Dialect verse: Louise Bennett, ‘Back to Africa’

Leave a reply

Back to Africa, Miss Mattie?
You no know wha you dah seh?
You haf fe come from somewhe fus
Before you go back deh!

Me know say dat you great great great
Granma was African,
But Mattie, doan you great great great
Granpa was Englishman?

Den you great granmader fader
By you fader side was Jew?
An you granpa by you mader side
Was Frenchie parlez-vous?

But de balance a you family,
You whole generation,
Oonoo all barn dung a Bun Grung–
Oonoo all is Jamaican!

Den is weh you gwine, Miss Mattie?
Oh, you view de countenance,
An between you an de Africans
Is great resemblance!

Ascorden to dat, all dem blue-yeye
White American
Who-fa great granpa was Englishman
Mus go back a Englan!

What a debil of a bump-an-bore,
Rig-jig an palam-pam
Ef de whole worl start fe go back
Whe dem great granpa come from!

Ef a hard time you dah run from
Tek you chance! But Mattie, do
Sure a whe you come from so you got
Somewhe fe come back to!

Go a foreign, seek you fortune,
But no tell nobody say
You dah go fe seek you homelan,
For a right deh so you deh!

*****

The trick with dialect verse is to read it aloud, and let it make sense. Then a word like “doan” will clarify itself as “don’t”. Perhaps the most difficult line in this poem is “Oonoo all barn dung a Bun Grung–” which is “You all born down in Burnt Ground”, a rural community in Jamaica.

Louise Bennett (1919 – 2006), more formally Louise Simone Bennett-Coverley OM OJ MBE, more commonly known by her pen name Miss Lou, was a Jamaican poet, folklorist, actress, writer and educator. She wrote and performed her poems in Jamaican Patois. Raised in Jamaica, educated at RADA on a British Council scholarship, she built her career in Jamaica but moved to Canada in her later years.

Semi-formal verse: Ann Drysdale, ‘Dialogue’

3 Replies

He might be coming tonight, said Heart to Head.
No he won’t, Head replied, firmly. You heard what he said.
I know, said Heart, but still he didn’t exactly
turn me down flat.
Well, he wouldn’t, would he? said Head,
you know him better than that;
what he said was ‘barring a miracle’–
I thought you understood.
Granted, he did, said Heart, but he also said
he would if he could.
If he’d meant to come, said Head, he’d have mentioned trains;
he’d have confirmed the time.
So he forgot, so what? said Heart.
Since when has that been a crime?
Go on, said Head, firmly but gently. Pick up the phone,
ring and un-book the hotel.
Not yet, said Heart. But I will.
Why do you carry on playing, said Head
when there’s so little chance of winning?
Poor Head–am I ‘doing you in’? said Heart, grinning.
Death, even by a thousand cuts, said Head,
is still, ultimately, Death.
‘Hope springs eternal in the human breast’,
said Heart, under its breath.
That was unworthy of you, said Head,
it’s a cliché, and it’s ugly.
‘L’espoir luit comme un brin de paille dans l’étable‘,
said Heart, smugly.
Straw doesn’t shine in stables, said Head,
it just lies there, soaking up shit.
That’s right, said Heart. That’s it.
Face it, said Head, not unkindly; he isn’t coming tonight.
I know, said Heart. But he might.

*****

Ann Drysdale (née Corrigan), 1942 – 2024, was a celebrated poet and editor, known for her wit and humour. Her work won the Dylan Thomas Prize for poetry in performance and numerous awards in competitions including Manchester, Cardiff, Peterloo, Bridport, and the Housman Society. Born near Manchester and raised in London, Ann later lived in Birmingham, the North York Moors, and South Wales. ‘Dialogue’ comes from her 2009 collection, ‘Quaintness and Other Offences’.

Here is the bio that she chose to represent herself with: “Ann Drysdale still lives in South Wales. She has been a hill farmer, water-gypsy, newspaper columnist and single parent – not necessarily in that order. She has written all her life; stories, essays, memoir, and a newspaper column that spanned twenty years of an eventful life. Her eighth volume of poetry – Feeling Unusual – came together during the strange times of Coronavirus and celebrates, among other things, the companionship of a wise cat and an imaginary horse.”

She was a much-loved member of the world of (especially formalist) poetry, and there is a tribute (and an enormous selection of her verse) in The HyperTexts. She was a truly good person.

“head over heart” by i_gallagher is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0.

Hilaire Belloc, ‘On a General Election’

1 Reply

The accursed power which stands on Privilege
(And goes with Women, and Champagne, and Bridge)
Broke—and Democracy resumed her reign:
(Which goes with Bridge, and Women and Champagne).

**

It is nice to see American democracy, flawed as it is, starting to restore itself. Welcome back, America! We don’t entirely trust you and your archaic mindset, but you have a lot of strengths.

