Letter to Hong Kong

Queen's birthday parade,
Kowloon, early 1960s

Letter to Hong Kong

after Letter to N.Y., Elizabeth Bishop                                    

In your next letter I wish you’d stay                  

just as you were, easygoing;

the hills, the beaches, the Malay

curries, growing and unknowing,

sophisticated taxis in glittering light,

downing a Coke float, the bowling ball

striking straight, travelling yards and yards.

No one would ever grow old.

Rows of flame of the forest trees so green,

musical drone on a stave,

and suddenly you’re in a different place

where everything seems to be scathed

by leaving, riots and firecrackers

banned, a price to be paid...

Day 10 of the NaPWriMo challenge, and I'm attempting to chart my views about Hong Kong from my teenage years living there, then the years following when I came across challenges to the dominant colonial political views.

Clay

Hmm. Getting a poem down today, Day 9 of NaPorWriMo, was more of a struggle. The Poetry School prompt is: a response poem - argue against, agree with, re-write, or converse with someone else’s poem.

I have been inspired by a poem by Becky Cherriman, amongst other things a poet and writer, who lives in the same northern English city as me.  The poem is called All Princes were Monsters Once, and is in her pamphlet Echolocation, published by Mother’s Milk Books. Having roughly followed the original pattern/form I then cut most of it, used part of what was left, and added something to the end.

I’ve enjoyed posting my complete poems on the Campus part of the Poetry School site, making and receiving comments there.

Clay

Another year, now

he’s more than my size, measures

up, way beyond me in Maths.

I have grown older 

like a trunk lop-sided...

How easy it is

Day 8 of the national poetry writing month - though it is international.  The Poetry School prompt today is anaphora, repetition.  This was dashed off quite quickly. As ever, it is only the first part of the poem. In this case about half.

How easy it is to love the dead tree: first line of The Dead Tree, in The Art of Falling by Kim Moore

How easy it is to love the dead tree

How easy it is to forget that friends die

How easy it is to cut brambles with protective gloves

How easy it is to concentrate just on your lust ...

Bogoff

Hohner Lilliput - beauthiful
to look at, to play
and a full, round sound

As I posted yesterday's today, here is today's NaPoWriMo offering, Day 7
as well, so your buy one get one free, or bogof ... 
The Poetry School Campus, which is a forum you can join for free, has prompted with an ode. So here is the start of one, to the instrument I learnt later in life, and which I love to play and listen to.

Morris melodeon

Pushed and pulled

air in, air out

keep the music going

shoulder passions

pearled, tan wood

cut-out or gold filigreed,

three-rowed or two, many

voiced, or single-minded, ...

Just one cigarette

Mum, not smoking, in the tropical
heat of Hong Kong, looking
towards HK island from the
roof of the YMCA c. 1961

Just one Cigarette

Just one cigarette after lunch

for years, at the wooden table

in Grand Court. The midday heat ...

This is the start of a short poem,

prompted by the Poetry School - a ritual.

Though I wrote it yesterday only

had time to post it today.

For years my mum smoked just 

this one.  I did sneak one or two in 

my early teens.

From protest to memory

Day 5 NaPoWriMo

Aubade

i.m. Tim Garland 1955-1979

The morning you spent on deck with the crew

then came running to tell us we’d be having

flying fish that night for dinner and Dad

said they were only being kind to you because

it was your sixth birthday.

The morning you didn’t believe me I said

there had been an earth-quake. The picture on the wall

had tilted in its frame. In the night ...

Tim and buffalo calf
Clearwater Bay, Hong Kong
c. 1961

There's both more work to be done on this, and there is more of the poem I haven't posted here.

Shake your chains

https://archive.org/details/masque_of_anarchy_pb_librivox

Maxine Peake, actor, has inspired a clerihew, a form suggested, for Day 4 of NaPoWriMo, by the Poetry School:

I listen to her, Maxine Peake,

What ideological physique!

Shakes her chains to earth like dew,

Lippy Lancashire words so true.

Shake your chains to earth like dew are words taken from The Masque of Anarchy by Percy Bysshe Shelley, written to commemorate the people slaughtered at the Peterloo Massacre, Manchester in August 1819, when cavalrymen charged into peaceful protesters killing at least 15, injuring 600-800 others - the first being a 2-year old.  In July 2013 Maxine recited the whole poem at a gathering close to the site, in remembrance.  Details here.  And poet Adam Riordan had something to say about the resonance for today’s governments.

Day 3 NaPoWriMo 2017
Working initially from a prompt at the Poetry School, starting with list poems, this strange creature then took on other guises and emerged as this short poem. I'm still trying to figure out what it means ...

Windowkins

These cute little pieces of glass

staying put in the screen even when

the small saloon car’s bonnet stares

back on itself, and she sits there

with only a streak of blood coming from

her nose, shocked but not broken.

She doesn’t smile, doesn't repeat, 

‘You cute little windowkins’. 

The washing machine

Judders sideways much as a giant crab

might submerge itself in a salty pool

elbowed in by Robin Hood’s Bay rocks washed

by North Sea storms.

Its own storms show a rotting rubber rim,

and a rust Rorschach fronting like an iron lichen.

The washing machine doctor cured it of 

...

My NaPoWriMo effort for today, inspired by a prompt from Paper Swans Press on FB: Write a poem about a kitchen appliance. This, again, is just the first half.

NaPoWriMo 2017

Lion Rock, Kowloon, early 1960s
my view from the Chemistry lab in school

Here we go again!
Today I've used NaPoWriMo as my prompt where they provided a link to a Kay Ryan poem which I have used.  This is the beginning of my draft poem:

School lessons

Dragons come into it

somewhere. Scales sharp,

flames arc from red flesh

just as her tail sinks

down as she shrinks to

become a mere lizard

creeping around the sweaty ...