On The Boats: A Tragi-Comedy
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About this ebook
Foreword from Sir Anthony Seldon:
'Like a fine Prosecco in summer, they trickle easily through your body, leaving you gently uplifted and transported.
The author is a brilliant teacher and inspirer of creative writing, a passionate supporter of students and staff, and our very own ‘Happiness Tsar’, responsible for driving forward our pioneering well-being agenda.
Many of the poems that follow reveal the author’s rare combination of skill as a writer and deep human sensitivity. To me, perhaps understandably, the poem on the Boss epitomises that combination at its best.'
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Book preview
On The Boats - Cherry Coombe
2018
PROLOGUE
(For Joanna Seldon)
Grace in transit
engraves a trace of love
endowing the bereft Mason
to chisel joy from rock’s cold sorrow.
ACT ONE
JOINED UP WRITING
An epiphany in 73
at the top of Lardon Chase,
half way through our O levels,
peering at stars in space:
‘calligraphy, geography,
plumbing, science,
philosophy, fight
opposing forces, put
fences there’s no reason for,
between each field of thought;
Grammar fights analysis;
French fights cookery’.
‘Unless you’re in the A stream,
where Latin’s all you need’.
At the top of the hill
in the den that Jill
and I had dreamt our lives
we woke up to the potency
of competition’s drives.
‘Each school’s costed on its worth.
One skill puts the other down.
Philosophers are Physics’ clowns.
Evolutionists and Freud
sidled-up on libraries’ shelves,
shoulder to shoulder,
facing out,
never turned to left or right
to wonder at the long held fight
between, within the disciplines,
locked up, potently.’
Today news tells us pharmacists
have no will to unlock cures
(dollars drive investors’ hours);
but patients would spend
their short time left
seeking relief, for their bereft;
finding the cure for the curse
passed on, driven to succeed,
antithesis of human need.
Economies of space and time,
geographic draughtsmen’s lines;
private water, grammar schools,
referenda carving out
small divisions, separate rules;
academic privacy, poverty and
ownership, origins and policies;
each department guarding life
from internal enemies
was locking in what might be free,
in 1973.
GOOD PROSE
(Dedicated to Long-haired Pete.)
What has happened to good prose?
Suggesting essayists are those
who read new authors and adopt
experimental turns of phrase,
and are creative, innovate?
Original’s now out of date.
Who profits from the dead templates
which propagate disease, stagnate?
Abilities that are innate
are disallowed and quashed.
Why are English language freaks
free to tell you how one speaks
is inappropriate?
Instead, the language police