new poem

(from poetry workshop in Didsbury Arts Festival)

Visitors must think you always wore trunks:
Pat's thin, young, athletic husband,
but you didn't of course, just on holiday,
and you weren't athletic and you weren't young
but you were thin,
so when the wasting disease came calling
you had nothing to give but yourself.

Married at 34 and a father at 37, 38 and 40,
you hardly played football with your sons
and never walked the Pennine Way
just swam from rocks once a year
your thin, white limbs dangling from the bright red trunks,
that elicit comments from Pat's fellow residents

She doesn't tell them these were working holidays:
one day of beach for six spent photographing
Northumberland churches
Welsh castles
or Ironbridge's iron bridge
black-and-white slides for your history students
who never saw the trunk-wearing you.

Photo after photo, coast after coast, year after year,
the same red trunks
the same black towel
with red, yellow and blue stripes
getting thinner and thinner
but never replaced.

UK Green Party MP elected

China Post editorial:

Small parties — important, irrelevant or dangerous?

As The China Post went to press last night, the United Kingdom was still without a new government, despite polls closing last Thursday evening. Normally the new prime minister would visit the queen the following morning to get her assent, and then begin his new term of office, which can last for up to five years.

For the first time in almost half a century, however, Britain's first-past-the-post electoral system, which tends to give exaggerated power to the two main parties, has produced a hung parliament. With the third-largest party, the Liberal Democrats, holding the balance of power and demanding electoral reform so that its habitual 20-25 percent of the vote is never again translated into less than 10 percent of legislators, negotiations are still taking place.

One result that is clear, however, is that after decades of trying, the Green Party has its first member of the national parliament, Caroline Lucas, who was elected in Brighton. Without having improved its share of support, which remained consistent at about 1 percent, the party has perhaps come of age through its adoption of some of the strategies of its more established competitors. For example, it focused a disproportionate amount of party resources on its two most winnable seats, Brighton and Norwich. Furthermore, having eschewed the concept of party leader for ideological reasons throughout most of its history, it recently adopted such a figurehead, with Lucas being elected to the post.

Perhaps it was the growing specter of climate change that provided the final nudge to persuade voters of the Green Party's relevance.

But although the Green Party might sound nice, middle-class and cuddly, behind its voter-friendly name it has a radical agenda by no means limited to environmental protection, preventing climate change, or even opposing nuclear power stations.

The party's mission statement begins: “Life on Earth is under immense pressure. It is human activity, more than anything else, which is threatening the well-being of the environment on which we depend. Conventional politics has failed us because its values are fundamentally flawed.”

From this plausible beginning, the Green Party of England and Wales is led down an increasingly left-wing path. Encouraging more sustainable transportation not only means advocacy of buses and trains, but is also translated into re-nationalization of the train network and punitive taxes on fuel.

Without using the word socialism, the Greens also campaign for increased levels of income tax on richer people, increased corporation tax on big businesses, and “eco taxes” on polluters. They seek to reduce drug companies' influence on Britain's health service, and community self-reliance to treat and prevent a growing mental health crisis they claim is caused by the market-driven culture.

Greens see economic growth and mass consumption of the capitalist lifestyle as incompatible with the planet's finite resources, and so promote a sustainable economy.

The only sense in which the Green Party is “republican” is in seeking an end to the constitutional role of the British monarchy.

Given these left-wing standpoints of the UK and other green parties, it is ironic that their most influential moment was probably in helping George W. Bush into office in 2000. U.S. Green Party candidate Ralph Nader received 2.74 percent of the popular vote, almost 3 million in total, making the party third-largest nationwide. But it was in Florida, where Bush defeated Al Gore by just 537 votes, that the almost 100,000 votes cast for Nader led many supporters to accuse the Green Party of spoiling the election for the Democratic Party. A decade on, there is still much bad blood between the two sides.

But what, if anything, has all of this to do with Taiwan? Not much perhaps. Taiwan's Green Party is minute, even by comparison with the UK's, and musters only handfuls of supporters to its events.

More importantly, Taiwanese political parties have surely learned the danger of third-party politics. The KMT learned the hardest way, with incumbent Huang Ta-chou losing the 1994 Taipei City mayoral election to the Democratic Progressive Party's Chen Shui-bian, when what is now called the pan-Blue vote was split by Chao Shao-kong of the New Party. This was followed in the 2000 presidential election with James Soong, who left the KMT to stand as an independent, spoiling the election for the KMT's Lien Chan, once again allowing Chen to slip in the back door with less than 40 percent of the total vote.

