the editors are dedicated to keeping poetry real, removed from the ivory towers of ‘the old guard’ but maintaining a standard which is hard to beat.  To find out more about Erbacce have a look at the website – www.erbacce.com
Time has been a commodity in short supply – where does it go?  A recent, protracted house move has eaten into a third of my year already and, as I write this, it’s already the longest day (here in the UK at any rate). So we can soon look forward to the shops being filled with Christmas cheer!   Before that, however, interested parties might consider entering the competition below; the deadline now extended to October.  I hope you all enjoy this issue and have a great summer too.
Lesley Quayle. (co-editor)

The Biennial British Haiku Society Haibun Anthology 2009

Entries are invited for this prestigious international event, the purpose of which is to help raise the quality and range of the haibun genre, which combines poetic prose and haiku.

Entry fee: £ 6.00 (cheques to ‘British Haiku Society’, or US$ 12 in dollar bills), plus
 £ 3/ $6 for each additional haibun.

Conditions of entry: Open to all, except BHS Committee members and any others involved with the administration of the anthology. Entries must be written in English, and be between 100 and 2000 words long, including haiku. Work must be unpublished and not under consideration for publication elsewhere. Each haibun should be given a title. Entries will not be returned, so please retain copies of each submission. Copyright reverts to the author after publication in the anthology. In the unlikely event of an insufficient quantity and/or quality of submissions, those that are received will be carried forward to the following year for consideration.

Submission details: Three copies of each haibun, with each copy starting on a separate A4 sheet. One copy should show your name, address, telephone number and e-mail address (if applicable). The other two copies should carry no identification. Entries on disk (floppy or CD, in Word format) are also acceptable and in fact preferred. If you require receipt of your entry, please either request an e-mail acknowledgement or send an SAE, or, for those overseas, an IRC stamped by the originating office.

Address for entries: Andrew Shimield, Haibun Anthology, 18 Deepwell Close, Isleworth, Middlesex, TW7 5EN. UK.

Closing Date: In hand by 1st February 2009 – extended to 1st October 2009

Assessment and appraisal of entries: The process will be undertaken by Jo Pacsoo and Lynne Rees. They will select the haibun for publication in the Anthology, and will provide an explanation and commentary on their selections. It is anticipated that the Anthology, whose title will be drawn from the selected haibun, will be published by Spring 2010. All those who enter will receive one copy of the anthology.

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In my Library

In my library
there are books about other books.
There are stories
you’d rather not hear.
There are men and women cavorting
through fictional jungles
carrying wild animals under their
coats. There are poems in
obscure languages, languages
that no one uses anymore.
In my library
there are a million reasons to keep
moving on, forgetting
the bad news today, forgetting
just what makes us
fragile and human and communicators.
In my library
there is the last word in prayer, the
one that ends, amen.
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The Edge of You

I knew that standing on the
edge of you
was dangerous. It wasn’t the
falling in
that was ticklish. It was the
language your
chaotic abyss used to call me,
the secret tongue
that I thought was extinguished. 

Corey Mesler

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For My Dad

Old life fading
New life emerging
Spinning round and round
Inside my head –
What's up?
What's down?
Everything comes and goes
Like a snowflake on a wet day
For a moment it exists
On the windscreen of my awareness
Before it drips away,
One unique and infinitely precious special moment:
A snapshot of eternity …
 
Andrew Barham

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Orion's Belt

After the relentless
fever of a day
a cross, mean, snipe of a day
came the cool change.
Orion's Belt perfectly clear
between two gum tree silhouettes
and you
musing on the full moon
so bright against the ink splashed blackness
you couldn’t believe it wasn’t lit from within
little green moon men switching on lights.
Lingering in the night air relief
you waved your arms
singing
this.  Just this.
Tomorrow will be hot again
another nasty argument
of a day
forecast.
Still
light years notwithstanding
Orion's Belt is there
as it has been for far longer than our smoky lifetime
cooling your fevered head
reminding you
of this.  Just this.

