Write a funeral poem

This was the instruction ringing in my ears as I watched the sea take on shades of subtle green. A sea seen against an overgrown thistle with purple-spiked heads. I turned to see who had triggered the initial instruction, but in the dying light, all I could make out was a dark shape that slouched off in the direction of my own home. And this fact seemed to liberate me to walk further, even during approaching night, down to the sea where the sounds of breeze were part of the changing shades of colour working their own language for me in the direction of the poem that had been required. Not so much seeing readable words but more seeing the aforementioned shades moving across a blank page — or were they moving across a translucent layer of attenuating skin?

I spoke to myself as if I were a different person, and that person spoke back to me who thought me equally different from him. Or should it have been equally different TO him? I never knew what the rule was. Being a poem, it did not seem to matter. Poetry was created so as to break rules of expressing thoughts and make them as if they had never been expressed before. The sea seemed to agree as it lost its latest colour to the darkness. I was now much nearer the sea, so it was hard to see it as a sea at all, having become a strange fluid slushing at my feet. Its shingly undertow articulating…

He was born to write this,
He was born to write that.
Each word to hit or miss,
Dots making commas flat.

You know I know you know
The moments getting slow
Punctuation flown
Rhyme and reason blown

Into the shades of tide
Into a night so wide
A slow swish of time
A misrule of rhyme

I could not remember what a poem was
Let alone a funeral
Even though a funeral was the last thing
I should have remembered
Being on the other side as I am
Immediately after the funeral
As I write this
In broken lines
To mimic a poem
And so the poem as concept re-lives

Lamentation by Naiyer Masud


“Each man-woman pair would touch first elbows,… […] … with motley strings of colour connecting the wrist and elbow;…”

 …being the many attractively tuggable tags that this book contains. This is another story in this book that is remarkably landmarkish in the canon of what I have read in my life. How can this possibly continue? In many ways it reminds me of modern Folk Horror but in a more stylish vintage, pervaded with R. Ostermeier’s Peninsula world, and is about a narrator who visits the wasteland communities who later become his paper-people, oh  whistle and I shall come, my lad, in more ways than one, evolving, amid an entrancing sense of psychogeography, and the unforgettable concept of the ‘congregational lament’, and much more. Who knows I may be that old man who looks like a small boy in that outlandish cart (a vehicle in itself unforgettable) all yearning towards me to help from the time when I was younger. Gestures and tones that mock my gestalt real-time reviewing. Please simply read the first paragraph as an example.  This story is my ‘prize’ fallen from the bazaar table in a bizarre geography I have travelled so far with this great book.

“….all the way up to the elbow…”

FULL CONTEXT OF THIS REVIEW: https://dflewisreviews.wordpress.com/2024/04/04/the-essence-of-camphor-by-nainer-masud/

Radio Caroline

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I remember listening to the Radio Caroline ship still broadcasting (!) as it sailed around the English coast from Clacton to Liverpool area to become Caroline North, leaving Radio Atlanta off Clacton (where I live now) to become Caroline South.
Conveniently, I went to University in Lancaster around that time and came back to the parental home in Colchester during the holidays, so I listened to both!