Tuesday Poem: "Eclipse"

For Lucy (aged 5)

For that moment

my heart froze

my breath stopped

and in that merest sliver of time,

a drop in the ocean of pleasure

I find in your company,

the sunshine fell under shadow,

clouded by a vision of a world without you.

At five

we all believe that nothing can touch us

as we run headlong at the world

wanting to stretch ourselves in every direction,

wanting to soak up everything like a giant sponge,

wanting to run up rainbows,

wanting to dance on clouds,

wanting to sing mountains into being,

wanting to cross rivers on our laughter

and taste and smell and touch our dreams. 

I see you,

little golden girl,

running so hard along these seaside pavements

until you wish you could fly

but for one terrifying moment

as you stood in the middle of that road

I saw you flying away forever,

taking away our sunshine.

I must apologise for the lateness of my posting this week, but the headlong rush to Christmas is, perhaps, a madness I could do without.

Tuesday Poem: "Five Clerihews"

Marilyn Monroe

had fame not fun though.

She took some pills, they couldn’t wake her.

Perhaps she should have stayed Norma Jean Baker.

James Dean

was suave and cut clean,

but when they pulled him from the car

I bet his looks weren’t movie star.

Saint Joan of Arc

lit the spark

which fired a nationalist feud.

The French canonised her, the English barbequed.

Marlon Brando

stayed his hand though

Cheyenne was badly beaten.

It took the gun of his son, Christian but Tahitian.

Madonna Louise Ciccone

has proved herself quite a show pony.

She mixed Marilyn’s image with coney tits

and made a squillion from her hits.

Something a bit light-hearted this week. According to that fount of all online knowledge, Wikipedia, "a clerihew is a whimsical, four-line biographical poem invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley."


Also, according to Wikipedia, "a clerihew has the following properties:

• It is biographical and usually whimsical, showing the subject from an unusual point of view; it pokes fun at mostly famous people
• It has four lines of irregular length and metre (for comic effect)
• The rhyme structure is AABB; the subject matter and wording are often humorously contrived in order to achieve a rhyme, including the use of phrases in Latin, French and other non-English Languages^[2]
• The first line contains, and may consist solely of, the subject's name."

If you wish to delve further into this poetic form, here is the link:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clerihew

The poet wishes to acknowledge Valley Micropress in whose pages some of these clerihews originally appeared.