Back then
The point was lost in translation
When it was first built
After a night when ice
Threatened to simmer
Before instead
Totally giving up the ghost
And standing out
Like a piece of tin foil
In the middle of a
Concrete jungle.
Back then
Just before Media City came,
The world seemed enormous
And the BBC seemed
An eternity away
,
And the people who
Worked there
From dawn to dusk
For over 30 years
Before tossed into the past
By Tory politics.
Back then
The point was lost in translation
But not so much the point
But the pain of
What had gone before
Of walking across eggs
Where others had suffered.
Back then
It wasn’t so much
A hollowness
Or a temporary lights out
Before a massive re-energising
But rather a re-generation
A rebirth
And the almost airbrushing
Of what had gone before
When people used
To queue up for hours
At a end
Only to be sent home
If their faces didn’t fit,
And standing out
Like a piece of tin foil
In the middle of a
Concrete jungle
Where no sound emerges
Only the coming and groaning
Of their breath across the wind
When they would have to
Go home and tell their wives
They had nothing.
Nothing
But shadows flickering
Up the walls
In a dockyard prayer
Mourning on the desert.
(15th Day of NaPoWriMo http://www.napowrimo.net/ asked for 'Today’s prompt asks you to get a bit silly and pen a parody. I’ve found these are actually a good way of internalizing lessons about rhyme and meter — they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and a good parody closely imitates the tone and rhythm of the poem that it mocks. And what poem should you parody? Well, the didactic, moralizing verses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are a rich mine of sing-songy, overly precise meters and bloatedly sentimental themes. Joyce Kilmer’s Trees has probably been parodied hundreds of times, but it kind of deserves it. My father used to gleefully render the opening lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s The Barefoot Boy, as “Barefoot boy, with cheeks of tan/run over by a moving van.'
Sadly I wasn't in the mood for that today but did use the word parody as I talked about where I worked in Salford Quays, Manchester)
(15th Day of NaPoWriMo http://www.napowrimo.net/ asked for 'Today’s prompt asks you to get a bit silly and pen a parody. I’ve found these are actually a good way of internalizing lessons about rhyme and meter — they say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and a good parody closely imitates the tone and rhythm of the poem that it mocks. And what poem should you parody? Well, the didactic, moralizing verses of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are a rich mine of sing-songy, overly precise meters and bloatedly sentimental themes. Joyce Kilmer’s Trees has probably been parodied hundreds of times, but it kind of deserves it. My father used to gleefully render the opening lines of John Greenleaf Whittier’s The Barefoot Boy, as “Barefoot boy, with cheeks of tan/run over by a moving van.'
Sadly I wasn't in the mood for that today but did use the word parody as I talked about where I worked in Salford Quays, Manchester)
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