A day of Journeys on Trains on the Underground. Comical poem 766 by Angela Lansbury.

 

Sherlock Holmes tiles on platform wall of the underground railway. Baker Street station. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Green Park underground railway station. Tiles on platform walls, showing leaves. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Lift guide in the lift. Photo by Angela Lansbury. Copyright.

Stairs to the underground to down

Escalators and lifts go down

The trains on the underground go round

On the circle line, round and round

On platforms, trains stop and start

Only statues sit admiring art

Tiles show boats, floats, churches and steeples

Queens, kings, Sherlock, famous people

Brunel statue at Paddington Station.

Commuters rushing everywhere

Foreigners calculating their fare

Children stare at Paddington bear

Brunel sits, calm, on his chair

Confused tourists go round and round

Excited laughter, guitar sounds

Standing, swaying, laughing, shout

Riding up lifts, pushing in and out

Long skirts, short skirts, old jeans, smart shirts

Ear-rings, nose rings, large tattoos

Posters, poets, tiles, mosaics

Accents, 'Move along,' high heeled shoes

Rushing back with all day tickets

Off to football, on to cricket

Off to opera, after high tea

Riders entertain you and me

At the end of the day, back again

Running to catch the very last train

Free newspapers, read in the deep

Last stop. Wake them! They fell asleep!

-ends-

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The Happy Ones Watch Wicked Tongues comic poem by 424

Are you spewing words of war

Of sharing words of peace?

Would your demise be a surprise

A tragedy or release? 

What did you learn from Tom and Jerry

When you were just a tot?

Did the story have a message

Which you, alas, forgot?

The happy, joyful words you say

Can brighten your hopeful today

And bring you joy tomorrow

To lighten all your sorrow

But it's tempting to forget

Your enemies, and yet, and yet

The danger is if you are blind

They creep up striking from behind

So if they're dead, just shake your head

And tut and tutu, the poor dead mutt

He came to a sticky end

And lost the chance to be my friend

But watch out for others just the same

With different or similar names

Now that you understand their games

You can decline to board their trains

When you are bored, feeling ignored

Just go where welcome is assured

But keep feet firmly on the ground

And whilst you're walking, look around

So, let your worries go away

But listen to what people say

Be sure you stay aware each day

Whether at work or just at play

Do not engage in jokes and pranks

Like pointing guns nor robbing banks

Don't pull hair, chairs, play dares, nor poke

So your life stays a happy joke.

-ends-.

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Flying Home See 'Si' Sea

Flying Home (Singapore to London)

by Angela Lansbury

See - the sky’s blue; the sunshine’s gold

The clouds look soft, fluffy, bright white.

Watched comic films, dramas, warm, coldI

Yet slept sound, upright, half the night

Cross new Europe, Poland, not Spain

“Si!” Languages ‘oui’ understand

Back to face bills, take pills again -

Rain waters rose, pines, waved wheat land

Water glasses clink like di’monds

Omelette, like perfume, wafts through air

Smilers wheel breakfast, offer choice

Shut eyes, dream, rest - stretch - soon be there!

Houses like toys, stand in neat rows

Cute cars race past puffed tiny trains

Drop down! Below, maybe hail, snows

Who cares - clunk, bump - we’re home again!

Angela Lansbury

May 2016

Poet’s notes: 

Inspired by a Facebook post enthusing about flying back to London.

I wrote the poem about flying over Spain, then a member of my family said that you don't fly over France or Spain from Singapore but over Poland.

Puns on sea and si, oui and we.

I changed roses to rose to save a syllable, which leaves the word rose ambiguous between a noun and the past tense of a verb, no longer meaning roses in English gardens but evoking flood water from the river or sea which rises or rose.

I changed cute cars which is alliterative to allow an extra syllable for puffed tiny trains which is both visual, puffing train, and ambiguous, the puffed or exhausted train, stops to let cars overtake. 

The scenes in the films are serious and comic, warm and cold. So is the temperature change in the plane from warm when boarding in Singapore to cold when arriving in London, England.Then I reinserted cute and deleted small, since I already had toys and tiny to convey the idea of small.  I thought of ‘houses like toy teeth, tombstones,’ or ‘neat milk teeth rows’ but I left the sentence unchanged to flow. The clunk is the dropping of the undercarriage; the bump is the plane landing.

In May when we flew back reports in the BBC news were of snow in Scotland the Midlands and even London, where snow did not settle but hailstones fell. Previous weeks had seen a heatwave in London. At the time of writing, May 10 2016, another heatwave.

Waved wheat land. Land is a bit dull. What you see from windows above as you fly over England (or travel by train) is undulating land (unlike the miles of flat land in Holland or what I saw for several days in central America in the nineteen sixties when I took a Greyhound bus) and in England you see leaves and trees and crops waving in the wind