Poem My Longest Day

War memorial – Preston city centre, Lancashire

Poem My Longest Day

Written to commemorate the 6^th June 2024 80^th Anniversary of the Normandy Landings.

Like shells bombing down on the beaches

A deadly bombshell reaches

Across time from Forty-Four to Seventy Eight

To the anniversary of the famous Normandy landing date

A message sent me home on unexpected leave

Unaware of the tragedy that I would soon begin to grieve.

All I was told was that my Dad had been taken ill.

The class sounded silent, and time seemed to stand very still.

I got home to find he wasn’t ill, but dead

My own D-Day, when the D Word was not being said

As though breaking it to me gently would spare me some of the pain

But I said he was dead and begged the rest of the family explain

What had happened, trying to take stock

Already reeling in a state of shock.

My dad had been out alone having breakfast at his favourite café in Town

When he clutched at his chest as if shot, and instantly fell down

A blood clot bullet had slammed into his heart.

Mouth to mouth resuscitation had failed to restart

Him, so like the families of those who fell at Normandy

News of his fall struck like shellshock on me and the rest of the family.

I grew up that day. My childhood died with my Dad

I didn’t just end up feeling terribly sad

I was spiralling into full on depression and despair

Told that I was the man of the house now, and that I had to care

For everyone I just wanted to desert and run, like a coward under fire

I left school too stressed and agitated, so no employer would hire

Me, and like many returning soldiers, I was unemployed.

Books, beer and self-loathing were the only things I enjoyed.

I had no medals, no glorious heroics to my name

I felt useless and as if I’d brought my family nothing but shame.

In consequence and as a result

I retreated into a mysticism cult,

Blindly following the orders of a self-appointed messiah

Many former friends saw me as a social pariah.

My guru gave orders I followed without question

Totally brainwashed, open to suggestion

Like the Nazis who thought Hitler the source of their salvation

Until I came to my senses and achieved my own liberation.

Would Dad have hated me for joining the cult in the first place?

Instead of helping my family I was a selfish disgrace

Or would he be proud of how I broke myself free?

Writing my verse, gaining my academic degree.

My Dad was born just too late to sign up and fight in the war

He wished he had gone and read every war book he ever saw

But he remains my hero, cruelly taken away

On the thirty-fourth anniversary of D Day.

Now, eighty years on, we remember again

The many brave men who fought to obtain

Freedom and liberty, ending Fascist and Nazi tyranny.

Many fathers and sons fell to guns and mines every step of the way.

Let’s never forget to salute their bravery on 1944’s more famous D-Day.

War Memorial, Cheadle, Manchester

Photos taken by me.

Arthur Chappell

Poetry Book Review – Teika Marija Smits – Russian Doll – 2021 Indigo Dreams Publishing

Teika Marija Smits is writer and editor with an extraordinary range and diversity.  Her resume includes science fiction, fantasy and studies in motherhood. This is the first of hopefully many collections of her poetry. 

It’s a slender volume with just twenty-one poems, but as rich and vibrant as a novel. 

There is a chronology to the poems, giving a sense of autobiography that gives the verse a deep sense of honesty and the deeply personal.  

Book cover for Teika’s book, taken by me

The narrator goes from describing the escapology skills with which she clamboured from her cot to join her parents in their bed, through a delicious description of a Choc Chip ice cream laid out in the shape of an ice cream cornet. 

The text gets more serious in Teika’s description of her athletic, and competitive friend Anne Marie, always ahead in life, only to succumb to depression and suicide despiye having seemed so much better in every way.  This is slammed home harder later when, after watching Inner Space (about a shrinking people to put them inside other people) she and her father discuss the scientific and medical applications of the idea, oblivious that her father was already dying and beyond such help.   I could really relate to this, as during my own bowel cancer crisis in 2020, I found myself thinking a lot about an earlier film on the same premise, Fantastic Voyage, in which surgery is performed on a patient by miniaturized surgeons. 

Her father’s death during a routine shopping trip comes in the very next poem, and again it strikes personal chords, as my father died alone in a city centre cafe in Manchester aged 49, in 1978 from coronary thrombosis. It felt like the death of my childhood, and my cancer almost repeated his fate on me at a time when Covid made it impossible for anyone to visit me. 

The Russian Doll title refers to the Russian souvenir dolls within dolls you can buy (I got my Gran one on a childhood visit to ‘Leningrad’ as it was ten known, in 1977). Here it is a metaphor for the complex inner selves we have, the youth within the more mature self, the inner grief, creativity, etc.

