poetry test 2

7 Middagh Street

-a long poem -reference to auden "if yeats had saved his pencil-lead would certain men have stayed in bed?" -Paul Muldoon

Alphabets

A shadow his father makes with joined hands And thumbs and fingers nibbles on the wall Like a rabbit's head. He understands He will understand more when he goes to school. There he draws smoke with chalk the whole first week, Then draws the forked stick that they call a Y. This is writing. A swan's neck and swan's back Make the 2 he can see now as well as say. Two rafters and a cross-tie on the slate Are the letter some call ah, some call ay. There are charts, there are headlines, there is a right Way to hold the pen and a wrong way. First it is 'copying out', and then 'English', Marked correct with a little leaning hoe. Smells of inkwells rise in the classroom hush. A globe in the window tilts like a coloured O. II. Declensions sang on air like a hosanna As, column after stratified column, Book One of Elementa Latina, Marbled and minatory, rose up in him. For he was fostered next in a stricter school Named for the patron saint of the oak wood Where classes switched to the pealing of a bell And he left the Latin forum for the shade Of new calligraphy that felt like home. The letters of this alphabet were trees. The capitals were orchards in full bloom, The lines of script like briars coiled in ditches. Here in her snooded garment and bare feet, All ringleted in assonance and woodnotes, The poet's dream stole over him like sunlight And passed into the tenebrous thickets. He learns this other writing. He is the scribe Who drove a team of quills on his white field. Round his cell door the blackbirds dart and dab. Then self-denial, fasting, the pure cold. By rules that hardened the farther they reached north He bends to his desk and begins again. Christ's sickle has been in the undergrowth. The script grows bare and Merovingian. III. The globe has spun. He stands in a wooden O. He alludes to Shakespeare. He alludes to Graves. Time has bulldozed the school and school window. Balers drop bales like printouts where stooked sheaves Made lambdas on the stubble once at harvest And the delta face of each potato pit Was patted straight and moulded against frost. All gone, with the omega that kept Watch above each door, the good-luck horseshoe. Yet shape-note language, absolute on air As Constantine's sky-lettered IN HOC SIGNO Can still command him; or the necromancer Who would hang from the domed ceiling of his house A figure of the world with colours in it So that the figure of the universe And 'not just single things' would meet his sight When he walked abroad. As from his small window The astronaut sees all that he has sprung from, The risen, aqueous, singular, lucent O Like a magnified and buoyant ovum - Or like my own wide pre-reflective stare All agog at the plasterer on his ladder Skimming our gable and writing our name there With his trowel point, letter by strange letter. -Seamus Heaney

W.H. Auden

After WWI poet. Hardy is an influencer--nature -interested in the world of real events, the news and what's happening -feels that poetry is there to expose the truth

Do Not Go So Gentle into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night, Old age should burn and rave at close of day; Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Though wise men at their end know dark is right, Because their words had forked no lightning they Do not go gentle into that good night. Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight, And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way, Do not go gentle into that good night. Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay, Rage, rage against the dying of the light. And you, my father, there on the sad height, Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray. Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light. -Dylan Thomas

Casualty

He would drink by himself And raise a weathered thumb Towards the high shelf, Calling another rum And blackcurrant, without Having to raise his voice, Or order a quick stout By a lifting of the eyes And a discreet dumb-show Of pulling off the top; At closing time would go In waders and peaked cap Into the showery dark, A dole-kept breadwinner But a natural for work. I loved his whole manner, Sure-footed but too sly, His deadpan sidling tact, His fisherman's quick eye And turned observant back. Incomprehensible To him, my other life. Sometimes, on the high stool, Too busy with his knife At a tobacco plug And not meeting my eye, In the pause after a slug He mentioned poetry. We would be on our own And, always politic And shy of condescension, I would manage by some trick To switch the talk to eels Or lore of the horse and cart Or the Provisionals. But my tentative art His turned back watches too: He was blown to bits Out drinking in a curfew Others obeyed, three nights After they shot dead The thirteen men in Derry. PARAS THIRTEEN, the walls said, BOGSIDE NIL. That Wednesday Everyone held His breath and trembled. II It was a day of cold Raw silence, wind-blown surplice and soutane: Rained-on, flower-laden Coffin after coffin Seemed to float from the door Of the packed cathedral Like blossoms on slow water. The common funeral Unrolled its swaddling band, Lapping, tightening Till we were braced and bound Like brothers in a ring. But he would not be held At home by his own crowd Whatever threats were phoned, Whatever black flags waved. I see him as he turned In that bombed offending place, Remorse fused with terror In his still knowable face, His cornered outfaced stare Blinding in the flash. He had gone miles away For he drank like a fish Nightly, naturally Swimming towards the lure Of warm lit-up places, The blurred mesh and murmur Drifting among glasses In the gregarious smoke. How culpable was he That last night when he broke Our tribe's complicity? 'Now, you're supposed to be An educated man,' I hear him say. 'Puzzle me The right answer to that one.' III I missed his funeral, Those quiet walkers And sideways talkers Shoaling out of his lane To the respectable Purring of the hearse... They move in equal pace With the habitual Slow consolation Of a dawdling engine, The line lifted, hand Over fist, cold sunshine On the water, the land Banked under fog: that morning I was taken in his boat, The Screw purling, turning Indolent fathoms white, I tasted freedom with him. To get out early, haul Steadily off the bottom, Dispraise the catch, and smile As you find a rhythm Working you, slow mile by mile, Into your proper haunt Somewhere, well out, beyond... Dawn-sniffing revenant, Plodder through midnight rain, Question me again. -Seamus Heaney

Epilogue

I have crossed an ocean I have lost my tongue from the root of the old one a new one has sprung -grace nichols

September 1, 1939

I sit in one of the dives On Fifty-second Street Uncertain and afraid As the clever hopes expire Of a low dishonest decade: Waves of anger and fear Circulate over the bright And darkened lands of the earth, Obsessing our private lives; The unmentionable odour of death Offends the September night. Accurate scholarship can Unearth the whole offence From Luther until now That has driven a culture mad, Find what occurred at Linz, What huge imago made A psychopathic god: I and the public know What all schoolchildren learn, Those to whom evil is done Do evil in return. Exiled Thucydides knew All that a speech can say About Democracy, And what dictators do, The elderly rubbish they talk To an apathetic grave; Analysed all in his book, The enlightenment driven away, The habit-forming pain, Mismanagement and grief: We must suffer them all again. Into this neutral air Where blind skyscrapers use Their full height to proclaim The strength of Collective Man, Each language pours its vain Competitive excuse: But who can live for long In an euphoric dream; Out of the mirror they stare, Imperialism's face And the international wrong. Faces along the bar Cling to their average day: The lights must never go out, The music must always play, All the conventions conspire To make this fort assume The furniture of home; Lest we should see where we are, Lost in a haunted wood, Children afraid of the night Who have never been happy or good. The windiest militant trash Important Persons shout Is not so crude as our wish: What mad Nijinsky wrote About Diaghilev Is true of the normal heart; For the error bred in the bone Of each woman and each man Craves what it cannot have, Not universal love But to be loved alone. From the conservative dark Into the ethical life The dense commuters come, Repeating their morning vow; 'I will be true to the wife, I'll concentrate more on my work,' And helpless governors wake To resume their compulsory game: Who can release them now, Who can reach the dead, Who can speak for the dumb? All I have is a voice To undo the folded lie, The romantic lie in the brain Of the sensual man-in-the-street And the lie of Authority Whose buildings grope the sky: There is no such thing as the State And no one exists alone; Hunger allows no choice To the citizen or the police; We must love one another or die. Defenseless under the night Our world in stupor lies; Yet, dotted everywhere, Ironic points of light Flash out wherever the Just Exchange their messages: May I, composed like them Of Eros and of dust, Beleaguered by the same Negation and despair, Show an affirming flame. -W.H. Auden

Aubade

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die. Arid interrogation: yet the dread Of dying, and being dead, Flashes afresh to hold and horrify. The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse - The good not done, the love not given, time Torn off unused - nor wretchedly because An only life can take so long to climb Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never; But at the total emptiness for ever, The sure extinction that we travel to And shall be lost in always. Not to be here, Not to be anywhere, And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true. This is a special way of being afraid No trick dispels. Religion used to try, That vast, moth-eaten musical brocade Created to pretend we never die, And specious stuff that says No rational being Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing That this is what we fear - no sight, no sound, No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with, Nothing to love or link with, The anasthetic from which none come round. And so it stays just on the edge of vision, A small, unfocused blur, a standing chill That slows each impulse down to indecision. Most things may never happen: this one will, And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood. Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape. It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know, Have always known, know that we can't escape, Yet can't accept. One side will have to go. Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring Intricate rented world begins to rouse. The sky is white as clay, with no sun. Work has to be done. Postmen like doctors go from house to house. -Philip Larkin

In Praise of Limestone

If it form the one landscape that we, the inconstant ones, Are consistently homesick for, this is chiefly Because it dissolves in water. Mark these rounded slopes With their surface fragrance of thyme and, beneath, A secret system of caves and conduits; hear the springs That spurt out everywhere with a chuckle, Each filling a private pool for its fish and carving Its own little ravine whose cliffs entertain The butterfly and the lizard; examine this region Of short distances and definite places: What could be more like Mother or a fitter background For her son, the flirtatious male who lounges Against a rock in the sunlight, never doubting That for all his faults he is loved; whose works are but Extensions of his power to charm? From weathered outcrop To hill-top temple, from appearing waters to Conspicuous fountains, from a wild to a formal vineyard, Are ingenious but short steps that a child's wish To receive more attention than his brothers, whether By pleasing or teasing, can easily take. Watch, then, the band of rivals as they climb up and down Their steep stone gennels in twos and threes, at times Arm in arm, but never, thank God, in step; or engaged On the shady side of a square at midday in Voluble discourse, knowing each other too well to think There are any important secrets, unable To conceive a god whose temper-tantrums are moral And not to be pacified by a clever line Or a good lay: for accustomed to a stone that responds, They have never had to veil their faces in awe Of a crater whose blazing fury could not be fixed; Adjusted to the local needs of valleys Where everything can be touched or reached by walking, Their eyes have never looked into infinite space Through the lattice-work of a nomad's comb; born lucky, Their legs have never encountered the fungi And insects of the jungle, the monstrous forms and lives With which we have nothing, we like to hope, in common. So, when one of them goes to the bad, the way his mind works Remains incomprehensible: to become a pimp Or deal in fake jewellery or ruin a fine tenor voice For effects that bring down the house, could happen to all But the best and the worst of us... That is why, I suppose, The best and worst never stayed here long but sought Immoderate soils where the beauty was not so external, The light less public and the meaning of life Something more than a mad camp. `Come!' cried the granite wastes, `How evasive is your humour, how accidental Your kindest kiss, how permanent is death.' (Saints-to-be Slipped away sighing.) `Come!' purred the clays and gravels, `On our plains there is room for armies to drill; rivers Wait to be tamed and slaves to construct you a tomb In the grand manner: soft as the earth is mankind and both Need to be altered.' (Intendant Caesars rose and Left, slamming the door.) But the really reckless were fetched By an older colder voice, the oceanic whisper: `I am the solitude that asks and promises nothing; That is how I shall set you free. There is no love; There are only the various envies, all of them sad.' They were right, my dear, all those voices were right And still are; this land is not the sweet home that it looks, Nor its peace the historical calm of a site Where something was settled once and for all: A back ward And dilapidated province, connected To the big busy world by a tunnel, with a certain Seedy appeal, is that all it is now? Not quite: It has a worldy duty which in spite of itself It does not neglect, but calls into question All the Great Powers assume; it disturbs our rights. The poet, Admired for his earnest habit of calling The sun the sun, his mind Puzzle, is made uneasy By these marble statues which so obviously doubt His antimythological myth; and these gamins, Pursuing the scientist down the tiled colonnade With such lively offers, rebuke his concern for Nature's Remotest aspects: I, too, am reproached, for what And how much you know. Not to lose time, not to get caught, Not to be left behind, not, please! to resemble The beasts who repeat themselves, or a thing like water Or stone whose conduct can be predicted, these Are our common prayer, whose greatest comfort is music Which can be made anywhere, is invisible, And does not smell. In so far as we have to look forward To death as a fact, no doubt we are right: But if Sins can be forgiven, if bodies rise from the dead, These modifications of matter into Innocent athletes and gesticulating fountains, Made solely for pleasure, make a further point: The blessed will not care what angle they are regarded from, Having nothing to hide. Dear, I know nothing of Either, but when I try to imagine a faultless love Or the life to come, what I hear is the murmur Of underground streams, what I see is a limestone landscape. -W.H. Auden

