Thanks to poet Jonathan Davidson for introducing me (and the other poets on the course) to the Sestude. This form (a poem of 62 words) was invented by John Simmons, co-founder of the ‘26’ writing group in 2003. The English alphabet has 26 letters and 62 is its opposite.
It started with a project ‘26 treasures’ in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s British Galleries. The creative community 26.org.uk is a not-for-profit organisation which still undertakes a range of creative projects.
I enjoyed playing around with the form and, going through my folders, came across a short prose poem that only needed to lose a few words:
If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky.
If there were no wind, cobwebs would cover the sky. Soon enough, the clouds would get angry, address the spiders Have you no manners? Your offspring is just sitting around. The angrier the clouds got, the greyer they looked. It was a battle of grey against grey. Battles and wars always end in tears. The people below were relieved: Rain at last.
Note: Serbian proverb quoted by Vasko Popa, The Golden Apple, 2010.
The Golden Apple collection is a round of stories, songs, spells, proverbs & riddles that Popa himself selected from various anthologies of Serbo-Croatian folk literature.
Writing Prompt
A few more proverbs and riddles. I will share answers next month!
Proverbs
Get your moustaches together, you’re going on a journey.
If you put him on a wound, it would heal.
When did fog ever uproot a tree-trunk?
Riddles
In one room both bone and flesh grow.
I stretched a gold thread through the wide world and wound it up into a walnut shell.
I shake a tree here, but the fruit falls half an hour away.
Many thanks to Kathleen Mcphilemy for including three of my poems in episode 37 of Poetry Worth Hearingor you can listen on Youtube, Audible and Spotify.
One of the poems is his ashes on a corner.
The theme was hiding and/or seeking. The episode is 60 minutes. The first half hour or so is an interesting interview with poet Nancy Campbell who talks about her residency on Greenland among other things. The interview and Nancy’s poems bookend poems by Guy Jones, Zelda Cahill-Patten, Lesley Saunders, Pat Winslow, Richard Lister, Dinah Livingstone, and Sarah Mnatzaganian.
The theme for the next episode is all things ‘eco’. Send up to four minutes of unpublished poems (text and sound file) plus a short biography to poetryworthhearing@gmail.com by 18 January 2026. Find more information on poetryworthhearing.biz.
his ashes on a corner
of the dining table by the small square votive container the discreet undertaker’s logo
she greets him will have a glass at six his ashes waiting with us for borders to open
It’s a great pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Cliff Yates. I met him on an excellent online workshop he ran for the Poetry Business. They published his New & Selected Poems, which brings together poems from five earlier publications – over thirty years of ‘inimitable’ work. Poignancy, economy, humour, a touch of the surreal…
You can find Cliff’s biography and the link to his website below the poems.
Day Breaks as a Petrol Station
Day breaks deliberate as a petrol station newspapers and expensive flowers but you’re tired of vacuum-packed sandwiches and sordid headlines.
On the 15.07 out of Deansgate she’s reading The Holy Sinner. The dog opposite smiles through its muzzle. Coffee, or maybe something’s on fire we do appear to be speeding unless we’re stationary and the landscape’s rattling past. ‘It’s been a good day,’ she says, ‘it makes up for yesterday.’ ‘Why, what happened yesterday?’
Days without rain and suddenly it rains. Another country, your body’s not your own. You want to go for a walk. In this?
He threw a stick for the dog in Habberley Valley the tattoo flew from his arms landed in the bracken like leaves.
Dog
So many places closed: the off-licence, the butcher, the corner shop, even the telephone box screwed shut. Dog had come a long way, and now what?
The cherry blossom, he noted, looking up for once from the pavement, was particularly stunning this year, maybe it was the same every year
but noticing it, his heart was lifted and he decided not to be disappointed. The journey had been arduous, the future was uncertain, but there is more to life,
he reflected, cocking his leg against the letter box, than a bowl of fruit on a table.
The Lesson
The nun points out the ones to watch: the boy in the corner, the girl at the back. In this class it’s the boy in the middle who thinks he’s a cat.
Outside, workmen are felling trees. A bird’s nest tumbles in through the window, lands on a desk. Inside the nest, a baby bird. It’s okay it’s okay, the children say, Brian will know what to do.
The boy who thinks he’s a cat gathers the bird and, holding it at arm’s length in the cup of his hands, heads for the door, the nun behind him between the silent rows of children and the bird, as if on cue, lifts up its beak and sings.