Magdalena Ball



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Vegas

I was the first waiting.

Stood on a platform,
A missing person from LA,
Catching the next train to Vegas-
Where the silent streets are illuminated with black lights,
And the midnight bars fade into the morning.

The train tracks creaked and shivered,
Frozen over with a blanket of snow.
The sun rides low in the sky
And the grass is laced with dew.
The day began to dim-
The frost slowly melted.

I was the last to leave

Melissa Brabanski, Yarm.

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IN ROBO PARENTIS

Some robots designed to look
after children now are so safe
that parents can leave their
children with them for hours,
or even days – Professor Noel Sharkey
                      (expert on artificial intelligence)

IT expert/ social worker
failed to recognise
the circuit
modifications having been made
from accepted programming
that it had downloaded itself
from the internet
put the bruising down
to the wrong materials
being used for the hands
absolving the robot
from the resultant abuse
suggested woolly gloves
and left it at that

Geoff Stevens, West Bromich

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Emilia

Emilia: always preceded
by the staccato click of heels –
their scuff-stutter, scrape and shriek.
A neat and clever trick, this
appearing before really appearing –
(the painful, sharp hips) – everyone
always looking through that face – (pinched face, pursed lips)
just a petty, pretty thing
come to gun them down with plosives and wit.

Zoe Fiander

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 Looking outside With Nan

                    I don't know where they get the energy?

                    Voiced from a chair in the front room,
                    as against the wind-skewed clothesline
                    a tabby kitten tensed its claws.

                    In the garden, winter sun cast pallor on
                    a narrow pathway, chill-stark grass-
                    where any breath would wreath its own air.

                    Running the line, fiddling with twigs, mousing
                    the scuppered leaves, the kitten now
                    “too old to be taken in, too wild”.

 
 .
 
                      Lisdoonvarna
                                    for Chiara

                   We walked back in the clear
                   pitchless air of a March night,
                   the sky taut and immaculate.

                   We threw our wonders skyward,
                   vain as our unblurred breath
                   to tell the rimless distance-

                   When a brute refrain broke the air,
                   together with shared laughter, as our thoughts
                   turned to the afternoon's walk:

                   The looming glare from huddled cows
                   in dank yards and fields, their sheer stock-stillness
                   mooneyed and inscrutable.

                   The stars are bright, so much brighter out of town.
                  “So many”, you say , “They're like grains of sugar”,
                   tracing with deft hand, the pulse of Cassiopeia. 

Michael Lee Rattigan

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Green Fingers
 
The plants eat light and sound
In the dope factory which gathers every inch
The gardener, 10, sleeps in a doll's house space
Or womb, wrapped in interrogation-lamp hot wires
Encased in the greenhouse machine,
Surrounded by the city, the campus,
The hash-filled houses of iPod
He's woken with a prod:
 
-What time did you last water the plants?

David Whitehouse, Paris

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Leah

  When the Lord saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.

--Genesis 29:31

I wonder how many other women have done
as I have--
skilfully arranged the contraceptive packet
on the bedside-table, flanked by the tissues
and the nighttime read, then crumbled a tablet
into the waste paper basket each morning
while their lovers shower.

I wonder if they feel as I do--
that the guilt is somehow rinsed away
by the thought of his hands inching up
his other woman’s thigh.   
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X

However much I try to think in rational terms,
you will never be mine, lock, stock and barrel.
She is always there, scowling at me,
following us around.

A ghostly wisp with female form
and skinny wrists, tugging at your earlobe
like the miniature devil.
Of course, it could be worse.
There could be a whole paper-chain
of little ladies being pulled along behind us.
At least you've left the dullards out,
cut them loose.

But she was the one you learnt from.
Holding our hands in her wraithlike
authority she wraps her red tail around your neck,
dribbles saccharine insinuations into your ears.
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The Trouble With Forcing Feelings into Words

So as not to blight my chances, explode into the language of teenage angst--
where emotion takes a needle to the logical part of the brain and rationality
is sewn up-- I let time pass, drumming my fingers on counters whilst heating milk
for someone else, looking out the window at the neighbour hanging washing.

