Poetry Blogs (History)

I've tended to have an old fashioned view of libraries - a very positive one, but limited to book borrowing, quiet spaces for reading and a children's corner. Of course, there is much or to a modern library than that and I have become involved with a couple of aspects of Surrey Libraries of which I was previously unaware.

The first of these is a poetry blog. This is a regular feature which incl...

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Sell Me Something More Than Snake Oil And Lies

They say that pulling down statues

Is rewriting history

As though the sculptors who made them

Were historians

And not some commissioned artist

Doing what he was told

Sell me something more than snake oil and lies

It is a form of history

Cast in the wealthy viewpoint

From the stance of the privileged

It’s...

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Re-writing history's a

Picnic Cromwell's

Puritans

Henry V111 and the

Monasteries

Pol Pot Stalin

Mao Tse Tung killied

Millions when they

Pulled down the statue of

Saddam Hussein how that

Transformed Iraq the

Taliban blowing up the

Buddhas made Afghanistan a

Model state simply

Toss a lump of metal into the

Canal

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Judging the crimes of

History is easy just

Pull down a statue but

Who's judging us?

We get away with murder:

Inequality rife

Vice condoned

Old folk choking

Starving kids

Mass extinctions the

Planet going to hell,

Hourly we

Bequeath fresh skidmarks for

Our kids to

Topple

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A stroll around Kirkby Lonsdale with me

Take-away a bacon butty and a cup of tea

Start at Devils Bridge among the motorbikes

This is where we will begin our short hike

The pathway along the River Lune is our walk

Ending up the Radical Steps, breathless, unable to talk

A view made famous by Ruskin and Turner long ago

Across to Underley Hall and the Lune Valley below

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Based on a true story that happened in 1913, this poem was commissioned by a bar that opened last year to chronicle the tale of a bear that happened to "do a runner" from the zoo we had in town and was later captured again presumably with a smacked paw for its misadventures. although I consider this one of my child-friendly poems, (it were heavily inspired by the poem "Albert and The Lion" wrote o...

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In layers of strata lie the tracks of history

Archaeologists hunt for artefacts and bones

I cut off your flex and buried you with ceremony

Lamenting the demise of your dulcet tones

Sentinel moonlight lit the private interment

Your laser will exhume Miles Davis no longer

Millenia of chords traversed that plastic portal

You left me deaf, my hearing aids get stronger

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The Overland Launch:

In the land of Coleridge and his Ancient Mariner,

    In a time of coal fires, wooden boats and horsepower,

There is a story of the Lynmouth Lifeboat Louisa

    And the night horse and man over 13 miles pulled her.

Two of the afternoon clock struck a chime,

    On January 12th, 1899.

The wind howled and the sea it roared,

    Flooding ports and rai...

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