Poems

"Jenny-O" is the pseudonym of a friendly blogger from Nova Scotia, Canada. Her blog is "Procrastinating Donkey". Most Mondays she promotes a poetry challenge. It is a challenge I have taken up several times. Usually you just get a title to run with.

I don't know why - maybe it's just that I am a contrary kind of fellow - but the line I take on these poetry challenges is to come up with something that is a bit out of the ordinary, perhaps defying the expectations of the task setters.

Let's take Monday of this week for example. The title we were given was "The Tool Shed". What would you produce if indeed you felt okay about creating a poem?

I thought about an allotment on the edge of a city in a river valley. I thought about an old shed where the allotment owner would not only store tools and pot plants but where he might shelter from the rain, eat sandwiches and wrestle with terrible urges. I imagined him as a middle-aged  adult still living with his mother, a loner, someone who could never fit in. Someone very quiet with disturbing fantasies. I imagined children playing around the brook, under the trees at the bottom of the allotments and Roger tempting them back to his tool shed. This is what I came up with:-

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THE TOOL SHED

It was where he would take them
Roger I mean
He had an allotment
Down by the brook
Where he grew vegetables
And rhubarb
His mam made crumbles and pies
She loved those pink stalks
"Good lad Roger!" she'd smile
With pride in her eyes.
They say that there were five
But it could have been more
The youngest of them
Was just turned four.
The paper reported
That he hanged himself
But the rumour persists
It was somebody else.

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Looking back through the annals of "Procrastinating Donkey", here's another poem I contributed - in July of last year. It's now resurrected. The challenge was "Music". I thought about birdsong and what mankind is doing to our wild creatures. The poem is set somewhere in the future - perhaps not too far away:-

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MUSIC

Once there was music
Often the sources were unknown
Especially in jungle or forest
You would walk along
With accompaniment
From the green canopy above
From shady branches
Or from shrubs close by
Mellifluous and practised
Rising or falling
Woven patterns in the air
Or single note staccato
Sweet as honey
It was the soundtrack of our lives
Now
All is quiet
So very
Still…

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In May of last year, Jenny-O asked for "Rain" poems and I contributed one I had previously written which contains echoes of my East Yorkshire childhood:-

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RAIN

All through that night
And into the following day
It rained.
We tried to shelter
In the lee of trees
By the crossroads
Where we used to play -
Fine at first
The droplets grew,
Plothering from oak leaves
Under that leaden sky
Till sodden the verges
And the old road
Be-puddled
Muttering rivulets
Flowed down Harrison's Hill
Gurgling to gutters
Replete with water
While wet as fish
We splashed home
In the endless rain,
The endless
Rain.

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I have been writing poetry since I was seven years old. The urge to create poems rises and falls but it never disappears. It's always there. Perhaps you could suggest a new title for me or an idea for a poem. I hope to be inspired by one (sensible) visitor suggestion and to publish that new poem here in "Yorkshire Pudding".