Using form: George Simmers, ‘A Triumphal Ode’

1 Reply
decorative

A TRIUMPHAL ODE
Humbly Inſcribed to the Occaſion of The moſt Joyous and Auspicious ARRIVAL of
ANDREW MOUNTBATTEN-WINDSOR, Eſq.
at His Majeſty’s PRISON of BRIXTON
Composed with all due Solemnity & Pomp
and designed to be ſet to Muſick by
the late Great GEORGE FRIDERIC HANDEL

All the echoing prison round
Let great tumultuous welcome sound.
Let each incarcerated fellow
Loud and jubilantly bellow.
Let there be no dereliction;
Convicts, show your true conviction
In strong words and in minatory songs
That he is now where he belongs.

Let there be all kinds of musical cacophonies
Let there be mighty rattling of warders’ keys
Let there be synchronised humming of drug-transporting drones
Let them sound, the unharmonious ringtones of contraband phones
Let noise be noise in our unanimous celebration
Of this long-overdue incarceration.

He comes! Let every crooked eye be fixed on
The arrival of Mr Mountbatten-Windsor at Brixton.
He who for so long has sinned with impunity
Let him now be welcomed into the criminal community.
Here with the weaklings and the wicked,
Here with the druggie and the dickhead,
Here among the child molesters,
The frauds and Just Stop Oil protestors
The terrorists, the traitors
And the far-right agitators,
The ponces and the nonces, plus the mugger and the blagger,
The cracksman with a jemmy and the psycho with a dagger,
All citizens of this prison world, the scum of every slum
Rejoice and raise a happy voice that he at last is come
He, born second in line to the throne, now come to live
In the world where the snout baron rules, and the man with the shiv

Let him, the ex-royal, the ex-envoy for trade
Come here among his kindred, to the future he has made.

*****

George Simmers writes: “The Epstein revelations have muddied the reputations of many eminent men, and nobody looks grubbier than Mr Mountbatten-Windsor. The distasteful stories and compromising photographs have told their story. The only way is down. This Ode looks forward to celebrating an event that the British public is anticipating eagerly.

“It is doubtful whether prosecutions will follow for many of Mr Epstein’s guests. Their morals may be questionable and their reputations have suffered, but illegality can be hard to prove – it was Mr Epstein himself who did all the luring and procuring. But Mr Mountbatten-Windsor, because of his distinguished family connections, was lured not only with massages, but also with financial inducements. At the time when he was an official trade envoy of the British government, he had access to financial information (such as details of a forthcoming budget) that could have been very valuable to an investor like Mr Epstein. Documents in the voluminous Epstein archive suggest that such information was indeed shared. Mr M-W could therefore be prosecuted for the very serious offence of misconduct in a public office. This ode looks forward to the time when this foolish man is made to answer for his misdeeds.

“Such are the delays that have slowed the British court system since the hiatus of the Covid years, that legal experts estimate that Mr Mountbatten-Windsor’s case is unlikely to reach a court until 2030. It’s a long time to wait, but in the final eventuality, I hope that this ceremonial ode will be sung joyously by a massed choir. I imagine it set to music by that eminent composer George Frideric Handel, who was very good at such things. To those who object that Mr Handel is dead, I would point out that there is a psychic in America who has made productive contact with the shade of Mozart. Several peasant concerti have apparently resulted. I’m sure the lady could persuade Mr. Handel’s ghost, too, to come up with the goods. I imagine something a bit like the Hallelujah Chorus, but maybe even more jubilant.”

‘A Triumphal Ode’ was first published in Snakeskin.

George Simmers used to be a teacher; when he retired he then amused himself by researching a Ph.D. on the prose literature of the Great War. He now spends his time pottering about, walking his dog and writing a fair bit of verse. He is currently obsessed by the poetry of Catullus, and has self-published a slim volume of translations. He has edited Snakeskin since 1995. It is probably the oldest-established poetry zine on the Internet. His work appears in several Potcake Chapbooks, and his most recent general collection is ‘Old and Bookish‘. Another may be on the way.

Sara Teasdale, ‘May Day’

1 Reply

A delicate fabric of bird song
  Floats in the air,
The smell of wet wild earth
  Is everywhere.

Red small leaves of the maple
  Are clenched like a hand,
Like girls at their first communion
  The pear trees stand.

Oh I must pass nothing by
  Without loving it much,
The raindrop try with my lips,
  The grass with my touch;

For how can I be sure
  I shall see again
The world on the first of May
  Shining after the rain?

*****

This poem is in the public domain. Originally published in Flame and Shadow, by Sara Teasdale.

“100 Flowers 2019/35 – Cleveland Pear Trees and Blossoms” by Carol (vanhookc) is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.

