Tag: poetry

Time Travel

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A funny kind of time travel, notebooks and diaries. The poem I found in one of them is called time travel too, so I thought, a blog.

I’ve been tidying up a bit as I (re)launch into self-employed life, and I came across some poems I forgot that I wrote in 2020. As usual, there are versions of the same poem, longer and shorter, with scribbles and mis-spellings as they go from bad to – hopefully – better. Here is one that made me catch my breath. I think I wrote it on, or straight after, my first tube journey post lockdown one.

Tell me, which do you prefer Time Travel, or Empty? I’ll type them out below.

Time travel
Accelerating past a future that never was
Posters announce acts
that haven't played,
players that didn't act
in plays that
never opened.
A fleeting almost normal,
quieter.
Bicycles advertised 
a safer way to travel. 
Empty carriages mask what was habitual. 
What more could we lose
By S M R Smith on 10.08.20
Empty 
Posters of a never was
announce acts that didn't play  
and plays that never opened,  
belying the almost-normal 
of this tube ride.
Also by S M R Smith, a month or so later.

On holidays

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See below for all four parts of my poem inspired by a wonderful week in Dubrovnik, Croatia, almost exactly 3 years ago. I didn’t have my camera, and they became my ‘word photos’.

Holiday

I.

One finished fruit drops into the ceaseless sawing cicada sound — loud beneath the gnarled branches.
Peacocks peck between twisted trunks: dusty remnants of different days.
And now for an ice cream.

II.

Discoball light catches the sides, poised
to slice through the turquoise
curve of this small bay
Four rows of coral
and cream
scale a slope
shrubbed with green.
Another slides into harbour,
or does the town move to meet it?
Sleek fortress islands, they tower over the palms.

III.

Ten minutes from the shore
the rustling wake
dominates the motor stutter.
Dark waves to starboard reveal
that night draws near.
But to port the milky sea reminds
we’ve not quite left the day behind.

IV.

The sun has stopped
lighting the horizon
and each charcoal mass
darkens to blue.
Bright Layers of green
no longer startle
above rocky ground.

The canopies,
pierced by cypress tips,
invisible now.
The islands
impose their entirety
on the dark water.

On internet dating

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Soulmatch

We’ve turned the romance down a fraction.
Is there much anticipation? Hardly —
online love’s a bit of a transaction.

He asks me to dinner, I choose coffee.
His messages aren’t dim, I might like him.
Still, I’ll turn the romance down a fraction —

it’s quite likely that, in person, we’ll see
that our written rapport is far too slim.
Luckily online love’s a transaction

and I can later block him, or he me;
we’ll move on with a smile, and wit and vim,
redirecting the romance a fraction.

Since we each have to pay that monthly fee
like veg box subscriptions or the gym,
online love is basically a transaction.

Could this be real attraction? Surely that’s free.
Oh damn those six months I bought on a whim.
It’s time to turn the romance down a fraction,
for the sake of those future transactions.

On life being confusing as a child

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Glimpses

I see her
being stung by the bumble bee
on the windowsill she
was told not to play with.
Then chicken pox, being sick.
Drinking warm water to fix her tummy –
really mummy?

Shutting the door to her room
to keep the monsters out.
Waking up in the night to find
her parents not about
and the lady next door there instead.
That little boy at nursery
slapping play-dough
over one eye: I’m a pirate!

Scrambling over the wall towards
the field at the bottom of the garden.
In her red shorts,  J’ai pas d’culotte
Led back into the house,
getting dressed not quite mastered yet.

The swings at bluebell time:
a neighbour with long curly hair
and armfuls full of them. Was it legal then?

Louise and her red wellies.
Being allowed in the tractor.
Winnie the Pooh on the radio, sat
at the table near the window
site of that bee attack.

Mousey the pony trotting off
with a shrieking cousin on his back.
First school day, at lunch,
assigned to an older girl:
    Would you like seconds?
I remember
my confused look at the clock.

Revisiting ‘Switching off the news’

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Thank you to BBC News Magazine for a fascinating piece on the volunteer doctors currently saving lives in Greece. See it here.

It reminded me of this, which I wrote in early 2012, in response to the endless news reports about the Greek economy that I kept waking up to (more fool me for my choice of alarm clock radio station).

To be clear (dangerous and difficult where poems are concerned), I am not belittling the situation of those suffering the consequences of austerity in Greece, rather I am raising an eyebrow at the system that makes it so.

So:

Switching off the news*

I don’t know what they’re thinking
when they say that Greece is sinking.
All those commentators complaining
about people who are marching
would do better to check the satellite imaging
to see if it’s still there.

So I don’t know what they’re thinking
when they say that Greece is sinking:
take a flight over Athens at night
and you’ll see its lights a-twinkling.
It is definitely still there.

No I don’t know what they’re thinking
when they say that Greece is sinking;
yes the economy is bleeding
and those on gardening leave, weeding.
But ask any geologist & they’ll tell you
its landmass isn’t going anywhere
fast.

*The title is inspired by a Wendy Cope poem called ‘Unbearable or Things that make me switch the radio off’.

And yes, I have now switched station to wake up to.