Clearances

In Memoriam M.K.H., 1911-1984 She taught me what her uncle once taught her: How easily the biggest coal block split If you got the grain and hammer angled right. The sound of that relaxed alluring blow, Its co-opted and obliterated echo, Taught me to hit, taught me to loosen, Taught me between the hammer and the block To face the music. Teach me now to listen, To strike it rich behind the linear black. 1 A cobble thrown a hundred years ago Keeps coming at me, the first stone Aimed at a great-grandmother's turncoat brow. The pony jerks and the riot's on. She's crouched low in the trap Running the gauntlet that first Sunday Down the brae to Mass at a panicked gallop. He whips on through the town to cries of 'Lundy!' Call her 'The Convert'. 'The Exogamous Bride'. Anyhow, it is a genre piece Inherited on my mother's side And mine to dispose with now she's gone. Instead of silver and Victorian lace, The exonerating, exonerated stone. 2 Polished linoleum shone there. Brass taps shone. The china cups were very white and big— An unchipped set with sugar bowl and jug. The kettle whistled. Sandwich and tea scone Were present and correct. In case it run, The butter must be kept out of the sun. And don't be dropping crumbs. Don't tilt your chair. Don't reach. Don't point. Don't make noise when you stir. It is Number 5, New Row, Land of the Dead, Where grandfather is rising from his place With spectacles pushed back on a clean bald head To welcome a bewildered homing daughter Before she even knocks. 'What's this? What's this?' And they sit down in the shining room together. 3 When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes. They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron: Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water. And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other's work would bring us to our senses. So while the parish priest at her bedside Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some crying I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives— Never closer the whole rest of our lives. 4 Fear of affectation made her affect Inadequacy whenever it came to Pronouncing words 'beyond her'. Bertold Brek. She'd manage something hampered and askew Every time, as if she might betray The hampered and inadequate by too Well-adjusted a vocabulary. With more challenge than pride, she'd tell me, 'You Know all them things.' So I governed my tongue In front of her, a genuinely well- Adjusted adequate betrayal Of what I knew better. I'd naw and aye And decently relapse into the wrong Grammar which kept us allied and at bay. 5 The cool that came off sheets just off the line Made me think the damp must still be in them But when I took my corners of the linen And pulled against her, first straight down the hem And then diagonally, then flapped and shook The fabric like a sail in a cross-wind, They made a dried-out undulating thwack. So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand For a split second as if nothing had happened For nothing had that had not always happened Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go, Coming close again by holding back In moves where I was x and she was o Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks. 6 In the first flush of the Easter holidays The ceremonies during Holy Week Were highpoints of our Sons and Lovers phase. The midnight fire. The paschal candlestick. Elbow to elbow, glad to be kneeling next To each other up there near the front Of the packed church, we would follow the text And rubrics for the blessing of the font. As the hind longs for the streams, so my soul. . . Dippings. Towellings. The water breathed on. The water mixed with chrism and with oil. Cruet tinkle. Formal incensation And the psalmist's outcry taken up with pride: Day and night my tears have been my bread. 7 In the last minutes he said more to her Almost than in all their life together. 'You'll be in New Row on Monday night And I'll come up for you and you'll be glad When I walk in the door . . . Isn't that right?' His head was bent down to her propped-up head. She could not hear but we were overjoyed. He called her good and girl. Then she was dead, The searching for a pulsebeat was abandoned And we all knew one thing by being there. The space we stood around had been emptied Into us to keep, it penetrated Clearances that suddenly stood open. High cries were felled and a pure change happened. 8 I thought of walking round and round a space Utterly empty, utterly a source Where the decked chestnut tree had lost its place In our front hedge above the wallflowers. The white chips jumped and jumped and skited high. I heard the hatchet's differentiated Accurate cut, the crack, the sigh And collapse of what luxuriated Through the shocked tips and wreckage of it all. Deep-planted and long gone, my coeval Chestnut from a jam jar in a hole, Its heft and hush become a bright nowhere, A soul ramifying and forever Silent, beyond silence listened for. -Seamus Heaney

