Today we had some fun and looked at Paul Dehn's poem Alternative Endings to an Unwritten Ballad, featuring the redoubtable Mrs Ravoon. Here it is:
I stole through the dungeons, while everyone slept,
Till I came to the cage where the monster was kept,
There, locked in the arms of a Giant Baboon,
Rigid and smiling, lay....Mrs Ravoon!
I climbed the clock-tower in the first morning sun
And 'twas midday at least ere my journey was done;
But the clock never sounded the last stroke of noon,
For there, from the clapper, swung Mrs Ravoon.
I hauled in the line, and I took my first look
At the half eaten horror that hung from the hook.
I had dragged from the depths of the limpid lagoon
The luminous body of Mrs Ravoon.
I fled in the storm, through lightning and thunder,
And there, as a flash split the darkness asunder,
Chewing a rat's-tail and mumbling a rune,
Mad in the moat squatted Mrs Ravoon.
I stood by the waters so green and so thick,
And I stirred at the scum with my old, withered stick;
When there rose through the ooze, like a monstrous balloon,
The bloated cadaver of Mrs Ravoon.
Facing the fens, I looked back from the shore
Where all had been empty a moment before;
And there, by the light of the Lincolnshire moon,
Immense on the marshes, stood Mrs Ravoon!
We wrote some further alternative endings:
The election was lost and it looked like a draw
Where Labour was winning a moment before
But the Bigot in Bolton put paid to Brown's tune
And we shall be voting for - Mrs Ravoon!
Watch this space!
Below is a poem by Mary Williams
THE BURNING
In late November
when I was tired of you
filling up my cellar,
I burned your manuscripts in my yard;
a cremation for you again.
This time it was
your class notes I set light to,
all your course work
in French and German texts,
letters I did not think
your children ought to read,
strange guides to Europe,
correspondences.
I spoke to you in my head
while I emptied out the bags,
hoping you would forgive me
for incinerating all your work
and angry with you
for leaving me with your sad daughter
and so much of your past life still to burn.
I spread the ashes on my garden
around the place where you planted
pink geraniums, after your guinea-pig died.
You had no garden after all.
Each year when the geraniums flower
I remember not to dig there,
and think of you
imposing yourself awkwardly
upon the world
expecting to be dismissed.
My cellar is empty of your rubbish
except for a book or two
signed when you were young and single.
I cannot bear to let you go completely.
The geraniums will flower again next year.
Mary Williams. (published in Fieldwork and elsewhere)
Andrew Harrison, who is well known as a local poet, artist and singer, gives us this beautiful poem:
Such a Love.
Here, all in the womb-blind closeness of the earth,
Apparent absence of life
Does not mean that only death is present.
Underground, an embryo stirs without a sound
Then kicks and heaves against the weight of dark and stone.
The seedskin tears and opens like an eye.
Out of sight.
No thing to see. Alone.
No help to understand the plight of why,
Of how and what to be.
No thing to hear except the call of gravity and sky.
No thing to do but search and fight
For air and space, then reach for light.
And when that light is found
A flower bud then opens like another eye.
He greets the sun, bows to the breeze
And nods as if he understands the things he sees.
The whole wide world might fill his nodding head.
He even dances to the music of the lark
Yet still he listens to the pressing dark that lies within.
It fills with dread the hidden cells of memory.
It marks him with its blind embrace and holds him tethered to the past.
He was promised love, so he never tells his truth
While, far above,
Under a drifting, bruise-grey clouded brow,
Sol squints then stares.
having swept the sky with tears of rain
Sol ponders, thinking as a father might;
Why and how the gift of thought
Has brought the land he kissed to such a state.
Who cares? A choice was made. A chance is missed.
But plans we laid when first we blinked,
Are linked, it seems, to scripted armadillo dreams:
In lairs too deep for half-remembered light.
Who dares to wake and find himself unloved?
Who dares to waken from his dream alone?
Come on! Break the trance.
Forget the dark and risk a second chance.
Join the dance and dare to love this world and all you find
With all your heart and with all your mind
Even though your lonely soul has just one small word
For such a love.
Andrew D. Harrison, November 2006 
