Benjamin Macnair - Issue 37

Ben Macnair is an award-winning poet and playwright from Staffordshire in the United Kingdom. Follow him on Twitter @benmacnair.

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Fragility

The old china cups,

that your Grandmother saved for best,

there is a set like that on Facebook.

Free to a good home it says,

but maybe a good house

won't use them,

only saving them for best,

in the best room,

which never needed hoovering,

because no-one ever went in there.

Like the best friends she never saw,

always making everyone else seem second-best.

Fragile egos matching fragile crockery,

a marker of a time,

when things were kept for longer.

Ramsey Lewis

Ramsey Lewis is playing The Incrowd, .

Just him, the simplest of tunes,

a well recorded piano,

drums and bass.

Raising the Gospel of the fervent moment,

for an appreciative audience.

When the drums pick up the pace

at the two minute mark,

the audience whoops and shouts along.

Not for them complicated, finger twisting chords,

a modulation when it is not needed,

solos that go on and on and on,

just a steady rising groove,

some open, accessible harmonies,

the message, delivered, remembered,

forty years after it was first sent.

Asking Directions

I took the road less travelled,

and I got completely lost.

Not even Google maps could help me.

Thanks a lot, Robert Frost.