The Schooner Flight

In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Caribbean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight. Out in the yard turning gray in the dawn, I stood like a stone and nothing else move but the cold sea rippling like galvanize and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof, till a wind start to interfere with the trees. I pass me dry neighbor sweeping she yard as I went downhill, and I nearly said: "Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard," but the bitch look through me like I was dead. A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on. The driver size up my bags with a grin: "This time, Shabine, like you really gone!" I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in the back seat and watch the sky burn above Laventille pink as the gown in which the woman I left was sleeping, and I look in the rearview and see a man exactly like me, and the man was weeping for the houses, the streets, that whole ****ing island. Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road to when I was a dog on these streets; if loving these islands must be my load, out of corruption my soul takes wings. But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl, coolie, ******, Syrian, and French Creole, so I leave it for them and their carnival— I taking a sea bath, I gone down the road. I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red ******, and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I'm just a red ****** who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, ******, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation, But Maria Concepcion was all my thought watching the sea heaving up and down as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun signing her name with every reflection; I knew when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea, sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back, so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied and the Flight swing seaward: "Is no use repeating that the sea have more fish. I ain't want her dressed in the sexless light of a seraph, I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and till the day when I can lean back and laugh, those claws that tickled my back on sweating Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand." As I worked, watching the rotting waves come past the bow that scissor the sea like silk, I swear to you all, by my mother's milk, by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace, that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home; I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. You ever look up from some lonely beach and see a far schooner? Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go be the wind, my pages the sails of the schooner Flight. But let me tell you how this business begin. 2 Raptures of the Deep Smuggled Scotch for O'Hara, big government man, between Cedros and the Main, so the Coast Guard couldn't touch us, and the Spanish pirogues always met us halfway, but a voice kept saying: "Shabine, see this business of playing pirate?" Well, so said, so done! That whole racket crash. And I for a woman, for her laces and silks, Maria Concepcion. Ay, ay! Next thing I hear, some Commission of Inquiry was being organized to conduct a big quiz, with himself as chairman investigating himself. Well, I knew damn well who the suckers would be, not that shark in shark skin, but his pilot fish, khaki-pants red ******s like you and me. What worse, I fighting with Maria Concepcion, plates flying and thing, so I swear: "Not again!" It was mashing up my house and my family. I was so broke all I needed was shades and a cup or four shades and four cups in four-cup Port of Spain; all the silver I had was the coins on the sea. You saw them ministers in The Express, guardians of the poor—one hand at their back, and one set o' police only guarding their house, and the Scotch pouring in through the back door. As for that minister-monster who smuggled the booze, that half-Syrian saurian, I got so vex to see that face thick with powder, the warts, the stone lids like a dinosaur caked with primordial ooze by the lightning of flashbulbs sinking in wealth, that I said: "Shabine, this is shit, understand!" But he get somebody to kick my crutch out his office like I was some artist! That bitch was so grand, couldn't get off his high horse and kick me himself. I have seen things that would make a slave sick in this Trinidad, the Limers' Republic. I couldn't shake the sea noise out of my head, the shell of my ears sang Maria Concepcion, so I start salvage diving with a crazy Mick, name O'Shaugnessy, and a limey named Head; but this Caribbean so choke with the dead that when I would melt in emerald water, whose ceiling rippled like a silk tent, I saw them corals: brain, fire, sea fans, dead-men's-fingers, and then, the dead men. I saw that the powdery sand was their bones ground white from Senegal to San Salvador, so, I panic third dive, and surface for a month in the Seamen's Hostel. Fish broth and sermons. When I thought of the woe I had brought my wife, when I saw my worries with that other woman, I wept under water, salt seeking salt, for her beauty had fallen on me like a sword cleaving me from my children, flesh of my flesh! There was this barge from St. Vincent, but she was too deep to float her again. When we drank, the limey got tired of my sobbing for Maria Concepcion. He said he was getting the bends. Good for him! The pain in my heart for Maria Concepcion, the hurt I had done to my wife and children, was worse than the bends. In the rapturous deep there was no cleft rock where my soul could hide like the boobies each sunset, no sandbar of light where I could rest, like the pelicans know, so I got raptures once, and I saw God like a harpooned grouper bleeding, and a far voice was rumbling, "Shabine, if you leave her, if you leave her, I shall give you the morning star." When I left the madhouse I tried other women but, once they stripped naked, their spiky ***** bristled like sea eggs and I couldn't dive. The chaplain came round. I paid him no mind. Where is my rest place, Jesus? Where is my harbor? Where is the pillow I will not have to pay for, and the window I can look from that frames my life? 3 Shabine Leaves the Republic I had no nation now but the imagination. After the white man, the ******s didn't want me when the power swing to their side. The first chain my hands and apologize, "History"; the next said I wasn't black enough for their pride. Tell me, what power, on these unknown rocks— a spray-plane Air Force, the Fire Brigade, the Red Cross, the Regiment, two, three police dogs that pass before you finish bawling "Parade!"? I met History once, but he ain't recognize me, a parchment Creole, with warts like an old sea bottle, crawling like a crab through the holes of shadow cast by the net of a grille balcony; cream linen, cream hat. I confront him and shout, "Sir, is Shabine! They say I'se your grandson. You remember Grandma, your black cook, at all?" The bitch hawk and spat. A spit like that worth any number of words. But that's all them bastards have left us: words. I no longer believed in the revolution. I was losing faith in the love of my woman. I had seen that moment Aleksandr Blok crystallize in The Twelve. Was between the Police Marine Branch and Hotel Venezuelana one Sunday at noon. Young men without flags using shirts, their chests waiting for holes. They kept marching into the mountains, and their noise ceased as foam sinks into sand. They sank in the bright hills like rain, every one with his own nimbus, leaving shirts in the street, and the echo of power at the end of the street. Propeller-blade fans turn over the Senate; the judges, they say, still sweat in carmine, on Frederick Street the idlers all marching by standing still, the Budget turns a new leaf. In the 12:30 movies the projectors best not break down, or you go see revolution. Aleksandr Blok enters and sits in the third row of pit eating choc- olate cone, waiting for a spaghetti West- ern with Clint Eastwood and featuring Lee Van Cleef. 4 The Flight, Passing Blanchisseuse Dusk. The Flight passing Blanchisseuse. Gulls wheel like. from a gun again, and foam gone amber that was white, lighthouse and star start making friends, down every beach the long day ends, and there, on that last stretch of sand, on a beach bare of all but light, dark hands start pulling in the seine of the dark sea, deep, deep inland. 5 Shabine Encounters the Middle Passage Man, I brisk in the galley first thing next dawn, brewing li'l coffee; fog coil from the sea like the kettle steaming when I put it down slow, slow, 'cause I couldn't believe what I see: where the horizon was one silver haze, the fog swirl and swell into sails, so close that I saw it was sails, my hair grip my skull, it was horrors, but it was beautiful. We float through a rustling forest of ships with sails dry like paper, behind the glass I saw men with rusty eyeholes like cannons, and whenever their half-naked crews cross the sun, right through their tissue, you traced their bones like leaves against the sunlight; frigates, barkentines, the backward-moving current swept them on, and high on their decks I saw great admirals, Rodney, Nelson, de Grasse, I heard the hoarse orders they gave those Shabines, and that forest of masts sail right through the Flight, and all you could hear was the ghostly sound of waves rustling like grass in a low wind and the hissing weeds they trailed from the stern; slowly they heaved past from east to west like this round world was some cranked water wheel, every ship pouring like a wooden bucket dredged from the deep; my memory revolve on all sailors before me, then the sun heat the horizon's ring and they was mist. Next we pass slave ships. Flags of all nations, our fathers below deck too deep, I suppose, to hear us shouting. So we stop shouting. Who knows who his grandfather is, much less his name? Tomorrow our landfall will be the Barbados. 6 The Sailor Sings Back to the Casuarinas You see them on the low hills of Barbados bracing like windbreaks, needles for hurricanes, trailing, like masts, the cirrus of torn sails; when I was green like them, I used to think those cypresses, leaning against the sea, that take the sea noise up into their branches, are not real cypresses but casuarinas. Now captain just call them Canadian cedars. But cedars, cypresses, or casuarinas, whoever called them so had a good cause, watching their bending bodies wail like women after a storm, when some schooner came home with news of one more sailor drowned again. Once the sound "cypress" used to make more sense than the green "casuarinas," though, to the wind whatever grief bent them was all the same, since they were trees with nothing else in mind but heavenly leaping or to guard a grave; but we live like our names and you would have to be colonial to know the difference, to know the pain of history words contain, to love those trees with an inferior love, and to believe: "Those casuarinas bend like cypresses, their hair hangs down in rain like sailors' wives. They're classic trees, and we, if we live like the names our masters please, by careful mimicry might become men." 7 The Flight Anchors in Castries Harbor When the stars self were young over Castries, I loved you alone and I loved the whole world. What does it matter that our lives are different? Burdened with the loves of our different children? When I think of your young face washed by the wind and your voice that chuckles in the slap of the sea? The lights are out on La Toc promontory, except for the hospital. Across at Vigie the marina arcs keep vigil. I have kept my own promise, to leave you the one thing I own, you whom I loved first: my poetry. We here for one night. Tomorrow, the Flight will be gone. 8 Fight with the Crew It had one bitch on board, like he had me mark— that was the cook, some Vincentian arse with a skin like a gommier tree, red peeling bark, and wash-out blue eyes; he wouldn't give me a ease, like he feel he was white. Had an exercise book, this same one here, that I was using to write my poetry, so one day this man snatch it from my hand, and start throwing it left and right to the rest of the crew, bawling out, "Catch it," and start mincing me like I was some hen because of the poems. Some case is for fist, some case is for tholing pin, some is for knife— this one was for knife. Well, I beg him first, but he keep reading, "O my children, my wife," and playing he crying, to make the crew laugh; it move like a flying fish, the silver knife that catch him right in the plump of his calf, and he faint so slowly, and he turn more white than he thought he was. I suppose among men you need that sort of thing. It ain't right but that's how it is. There wasn't much pain, just plenty blood, and Vincie and me best friend, but none of them go **** with my poetry again. 9 Maria Concepcion & the Book of Dreams The jet that was screeching over the Flight was opening a curtain into the past. "Dominica ahead!" "It still have Caribs there." "One day go be planes only, no more boat." "Vince, God ain't make ****** to fly through the air." "Progress, Shabine, that's what it's all about. Progress leaving all we small islands behind." I was at the wheel, Vince sitting next to me gaffing. Crisp, bracing day. A high-running sea. "Progress is something to ask Caribs about. They kill them by millions, some in war, some by forced labor dying in the mines looking for silver, after that ******s; more progress. Until I see definite signs that mankind change, Vince, I ain't want to hear. Progress is history's dirty joke. Ask that sad green island getting nearer." Green islands, like mangoes pickled in brine. In such fierce salt let my wound be healed, me, in my freshness as a seafarer. That night, with the sky sparks frosty with fire, I ran like a Carib through Dominica, my nose holes choked with memory of smoke; I heard the screams of my burning children, I ate the brains of mushrooms, the fungi of devil's parasols under white, leprous rocks; my breakfast was leaf mold in leaking forests, with leaves big as maps, and when I heard noise of the soldiers' progress through the thick leaves, though my heart was bursting, I get up and ran through the blades of balisier sharper than spears; with the blood of my race, I ran, boy, I ran with moss-footed speed like a painted bird; then I fall, but I fall by an icy stream under cool fountains of fern, and a screaming parrot catch the dry branches and I drowned at last in big breakers of smoke; then when that ocean of black smoke pass, and the sky turn white, there was nothing but Progress, if Progress is an iguana as still as a young leaf in sunlight. I bawl for Maria, and her Book of Dreams. It anchored her sleep, that insomniac's Bible, a soiled orange booklet with a cyclop's eye center, from the Dominican Republic. Its coarse pages were black with the usual symbols of prophecy, in excited Spanish; an open palm upright, sectioned and numbered like a butcher chart, delivered the future. One night; in a fever, radiantly ill, she say, "Bring me the book, the end has come." She said: "I dreamt of whales and a storm," but for that dream, the book had no answer. A next night I dreamed of three old women featureless as silkworms, stitching my fate, and I scream at them to come out my house, and I try beating them away with a broom, but as they go out, so they crawl back again, until I start screaming and crying, my flesh raining with sweat, and she ravage the book for the dream meaning, and there was nothing; my nerves melt like a jellyfish—that was when I broke— they found me round the Savannah, screaming: All you see me talking to the wind, so you think I mad. Well, Shabine has bridled the horses of the sea; you see me watching the sun till my eyeballs seared, so all you mad people feel Shabine crazy, but all you ain't know my strength, hear? The coconuts standing by in their regiments in yellow khaki, they waiting for Shabine to take over these islands, and all you best dread the day I am healed of being a human. All you fate in my hand, ministers, businessmen, Shabine have you, friend, I shall scatter your lives like a handful of sand, I who have no weapon but poetry and the lances of palms and the sea's shining shield! 10 Out of the Depths Next day, dark sea. A arse-aching dawn. "Damn wind shift sudden as a woman mind." The slow swell start cresting like some mountain range with snow on the top. "Ay, Skipper, sky dark!" "This ain't right for August." "This light damn strange, this season, sky should be clear as a field." A stingray steeplechase across the sea, tail whipping water, the high man-o'-wars start reeling inland, quick, quick an archery of flying fish miss us! Vince say: "You notice?" and a black-mane squall pounce on the sail like a dog on a pigeon, and it snap the neck of the Flight and shake it from head to tail. "Be Jesus, I never see sea get so rough so fast! That wind come from God back pocket!" "Where Cap'n headin? Like the man gone blind!" "If we's to drong, we go drong, Vince, fock-it!" "Shabine, say your prayers, if life leave you any!" I have not loved those that I loved enough. Worse than the mule kick of Kick-'Em-Jenny Channel, rain start to pelt the Flight between mountains of water. If I was frighten? The tent poles of water spouts bracing the sky start wobbling, clouds unstitch at the seams and sky water drench us, and I hear myself cry, "I'm the drowned sailor in her Book of Dreams." I remembered them ghost ships, I saw me corkscrewing to the sea bed of sea worms, fathom pass fathom, my jaw clench like a fist, and only one thing hold me, trembling, how my family safe home. Then a strength like it seize me and the strength said: "I from backward people who still fear God." Let Him, in His might, heave Leviathan upward by the winch of His will, the beast pouring lace from his sea-bottom bed; and that was the faith that had fade from a child in the Methodist chapel in Chisel Street, Castries, when the whale-bell sang service and, in hard pews ribbed like the whale, proud with despair, we sang how our race survive the sea's maw, our history, our peril, and now I was ready for whatever death will. But if that storm had strength, was in Cap'n face, beard beading with spray, tears salting his eyes, crucify to his post, that ****** hold fast to that wheel, man, like the cross held Jesus, and the wounds of his eyes like they crying for us, and I feeding him white rum, while every crest with Leviathan-lash make the Flight quail like two criminal. Whole night, with no rest, till red-eyed like dawn, we watch our travail subsiding, subside, and there was no more storm. And the noon sea get calm as Thy Kingdom come. 11 After the Storm There's a fresh light that follows a storm while the whole sea still havoc; in its bright wake I saw the veiled face of Maria Concepcion marrying the ocean, then drifting away in the widening lace of her bridal train with white gulls her bridesmaids, till she was gone. I wanted nothing after that day. Across my own face, like the face of the sun, a light rain was falling, with the sea calm. Fall gently, rain, on the sea's upturned face like a girl showering; make these islands fresh as Shabine once knew them! Let every trace, every hot road, smell like clothes she just press and sprinkle with drizzle. I finish dream; whatever the rain wash and the sun iron: the white clouds, the sea and sky with one seam, is clothes enough for my nakedness. Though my Flight never pass the incoming tide of this inland sea beyond the loud reefs of the final Bahamas, I am satisfied if my hand gave voice to one people's grief. Open the map. More islands there, man, than peas on a tin plate, all different size, one thousand in the Bahamas alone, from mountains to low scrub with coral keys, and from this bowsprit, I bless every town, the blue smell of smoke in hills behind them, and the one small road winding down them like twine to the roofs below; I have only one theme: The bowsprit, the arrow, the longing, the lunging heart— the flight to a target whose aim we'll never know, vain search for one island that heals with its harbor and a guiltless horizon, where the almond's shadow doesn't injure the sand. There are so many islands! As many islands as the stars at night on that branched tree from which meteors are shaken like falling fruit around the schooner Flight. But things must fall, and so it always was, on one hand Venus, on the other Mars; fall, and are one, just as this earth is one island in archipelagoes of stars. My first friend was the sea. Now, is my last. I stop talking now. I work, then I read, cotching under a lantern hooked to the mast. I try to forget what happiness was, and when that don't work, I study the stars. Sometimes is just me, and the soft-scissored foam as the deck turn white and the moon open a cloud like a door, and the light over me is a road in white moonlight taking me home. Shabine sang to you from the depths of the sea.

