Weather

May 2014

#064

 

Warping Weather With Wealth

Remember
When winter was cold?
Remember when summer was hot?
Remember
When cold became hot
Slowly slowly
From year start
To year middle?
Then from hot to cold
Slowly slowly 
From year middle to end?
That meteorological stability 
Was helped by 
The polar ice-caps.
Oh yeah, remember
The polar ice-caps?
Well forget it!
Modern weather is here.
We now can have
Thanks to big business
Winter one day
And summer the next.
More droughts, more floods,
More hurricanes, tsunamis,
And earth-quakes
Are now available
Thanks to modern technology
Ergo nuclear fission
Fluoro-carbons
Fracking
And fanatical
Felonious financial fraud
For 
The forseeable future.
Weather you like it
Or not.

(c) David Gordon
The Bread is Rising Poetry Collective

 

Winter Berry

When the season of winter rain blues
Is neither spring nor summer
That falls on this earth
You know it’s global warming
And on this Thursday,
On this sunny beautiful May Day
At Fair Haven
We honor our fallen comrades
Who fought for 8 hours
And as we fight and march
For our brothers and sisters
For a living wage
From the evils of starvation
From the den of thieves and swindlers
Who sit as kings and queens
In dog’s paradise
They don’t waste our blood
They just dance to dog heaven
But when there’s no justice
There’s no peace
In the land of bitter winter
In which a worker
Will see sunshine one day
Peace and love

© 5/1/14 Carlos Raúl Dufflar
The Bread is Rising Poetry Collective

 

The Coming Storm

united, front-facing
the coming storm
i feel earth shudder
under the pounding of boots

if evening is the end
of the nightmare
then the night will truly be
one of power

truth must not be left
to broken fragments
hidden under ashes
of pilgrim’s tales

distortions are cast away
with – what to them –
is a most frightful rain
that nothing can sway

© Ángel L. Martínez 30 May 2014
The Bread is Rising Poetry Collective

 

Heatwave

It’s sunny, it’s clammy, the heat is terrific.
Everyone’s happy, unless sat in traffic.
People meander when crossing the street,
Taxis are threatening to drive on their feet.
A man with two children’s attempting to cross,
The drivers won’t let him, they don’t give a toss.
There’s swearing and shouting, impatience abounds.
The noise from the hooters is heard all around.
But soon we’ll have sanity here once again;
The sunshine will go and we’ll wallow in rain!

Andrew Diamond
Goodmayes Writers

 

Wet

The Jubilee’s a washout
Just like the Coronation,
But we won’t let a drop of rain
Affect our celebration.
It’s rained throughout the sixty years
For more than forty days.
St. Swithin’s come to Britain
And this is where he stays.
Perhaps when Charles becomes the King
The weather will get better.
But I suspect, with due respect,
That it will be much wetter.

Andrew Diamond
Goodmayes Writers

 

Lost In Translation

Snow is a state of being.
It is not weather, in Canada
or anywhere else, the Inuit
do not really have all those
words for different kinds
of snow - that’s just their
standard gullibility test for
anthropologists or outsiders,
it is not the opposite of sand
(do not tell me Berbers have
50 words for different types
of sand) but it is somewhere
I never want to be again,
something I never want to see
again, never want to walk
through or walk over, and
something I never want to look
out on, or know I will have to
deal with, even for one day.
If I have to explain this,
we have less in common than
I thought, & if you tell me
you enjoy skiing, then I will
say to you not in these shoes,
not anywhere I want to live,
which will be somewhere it
has never snowed, somewhere
snow does not evoke saudade,
heimweh, or my neighbours
enjoy ice hockey on TV.

Brian Docherty
Word for Word

 

Raintown Blues

Rain is what puts me off Seattle or Vancouver,
when I read New Orleans paddles 57”per annum,
a new life in the Big Easy became a fade to grey.

I’ll take Randy Newman’s word on Chicago,
little bit too rugged for me, pause Muddy Waters,
Arizona or New Mexico more my kind of place.

If Glasgow mimes New York, roll over Trotsky,
this is permanent recession, we are extras in Taggart
for real & forever; Tom Waits Sings Elmore James

our soundtrack, intercut with The Fields of Athenry’
&‘the Famine is over/why don’t you go home’
so until it stops raining on the just & unjust alike,

I choose London & dream of San Francisco; even
in Byres Rd, I am estranged, one step away from
being jist anither Taig, a bloody shirt, an ambulance.

Back in London, watching sky Sports comfortably numb,
our halftime quiz: “You ever think about going home?”
“Naw, no even for a free season ticket at Parkhead.”

More to life? You got that right pal, I can be Irish anywhere,
be whoever I want to be, but no-one can put a label on me
or put me in a box. As for Billy Connolly’s ‘no such thing

as bad weather, just the wrong clothes’, I choose to live
somewhere the wrong face, wrong name or football shirt,
is not a health hazard, somewhere without constant drizzle,

flash floods, levees breaking, or Radio Snyde playing
‘I Can’t Stand the Rain’ or‘The Sky is Crying’, the DJ
chanting “Ryanair’s bought Concorde; Miami £10 + taxes.”

Brian Docherty
Word for Word

 

Winter

I met a man once who had homes in Michigan,
Malibu and New York, got our local estate agents
& the Hornsey Journal excited when he mumbled

something nice about Crouch End. Of course,
it didn’t last long, he moved on after getting thrown
out of the pub for wandering in barefoot & cashless.

Being rich & famous is no good if you can’t produce
the evidence or don’t look like your records anymore,
and no, we’re not blasé, we’re all famous round here.

He was bored with LA, preferred seasons to weather,
liked to rotate the view from his bedroom window,
told me he went cross-country skiing back home.

I’ll leave skiing archived in the Imaginary Museum
till climate change brings snowboards to Malibu
& snowbirds overfly Florida for Rio de Janiero.

I’ll swap places with anyone bored with their life,
as long as it doesn’t involve winter sports or dogs,
& their ex-wives don’t turn up drunk at 2 am.

We should agree our weather, no surprises like daily
thunderstorms in August or 8 feet of snow in October.
Anyone owning snowshoes or a dinghy need not apply.

Tell me no snow in living memory where you live,
ice hockey is illegal there, hats are fashion statements,
nothing nasty lurks in the woods, & you got a deal.

Let me walk along a beach too wild to surf off,
but no need to impersonate Roald Amundsen,
somewhere the winds blow in from Hawaii.

Brian DOocherty
Word for Word

 

The Salesman

Why is it always raining,
Why is it always cold.
I hate this freezing country
No place for growing old.
The London Borough Council
That used to pay my wage
Took my steady job away
At my golden age.
So now I am a salesman
Conning all the punters,
Standing in the pouring rain
To screw the bargain hunters.
And that’s what I’ll be doing
Until my pension comes.
So take all my diplomas
And shove them up your ....
(places where the sun don't shine).

Andrew Diamond
Goodmayes Writers

 

Blue Weather Shines Upright

The weather is as it is weather
have to adjust to the weathering
Colors whistling wind snowflakes
Rainbow arch green wild shade
Bitter cold frost bite aches weathered
Rain falls pools circle dropped feathered
Drip treacle slowly on the window
Clouds race each other spots shaped
Heat suns burn dry patch grass grade
Moon shone down from mountain tops
Damp seed picks grown breezes
Temperatures rise from fall
Longer day long night holds
Warm fleece freezes out the sting
Icicle ice frozen river cracks season
Rain weather westward wind blowing

John Joseph Sheeh