Tag: free verse

The summers of his youth

In Algiers, you don’t talk about ‘going swimming’
but ‘knocking off for a swim’.

I won’t insist.

People swim in the harbour
and then go rest on the buoys.

When you pass a buoy
where a pretty girl is sitting,

you shout to your friends,
‘I tell you it’s a seagull’.

These are healthy pleasures.
They certainly seem ideal to the young men.

A quote from Albert Camus found in this essay. Submitted by Rishi Dastidar.

Vitriol and Opportunity

I would love to say we’ve got a great show for you tonight,
but I’m not sure that’s the case.
Old friends, no one wants to do this listening.
All too often we are here.
Stunned by a crazy that is rarer than we think,
how incredible, the packing of the deceased,
the pain of disturbing nature with a moment of graphic speak,
of toxic and absurdity.

Here we are again, violent.
Vitriol and opportunity on television,
in the way we talk to each other.
Exonerate from blame a reality that we cannot approach verbally.
Our capacity to be horrified by being truly sad.
The shattered lunacy of real dignity,
the sense of such situations.
Senselessness in being cut way too short.

Read up on being numb,
the dispiriting implications,
troubled enemies with families of pain.
Match the forever-paranoid with great rhetorics
of light and thank you.
Never worse than when the actions of madmen take forever.

Don’t you know the leading of thought
away from the tragedy of shame?
How much living and catharsis in predictable crazy.
Something incredibly stupid and silly
that we had previously lost.
Manifestos of anonymous goodness.
More often than not, people creating solace
for tomorrows they’ve never even met.
Wouldn’t it be nice to cause this hyperbole of feeling,
however fleeting?

Taken from the Jon Stewart show after the Tucson shootings, on the 20th January 2011. Submitted by Haley Patail.

Falseworks

Most falseworks
are designed to support
vertical
loads,
but in practice
they are also subjected
to forces in the horizontal plane.

These result
from dynamic effects
such
as the rapid pouring
or vibrating of concrete,
from the movement of ten-
sioning cables,
from the wind, from differential
expansion
under heat or load,
and from many
other causes.

Some of these forces
can be estimated
but others can not,
and the fact
that they
are usually contained
is no proof
that they are not important.

They may be
particularly significant
in skew spans
where displacements in two
perpendicular directions
produce unexpected strains
in the third,
or in cases where
the design loads are applied
consecutively
rather than simultaneously.

Taken from an article (that I have, without reason, kept for a very long time) on the Building Standard 449:1959 – The use of structural steel in building. Submitted by Kim Rooney.

Not in Our Name

There were mutterings that each day grew louder,
signs and portents that we refused to believe.
Local militia were organizing and drilling
getting ready to answer the call should it come.

Not that people thought that it would come.
They believed, as they hoped,
that something would be done to prevent war…….

As for those others who prophesied and prayed for it,
who wanted the vials of God’s wrath uncorked,
they got what they wanted.
Their prayers were answered;
the land was drenched in blood.

But for the most of us
we did not.

Taken from ‘A Virginia Girl in the Civil War, 1861-1865: Being a Record of the Actual Experiences of the Wife of a Confederate Officer’, edited by Myrta Lockett Avary. By Juliet Wilson.

Détente

read it

KEEP OUT

NO sisters and apsolutley NO brothers

Just sisters

Just for today
Brothers
allowed

and me
Freddie

A notice blu-tacked to the sitting room door by my son, aged seven, 24 February 2011. It was half term. By Amy.

An anemone also

This is a whelk.
When it dies its shell lies
On the sea bed until……

A growing hermit crab
Takes up residence.

In his new home
The hermit does not
Feel the arrival of a ragworm,
Which crawls into the same shell.

Later, an anemone also
Settles on his shell.

So the ragworm, anemone and
The hermit, all live together
In an old whelk shell.

When the hermit feeds,
The ragworm takes his share
And the anemone clears up
What is left on the floor.

If attacked, the great claw
Provides an armour-plated door.

Taken from a display in an aquarium on the Cobb in Lyme Regis. By Nathan Lechler.