Bits and Pieces
by Gordon Dyer
'New' 1959 Frogeye Austin Healy Sprite
Outside "The Rat Inn"
Reason and Rhyme (and Rhythm)
There is a balance of Reason and Rhyme
in all of our poems, across all of time.
We strive for the reason, the meaning of words,
and try to miss potholes in rhyme and in verse.
Our cart trundles on down an old country lane,
where rhythm is found when wheels miss the pain
of hitting a hole that might crack the rim
and meaning is held, steering words that are trim.
We wobble along, pulling reins, hitting holes,
And strive for a path that gives meaning to those
who ride in the cart, but need a smooth line
to understand us, across all of time.
15 Feb 2023
© Gordon Dyer 2023
Pastoral Life
We sit by a stream where the water flows,
Like rippling thoughts and babbling words,
Where the sun shines down warming your soft skin,
Where the autumn leaves fall and float within
My thoughts that move with the trickling stream,
Tumbling along to find what they mean.
The trees barely move, they whisper at us,
Holding onto their leaves without any fuss.
They grow their offspring with patience and grace,
Who blow with the wind to find their own place.
They're fed by the air and the earth where they stand.
They don't have to plough or nurture the land.
They are happy just to be where they are,
Not like us who want to travel afar,
Which is how we came here to sit by the stream,
Finding out what our lives can possibly mean.
© Gordon Dyer 2023
The ideas for this poem began when I was listening to
'Leaf and Stream' by Wishbone Ash.
Our Purpose
We think that the whole universe
Was created for our purpose,
But the truth is just the opposite,
We are little by-products of it.
A walk on the green hills
Where we don't interfere,
Makes the truth of our place
So obviously clear.
© Gordon Dyer 2023
Caw Gap Cow Pat
Before a good walk I polished my boots,
wondering if Romans polished theirs too.
I walked up the wall to the West of Steel wood,
along to Caw Gap where a Roman turret stood.
I took a close photo at Caw Gap,
Then needing more space, I stood well back -
My foot slithered down and made a loud splat,
Into a great big sloppy cow pat.
It was the biggest cow pat seen that day,
From sunny Wallsend to Bowness-on-Solway.
Luckily the soft grass saved the fateful day,
Wiping the sloppy shit on my boots away.
© Gordon Dyer 2023
A Bargain LP
(from an incident in Leeds in 1975)
There once was a man with a spare LP,
which he tried to sell to make some money.
By pestering two lads with long hair and flairs,
He thought he would profit from this green pair.
"You can have this for free if you want to donate"
(...to a charity whose fund is very opaque).
The LP was taken to stop the non-sense
and all he got back was a shiny ten pence!
© Gordon Dyer 2023
A Pinch of Salt
(A comment on free speech and thought)
The anchor is weighed and the ship sails on,
the journey of life has just begun.
With accurate hands I coil up the rope,
giving all who sail a feeling of hope
that it's ready for when we find the land,
where joy gives us hope and extremes are banned.
With my spyglass at hand in the 'nest up high,
I search for a land where we all can comply
with reason and doubt, moderation and fun,
and no blinkered views of our horizon.
Where words are served up with a pinch of salt,
and the taste of our views is nobody's fault.
© Gordon Dyer 2023
A visiting friend on the veranda, waiting for more nuts...
Her Last Garden
The bees and birds sing together
Humming and flitting around the heather.
Chirping in song are blackbirds and thrushes,
Wrens build nests inside the bushes,
They love the protection of a big hornbeam,
escaping from prowling cats, unseen.
Marigolds give the beds a glow
of orange that warms her resting soul.
The heather is green after its short spring flower
when snowdrops and crocus survived the snow shower.
Snow long forgotten as summer sun
now bakes the roses and poppies for fun.
Granny sits sipping a warm milky tea
and with a grin she remembers with glee
her time spent weeding the herbaceous border
at Garden Cottage, where her energy allowed her
to fly about doing so many things,
but now it's as if someone clipped her wings.
