Holy Cow!

Tags

Adam Wst, Batman, caped crusader, clerihew, dynamic duo

 

Adam West,

caped crusader, – in peace may you rest.

We need a dynamic duo to rescue us right now,

for our present leaders…… Holy cow!

Evil Couplings

Tags

Blackburn, counterclockwise, Dangerous Woman, DNA, dockyard confetti, etymology, evil coupling, flange, gimlet, internal fixation, Jahannam, jam, Man United, Manchester, Manchester Arena, Mancunian, nuts and bolts, Ormskirk, Preston, retronym, Rochdale, Salford, Salman, screw loose, shrapnel, suicide bomber

(Manchester Arena: Image by Pitt-yacker at

Wikipedia)

 

In Hope Street they manufacture nuts, bolts…

The company is even called ‘Nail It.‘

(Man United usually does just that.)

Salford, Manchester, Blackburn, Ormskirk,

Rochdale, Preston – all ‘nuts and bolts‘ places.

Their people are frank and they don’t quibble

over distinctions between flange and jam.

They vote ‘righty-tighty; lefty loosey.‘

At weddings there’s no ‘dockyard confetti‘

and shrapnel is small change in a pocket.

They know their hardware inside out and don’t

excuse idiots who have a screw loose.

They expect ‘Salman’ to mean a ‘blessing’:

that’s what the etymology suggests.

But they can differentiate as well –

‘Dangerous Woman‘ is just a concert

and not a female suicide bomber.

When someone with internal fixation

and tensioned beyond proof starts to behave

in a counterclockwise manner, they know

that it’s not about connection, coupling,

conjunction.

But they had no time to crack

a nut who suddenly raised his own head;

someone whose helical rage respected

no one else’s DNA – who spiralled –

blasted into Jahannam’s lowest pit,

not in a blaze of glory, but in shards

of eye, shoulder, thumb, rib neck and hex bolts.

‘Human being‘ needs a modifier.

We need to qualify with retronyms:

‘compassionate‘, ‘decent‘ or ‘evil,’

for we no longer know what is ‘human‘-

neither do straight-forward Mancunians.

Yet their gimlet eyes saw glimmers of it

in the selflessness of those who helped them.

Strong and Stable

Tags

stable government, Theresa May

(Vigiles du Roi Charles VII: Wikipedia)

 

Theresa:

 

It’s time for

a strong and stable

government.

The Ballad of the Twice-Hanged Man

Tags

ballad, Downside, Hereford, Lazarus, leper, pilgrimage, Prime, Santo Severo church, Swansea Castle, Terce, Thomas Cantelope, Trahaern ap Hwyel, twice-hanged man, veneration, Wassail Gate, William Cragh

(tomb of Thomas Cantelope in Hereford

Cathedral: Wikipedia)

 

William Cragh was a warrior bold;

rebelled against the king.

Thirteen men were slain by him

and so he had to swing.

 

Outside Swansea Castle stood

the gibbet where he’d die.

Trahaern ap Hywel broke the beam

(they’d swung him up so high.)

 

Both were hanged again, it’s said,

from Terce until Prime.

Lady Mary* claimed his corpse

for burial in due time.

 

William’s eyes were bulging out;

his face was black as coal.

They wheeled him to Tom Mathew’s house,

while she prayed for his soul:

 

Bishop Thomas Cantelope,

hear me when I pray.

Restore to life this rebel here

and wash his sins away.

 

Her ladies took a silken thread,

to span the dead man’s length.

A candle of such size I’ll make,

as measure of faith’s strength.

 

The dead man’s feet began to twitch;

a fortnight later stood

and walked right through the Wassail Gate,

among the great and good.

 

The executioner and priest;

a thirteen year old youth;

Lady Mary’s son to boot

witnessed to the truth.

 

In English, Latin, French and Welsh

all doubts were then erased.

For each confirmed they felt the same:

William had been raised!

 

Will left his effigy in wax

and placed it on the grave

of Cantelope, in Hereford

and, steadily a wave

 

of veneration then arose;

priests were soon advised

of miracles and so they pressed

to have him canonised.

 

Will lived a further eighteen years,

till, Lazarus-like, he died,

but the tongue that swelled to choke him once,

on pilgrimage testified

 

that some recovered speech and sight

and lepers had been healed,

yet he alone was a twice-hanged man,

whose death had been repealed.

