Vivid

I am not sure why this summer seems so vivid,
with each day somehow more beautiful than the last.
I only know that is the way it feels. The days
are moving as if each hour is two, and every
detail – a salad, a bunch of sweet peas or box
of tiny broad beans – is somehow more rich than it
would normally be. It is as if the colours,
sounds and scents of summer have been turned up a notch.

Tiny broad beans so tender you could eat them pod
and all; sweet little peas (they love a drop of good
steady rain) and lettuces that have benefited
from the cooler mornings and evenings. I made a
bean sauce this week with a base of crisp purple
and white spring onions, broad beans and tarragon. I
gave it a backbone of cubed unsmoked bacon and
bound it with a little cream. I skinned the larger beans
but left the real babies in their paper-thin skins.

The early peaches are at last arriving from
France and Italy. I wait all spring for these fruits
with their rose-scented juice. It is rare to find them
perfectly ripe in the shops, so I make sure I
buy them a couple of days before I need them.
The old trick of putting them in a paper bag
with a ripe banana to speed up their ripening
works well, but they do very nicely just left out
for a day or two. But there is no need to squeeze
and prod. An unripe peach has virtually no smell;
a ripe one will tell you it is ready to eat.



From Nigel Slater's column in the Observer, 4 July 2010. The opening paragraph was perfectly dodecasyllabic (breaking into 12 syllable lines) so 'sort of' was removed from line 13 and 'I find' from line 25 to maintain the pattern. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Sawbones

I will reach in gently and caress the liver,
the stomach and spleen.
Slide over the top,
into the recesses,
curl the fingers enough to sense the texture,
the fullness.
The bowels move away and under,
and over the top as I direct my hand.
I can describe your kidneys now,
I’ve circled the top of your rectum,
held your uterus,
measured your ovaries between my fingers.
Part of you is gone at the moment,
but I’m here,
I know you now.
You trusted and let me in,
you opened your belly to me,
and I entered with force.
I’ll stay until it’s right.
It’s what I must do.
You think you’ll never touch me so
intimately as I’ve touched you.
But you have.
You have.



From a Surgeonsblog post published 7th October, 2006. Submitted by Marika Rose.

The Eye in Time

Keen lemon-yellow
Hurts the eye in time
As a prolonged and shrill trumpet-note
The ear.

Or white
Conveys a harmony of silence
Which works upon us negatively
Like many pauses in music
That break
Temporarily
The Mel-
-ody.



A Kandinsky quotation taken from 'Music and Jugendstil', Critical Inquiry, Autumn 1990. Submitted by Kate Guthrie.

The Death of Alden

Many of them are neither
in the army nor in war work.
Many have found this a golden
opportunity to make
money during a war boom---
by writing, by commercial photography,
through the movies, or by other
worthless activities---worthless
when compared with what
your brother Alden was doing.
These bastards let your brother die, Forry,
and did not lift a hand to help him.

I mean that literally. The war
in Europe would have been over
if all the slackers in this country
had been trying to help out---
would have been over before the date
on which your brother died.
The slackers are collectively
and personally responsible
for the death of Alden.
And a large percent of fans
are among those slackers.
Alden's blood is on their hands.



From a letter written by sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein to a dedicated fan (as reproduced on Letters of Note), 28th January 1945. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

By Saturn's Moons

An aurora, shining high above
the northern part of Saturn, moves
from the night side to the day
side of the planet … tall auroral
curtains, rapidly changing over
time when viewed at the limb, or edge,
of the planet's northern hemisphere.

A large cloud formation swirls
through the high northern latitudes
of Saturn near the top …

Appearing like eyes on a potato,
craters cover the dimly lit surface
of the moon Prometheus …

Cassini looks down on the clouds
in the upper atmosphere of Saturn,
just over the shoulder of the moon

Helene … Saturn's rings, made dark
in part as the planet casts its shadow
across them, cut a striking figure
before Saturn's largest moon, Titan.

The shadow of Saturn's largest moon darkens
a huge portion of the gas giant planet.

Titan's golden, smog-like atmosphere
and complex layered hazes appear
to Cassini as a luminous ring
around the planet-sized moon.

