List

Copyright: Janet Cameron

LIST

I like the sound
when soft winds play pizzicato on wing feathers
of swans in flight.

I like the songs
of sunset when starlings audition
for Aerial Idol.

 

I like the sight
of sanderlings prospecting in the shallows
like grouchy old men.

I like the fresh smell
of a new day,- the taste of sea spray
on my lips

and of you on my tongue.


(Janet Cameron, from Acumen No. 51, January, 2005)

Air Mines

AIR MINES

(A flock of swans flew into power lines in January 2003 on the Isle of Thanet. Most were electrocuted or fell to the ground and died of their wounds)

no one gets a medal for this
except perhaps the red badge of
carnage.

I saw her last Sunday
lazy on a slim stream where warblers make
song in reeds
maybe among the slaughtered who

dropped
and later died from wounds
were three who skimmed
my head as i tramped over marshes
i heard their rich vibrato
i knew them personally.

i make light, trivialise, tell myself
they're merely big white ducks
with crooked necks, and lucky
on account of an arbitary accident of
extreme beauty
not to compete with turkeys at christmas

no importance compared to the war in iraq
less newsworthy than kate winslett's diet

a flock of swan needlessly massacred
for want of a few markers
on power lines
over a kent field
in winter

(Janet Cameron from Logos 9, Spring 2004 & Equinox 9, March 2004. Highly commended in The Lady Longford Poetry Competition 2004)

The Way Throught the Woods by Rudyard Kipling

I adore this poem by Rudyard Kipling. When Kipling wrote it he wouldn't have guessed the awful change in our natural environment. It's ironic that his complaint about the road disappearing has now turned itself around. Now we complain because the roads are key, and the precious countryside is disappearing.

And wildlife is diminishing so much. When I was a kid sparrows were the most common town birds.

Their "dawn chorus" woke me each morning. There were so many little birds, so many different breeds. You needed a bird book to identify them all. Like The Observer's Book of British Birds, a little pocket-sized book that went in your anorak (when it wasn't creepy to own an anorak) to be got out the instant you spotted a bird you'd never seen before.

When I was a kid I knew the names of birds and trees and flowers. I'm so glad I had that, so glad the world was as it was for me.  So much has changed, some of it for the better, but a lot for the worst.

Copyright Janet Cameron

The Way Through the Woods, by Rudyard Kipling

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods,
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few.)
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods...
But there is no road through the woods.

What I Like and Dislike About Poetry and Poets and Other People

I like:

Poets who invent new, exciting words, just so long as I have some idea of what is meant through the context in which they are used.

I dislike:

Pernickety people who say, "There's no such word!"

I like:

People who admit they don't know much about poetry, but they have an open mind, and are willing to see if they can get something from it.

I dislike:

People who just declare they don't like poetry, even though they've never bothered to try it.

I can live with:

People who are indifferent but who don't make judgements are okay. That's their choice and they have every right to make that choice. It's just the noisy detractors I cannot stand.

I like:

People who are open to trying different forms, and don't make certain kinds of poetry "wrong". 

I dislike:

People who insist they hate rhyming poetry or contemporary blank verse, or prose poetry, or humorous verse. There's room for everything, and one kind of voice doesn't prevail over all others.

I like:

Poets who are original and who write from their own experience.

I dislike:

Pretend-poets who steal other people's ideas, change a few words around, (just enough to avoid a charge of plagiarism) and present it as their own. 

I especially dislike:

Two poets who have played that trick on me!

A Poem Lovely as a Tree

Sheffield Park,Photo: Janet Cameron

I think that I shall never see

A poem lovely as a tree.
A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth's sweet flowing breast;
A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;
A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;
Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.
Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

By Joyce Kilmer
    

I Meant to Do My Work Today by Richard LeGallienne

Richard LeGallienne was a contemporary of Oscar Wilde and this simple but truly enchanting poem is one of my favourites. In a few sentences LeGallienne justifies his own longing to escape - a longing he indulges with utter and complete joy.  I have been, so many times, inside that experience, but usually I repress my longing to go and dance among the buttercups, and, instead, I press on with my work. I won't ever do that again.

Copyright: Janet Cameron

I meant to do my work today -
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree
And a butterfly flitted across the field
And all the leaves were calling me.

And the wind went singing over the land
Tossing the grasses to and fro,
And a rainbow held out its shining hand -
So what could I do but laugh and go?

Keats' To Autumn

I am going to learn this poem. I think it's great to learn a poem. You can say it to yourself as a sort of beautiful meditation.  To Autumn contains the most sublime sentence structure - a twisty string of delicious words that seem to want to hang around inside your eardrum like an echo.  Soothing to the spirit and keeps the brain synapses sparking.

Every few days I will learn a few more lines until I can recite the entire poem.

Sometimes it's good to do something just for the hell of it.

To Autumn by John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, 
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.


Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
Drows’d with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they? 
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,—
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.