The next meeting is on 3rd December and is the Christmas party. This year we're having a Jacob's Join evening and entertaining ourselves with a poetry quiz and some readings.

Check out the new Preston poets blog at http://prestonpoets.blogspot.com

For information on the anniversary book, see the article below.

On 16th November the Preston Bird-Watching and Natural History Society have guest speaker Carole Thistlethwaite, a poet from Euxton. She will be reading some of her wildlife-inspired poems and illustrating with digitally projected images. The meeting is at St Mary's, Cop Lane, Penwortham at 7.30pm.

Eine Kleine Nachtmusik

(After the painting by Dorothy Tanning)
 
201’s ajar, a slant of light:
the eye of a nightmare.
Giant sunflower broken
on the landing;
petals on the stairs.
Children traumatized:
8-year-old Mary
corkscrew golden hair,
torn dress; yellow
petal in hand -
leaning by the door:
washed out, blood drained.

Jane 7, ripped skirt;
hair rippling upwards:
no apples in the cheek -
just a face of grief.
The sunflower a crucified
Christ cut down from heaven.

Someone’s dying out
of frame in room 209.
In 207 a raven’s pecked
out teddy’s brown eyes.
Outside a snowstorm;
and the virgins are the
bone-chimes of tomorrow.

Act of Faith

Minds accumulate their own stores of belief
Harvesting words
To squeeze dry in the press
Crushing
The kernel of hypothesis
To dress the salad of their joy or grief
And strange
The extreme unctions that accrue
The charms embraced
The flaring phlogiston of the untenable
The slick fiction
The wilful self-deception
The skewed view
Perhaps at times these drizzlings serve us well
Inspiring us
To think and act with grace
Reminding mortals to beware of vice
Or prompting oddness
Quaint and fanciful
But rancid oil embitters and pollutes
And hatred can ignite
Once holy balm
Releasing hellish fury like napalm
To raze
What it dogmatically refutes
For each established 'truth'
That we believe
Shouts crude anathema to other minds
Grant us the inner process that refines
The oils that we inherit and bequeathe

First Frost

Quietness of morning,
Light streaming through
The curtains. No birds sing,
Too early yet. Strange whiteness
All around. Looking out
Of the window, crisp overnight
Frost covering field,
Grass, brambles,
Everything looking brittle,
Fragile, breakable.

Clouds tinged with
Pale red, sunlight
Slowly steals downwards
From tops of trees,
Revealing their bareness,
The barrenness of winter.
Where the sun has touched,
Field, grass and brambles
Lose their fragility.

Grand Old Age?

Old age brings wisdom so they say
but all I see is slow decay.
Once I was strong and fairly clever
and then I wanted to live for ever.
Now I must ask for all I need.
I can’t see properly to read,
I find it impossible now to dance,
and have to live with incontinence.
I cannot hear, my mind goes blank,
I have to ask for food and drink.
My hair is thin, my hands are gnarled,
I am more helpless than a child.
I cannot with equanimity
accept all this indignity.
I am filled with a helpless rage
against this state of ‘Grand Old Age’.

Stagnant Waters

There we are, who we are

a view from a hill

a stream spilling

haphazardly

into waterlogged fields

The way we were

as we were

together

and separate

the people we once were

concealed, packed tightly

wrapped brightly in smiles

So we stayed

so we still are together

and separate and stranded

either side of a ridge

I pretend I depend

on the view from our hill

I am the stream going nowhere

drifting under your bridge

We converge overflowing

bedraggled directionless

a fools’ journey this marriage

collecting in pools

in flat unworked fields

There we are

as we are

Tinsel Tat

It comes too soon, the Christmas tinsel tat.

It’s here, in your face, even before the real

And blessed trees in the unconditioned air

Have shed their leaves in pre-autumn October.

It’s here, the detritus, hauled out of its

Brief dormancy in the warehouse annex:

The scarlet robes, the tapes of brazen girls

Singing Jingle Bells through wedged-open doors,

The giant reindeer lashed to its scaffold

Above the clashing trolleys in the cold, dark

Red-blurred car park of the hyper market

(Open twenty-four hours, seven days, of course).

Yet, it is not for these unwilling hordes,

Trapped among the bleeping tills, to seek

Forgiveness for The Light made dim among

The rows of flickering computer screens.

Behind the shining, lurk the mind benders:

The propagandists and the programmers,

And lost somewhere in all the frenzied hype,

The Programmer Original, who made us

In His own unfathomable image

- Not an exact copy, you understand.

It had been a hectic week at the building site

And there were some tricky issues to weigh.

The installation of a creative psyche,

With long-term free-will functionality,

Produced a number of unforeseen problems.

He did his best on a busy day.