November verse 1, 2023

It’s the second day of November and I have to get to writing verse. This is my 14th year of taking on the challenge to write 14 14-line poems in November, in what I’ve called LoSoRhyMo – Local Sonnet Writing Month – before I learned that my favoured verse form is not a sonnet, but an Onegin stanza. You can browse 20 screens of past efforts here, or you could even buy one of the five little books I’ve made out of them – here.

Today I’m taking as my starting point Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens’ discussion of the recent referendum result on The Minefield, though I’ve only listened to their opening salvoes, so my verse doesn’t actually engage with their thinking.

Here goes, with a bag of mixed metaphors and apologies for the Kipling reference:

November verse 1: Yes and no
Yes means yes, and No means something
else, just not the offered thing.
True, Yes is narrow, No's a thumping
choir too many voices sing, 
to drown out Yes's one voice, crowing,
snarling, weeping croc tears, lowing 
pride-like, herd-like, chewing cud
of victory, and tasting  blood.
But Yes can watch its hopes lie broken,
stoop, and build with worn-out tools
a new flame as the old one cools.
Not just the Woke have now been woken:
gauntlet's run and gauntlet's thrown,
to be picked up. A seed is sown.