It makes you think, there are so many others now looking out of windows,
gazing hard, or sometimes softly if remembering a pictorial past. But those gazing
hard aren't searching-- they're so much themselves. They're wanting, true,
but for what's never audible. And why, if written, would not be legible.

Looking down from the top floor, the feet that scurry the streets beneath
are akin to the wind. It's the horizon that's important. Narrowing eyes squint
at the line where the sky meets building tops, feeling a little freer.
Then they catch their faces ghosted on the glass, are drawn back inwards.

Looking down at hands is another thing. The hands that formally clutched:
the headboard in euphoria (glance at it, envisage a handprint in some dust),
a phone like a lifeline, things that other hands held simultaneously: a paint roller,
one side of a broadsheet newspaper, the stalk of an umbrella.

I think I feel my hands burning. I haven't stopped pressing my nose into the dresses
your hands touched while I wore them, inhaling. My only language can be that of angst,
like the milk bubbling over. And it is rational-- just think of all the other people looking
out of windows.

Lamorna Elmer, Cardiff

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POST OFFICE ON THE RIDGE

tigers saunter in for Western Union
from their non-resident children

oak forests have walked away
and left behind a two-blade ceiling fan

a hundred years ago
here
Corbett shot a man-eating leopard
in the kitchen garden

the ‘India Post’ cottage on the ridge
has an artist postmaster with gerbera and carnation
in his hair
grey with time deposits
that fathers bequeath their sons
and diesel fumes that the hill-girls
now carry as dowry
along with compulsory primary education

in Muktesar*
the sun sets in the west
and renders vermillion
the Lord’s Trident
his Consort and Her East face
further east
the five Furnace Peaks glow

*Muktesar (7500ft) is in the Kumaon Himalayas and commands a panoramic view of Greater Himalayan peaks (22000ft to 26000ft). In this poem, the Lord’s Trident is Trishul, Nanda Devi and Nanda Devi East are his consort and her east face, and the Furnace Peaks are Panchachuli.

Ashok Niyogi, New Delhi

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--- Bird, fallen from tree

I collect her like a fragile parcel,
a soft-pillowed pudding in my hand.

Full of quaking, it's as if she sees death
arranged in sky, on ground,
and in the blossom of tree.


Libby Hart, Australia

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COFFEE CULTURE

I go to the coffee shop, one I have been to many times before.
The young girl asks me what I would like.
I would like a new life, I tell her.
She looks at me for longer than normal, then she smiles.

I mean what I say , I tell her.
Am I in the wrong place I ask as I settle for a coffee.
She turns to the other girl who works there.
New life, new life can we do that.
The other girl turns and takes a look at me and tells me that I am in the wrong place.

But I am always in the wrong place.

Marc Carver

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don’t drink don’t smoke what do you do
 one click those hard patent heels’ paintbox-blue
two clicks the forget-me-nots around your socks
three clicks the gingham-sky checks of your dress
four clicks the harebell haze of your white apron
five clicks the breath-tight azure sash right here
six clicks the cerulean scarab on your silver ring
seven clicks your faux-sapphire string o’ beads
eight clicks the midday firmament in your eyes
nine clicks the mediterranean ribbon at your nape
ten clicks oh those blue-jay paintbox heels…
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Leaf 9
To me you are a webbed hand
waving, signing, believing me deaf.
To me, you sound out your morse-taps,
you brown beech-remnant, you laggard,
you semaphore slip-away and stay-out-late.
You’re the echo of the sudden stink of summer,
a frantic, eager voice begging to sing loud,
the worst mockery, the trace of youth in age.
A touch for that – and get beneath my boot!
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Leaf 1
Beech-husks pitter-pattered on my face,
and skitter-scattered on the rack of an impatient breeze;
a leaf tussled to leave, scratching at my breasts
the way your fingernails used to do.

