Poems by Members - page 2
I am wiped out. They do not speak my name. She has it all now - children, house, the lot. No contest. I am dead and have no claim. She walks in - the surroundings are the same pours tea, snaps roses' heads. And I shall rot. I am wiped out and they don't speak my name. Routines go on; she drives my children home from school and tucks the baby in his cot. I won't protest; I'm dead and have no claim. She entertains his friends - the ones who came before my time - smiles, savours all she's got. I am wiped out. They do not speak my name. You hear faint whispers, hints she has no shame, but it no longer matters who did what, considering I am dead and have no claim. The man we loved gets very little blame; she did, but now she's here, and I am not. I am wiped out and they don't speak my name, seeing that I am dead, and have no claim.
This is the title poem of Merryn's book (just published). It reappears in Peter Stileman's review of the book.
Potatoes in the natural state have wild and waving sticky hairs, once thought to keep inviolate their leaves from aphid predators. The aphid tribe, of every sort, tiny beetles, thrips,and mites, would to this hairy spud resort to sate their aphid appetites. But on the leaf, about to bite, what horror meets the diner's view? His fellow rovers on the site in agony and hairy glue and all around them tendrils thin whose slightest accidental touch acts as a noose, a snare or gin to hold him with adhesive clutch. In situations such as this all aphids recognize defeat, stand helpless in paralysis before they signal a retreat.. Experiments, since done, included whole invading armies wrecked. Botanic scientists concluded that clearly sticky hairs protect. But things are seldom what they seem. New finds uncover truths that fly way beyond the wildest dream. There's more to hairs than meets the eye. The facts are these: when it is dying, a beetle, aphid, thrip or mite, having no voice, instead of crying "danger, help, all is not right!" ejects into the atmosphere a chemical - B-Farnesene - which to any insect near is not unlike a dying scream. Just how this warning operates we laymen may not understand. Suffice to say it activates approaching aphids near at hand. At the potato though enticed by scent of luscious feasting blown as if from aphid Paradise, they'll not approach the danger zone. And so, we're given to understand, this discovery arrests in farms and gardens through the land the depredations of these pests. Watch the aphid millions move when their senses realize in the air the presence of B-Farnesene -now synthesized. Watch the little buggers skip, banished from each planted site; aphid, beetle mite and thrip; beetle, aphid, thrip and mite. NOW there's no such word as can't. From the flower to its roots you free from bugs your choicest plant. Buy the stuff at every Boots. But hold! the story isn't over. B-Farnesene's a pheromone, a signal of fantastic power; a chemical that finds its home, so we are told, in you and me. We too, like aphids are programmed from birth by the same chemistry. We too like aphids could be damned. A fiendish scent has been devised. I read in women's magazines men's make-up is now analyzed and made to subserve female schemes. Whate'er his moral views, no male can spurn a woman far from pure if she chooses to exhale the right pheromonal allure. Conversely, no determined virgin who inhales HIS pheromone can resist the crudest urging of a roaming sexy Tom. So, living creatures are machines. This chemical Impresario has the power and the means to rule you, me - and even Aunty Flo.
Ancient woodland seems to me
a place of mystery.
Between the old trees there will be
rustling and whispering
or a significant silence.
Here a passage of darkness
overarched with boughs
invites but disallows
investigation. It guards
its privacy. No further now.
It will not show what lies concealed.
We may not know
what happened many years ago,
events not fit to be revealed.
Presences linger.That is how
an atmosphere has been preserved,
despite apparent calm
and commonness. No harm in me
the forest breathes and yet ..... and yet,
it retains secrets that it would forget.
That whispering!...... Those silences!
(when hay bales were rectangular)
I step through stubby bristle on the crumbly dry clay earth, where hay bales heap like hampers on a shooting-train to Perth. Lines of corn, cut and drying, texture patterns purl and plain, while other fields are blackened by the burning of old grain. The town dog - in abandon - all quivering nose and ears at partridges' flush whirring, rabbits' tantalising rears, and pigeons flapping upwards in disturbed, branch-hopping flight - leaps and gallops, pants and grins at the countryside's delight. The sun is not September but a memory of June, though hips and elderberries herald winter's crackling tune. A Lilliputian insect mountaineers on corduroy: his winter comes in minutes - make the most of summer joy.