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Town Poems
Author : Leslie Bishop |
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Saint Wulfad’s Fair
Stone, rock of refuge in tempestuous days, we thank and celebrate you now!
Seven centuries and fifty years have passed since the third Henry, generous, cultured King
indifferent to tradition, gave venerable Giles, your Prior,
a charter for a Tuesday market and a three-day Fair
in honour of Saint Wulfad, martyred Prince-
- a fair revived this year by steadfast John,
rector of Michael-and-Wulfad, your Mother Church.
He is the spiritual descendant of Prior Giles.
Your principle of conduct was laid down by Adelaide – to her grandson – in these words:
“When you make something, do it well!
Serve God and the community with little thought for money-making or self.”
In war your citizens have proved their worth
afloat on sea, in air, on soil and desert sands.
In learned halls your progeny has left its mark-
teachers like Kitchener, Waghorn and Woods –
Historians: Wilson, Cocking, Cope, Leason and Pearson, to name but few,
and what a story they were proud to tell!
Your families grew strong on regular exercise and good plain food.
Joan Fry fought Lenglen for the Wimbledon crown.
For years your lower reaches were perfumed by hops a-brewing for John Joule’s ale, and baking bread at Norbury’s.
Here at Bill’s Mill on Mill Street was produced the special flour, later named Hovis.
Fresh fruit abounded in the market and John Flower grew
the biggest gooseberry that the world had known.
A happy halt ‘tween Liverpool and B’rum, you shared the galloping glory of the horse,
when thirty-eight stage-coaches every day passed by your windows!
Swiftly adaptable to economic changes and eccentricities of high finance-
shoe-making in the nineteenth century for London
and, in the twentieth, electric meters for the world.
You recognised the twentieth century’s distinctive art of cinema –
the realm where Garbo swooned and Katherine Hepburn found
her “morning glory!”
Alas, the “picture palace” was allowed to close.
Now Martin Shaw gives you a radio voice, with brightest programmes, worthy of acclaim.
Traditional in views of Church and State, moderate in a day of extremes,
modest in a day of conceit, neighbourly in the hour of need,
honest in dealing, painstaking in work, you can tell your brood time-proven triumphs.
Here still there beats England’s resilient heart!
While larger towns congest, you offer flower-decked roads
and well-cut waterways that once transported
our finest tableware to distant places.
So, as the lock-gates open and your splendid Band
fills Market Square with music,
You stand alert and ready to accommodate another century’s increasing trade!
A poem for the Millennium
A Clean Town
God gave Stone its share of dappled sunshine
and life enhancing winds,
making a clean town -England's centrepiece,
washed by rains
scoured by the sweep of the unobtrusive Trent,
wrapping its waste in silver.
Cairn of martyred princes,
since acclaimed by generations of evangelists.
A town of proud women whose children reign
with music and song -
despising money - grubbers and profiteers.
A happy halting place for wayfarers
passing on the canal.
Once a rendezvous for stage coaches;
Next, served by Victorian trains;
Now, shaken by the surge of Euro trade,
as, in the hell-for-leather "rat-race",
domineering juggernauts, taking shortcuts,
spray pollution on verdant drives
Yet Stone's great multitude of flowers
has power to overcome the smog
and, celebrate the radiant dawn tomorrow
Biography
Leslie Bishop, Stone's unofficial poet laureate, is a retired journalist with a distinguished career behind him. Mr Bishop was born in Oulton House near Stone in 1908.
Married to Canadian Poet Mary Davidson, Mr Bishop worked as a military reporter for the Wnnipeg Free Press and in 1947 was sent back to London as a correspondent for Siffon newspapers in Canada.
His first novel, Paper Kingdom, was published in 1936 and there have been many since, including a portrait in words of his grandmother, Oulton woman Adelaide Bishop (1992).
Stone is Mr Bishop's chosen place of retirement and his love of the town has been marked in recent years by the publication of two poems, one to mark the millennium and a second work to commemorate 750 years of the granting of the Market Charter. |
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