Matthew Paul: Poetry & Stuff

How wonderful it is to have the Tory clouds lifted from the UK after 14 dark and dreadful years. Yes, Labour won’t be – or be in a position to be – as radical as I and many others would like them to be, but a large swathe of the populace who have just elected them undoubtedly wouldn’t have done so if Labour had stood on a radical platform like they did in 2019. I’m just glad that, as many people have noted, there are grown-ups back at the helm.

Voting is, of course, a privilege which we shouldn’t take for granted. It always grieves me when people say they can’t be bothered to vote and ‘all the parties are the same so what’s the point?’ Thousand of very brave people fought for universal adult franchise and many died in doing so. And, frankly, if people can’t differentiate between the Tories and parties to the left of them, then they really aren’t using their senses in the manner they were designed for.

I always enjoy elections and the act of voting. In order to celebrate that, and the outcome of Thursday’s election, here are some poems by the late, great haiku poet David Cobb. The first is from Jumping from Kiyomizu (Iron Press), 1996, happily still available here; the second and third were published in his 2000 collection A Bowl of Sloes (Snapshot Press); the fourth is from Wing Beats, ed. John Barlow and me (Snapshot Press, 2008), available here; and the fifth was published in David’s 2015 self-published collection Chiaroscuro.

It’s nice to see that David was well ahead of the game in observing dogs at polling stations.

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wet election day
poster-faces all
a pulp on sticks

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canvassing again
the dogs seem bigger
this election time

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politician’s face –
the billboard stuck
in a rabbit hole

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polling day—
swallows swooping
through a mist of flies

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polling station
the wall-eyed dog
chained to the door