I held it against the tag-along moonlight,
to see the fan of brittle veins. It’s a Romany thing,
to read the roads of life in a hand, so much more
to hear the lost whispers of summer in a stubborn leaf.

I touched it to my lips, felt it burr as I said
you are a brass-rubbing from the cathedral of trees.
Marie Marshall

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Proper glasses not rose coloured

I saw you in the corner
A study in black
A lesson in spiralled despair.
Yet beyond the whisky glaze
I spied the original, the core, the crux.
Like a masterpiece behind a tawdry copy
Or the feisty sun pushing away the belligerent cloud.
You would become my work in progress,
My perfect day that follows a storm.

Sophie Gidley, Bradford

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Polly’s Train of Thought

Polly’s thoughts run like a night train thriller,
it’s the time that drives her crazy.
Time spent on wasted kisses
time spent on unfulfilled wishes.
A bottle of wine but only one glass,
the mirror laughs; “I told you so”.

So pride comes before a fall. 
Polly’s been pushed through glass
she’s shattered
as if those days never mattered. 
Crashlanded.  Smashed to pieces.
All the king’s horses away at the races. 
Bin bags stuffed with dead flowers
 
and photographs of hollow laughter,
for ever-after seemed to last
no time at all.  Another shift
behind drawn curtains wondering when happiness
upped and vanished: it’s escaped
and on the run down the mascara trail.

True what she heard, alone in the dark,
whispers full of talk talk talk.
Malicious gossip
about her miscarried marriage
and how the wheels
came off that precious carriage,
splintered into thousands of fragments;

she’s fractured. Broken promises
can’t be mended with Prozac glue.
Couplet fatigue; there’s cracks on the track.
Scratch. The songs of romance have failed.
But she’s in another world;
silent heart ache. 
Poor Polly: terminally derailed.

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Two Timing Mouse

You came home loose sketched
calling me ‘honey’
with those large graphite grey eyes
smudged mascara black 
and a cross hatch frown
formed from a shaded glance down,

and yet it was the animated sadness
in the corners of your mouth
that outlined some deceit
in such an intricately hand tinted sorrow.

I’m sorry I found it so funny,
but you did sound like Minnie Mouse,
I’m sure at one point
you even said Mickey had found out
as you tried to cling to me;
end of the world close.

Although I admired that you could sob
so enthusiastically
without depth,
bubbles of pain effervescing
above your doleful head,
but you always were
a dimension short of being loving.
 
Time to confess
that you’re not so skilled in multitasking.
You couldn’t cry and talk simultaneously
you tried,
but it just blabbered out
in fizzy snot and squeaky noises
as you acted out a cat and mouse charade
in a polka dot dress.

P.A. Levy, Suffolk.

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Jill’s poem

when she was young
her poems would
simply run-
free-as-her-old English puppy's
headlong sprint on garden paths -
blind to choice
deceit and the
dangerous road over the hedge -
and oh how the wool
was thick over her eyes

Julie Sampson

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Beware of the Dog

They start out across the street.
In the neighbor's yard.
Next door.
Their mark is unmistakable;
the tenor clear-cut.

You learn your lessons.
One time.  Two times.

You learn when it's safe
to cross the street.
To jump the fence.
To knock on the door.

And you learn when
it's time to hide.

But how come they never told you
about the wild one within,
lurking, brooding, waiting to pounce.
Biding its time to be man's best friend.

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Isn't It Odd?

Isn't it odd
that tonight
after the brief rain

I should recall
who it is
you remind me of?

June Swift, sixth grade, 1965.
That afternoon
on the bus she placed

a bright green tree frog
on her tongue.
I was awed.

Aren't we all,
one time
or another?

Richard Spuler, Houston

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Stage maintenance

Not trying to put on a show anymore
You’re not
Though a circus was minimum
Required
Nay, promised in excited haze

The matinee is over now
The sun is hiding
No one knows if it’s
Getting back on the boards
Again tonight

Gary W Hartley

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MARIA AND LORD BYRON

Grandmother was a junk shop junky
and among her posthumous treasures
I found the bronze medallion Stothart struck
to commemorate the poet’s life.
Byron’s profile looks back at the past,
verso, a bay tree in full leaf remains undamaged
by a zigzag of Zeus’ lightning. Two words
in Greek assert  “Never to perish”.