 

In Santo Severo church, the flesh

of  Cantelope rests still;

his bones in Hereford reside –

in Downside lies his skull.

 

 

 

 

Nothing New Under the Sun

Tags

British Library, Luttrell Psalter, waterboarding

(Luttrell Psalter.  British Library MS 42130, 1325)

 

And you thought

waterboarding was

something new.

Upon Westminster Bridge

Tags

2017, 22nd March, profanity, Westminster Bridge, Wordsworth Upon Westminster Bridge

March 22nd,2017

Earth has not shown anything more evil;

traumatised all those who would stumble by

a sight so shocking in its travesty.

This city, plunged in darkness, drew a veil

on those who ventured out to breathe, to live:

now still on bloodied pavements.  Strangers try

to open airways; paramedics cry.

Parliament questions what it can achieve.

Daylight was to rise on a new carnage.

Someone denied his humanity

yet, as has been said, in the old adage:

there’s nothing new at all. Profanity

ever explodes in pointless destruction,

but somehow, with more violence, in our age.

Musical Bumps

Tags

Beethoven, Donizetti, Eisenstadt, Esterhazy, Florian Gassmann, Gall&Spurzheim, Gumpendorf, Hundsthurm, Joseph Haydn, Joshua Reynolds, Karl Rosenbaum, Mrs Billington, Napoleon, Nepomuk, phrenology, Princess and the Pea, Princess Maria Josepha Hermengild, Seven Last Words, St Cecilia, The Creation, The Seasons

A re-blog:

MUSICAL BUMPS

In the end, it was not The Seasons that gave him his finishing stroke,

but rather a sharp instrument which severed his skull from his spinal

column.  Eight days after his internment, he might have been as

surprised as his audiences, not by any symphonic eccentricity, but by

the admission of light, as his coffin lid was prised open.  Perhaps his

agitated outburst at his final attendance of The Creation implied some

premonition, for he exclaimed: It came from hence!  (Rather than a shaft

of divine inspiration, however, this interruption emanated from an

earthier and more material source and might have been deemed a

diabolical intrusion, instead of an ethereal epiphany.)  In fact, the whole

episode had been engineered by my thoroughly material amateur

phrenologist spouse and his associate.

We had all been friends for years.  My husband, Karl Rosenbaum, had

been Secretary to the Esterhazy family and we even attended the burial

at Hundsthurm churchyard in Gumpendorf, the suburbs where Haydn had

lived.  Thank God that Napoleon had ordered his troops to be respectful

and the simple service passed without incident.  However, the memorial

plaque’s inscription could be seen to have been proleptic and ironic, I

suppose: I will not die completely.

Personally, I liked Josef.  He was generous enough to offer me solos in

his masses and in his Seven Last Words.  I wonder what his seven last

words to me would have been, if he had known that I would make an

exhibition of his skull in an ebony box with a golden lyre on the lid.

Musicians and those I considered important enough to be invited to

my soirees marvelled when I displayed the great relic, reposing on its

cushion of white silk.  They gawped through the glass side panels with

gratifying envy and voyeuristic intensity.

My father, Florian Gassmann, the Viennese chamber composer might

not have approved, I fear, nor would Haydn’s patroness and friend,

Princess Maria Josepha Hermengild.  However, Josef had no children

to object, nor a wife by then.  Why should we not have preserved some

remains for posterity?

(Princess Maria Josepha Hermengild: Wikipedia)

It was not as if it was a very pleasant task for Karl and his friend,

Johann, to have to boil and examine the skull.  However, it was for

research purposes, you understand, and for the advancement of

human knowledge.

Number 17 cranial organ was as expected, Karl told me. It showed great

musical aptitude, confirming Gall and Spurzheim’s theories on the links

between mental capacity and aspects of anatomical protuberances.

Musical bumps, I joked.

There had been no malice in the procedure whatsoever, I vow.

As I said, Haydn, though swarthy and pockmarked and generally

unattractive physically, was genial and complimentary to the

female sex- even to his insufferable wife,

whose cranial convexities must have been minimal.  She used to

line her pastry tins and curl her ringlets with paper from his

manuscripts.  She selected the house that he lived in latterly,

telling him that it was suitable for a widow. Yet he loved ladies

and was chivalrous and Platonic in his behaviour and demeanour.