Hilaire Belloc (1870 – 1953) was a prolific Anglo-French author, best known today for his ‘Cautionary Tales for Children‘ (“Matilda: Who told Lies, and was Burned to Death”, etc). His 1923 ‘On a General Election’ has a universal and timeless quality to it – though the introduction of women as players instead of game pieces over the past 100 years has arguably raised the level of honesty and morality… somewhat. You may disagree with the politics of both Dick Cheney and his daughter Liz, but there is still a difference of political character between them.

Image: “Corruption box” by watchsmart is licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Odd Poem: Rudyard Kipling, ‘Rejection’, with commentary in verse by Julie Steiner

1 Reply

‘We will lay this thing here’
    Thus spake the voice of the sea,
    Murmuring wearily—
In the rock’s ear—

Then the green laver rose,
    Shook out her folds & cried,
    Before the rising tide
‘Let me repose—

Stir not my rest O sea,
    With dead things in these silent deeps,
    Surely wave tossed he sleeps
As heavily’—

The weedhung chambers then
    Made answer—’O thou sea,
    The beasts that feed in me
What need they men’—

Rock limpets cowering,
    Murmured gloom shaded—’There is meat
    Enough for all to eat
Bear hence this thing—

In thy strong arms O sea,
    Out, even to the quicksands’ brink,
    It shall be that he sink—
There, utterly.’

‘We will lay this thing here’
    Thus spake the voice of the sea,
    Ever persistently
In the rock’s ear.

*****

Julie Steiner writes: “Even Kipling seems to have had doubts about this metrically fluid, grisly poem about a wave-battered corpse, since he never included it in any of his collections. When I encountered it on the website of the Kipling Society, I immediately started writing a glosa about how strange the poem seemed to me. (A glosa is a Spanish form that meditates on another poem, by turning each line of a four-line excerpt into the refrain of a ten-line stanza.)

“To my surprise, my glosa turned into an ars poetica statement about why I’ve kept returning to certain grim topics (including child sexual abuse) in my own work, despite repeated rejection from those who turn a “rock’s ear” to them. As is their right, of course.”

*****

Glosa on Kipling’s ‘Rejection’

‘We will lay this thing here’

  Thus spake the voice of the sea,

  Murmuring wearily—

In the rock’s ear—

Off-kilter, this odd composition.
    Kipling’s, you say?
    It counters cognition
to think such a tub-thump musician
had noodled with meter that way.
Anapestic? Syllabic, at times?
    The scansion’s unclear.
    Both margins career.
Irregular pulses. Wrenched rhymes.
‘We will lay this thing here’:

So tidal vicissitudes shrug
    with listless resistance,
    refusing to lug
what a shove against gravity’s tug
can abandon. And yet there’s persistence
within this passivity, too.
    It wills itself free,
    determined to be
unburdened of what it can spew.
Thus spake the voice of the sea.

Its shape-shifting cadences show
    the moon-manic force
    as lines ebb and flow.
The sea’s letting everything go:
this thing that it wants to divorce;
    poetic convention;
attention to naysayers. (Three
    say no with esprit,
but the matter’s not up for contention.)
Murmuring wearily

becomes, by the end of the song,
Ever persistently. Yes,
    as obsessions prolong,
    revulsions grow strong.
Push on, then, Subconscious. Express
    what silent deeps hide.
We will lay this thing here.
Set it down on these pages, to clear
    the rot-ridden tide
In the rock’s ear.

*****

Julie Steiner is a pseudonym in San Diego, California. Most of her published poems—many of them in repeating forms—are available on Substack at Off-Piste on Mount Parnassus (offpisteonmountp.substack.com).

Painting: Axel Johan Gustaf Acke, ‘Leander’s Body Washed Ashore’. Public domain

Sonnet: Susan McLean, ‘Day of the Dead’

2 Replies

As if the day took on her warmth and calm,
above the blazing maple trees extends
a sky serenely blue. While kin and friends
assemble, breezes gentle as a balm
flutter the tablecloths and vibrant vases
of cannas and zinnias. Do we still remember,
given our lively chat and smiling faces,
we’re picnicking in volatile November?

Above the tableful of photos flies
a vee of geese, still low, in close formation,
honking in concord as they carry on
their sociable long-distance conversation.
We pause to watch them as they slowly rise
and fade until, like Mother, they are gone.

*****

Susan McLean writes: “My mother did not want a funeral, so when she died, my siblings and I were trying to find a way to commemorate her in a celebration that her family and friends could attend. Though she died in late October, the weather in Maryland had been freakishly warm for that time of year, so we chose to hold a picnic at her favorite park. I had learned about the Hispanic tradition of celebrating the Day of the Dead from my colleague Lupe Solis, so I thought that holding the picnic on November 1, with photos, flowers, and my mother’s favorite foods, would be appealing. Fort Washington Park is right on the Potomac River, and just as we had finished setting the tables, a vee of geese flew over us, still very close to the ground. The moment felt surprising and symbolic as we all stopped to watch them depart.”

This sonnet was originally published on Ken Gordon’s Substack The Sonneteer.

Susan McLean has three books of poetry: The Best Disguise, The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and her latest, Daylight Losing Time (Able Muse, 2026). She had also published a book of translations of Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her poems have appeared in Light, Lighten Up Online, Crab Orchard Review, Able Muse, and elsewhere. She lives in Iowa City, Iowa.

