Ashes

Forget the Big Bashes
Or sub-continental clashes
Ignore the one-day dashes
It's almost The Ashes

Botham's sweet-store smashes
Boon's and Hughes' moustaches
All the last wicket gnashes
It's almost The Ashes

Warne's tricks in caches
Pietersen's off-side slashes
Series igniting flashes
It's almost The Ashes

Horror

I didn't see the smoke and blood
Or the death indiscriminate

Or soot and tear stained survivors faces
In shock at escaping fate

I didn't hear the detonation
Or the crashing of the train

Or the panicked screams underground
Of bewildered anguish and pain

But I felt the shock of the city
A sense that something had changed

And I felt horror and sympathy for those
Whose lives had been rearranged

Truant

What are we teaching our kids
With this high handed approach
The hand of government
Reaching too far
They're preaching family values
while eroding the rights of the parents
Who despite beseeching requests
Are left with no choice
No opportunity to voice their dissent
Without paying a fine
A form of rent on bad luck
On an extraordinary event
And yet the politicians
Won't turn up every day
They play truant and deny us
Our democratic say.

http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jul/05/couple-faces-court-children-term-time-absence-school-sick-grandfather

Lionesses

Such roaring successes
After past world cup messes
The England lionesses
Have learned how to impress us

But in male dominated society
It won’t bring equality
In the town or the city
Which must be a pity

So we must help the drives
Against a world that deprives
Our daughters, girlfriends, wives
Of fairness in their lives

We must begin the redresses
Ease up on the stresses
That daily represses
On our own lionesses

Tour

A romantic mixture
Of myth, legends and endurance time trial.
And the ultimate billets-doux
Sent by the French people
To its countryside.
Fields and flowers and expanses,
Wide roads and roundabouts,
At which a peloton
Unzips and spins.
Quaint cobbled villages,
Windowboxed and spruced
Cheers and celebrates.
While mountain passes bring out the mist
And the misty eyed,
Where cloud dreams can burst
Like raindrops.
And the jewel of Paris
Where it ends,
Under the watchful eye of Triomphe.

The race fashions itself
Upon coloured jerseys.
The greens with their explosive
Gun shattering speed,
Swaying and piston-driving in the sprint.
And polka dots hit the heights
With a raw strength,
On the endless, sapping Escherian slopes.
While, like a burning beacon of sunshine
The yellow lights up the front,
And the late night Lantern Rouge
Brings up the rear.
A sense of the iconic
And the spectral,
In which the devil
Can show himself at any time,
Over a three week journey
Of personal joys and hells.

Peas

I wonder what the experts said
When a caveman first cooked meat
"It tastes of carbon"
"It doesn't ooze with blood"
"This idea is obsolete!"

And what about the moment when
Someone first fermented grain
"It's got a nasty taste"
"It made me sick"
"It made me feel a tad insane"

So uproar over a guacomole
Made with peas is no surprise
Though my personal taste
Is to have them mushy
With mash and two meat pies

 http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/01/guacamole-peas-barack-obama-outcry

Keeping

The tick tock of time
Sweeps past like a broom
Whisking away
Dust and detritus of history
Hands changing hands
Like feet dancing on tiptoe
To the continuous beat
Of relentless change
Only the emotionless clock face
Stares back spinning
In the same cycle
Start to end, twice a day
And the key question
Just who is keeping who?