My Town

Every Poet Laureate must pen at least one civic poem as part of the job. Here's mine, but in the spirit of civic shareware, I decree this poem to be copyright-free, so you may adapt for your own town or city, or perhaps do a cover version if you're a musician.

Save Changes

Customise your town. Edit urban decay
Knit your own community, have your say
It's Oxford ‘Talk To Your Neighbours Day’
United, we stand for a better (not third) way
Let’s clean up this town, sprinkle green onto brown
Polish the jewel of Oxfordshire’s crown
Build better density housing that won’t offend the tourists
Keep the conurbation special, serve cake (with icing) to the purists
Tell the druggies and alcies, it’s time to pull their socks up
Or next time they pass Bonn Square, there might just be some stocks up!
Let's revert the prison from posh hotel to its proper use
And never refuse to collect refuse.
Then there's doubling up the lonely
To be greener and more friendly.
We could reclaim the streets and alleys
From the crims, scammers, scallies
Treasure our noble architecture
Design out corporate, brave or car-chitecture
And merge town and gown
Into a social model of world renown.
Why wait or emigrate for Paradise?
We could all make this place nice.

LS King 2008

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The Ted Hughes I Never Knew...

A tribute to all the female journalists who've ever claimed to have slept with our late Laureate (and I may as well modestly reveal that I myself informed and inspired third clump of heather from the left in his penultimate Pennine poem)...


How oft I’ve climbed the craggy escarpment
Of the brooding North Yorkshire moors of your face
In my mind,
Careful not to tread on the nests of puffins
On the ledges of your brows
Disturb pipistrel bats hung underneath
Until, gripping the bracken of your hair,
I draw myself level
With your uppermost.
A mountain of metaphor
Could not begin to staunch the rivulets
Of my sharded tears for what never was!
I remember our bedroom tempests
As we fought to break through flesh barriers
To rub our very souls together
Defy nature’s boundaries
Like they actually happened.
My auntie saw you at a booksigning once
And my friend had a friend whose father
Once drove you to Royal Festival Hall.
I nearly came to see you read
Just before you died
But it was forty-five quid
So I didn’t
And now eternity separates us, my love.
Yet, I sense you are but a whisper away,
Close my eyes, inhale your peaty armpits still.
Seamus Heaney had nothing on you
Original son of the sod.
Master of the bog.
Hark, a hawksparrow at twelve o’clock
Bringing dead mice for us,
Or is he just, migrating…?

© LS King 2004