You wait ages and then...

Giant panda cub born at zoo is found dead

The Guardian, 24 September 2012

They don’t come round often

so she didn't mind the long wait,

time to catch up on the war

in Syria, poor things, holding out

for an Orwell or a Laurie Lee

to write their legend into print.

It wasn't so cold in the shelter,

the autumn sun had seen off

the morning dew and the wind

that had maddened the spangle

of still green fallen leaves

had let them be, left them neatly

packed into corners and vents

and not so much as a zephyr

remained to fill the white sails

of her broadsheet. All week

she'd waited so one more hour

was nothing, knowing as she did

that the schedule was only a guide,

that the twenty-eight was as prone

to breeze in early as wallow in late.

It rolled in right on time and slowed,

the driver craning his neck

as he coasted past not seeing her

slumped on the bench under

the crisp white sheets of her paper.

She awoke some time later

stood, stretched and sauntered home

to phone her nephew about a lift

into town. He asked hadn't she heard

the number twenty-eight had veered

into a ditch after skidding on leaves.

She berated him, told him

don't believe everything you hear

until you read it in tomorrow’s news.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Antibodies

Some skeptics start to feel the heat

Montreal Gazette, 18 September 2012

her airways are choked

with industrial smoke

her alveoli littered

with no particular particulate

radical molecules

flushed from her ventricles

rush to her nether region

bedevilling her circulation

but the infection is identified

and t-cells multiply

in the marrow;

        pyrexia follows

global inflammation

is no longer in question

staple prices double

as fields are razed to stubble

borders flex on political maps

where refugee camps

sprouting like mushrooms

between droughts and monsoons

prevent any further dispersion

of the agent of infection

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Rosy with cider

Apple growers find poor pickings after wet summer

The Guardian, 17 September 2012

It was the early hours when he’d filled his boots

and with numbed fingers pulled on overshoes

to take to the orchard, swaying down avenues

cutting a zig-zag between muddied ewes

with a Poetry Review held open in one hand,

giving shape with the other to wild declamations

of a half-dozen sonnets by Shapcott on bees

not to weep bees but to sing them into being.

Last year’s rich harvest fermenting within him

his head was buzzing and bee-friendly words

flew out into the night: woundwort and clover

and bee sage. A honeyed moon hung in the sky

multiplied sixfold through pollen-yellow eyes

soothing the histamine rage of his ruddy hives.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

How I lost my faith in Cod

Scientists fear for cod stocks as study reveals there are just 100 adult fish in the North Sea

Daily Mail, 16 September 2012

her inscrutable stare

her industrious hands an instant still

my order incomprehensible:

Cod and chips please

Godship?

not a phrase she'd needed to learn

phonetically till then

Godship?

run that through the Linguaphone—

ah, the renminbi drops

fishachip!

you wan fishachip!

and the writing on the wall

was there all along—

no haddock, no hake

and there is definitely no Cod

it's just fish

and it’s not as cheap as chips

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The way to Senkaku

Chinese ships enter Japanese waters over island dispute

The Telegraph, 14 September 2012

The Chinese fleet

at station off his windward bow

the fisherman

squints the salt glare from his eyes

dries his brow with his cap

and orders in the nets.

Addressed by the admiral of the fleet

in staccato accented Japanese

the fisherman confesses

not to know the way to Diao Yu

then quickly suggests

not to detain his guests any longer

than need be, to please enquire at Senkaku

half a day's sail south-west.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Richard the disinterred

Eyes of the world on Leicester as Greyfriars skeleton find revealed

Leicester Mercury, 13 September 2012

Dig, historian, dig, you’ll never light

upon so sweet a poison as this truth

revealed from under Shakespeare’s tumulus

of oft repeated barbs: millstones unwept

neither villany nor passion prove. Yet mark

how bone from clay the archaeologist parts

and wakes the happ’ly dead Plantagenet king

Richard from God knows what tormenting dream.

Have centuries as sentries gravely served

to flee with affright this trowel wielding foe?

To be with Anne I lowered sword and shield,

sweet Anne, above whom common daisies grew.

The idle pleasures lost to Bosworth field

renew, we are thrown back on living woe.


(c) 2012 Ye Slush Poet

An angel descends upon Derry

Body found on [London] pavement may have fallen from plane

Belfast Telegraph, 10 September 2012

The ever-heedful road sweeper's eye

is drawn to what seems like roadkill

an unearthly amalgam of feathers and gore

too big for pigeon, too bloody for hedgehog

and, when he patty-flips it on his spade,

the face of a child, its eyes upturned,

and a frozen smile like the cherubim

in papist shrines on the Catholic side.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Leaving through the looking glass

Mankind prepares to voyage across the final frontier

The Telegraph, 9 September 2012

Nothing expands a young man’s horizons

like travel. My parents left me standing

on a market square in Cambridgeshire

with a sky that sat on an earth so flat

it looked upturned, convex, and my mother’s

vexed smile speeding towards the receding

horizon, though smaller hour by hour,

even now refuses to fade fully away.

