Blurt!
�1. A manifesto.
Let's call poetry the kind of thing
You have to read aloud or sing.
(And while we're on the subject: we are irritated how little poetry is available in ebook form, and scandalised that the preferred alternative is apparently to let it go out of print.)
�2. Noon on the first Monday of the month
For the first time in six years the siren sounds
with me at home alone
Surprised by the unbursting into tears,
An unsprung-into-ness of arms
By children both now otherwise engaged,
With schoolmistresses to minister to their alarms.
�3. What I choose to believe
Having salvaged the countess's old Blackberry from scrap, last week I took both children after school, as I have done for many years, to visit the goats at the nearby petting zoo.
With a smartphone but no dataplan, and the children requiring, for once, not much attention, I was left to remark that the only book on the phone's Kindle app was Goethe's West-�stlicher Diwan.
So now when I see people anxiously staring at the pocket supercomputers that they still for some reason call phones I assume they are also reading Goethe. I just hope that (unlike me) they have had the sense to learn German first.