When his wife told Byron to get lost,
his portmanteaux bulged with past amours.
Smiling at Grandmother’s locket portrait,
returning her shy smile, admiring
the lustrous dark hair, expressive eyes
and pale skin, I guess that if they’d met, 
his Lordship might have found her mixture
of innocence and promise, irresistible.

Why, with so little cash,did she buy
the poet’s bronze apotheosis? 
Maybe she admired the courage that ended
with his death on Missolonghi’s muddy plain
and furthermore, saw as truly epic,
the replica of Achilles’ helmet
he’d planned to sport in battle
or just thought of it as an investment.

Today, the medal’s worn surfaces
reinforce its message of survival.
Byron struggled with life as man and poet,
but Grandmother knew about survival too:
husband dead at thirty-one and two babies
to raise in all around uncertainty.
I could see her smile, older but wiser,
weighing the poet’s value in her palm.

John Younger, Lincolnshire

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Archaeology

The bottle,
Buried in a concrete wall
Near Auschwitz,
Containing a note
Written
By seven young, male prisoners on a work party
In 1944,
Has just been found.

The note,
Written in pencil,
Records their names, the towns they came from
And the numbers burnt into their skin.

They would have sealed in
The worst of what they knew
Behind frozen faces,
Blinding themselves to its horrors.
Perhaps their anonymity
Would, out of all the wires that caged them,
Prove the least impossible to leap.

Knowing that every wall will be toppled
When the time comes,
When what was kept inside its geometry
No longer counts,
Or when it collapses like a slum,
Constructed on the cheap,

Perhaps they smiled,
Wrinkles breaking through the crust.
Did they imagine their autobiographies
Years or decades hence, emerging
From a hole made by hammers,
Absolving the bricks of their long pact
With the cold, grey slop of mortar,
And their freedom's moment
Shining in the dust?

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Bird Movements

Trailer
Stopped at the lights,
Stacked ten feet high with crates,
Blue,
Plastic,
Full of chickens,
Packed in so tight
They can't stretch
Or turn
Or sit,
A single feather
Fluttering as it waits,
A beak opening and closing
And one eye staring,
Till it moves off,
Leaving the street clear,
Able to breath at last,
Open its own eyes,
Get back to business
And pretend that nothing happened here.

Roy Cockcroft

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Tree

Silence of the growing tree
of the trees growth into the heartwood
into this  thought into speech
and where there is no speech
silence of the growing tree
become its own eloquence:
preacher, painter, sculptor
raising its mute arms against thunder.

Colin Honnor

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The Family Her String Quartet

Striding into the home
they have been happy in
for the seven years
since she stormed out

she picks up her bow
and with an imperious nod
tries to rush them
into a march of her design

but they stubbornly hold to
the freeform jazz
they delighted in
while she was gone.

Juliet Wilson

.

Momentary Trace
Out of the lost passage of time
a schoolboy remembrance,
a face glimpsed in the city,
a passport to love and longing
that closed the doors of forgiveness,
denying the days of child apology,
when fault and sin could be forgotten,
while each tomorrow
exacts yesterday’s error.
 
Gary Beck, New York

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About her mother’s face.

Now that her memory has degraded, the daughter
wonders if she overestimated her mother’s beauty.

Youthful photographs, like the early snaps of Marilyn,
 offer no clues as to her face’s full potential.

And the portrait taken in middle age to celebrate her
beauty’s climax, is disfigured by melancholy.

Her mother was ordinary until she joined the school
girls’ crush, as they peeped at her through the stage curtains.

Grew up to be invisible by her side, as men and women
gawped at her in the street like a gorgeous freak.

When paparazzi raised their cameras reflexively at the airport,
it was clear her face deserved a wider audience than East Kent. 

