I would love to tell you something new. Something relevant. Something exciting. But I haven't got anything new, necessarily, that will entertain you. I've been writing like a maniac, all manner of things, but I can't seem to get a piece of fictional poetry out of my head.
O, dear my lord,
Let this breast
Upon which you have leant
Serve now as your shield.
If that's even how it goes. That, and Israfel. I contemplated writing a myth with a bunch of symbolism concerning the divinity of the feminine, but I flaked out of it cause I don't believe women are divine. Or that any gender is, essentially, divine, in any other way beside the fact that we were fashioned divinely. But that is honestly neither here nor there.
No, what I want to talk to you about is Andrew Motion. Current Poet Laureate, whom I have very mixed feelings about. On the one hand, I admire his work. It's literal, personal, technical in a way that is difficult to use when employing open verse. He managed to make the epitaph of the Queen Mother not at all grandiose or distant, but something everyone could relate to. I think he signifies a lot that is right in the world of poetry, and a lot that isn't. There is no longer any pretension in the idea of divine right of monarchs, and they are sent out of the world with the same sort of affection as someone else's mother is. But still, read this. And tell me. It's called Ice.

When friends no longer remembered
the reasons we set forth,
I switched between nanny and tartar
driving us on north.

Will you imagine a human hand
welded by ice to wood?
And skin when they chip it off?
I don’t think you should.

By day the appalling loose beauty
of prowling floes:
lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks,
and a thing like a blown rose.

By night the seething hiss
of killers cruising past -
the silence after each fountain-jet,
and our hearts aghast.

Of our journey home and the rest
there is nothing more to say.
I have lived and not yet died.
I have sailed in the Scotia Sea.