He quipped that if four eyes could have been sealed, he could have

married his nineteen years old, already espoused enamorata.  He

also praised the vocalist, Mrs Billington, who was having her

portrait painted by the great Joshua Reynolds, as St Cecilia listening

to the angels.  Haydn stated that there must have been some mistake,

for the angels should have been depicted as attending to her.

We did not take possession of it immediately.  It was eleven years

later when Prince Nikolaus Esherhazy was suddenly reminded that

he had promised to remove Haydn’s remains to the family seat in

Eisenstadt.

Sturm und Drang! he expostulated.  He made some stronger

comments when he realised that the skeleton was incomplete.

Johann passed the skull to us and we hid it under my straw mattress.

I feigned indisposition when the search party raided- women’s

matters!- and so no trace of it was discovered.  Meanwhile I felt like

the Princess and the Pea and wager that Haydn himself would have

appreciated the  farce, in addition to enjoying the intimacies of my

bed.

However, the Prince grew imperious and we tried to distract him

with a substitute, but unfortunately, being amateur phrenologists,

we did not discern the differences between the skull of a seventy

year old and that of a twenty year old man.  In the end, though, he

accepted an alternative.

Everyone in Vienna knew where the skull was.  After all, we passed

it around with post-prandial spirits and it received due homage.

Karl had promised to return it to Johann on his own decease, in order

that it should finally be given to the Society of Friends of Music, but I

preferred to retain it and willed it to my doctor, so that it should receive

veneration at the Austrian Institute of Pathology and Anatomy, as well

as being of benefit to medical advancement.

How was I to know that it would be a century and a half and two

intervening World Wars before the dear old boy would be made

whole?

For a time he lay in two different zones: the Soviet and International,

but, let us be clear, he already belonged to a wider audience than

Austria alone.

And Johann kept the secret well.  His middle name was Nepomuk, so

I expect his patron saint assisted him, even when the heavens were telling.

At least he died with his tongue intact, unlike his namesake.  So, although

our associate knew the truth, others, such as Beethoven, knew nothing.

Well, he would not, would he?

Haydn often said that he made something out of nothing.  I feel that

the musical world did the same.  When all is said and done, he is at

peace and a man who exchanged his best quartet for a good razor would

surely not have minded us sharing his effulgence.  We cannot all get

what we want-like Jacob, he had to take the sister of the girl he really

loved.

We just made sure that we took what we wanted.  At least the Nazis did

not appropriate the head and we preserved him from Donizetti’s fate:

apparently his skull was sold to a pork butcher who used it as a receptacle

for collecting money.  Some people have no respect!

Beethoven’s ear passages were excised and two of his teeth stolen,

so, all in all, Josef suffered no sacrilege and was surrounded by music,

rather than the silence of the grave.

Many a time a visiting tenor directed his dulcet tones to his casket:

His large and arched brow sublime

Of wisdom deep declares the seat..

At least when the Lord took the great man’s breath away, he did

not disappear into dust.  And now the heavens and earth his power

adore.

Achieved is his glorious work.  The Lord beholds it and is pleased.

And we were that happy pair, misled by false desire to covet that

we should not have, nor should have striven to know what was not

meet.  Nevertheless, I did enjoy possession for a while, but you have

his essence for eternity.

 

A Hallowe’en Grisly Tale Part 1

Tags

Auld Reekie, Blaw Wearie, Canongate, Girth Cross, grisly tale, guillotine, Heart of Midlothian, Holyrood, James VI, Kincaid, Lady Warriston, Leith, Lord Dunnipace, The Boot, The Maiden, The Wheel, Tolbooth

DEATH AND THE MAIDEN

It was the summer of 1600 when I was permitted to abandon my loom

and I climbed onto the roof of my mistress’ tenement in the Canongate,

from which an excellent view of the Girth Cross of Holyrood could

easily be discerned.  All around, the citizens of Auld Reekie had

adopted the same strategy and were well-established, in spite of the

early hour.  A  unison intake of breath unbalanced me on my precarious

eyrie, so that I had to grab Nelly’s sleeve for support.

The sinister outline of the Maiden, transported from Halifax, dominated

the scene, looming over the slender figure approaching it.  Well might the

Memorial later describe her as a woman and a bairn.  Apparently, like

myself, she was twenty one, but, she had a child of her own, whereas I

only minded my employers’ weans.