Yet her ambition was to ‘look out her kitchen window
and see a reliable husband digging in his garden.’

In civilian life her beauty only drew a gold rush of rogues
to her front door, and like Rita Hayworth, she could never live

up to her face’s promise. She become a sheep in a wolf’s skin
coat trotting down the high street unable to pay the gas bill.

Incredible now, the daughter’s cultish existence, where
house keeping was willingly sacrificed for turtle soap

and Vichy skin preparations. Her mother's mornings 
observance; heated rollers crowning snow white’s hair

and a wing of 50s movie star eyeliner swept above moss
agate eyes that changed colour with her mood.

Since the house keeping would never have stretched
to a face lift, the daughter wonders what her mother would

have done when heads stopped turning like sunflowers.
‘That’ll be me ‘she teased as they watched Sunset Boulevard,

 but she would never have resorted to shoring up her own facial
 landslide with a chin hammock and tape behind her ears.

Becoming perhaps the Garbo of the housing estate, or made
up for a life time’s abstinence like Elizabeth Taylor.

Twenty years since the daughter has really seen her mother’s face.
Occasionally her memory is ambushed by the appearance of

Ava Gardner on the TV and she changes channels.

Fiona Sinclair

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Sir Algernon and The Poets

In my hand:
An Anthology of Modern Verse (pub. 1921 & reprinted 48 times to 1959).

The copy I picked up today for 50p in Cancer Research has pencilled in:
Diane Campkin neat above the faded inkstamp of County Grammar
School, Windmill Lane, East Grinstead.  The edition we used, and another.

A New Anthology of Modern Verse, 1920 – 1940, but this time poets in charge.

Hymns (and these, I know) taught us what poetry is: metred, neat, and, the Introduction says, no danger to rectitude &     respectability.
Sir A. Methuen hands on the baton to C. Day Lewis and Strong, L.A.G.

No wonder in late 50s & Shock of the New 60s it was pop we hummed.
What was Diane Campkin like?  Blonde, brunette or redhead with the
whitest of teeth, flashing eyes, and the risk of mascara for school, hmm?

And who nowadays recalls A.E (George Russell) or Eva Gore Booth,
Austin Dobson or Helen Parry Eden (Mrs. John Lane)?  Bygones
they are now, just as, like Ozymandias, we shall be next century.

East Grinstead is Scientology Central, is it not?  And is the Grammar
there still on Windmill Lane, or bulldozed for commuter pods, desirable?

But not all of it is utterly forgettable: Eliot, Blunden & W.H. Davies
jog my forty-five-years-later brain: La Figlia che Piange; Rain-sunken
roof, grown green and thin/For sparrows’ nests and starlings’ nests;
Dishevelled eaves; unwieldy doors,/Cracked rusty pump, and oaken floors

And my favourite W.H. – What is this life if, full of care,/We have no time
to stand and stare?  Not while you have to cram for exams, you wretches.
It is only, only poetry, and all of you have livings to earn.  Poetry?  Pah!

C J Heyworth

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CLOCKS AND THE SHADOWS OF CLOCKS

He wanted clocks and the shadows of clocks
in his Victorian manse –
but because he could not abide the ticking of clocks,
the ticking and tocking –
he went out and bought photographs of clocks,
posters and paintings of clocks,
and above the pink hyacinths and rainbow roses,
two-dimensional clocks bloomed,
and he was surrounded by all manner of clocks,
and they were silent, and without shadows –
shadows to grow taller or shorter,
shadow clocks to tell the time to the hyacinths
and the rainbow roses.

Linda Marshall, Leeds.

.

CHILD OF THE UNIVERSE

child with your daisy chains
your rocking horse
and wardrobes crammed with toys
soon the distant future
will blast out
your wayward joys
and your cupboards will be filled
with arthritic bones
and the ever-absent angels
will talk nonsense
on their magellanic phones
and won’t have time
to answer your childlike prayers
as you struggle up
the steep and narrow stairs

Linda Marshall, Leeds.

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