Pest?

The first wasp of the season is something to note; it is a flying indication that summer or something spring-like is near.  OK, the wasp may have been lured into the wide open though a freakishly summery day, but it is a harbinger of warmer days ahead.

     I suppose it was my observation of the creature rather than a frantic flapping as it approached my cup of tea and baguette after my customary swim than started my jottings.  Although I suppose it is tempting fate to say it, I have never been stung by a wasp.  Indeed, now I come to consider it, I don’t know anyone who has been stung by a wasp either.  I have been stung by a bee; but that was because I topped a passing weed when walking the dog and a bee happened to be on the plant head.  I can hardly blame the poor creature for having an instinctive reaction to being swept up in a giant hand!  And I can remember looking at the tiny, still pulsating sting lodged in the fleshy part of my hand at the base of my thumb and realizing that the ‘offending’ bee was now one of the flying dead.

     The reaction of people to wasps is one that goes beyond the pain of the sting; for some people the fear of these creatures is visceral and reduces them to gibbering wrecks.  Mind you, I have seen the same reaction to the appearance of a daddy-long-legs – and when has one of those ever managed to pierce the skin of a human!

     My aunt had an allergic reaction to wasp stings.  She was told that if she was stung she should not panic, but go to a hospital immediately – but she was not as neurotic about wasps than those who only had to endure a little local pain if they managed to get it to attack.  Fear of wasps is not logical: yes, there is the possibility of a sting, but you have to work fairly hard to get a wasp to attack.

     The post-swim wasp did come exploring me and had an expeditionary crawl along my hand, and then it flew away.  That has always been my experience; wasps do not really want to expend energy and valuable venom on a creature that is not (usually) going to drop down dead in response.  However, I do not go out of my way to commune with wasps as my experience with the bee shows that even the most placid ‘live and let live’ attitude can be compromised by accident.

     And the last section of the poem asks the question of definition as we usually find that approximation is enough for action.

 

 

 

Pest?

I don’t kill wasps.

Don’t panic-swat with flailing hand,

infuriate with futile squeals.

I let them be.

And watch.

As they traverse the contours of my hands;

short, darting tongues through hairs to flesh

to drink in what I smell of: meat.

The gaudy abdomen, sting tipped

in sunshine’s gleam, is threat,

but why should they, whose prey

is ants and spiders, flies and Coke

take on a landscape smeared with taste?

For me the wasps are visitors:

they stay; they eat; they leave.

And no attack, no pain, just tickle-foraging

through hirsute undergrowth. 

And flight. 

Away.

An aunt of mine

did not kill wasps,

though they could easily

have finished her:

anaphylactic shock

could follow sting –

and death, of course.

But she did not

regard the summer months

as buzzing with mortality.

Discarded ice cream wrappers

and the overflowing bin

were Scylla and Charybdis

on an August stroll, for her,

but she pressed on as if the

sighted, noted, danger was not there;

walked though, and passed unscathed.

Our fear becomes attack:

provokes and redefines.

The wasp has a bad press

(and there’s resentment

at no ‘bee-death’ after sting)

but it’s entitled to defend when it’s ‘attacked’

It’s feared, though adder’s feared more,

and adders do not lurk for human strike,

but they will bite if stepped upon.

And bite and sting are real,

though more in thought

than in lived life.

Pain is always possible,

but weapon’s definition

not offence.

Flight, not fight, the coloured patterns urge,

and gaudiness is warning: go or stay,

your choice,

and was the ‘wasp’ that started

all of this a hoverfly?

My subject matter gets ever more ordinary!  My last poem was centred on nakedness in a public changing room and this present one is about crumbs!
     This too is related to my daily swimming experience, but this time out of the changing room and into the cafe for my obligatory cup of tea.  With the tea (depending on who is making it) I get a couple of those little foil wrapped biscuits that are part of the cup of tea experience.  I tuck one of the biscuits into the side pocket of my sports bag for later use as a base for my home made yogurt, while the other is a treat that I allow myself.  It was the breaking of this little biscuit that prompted the poem.
     I suppose in some ways this is a poem about the writing of a poem, a meta-poem, because while having my cup of tea I try and write something in a small 9 x 14 cm notebook that I have with me at all times.  what I write in this book is usual banal in the extreme, something about the weather or what I am going to do, or more often something I have not done.  But the idea of the writing is to write something, anything, in the hope that a free flow of words might bring something to the surface which can be useful for a poem.  This works sometimes.  Other times, it is just pages of irrelevance.
     For some reason, after the biscuit broke as I was taking it out of its foil wrapper and half the thing bounced on the page on which I was writing, instead of brushing the tiny crumbs away I just looked at them.  Part of me was simply resting after a particularly impressive catch to stop the floorward half of the biscuit from reaching its target, but the other part was thinking about bits and pieces that get caught in the pages of books and are discovered later.  Receipts used as bookmarks, torn pieces of paper, references, comments, newspaper, insects, leaves, photographs, sand, dirt, blood, phone numbers, cloth, ribbon, food, a tiny shell, book marks, money, cards - those are just some of the things that I can remember finding.  There are also the more poignant items when you find something of a parent or a grandparent inside a book that was once theirs.  Or indeed of friends who are still very much alive but far away.
     Whatever the reason for my musing, I decided to leave the crumbs there and wonder if I would ever go back and if I did would I remember leaving them there for me to remember that I left them for that purpose.  So to speak!
     As I say in the poem,
               Should I return,
               as, having written this, I might,
                                        I am conscious that I am deliberately making something out of nothing, but it is also a playing with a concept of memory.
     I am well aware that when I re-visit some of my writing, I read it almost as a stranger - though an oddly prescient one.  Although I cannot directly and precisely relate to all the exact circumstances of the production of each piece of writing, I am certainly strangely in sympathy with the writer!
     I always enjoy experiencing,
               what another me laid down
               for future memory