ogun

My uncle made chairs, tables, balanced doors on, dug out coffins, smoothing the white wood out with plane and quick sandpaper until it shone like his short-sighted glasses. The knuckles of his hands were sil- vered knobs of nails hit hurt and flat- tend out with blast of heavy hammer. He was lock knee'd flat-fooed and his clip clop sandals slapped across the concrete flooring of his little shop where cane field mulemen and a fleet of bedford lorry drivers dropped in to scratch themselves and talk. There was no shock of wood no beam of light mahogany his saw teeth couldn't handle when shaping squares for locks, a key hole care tapped rat tat tat upon the handle of his humpbacked chisel. cold world of wood caught fire as he whittle: rectangle window frames, the intersecting x of fold- ing chairs, triangle trellises, the donkey box-cart in its squeaking swaure but he was poor and most days he was hungry imported cabinets with mirrors, formica table tops spine curving chairs made up of tubes, with hollow steel-like bird bones that sat on rubber ploughs thin beds stretched not on boards, but blue high tensioned cables were what the world preferred and yet he had a block of wood that would have baffled them with knife and gimlet care he worked away at this on sundays explored its knotted hurts, cutting his way along its yellow whorls until his hands could feel how it had swelled and shivered, breathing air, its weathered green burning to rings of time its contoured grain still tuned to roots and water. and as he cut he heard the creak of forests green lizard faces gulped, grey memories with moth eyes watched him from their shadows soft liquid tendrils leaked among the flowers and a black rigid thunder he had never heard with his hammer came stomping up the trunks. and as he worked within his shattered sunday shop, the wood took shape, dry shuttered eyes slack anciently everted lips, flat ruined face, eaten by pox, ravaged by rat and woodworm, dry cistern mouth cracked gullet crying for the desert, the heavy black enduring jaw; lost pain, lost iron; emerging woodwork image of his anger. -kamau brathwaite

Talking in Bed

Talking in bed ought to be easiest, Lying together there goes back so far, An emblem of two people being honest. Yet more and more time passes silently. Outside, the wind's incomplete unrest Builds and disperses clouds in the sky, And dark towns heap up on the horizon. None of this cares for us. Nothing shows why At this unique distance from isolation It becomes still more difficult to find Words at once true and kind, Or not untrue and not unkind. -Philip Larkin

The Whitsun Weddings

That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river's level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet. All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles inland, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose: and now and then a smell of grass Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth Until the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars. At first, I didn't notice what a noise The weddings made Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys The interest of what's happening in the shade, And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls I took for porters larking with the mails, And went on reading. Once we started, though, We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls In parodies of fashion, heels and veils, All posed irresolutely, watching us go, As if out on the end of an event Waving goodbye To something that survived it. Struck, I leant More promptly out next time, more curiously, And saw it all again in different terms: The fathers with broad belts under their suits And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat; An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms, The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes, The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that Marked off the girls unreally from the rest. Yes, from cafés And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days Were coming to an end. All down the line Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round; The last confetti and advice were thrown, And, as we moved, each face seemed to define Just what it saw departing: children frowned At something dull; fathers had never known Success so huge and wholly farcical; The women shared The secret like a happy funeral; While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared At a religious wounding. Free at last, And loaded with the sum of all they saw, We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam. Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast Long shadows over major roads, and for Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem Just long enough to settle hats and say I nearly died, A dozen marriages got under way. They watched the landscape, sitting side by side —An Odeon went past, a cooling tower, And someone running up to bowl—and none Thought of the others they would never meet Or how their lives would all contain this hour. I thought of London spread out in the sun, Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat: There we were aimed. And as we raced across Bright knots of rail Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail Travelling coincidence; and what it held Stood ready to be loosed with all the power That being changed can give. We slowed again, And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain. -Philip Larkin

The Not Tale (Funeral)

The great labour of appearance Served the making of the pyre. But how Nor how How also How they Shal nat be toold Shall not be told. Nor how the gods Nor how the beestes and the birds Nor how the ground agast Nor how the fire First with straw And then with drye And then with grene And then with gold And then Now how a site is laid like this. Nor what Nor how Nor how Nor what she spak nor what was her desir Nor what jewels When the fire Nor how some threw their And some their And their And cups full of wine and milk And blood Into the fyr Into the fire. Nor how three times And three times with And three times how. And how that Nor how Nor how Nor how Nor who I cannot tell Nor can I say But shortly to the point I turn And make of my tale an ende. -Caroline Bergvall

Hedgehog

The snail moves like a Hovercraft, held up by a Rubber cushion of itself, Sharing its secret With the hedgehog. The hedgehog Shares its secret with no one. We say, Hedgehog, come out Of yourself and we will love you. We mean no harm. We want Only to listen to what You have to say. We want Your answers to our questions. The hedgehog gives nothing Away, keeping itself to itself. We wonder what a hedgehog Has to hide, why it so distrusts. We forget the god Under this crown of thorns. We forget that never again Will a god trust in the world. -Paul Muldoon

Sketch for a Financial Theory of Self

The qualities as they continue are the silk under the hand; because their celestial progress, across the sky, is so hopeless & so to be hoped for. I hope for silk, always, and the strands are not pure though the name is so. The name is the sidereal display, it is what we know we cannot now have. The last light is the name it carries, it is this that binds us to our unbroken trust. 2. So then, we should not trust the hope that is merely a name for silk, for purity untouched by any Italian hand. The celestial routine is begging, & a nasty toy at that; the stars are names and the names are necessarily false. We choose to believe in the flotsam, the light glance passing and innocent because unpriced. 3. Which is grossly untrue, because we pay for it well enough, I have squandered so much life & good nature I could hardly guess the account. The numbers are out there in the human sky, the pure margin which are the trust we deserve. And we should have what the city does need, the sky, if we did not so want the need. 4. The name of that is of course money, and the absurd trust in value is the pattern of bond and contract and interest-just where the names are exactly equivalent to the trust given to them. Here then is the purity of pragmatic function: we give the name of our selves to our needs. We want what we are. 5. And not silk except for ties, or the sky as even for exchange, the coin of the face we look up to as a vault ready for trust. That much is trickery, but the names, do you not see, are just the tricks we trust, which we choose. The qualities then are a name, corporately, for the hope that they will return to us. The virtue in whose exercise we retain the fiction of air, silence, fluid round the hub of the week. 6. How could this be clearer? The items are, that we are bribes and that silk is a random but by tradition a costly gift. Quality is habit. 7. What follows is where we are now, or where I am. The old cry about chastity, that we are bound by the parts of our unnatural frames. The median condition is the city and not the travel or the remoteness of travel, in sound. Music, travel, habit and silence are all money; purity is a glissade into the last, most beautiful return 8. And how much we hope for it is the primacy of count. This is the shining grudge of numbers, the name we will not lose to any possible stranger: the star & silk of my eye, that will not return. -J.H. Prynne

Slips

The studied poverty of a moon roof, the earthenware of dairies cooled by apple trees, the apple tree that makes the whitest wash... but i forget names, remembering them wrongly where they touch upon another name, a town in France like a woman's Christian name. My childhood is preserved as a nation's history, my favorite fairytales the shells leased by the hermit crab. I see my grandmother's death as a piece of ice, my mother's slimness restored to her, my own key slotted in your door. Tricks you might guess from this unfastened button, A pen mislaid, a word misread, My hair coming down in the middle of a conversation. -Medbh McGuckian -territory of poetry is the female subconscious or semi-conscious

In Memory of Sigmund Freud

When there are so many we shall have to mourn, when grief has been made so public, and exposed to the critique of a whole epoch the frailty of our conscience and anguish, of whom shall we speak? For every day they die among us, those who were doing us some good, who knew it was never enough but hoped to improve a little by living. Such was this doctor: still at eighty he wished to think of our life from whose unruliness so many plausible young futures with threats or flattery ask obedience, but his wish was denied him: he closed his eyes upon that last picture, common to us all, of problems like relatives gathered puzzled and jealous about our dying. For about him till the very end were still those he had studied, the fauna of the night, and shades that still waited to enter the bright circle of his recognition turned elsewhere with their disappointment as he was taken away from his life interest to go back to the earth in London, an important Jew who died in exile. Only Hate was happy, hoping to augment his practice now, and his dingy clientele who think they can be cured by killing and covering the garden with ashes. They are still alive, but in a world he changed simply by looking back with no false regrets; all he did was to remember like the old and be honest like children. He wasn't clever at all: he merely told the unhappy Present to recite the Past like a poetry lesson till sooner or later it faltered at the line where long ago the accusations had begun, and suddenly knew by whom it had been judged, how rich life had been and how silly, and was life-forgiven and more humble, able to approach the Future as a friend without a wardrobe of excuses, without a set mask of rectitude or an embarrassing over-familiar gesture. No wonder the ancient cultures of conceit in his technique of unsettlement foresaw the fall of princes, the collapse of their lucrative patterns of frustration: if he succeeded, why, the Generalised Life would become impossible, the monolith of State be broken and prevented the co-operation of avengers. Of course they called on God, but he went his way down among the lost people like Dante, down to the stinking fosse where the injured lead the ugly life of the rejected, and showed us what evil is, not, as we thought, deeds that must be punished, but our lack of faith, our dishonest mood of denial, the concupiscence of the oppressor. If some traces of the autocratic pose, the paternal strictness he distrusted, still clung to his utterance and features, it was a protective coloration for one who'd lived among enemies so long: if often he was wrong and, at times, absurd, to us he is no more a person now but a whole climate of opinion under whom we conduct our different lives: Like weather he can only hinder or help, the proud can still be proud but find it a little harder, the tyrant tries to make do with him but doesn't care for him much: he quietly surrounds all our habits of growth and extends, till the tired in even the remotest miserable duchy have felt the change in their bones and are cheered till the child, unlucky in his little State, some hearth where freedom is excluded, a hive whose honey is fear and worry, feels calmer now and somehow assured of escape, while, as they lie in the grass of our neglect, so many long-forgotten objects revealed by his undiscouraged shining are returned to us and made precious again; games we had thought we must drop as we grew up, little noises we dared not laugh at, faces we made when no one was looking. But he wishes us more than this. To be free is often to be lonely. He would unite the unequal moieties fractured by our own well-meaning sense of justice, would restore to the larger the wit and will the smaller possesses but can only use for arid disputes, would give back to the son the mother's richness of feeling: but he would have us remember most of all to be enthusiastic over the night, not only for the sense of wonder it alone has to offer, but also because it needs our love. With large sad eyes its delectable creatures look up and beg us dumbly to ask them to follow: they are exiles who long for the future that lives in our power, they too would rejoice if allowed to serve enlightenment like him, even to bear our cry of 'Judas', as he did and all must bear who serve it. One rational voice is dumb. Over his grave the household of Impulse mourns one dearly loved: sad is Eros, builder of cities, and weeping anarchic Aphrodite. -W.H. Auden

The Dream Language of Fergus

Your tongue has spent the night In its dim sack as the shape of your foot In its cave. Not the rudiment Of half a vanquished sound, The excommunicated shadow of a name, Has rumpled the sheets of your mouth. ii. So Latin sleeps, they say, in Russian speech, So one river inserted into another Becomes a leaping, glistening, splashed And scattered alphabet Jutting out from the voice, Till what began as a dog's bark Ends with bronze, what began With honey ends with ice; As if an aeroplane in full flight Launched a second plane, The sky is stabbed by their exits And the mistaken meaning of each. -Medbh McGuckian

On Not Being Milton

by Tony Harrison Read and committed to the flames, I call these sixteen lines that go back to my roots my Cahier d'un retour au pays natal , my growing black enough to fit my boots. The stutter of the scold out of the branks of condescension, class and counter-class thickens with glottals to a lumpen mass of Ludding morphemes closing up their ranks. Each swung cast-iron Enoch of Leeds stress clangs a forged music on the frames of Art, the looms of owned language smashed apart! Three cheers for mute ingloriousness! Articulation is the tongue-tied's fighting. In the silence round all poetry we quote Tidd the Cato Street conspirator who wrote: Sir, I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting. -Tony Harrison -

Cordelia

to those who kiss in fear that they will never kiss again to those that love with fear that they shall never love again.... a poem should not mean, but be -Veronica Forrest Thomson -the line a poem should not mean but be is from Ars poetic

