i just thought it was such a cool story and I am dying to take someone specialOriginally Posted by Alf
Hardy again freckle
It threw me a bit that line "No lip has touched it since his and mine " as I thought it was Hardy's voice behind the poem? Then I realised it was his companion that day at the waterfall voicing the poem , probably his wife as she is often in his poems.to a waterfall at the earliest opportunity!!!!!
By eck its quite on here these days....not enough angst in summer clearly!
found this today and rather liked it...
My Papa's Waltz by Theodore RoethkeThe whiskey on your breath
Could make a small boy dizzy;
But I hung on like death:
Such waltzing was not easy.
We romped until the pans
Slid from the kitchen shelf;
My mother's countenance
Could not unfrown itself.
The hand that held my wrist
Was battered on one knuckle;
At every step you missed
My right ear scraped a buckle.
You beat time on my head
With a palm caked hard by dirt,
Then waltzed me off to bed
Still clinging to your shirt.
Been helping out on a lot of BGRs recently and felt the urge to pen this... I hope it rings a bell with those BGR alumni, both recent and less so!
Aftermath
Glowing with pride and wincing with pain
The heat-of-the-moment cries 'never again'
The pats on the back and the banners unfurled
The texts and the posts pass the news to the world
The following day and a duel with the stairs
A ten hour sleep and the diet of a bear
Reliving those moments of hell and delight
Puking on Pillar, the end of the night
The week rumbles on and the muscles repair
The jubilant mood now threatened by dispair
Months of obsession and focus have passed
Now difficult thoughts try to cope with the gap
The obvious question is what to do now?
The Paddy, the Ramsey, a mid-winter round?
A return to racing and pacing your friends?
Or finding excuses to go round again...
Last edited by OneOffPoet; 30-05-2010 at 09:49 PM.
The Tyre
Just how it came to rest where it rested,
miles out, miles from the last farmhouse even,
was a fair question. Dropped by hurricane
or aeroplane perhaps for some reason,
put down as a cairn or marker, then lost.
Tractor-size, six or seven feet across,
it was sloughed, unconscious, warm to the touch,
its gashed, rhinoceros, sea-lion skin
nursing a gallon of rain in its gut.
Lashed to the planet with grasses and roots,
it had to be cut. Stood up it was drunk
or slugged, wanted nothing more than to slump,
to spiral back to its circle of sleep,
dream another year in its nest of peat.
We bullied it over the moor, drove it,
pushed from the back or turned it from the side,
unspooling a thread in the shape and form
of its tread, in its length, and in its line,
rolled its weight through broken walls, felt the shock
when it met with stones, guided its sleepwalk
down to meadows, fields, onto level ground.
There and then we were one connected thing,
five of us, all hands steering a tall ship
or one hand fingering a coin or ring.
Once on the road it picked up pace, free-wheeled,
then moved up through the gears, and wouldn't give
to shoulder-charges, kicks; resisted force
until to tangle with it would have been
to test bone against engine or machine,
to be dragged in, broken, thrown out again
minus a limb. So we let the thing go,
leaning into the bends and corners,
balanced and centred, riding the camber,
carried away with its own momentum.
We pictured an incident up ahead:
life carved open, gardens in half, parted,
a man on a motorbike taken down,
a phone-box upended, children erased,
police and an ambulance in attendance,
scuff-marks and the smell of broken rubber,
the tyre itself embedded in a house
or lying in a gutter, playing dead.
But down in the village the tyre was gone,
and not just gone but unseen and unheard of,
not curled like a cat in the graveyard, not
cornered in the playground like a reptile,
or found and kept like a giant fossil.
Not there or anywhere. No trace. Thin air.
Being more in tune with the feel of things
than science and facts, we knew that the tyre
had travelled too fast for its size and mass,
and broken through some barrier of speed,
outrun the act of being driven, steered,
and at that moment gone beyond itself
towards some other sphere, and disappeared.
Simon Armitage
Wonderful stuff One Off....doing a BGR is the stuff of dreams for someone such as me but I love to hear of tales associated with it and this is just awesome, particularly liked the reference to puking up, gave it that realistic edge! :-)
nice one harry can't wait to hear the man himself live!
Last edited by freckle; 30-05-2010 at 11:33 PM.
Couldn't have said it better myself
how true is every word?!
I enjoyed the Simon Armitage poem that Harry posted and freckle's Theo Roethke so here is one that very loosely links both poets from Michael Donaghy who like Roethke is an American and was included in the top 20 young poets in 1994 with Simon Armitage.
Machines
Dearest, note how these two are alike:
This harpsicord pavane by Purcell
And the racer's twelve-speed bike.
The machinery of grace is always simple.
This chrome trapezoid, one wheel connected
To another of concentric gears,
Which Ptolemy dreamt of and Schwinn perfected,
Is gone. The cyclist, not the cycle, steers.
And in the playing, Purcell's chords are played away.
So this talk, or touch if I were there,
Should work its effortless gadgetry of love,
Like Dante's heaven, and melt into the air.
If it doesn't, of course, I've fallen. So much is chance,
So much agility, desire, and feverish care,
As bicyclists and harpsicordists prove
Who only by moving can balance,
Only by balancing move.
Michael Donaghy
I think the word to use here is "delectable" ....lush poem Alf, particularly like the phrase "gadgetry of love" and those last two lines...makes me think about the process of running down a hill .....the stuff of signatures i think!
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