Chris O’Carroll, ‘Dorothy Parker on Andrew Marvell’

2 Replies

He doesn’t have the time, he pleads,
For long and patient wooing.
A mortal man with urgent needs,
He would be up and doing.

He’d worship for two hundred years
Your left breast, then your right,
He swears, but can’t because he fears
Death’s swift-encroaching night.

He notes how brief are human lives.
He says you mustn’t tease,
For once that chariot arrives,
You’ll have no days to seize.

Though you know joining him in bed
Is what you’ll likely do,
You’re certain romance will be dead
Before the two of you.

*****

Chris O’Carroll writes: “Dorothy Parker’s verse paints her enthusiastic about sex but skeptical about romance. I wanted to incorporate both of those outlooks into her imagined response to Marvell’s famous come-hither argument.”

‘Dorothy Parker on Andrew Marvell’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Chris O’Carroll is the author of four books of poems — The Joke’s on Me, Abracadabratude, Quantum Creed, and the newly published Ridiculous Positions. He is a Light magazine featured poet and a contributor to Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Extreme Sonnets, New York City Haiku, and The Great American Wise Ass Poetry Anthology, among other collections.

RHL, ‘Fifty Year Argument: Old Fool, Young Twit’

Leave a reply

1. To Myself in Fifty Years Time

Old fool!  You really think yourself the same
As I who write to you, aged 22?
Ha!  All we’ve got in common is my name:
I’ll wear it out, throw it away,
You’ll pick it up some other day….
        But who are you?

My life’s before me; can you say the same?
I choose its how and why and when and who.
I’ll choose the rules by which we play the game;
I may choose wrong, it’s not denied,
But by my choice you must abide….
        What choice have you?

If, bored, I think one day to see the world
I pack that day and fly out on the next.
My choice to wander, or to sit home-curled;
Each place has friends, good fun, good food,
But you sit toothless, silent, rude….
        And undersexed!

Cares and regrets of loss can go to hell:
You sort them out with Reason’s time-worn tool.
Today’s superb; tomorrow looks as well:
The word “tomorrow” is a thrill,
I’ll make of mine just what I will….
        What’s yours, old fool?

2. Reply to Myself – Fifty Years Later

Young twit! You really think we’re not the same?
That means you’re too young to extrapolate.
You’re the mere seed of what I since became:
    a husband, father, game creator,
    global skills facilitator…
        well paid; thought great!

You claimed to thrive, renting some garbage heap;
you travelled: hitchhiked, froze, thought life’s a bitch,
and ate whatever you could find that’s cheap;
    I travel too, and I eat well,
    and choose to sleep in a hotel…
        not in a ditch!

Your search for happiness was excellent;
you lived with several countries, faiths and girls,
though little lasted from those years you spent;
    for when you can’t tell love from lust
    and never work out who to trust…
        of course life whirls!

Your limited perspective proved a sham.
Your rude invective, though a load of shit,
helped fertilise my growth to what I am.
        My resumé –kids raised, loves gained,
        a business built –shows much attained…
            what’s yours, young twit?

*****

I was proud of the form I created when I wrote the first bratty poem, with both the rhyme scheme (abaccb) and the lines getting shorter (3 pentameter, 2 tetrameter, and a dimeter) contributing to the effect of each stanza ending with a punchline. But after I wrote that first poem to my future self at age 22, I was nagged by the need to respond as I got older; and I was never able to produce anything I liked. Finally, a full 50 years later, I produced the 72-year-old’s point by point rebuttal in the same form as the original. The original took a couple of hours over two days to write; the response was done in a couple of hours in one day.

The argument was first published in Snakeskin.

The illustration is one of Tenniel’s for Lewis Carroll’s “You are old, Father William“. And, yes, I still do headstands.

Anzac Day, 25 April: John Gallas, ‘Anzac Snap’

Leave a reply

‘The soldier is F. Come (NZ), to be killed soon after on the crest of Chunuk Bayir.’

Churchill sat in a smoky chair
and watched the London rain:
We’ll chase the Turks to Hell, he said,
and chase them back again.

The Beautiful Battalions sailed
under a seething sky:
they landed at Gallipoli
to do his work and die.

We’ll be in Consty-nobble soon
and drinking pink champagne,
and then we’ll get our medals, boys,
and sail back home again.

But X was full of dying men
and Y was full of dead,
and Heaven, boys, was full of shells
that whistled overhead.

O Johnny Turk keeps shooting, boys,
so keep your heads down low:
we’ll be in Consty-nobble soon,
cos Churchill tells us so.

I just stood up to see the sea.
It’s quiet, boys, I said,
and something whistled through the sky
and hit me in the head.

The farm is still at Paterau,
the sheep graze by the sea,
and men ride up and down the bush
who’ve never heard of me.

O History is made by men
with nothing else to do.
They watch the rain, and have ideas
to try on me and you.