Lighthouse
The lighthouse flickers at the end of the pier. We watch it in our red pyjamas. Actually, neither of us are wearing red pyjamas. You’re wearing my blue shirt.
The lighthouse flickers at the end of the pier. It’s the only thing we can be sure of. Everything’s uncertain since you set alight my record collection.
I’m trying to work out an appropriate reaction, rearranging things in my head to eliminate all memory of the record collection. The lighthouse flickers on and off.
Actually it doesn’t, you point out, it just appears to. You look amazing in my blue shirt. I haven’t words to describe how good you look in the light from the lighthouse. Now you’re here
now you’re not. Maybe I should burn something of yours, you suggest. Your voice leaves me in the dark. It doesn’t sound like you when I can’t see you.
Cliff Yates was born in Birmingham and has been publishing poetry since the 1980s. His New & Selected Poems (Smith/Doorstop, 2023) brings together work from various collections including Henry’s Clock (Fenton Aldeburgh First Collection Prize; Poetry Business Book & Pamphlet Competition), Frank Freeman’s Dancing School (Arts Council England Writers Award) and Jam (ACE Grant for the Arts). He taught English at Maharishi School in Skelmersdale and wrote Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School during his time as Poetry Society poet-in-residence, following the success of his students in poetry competitions. He has led courses for, among others, the Arvon Foundation and the British Council.
Today I am voting twice: first for a political party, then for a tree.
In a busy city, there is little room for trees to become old. On average, a city tree lives for 50 years.
The Hague doesn’t have many old trees: during WWII a lot were cut down, their wood used for cooking and heating. Of the 120,000 city trees, only around 1300 have the ‘monumental’ tree status.
Such trees are over 50 years old and meet at least one of these criteria: it is irreplaceable, of rare type, shape, or size. It may have historical value, or provide a home for rare plants or animals.
Photo credit: Joost Gieskes
The veteran tree initiative comes from the UK. The first official veteran tree of The Hague – even of The Netherlands – is a lime or linden tree (Tilia x europea) on the Clingendael Estate. This was planted around 1733.
I came across it on my walks during the first 2020 lockdown: Clingendael is close to the camping where I had my caravan. I was intrigued to find a tree in a corner of a field with a fence round it.
A veteran tree is protected and allowed to remain in place forever. A ‘monumental’ tree may be cut down when it becomes dangerous or diseased.
Japanese flowering cherry, tree. 92, 13 m wide.
The Hague local authority has nominated 10 trees and invites people to vote for five of these to become a veteran tree. The five trees that don’t get veteran status will become monumental trees. All the nominated trees are between 70 and 220 years old.
This is much harder than choosing a political party!
Will I choose that Japanese cherry, or the ’12 Broers’, tree no. 73, a 220-year-old oak that had a tough life (cut down often) and now has 12 trunks (the brothers), or choose the 145-year-old Mourning beech that houses falcons. I will let you know.
This coming Wednesday are the elections for the ‘Tweede Kamer van de Staten Generaal’ – the lower house of parliament.
All over the country, boards have appeared with the 24 political parties. In large cities and towns each party has its own board. In small towns, like mine, the one shown.
On Friday, a pale grey sheet of A1-sized paper arrived by post: names of candidates for the 25 parties. So much detail: it’s essential to orient yourself beforehand. Otherwise, you’d spend too much time in your cubicle on the day, and there will be queues. When I voted in the last elections (November 2023), I couldn’t fold the paper back into its original roadmap shape…
The Dutch are famed for their tolerance. I find that puzzling, but then I spent most of my life outside The Netherlands.
A few months ago, a new political party ‘Vrede voor Dieren’ (Peace for Animals) was established. They split from the original ‘Partij van de Dieren’ (Party of the Animals) because the leader of the PvdD (initially pacifist) changed their views and now supports re-armament. The new VvD rejects re-armament in principle.
You don’t need to have read Animal Farm to think that an animal’s view of pacifism is probably Will I be eaten or not? (paraphrasing a Dutch novelist).
Confidence in politics and politicans
Confidence in politics is at an all-time low. In the August 2025 polls it ranged from 4% – 9%. Some 25% of those polled were floating voters. There are several reasons for that.
Photo credit: MabelAmber via Pixabay
Time lost in the polder…
The ‘polder’ model is the pragmatic recognition of pluriformity. Time is needed to achieve consensus: people will need to polder. However, this verb has a negative connotation in relation to politics. An election will be followed by months of sitting and talking, walking and talking. A ‘formateur’ will facilitate the process. Meanwhile, the previous coalition is just ‘care taking’ and keeps things ticking over.