Now it is the opposition DPP that is in danger of learning this lesson through defeat, as it tries to maintain discipline in its own ranks in advance of the yearend elections.

So while neither the UK nor Taiwan Green Party has anything like enough influence to cause an electoral upset, the issues of democracy, hung parliaments and third-party politics should not be ignored by our political combatants.

fish of the day

got the muse on while in the Abbey National on Kilburn High Street
dived for a pub lunch
apparently a member of the "Barracuda Group" (whatever that is)


[i didn't get a poem, but i did get a chapter for Luan-jaing Wang]

fish of the day

oyster and seafood stall,
Brighton prom

fish(ery museum) of the day

fisheries museum in Brighton,

in an arch under the prom

on the site of the old fishmarket dating from 1867

before which fish would have been sold impromptu on much the same site

(but without the authorities taxing the catch perhaps)

rather like much of India (and presumably the world) still is

drawing of fishsellers pre-1867

poster announcing establishment of the market 1867

photos of the fish market

fish of the day

car boot fair, Lewes, Sussex

catch of the day

SATURDAY, 17TH OCTOBER 2009



restaurant below Brighton prom

fish of the day

church doors,

Gorgie Road,

Edinburgh

fish of the day

ok, this is probably not clear
i chased after the car, to retake the photo
and interview the driver
but it disappeared


it is a picutre of a fish with legs
with 'DARWIN' written inside

how cool is that!

i want one
a reaction to the Christian symbol
from a neo-Darwinist like myself

I WANT ONE for my bike

new verse

i went back to my primary school today to talk to the Primary One and Two classes (as well as some older children) about my recent trip to India

it was my first trip back since leaving almost 40 years ago and brought back many memories

as usual for these occasions i tried to write a poem, as usual i didn't find it easy, in part because i've never tried to write anything for five/six-year-old children before

Memories Stirred by a Visit to My Primary School

In whatever country, in whatever city,
when I see gorse flowers, so yellow and so pretty,
I remember, of course, my six years on a stool,
sat listening to teachers here at Gorsey Bank School.

Primary One was kind of fun,
the teachers were nice, but I still missed my mum,
things got better in Primary Two
there were collages, football and reading
... lots of good things to do.

Primary Three wasn't my best,
I recall, above all, failing the spelling test,
and most of Year Four I spent on the playground,
kicking a ball of old stockings around.

All i remember of Five was being out in the sun,
playing football on the Carnie,
... and skating on Lindow Common;
finally in Six I was taught how to hope,
writing essays entitled "What I want to do when I grow up."

I remember friends, like Susie and Jonathan,
and Robert (who said his name was Trebor backwards)
... and let's not forget Simon,
so looking back to my last days from the first,
so many happy memories at Gorsey Bank Primary School, Wilmslow,
... Cheshire, England, Europe,

... Northern Hemisphere, The Earth, The Solar System, The Galaxy,
... The Un ... i ... verse.

photo of the day

happy days indeed

i'm sure

rockin' Rochdale

(*i don't suppose it helped that it was raining when i passed through R)

not my dog (iix)

surprising dog in my sister's neighbourhood (Todmorden)

fish of the day

bought "100 Poems by 100 Poets" (ed. Harold Pinter et. al.) in Oxfam today
(almost) the first poem i read was "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
[so i shall call the "you're-never-too-late" woman "Elizabeth"]

The Fish

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes of full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly -
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
- if you could call it a lip -
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels - until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

fish of the day

SATURDAY, 26 JUNE 2009

great fish-and-chip-shaped salt and vinegar dispensers

in Oddbar, Manchester

new verse

過去未來完成式

取下一本小說
內頁寫著 「給M,我的未來」
哈，那應該很好笑
如果算得上笑話
如果不會讓妳嫉妒

所以我應該把書破壞
把題字擦掉
或者隱瞞妳
還是妳能接受我有過去
但妳是我的未來？

Past Future Perfect

I took down a book
inscribed For M., My Future
which would be funny
if it was funny
and if it wouldn't make you jealous

so should I destroy it
or destroy the first page
or just not tell you
or can you accept that i have a past
but that you are my future?


thanks to the Shad for help with translation

not my dog (VII)

in fact, my sister's cat

fish of the day

Friday, 11 September 2009











and in full detail:

fish of the day

希望食物比笑話熱