*Poem of the day thread

[Donna Ferentes]

A couple of poems by Wendy Cope on the theme of TS Eliot:

1. A Nursery Rhyme
(as if it might have been written byT.S. Eliot)

Because time will not run backwards
Because time
Because time will not run
Hickory dickory

In the last minute of the first hour
I saw the mouse ascend the ancient timepiece,
Claws whispering like wind in dry hyacinths.

One o'clock,
The street lamp said,
'Remark the mouse that races toward the carpet.'

And the unstilled wheel still turning
Hickory dickory
Hickory dickory
dock

2. Waste Land Limericks

I.
In April one seldom feels cheerful;
Dry stones, sun and dust make me fearful;
Clairvoyants distress me,
Commuters depress me--
Met Stetson and gave him an earful.

II.
She sat on a mighty fine chair,
Sparks flew as she tidied her hair;
She asks many questions,
I make few suggestions--
Bad as Albert and Lil--what a pair!

III.
The Thames runs, bones rattle, rats creep;
Tiresias fancies a peep--
A typist is laid,
A record is played--
Wei la la. After this it gets deep.

IV.
A Phoenician called Phlebas forgot
About birds and his business--the lot.
Which is no surprise,
Since he met his demise
And was left in the ocean to rot.

V.
No water. Dry rocks and dry throats.
Then thunder, a shower of quotes!
From The Sanskrit to Dante.
Da. Damyata. Shantih.
I hope you'll make sense of the notes.

 

[dwen]

Field of vision- Seamus Heaney

I remember this woman who sat for years
In a wheelchair, looking straight ahead
Out the window at sycamore trees unleafing
And leafing at the far end of the lane.
Straight out past the TV in the corner,
The stunted, agitated hawthorn bush,
The same small calves with their backs to wind and rain,
The same acre of ragwort, the same mountain.

She was steadfast as the big window itself.
Her brow was clear as the chrome bits on the chair.
She never lamented once and she never
Carried a spare ounce of emotional weight.

Face to face with her was an education
Of the sort you got across a well-braced gate--
One of those lean, clean, iron, roadside ones
Between two whitewashed pillars,where you could see

Deeper into the country than you expected
And discovered that the field behind the hedge
Grew more distinctly strange as you kept standing
Focused and drawn in by what barred the way.

 

[butchersapron]

A topical one - it's supposed to be broken up like that.


Leaflet
If you've noticed that people have been acting
_______kind of nervous _____think
of whole nations
they are absolutely pathological
_______one day we were selling them
so much killing hardware
_______their governmental teeth
were eroding with the metallic grind
_______but their appetites increased
along with our economic delight when
_______we filled their commissaries
with our indigestible grain as well
_______as other stuff they'd once
grown themselves______ suddenly (it seemed
_______to them) we stopped and declared
them enemies (for what we called
_______geographically defensible
reasons) just when they considered us
_______a safe source of appetite ful-
filling ordinance ______without
_______notice ______even
everyday fighter planes
were withheld ______naturally they responded
_______with infantile rage and alarming
violence______ these countries
_______have to be put away for their
own
historic health ______put out of their
_______inflammable misery ______embraced
properly by our embargoes ______sanctions
etc.
_______it's a pity they act so crazy
______look
how nervous you get when the weather changes

Grace Paley

 

[chrissie]

Yeah! Back on the 'real' thread!

Should we copy the poems from the temporary thread onto here? What do you think?

And a VERY topical poem. Bush is 'losing patience' we gather! Moron.

 

[RubyToogood]

Chrissie, yes I do think people should copy their poems over!

 

[wiskey]

my two were -

17 Jan 03

By Lewis Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland.


"You are old, Father William," the young man said,
"And your hair has become very white;
And yet you incessantly stand on your head--
Do you think, at your age, it is right?"


"In my youth," Father William replied to his son,
"I feared it might injure the brain;
But, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none,
Why, I do it again and again."


"You are old," said the youth, "as I mentioned before,
And have grown most uncommonly fat;
Yet you turned a back-somersault at the door==
Pray, what is the reason for that?"


"In my youth," said the sage, as he shook his grey locks,
"I kept all my limbs very supple
By the use of this ointment--one shilling the box--
Allow me to sell you a couple"


"You are old," said the youth, "and your jaws are too weak
For anything tougher than suet;
Yet you finished the goose, with the bones and the beak--
Pray, how did you manage to do it?"


"In my youth," said his father, "I took to the law,"
And argued each case with my wife;
And the muscular strenth, which it gave to my jaw
Has lasted the rest of my life."


"You are old," said the youth, "one would hardly suppose
That your eye was as steady as ever;
Yet you balanced an eel on the end of your nose--
What made you so awfully clever?"


"I have answered three questions, and that is enough,"
Said his father. "Don't give yourself airs;
Do you think I can listen all day to such stuff?
Be off, or I'll kick you down-stairs.

