Hormuz

 April 25 Word of the Day: Hormuz

 

No one’s going anywhere in the Strait of Hormuz

All attention telescoped on shipping at anchor

Where no means yes and the command is refuse,

Destroyers indistinguishable from tankers.

 

World’s attention telescoped on shipping at anchor

Asks who is the prince and who the buffoon,

Carriers indistinguishable from tankers

When next week or next year both mean soon.

 

Ask who is the prince and who the buffoon -

It’s a narrow call, a tight squeeze, a stalemate

When next week or next year both mean soon

And you are merely the current head of state.

 

It’s a narrow reach, a sight tease, a failed state

The Strait of Hormuz every second in the news

And you are clearly the current headline’s fate

Running out of energy searching for clues.

 

Dire strait of Hormuz every second in the blues

Knows everyone to blame and no one to thank

Running out of energy not wanting to choose

With holidays on hold and no tiger in the tank.

 

Now everyone’s to blame and no one’s to thank

What’s mine’s mine turning overnight oil shocks

With holidays on hold and no extra in the bank

The very latest form of Persian paradox:

.

Mine’s mined, burning midnight oil shocks

No one’s going anywhere in the Strait of Hormuz

The very oldest form of Persian paradox

Where yes means no and the command is accuse.

Tokyo

 April 24 Word of the Day: Tokyo 

 

This time not, will never go

Neon noodles anime shops

Perfect parcels fishbowl lenses

Now overseas is out of reach.

 

Noodle neons anime stops

Behind roller doors’ double locks

Now overseas is out of reach,

The Tokyo I have never seen.

 

Beyond roller doors, double locks

Grow bamboo walls moss-bank gardens

Old Tokyo where I’ve never been,

The place you read about in books

 

Green bamboo walls moss-dank gardens

Cinder layers of firestorms

Places you only see in films,

Nonstop faces’ fluent markets.

 

Cinder layers of firestorms

We can only half imagine,

Nonstop faces, fluid markets

Not now, all grounded.

 

We can only half imagine.

Microcircuits scroll up and down.

Not now, all grounded,

Only us at home like thousands.

 

Microcircuits must do instead

This time, now we’ll never go,

Only online pictures thousands

Perfect parcels fishbowl lenses.

 

[August 2020 & April 2026]

 

Image: Sake tributes in Tokyo, by B. Harvey 2025. In online poetry group during lockdown, as an exercise I invited members to write a poem about a city that they currently could not visit: “The poem can go anywhere. It can be descriptive. Memories may fill the poem. Longing to return is possibly at work. By imagining the city then and now and even in the future, you play with one of poetry’s strongest devices, which is tense. The reader is left with a strong sense of the city.” I chose the pantoum and wrote three poems for the group (Florence, Jerusalem, Tokyo) in August 2020, which are released here, with little alteration, in April 2026.

Bardolatry

 April 23 Word of the Day: Bardolatry

 

[Found Poem]

 

Ranking Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.

Is it the intricate plot?

So much of Shakespeare is about the contradictions

between the private and the public self,

and how we adopt a part to perform the latter.

But of course, your personal favourite may be influenced

by the actual production and the cast. While there are

some obvious strong and weak plays,

different plays speak to different situations. 

Even the (reputedly) bad plays often have sheer brilliance

within them. Because most Shakespeare plays

have some very meaty roles, a great performance

can really boost the enjoyment of the play,

in my opinion, transcending

some of the weaker plot elements.

 

Ranking Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.

Is it the evocative and sometimes impenetrable dialogue?

It's a concentrated assault on the language processing centres

of the brain, for sure,

but it leaves me giddy with emotion.

Love the language in all the plays.

Yet atomising the plays here

apart from the nominal multi-parters

ignores the reality that no play stands alone,

the sum is greater than the parts,

and there are clearly much larger-scale projects afoot.

The camera angles are typical of its director.

 

Ranking Shakespeare's plays is so subjective.

Such ranking is necessarily an exercise in both futility

and eccentric preference. Shakespeare should not be read

as history, despite the desperate attempts of some

to insist they are true biography. Of course,

all the politically incorrect plays are lower down the list:

every age creates the Shakespeare

that reflects its self-image best. Shakespeare wrote

for the theatre at the time,

not for PhD theses centuries later.

The outdoor ambience is amazing,

with songbirds around the park

adding ad-libs from nearby.

Just magic.

 

[Found Poem: Fragments from the Comments column to ‘To see or not to see : every single Shakespeare play – ranked!’, by Michael Billington. The Guardian, 22 April 2026: https://www.theguardian.com/stage/ng-interactive/2026/apr/22/every-shakespeare-play-ranked-lear-antony-cleopatra-hamlet ]