In the second half of the collection Teika goes from being the daughter doll in the family to being the mother figure, the outer, more protective shell to her own inner dolls as much as mother to her own family. 

During pregnancy Teika went through phases of seeing her child as some kind of cursed fairie entity changeling in possession of her belly but came to love and understand her through support from the father and medication. 

I really like ‘The Right Tool’ piece, in which Teika is impressed by her son’s pragmatic sense of what instruments and tools are needed for various tasks, given that her grandmother somehow achieved everything with the same knife.  Teika is frightened by a Warcraft computer game involving zombies where her son is able to fend them off easily while she wants only to scream  and flee.  Here is a sense of changing perspectives over generational divides. 

The title poem indicates the regrets that come of age, as the author feels her younger selves, her inner dolls, might be disappointed with the outer layer, but the closing verse shows greater optimism, as Teika takes to a swing, remembering doing so as a child, feeling renewed, reinvented, reborn. 

Of course, her immense talents show just how much Teika still has to give, take and share in life.   This is a wonderful collection. Her admission to her sense of her vulnerabilities and frailties are actually showing how strong and powerful she really is.

Arthur Chappell. 

Review – How To Be A Better Human by Chris Singleton – The Stanley Arms Preston

The Preston based Lancashire Fringe Festival reached about the half-way mark on its programme of events and continues to go from strength to strength.  After having to abort a afternoon visit to the cinema due to buses failing to turn up on schedule, (that can wait until tomorrow), I headed to The Stanley Arms, in the city centre for a few beers and some pre-show food. 

Pub sign – Stanley Arms – Preston – taken by me

I have been to events at The Stanley Arms before, even participating, (as a poet), in a series of burlesque events there in 2017.  (My Burlesque poem https://arthurchappell.wordpress.com/2022/05/11/burlesque-a-poem/ )

It was clear that Chris Singleton’s event had drawn a big audience. There was quite a scramble to bring in extra chairs to accommodate everyone arriving. 

Chris’s deeply moving heartfelt monologue began deceptively as a life coaching lecture parody echoing the theme of the process of loss and grief can ultimately make us stronger after plunging us into the depths of despair and in many cases, depression. His use of music, poetry and Powerpoint was very well handled. 

Chris had an idyllic family who travelled around together, in the UK, Europe and over the wider world.  Their lives were thrown into turmoil when Chris’s father was diagnosed with bowel cancer, which eventually became inoperable, as the family faced the brutal reality of palliative care, and impending loss. The story moves through changing moods from the farcical comedy of getting in the wrong lift while trying to reach the ward to the growing realisation that they were losing their father. 

Old pub sign For The Stanley Arms – taken by me

Chris charts the emotional devastation wrought with great humour and pathos. He shows the last family photos of the family together, on a visit to a Yorkshire sculpture park, where gravel paths are not very good for pushing wheelchairs, as not being the best mementoes they could have been, as they are shot on a windswept overgrown picnic spot, with much more interesting features just out of shot, and the last image seen of his father showing his fair blown up sharply by the breeze. 

After the loss of his father Chris faced ongoing drama, as in taking a portion of his ashes through customs to scatter in Canada where his daughter (Chris’s sister) lives.  Chris takes great pride in that his father’s love of travel extended to his remains being spread around the World.  

Chris was plunged into the depths of despair but built himself up to feel happy in his freedom and independence, showing his rented accommodation with pride as still very much his own even though he doesn’t actually own it. The theme was very much that what doesn’t destroy us has the potential to make us stronger. 

As undoubtedly for many in the audience there was a great deal here to relate to for me. I have faced the long slow bedside vigil by the side of several relatives (though my father was snatched instantly without warning by a coronary heart attack aged 49 in 1978). I myself faced bowel cancer at the height of the Covid lockdown (much of Chris’s story is set in the year before Covid struck the UK). I was fortunate enough to come through but so many do not, 

Chris makes his father into such a wonderful character that you are left with regret that you never met him personally, Chris has undoubtedly done him proud in presenting his story, and that of the whole family and Chris himself so well, with great humour and bravery. 

A deeply moving show that is well worth seeing if you get a chance. 

Thanks to Chris, to Garry Cook and all at Lancashire Fringe, and to friends I met up with pre and post show too.  

Arthur Chappell