A new poem - surreal sonnet to be precise...

Day of The Pylons

 

One day, the pylons sat down for a rest,

shook off the cables, yanked up bolted feet

and kicked back. All the countryside was sprawled

with loafing metal giants. Power cut?

The last: this Atlas-race set down our world

of night time brightness on the grass beside them,

and armies couldn’t make them pick it up.

Negotiations failed: we lacked their language.

They didn’t know us for their former masters,

apologising only to the birds

for failing them in prime-time perching season

and that we worked out only after toiling

to break their syntax: creaking, crackling,

a basic grasp of which killed many men.

Owen and The Old Man's Beard

Two things coincided very productively today: I read Wilfred Owen's collected poems on my Kindle, and I finally figured out the name of the plant that I always notice on roadsides in winter, with its clumps of white downy, wispy, cottony stuff - at one point, I even wondered if it was the cotton plant. It isn't, of course: it's Wild Clematis, a.k.a old man's beard. Thus a sonnet called Wild Clematis was born, and duly completed, informed by Wilfred Owen's poetry and making use of the image of the old mans' beard - the white beards that a generation of soldiers would never reach old age to grow. I'm quite pleased with the result, enough, even, to consider sending it to a magazine, which alas prevents me from uploaded it here. Still, when it wins a prize, I've documented the day of its creation; and when it doesn't, well, at least it has a blog to mark it out from the obscurity in which I and the rest of my poems languish.