For a Culture Central project 2021

I tell you  This isn’t the first and it won’t be the last poem written in spring, and although I knew all along it was coming, and each time that it does, meaning  more and more with its closeness  to the last, my last, (the endmost, not the previous) -when I see that first bee, knees strapped with full orange sacs, butting between snowdrops, I tell you, I could cry.  Trees bud, and sap rises. I resolve to live better, clean my house, I lean into love, breezing through ‘til midsummer, dancing from one to another, idea to idea room to room flower to flower  Cheeks full of sweet-pollened air, Eyes itchy, chest wheezing. Why should you care for the memory of winter? Faded and forgotten, With each stretched day fainter, with the sun you are smitten.

SPRING'S CALLING

Vidimus - A Coventry Poem - Wesley Finch

1.
Look at me. I am still your city:

The destroyed old and the next new.
Edges spread, assuming villages
The centre rises, reaching heavenward. 
     -Do not look down.

The wheel of construction/destruction/construction.
Fragments of a red city wall,
The eye of the road ringing, rumbling with tyres.
   -Go clockwise around.

Echoing ghosts held to a cobbled street,
Cardboard beds and sleeping bags in grand doorways,
Scaffold against eroded sandstone
     -that unheard known sound.

They send them here/they come of their own volition.
Hoarder of lives, host of history.


2
Cars roll off production lines…
Blue bubbles in the fountain…
New music from the neighbourhood…
Suburbia in Humbrol…
Shapes in the rubble…
The angels of death…
All this we have seen.

3
(If I were a bird what bird would I be?
Not a dove, not a phoenix
Perhaps a pigeon, a magpie maybe!?)



4

Where once we made things useful
We pack and stack and house you
We sell the useless to you
Take your money to distract you

5

“There are few vantage points from where you can now see
All three spires 
That once defined this Coventry
For any approaching traveller.”

Obscured by gyms and high rise Study Inns
The colour coded monoliths 
Monuments to big business academia.
Not so mighty now, the steeples seem feeble.

We have made for you a CAD grown Holloway
As you circle the city
Looking for your exit.


6

Park your car and walk with me.
Put down your shopping bags
Just for me, for a moment, pocket your device.

Now, 
Look east in the morning, as you stand
In that roofless cathedral ruin.
High up there, in the long blasted out window arch:
Like a Flanders field poppy, a tiny circle of red glass remains,
After all this, faintly glowing, in the blue morning sky,
A coal of hope glows anew every morning.
Look at it. This is your city.

Vidimus

This is Why We are All Doomed.

 
A tree stood in the middle of a busy dual carriageway.

The tree spent some time
standing on the Highway on Tuesday,
after it fell off a flatbed trailer.
It was painstakingly moved.

Karen bought the olive tree at Costco on impulse,
but transporting it proved rather a difficult process.
The tree is meant as a centre piece
for a princess themed room.

Karen enlisted the help of a friend,
who arrived with a van to move it.
However, with the sheer size of the tree,
the van was not big enough.


Next, Karen decided to ask her other friend
to come with his truck, towing Karen's horsebox to the store,
with the plan to put the tree inside it for transportation.
This also was not big enough.

They had a flatbed trailer and would go and get it.
They borrowed a forklift,
placed the tree on a pallet,
on the trailer, and off it went.

They had only travelled 100 yards when they realised
the tree was no longer on the flatbed –
the tree had toppled off and was standing in the road,
the pallet had broken.

"People were slowing down, going round it,"
"You couldn't make it up.
I was laughing,
but no-one else was,” said Karen.

“Three lads, who had jumped out of their van, a cyclist and two drivers,
all stopped to help,
and we somehow managed to pick up the tree and
put it on the kerb.”

It then took an hour to lift it back on the trailer
(without the forklift),
without causing death or serious injury to anyone.
It took over six hours in all.

Hopefully the effort will prove worthwhile in
the end.

(From a news report in the Coventry Telegraph, April 2021)

This Is Why We Are All Doomed

An episode of Radio4's Ramblings show, from Coventry, dictated by speech to text, edited and presented through speech to text.
See Here:
1.
The skies have cleared.
There's a storm forecast later. 
There were children playing in a playground,
birds singing around in three enormous copper Beech trees, 
in a park that is currently being developed.

Take me on a guided tour of this city that is an amazing amount of remains? 
*

2.

And then we've got this huge gap, 


[. ]



then this big rush of development bothtimeswhenitwashappeningbehindme this lake is being dugout yes this is north very much the cycle industry has been booming for quite a number of years and then the very origins of the car industry. 

So, this community around us would have been working?

This was a beautiful part laid out for local people 
and only just a short walk from the city centre. 
It was the site of the former mill 
on the city's water courses. 