A Far Cry From Africa

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies, Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt. Corpses are scattered through a paradise. Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries: "Waste no compassion on these separate dead!" Statistics justify and scholars seize The salients of colonial policy. What is that to the white child hacked in bed? To savages, expendable as Jews? Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break In a white dust of ibises whose cries Have wheeled since civilization's dawn From the parched river or beast-teeming plain. The violence of beast on beast is read As natural law, but upright man Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain. Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum, While he calls courage still that native dread Of the white peace contracted by the dead. Again brutish necessity wipes its hands Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again A waste of our compassion, as with Spain, The gorilla wrestles with the superman. I who am poisoned with the blood of both, Where shall I turn, divided to the vein? I who have cursed The drunken officer of British rule, how choose Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Betray them both, or give back what they give? How can I face such slaughter and be cool? How can I turn from Africa and live? -Derek Walcott

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong, The old Masters: how well they understood Its human position: how it takes place While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along; How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting For the miraculous birth, there always must be Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating On a pond at the edge of the wood: They never forgot That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse Scratches its innocent behind on a tree. In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on. -W.H. Auden

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell. There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies, But best of all was the warm thick slobber Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied Specks to range on window sills at home, On shelves at school, and wait and watch until The fattening dots burst, into nimble Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how The daddy frog was called a bullfrog And how he croaked and how the mammy frog Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too For they were yellow in the sun and brown In rain. Then one hot day when fields were rank With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges To a coarse croaking that I had not heard Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus. Right down the dam gross bellied frogs were cocked On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped: The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting. I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it. -Seamus Heaney

And Death Shall Have No Dominion

And death shall have no dominion. Dead man naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again; Though lovers be lost love shall not; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. Under the windings of the sea They lying long shall not die windily; Twisting on racks when sinews give way, Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break; Faith in their hands shall snap in two, And the unicorn evils run them through; Split all ends up they shan't crack; And death shall have no dominion. And death shall have no dominion. No more may gulls cry at their ears Or waves break loud on the seashores; Where blew a flower may a flower no more Lift its head to the blows of the rain; Though they be mad and dead as nails, Heads of the characters hammer through daisies; Break in the sun till the sun breaks down, And death shall have no dominion. -Dylan Thomas

As I walked out one evening

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: 'Love has no ending. 'I'll love you, dear, I'll love you Till China and Africa meet, And the river jumps over the mountain And the salmon sing in the street, 'I'll love you till the ocean Is folded and hung up to dry And the seven stars go squawking Like geese about the sky. 'The years shall run like rabbits, For in my arms I hold The Flower of the Ages, And the first love of the world.' But all the clocks in the city Began to whirr and chime: 'O let not Time deceive you, You cannot conquer Time. 'In the burrows of the Nightmare Where Justice naked is, Time watches from the shadow And coughs when you would kiss. 'In headaches and in worry Vaguely life leaks away, And Time will have his fancy To-morrow or to-day. 'Into many a green valley Drifts the appalling snow; Time breaks the threaded dances And the diver's brilliant bow. 'O plunge your hands in water, Plunge them in up to the wrist; Stare, stare in the basin And wonder what you've missed. 'The glacier knocks in the cupboard, The desert sighs in the bed, And the crack in the tea-cup opens A lane to the land of the dead. 'Where the beggars raffle the banknotes And the Giant is enchanting to Jack, And the Lily-white Boy is a Roarer, And Jill goes down on her back. 'O look, look in the mirror, O look in your distress: Life remains a blessing Although you cannot bless. 'O stand, stand at the window As the tears scald and start; You shall love your crooked neighbour With your crooked heart.' It was late, late in the evening, The lovers they were gone; The clocks had ceased their chiming, And the deep river ran on. -W.H. Auden

The Grauballe Man

As if he had been poured in tar, he lies on a pillow of turf and seems to weep the black river of himself. The grain of his wrists is like bog oak, the ball of his heel like a basalt egg. His instep has shrunk cold as a swan's foot or a wet swamp root. His hips are the ridge and purse of a mussel, his spine an eel arrested under a glisten of mud. The head lifts, the chin is a visor raised above the vent of his slashed throat that has tanned and toughened. The cured wound opens inwards to a dark elderberry place. Who will say 'corpse' to his vivid cast? Who will say 'body' to his opaque repose? And his rusted hair, a mat unlikely as a foetus's. I first saw his twisted face in a photograph, a head and shoulder out of the peat, bruised like a forceps baby, but now he lies perfected in my memory, down to the red horn of his nails, hung in the scales with beauty and atrocity: with the Dying Gaul too strictly compassed on his shield, with the actual weight of each hooded victim, slashed and dumped. -Seamus Heaney

book ends

Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don't try. You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare... The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay, only our silence made us seem a pair. Not as good for staring in, blue gas, too regular each bud, each yellow spike. At night you need my company to pass and she not here to tell us we're alike! You're life's all shattered into smithereens. Back in our silences and sullen looks, for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between 's not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books. II The stone's too full. The wording must be terse. There's scarcely room to carve the FLORENCE on it-- Come on, it's not as if we're wanting verse. It's not as if we're wanting a whole sonnet! After tumblers of neat Johnny Walker (I think that both of us we're on our third) you said you'd always been a clumsy talker and couldn't find another, shorter word for 'beloved' or for 'wife' in the inscription, but not too clumsy that you can't still cut: You're supposed to be the bright boy at description and you can't tell them what the **** to put! I've got to find the right words on my own. I've got the envelope that he'd been scrawling, mis-spelt, mawkish, stylistically appalling but I can't squeeze more love into their stone. -Tony Harrison -about his estranged relationship with his father -mother died -harrison treasures silence -his father was a baker

Dis Poetry

Benjamin Zephaniah Dis poetry is like a riddim dat drops De tongue fires a riddim dat shoots like shots Dis poetry is designed fe rantin Dance hall style, big mouth chanting, Dis poetry nar put yu to sleep Preaching follow me Like yu is blind sheep, Dis poetry is not Party Political Not designed fe dose who are critical. Dis poetry is wid me when I gu to me bed It gets into me dreadlocks It lingers around me head Dis poetry goes wid me as I pedal me bike I've tried Shakespeare, respect due dere But did is de stuff I like. Dis poetry is not afraid of going ina book Still dis poetry need ears fe hear an eyes fe hav a look Dis poetry is Verbal Riddim, no big words involved An if I hav a problem de riddim gets it solved, I've tried to be more romantic, it does nu good for me So I tek a Reggae Riddim an build me poetry, I could try be more personal But you've heard it all before, Pages of written words not needed Brain has many words in store, Yu could call dis poetry Dub Ranting De tongue plays a beat De body starts skanking, Dis poetry is quick an childish Dis poetry is fe de wise an foolish, Anybody can do it fe free, Dis poetry is fe yu an me, Don't stretch yu imagination Dis poetry is fe de good of de Nation, Chant, In de morning I chant In de night I chant In de darkness An under de spotlight, I pass thru University I pass thru Sociology An den I got a dread degree In Dreadfull Ghettology. Dis poetry stays wid me when I run or walk An when I am talking to meself in poetry I talk, Dis poetry is wid me, Below me an above, Dis poetry's from inside me It goes to yu WID LUV.

Digging

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun. Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging. The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly. He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep To scatter new potatoes that we picked, Loving their cool hardness in our hands. By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man. My grandfather cut more turf in a day Than any other man on Toner's bog. Once I carried him milk in a bottle Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up To drink it, then fell to right away Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods Over his shoulder, going down and down For the good turf. Digging. The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge Through living roots awaken in my head. But I've no spade to follow men like them. Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests. I'll dig with it. -Seamus Heaney

VIA

Caroline Bergvall -48 translations of the divine comedy

Elements of Composition

Composed as I am, like others, of elements on certain well-known lists, father's seed and mother's egg gathering earth, air, fire, mostly water, into a mulberry mass, moulding calcium, carbon, even gold, magnesium and such, into a chattering self tangled in love and work, scary dreams, capable of eyes that can see, only by moving constantly, the constancy of things like Stonehenge or cherry trees; add uncle's eleven fingers making shadow-plays of rajas and cats, hissing, becoming fingers again, the look of panic on sister's face an hour before her wedding, a dated newspaper map, of a place one has never seen, maybe no longer there after the riots, downtown Nairobi, that a friend carried in his passport as others would a woman's picture in their wallets; add the lepers of Madurai, male, female, married, with children, lion faces, crabs for claws, clotted on their shadows under the stone-eyed goddesses of dance, mere pillars, moving as nothing on earth can move &mdash I pass through them as they pass through me taking and leaving affections, seeds, skeletons, millennia of fossil records of insects that do not last a day, body-prints of mayflies, a legend half-heard in a train of the half-man searching for an ever-fleeing other half through Muharram tigers, hyacinths in crocodile waters, and the sweet twisted lives of epileptic saints, and even as I add I lose, decompose, into my elements into other names and forms, past, and passing, tenses without time, caterpillar on a leaf, eating, being eaten. -A.K. Ramanujan

The Secret Agent

Control of the passes was, he saw, the key To this new district, but who would get it? He, the trained spy, had walked into the trap For a bogus guide, seduced by the old tricks. At Greenhearth was a fine site for a dam And easy power, had they pushed the rail Some stations nearer. They ignored his wires: The bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming. The street music seemed gracious now to one For weeks up in the desert. Woken by water Running away in the dark, he often had Reproached the night for a companion Dreamed of already. They would shoot, of course, Parting easily two that were never joined. -W.H. Auden

The Wanderer

Doom is dark and deeper than any sea-dingle. Upon what man it fall In spring, day-wishing flowers appearing, Avalanche sliding, white snow from rock-face, That he should leave his house, No cloud-soft hand can hold him, restraint by women; But ever that man goes Through place-keepers, through forest trees, A stranger to strangers over undried sea, Houses for fishes, suffocating water, Or lonely on fell as chat, By pot-holed becks A bird stone-haunting, an unquiet bird. There head falls forward, fatigued at evening, And dreams of home, Waving from window, spread of welcome, Kissing of wife under single sheet; But waking sees Bird-flocks nameless to him, through doorway voices Of new men making another love. Save him from hostile capture, From sudden tiger's leap at corner; Protect his house, His anxious house where days are counted From thunderbolt protect, From gradual ruin spreading like a stain; Converting number from vague to certain, Bring joy, bring day of his returning, Lucky with day approaching, with leaning dawn. -W.H. Auden -natural imagery -alliteration -misses home -enjambment of nature is timeless

Anorexic

Flesh is heretic. My body is a witch. I am burning it. Yes I am torching her curves and paps and wiles. They scorch in my self denials. How she meshed my head in the half-truths of her fevers till I renounced milk and honey and the taste of lunch. I vomited her hungers. Now the bitch is burning. I am starved and curveless. I am skin and bone. She has learned her lesson. Thin as a rib I turn in sleep. My dreams probe a claustrophobia a sensuous enclosure. How warm it was and wide once by a warm drum, once by the song of his breath and in his sleeping side. Only a little more, only a few more days sinless, foodless, I will slip back into him again as if I had never been away. Caged so I will grow angular and holy past pain, keeping his heart such company as will make me forget in a small space the fall into forked dark, into python needs heaving to hips and breasts and lips and heat and sweat and fat and greed. -Eavan Boland