It also takes several months to organise an election, typically four to five.
The coalition Rutte II was the first cabinet that completed its full four-year term since 1998. Its starting date was 5 November 2021. Since then, just over two years were spent on forming the next three coalitions.
Not lasting the course…
Rutte III – the full cabinet resigned over the child benefit scandal. A parliamentary enquiry had found that officials had knowingly and systematically deprived people who were legitimate claimants. Thousands of people have still not been compensated.
Rutte IV – resigned over fundamental disagreements regarding immigration measures.
Schoof – An unstable coalition from the start: two parties (the Boer Burger Beweging or BBB) and the NSC (Nieuw Sociaal Contract) both new to government and both struggling to get enough credible candidates for their seats. With Wilders of the PVV (Partij voor de Vrijheid) who’d walked out of an earlier coalition government. Seen as a ‘bunch of amateurs bickering amongst themselves.’
Not tackling the crucial issues
The Hague is a long way from the northern province of Groningen where thousands of people have been waiting for over a decade for compensation. (The subsidence caused to properties caused by fracking. Another parliamentary enquiry.) Just an example.
This time I’m a floating voter. So, I’ll go and have another coffee, inspect that grey form a little closer!
It is a pleasure and a privilege to share three poems from Wendy Klein’s new pamphlet Having Her Cake, published by Grey Hen Press. The pamphlet is dedicated to Barbara Cox (1943 – 2019). Several poems give us vivid details about their lifelong friendship. However, the focus is Barbara’s ‘physician assisted’ death. The opening poem starts: Barbara never knows what time it is in Britain. California calling ends: the kindly California law / on assisted dying / I tell her I’m coming.
Having her Cake
The chocolate cake, left over from her annual pre-Christmas do sits on a large white china plate, dwindling in size day by day, an unwashed fork lying next to it, a temptation to any passers-by, though no one ever sees anyone else eating it and it would have been sacrilege to open the cutlery drawer, select a clean fork, place the used one in the sink or the dishwasher, but someone on the third day I’m there removes the plate, crumb-covered and sticky, replaces it with a tidy paper version tucking the now over-large piece of cling-film around the edges clumsily, carelessly, as if it no longer mattered, as if at any moment it could be binned plate and all.
What you can’t wake
The dead. No, not even the dogs, grumbling at being shut in their crates, beside her bed peering through the grate, eyes full of reproach.
No, you can’t wake the dead, but the not-quite-dead are too awake, their eyes peeled until the last, their flesh jumpy, their muscles braced.
Beneficiary
Released from the need to worry for herself, she frets about the falling stock market on behalf of her beneficiary, a willowy young hairdresser, the daughter she never had, who will inherit everything: the rambling shambolic bungalow with its million and one flaws: the water pressure that shuts down the whole system when the shower is on, necessitating bouts of shouting, water, water if someone so much as turns on a tap to rinse a cup, brushes teeth, flushes the toilet in any other part of the house — a second-hand Honda Jazz, a rusting dishwasher, a dog run which looks like a concentration camp for canines, meant to be protection from ‘critters out there,’ and the stock market falling, falling, falling.
Biography
Widely published and the winner of many prizes, Wendy Klein is a retired psychotherapist, born in New York and brought up in California. Since leaving the U.S. in 1964, she has lived in Sweden, France, Germany, and England. Her writing has been influenced by early family upheaval resulting from her mother’s death when she was nine months old, her nomadic years as a young single mother and subsequent travel. She has published three collections: Cuba in the Blood (2009) and Anything in Turquoise (2013) from Cinnamon Press, and Mood Indigo (2016), from Oversteps Books., plus a new and selected, Out of the Blue (2019) from The High Window Press. Her first pamphlet Let Battle Commence (2020) from Dempsey & Windle, was based on her great grandfather’s letters home while serving as a Confederate Officer in the US Civil War. She shares her work on https://www.cronepoet.com.
I’m delighted to share three poems by Matthew Paul from his new collection with Crooked Spire Press. The poems demonstrate Matthew’s ‘unflinching clarity’, and his ‘fierce attention to detail’. His biography follows the poems and there you can also find a link to his own website.
