A Yard Of Ale

A Yard Of Ale

A yard of ale, that old-time drink,
Keeps us a metre apart;
The distancing solution,
State of the safe-pub art.

And when I want to meet you over
Chips and battered cod,
Let’s use the café garden,
And a social-bubble pod.

We can gather on the beach
A metre-plus between us
A reasonable distance
To keep us heterogeneous.

When at last we can get closer,
Can shake hands and hug and kiss,
We will clutch our sides and laugh
Over these tortions and reminisce. 

In Vino Veritas

 

Photo: WHB – Devon 2019  . . .  ©

Truth …  
In wine? 
Pull the other one. 
Stick it on me, babe 
I’ll believe it when I feel it 
 
Next you’ll be persuading me 
Love is blind 
When everyone knows 
However fickle 
It’s in the beholder’s ken 
The plaything of their whim 
Their only hope for the future 
 
Then 
You’ll be saying 
Time flies 
When we all know  
It sinks and swims 
Runs and stutters 
Can’t make its mind up 
Whether to be patient 
Or restive 
Anxious or unhurried 
 
And as for 
Life being for living 
Non sequiturs 
Don’t come better than that 
Its for laughing 
For crying 
But…. 
Above all it’s for dying 
For returning to the earth which spawned us 
For calling time on the pain of living 
 
For …  
And this we must remember …  
As the old song goes 
You can’t have one without the other. 
 
Sic transit gloria mundi 

Mrs Reece Laughs

(Poem No.32 of my favourite short poems)

Today’s poem was written by MARTIN ARMSTRONG, who was  born in Newcastle-on-Tyne in 1882.  He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College Cambridge.  His first publication of poems appeared in 1912.  During 1914-1915 he served in France on the Western Front, in, first the 2nd Artist Rifles, then he was commissioned into the 8th Middlesex Regiment from 1915 until the end of the war.   His book. ‘Buzzards and other Poems’ was published in 1921.   Martin Armstrong died in 1974.

Mrs Reece Laughs

Laughter, with us, is no great undertaking;
A sudden wave that breaks and dies in breaking.
Laughter with Mrs. Reece is much less simple:
It germinates, it spreads, dimple by dimple,
From small beginnings, things of easy girth,
To formidable redundancies of mirth.
Clusters of subterranean chuckles rise,
And presently the circles of her eyes
Close into slits and all the woman heaves,
As a great elm with all its mounds of leaves
Wallows before the storm. From hidden sources
A mustering of blind volcanic forces
Takes her and shakes her till she sobs and gapes.
Then all that load of bottled mirth escapes
In one wild crow, a lifting of huge hands
And creaking stays, a visage that expands
In scarlet ridge and furrow. Thence collapse,
A hanging head, a feeble hand that flaps
An apron-end to stir an air and waft.
A steaming face . . .  And Mrs. Reece has laughed.

By Martin Armstrong