In Memory of W.B. Yeats

He disappeared in the dead of winter: The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted, And snow disfigured the public statues; The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. Far from his illness The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests, The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays; By mourning tongues The death of the poet was kept from his poems. But for him it was his last afternoon as himself, An afternoon of nurses and rumours; The provinces of his body revolted, The squares of his mind were empty, Silence invaded the suburbs, The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers. Now he is scattered among a hundred cities And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections, To find his happiness in another kind of wood And be punished under a foreign code of conscience. The words of a dead man Are modified in the guts of the living. But in the importance and noise of to-morrow When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse, And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed, And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom, A few thousand will think of this day As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual. What instruments we have agree The day of his death was a dark cold day. II You were silly like us; your gift survived it all: The parish of rich women, physical decay, Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry. Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still, For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives In the valley of its making where executives Would never want to tamper, flows on south From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs, Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives, A way of happening, a mouth. III Earth, receive an honoured guest: William Yeats is laid to rest. Let the Irish vessel lie Emptied of its poetry. In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate; Intellectual disgrace Stares from every human face, And the seas of pity lie Locked and frozen in each eye. Follow, poet, follow right To the bottom of the night, With your unconstraining voice Still persuade us to rejoice; With the farming of a verse Make a vineyard of the curse, Sing of human unsuccess In a rapture of distress; In the deserts of the heart Let the healing fountain start, In the prison of his days Teach the free man how to praise. -W.H. Auden

Wounds

Here are two pictures from my father's head — I have kept them like secrets until now: First, the Ulster Division at the Somme Going over the top with '**** the Pope!' 'No Surrender!': a boy about to die, Screaming 'Give 'em one for the Shankill!' 'Wilder than Gurkhas' were my father's words Of admiration and bewilderment. Next comes the London-Scottish padre Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick, With a stylish backhand and a prayer. Over a landscape of dead buttocks My father followed him for fifty years. At last, a belated casualty, He said — lead traces flaring till they hurt — 'I am dying for King and Country, slowly.' I touched his hand, his thin head I touched. Now, with military honours of a kind, With his badges, his medals like rainbows, His spinning compass, I bury beside him Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone. A packet of Woodbines I throw in, A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus Paralysed as heavy guns put out The night-light in a nursery for ever; Also a bus-conductor's uniform — He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers Without a murmur, shot through the head By a shivering boy who wandered in Before they could turn the television down Or tidy away the supper dishes. To the children, to a bewildered wife, I think 'Sorry Missus' was what he said. -Michael Longley

Quoof

How often have i carried our family word for the hot water bottle to a strange bed, as my father would juggle a red-hot half brick in an old sock to his childhood settle. I have taken it into so many lovely heads or laid it between us like a sword. An hotel room in New York City with a girl who spoke hardly any English, my hand on her breast like the soldering one-off spoor of the yeti or some other shy beast that has yet to enter the language. -Paul Muldoon

Heredity

How you became a poet's a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from? I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry -- one was a stammerer, the other dumb. -Tony Harrison

The tollund man

I Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country near by Where they dug him out, His last gruel of winter seeds Caked in his stomach, Naked except for The cap, noose and girdle, I will stand a long time. Bridegroom to the goddess, She tightened her torc on him And opened her fen, Those dark juices working Him to a saint's kept body, Trove of the turfcutters' Honeycombed workings. Now his stained face Reposes at Aarhus. II I could risk blasphemy, Consecrate the cauldron bog Our holy ground and pray Him to make germinate The scattered, ambushed Flesh of labourers, Stockinged corpses Laid out in the farmyards, Tell-tale skin and teeth Flecking the sleepers Of four young brothers, trailed For miles along the lines. III Something of his sad freedom As he rode the tumbril Should come to me, driving, Saying the names Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard, Watching the pointing hands Of country people, Not knowing their tongue. Out here in Jutland In the old man-killing parishes I will feel lost, Unhappy and at home. -Seamus Heaney

Punishment

I can feel the tug of the halter at the nape of her neck, the wind on her naked front. It blows her nipples to amber beads, it shakes the frail rigging of her ribs. I can see her drowned body in the bog, the weighing stone, the floating rods and boughs. Under which at first she was a barked sapling that is dug up oak-bone, brain-firkin: her shaved head like a stubble of black corn, her blindfold a soiled bandage, her noose a ring to store the memories of love. Little adulteress, before they punished you you were flaxen-haired, undernourished, and your tar-black face was beautiful. My poor scapegoat, I almost love you but would have cast, I know, the stones of silence. I am the artful voyeuur of your brain's exposed and darkened combs, your muscles' webbing and all your numbered bones: I who have stood dumb when your betraying sisters, cauled in tar, wept by the railings, who would connive in civilized outrage yet understand the exact and tribal, intimate revenge. -Seamus Heaney

Mrs Lazarus

I had grieved. I had wept for a night and a day over my loss, ripped the cloth I was married in from my breasts, howled, shrieked, clawed at the burial stones until my hands bled, retched his name over and over again, dead, dead. Gone home. Gutted the place. Slept in a single cot, widow, one empty glove, white femur in the dust, half. Stuffed dark suits into black bags, shuffled in a dead man's shoes, noosed the double knot of a tie around my bare neck, gaunt nun in the mirror, touching herself. I learnt the Stations of Bereavement, the icon of my face in each bleak frame; but all those months he was going away from me, dwindling to the shrunk size of a snapshot, going, going. Till his name was no longer a certain spell for his face. The last hair on his head floated out from a book. His scent went from the house. The will was read. See, he was vanishing to the small zero held by the gold of my ring. Then he was gone. Then he was legend, language; my arm on the arm of the schoolteacher-the shock of a man's strength under the sleeve of his coat- along the hedgerows. But I was faithful for as long as it took. Until he was memory. So I could stand that evening in the field in a shawl of fine air, healed, able to watch the edge of the moon occur to the sky and a hare thump from a hedge; then notice the village men running towards me, shouting, behind them the women and children, barking dogs, and I knew. I knew by the sly light on the blacksmith's face, the shrill eyes of the barmaid, the sudden hands bearing me into the hot tang of the crowd parting before me. He lived. I saw the horror on his face. I heard his mother's crazy song. I breathed his stench; my bridegroom in his rotting shroud, moist and dishevelled from the grave's slack chew, croaking his cuckold name, disinherited, out of his time. -carol ann duffy

Wherever I hang

I leave me people, me land, me home For reasons I not too sure I forsake de sun And de humming-bird splendour Had big rats in de floorboard So I pick up me new-world-self And come to this place call England At first I feeling like I in a dream - De misty greyness I touching the walls to see if they real They solid to de seam And de people pouring from de underground system Like beans And when I look up to de sky I see Lord Nelson high - too high to lie. And is so I sending home photos of myself Among de pigeons and de snow And is so I warding off de cold And is so, little by little I begin to change my calypso ways Never visiting nobody Before giving them clear warning And waiting me turn in queue Now, after all this time I get accustom to de English life But I still miss back-home side To tell you de truth I don't know really where I belaang Yes, divided to de ocean Divided to de bone Wherever I hang me knickers - that's my home. -Grace Nichols

Ovid in the Third Reich

I love my work and my children. God Is distant, difficult. Things happen. Too near the ancient troughs of blood Innocence is no earthly weapon. I have learned one thing: not to look down So much upon the damned. They, in their sphere, Harmonize strangely with the divine Love. I, in mine, celebrate the love-choir. -Geoffrey Hill

Going Going

I thought it would last my time - The sense that, beyond the town, There would always be fields and farms, Where the village louts could climb Such trees as were not cut down; I knew there'd be false alarms In the papers about old streets And split level shopping, but some Have always been left so far; And when the old part retreats As the bleak high-risers come We can always escape in the car. Things are tougher than we are, just As earth will always respond However we mess it about; Chuck filth in the sea, if you must: The tides will be clean beyond. - But what do I feel now? Doubt? Or age, simply? The crowd Is young in the M1 cafe; Their kids are screaming for more - More houses, more parking allowed, More caravan sites, more pay. On the Business Page, a score Of spectacled grins approve Some takeover bid that entails Five per cent profit (and ten Per cent more in the estuaries): move Your works to the unspoilt dales (Grey area grants)! And when You try to get near the sea In summer . . . It seems, just now, To be happening so very fast; Despite all the land left free For the first time I feel somehow That it isn't going to last, That before I snuff it, the whole Boiling will be bricked in Except for the tourist parts - First slum of Europe: a role It won't be hard to win, With a cast of crooks and tarts. And that will be England gone, The shadows, the meadows, the lanes, The guildhalls, the carved choirs. There'll be books; it will linger on In galleries; but all that remains For us will be concrete and tyres. Most things are never meant. This won't be, most likely; but greeds And garbage are too thick-strewn To be swept up now, or invent Excuses that make them all needs. I just think it will happen, soon. -Philip Larkin

Mise Eire

I won't go back to it - into old dactyls, oaths made by the animal tallows of the candle - land of the Gulf Stream, the small farm, the scalded memory, the songs that bandage up the history, the words that make a rhythm of the crime where time is time past. A palsy of regrets. No. I won't go back. My roots are brutal: I am the woman - a sloven's mix of silk at the wrists, a sort of dove-strut in the precincts of the garrison - who practises the quick frictions, the rictus of delight and gets cambric for it, rice-coloured silks. I am the woman in the gansy-coat on board the 'Mary Belle', in the huddling cold, holding her half-dead baby to her as the wind shifts east and north over the dirty water of the wharf mingling the immigrant guttural with the vowels of homesickness who neither knows nor cares that a new language is a kind of scar and heals after a while into a passable imitation of what went before. -Eavan Boland

Invitation

If my fat was too much for me I would have told you I would have lost a stone or two I would have gone jogging even when it was fogging I would have weighed in sitting the bathroom scale with my tail tucked in I would have dieted more care a diabetic But as it is I'm feeling fine feel no need to change my lines when I move I'm target light Come up and see me sometime 2 Come up and see me sometime Come up and see me sometime My breasts are huge exciting amnions of water melon your hands can't cup my thighs are twin seals fat as slick pups there's a purple cherry below the blues of my black seabelly there's a mole that gets a ride each time I shift the heritage of my behind Come up and see me sometime -Grace Nichols

Listen Mr. Oxford Don

John Agard Me not no Oxford don me a simple immigrant from Clapham Common I didn't graduate I immigrate But listen Mr Oxford don I'm a man on de run and a man on de run is a dangerous one I ent have no gun I ent have no knife but mugging de Queen's English is the story of my life I don't need no axe to split/ up yu syntax I don't need no hammer to mash/ up yu grammar I warning you Mr. Oxford don I'm a wanted man and a wanted man is a dangerous one Dem accuse me of assault on de Oxford dictionary/ imagine a concise peaceful man like me/ dem want me to serve time for inciting rhyme to riot but I tekking it quiet down here in Clapham Common I'm not violent man Mr. Oxford don I only armed wit mih human breath but human breath is a dangerous weapon So mek dem send one big word after me I ent serving no jail sentence I slashing suffix in self-defence I bashing future wit present tense and if necessary I making de Queen's English accessory/ to my offence

Lullaby

Lay your sleeping head, my love, Human on my faithless arm; Time and fevers burn away Individual beauty from Thoughtful children, and the grave Proves the child ephemeral: But in my arms till break of day Let the living creature lie, Mortal, guilty, but to me The entirely beautiful. Soul and body have no bounds: To lovers as they lie upon Her tolerant enchanted slope In their ordinary swoon, Grave the vision Venus sends Of supernatural sympathy, Universal love and hope; While an abstract insight wakes Among the glaciers and the rocks The hermit's carnal ecstasy. Certainty, fidelity On the stroke of midnight pass Like vibrations of a bell, And fashionable madmen raise Their pedantic boring cry: Every farthing of the cost, All the dreadful cards foretell, Shall be paid, but from this night Not a whisper, not a thought, Not a kiss nor look be lost. Beauty, midnight, vision dies: Let the winds of dawn that blow Softly round your dreaming head Such a day of welcome show Eye and knocking heart may bless. Find the mortal world enough; Noons of dryness see you fed By the involuntary powers, Nights of insult let you pass Watched by every human love. -W. H. Auden