But glory isn’t Names and Noise,
it isn’t Arms and Men:
it’s living out the little life
I’ll never live again.

*****

John Gallas writes: “A ballad for the Aotearoa/NZ dead at Gallipoli (Gelibolu). The epigraph is a photo caption from a book that, along with the accompanying picture of F. Come, set me writing. In common with lots of Australian/NZ commentaries (eg. Peter Weir’s film ‘Gallipoli’) it is less than complimentary about the Top Brass, and attempts to represent the soldiers themselves as people from farms and towns who would never come back. Gallipoli remains a potent historical event to NZers: the debate between splendid sacrifice vs foolish waste, world solidarity vs nothing-to-do-with-us, significance vs time-to-forget-it is ongoing. 

“The Blue and Red Pencil drawing by David Barker (Gallipoli, 1915) represents an anonymous ‘cheery’ EnZed soldier. Like Come, he never got back to his farm; he was “At the landing, and here ever since”. The drawing is on p.53 of my collection ‘Star City‘, from which this poem is taken.”

*****

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.  

Sonnet: Meredith Bergmann, ‘Public Art’

1 Reply

A girl, eleven, racing down the street
(who might be an imaginary daughter)
pulled by her Lab (a female?) plants her feet
before a statue whose bronze skirt has caught her
big dog’s attention.
Works of art command
our gaze, on average, for three seconds. Thought
or feeling must work quickly. We can’t stand
like statues—life is taxed and overwrought.
She doesn’t have her gadget, so she scans
the stone: “Remember”, “Deepen” and “Surpass.”
Her dog is eager for a fresher scent.
The sculptures, though, are asking if she can
imagine she might wield these words. It’s fast.
This is the moment of the monument.

*****

‘Public Art’ was originally published in The Sonneteer.

Meredith Bergmann is an award-winning sculptor whose public monuments can be seen in New York, Boston and beyond. Her Women’s Rights Pioneers Monument was unveiled in Central Park in August 2020, and she recently unveiled a monument for the historic center of Lexington, MA. Her many poetry publications include Barrow Street, Connecticut River Review, Contemporary Poetry Review, Hopkins Review, Hudson Review, Light, Mezzo Cammin, New Criterion, New Verse Review, Tri Quarterly Review and the anthologies Hot Sonnets, Love Affairs at the Villa Nelle, Alongside We Travel: Contemporary Poets on Autism, Powow River Poets Anthology II, and the forthcomingThe Country in the Mirror: Poems of Protest and Witness. She was poetry editor of American Arts Quarterly from 2006-2017. She has won three honorable mentions from the Frost Farm Poetry Prize, and in 2020, a 2nd prize from the Connecticut Poetry Club. Her chapbook A Special Education is available online from Bainbridge Island Press, and The Dying Flush, with poetry and illustrations by Bergmann, 2024 is available from EXOT Books.

Photo of Boston Women’s Memorial, Meredith Bergmann, 2003, from City of Boston

Sonnet: Saad Kayani, ‘Sonnet’

Leave a reply

I see no pretty things to write about.
Industrial smoke obscures the summer skies.
No novel image schemas to lay out—
no logical entailments to devise.
I’ll write instead of how efficient, say,
a cluster bomb can be, the skill it takes
to mow the grass on which the children play
and monetize the rubble that it makes.
But better artists beat me to that muse:
the medalists whose medals killers win,
the columnists who weave the daily news,
and spin, and spin, and spin, and spin, and spin!
I’m dizzy now—no pretty things to say.
Poetry is for fascists anyway!

*****

‘Sonnet” was first published in Snakeskin.

Saad Kayani lives in Toronto. Recent poems appear in Shot Glass Journal and Neologism Poetry Journal.

Photo: “GAZA Crisis July 2014” by Syeda Amina Trust® is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Villanelle: Susan Jarvis Bryant, ‘Gassy Asses – a windy villanelle’

Leave a reply

He had a wealth of worthless words to say –
A jawing maw of poppycock to spout.
His bellyful of bluster blew all day.

From dawn till dusk the cosmos heard him bray.
He hee-hawed on until the sun went out.
He had a wealth of witless words to say.

Like rasping bagpipes cranking up to play  
With unremitting eardrum-splitting clout
His bellyful of bluster blew all day.

One Stone-of-Blarney afternoon in May
He heard a louder bloviator shout.
She had a wealth of wicked words to say –  

A brassy blast – a gossipy array
Of noxious guff – the lingo of a lout.  
Her bellyful of bull blew him away.

Their hot air flared. It seared the Milky Way.
It charred a slew of stars and left no doubt   
They had a wealth of wedded words to say –  
A honeymoon of hooey night and day.  

