Poetry News

Magma rejection: Acquaintance, Calling At, Between Stations, Evening Out, Delivery, Quilt


Day of little serendipity. Visited Yeovilton Air Arm museum. Great War era planes, like models themselves with big wooden propellors. The sea plane was fantastic.

Disliked the modern planes, the scale was less human.

Walked students to St Barts church, a military cemetary backing onto it. There was a notice for the five soldiers recently died in Iraq, including the first British servicewoman to die. It rained, the church was closed, I felt uneasy with the Qatari students mock marching and using mobile phones in the cemetary, as if somehow this was supposed to be one piece of land forever England. Some of the graves had nicknames: Smudge. Japanese students tried to fly a kite in the rain. Left my scarf on the bus.


Double-barrelled signal pistol
Weighted streamers - used for dropping messages to ground forces
A sweetheart brooch
Metal detector plates to wooden propellors of single seater tracker machines
April 1917 casualty rate high; life-expectancy of pilot about three weeks
Observer in front
Albatross DVa / Sopwith Camel
Armoured car
Strafe (v)- machine gun fire
Sopwith Camel fighter on lighter towed by destroyer
'The airship menace,' 'The new terror,' 'Britain's peril in the air' - could carry 20 passengers
Flying from ships
Heroism - Lt Richard Bell-Davies, Royal Navy
Shagbat sea-plane

He whom this scroll commemorates was numbered among those who, at the call of King and Country, left all that was dear to them, endured hardness, faced danger, and finally passed out of the sight of men by the path of duty and self-sacrifice, giving up their own lives that others might live in freedom. Let those who come after see to it that his name be not forgotten.

Newspaper advert: Fallen heroes will be honoured