The buzz of conversations receded and I first heard snatches of that

melody which would quickly enter the consciousness of all

Lowland ballad lovers:

O Warriston, ye acted ill

To lift your hand to your ain lady…

Then a ripple of wheeshts surged through the crowds below and Jean

Livingstone, Lady Warriston, removed her gold brocade, stepped

forward on her twa weel-made feet and knelt in her sark.

The parlourmaid, Nelly, poked me in the ribs, observing, She is

as cheerful as if she were going to her own wedding.

The cook shifted her bulk and craned forward dangerously, before adding

sententiously: She appears ravished by a spirit higher than that of man

or woman.

We giggled; she always speaks like her aptly named minister, The Rev.

Andrew Cant.

However, we soon sobered up as the blade began to fall.

Later our chimney sweep, Peter, told us that the blade had fallen just as

she began to pray: Into Thy hand, O..  She had got no further.

He also reported that he had tried to make his way up to Castlehill, to

witness the strangulation and burning of her nurse, Janet Murdo, but the

authorities had arranged the ghastly ceremony simultaneously, in order,

unsuccessfully, to create a counter-attraction, drawing attention away

from the young noblewoman’s plight.

Both punishments had been well- publicised, although the crime had

only been perpetrated a matter of days beforehand.  However, the

timing had been set to maximise and to demonstrate the very satisfying

show of repentance by the Lady, who had been well-rehearsed by the

Revs. Balfour and Bruce, God rest her soul!

Peter said that many in the mob were surprised that her father, the Laird

of Dunnipace, had not exerted himself on her behalf.  He was a well-

known sook, or favourite of King James, who had apparently expressed

His regal regret that such a beautiful young woman should be sacrificed

to Justice:

I never saw a woman’s face

I was sae sorry to see dee.

 

 

Part 2 next post- having problems with formatting!

 

 

The Fourth Circle

Tags

Dante, Fourth Circle of Hell, glossolalia, Gustav Dore, mountebank, sestina, tele-evangelist, villanelle, widow's mite

So, villanelle rhymes with hell? commented Brassie.

Yes, and very useful it is for my poetic purposes, I replied.

And ‘fourth circle?’ queried Brassie.

The destination of corrupt tele-evangelists and their like.

But there was no television in Dante’s time.

She can be really obtuse.

Just listen and learn!

 

THE FOURTH CIRCLE

 

He played upon their fear of going to Hell

and claimed that he could heal the blind and lame,

till, mesmerised, they fell beneath his spell.

 

Attracted to his giveaway gospel,

as to a mountebank, the greedy came:

he played upon their fear of going to Hell.

 

Glossolalia from forked tongue glibly fell;

extracted cash lent kudos to his name,

till, mesmerised, they fell beneath his spell.

 

His oleaginous hair, apparel

slick as the cut and thrust which was his aim:

he played upon their fear of going to Hell.

 

How could his victims reservations quell?

They trusted one who seemed to know his game,

till, mesmerised, they fell beneath his spell.

 

No one seemed to mind when he’d embezzle

the widow’s mite.  To query would bring shame.

He played upon their fear of going to Hell,

till, mesmerised, they fell beneath his spell.

 

 

Villanelle

Tags

Jacob and Esau, Rebekah and Isaac, villanelle

I haven’t written a sestina yet, I lamented to Brassica.

They are supposed to be good for laments, she said, somehow

reading my thoughts and mood.  Try a villanelle.  It might be

easier to start there.

So, I tried to think of a topic and turned to The Bible for those

little dramas that illustrate human nature.  Suddenly Jacob, Isaac

and Esau popped into my mind and, before I knew it, inspiration had

prompted the following poem.  Maybe it is an exercise in form,  but

I hope it transmits the essence of their relationship struggle.

HALF LIGHT

Half-blind, he mistook goat for venison.

(Mother and son were partners in the crime.)

And so he gave Jacob his benison.

 

Take this stew and treat him with kid gloves, son.

Rebekah staged her little pantomime:

half-blind, he mistook goat for venison.

 

Jacob stayed at home- a tent denizen;

but Esau was a hunter in his prime.

Isaac still gave Jacob his benison.

 

Isaac couldn’t recognise anyone.

His cataracts obscured this social climb:

half-blind, he mistook goat for venison.

 

Jacob knew when to put the lentils on.

Esau’s priority was dinner time.

Thus Isaac gave Jacob his benison.

 

An old man’s craving made him jettison

Divine will.  So, trapped like a bird on lime,

half-blind, he mistook goat for venison

and gave Esau a lesser benison.