My apologies, I have been a bit erratic and those of you who notice such things may have registered my absence for part of the week. It is simply a case of me using my time unwisely. I have caught up with some of it but have decided to let slide.

My apologies, too, for two poems in two days. There’s something tedious about poets publishing their own poetry in quantity, but these two fit together so I thought I’d do them both.

In the meantime, I have had a poem accepted, submitted a few more and had a piece used in a local newsletter. It was based on Major Becher. I have written about him before in several places. I really should go back and make a correction – his son was not killed in a plane crash, but in  an Italian bombing raid. Same result, but different details.

I said, in a previous post, I was going to publish my other, unsuccessful, nomination for the anthology. In a number of ways I prefer this one and would be interested in hearing what people think.

It is 105 words and it is complete. That as i keep saying to people. is the beauty of writing poetry compared to novels.

Autodidact with Knife and Fork

Workmen drag temporary traffic lights into place as their companions spray bright colours on the road. An old lady stoops suddenly, pulls a plastic bag from her pocket, picks up the mess her ancient dachshund made. A scowling mother with a double buggy, swerves around the crouching woman, forcing a teenager to jump aside. He almost drops his phone. A shopkeeper and a builder stand outside a shop, point to a green vee on the wall, discuss the leaking gutter. 

as a child
Breughel’s busy peasants
lived on my place mat
the things my father taught me
over Sunday lunch

For those of you who like context, I “wrote” most of it whilst I was in a queue caused by roadworks where Edwards Lane and Mansfield Road meet outside the Sherwood Manor pub. Sometimes poems just come to me.  The people were all people I saw that day, though not all while i was waiting – the men looking at the shop cropped up later. I missed out the blind man who got mixed up in it all as it was too complicated to explain how he swerved round the lady with the dog and thus showed he had more sight than his white stick suggested. Sometimes less is more. One day I might give him a poem of his own.

It’s a very different process to the previous poem, which was much more engineered and less spontaneous.

It was accepted by Ribbons, first time out, though there was a heavy edit – the final two lines (31 words) were removed and the story of the mats was contained in the rewritten tanka.

Again, no photo. I really am falling down on the job.