 

[wiskey]

21 Jan 03

Lines and Squares


Whenever I walk in a London street,
I'm ever so careful to watch my feet;
And I keep in the squares,
And the masses of bears,
Who wait at the corners all ready to eat
The sillies who tread on the lines of the street
Go back to their lairs,
And I say to them, "Bears,
Just look how I'm walking in all the squares!"

And the little bears growl to each other, "He's mine,
As soon as he's silly and steps on a line."
And some of the bigger bears try to pretend
That they came round the corner to look for a friend;
And they try to pretend that nobody cares
Whether you walk on the lines or squares.
But only the sillies believe their talk;
It's ever so portant how you walk.
And it's ever so jolly to call out, "Bears,
Just watch me walking in all the squares!"

Alan Alexander Milne 1882-1956

 

[Yossarian]

my two were...16/01/03

Bluebird
Charles Bukowski

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say, stay in there, I'm not going
to let anybody see
you.

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I pur whiskey on him and inhale
cigarette smoke
and the whores and the bartenders
and the grocery clerks
never know that
he's
in there.


there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too tough for him,
I say,
stay down, do you want to mess
me up?
you want to screw up the
works?
you want to blow my book sales in
Europe?

there's a bluebird in my heart that
wants to get out
but I'm too clever, I only let him out
at night sometimes
when everybody's asleep.
I say, I know that you're there,
so don't be
sad.
then I put him back,
but he's singing a little
in there, I haven't quite let him
die
and we sleep together like
that
with our
secret pact
and it's nice enough to
make a man
weep, but I don't
weep, do
you?

 

[Yossarian]

20/01/03

(excellent poem by Harold Pinter in today's Guardian, coincidentally...)

Don't Look
Harold Pinter

Don't look.
The world's about to break.

Don't look.
The world's about to chuck out all its light
and stuff us in the chokepit of its dark,
That black and fat suffocated place
Where we will kill or die or dance or weep
Or scream or whine or squeak like mice
To renegotiate our starting price.

 

[RubyToogood]

I quite liked the incomplete version of that Yoss, as though the world had ended before he managed to finish writing it... wondered whether it was meant to be like that at first .

 

[Yossarian]

heh heh, Ruby, damn ezboards...

Here's that poem I mentioned above :

God Bless America
Harold Pinter

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.

The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.

The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

 

[wiskey]

The Owl and the Pussycat

The Owl and the Pussy-Cat went to sea
In a beautiful pea-green boat,
They took some honey, and plenty of money
Wrapped up in a five-pound note.
The Owl looked up to the stars above,
And sang to a small guitar,
"O lovely Pussy, O Pussy, my love,
What a beautiful Pussy you are,
You are,
You are!
What a beautiful Pussy you are!"

Pussy said to the Owl, "You elegant fowl!
How charmingly sweet you sing!
O let us be married! too long we have tarried:
But what shall we do for a ring?"
They sailed away, for a year and a day,
To the land where the Bong-tree grows
And there in a wood a Piggy-wig stood
With a ring at the end of his nose,
His nose,
His nose,
With a ring at the end of his nose.

"Dear Pig, are you willing to sell for one shilling
Your ring?" Said the Piggy, "I will."
So they took it away, and were married next day
By the Turkey who lives on the hill.
They dined on mince, and slices of quince,
Which they ate with a runcible spoon;
And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,
They danced by the light of the moon,
The moon,
The moon,
They danced by the light of the moon.

Edward Lear

 

[isvicthere?]

"good at football" by joe cairo

good at football

my mate Frank had a trial for Charlton
he was good on the ball
and had two quick feet

my mate Jack had a trial for the Arsenal
he was strong in the air
and he tackled like a tank

my two mates
were good at football

me? i had a trial at the Elephant and Castle
i got a three year suspended sentence
and a fuckin' big fine

i was never any good at football
i was also a bad car thief

by Joe Cairo

 

[child apollo]

Two Sailors on the Beach - F. Garcia Lorca

1.
He wears in his heart
a fish from the China Sea.

At times one sees it crossing,
diminished, in his eyes.

Being seaman he forgets
bars and oranges.

He looks at the water.



2.
He had a soapy tongue.
He washed his words and was still.

Level world, hilly sea,
a hundred stars and his ship.

He saw the balconies of the Pope
and the golden breasts of Cuban girls.

He looks at the water.
---------------------------------------------------

I love this one. So brief & serene.

(Hope I'm not posting a repeat.)

 

[Loki]

Ozymandias - Shelly

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

 

[chrissie]

Mmn. What a great and powerful poem. Don't you just find yourself standing with legs akimbo and arms raised, reciting the words of power?

I cannot read this without becoming Ozymandias at his most majestic. Yet to shrink to nothing because the sands of time (literally and metaphorically) have ground one down....

Ah! The arrogance of those in power, who think they will last beyond themselves.