Spent Matches
Mum lets only Granddad light up in our house. The second Thursday of every other month, she fetches Grandma and him over from Sutton. The chalkhill-blue elegance of the Wedgwood ashtray rhymes with unfiltered smoke rings pixilating like Ceefax in the living-room air.
Teatime doesn’t wait for Dad: Hovis, Primula, Shippam’s fish paste, allotment tomatoes, cress; mini rolls, Penguins, cremated fruitcake; pots of Brooke Bond PG Tips; Beryl Ware replaced by Royal Worcester, on Hay Wain place mats. Chit-chat wilts like Dad’s California poppies.
Mum fills space with monologues. My brothers’ progress; mine. WRVS activities. Her botched hysterectomy. We watch Grandma’s must-see, Crossroads, then ours: ‘Top of the Flops, I call it,’ says Granddad. The outfits, songs, presenters and Legs & Co. baffle him into silence; except
when Julio Iglesias butchers ‘Begin the Beguine’. ‘Artie Shaw!’ he cries; and his and Grandma’s memories spool back to bulletins on the wireless, to Chamberlain’s jubilant declaration of peace. Barely through the door, Dad re-buttons his coat to take them home. Granddad beams, ‘Abyssinia!’
Photo credit: Liam Wilkinson
A Common Hand
I don’t have to prove whether I did it or not; if they can’t see it, what kind of damned experts are they? [. . .] I’m not a crook; I’m just doing what people have always done in the history of the world: ever since art was invented, people have made imitations of it. Eric Hebborn, ‘Portrait of a Master Forger’, Omnibus, BBC TV, 1991
Eric pestles oak gall, gum Arabic, pinches of iron Sulphate and rain into ink with ‘a gorgeous patina’, To pen his line on slyly foxed paper, in the styles Of Pisanello, Poussin and sundry other old masters, Reshaping preparatory sketches to make pentimenti, Faking collectors’ monograms as cherries on top.
At junior school, Eric, aged eight, discovered that Burnt Swan and Vesta matchsticks’ charcoal tips Burnished imagination’s marks, incurring, firstly, Welts from a leathering for possessing matches, Then a three-year stretch in an Essex reformatory For wilfully setting cloakrooms on fire. A flair for Painting sees him into art schools, lastly the RA, Where, though he wins every prize, contemporaries Remember Eric only as ‘a silent creature’; ‘a joke’.
They would say that, since he’s brought their craft Into disrepute. ‘Dealers are not interested in art, but Money,’ he says. ‘The real criminal, if there is one, Is he who makes the false description; guiltier by far Than had he manipulated the nib himself. Ignore The fusspots. Enjoy art, without worrying whether Attributions are correct.’ Museums have everything To lose from uncovering Eric’s handiwork; queasily, They check their acquisitions back to the Sixties And issue, de haut en bas, highly selective denials.
‘No one is studying art with honesty,’ claims Eric, Upon the publication of The Art Forger’s Handbook In Italian. Out in Trastevere three icy nights later, He stumbles, soaked in Chianti Classico Riserva, Down a cobbled passage, to his blunt force demise.
In Which I Spend a Fortnight of my West Berlin Summer in 1987 Doing a Few Hours’ Cleaning Per Day in Some Multinational’s HQ
My Iraqi supervisor Zaynab and I enjoy, for our lingua franca, helpless amusement. Every day, precisely at knocking-off time, we point at the clock, chorus ‘Sechs!’, then cackle like siblings.
Dieter, fellow cleaner, never gets our jokes. Just like me, he’s twenty and nearing the end of a gap year; mandatory, before enrolment at Humboldt. Mine’s elective, for my mental health. He and I view the city’s halves from the roof: the Wall zigzags like the Western Front.
Afterwards, we take the U-Bahn —he buys a ticket; I don’t— to the agency’s office, at Nollendorfplatz. He translates the clerk: I won’t get paid until next week. ‘Scheisse,’ I say. Dieter deadpans: ‘She said, “Ah, so the English boy can speak German after all”’
Biography
Matthew Paul hails from South London and lives in South Yorkshire. His second collection, The Last Corinthians, was published by Crooked Spire Press in June 2025. He is also the author of two haiku collections – The Regulars (2006) and The Lammas Lands (2015) – and co-writer/editor (with John Barlow) of Wing Beats: British Birds in Haiku (2008), all published by Snapshot Press. His reviews regularly appear in The Friday Poem and elsewhere. He blogs here.