*****

Susan Jarvis Bryant writes: “Through fear of reprisal, I have nothing to say about the bloviating brayers who prompted this windy villanelle. Asses have been known to bite and kick (savagely) when mocked. I know this from personal experience… and livid scars.”

‘Gassy Asses’ was first published in Snakeskin.

Susan Jarvis Bryant is originally from the UK and now lives on the coastal plains of Texas. Susan has poetry published on The Society of Classical Poets, Lighten Up Online, Snakeskin, Light, Sparks of Calliope, and Expansive Poetry Online, The Road Not Taken, and New English Review. She also has poetry published in The Lyric, Trinacria, and Beth Houston’s Extreme Formal Poems and Extreme Sonnets II anthologies. Susan is the winner of the 2020 International SCP Poetry Competition and was nominated for the 2022 and 2024 Pushcart Prize. She has published two books – Elephants Unleashed and Fern Feathered Edges.

Photo: “Braying donkey” by arcticpenguin is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0.

William Walters, ‘Interdisciplinary Indiscipline’

Leave a reply

A lifetime ago, back in seventh-grade band,
“The Bullwhip” had all us kids pledge to expand
Our goals for our music.  He went on to ask us
To double our time spent in personal practice.
The girls—mostly woodwinds—were eager to please;
Ol’ Bullwhip could always control them with ease.
We boys on the trumpets and trombones, however,
Were harder to handle—we thought we were clever.
We readily signed when the sheet came around—
Exploited a loophole that one of us found.
Response to the ask had just turned on a dime,
And some even wrote that they’d triple their time!
Now no one could say that we out and out lied.
A math rule we’d learned was defense on our side:
Go multiply zero as much as you will—
The answer you come to remains zero still.

*****

William Walters “This poem tells a true story about an early class with our respected and beloved school band director, a colorful character who wore cowboy boots and carried a bullwhip around on his hip and actually went by the nickname “Bullwhip.”  A remarkable educator, he managed to be strict and demanding and patient and caring and encouraging all at the same time and, by our high school years, had us rural Southwest Kansas kids whipped into shape—figuratively, not literally—and disciplined to be an excellent marching band that competed very well against the big schools from Wichita, Topeka, Kansas City, and the like when we travelled back east for contests.  We had only about 170 students total in our high school, and we always had over 80 in the band!  Bullwhip certainly knew how to run a music program, and he gave our sleepy little town something to be proud of!     

“As far as the meter of the poem is concerned—it’s technically some kind of hendecasyllabic meter with hypercatalexis in a couple of the distichs.  But I didn’t really think much about rigid adherence to any form; I just went with what seemed to flow and what sounded good to me.”

‘Interdisciplinary Indiscipline’ was first published in Allegro.

William Walters has been a professor of English and linguistics at Rock Valley College, in Rockford, Illinois, for the past thirty-seven years.  He played trombone in many music groups in high school and college, and he’s a bass trombonist in a college/community band even now.

Photo: “Enterprise Middle School band plays for White Bluffs Center Tea Party” by Scott Butner is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Monostich: Farah Shah, ‘Funhouse’

Leave a reply

father as a funhouse mirror: somewhere in that mess is my reflection.

*****

 Farah Shah writes: “I was actually not very moved at first to participate in OnlyPoems’ call for monostitch poem submissions. I’m unfortunately a woman of many words, especially in my writing. I’ve found word limits, shortening stories, and other forms of briefening composition painstaking at best. However, I’ve been trying to do things I’m not very good at (or maybe not very passionate about) because I’ve found the more you move a muscle, the stronger it becomes. I recently cut a piece of mine I loved into less than 300 characters; the Frankenstein-esque process of sewing back the body parts of that poem was difficult, but the new composition that emerged I found to be much stronger. In a way, with less to write, I had more to say. Like many  peoples’ poems, mine is about my father (dads just make for such great material), and because of that, it’s also about me. My father is someone I could write almost anything about: love songs, comedies, tragedies. I didn’t think I could write about us in one line, but I tried to, and I did. Like I mentioned to Karan, the editor of Only Poems, writing this poem reminded me to call my dad.”

‘Funhouse’ was originally published in Only Poems.

Farah Shah is a recent University of Central Florida graduate, spending time between degrees learning to bake sourdough, overworking her airfryer, and penning sappy poetry while she waits for her dough to proof.  She spent her formative years in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, and thinks the best parts of herself come from that time. She writes: “I have yet to wrangle my writing into one specific place, but I post here and there on my instagram @farahxshah, and I’ve been featured on Threads “Closing” Issue for microfiction: https://www.threads.com/@threadlitmag/post/DTTbwivjNQW?xmt=AQF0J35LQzeadqjpGB8j6qbUeGGrAMYyGhCUb3x810IEZg“

“Sunday Self Portrait” by davitydave is licensed under CC BY 2.0.