Nature’s daily aubade

Starling, from an Edwardian print

Anticipating baton’s beat
the redbreast trills the starting note
before day’s orb peers over backstreets,
opens up his boastful throat.

Then blackbird’s improvising weaves
a fluting countermelody,
inciting Jenny Wren’s crescendo,
chiffchaff’s seesaw hymnody.

Sparrows’ urgent chirps now merge
with traffic’s distant growing rumble,
songthrush ostinato verse
and pigeons’ constant wheezing grumble.

Thus Nature’s daily sung aubade
invades the street as well as glade.

© C A Lovegrove

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Written for a Twitter readalong of Philippa Pearce’s Tom’s Midnight Garden

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Data-driven

Image: WordPress Free Photo Library

Politicians data-driven?
Pressed for details they ignore us,
dates of easing seldom given,
days of lockdown stretch before us.

Better to ignore the chorus
of demands to ease restrictions:
Covid-19’s bounds are porous,
plague rides free of firm predictions.

But uncertainty brings frictions,
tempting some to break the rules,
claims that virus facts are fictions,
those who credit them but fools.

Data comes from sense-led asking;
until then let’s keep on masking.

* * * * *

A Spencerian sonnet written in trochaic tetrameters: the rhyme scheme is abab bcbc cdcd ee

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Coronaverse: an alphabet of terms related to Covid-19. Tomorrow brings us the letter E.

Music speaks

Music score (credit: WordPress free media library)

When I tire of conversation,
when I want to be alone,
working or in contemplation,
one thing always sets the tone.

Whether solo, band or drone,
fugue, sonata, golden oldie,
folksong, classic (known, unknown),
jazz: each has the power to hold me.

Music, reaching to enfold me,
speaks directly to the brain.
Right from childhood music called me,
smoothing pain and soothing strain.

Music speaks, not words but phrases.
What it still tells me amazes.

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A Spencerian sonnet written in trochaic tetrameters: homework written for a creative writing course. Its discipline made it quite hard to not sound forced while continuing to convey an authentic emotion. The rhyme scheme is abab bcbc cdcd ee

The unkind question

Phrenology head (https://thegraphicsfairy.com/vintage-clip-art-antique-phrenology-head/)

For E. L.

So when you asked if being deaf or blind
which one I’d choose, if choice I had to take,
the options offered hurt, made my heart ache
to realise I’d have to be resigned
to sight or sound; the question was unkind.

Not hear her voice? What, no, for heavens sake!
Or not see her each morning when I wake?
I think I would soon start to lose my mind.

Between the devil and the deep blue sea
or that hard place that stands against the rock
you’d have me lie. Well, I won’t take my pick,
I’ll have them both for surely both suit me.
Until the final tick comes out of clock
against such awful choices I shall kick.

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The homework for the poetry writing class was to write a sonnet;
I chose to write a Petrarchan sonnet, with a rhyme scheme abba abba cde cde