This month’s featured poem, ‘Misheard Lyrics’ by Graham Bruce Fletcher, is an ironic reflection on what birdsong means.
Graham said: ‘Romantic poets like to make a fuss over Spring flora and fauna and imagine that everything in the garden is ‘lovely’, but life wasn’t created to please people (as the swimmer realised when he saw a Great White Shark approaching.) It’s best to be neither an optimist nor a pessimist; to try to be realistic – not deluded by things many people want to believe. Some of the facts of life are so uncomfortable that the easiest way to cope with them is to laugh. Victoria Wood and Pam Ayres were experts at spotting absurdities and lampooning them.
‘This little rhyme steals from Keats, Eleanor Farjeon (who wrote the hymn ‘Morning Has Broken’) and Paul McCartney. It probably helps if the reader can imagine it being spoken by an effete man dressed in a velvet jacket, with lace cuffs and jabot, clutching a wilting flower. Stella Gibbons’ Mr Mybug in her novel ‘Cold Comfort Farm’ would be an appropriate personification, if he were played by an actor with a fear of butterflies.’
You can read Graham’s poem here
Somewhere Else Writers Group 