Recently, I had a short reunion with the friend I met 35 years ago during a holiday to China. Our reunion last year was in Ghent, Belgium. I was very pleased to discover a branch of De Slegte, second-hand bookshop, in the same street as our hotel. I’d come by train with a rucksack: spending was modest.
I lent Eleven Kinds of Loneliness by Richard Yates to my friend, so she had reading material for her journey back to the UK. I am a keen reader of short stories, glad to have the paperback returned to me. I enjoyed these: the mundane sadness of domestic life.
As the blurb says: ‘a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true – and just beginning to ring a little hollow.’ Yes, it’s bleak, like Raymond Carver without the humour. Yates had a difficult childhood and suffered from TB which must have coloured his view of life.
Yates is probably best known for his first novel Revolutionary Road. It was published in 1961 and an instant success. The 2008 film with Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio was true to the book.
Bookshop De Slegte, Ghent, Belgium
Mary Ruefle’s My Private Property (2016) includes 11 short pieces about Sadness which are spread throughout the book. Here is an extract from Granta’s website: ‘Red sadness never appears sad . . . it appears in flashes of passion, anger, fear, inspiration and courage, in dark unsellable visions; it is an upside-down penny concealed beneath a tea cosy.’
Writing prompt
Go with loneliness or sadness if it appeals. Or choose another emotion/feeling you would like or not like to write about. Choose a few colours which you like and a few you don’t. What comes out of the melting pot? In her prose poems, Ruefle mixes the descriptions of concrete objects with some abstraction, and off-beat imagery: Grey sadness is the sadness of paper clips and rubber bands, of rain and squirrels and chewing gum,….
Yellow sadness is the surprise sadness. It {….} is the confusing sadness of the never-ending and the evanescent…
It’s an enormous pleasure to introduce this month’s guest poet Pam Thompson. Pam and I met 13 years ago on an extended writing course. You can find her biography below the poems. These are from Pam’s prize-winning pamphlet and show the range of her writing. The Paper Swans pamphlet competition was judged by John McCullough: ‘Sub/urban Legends gripped me because of the way it marries poignancy with a really bold imagination and stylistic flair’. The intriguing cover image is also by Pam.
Explorers, Antarctica, 1901
The leader sits on the sledge. He never does this. It’s against the rules of the expedition but now there are no rules.
Two huskies – the two remaining huskies, they ate the rest – sit either side like imperial lions.
The ship is stuck in frozen waves. The crew are starving or dead but this photo will be evidence that they reached their destination.
The photographer in the black hood. Stepping back. Pulling the cord. The flash.
Self Portrait as Fulang Chang
Freedom, chica, is all. I’ll wear the mandarin’s hat and silk waistcoat, eat all the honeyed grapes, to stay favoured, like a first-born.
I perch on her left shoulder, always on guard, never at ease. I bare my teeth and scream, at Diego and the village dogs.
I am the brush passer, ear for her secrets, but I am all chat, you know, teller of her tales though she isn’t one to keep schtum.
The bloody hearts we paint will drip onto the Blue House floor.
Fête Galante
Take the bus from outside the Water Margin Chinese restaurant—or from where it used to be in 1974—allow plenty of time. You’re at work in Lewis’s, folding up school shirts badly, cramming them back in their packaging; in a History of Art lecture looking at a slide of Fragonard’s ‘The Swing’. The bus will be full, people will be smoking on the top deck, so will you. This must be your stop. Is it everybody’s stop? You join the flow—you think of Tracy Emin’s tent with the names of all the people she ever slept with, or is it her messy bed you’re thinking of. All the beds you ever slept in. Lewis’s. All the shops you ever worked in. And the canteen in the factory where the men always patronised you. Here—you say to the tiny chef—you scrub the bloody burnt pans. All the patronising men you ever worked for—they all get off the bus. You watch them cross London Road. You haven’t moved very far. The Water Margin is the water’s margin and you wonder how this pond, this lake, this sea, arrived in the city. There are willows, and, over there, a fête galante, a woman on a swing, being pushed and pulled, higher and harder, by all the people she ever slept with.
Biography
Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer based in Leicester. She is a Hawthornden Fellow. Her works include The Japan Quiz (Redbeck Press, 2009) and Show Date and Time, (Smith|Doorstop, 2006). Her collection, Strange Fashion, was published by Pindrop Press in 2017. Pam was winner of the 2023 Paper Swans Pamphlet Competition and her winning pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) was published in March 2025.
Acacia Publications 