Saturn's moon Dione passes in front
of the larger moon Titan … Enceladus
continues to spew ice into space …

A closer view of a feature
on Enceladus called Baghdad Sulcus,
one of four tiger stripes that cross
Enceladus' south pole … Cassini

is on the night side of the moon,
viewing brightly-lit plumes
of ice being ejected from fissures
at Enceladus' south pole.

Saturn's moon Rhea looms near
its sibling moon Epimetheus …

Irregularly shaped Calypso is one
of two Trojan moons that travel
in the same orbit of the larger moon
Tethys, traveling ahead and behind.
Calypso's smooth surface does not appear
to retain the record of intense cratering
that most of Saturn's other moons possess.



Compiled from NASA's notes on photographs taken of Saturn's system by their spacecraft Cassini. The photos were collected at The Big Picture 21 May 2010. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

First Night

If you and I meet up
and have a fabulous evening,
I will try and match you,
for the rest of our relationship,
with my image of
that fabulous evening.

But you are all sorts of other things.
And when I find that I then
can’t match up the magic
of that fabulous bubbly first night
to our second night I become
depressed and disgruntled

and I start hating you.



By Rishi Dastidar, taken from an interview with Rupert Everett in the Metro, 15th June 2010.

Meet me in Johannesburg

Honduras, Algeria,
Germany, Nigeria,
USA, Slovenia,
Ivory Coast.

Denmark, Spain, Slovakia,
Ghana, France, South Africa,
Chile, Greece, Australia,
Japan, Mexico.

Cameroon and Uruguay,
Portugal and Paraguay,
Serbia and Italy,
Switzerland.

England and North Korea,
Holland and Argentina,
Brazil and South Korea,
New Zealand.



A cheeky not-exactly-found poem constructed from the 32 teams in the 2010 World Cup, plus conjunctions for scansion. Submitted by Gabriel Smy.

Be mine

Why’ve you got so many pictures of Maria -
she your girlfriend or summat?
Yes, she is.
So have you had sex with her?
No.
Have you felt her bazookas?
No.
Well obviously, it being your girlfriend
you've kissed her, yeah?
Not yet.
Well mate, in England
it's sorta like a tradition
for, like, a girlfriend to kiss her boyfriend
so it sounds to me like you’re not actually with her
you just like her.

In Poland you mustn’t kiss to be together
and to think only about one thing.

But mate, we’re not in Poland:
this is England.



From dialogue in the film Somers Town, 15th June 2010. Submitted by Marika Rose.

File. Print. Colour. Print.

Colour printing
available from this
room.

Please choose the
printer below from
the drop down
menu.

From a poster in a Durham University computer room. Submitted by Marika Rose.

NOOMA is there for us

We can get anything we want,
from anywhere in the world,
whenever we want it.
That's how it is
and that's how we want it to be.
Still, our lives aren't any different
than other generations before us.
Our time is.

We want spiritual direction,
but it has to be real for us
and available when we need it.
We want a new format
for getting Christian perspectives.

NOOMA is the new format.
It's short films with communicators
that really speak to us.
Compact, portable, and concise.

Each NOOMA touches on issues
that we care about,
that we want to talk about,
and it comes in a way
that fits our world.
It's a format that's there for us
when we need it,
as we need it,
how we need it.



From the blurb on a series of short films. Submitted by Marika Rose.

Data Protection

All information about you
of a sensitive or personal nature
will be treated as private
and confidential.
We will, however, use
and disclose
the information we have about you
in the course of arranging,
placing
and administering your insurance.
This may involve
passing information about you
to insurers,
other intermediaries,
risk management assessors,
uninsured loss recovery agencies
and other third parties
(directly or indirectly)
in your insurance.



By Tracy, taken from the Towergate Professional Liability Insurance Terms of Business, 25th May 2010.

The shade you chose

Apply section by section

Put on the gloves.
Wet the hair without washing it.
Towel dry.
Apply the mixture to the roots,
by parting the hair into sections
using the applicator nozzle.
Then spread it all over the hair.

Massage

Massage the hair gently. Work up a lather.
The colour of the product will become
darker and darker
Don't worry.
After the development time,
the colour will have developed fully:
that way you are sure to
obtain the shade you chose.
Let it develop for 30 minutes

Rinse

Pour a little warm water on the hair
and massage gently.
Rinse thoroughly
with warm water
until the water runs clear.



From the instructions for L'Oreal hair dye, 27th May 2010. Submitted by Marika Rose.