Fern Hill

Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green, The night above the dingle starry, Time let me hail and climb Golden in the heydays of his eyes, And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves Trail with daisies and barley Down the rivers of the windfall light. And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home, In the sun that is young once only, Time let me play and be Golden in the mercy of his means, And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold, And the sabbath rang slowly In the pebbles of the holy streams. All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air And playing, lovely and watery And fire green as grass. And nightly under the simple stars As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away, All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars Flying with the ricks, and the horses Flashing into the dark. And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all Shining, it was Adam and maiden, The sky gathered again And the sun grew round that very day. So it must have been after the birth of the simple light In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm Out of the whinnying green stable On to the fields of praise. And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long, In the sun born over and over, I ran my heedless ways, My wishes raced through the house high hay And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs Before the children green and golden Follow him out of grace, Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand, In the moon that is always rising, Nor that riding to sleep I should hear him fly with the high fields And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land. Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means, Time held me green and dying Though I sang in my chains like the sea. -Dylan Thomas

The explosion

On the day of the explosion Shadows pointed towards the pithead: In the sun the slagheap slept. Down the lane came men in pitboots Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke, Shouldering off the freshened silence. One chased after rabbits; lost them; Came back with a nest of lark's eggs; Showed them; lodged them in the grasses. So they passed in beards and moleskins, Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter, Through the tall gates standing open. At noon, there came a tremor; cows Stopped chewing for a second; sun, Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed. The dead go on before us, they Are sitting in God's house in comfort, We shall see them face to face - Plain as lettering in the chapels It was said, and for a second Wives saw men of the explosion Larger than in life they managed - Gold as on a coin, or walking Somehow from the sun towards them, One showing the eggs unbroken. -Philip Larkin

Church Going

Once I am sure there's nothing going on I step inside, letting the door thud shut. Another church: matting, seats, and stone, And little books; sprawlings of flowers, cut For Sunday, brownish now; some brass and stuff Up at the holy end; the small neat organ; And a tense, musty, unignorable silence, Brewed God knows how long. Hatless, I take off My cycle-clips in awkward reverence. Move forward, run my hand around the font. From where I stand, the roof looks almost new - Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I don't. Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few Hectoring large-scale verses, and pronounce 'Here endeth' much more loudly than I'd meant. The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door I sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence, Reflect the place was not worth stopping for. Yet stop I did: in fact I often do, And always end much at a loss like this, Wondering what to look for; wondering, too, When churches will fall completely out of use What we shall turn them into, if we shall keep A few cathedrals chronically on show, Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked cases, And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep. Shall we avoid them as unlucky places? Or, after dark, will dubious women come To make their children touch a particular stone; Pick simples for a cancer; or on some Advised night see walking a dead one? Power of some sort will go on In games, in riddles, seemingly at random; But superstition, like belief, must die, And what remains when disbelief has gone? Grass, weedy pavement, brambles, buttress, sky, A shape less recognisable each week, A purpose more obscure. I wonder who Will be the last, the very last, to seek This place for what it was; one of the crew That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were? Some ruin-bibber, randy for antique, Or Christmas-addict, counting on a whiff Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh? Or will he be my representative, Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly silt Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground Through suburb scrub because it held unspilt So long and equably what since is found Only in separation - marriage, and birth, And death, and thoughts of these - for which was built This special shell? For, though I've no idea What this accoutred frowsty barn is worth, It pleases me to stand in silence here; A serious house on serious earth it is, In whose blent air all our compulsions meet, Are recognized, and robed as destinies. And that much never can be obsolete, Since someone will forever be surprising A hunger in himself to be more serious, And gravitating with it to this ground, Which, he once heard, was proper to grow wise in, If only that so many dead lie round. -Philip Larkin

An Arundel Tomb

Side by side, their faces blurred, The earl and countess lie in stone, Their proper habits vaguely shown As jointed armour, stiffened pleat, And that faint hint of the absurd- The little dogs under their feet. Such plainess of the pre-baroque Hardly involves the eye, until It meets his left hand gauntlet, still Clasped empty in the other; and One sees, with sharp tender shock, His hand withdrawn, holding her hand. They would not think to lie so long. Such faithfulness in effigy Was just a detail friends could see: A sculptor's sweet comissioned grace Thrown off in helping to prolong The Latin names around the base. They would not guess how early in Their supine stationary voyage Their air would change to soundless damage, Turn the old tenantry away; How soon succeeding eyes begin To look, not read. Rigidly they Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light Each summer thronged the grass. A bright Litter of birdcalls strewed the same Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths The endless altered people came, Washing at their identity. Now, helpless in the hollow of An unarmorial age, a trough Of smoke in slow suspended skeins Above their scrap of history, Only an attitude remains: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone finality They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: What will survive of us is love. -Philip Thomas

Tropical Death

The fat black woman want a brilliant tropical death not a cold sojourn in some North Europe far/forlorn The fat black woman want some heat/hibiscus at her feet blue sea dress to wrap her neat The fat black woman want some bawl no quiet jerk tear wiping a polite hearse withdrawal The fat black woman want all her dead rights first night third night nine night all the sleepless droning red-eyed wake nights In the heart of her mother's sweetbreast In the shade of the sun leaf's cool bless In the bloom of her people's bloodrest the fat black woman want a brilliant tropical death yes -Grace Nichols

Calypso

The stone had skidded arc'd and bloomed into islands: Cuba and San Domingo Jamaica and Puerto Rico Grenada Guadeloupe Bonaire curved stone hissed into reef wave teeth fanged into clay white splash flashed into spray Bathsheba Montego Bay bloom of the arcing summers... 2 The islands roared into green plantations ruled by silver sugar cane sweat and profit cutlass profit islands ruled by sugar cane And of course it was a wonderful time a profitable hospitable well-worth-you-time when captains carried receipts for rices letters spices wigs opera glasses swaggering asses debtors vices pigs O it was a wonderful time an elegant benevolent redolent time-- and young Mrs. P.'s quick irrelevant crine at four o'clock in the morning... 3 But what of black Sam with the big splayed toes and the shoe black shiny skin? He carries bucketfulls of water 'cause his Ma's just had another daughter. And what of John with the European name who went to school and dreamt of fame his boss one day called him a fool and the boss hadn't even been to school... 4 Steel drum steel drum hit the hot calypso dancing hot rum hot rum who goin' stop this bacchanalling? For we glance the banjoy dance the limbo grow our crops by maljo have loose morals gather corals father out neighbour's quarrels perhaps when they come with their cameras and straw hats: sacred pink tourists from the frozen Nawth we should get down to those white beaches where if we don't wear breeches it becomes an island dance Some people doin' well while others are catchin' hell o the boss gave our Johnny the sack though we beg him please please to take 'im back so now the boy nigratin' overseas... -Kamau Brathwaite

Reasons For Attendance

The trumpet's voice, loud and authoritative, Draws me a moment to the lighted glass To watch the dancers - all under twenty-five - Solemnly on the beat of happiness. - Or so I fancy, sensing the smoke and sweat, The wonderful feel of girls. Why be out there ? But then, why be in there? Sex, yes, but what Is sex ? Surely to think the lion's share Of happiness is found by couples - sheer Inaccuracy, as far as I'm concerned. What calls me is that lifted, rough-tongued bell (Art, if you like) whose individual sound Insists I too am individual. It speaks; I hear; others may hear as well, But not for me, nor I for them; and so With happiness. Therefor I stay outside, Believing this, and they maul to and fro, Believing that; and both are satisfied, If no one has misjudged himself. Or lied. -Philip Larkin

The season of phantasmal peace

Then all the nations of birds lifted together the huge net of the shadows of this earth in multitudinous dialects, twittering tongues, stitching and crossing it. They lifted up the shadows of long pines down trackless slopes, the shadows of glass-faced towers down evening streets, the shadow of a frail plant on a city sill— the net rising soundless as night, the birds' cries soundless, until there was no longer dusk, or season, decline, or weather, only this passage of phantasmal light that not the narrowest shadow dared to sever. And men could not see, looking up, what the wild geese drew, what the ospreys trailed behind them in silvery ropes that flashed in the icy sunlight; they could not hear battalions of starlings waging peaceful cries, bearing the net higher, covering this world like the vines of an orchard, or a mother drawing the trembling gauze over the trembling eyes of a child fluttering to sleep; it was the light that you will see at evening on the side of a hill in yellow October, and no one hearing knew what change had brought into the raven's cawing, the killdeer's screech, the ember-circling chough such an immense, soundless, and high concern for the fields and cities where the birds belong, except it was their seasonal passing, Love, made seasonless, or, from the high privilege of their birth, something brighter than pity for the wingless ones below them who shared dark holes in windows and in houses, and higher they lifted the net with soundless voices above all change, betrayals of falling suns, and this season lasted one moment, like the pause between dusk and darkness, between fury and peace, but, for such as our earth is now, it lasted long. -Derek Walcott

Night Feed

This is dawn. Believe me This is your season, little daughter. The moment daisies open, The hour mercurial rainwater Makes a mirror for sparrows. It's time we drowned our sorrows. I tiptoe in. I lift you up Wriggling In your rosy, zipped sleeper. Yes, this is the hour For the early bird and me When finder is keeper. I crook the bottle. How you suckle! This is the best I can be, Housewife To this nursery Where you hold on, Dear Life. A silt of milk. The last suck. And now your eyes are open, Birth-colored and offended. Earth wakes. You go back to sleep. The feed is ended. Worms turn. Stars go in. Even the moon is losing face. Poplars stilt for dawn And we begin The long fall from grace. I tuck you in. -Eavan Boland

This Lunar Beauty

This lunar beauty Has no history Is complete and early, If beauty later Bear any feature It had a lover And is another. This like a dream Keeps other time And daytime is The loss of this, For time is inches And the heart's changes Where ghost has haunted Lost and wanted. But this was never A ghost's endeavor Nor finished this, Was ghost at ease, And till it pass Love shall not near The sweetness here Nor sorrow take His endless look. -W.H. Auden

Rich In Vitamin C

This poem is followed by a commentary by John Kinsella Under her brow the snowy wing-case delivers truly the surprise of days which slide under sunlight past loose glass in the door into the reflection of honour spread through the incomplete, the trusted. So darkly the stain skips as a livery of your pause like an apple pip, the baltic loved one who sleeps. Or as syrup in a cloud, down below in the cup, you excuse each folded cry of the finch's wit, this flush scattered over our slant of the day rocked in water, you say this much. A waver of attention at the surface, shews the arch there and the purpose we really cut; an ounce down by the water, which in cross-fire from injustice too large to hold he lets slither from starry fingers noting the herbal jolt of cordite and its echo: is this our screen, on some street we hardly guessed could mark an idea bred to idiocy by the clear sight-lines ahead. You come in by the same door, you carry what cannot be left for its own sweet shimmer of reason, its false blood; the same tint I hear with the pulse it touches and will not melt. Such shading of the rose to its stock tips the bolt from the sky, rising in its effect of what motto we call peace talks. And yes the quiet turn of your page is the day tilting so, faded in the light. -J.H. Prynne

September Song

Undesirable you may have been, untouchable you were not. Not forgotten or passed over at the proper time. As estimated, you died. Things marched, sufficient, to that end. Just so much Zyklon and leather, patented terror, so many routine cries. (I have made an elegy for myself it is true) September fattens on vines. Roses flake from the wall. The smoke of harmless fires drifts to my eyes. This is plenty. This is more than enough. -Geoffrey Hill

Meeting the British

We met the British in the dead of winter. The sky was lavender and the snow lavender-blue. I could hear, far below, the sound of two streams coming together (both were frozen over) and, no less strange, myself calling out in French across that forest- clearing. Neither General Jeffrey Amherst nor Colonel Henry Bouquet could stomach our willow-tobacco. As for the unusual scent when the Colonel shook out his hand- kerchief: C'est la lavande, une fleur mauve comme le ciel. They gave us six fishhooks and two blankets embroidered with smallpox. -Paul Muldoon -muldoon is much like his hedgehog poem--he doesn't easily share his meanings or feelings in his poems -parables to verbal puzzles about the violence of history.

