Sonnet: Be still, my swell-ed heart

I did but see her glassy-eyed, astride

her pied ride as she wended to her home

sighing in her saddle set to the side,

clutching her cask of wine to her bos-ome

Full sore my lovesick heart (and other parts) swell-ed

as Cupid’s arrow shrived my mortal soul

and I resolved to plight my troth once held

by the Fair Young Maid at my watering hole.

Dark Lady, I fulsome cried, be my bride

and let us to Lethe flee and there be wed.

She fix-ed me full-faced but gimlet-eyed

and intoned words that ‘minded of the dead.

“Marry, not marry, for I am wed to Sid

but as to your other needs, whatsay twenty quid*?”

*British slang for a pound

Shakes peer

‘Now is the winter of our wet cement’

quoth Lucy in her sty with diamonds in her silk-purse ears.

Meanwhile, in a battlefield far, far, away, Dicky Three hunched his back,

despairing at the sward strewn with sordid, sworded bodies in his path

and cried ‘A hearse, a hearse, my kingdom for a hearse’.

Hearing nothing but the sounds of silence he bellowed

‘Unleash the dogs of war. Out, damn-ed Spot and yes, you, Fido,

and you, frumious Bandersnatch.

And let no-one ask who let the dogs out.’

But alas, alack, the dud plan of attack now needed a patsy stone.

He roared so all could hear,

“Cry ‘Harry (and Meghan), England and Boy George’ ”

and hied himself to the tintinnabulation of the belfry of Notre Dame.

Thus it was left to the immoral bard, TS (George) Eliot to record,

on a cold, bright day whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

and the clock was striking thirteen,

“This is the way the world ends,

not with a clang but a boom-tish.”

God ignoring the bleak midwinter

The bleak midwinter arrived in

the middle of winter

and it was bleak.

Not moor bleak;

more bleak than that.

The wind was keen,

not in that American neat way

nor like mustard,

but sharp

and bleak

because it was midwinter.

I watched it being bleak midwinter

but I don’t think God did.