Her thoughts turn to elephants in the town,
she's a little girl now without the frown
from being old and having to sit down.
She skips and runs through Jesmond Dene
and remembers the cook so jolly, not lean,
with a big round face and rosy cheeks
from cooking at the old hot range for weeks.
She's ready to roast the beef and veg
with parsnips placed along the edge.
(Back at Halorshield...)
There's a soft french smell of lavender bushes
with some weeds and moss along the edges.
Ants love the cracks between paving stones
pushing up piles of grit around holes.
Her smile returns as she sits there
with blanket on knees in her wheelchair.
She loved the sun, the wind, the rain
and she'd love to sit in the garden again.
© Gordon Dyer August 2022
The fridge door seal became very leaky causing the contents to warm and condensation to freeze into large blocks of ice at the back of the fridge...
LEMON TWIST
Where bacteria do thrive
and arctic conditions
push food alive
out of the door,
can we survive?
Icebergs fit to sink Titanic
uncomfortably sit in silent panic,
warming, melting into the drain,
crying, cracking as if in pain?
No, just chosen not to be,
by the heat and entropy.
Lemon Myrtled, sparking clean,
bug-free shelves can now be seen.
And with a quick twist of cloth,
they gleam in shining glory,
ready for the next food story.
© Gordon Dyer 2022
A Letter to the Papers
I have a very good friend who regularly writes to the newspapers expressing the views of the silent majority in this country.
However, I fear the words of Ian McDonald are true:
"I talk to the wind
My words are all carried away
I talk to the wind
The wind does not hear
The wind cannot hear"
King Crimson, 1969.
21st Century Schizoid Man is well and truly established.
Gibberish
(A comment on the treatment of Victorian gentlemen by WOKE)
If only they knew that Mr Lear
had his language adopted with hardly a sneer.
And that is in spite of burning his book
in ignorant protest, not even a look
at past deeds done with noble intent
and thoughts which all were very well meant.
Like tourists flocking down to the beach
they soon destroy what they seek to reach.
HP calculators were an essential tool for my work and here is a hommage to them, built to learn C++ programming:
sites.google.com/view/calculator-gd9841r/home
A 5 minute contribution to the poetry genre:
My code is writ
My memory stored
I’m ready now for my reward
The power surges
Display shines bright
Ready now for my delight
My buttons click as fingers tap
My numbers flash while circuits map
The answer's given and I’m his slave
My master's happy don’t misbehave
And now I sit there quite benign
Until I get another sine.
Chris. Greasley
If you are interested in microwave oscillators, here is some history about them. My PhD Thesis from 1981:
As an undergraduate I used an English Electric KDF9 computer at Leeds University in 1974 and 1975. I kept a copy of the programmes I wrote and they are in the document shown below..
There was also a program for writing "poetry" using semi-random word sequences sorted into grammatical phrases, I think the words were classified as nouns, adjectives and verbs. The first two pages of this document show two of the "poems" it created.
It could be thought of as very early AI (Artificial Intelligence), but if you ask ChatGPT-4 [https://openai.com/product/gpt-4] to write a poem for you now, you will find a stark contrast in the results compared to this 1970's technology.
KDF9 Fortran Programs 1974-75s.pdfThe Eldon 2 Operating System for KDF9
Published 1971
Computer Science
Comput. J.
Eldon2* is an operating system for a KDF9 computer which has been developed by the Computing Laboratory at Leeds University. The system provides conversational file maintenance, multiple remote job entry into either a background or foreground job queue (the latter ofiering a turn round time of a few minutes), and efficient processing of background jobs. A disc based filing system with archive and retrieval facilities for less frequently used files is accessible via a variety of external media and the system incorporates automatic accounting for all work processed. Use of this system has increased CPU utilisation from about 50% to about 85% and allows the processing of over 1,000 jobs per day. (Received December 1969)
The speed of the computer is indicated in this extract from a marketing brochure, It had a magnetic core memory with an access time of 6 micro-seconds.
English_Electric_KDF9.1961.pdf