A fourth poem from Bad Idea published on Stride (remember Karen Bradley?)

A sequential run of six sonnets from Bad Idea is to appear on Stride on the 1,3,5,7,9,11 January 2020. They are all versions of Michael Drayton’s sonnets from his Idea. (In short, my ‘bad’ idea is Brexit.)

Please check here for the latest: https://stridemagazine.blogspot.com/

‘Bad Idea’ XXV is dedicated to the virtually-vanished Karen Bradley who was appointed Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, but had no idea (not even a bad one) about sectarian voting patterns or life in NI. Drayton’s poem that is transposed here amused me because in a poem that praised the English language, he used many loan words (and words that had not been loaned). I use one:  

Hear me keen on your Brexit county boundary,

Hailing your stiff-necked loyalist with healing song,

Disarming with lyric the slaughtering gallōglāch!

You may access the full poem directly here.

Bad Idea is described fully (with links to other poems from the work) here:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/09/on-bad-idea-and-reference-to-earlier.html

Or you can look up the eight online poems from Bad Idea that may be accessed from this post:

https://robertsheppard.blogspot.com/2019/12/robert-sheppard-two-more-poems-from-bad.html

When all six have been posted I shall post a single post on Pages on 13^th January to guide readers directly to them all.

Thanks to Rupert Loydell, Stride editor, for taking them all.