We recently celebrated the centenary of the wonderful writer Roald Dahl. This poem uses many of his made-up words and a few I created myself, including the title. It was also inspired by a sketch called 'Endless Column' by
Jude Macklin, which was part of a printmakers exhibition held this summer at the Old College in Aberystwyth.
You don't really need to know what all the new words mean, but I would say that a 'quogwinkle', according to Dahl, is an alien from space.
Splatchwordy world
(in memory of Roald Dahl)
How’s the view from up there,
quogwinkle?
Cast
your goggler over the way we live our patchwork lives --
criss-crossing
cross-stitching
cross-matching
wiggle-waggling
splatch-winkling
jumbly-mumbling
are we worth just a glimp
from your perch
above
that purple morning haze?
Are we wobble-crossing
down the street,
not
finding a path,
just tripping the stones beneath our feet?
How is the view from up there?
Can you spygog us
down that
middleclasping
mundane road -
among everyday traffic in the
cloudy mauve
jiggered
morning
kind of rain
How is the view from up there?
Are you biffs-quiggled by our scrotty lives?
Can you
see
through your violet shadows
our darksome,
jumbly froth-buggling,
fluck-gangled,
whopsy-waddling,
poisnowse
world?
Tell us, quogwinkle,
what do
you see with your glimpy-gumbled spy in the sky?
What do you see?
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