Crevice crumbs

They’ll stay where pages meet.

Detritus, smaller than a nit.

Memorials to where a biscuit broke,

fell, bounced, but did not hit the floor,

but left some shattered bits to

trail along the notebook’s seam.

Slight specs, like foxing,

on the newly filled-in page.

I turn that page

and run my nail along the crease.

I feel a tiny crunch.

And start another leaf.

This notebook waits for distant eyes

to come back through and glean

the words that have been missed,

that could, perhaps, feed thought anew.

Should I return,

as, having written this, I might,

will I observe small rubble

from a crumbled rusk

and struggle to recall

why it’s still there?

Or turn the pages, losing

what another me laid down

for future memory?

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By the time I entered secondary school I was taller than three-quarters of my grandparents, with only my mother’s father overtopping me.  On our first day in The Cardiff High School for Boys, we were lined up in order of height and then distributed to the Houses so that each one could have a ‘fair’ selection for their rugby teams!  At the end of the line, I was the second tallest.  And in case you’re wondering, as I was never exactly willowy, I was placed in the second row in the house rugby team and there I stayed for seven muddy years!

I am working to a point.  If you are tall and solid, the ‘dangling child’ years are limited and what I describe in the short poem that follows was restricted to a painfully short number of 'growing' years.

I can remember sitting on my father’s shoulders, and there exists a picture of me standing on his shoulders during one of our many visits to Barry Island beach.  But the memory that stays with me most concerns flying and the sea.

My especial delight was to accompany my dad into our bit of the Bristol Channel in Barry Bay, then put a foot into his cupped hands and be thrown over his shoulder into the waves.  I could happily have been flung for hours, but physical  (dad's not mine) limited my satisfaction.  All too soon I was too tall and too solid for my dad to pander to my aeronautical desires.

In school too, in gym lessons, demonstrations on the trampoline for example, always used the lighter, smaller, more manageable kids.  Not I.  I needed the teacher to ensure my safety and he was in shorter supply than fellow students.  Still, I would be lying if I said that gym lessons were my favourites, and I was generally quite happy to watch rather than participate.  But the memory of flung flight has never left me.

Sometimes in the pool I see fathers and sons engaging in what for me is only a distant memory.  It was noticing one such couple that was the inspiration for the following poem.

My parents would often tell me about my early love of swimming pools.  When I couldn’t walk but had elevated crawling into a juvenile Olympic sport, I was placed pool side in a swimming pool in Leeds and proceeded to make my determined way towards the water’s edge.  My father swept me up before I fell in, but he rapidly tired of thwarting my ambition to get wet.  He decided, therefore, to allow me to achieve my goal, suffer the consequences and thereby learn just why he constantly picked me up before I got to my destination.

I crawled.  I fell.  I spluttered.  I was rescued.  Lesson learned, I was placed poolside once again.  And proceeded to crawl towards the edge.  I had obviously decided that death was a reasonable price to pay to get to the element that I enjoyed!  As I am typing this more than sixty years later, you can appreciate that my father did not let me drown, in spite of my best efforts then, and indeed on one or two other occasions much later!

A child believes that mum and dad will always be there.  You can be thrown in the air in a blanket held by parents in a grandparents’ house; you can be held upside down by one leg and swung around; you can be held and be pretend-dropped and caught just-in-time - because your parents will make sure that you come to no harm.  It is the safe-danger of parents, like the safe-danger of thrilling fairground rides.

But your parents are not always there.  And belief is tested.  And faith strained.  And assumptions questioned.  Some trust games destroy rather than cement.

So the last two lines of the poem are perhaps a cautionary exploration of the implications of the word ‘play’ in the title.

As always, I welcome comments.

Pool play

A wriggling and excited child,

manhandled by devoted dad,

and tumbling down his father’s frame,

caught upside down in

incoherent glee.

A careful roughhouse,

ending with a tummy kiss,

and rest,

with hands on shoulders,

with bright eyes wet

with dangerous delight.

