I don't know about you, but often news stories (especially the ones that are tucked away on page 12) really grab me. They may be reported in only a few lines, but you get a sense that there are huge stories behind them. Or am I a nutter?
So proposed exercise is to write a poem based on that kind of news story or small ad - ones that make you think "I wonder what the full story is behind that one?"
Here's one I wrote, which was inspired by a very small news story in the local paper about a young man who had committed suicide and his father had found him hanging in their village church. Really chirpy subject eh?!
Mr Baird Breaks The Spell
The weighted rope must have creaked
When you found your son hanging in the church
The church he had known forever
Like all the others, the unforgiving grey Scottish stone
Like rain or ash or gull feathers
Cruel, to let you find him
Although you would want to find him
For the first time, the first time to know him
How long he had been there
In the still greyness you would never know
He had gone back to the green edgeless world
Unborn again, no more dead than the embryo.
But the church?
So many questions echoing about the gull-grey walls
Thick as mystery, thick as silence
Thick as the obscure folds of the monk?s brown cowl
The texture of shock, irregular,
Filling the space between the thick, thick walls.
The air shatters
Shards of shrapnel light whizz past your head
As you compute the scene.
But it does not compute, it will not compute
Suffocating in the cold drab light
Unspeakably mundane
Normality becomes an obscenity
And your brain crashes
And you think of the list your wife gave you minutes ago
The loaf of bread - ?wholemeal, not brown?,
Because ?brown? can mean just food colouring -
And the toilet rolls and the ham or the tongue for your sandwiches
And the screws to match the screws in your pocket
To finish the shelves you had promised to finish
And the newspaper and the tobacco and the stamps
And a minute ago you were laughing
And now ...
Gulping for air in that cold, airless place
The ghastly sound of the creaking rope
And the gull-white pallor of his skin
The deep translucence of marble
A fishes? eye clouded milky-black
And the walls, the walls that hold the silence
Retching, you stumble back into the harshness of the day.
After the raising of the alarm
And the calling of the ambulance
And the faces, the faces mouthing words in an alien tongue
When you found your way back to the house
You heard her voice, so alive, so full of life -
Each second stretched, fractured, as you approached
The door, and the opening of the door, and the turning of her head, and the smile falling from her face, and the finding of the words, and the speaking of the words, the words,
The words that would break the spell.