Johnny Cash Hurt Video

 

I think this is an extra ordinary song.

Pickle Ditch

During the 1970’s in Colliers Wood in South West London, the river Wandle was diverted to make way for a massive building project - a huge hypermarket – the Sainsbury’s Saver Centre. However the engineers left the original course of the river in which flows now a narrow channel of water known as the Pickle.

The hypermarket is built on the 12th century Merton Priory. The Pickle forms part of its medieval boundary.

Pickle Ditch

Beside a pylon
a gutter of scruffy water -
a floating crust of dust and oil -
the Pickle.

The Wandle’s original line
before they straightened it
and split it in two.

Here where two car parks meet
the tarmac ends.
Opens to a triple scored boundary
of medieval wall and footpath
and the deep black crack of water
ignored by locals
unadorned like a drainage ditch.

This fringe remains of the meadows
that long ago lay here
in the grounds of the Priory.

Of calico drenched in river water
laid out in a billowing haze of light
bleaching slowly in the sun
while the Priory bells call vespers
and a thin river mist gathers.

But now among the verges
lined with Honda and Renault
beside Kiss Me Hardy and Burger King
half floating –
a sunken barrel of beer, police cones,
and an upturned shopping trolley
littering the line of water,
heading north.

© David Loffman

Merton Priory Trust

Reading a poem in public

I read one of my own poems at the Bedford Park Arts Festival last night. Andrew Motion complimented me on it.

Poetry is................

“Poetry, the best words in the best order” S.T. Coleridge

“Poetry is the art of using words charged with their upmost meaning” Dana Gioia

“It should strike the reader of a wording of his own highest thoughts and appear almost a remembrance” John Keats

“Poetry is truth seen with passion” W.B. Yeats

“Poetry cannot be defined, only experienced” C Logue

“Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings; it takes its origin in emotion recollected in tranquillity” William Wordsworth

“It is a widening of consciousness, an extension of humanity” David Constantine

“A poem should not mean but be” Archibald MacLeith

“Poetry is that which arrives at the intellect by way of the heart” R.S. Thomas

“Poetry is a way of talking about things that frighten you” Mick Imlah

Poetry is “a little concoction of words against death” Miroslav Holub

“In the dark times
Will there also be singing?
Yes. There will also be singing
About the dark times” Bertolt Brecht

“In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start
In the prison of his days
Teach the freeman how to praise” W.B. Yeats

“Poetry is a zoo in which you keep demons and angels” Les Murray

“Poetry is the voice of spirit and imagination and all that is potential as well as of the healing benevolence that used to be the privilege of the Gods” Ted Hughes

“To see a world in a grain of sand
And a heaven in a wild flower
Hold infinity in the palm of your hand
And eternity in an hour” William Blake

“These fragments I have shored against my ruin” T.S. Eliot

“Poetry comes out of wonder, not out of knowing” Lucille Clifton

“Poetry is a place where all the fundamental questions are asked about the human condition” Charles Simic

“Poetry is a brilliant vibrating interface between the human and the non-human” Edwin Morgan

“Poetry can tell us what human beings are” Maya Angelou