Paula Jennings, featured poet at StAnza Poetry Festival in 2005, and experienced teacher of poetry, swaps her thinking cap for a snowdrop hat as she seeks inspiration for the Poetry Writing Workshop she is taking at Cambo Snowdrops on Saturday 16 February.
Her class will be small and both budding and more experienced poets will be made most welcome. It is hoped that some of the participants may be encouraged to air their works in public the following Friday when Red Wine Productions stage their light-hearted evening of snowdrop and pig poetry and prose in the Drawing Room at Cambo House.
The poem below was written by Lyn Moir as a result of the workshop.
Tamburlaine
You’ve heard of Ferdinand, the bull who wouldn’t fight
but sat under a cork tree, smelling flowers?
Well we, snowdrops at Cambo, cap that tale easily
with one of ours.
Each year wild wee piglets, jolly weans, rotund and sleek,
play acorn-football, king of the castle, curl-tail-tig, hide and seek,
each week growing bigger, stronger, wilder
as days grow longer.
Trying to live up to their warlike given names,
the sibling piglings battle for supremacy in games:
Boadicea, Kate Bar-the-Door, Attila
and Tamburlaine.
Boadicea’s mouthy, Kate’s a strapping lass.
Attila’s always hungry, the scourge of every class,
while Tam… Tam’s dreamy, making verses.
His mother curses.
He’s strong enough, can hold his own in battles
but he doesn’t see the point, snorts ‘Fechting,
schmechting! You can keep your feathered bunnets.
I’ve written sonnets.’
And he sits among us snowdrops with his pen;
he rootles acorns, yes, but takes his inspiration
from us flowers, says the profusion of our petals
is perfection.
He’s not stupid, Tamburlaine, he knows
better than the others that his end is sausages and chops
in the better class of shops, therefore why not wait it out
with poetry and prose?
Neither chauvinist nor bore, he’s the pig we flowers adore,
always careful of our tender roots and shoots. He’s BIG.
Tambo the Cambo Rambo? No, not even the Cambo Rimbaud:
Tam Worthy, the very parfit gentle poet-pig.
© Lyn Moir 2008
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