Day 3 Sea Shanty

Day 3 Sea Shanty

I’ll sing you a song of the foreshore and strand

Way down Redcar

I’ll sing you a song of the foreshore and strand

And we’re bound for the vertical pier.

Then howay, pet, howay,

Way down Redcar.

So tara to all you who bewailed the cost

For we’re bound for the vertical pier.

Sing ‘Hello there, Beacon, all shiny and new,’

Oh, down Redcar.

And ‘Hello, steps up to the wraparound view,’

For we’re bound for the vertical pier.

Then Howay, pet, Howay,

Way down Redcar

And tara to all you who bewailed the cost

For we’re bound for the vertical pier

NAPOWRIMO 2013 day 1

Slowly, silently, now the moon
has gone, I can breathe for one
again. When she's looking on,
my heart splits in two, my lungs
become a double silver helix,
a balloon - lift me clean into
the air. Soundless, I hover
over darkened ground.

Napowrimo 2013

Waiting for NAPOWRIMO 2013 to begin.

Prompt day 24 Lipogram

Beautiful Outlaw - RAIN

Let some come to lochs, wells, pools,
but too much gets us upset, seems to stop
mouths, keeps souls doleful.

Cento

Starting from fish-shape Paumanok where I was born,

on a morning sick as the day of doom,

in crumpled, bardic corduroy

I took the embankment path,

full of people with their unsuspected sound.

I think I was searching for treasures or stones.

My veins flowed with the Eastern weather

and a love of the rack and the screw.

Courage was mine and I had mystery,

a burning forehead and a parching tongue.

Gold survives the fire that’s hot enough,

all bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Walt Whitman, Thomas Hardy, Wendy Cope, Seamus Heaney, Jo Shapcott, Carol Ann Duffy, Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Wilfred Owen, John Keats, Tony Harrison, William Wordsworth.

Lullaby Day 18 prompt

Hush little poet, don't write a word,
Your hand's all shaky, your vision is blurred.
I'll sing a song that will calm your mind.
It's been such a long day - all the books you've signed
and that press conference and the interviews
when they read your poems on the 10 o'clock News.
So hush little poet, tomorrow it will seem
that all the fuss and fame today was nothing but a dream.

Day 12 prompt - a sort of translation.

 ‘Der Türmer, der schaut zu Mitten der Nacht’  - (Totentanz  - Goethe)

Determined, they shout about their fur mittens being knacked.[1]

‘How can this have happened?’ they cry. ‘We demand recompense.

We put them in the washing machine in all good faith. Now,

they are shrunken and have become crispy and dried up,

not soft and shining as they were, once, before the detergent

drained the very life from them and the tumbling cylinder

pitched them about until they are fit, now, only for the midden.

You should have warned us!’ but the door creaks closed

and they are left to journey on, bare-handed.

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[1] A slang word meaning spoilt/ruined