A poem

IF

If you can keep your head when all around you

Are losing theirs and tripping over you

If you can find a home when none has found you

And claim their garden, house and bedroom too

If you can wash a mile from any water

And roam without recourse to any map

Unwind from cold and calculating slaughter

By curling on a warm and cosy lap:

If you can fall, and find your feet by falling

If you can sleep, yet keep a watchful brain

If you can wake the dead with caterwauling

Or die yourself, and live to die again

If you can stare for minutes without blinking

And wear for hours on end a dreamy smile

And seem to think – quite undisturbed by thinking –

Through narrowed eyes aglow with secret guile:

If you can make one heap of shredded paper

From books they thought were safely out of reach

And sigh, and sulk, and claw and madly caper

At all attempts to reprimand or teach

If you can force your bleary-headed owner

To let you in and out the door at dawn

And oscillate from socialite to loner

And stare back in again with face forlorn:

If you can walk on shelves and spare the china

Ignore commands but answer to your name

If you can hog the whole of a recliner

Designed to hold the largest human frame

If you can turn to stone for half a minute

And climb a tree in fifteen seconds flat

Yours is the blackbird, nightingale and linnet,

For – after all – you are a cat. My cat.

(with apologies to Rudyard Kipling)

Let's go Haiking

I started writing haiku (haikus?) a few years ago, for reasons still unclear. I don’t generally attempt poetry but the haiku is a form that appeals to me, at least in so far as I grasp what they are and sort of get what they are trying to achieve.

Haiku in English, I think, are markedly different from the true Japanese sort, but I think are a valid separate form in their own right. Often people say a haiku must have exactly 17 syllables in a 5-7-5 arrangement, but I don’t agree, since are there many successful examples in English that use quite different structures. One of my favourites (and probably the shortest) is by Martin Lucas:

puddles
bubble

I still write haiku with stabiliser wheels attached – that is, I’m still not entirely confident about what constitutes a haiku (though this site offers wonderful introductions to them:
http://www.haiku.insouthsea.co.uk/english.htm)

However, what I like about writing haiku is that they are a great exercise. For me, a haiku is about trying to capture a single moment, a single thought, feeling or experience, in the most delicate framework. In fact I wrote a haiku trying to express that very thing:

dewdrops in the web
captured like bubbles of time
I think of haiku

I don’t think the above is an entirely successful attempt, though, despite its regulation 5-7-5 arrangement. Using a simile (like bubbles of time) is a bit of a cop-out; I think a haiku should give you stuff straight, laid bare, not hiding behind metaphors. Actually, the more I think about it, ‘like bubbles of time’ is a bit lame. But I’ll leave it there to show where I am with this whole business. Anyway, as I was saying, haiku force you to find only the words that will do, and more than that: they train your mind to seek out those moments that in themselves seem to have a ‘poetic’ sort of force. I’m not sure how better to explain that.

Haiku seem particularly effective at preserving memories, as if they were a sort of reality jam:

rainbow rows of jars
glistening with old sunshine
from hazy autumns

Or these holiday snaps from my three days in Weymouth this year:

a sodden city
smudging the line between sand
and sea

the orange beach ball
escapes over windy waves
light as a bubble

(We never did get it back.)

A poem

Submission

Another flare to fire into the night
More leaden lines to try and turn to gold
More waiting for the fickle fish to bite
Another script is straining to be sold.

A lifeline twists into a hangman’s rope
A brave new spring becomes a dreary drought
Another coal to feed the fires of hope
Another clinker soon to be spat out.