So, we're looking at what was originally the millpond?

it was turned into a model boating lake in 1910 
and today we are naturalising it to improve wildlife in this particular area. 

So, where would you like to take me in? 

I would like to take you in the millpond under our feet. 
I'd like to take you along the route as it passes under the ring Rd to meet the Sherbourne. 

So, doing pretty much a journey through time. 

etc

Cov Conversation - Urban Ramblings

Found sounds, music, poetry, noise.

The voice and the sounds of the city in June 2020.

Episode 1: Morning

Episode 2 - I Scream

Rishi - the voice of the city,

Fiona, from the allotment
...and friends

IOCH 3 - M)N£Y

Violin & Guitar - Jools Street
Words and sounds - Wes Finch

4 Poems.

1:
The City Awakes

Next doors car, choking into life wakes you first, drives off
Second time is the front door thudding, the knocker rattling
Then it’s the alarm clock, a click and into The Weather, sponsored by
“Allen’s Taxis, 5-5-3-5 double 5, you dial we’ll drive!”

Socks on the floor. Jeans on the chair. Shoes under the bed.
Colgate on your brush. Water on your face.
Back of the door, your jacket on a peg
“In our Coventry homes…”

You make the guts of what runs this town 
Factory shift, 5 days of the week. That grind will let up
Holiday Fortnight, Weston-super-mare or Skeg
Down the street, in cold morning air you cough out the last of the nights dreams.

2:
Soapy Syllabic

(from S. Fry)

Wash daily
By bath, shower or sink
Wash!
Cleanliness is…
In the olden days they just used
Perfume and scents
Well,
Everybody stank then.
Tapless homes

You should see
The range of soaps they have
‘Lush’
Blocks, bars, jellies
All smelling likes sweets and pudding
It’s a 
Somebody doesn’t
Try and eat some of them.

I bet they have.

3:
Acrostic Poem – Generated Online – 9/8/20

Wooden steeples
Equivalent axles
Solid stands

Fiery trials
Idle chases
Noble itches
Cycles
Half cycles

4:The Hammer and the Dance. 
A pleasing phrase
To explain our point in time
It will be a watershed
Things will be different
Everything that happens from now on…

Supression for protection

I have never been a fan
Of rules without reasons given
Or the reasons being ridiculous, but
I will abide, try to keep my mind
Right inside my house.

I am a lucky son
I have company and safe walls,
Cupboards full, why fye
And my awareness bubbling over
The aroma of genuine fear
Drifts through the rooms of the small house
Open the windows
Let it out

The weight of the hammer now;
The dance of balance and care 
after,
https://medium.com/@tomaspueyo/coronavirus-the-hammer-and-the-dance-be9337092b56
The title refers to one of three options given as response to a virus pandemic situation: Do nothing, Mitigate or the Hammer - locking down hard a.s.a.p.. Then comes the Dance, the what happens next.

4 POEMS

Episode 5 and end of Season 1

A Dream & A Poem.
Words by Wes Finch
Sounds by Wes Finch & Ben Haines

Vidimus: by Wes
1.

Look at me. I am still your city.
The destroyed old and the always new.
Growing outwards at the edges
Growing upwards in the centre
Eating villages, linking towns.
Reaching heavenward. Do not look down.

Building one thing, tearing it down, trying again.
Holding pockets of the past; 
glimpses of a red city wall,
Ghosts of before times walk stretches of cobbled street,
Cardboard and sleeping bags in grand doorways,
Scaffold against eroded sandstone

Opening arms to the incoming, squeezing it all in.
Hoarder of lives, host of history.

2

Cars roll off production lines…

Blue bubbles in the fountain…

New music from the neighbourhood…

Suburbia in Humbrol…

Sculptures from the rubble…

The angels of death…

All this we have seen.


3

(If I were a bird what bird would I be?
Not a dove, not a phoenix
Perhaps a pigeon, a magpie maybe!?)

4

Where once we made things useful
We pack and stack and house you
We sell the useless to you
Take your money to distract you


5

“There are few vantage points where now you can see
All three spires 
That once defined this Coventry
For any approaching traveller.”

Obscured by high rise Study Inns
The colour coded monoliths 
Monuments to big business academia.
Not so mighty now, the steeples seem feeble.

We have made for you a CAD grown Holloway
As you circle the inner city
Looking for your exit.


6

Leave your car and walk with me.
Put down your shopping bags
Just for me, for a moment, pocket your device.

Now, look east in the morning, as you stand
In that roofless cathedral ruin.
High up there, in the long blasted out window arch:
Like a Flanders field poppy, a tiny circle of red glass remains,
After all this, faintly glowing, in the blue morning sky,
A coal of hope glows anew every morning.
This is your city.

InOurCoventryHomes