Saturday 24 August 2019

Summer Twenty Nineteen

I can no longer get to the Wye Valley Writers Group meetings in Chepstow, but the members kindly invited me along to their summer celebration on Wednesday and we spent a beautifully warm and sunny afternoon sitting under Pam Robinson's pergola enjoying tea, cucumber sandwiches, scones and a variety of cakes - but it was afternoon tea with difference, with added poetry and prose! All written in response to this season that's now too rapidly drawing to a close.

Recently I've been doing some work with a group looking at "found poems", so I was delighted to hear Pam's contribution on Wednesday - a reading for two voices based on her experience of the summer this year and newspaper headlines outlining less happy events around the globe. Thank you, Pam, for giving me permission to use this on line; it's a great example of how we can use "found" material very effectively within our own writing.

Summer twenty nineteen

A double acrostic sums up a summer bathed in natural glory against the backdrop of ominous news. Alternate lines paraphrase a single day’s headlines (6 August 2019). The remainder are snapshots of my summer.

So many bees in my garden

Shootings in El Paso, and in Ohio too 

Under the long grass, crickets chirp

UK is second-largest arms exporter – fourteen billion pounds in sales

Many butterflies dance on the buddleia

Markets fall as US-China trade war looms

My vegetable patch bright with uninvited guests

Modi splits Kashmir and tensions rise with Pakistan

Everywhere apple trees bend beneath the weight of fruit

Egyptian president gives condolences as car bomb kills twenty

Raspberries, plums and peaches give way to blackberries

Royal Navy ships respond to threats in Gulf


The artichokes flaunt punkish purple petals

The residents of Whaley Bridge talk about their plight

White lilies light the evening, scent assaulting

Water stress ‘alarming’ in forty-four countries

Elderberries ripen and crab-apples redden

Environmental activist killings double to four a week

Nigel, the dog, surveys the scene with satisfaction

Nuon Chea, who killed a million Cambodians, dies aged ninety-three 

The cats, for once, are absent and the birds are glad

Tesco cuts 4,500 jobs across the country

Young and foolish blackbirds, though, crash kamikaze in my window

Youth crime is declared ‘emergency’


Nice to hear cuckoos calling in the Newport levels

Nicola Sturgeon says most Scots will vote ‘yes’

I’ve yet to see the glossy ibis preen at Goldcliff

In Hong Kong, China and the West confront


Nightjars clatter in the dusk at Trellech Beacon

New funding for the NHS – or is it?

Egrets roost in plenty by the lake at Magor Marsh

European diplomats told PM intends a hard Brexit


The herons nest, considerately, in full view of the hide

The gap between London and the rest increases


Evening light shimmers as we camp on Gower cliffs

Even now there’s hope MPs will avert No Deal

Everything seems unchanged for so many years

End of the shipyard as Harland and Wolff go under

Night falls as the fire glows

Not guns but video games caused shootings, Trump declares.


(Copyright Pamela Robinson 2019)






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