Tuesday and I wake to my partner having gone to work so I indulge in watching a selection of Mock The Week “things you wouldn’t hear…”. I finally drag myself away from the phone having checked my messages and cyber litter. Still no book cover yet. I get up, take my morning meds and get myself down to the village shop for a paper and then onto the village café for a bacon and sausage baguette washed down with a hot chocolate. I sit and do the crosswords, today I’m on fire and do not need to google anything. Its a small thing but gives a crumb of comfort that I’m still functioning on some level. On returning home I put the bins outside and settle down to, nothing.

In my state of “nothing” I fall back on reading and start my re-read of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I had forgotten just how good it is and fell right back into the joys of Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster and the immortal words “Don’t Panic”. After a while I go the laptop and star to write a poem. As I went to sleep last night I kept thinking about a poem that I remembered from my youth. It was a poem that contained reference to consonance and assonance not being able to express the experience of a prisoner getting shanked in a prison yard. In my head I had started to compose the poem, knowing that the poem I remembered was both right and wrong in some way. I know I read in the Penguin Modern Poet series published in the late sixties. I read the poem when I was 20 and it has stayed with me ever since, but I can’t remember who wrote it and which edition of the Penguin series it was in.

I draft my poem, eat tea and continue to write the poem and still I am nagged by the remembered poem and my inability to know who wrote it. I finish my verses and then start to draft the blog but I am nagged by not knowing who the poet was who stuck stuff in my head when I was 20. I retrieve my Penguin Modern Poets volumes from my poetry shelves and go through them page by page and then bingo I find the poem. Its a William Wantling poem called Poetry. On reading it I am taken aback by the similarities of the two poems in terms of their basic theme. I put both of them here for anyone who wants to read them.

I am distressed,
By my search,
For a poem once read, 
Indelible on my mind.
It spoke of the redundancy,
Of consonance and assonance.
A Penguin Modern series, 
Of the sixties and seventies. 
A man who wrote of prison, 
The brutality of survival
And the way the blood flowed 
When a man got shanked.
For him that was poetry,
He was wrong, 
For years in the heads 
Of the violent, 
The killers,
The outcasts
There was only fear,
Shame and loss.
When space allowed 
There was wit and desire,
To be better.
I was never a therapist 
More an operational moral philosopher,
Just trying to find out 
How to be a good person.
But the verses were always lodged, 
Ticking away in my mind
That there is something,
Beyond the structure 
And the academic noun.
A depth beyond 
The contrivances and the intricacies. 
I’m running out of time
And have no space for the fripperies,
Or linguistic baubles,
If I am to find 
What lays at the heart 
Of the words that move
The world of being. 
My dandelion clock
Sheds itself
As the wind blows,
And still I seek
The lost poem
And the ones to come. 

									365 23-01-24.
    
 

So today has been a good day, somehow there has been a connection over 55 years and the power of poetry is affirmed. My instinct to write seems to have been vindicated. What I find interesting is that Wantling and I seem to have found the same difficulty with poetry. I take my night meds, washed down with a 0% rum and coke and go to bed feeling relieved in a strange affirming way.