High Windows

When I see a couple of kids And guess he's ****ing her and she's Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm, I know this is paradise Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives— Bonds and gestures pushed to one side Like an outdated combine harvester, And everyone young going down the long slide To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if Anyone looked at me, forty years back, And thought, That'll be the life; No God any more, or sweating in the dark About hell and that, or having to hide What you think of the priest. He And his lot will all go down the long slide Like free bloody birds. And immediately Rather than words comes the thought of high windows: The sun-comprehending glass, And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless. -Philip Larkin

Anseo

When the Master was calling the roll At the primary school in Collegelands, You were meant to call back Anseo And raise your hand As your name occurred. Anseo, meaning here, here and now, All present and correct, Was the first word of Irish I spoke. The last name on the ledger Belonged to Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward And was followed, as often as not, By silence, knowing looks, A nod and a wink, the Master's droll 'And where's our little Ward-of-court?' I remember the first time he came back The Master had sent him out Along the hedges To weigh up for himself and cut A stick with which he would be beaten. After a while, nothing was spoken; He would arrive as a matter of course With an ash-plant, a salley-rod. Or, finally, the hazel-wand He had whittled down to a whip-lash, Its twist of red and yellow lacquers Sanded and polished, And altogether so delicately wrought That he had engraved his initials on it. I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward In a pub just over the Irish border. He was living in the open, In a secret camp On the other side of the mountain. He was fighting for Ireland, Making things happen. And he told me, Joe Ward, Of how he had risen through the ranks To Quartermaster, Commandant: How every morning at parade His volunteers would call back Anseo And raise their hands As their names occurred. -Paul Muldoon

Marked with a D

When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven not unlike those he fuelled all his life, I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven and radiant with the sight of his dead wife, light streaming from his mouth to shape her name, 'not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.' I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame but only literally, which makes me sorry, sorry for his sake there's no Heaven to reach. I get it all from Earth my daily bread but he hungered for release from mortal speech that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead. The baker's man that no one will see rise and England made to feel like some dull oaf is smoke, enough to sting one person's eyes and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf. -Tony Harrison

The Sea is History

Where are your monuments, your battles, martyrs? Where is your tribal memory? Sirs, in that grey vault. The sea. The sea has locked them up. The sea is History. First, there was the heaving oil, heavy as chaos; then, like a light at the end of a tunnel, the lantern of a caravel, and that was Genesis. Then there were the packed cries, the shit, the moaning: Exodus. Bone soldered by coral to bone, mosaics mantled by the benediction of the shark's shadow, that was the Ark of the Covenant. Then came from the plucked wires of sunlight on the sea floor the plangent harps of the Babylonian bondage, as the white cowries clustered like manacles on the drowned women, and those were the ivory bracelets of the Song of Solomon, but the ocean kept turning blank pages looking for History. Then came the men with eyes heavy as anchors who sank without tombs, brigands who barbecued cattle, leaving their charred ribs like palm leaves on the shore, then the foaming, rabid maw of the tidal wave swallowing Port Royal, and that was Jonah, but where is your Renaissance? Sir, it is locked in them sea-sands out there past the reef's moiling shelf, where the men-o'-war floated down; strop on these goggles, I'll guide you there myself. It's all subtle and submarine, through colonnades of coral, past the gothic windows of sea-fans to where the crusty grouper, onyx-eyed, blinks, weighted by its jewels, like a bald queen; and these groined caves with barnacles pitted like stone are our cathedrals, and the furnace before the hurricanes: Gomorrah. Bones ground by windmills into marl and cornmeal, and that was Lamentations— that was just Lamentations, it was not History; then came, like scum on the river's drying lip, the brown reeds of villages mantling and congealing into towns, and at evening, the midges' choirs, and above them, the spires lancing the side of God as His son set, and that was the New Testament. Then came the white sisters clapping to the waves' progress, and that was Emancipation— jubilation, O jubilation— vanishing swiftly as the sea's lace dries in the sun, but that was not History, that was only faith, and then each rock broke into its own nation; then came the synod of flies, then came the secretarial heron, then came the bullfrog bellowing for a vote, fireflies with bright ideas and bats like jetting ambassadors and the mantis, like khaki police, and the furred caterpillars of judges examining each case closely, and then in the dark ears of ferns and in the salt chuckle of rocks with their sea pools, there was the sound like a rumour without any echo of History, really beginning. -Derek Walcott

Why Brownlee Left

Why Brownlee left, and where he went, Is a mystery even now. For if a man should have been content It was him; two acres of barley, One of potatoes, four bullocks, A milker, a slated farmhouse. He was last seen going out to plough On a March morning, bright and early. By noon Brownlee was famous; They had found all abandoned, with The last rig unbroken, his pair of black Horses, like man and wife, Shifting their weight from foot to Foot, and gazing into the future. -Paul Muldoon

irae

dies irae dreadful day when the world shall pass away so the priests & showmen say what gaunt phantoms shall affront me mi lai sharpville wounded knee arthur kissorcallatme to what judgement meekly led shall men gather trumpeted by louis armstrong from the dead life & death shall here by voice less rising from their moist interment hoist ing all their flags before them poniard poison rocket bomb nations of earth shall come and his record page on page forever building he shall scan & give each age sentences of righteous rage if the pious then shall shake me what reply can merchants make me what defenses can they fake? mighty & majestic god head saviour of the broken herd heal me nanny cuffed cudjoe grant me mercy at thy word day of fire dreadful day day for which all sufferers pray grant me patience with they plenty grant me vengeance with they sword -Kamau Brathwaite --based off of a thirteenth century hymn based on Zephaniah 1:14-16 in the bible about the last day of wrath

Spain

esterday all the past. The language of size Spreading to China along the trade-routes; the diffusion Of the counting-frame and the cromlech; Yesterday the shadow-reckoning in the sunny climates. Yesterday the assessment of insurance by cards, The divination of water; yesterday the invention Of cartwheels and clocks, the taming of Horses. Yesterday the bustling world of the navigators. Yesterday the abolition of fairies and giants, the fortress like a motionless eagle eyeing the valley, the chapel built in the forest; Yesterday the carving of angels and alarming gargoyles; The trial of heretics among the columns of stone; Yesterday the theological feuds in the taverns And the miraculous cure at the fountain; Yesterday the Sabbath of witches; but to-day the struggle Yesterday the installation of dynamos and turbines, The construction of railways in the colonial desert; Yesterday the classic lecture On the origin of Mankind. But to-day the struggle. Yesterday the belief in the absolute value of Greek, The fall of the curtain upon the death of a hero; Yesterday the prayer to the sunset And the adoration of madmen. but to-day the struggle. As the poet whispers, startled among the pines, Or where the loose waterfall sings compact, or upright On the crag by the leaning tower: "O my vision. O send me the luck of the sailor." And the investigator peers through his instruments At the inhuman provinces, the virile bacillus Or enormous Jupiter finished: "But the lives of my friends. I inquire. I inquire." And the poor in their fireless lodgings, dropping the sheets Of the evening paper: "Our day is our loss. O show us History the operator, the Organiser. Time the refreshing river." And the nations combine each cry, invoking the life That shapes the individual belly and orders The private nocturnal terror: "Did you not found the city state of the sponge, "Raise the vast military empires of the shark And the tiger, establish the robin's plucky canton? Intervene. O descend as a dove or A furious papa or a mild engineer, but descend." And the life, if it answers at all, replied from the heart And the eyes and the lungs, from the shops and squares of the city "O no, I am not the mover; Not to-day; not to you. To you, I'm the "Yes-man, the bar-companion, the easily-duped; I am whatever you do. I am your vow to be Good, your humorous story. I am your business voice. I am your marriage. "What's your proposal? To build the just city? I will. I agree. Or is it the suicide pact, the romantic Death? Very well, I accept, for I am your choice, your decision. Yes, I am Spain." Many have heard it on remote peninsulas, On sleepy plains, in the aberrant fishermen's islands Or the corrupt heart of the city. Have heard and migrated like gulls or the seeds of a flower. They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel; They floated over the oceans; They walked the passes. All presented their lives. On that arid square, that fragment nipped off from hot Africa, soldered so crudely to inventive Europe; On that tableland scored by rivers, Our thoughts have bodies; the menacing shapes of our fever Are precise and alive. For the fears which made us respond To the medicine ad, and the brochure of winter cruises Have become invading battalions; And our faces, the institute-face, the chain-store, the ruin Are projecting their greed as the firing squad and the bomb. Madrid is the heart. Our moments of tenderness blossom As the ambulance and the sandbag; Our hours of friendship into a people's army. To-morrow, perhaps the future. The research on fatigue And the movements of packers; the gradual exploring of all the Octaves of radiation; To-morrow the enlarging of consciousness by diet and breathing. To-morrow the rediscovery of romantic love, the photographing of ravens; all the fun under Liberty's masterful shadow; To-morrow the hour of the pageant-master and the musician, The beautiful roar of the chorus under the dome; To-morrow the exchanging of tips on the breeding of terriers, The eager election of chairmen By the sudden forest of hands. But to-day the struggle. To-morrow for the young the poets exploding like bombs, The walks by the lake, the weeks of perfect communion; To-morrow the bicycle races Through the suburbs on summer evenings. But to-day the struggle. To-day the deliberate increase in the chances of death, The consious acceptance of guilt in the necessary murder; To-day the expending of powers On the flat ephemeral pamphlet and the boring meeting. To-day the makeshift consolations: the shared cigarette, The cards in the candlelit barn, and the scraping concert, The masculine jokes; to-day the Fumbled and unsatisfactory embrace before hurting. The stars are dead. The animals will not look. We are left alone with our day, and the time is short, and History to the defeated May say Alas but cannot help nor pardon. -W.H. Auden

Medusa

suspicion, a doubt, a jealousy grew in my mind, which turned the hairs on my head to filthy snakes as though my thoughts hissed and spat on my scalp. My bride's breath soured, stank in the grey bags of my lungs. I'm foul mouthed now, foul tongued, yellow fanged. There are bullet tears in my eyes. Are you terrified? Be terrified. It's you I love, perfect man, Greek God, my own; but I know you'll go, betray me, stray from home. So better be for me if you were stone. I glanced at a buzzing bee, a dull grey pebble fell to the ground. I glanced at a singing bird, a handful of dusty gravel spattered down. I looked at a ginger cat, a housebrick shattered a bowl of milk. I looked at a snuffling pig, a boulder rolled in a heap of shit. I stared in the mirror. Love gone bad showed me a Gorgon. I stared at a dragon. Fire spewed from the mouth of a mountain. And here you come with a shield for a heart and a sword for a tongue and your girls, your girls. Wasn't I beautiful Wasn't I fragrant and young? Look at me now. -Carol Ann Duffy