And today, arriving in London is something

the best kept village in Cheshire could never

prepare my daughter for. Everything lies

in reach, not like her teachers taught her.

Looking back, she’s someone now

who, when the lights change, disappears.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The ballad of charity

Born addicts: Some people will get hooked on anything

New Scientist, 8 September 2012

Could she spare some change?

Not as a rule, too stuck in her ways

she strode on past, but paused

at her office door to reevaluate—

the question was not ‘would’

but ‘could’, and of course the answer was ‘yes’

or maybe even ‘should’,

so ‘no’  was wanting even as a test

of logic, and morally in-

excusable, so retracing her steps

to where the beggar sat

she bent and palmed her fifty pence.

The resulting endorphin hit

set off in her brain a chain reaction.

She embarked on a giving spree

unrivaled by any major religion,

gave away all she owned

and as much as she could beg and borrow,

lived in doorways and sold

her body for money to buy the Big Issue

(which she returned unread

to the same vendors so they could resell them

to her again and again),

she kidnapped tycoons and held them to ransom

beheading live on the web

any whose wives refused outright

her demands on behalf of the needy,

while those who put up less of a fight

could expect the safe return

of their husbands, albeit not all at once,

she dealt in crack cocaine,

she trafficked slaves, she peddled guns,

but each donation paled

against the buzz of the previous one

and when Oxfam refused her aid

she laid down her burden, the giving done.

She died in a hail of gunfire

an enigmatic smile on her lips,

knowing the ambush was there

she gave her only remaining gift.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

The apple that survived the fall

Girl left for eight hours in car with murdered family

The Guardian, 7 September 2012

A campsite in the Massif Central.

Mountains whisper with voices of streams.

An amber girl gathers apples in the shade

of gnarled limbs.

Many lie bruised. Her grandmother scrutinizes,

sets them down

like stillborn kittens on the ground.

The amber girl prizes most the apples with leaves,

the ones she believes still alive and becoming trees,

not fooled by the magic of seeds.

Granny furbishes one on her sleeve, eat this one

that survived the fall.

A banderole road

shadows a wind-chime stream,

the engine hums

a lively tune to the pitch and roll

of the mountain’s hem. And then

the music stops

and screaming begins,

windows shattering,

shards, a blizzard

of glass inside the car.

Amber girl dives for cover

beneath her grandmother’s skirts.

Crack of snapping wood,

words not understood,

a smell like bonfire night,

door wrenched, flung wide,

yelling, cracking,

her sister's wordless pleading,

father, mother,

another crack, and another.

A roadside in the Massif Central.

The dead whisper with voices of streams.

An amber girl under canvas in the shade

of gnarled limbs.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

< void >

Tim Berners-Lee: the internet has no off switch

The Guardian, 5 September 2012

my inbox is a doormat

between us, look how

it lies down like I do

downtrodden, put upon

for the want of you

it gathers my suffering

into its indexes

and still among the junk

<void> beside your name

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Sacred cow

McDonald’s launches first vegetarian restaurants to target Indian pilgrims

The Telegraph, 4 September 2012

Come inside, friend, tether your ox

to the rings provided, rest assured

it is safe outside our door,

we butcher no beasts—in this store.

Ours is a bovine friendly joint

built on a symbiosis with cows:

their flesh is our flesh,

their blood flows—well, it flows.

(c) 2012 Slush Poet

Same but for the difference

Twenty-six police injured during sectarian rioting in Belfast

The Guardian, 3 September 2012

Their kind gathers to feast

at about the same times

on the same meat and veg,

but with a pinch more spice

to their grace. They wear

the same shades of Ulster grey

and seem so like us away

from their gravelly estates

they might be taken for human

save for lowering their sights

when our paths meet, taking

pains to conceal their defiance

and fooling no one. True colours

bleed out when lines get crossed.

(c) 2012 Andy Hickmott

First published in Interpreter's House vol 52
'Dedicated to the best in poetry'

Flat Earth Society

Cameron in new assault on green belt

The Daily Telegraph, 2 September 2012

Wirral was once the hundred of Willaston,
Willaston, now marooned in the Wirral
hemmed in by the Mersey and Dee
lapped at its shores by paddock and roost
the M53 seeming to moan through the cedars
modernity caring only to break
for tea and a cake as it hustles on through,
nostalgic for the twenty-first century.

In 1850 Battersea Fields, a wilderness
where gentlemen with more adventurous
ladies strolled the Thames’s reach,
couldn’t foresee the city’s westward creep,
the fences went up, but to keep the city
at bay or the wilderness, who can say?

(c) 2102 Slush Poet