Photo: Flying geese Jiaqian AirplaneFan Creative Commons Attribution 3.0

Susan Jarvis Bryant, ‘The Dead Fox’

Leave a reply

Her zest has been buried for too many moons.
Tonight, she has risen to nocturnal tunes
That thrum in the hoot of a shadowy owl
And hum in the howling of wolves on the prowl.
 
She weaves and she skips beneath flickering stars
Beguiled by the bustle of bistros and bars.
Imbued with the spirit of mischief and pluck
She hoodoos the heart of each hot-blooded buck.
 
She hovers and wuthers and wafts through the crowd.
She’s hauntingly naughty and shawled in a shroud.
Now loose from her tomb with the battiest brain
She kisses the stunned Casanovas insane.
 
With sass in her sockets and snap in her bones,
With scarabs adorning her decomposed zones,
She perks every pumpkin-packed, fiend-friendly scene –
This fustiest, flirtiest trick-or-treat queen.

*****

Susan Jarvis Bryant writes: “I will admit to being a bit of a Halloween curmudgeon… unless it comes to treating and tricking with words. Every Halloween my Muse is inspired to sing of witches and warlocks and the odd dead fox… and I simply have to dance to her spooky tune.”

‘The Dead Fox’ was originally 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 by Kegen Benson, BLM Wildlife Biologist. BLMUtah – Public domain – Kit Fox at Night (51191359677)

Sonnet: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Archaeology’

1 Reply

Chink-chink, clunk-clunk, there’s no escape.
You spade us from the ground, then scrape
our skulls and excavate our teeth,
spread naked what once lay beneath
mute earth. You want to learn our name.
Ah, we are levelled, made the same.
This bone-yard bursting at the seams
is one deep bed of blended dreams.

Our bodies are transformed and rotten,
and what you are, we have forgotten.
We wish to feed the shrubs and trees,
to nestle wild birds as they please.
We are all light now. Do not weep.
Heap heaviness upon us. Let us sleep.

*****
Reading through ‘Maz’ Griffiths‘ poems collected as ‘Grasshopper‘, this piece felt suitably Halloweenish to share at the end of October.

Photo: One of the Batavia mutiny (1629) victims, excavated on Beacon Island and now displayed at Fremantle Shipwreck Museum. Wikimedia Commons, 7 April 2014, 06:19:51, Guy de la Bedoyere

Semi-formal: ‘Maz’ Griffiths, ‘Falling’

1 Reply

In the library,
you fell over me.
You said, So sorry.
I said, Ouch.
Later you fell over me
on the couch.

Things were falling into place,
thigh to thigh and face to face.
Earth was falling
through the night
falling into birds and light.

As the sky unrolled
another day,
you kissed me,
then you walked away.

But walking,
I’m told,
is merely
falling
controlled.

*****

The always delightful Margaret Ann “Maz” Griffiths published in a huge range of voices: formal sonnets of wildlife and of the illness that finally killed her, blank verse rants against warfare or injustice, sad songs of the female loss of innocence, flippant anti-establishment sarcasm about the British Royal Family…

‘Grasshopper’, her 350-page collection of poetry (and also one of her nicknames) was assembled by fans after her death and published by Arrowhead Press in the UK and Able Muse Press in North America. It is readable and rereadable. I post the occasional poem in this blog.

Illustration: Wikimedia Commons: https://www.flickr.com/photos/alexisnyalphotography/5183318315/

Semi-formal poem: Mervyn Peake, ‘To Maeve’

Leave a reply

You walk unaware
Of the slender gazelle
That moves as you move
And is one with the limbs
That you have.

You live unaware
Of the faint, the unearthly
Echo of hooves
That within your white streams
Of clear clay that I love

Are in flight as you turn,
As you stand, as you move,
As you sleep, for the slender
Gazelle never rests
In your ivory grove.

*****

‘To Maeve’ is the final poem in ‘Mervyn Peake, Selected Poems’ published by Faber. Peake and his wife Maeve Gilmore were both artists and writers – after Peake’s death in 1968, Gilmore fleshed out a fourth book for the Gormenghast Trilogy from Peake’s notes and ideas, eventually published as ‘Titus Awakes: The Lost Book of Gormenghast‘.

Isabel Chenot, ‘driving by an Orchard, late October’

Leave a reply

Behind repetitive, recessive rows
of almond trees, radiance stutters:
an open phoneme that won’t close.
It flickers to the west, while lateral gutters

of long shadow interrupt its strobe.
The orchard’s shadows diagraph the road and flare
across to dust and scrub.
My inarticulable thoughts are there:

fleeing, opaque, colliding with the sound of glare.

*****

Isabel Chenot writes: ” I like to let the words speak for themselves as much as possible.”

‘driving by an Orchard, late October’ was originally published in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal.

Isabel Chenot has loved, memorized, and practiced poetry all her remembered life. Some of her poems are collected in The Joseph Tree, available from Wiseblood Books.

“Almond trees” by mental.masala is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.