 

When you are swimming, especially with my myopic eyes, it is only things in the water that have any clarity. My goggles and the water itself act as lenses and I can see a man sight better under water than I can when I take my head out of it!
     It is not surprising then that the details of what I see under the water during my sixty lengths are of more interest than anything else: the gaps between the tiles on the pool floor; the odd pieces of detritus that wash around; arms, legs and bodies all pass my generally uninterested gaze. The only colour in my monochrome underwater world are the bathing costumes of the ladies - the men's are usually nondescript and functional, unless they are those absurd long shorts that I think are uniquely designed with anything but swimming in mind.

     From time to time, however, some guy will have some startling bathing costume which cannot be ignored.  Recently it was a garish cut-up design of some antipodean flag which commanded attention as it was so unlike the black of navy blue briefs of everybody else!

     Swimming is not the most intellectually engaging of sports so there is plenty of time for musing and the body automatically goes through the motions of overarm and I begin to wonder just how much they cost and what they are made of.

     Briefs are not the choice of swimming costume of any but the dedicated swimmer and I know that inflated prices for material heavy costumes are sold on the premise that the material is some new form of substance that will keep colour, deflect water and make you faster.  This was part of the thinking that got me started on what eventually became this poem.

     I also thought about how easy and direct my swimming was when I was a child, and then compared that with what I do now each time I have a swim.

     Some differences are simply sense.  Swimming is much more enjoyable with goggles; the shoes and the hat are demanded by the regulations of the pool; the ear plugs are because I hate water trapped in my ears, and since the pool is not directly linked to the changing rooms then one of those magic towel that soak up water and dry quickly is simply sense when getting changed.

     But things are different and the difference is what informed the latter part of the poem.

     This is the first poem I have written which has a sort of chorus and I am still wondering if it adds anything!

     The last lines before the final chorus made me think.  I do enjoy swimming, but not in the same way I did when I was a child.  I think that swimming now is more of a need for me than an occasional pleasure.  I need to think more about the word 'fun' and wonder just how that relates to my swimming experience!

™&©

Cotton, Dacron, Jersey, Orlon,

Elastane and Aqualast,

Spandex, Lycra, Latex, Nylon,

Chloroban and Durafast!

When nappied underpants were gone

(but still with mop of golden hair)

the reflex clack of grannie’s knit

magicked a onesie just for me,

baptised in Barry Bay.

Scratchy garments’ thirsty sag

increased my weight a hundred fold,

but not enough to hinder dad

from flinging me behind his head.

I’d fly and shriek with pure delight

before the splash and scrambled gasp,

‘Do it again! Again!  Again!’

Until my father’s arms were tired.

Cotton, Dacron, Jersey, Orlon,

Elastane and Aqualast,

Spandex, Lycra, Latex, Nylon,

Chloroban and Durafast!

I was told how long before

I’d learned to walk or talk

I’d crawl in pools

directly to the edge.

Each time

(and just before I fell)

my mum or dad,

would scoop me up

until, and serially fed up,

my father’s patience snapped:

I crawled towards the drop –

he let me go straight in. 

And then he carefully

fished out the coughing,

drowned-lite babe. 

A lesson learned,

he fondly hoped. 

But placed, unspluttering,

upon the side, I resolutely

moved again

always towards

the margin’s tempt.

And water that

I simply loved.

Cotton, Dacron, Jersey, Orlon,

Elastane and Aqualast,

Spandex, Lycra, Latex, Nylon,

Chloroban and Durafast!

When I was young

I swam with ease:

undress and bathers and then in;

and swim and out and towel dry.

Three ha’pence

on the trolley bus

red chlorine eyed

for home.

Cotton, Dacron, Jersey, Orlon,

Elastane and Aqualast,

Spandex, Lycra, Latex, Nylon,

Chloroban and Durafast!

Now, ear-plugs, goggles and a hat

Slip-ons for feet (the rules say so);

and towel large, commodious –

and all in substances

that were not made

when I began to swim.

A warm-up length,

pre-exercise

and set my watch.

A metric mile.

Two lengths

cool down,

post exercise,

deodorant and after shave;

with cream for feet, and face as well

before I sit and have my tea.

I feel

much more

professional.

Much less

like someone

having fun.

Cotton, Dacron, Jersey, Orlon,

Elastane and Aqualast,

Spandex, Lycra, Latex, Nylon,
Chloroban and Durafast!

The title of this poem is somewhat unconventional, but I think that it tells you something about how I feel swimming is now treated: an opportunity for marketing and for encouraging people to spend so much more than the cost of a pair of bathers and a towel!

     In my local pool more and more people are bringing a whole bag of impedimenta with them to the pool side: webbed gloves; all types of floats; cut-down, stunted flippers; full face masks with snorkels up the middle; clipboards with length types; nose clips; palm boards and lord knows what else.  I feel positively primitive with my few bits and pieces!  I don't even wear my bone induction headphones any more!