Well known poet, Peter Sampson explored with the group how drawing up a list could be used to stimulate thinking to develop meaningful poems. We all had a go but I won't embarrass anyone by reprinting them!
As part of his introduction Peter read one of his own poems:
"Things my father could do"
Spit into the back of the fire
Turn a piece of metal on a lathe
Dance a quick-step
Ride his bicycle for miles with me on the cross-bar
Solve an intractable mathematical problem for his tearful son
Sing a comic song in the Sunday School pantomine
Play the overture "Poet and Peasant" on the piano
Build a perfect replica of a pullman car for my model railway.
The last thing I saw him do was
Fight the pain in his chest to wrestle with the clasps
On the tin trunk which was to be sent off to Cambridge
Containing all my worldly possessions.
When I received a telegram just before Christmas
To tell me I had won an award at Cambridge
He hugged me; he wept.
When he saw me play Richard the Second at school
He was full of wonder that his own son could be somebody
So different from the boy he thought he knew.
As a boy I had never seemed to be able
To satisfy his stern demands
By doing what he wanted or would have liked me to do
- maths, making models, fighting to defend myself -
But when I started to do the things I wanted to do
(Things I could do) he did not stint his praise,
Almost as if he was glad that I could cope
With what he could never understand.
Almost as if
When he knew that I could do without him
it made his day.
Peter Sampson
Peter also drew from our spiritual past with a poem by George Herbert
"Prayer"
Prayer the Churches banquet, Angels age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav'n and earth;
Engine against th'Almightie, sinners towre,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-daies - world transposing in an houre,
A kind of tune, which all things heare and fear;
Softnesse, and peace, and joy, and love, and blisse,
Exalted Manna, gladnesse of the best,
Heaven in ordinarie, man well drest,
The milkie may, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bels beyond the starres heard, the souls bloud,
The land of spices; something understood.