Rather a comforting thought to think they will come to no more than the least of us!

 

[chegrimandi]

Initial Illumination

Tony Harrison - written at the time of first Gulf War, published in the Guardian.


Farne cormorants with catches in their beaks
shower fishscale confetti on the shining sea
The first bright weather here for many weeks
for my Sunday G-Day train bound for Dundee,
off to St Andrew's to record a reading,
doubtful, in these dark days, what poems can do,
and watching the mists round Lindisfarne receding
my doubt extends to Dark Age Good Book too.
Eadfrith the Saxon scribe/illuminator
incorporated cormorants I'm seeing fly
round the same island thirteen centuries later
into the In principio's intial I.
Billfrith's begemmed and jewelled boards got looted
the sort of soldiery that's still recruited
to do today's dictators' dirty work,
but the initials in St John and in St Mark
graced with local cormorants in ages,
we of a darker still keep calling Dark,
survive in those illuminated pages.
The word of God so beautifully scripted
by Eadfrith and Billfrith the anchorite
Pentagon conners have once again conscripted
to gloss the cross on the precision sight.
Candlepower, steady hand, gold leaf, a brush
were all that Eadfrith had to beautify
the word of God much bandied by George Bush
whose word illuminated midnight sky
and confused the Baghdad cock who was betrayed
by bombs into believing day was dawning
and crowed his heart out at the deadly raid
and didn't live to greet the proper morning.
Now with nonday headlights in Kuwait
and the burial of the blackened in Baghdad
let them remember, all those who celebrate,
that their good news is someone else's bad
or the light will never dawn on poor Mankind.
Is it open-armed at all that victory V,
that insular initial intertwined
with slack-necked cormorants from black laquered sea,
with trumpets bulled and bellicose and blowing
for what men claim as victories in their wars,
with the fire-hailing cock and all those crowing
who don't yet smell the dunghill at their claws?

 

[chrissie]

I meant to copy poems from the ezboard

Deleted because I put up the wrong poems, and can't find the right ones now. Doh!

 

[jms]

With it being holocaust memorial day, I though Id post up something that isnt really related to it

Wait for me, and I'll return,
Only wait very hard.



Wait when you are filled with sorrow,
As you watch the yellow rain.
Wait when the winds sweep the snowdrifts,
Wait in the sweltering heat.
Wait when others have stopped waiting,
Forgetting their yesterdays.



Wait even when from afar no letters come to you.
Wait even when others are tired of waiting.
Wait event when my mother and son think I am no more.
And when friends sit around the fire drinking to my memory,
Wait, and do not hurry to drink to my memory, too.



Wait, for I'll return,
Defying every death.
And let those who do not wait say that I was lucky.
They will never understand that in the midst of death,
You, with your waiting, saved me.



Only you and I will know how I survived.
Because you waited, as no one else did.


Russian Soldiers Poem

 

[chrissie]

e. e. cummings - hate blows a bubble of despair into

hate blows a bubble of despair into
hugeness world system universe and bang
-fear buries a tomorrow under woe
and up comes yesterday most green and young

pleasure and pain are merely surfaces
(one itself showing,itself hiding one)
life's only and true value neither is
love makes the little thickness of the coin

comes here a man would have from madame death
nevertheless now and without winter spring?
she'll spin that spirit her own fingers with
and give him nothing (if he should not sing)

how much more than enough for both of us
darling. And if i sing you are my voice,

 

[Donna Ferentes]

Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken

Mein Hut, der hat drei Ecken,
Drei Ecken hat mein Hut.
Und hätt' er nicht drei Ecken,
So wär's auch nicht mein Hut.

My hat, it has three corners,
Three corners has my hat,
And had it not three corners,
It would not be my hat.

It's not much, but it's the only German I know. Apart from elfmeter.

 

[chrissie]

.

 

[Ace]

"Ballade des Pendus (L'Epitaphe Villon)"

Freres humains qui après nous vivez
N'ayez les cuers contre nous endurcis
Cas se pitié de nous povres avez
Dieu en aura plus tost de vous mercis.
Vous nous voiez cy attachez cinq, six.
Quant de la chair que trop avons nourrie,
Elle est pieça devorée et pourrie,
Et nous, les os, devenons cendre et pouldre.
De nostre mal personne ne s'en rie
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

Se freres vous clamons, pas n'en devez
Avoir desdaing, quoy que fusmes occis
Par justice. Toutesfois, vous sçavez
Qua tous hommes n'ont pas bon sens rassis.
Excusez nous, puis que sommes transsis,
Envers le fils de la Vierge Marie
Que sa grace ne soit pour nous tarie
Nous sommes mors; ame ne nous harie
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

La pluye nous a debuez et lavez
Et le soleil dessechiez et noircis.
Pies, corbeaulx, nous ont les yeux cavez
Et arrachié la barbe et les sourcis.
Jamais nul temps nous ne sommes assis;
Puis ça, puis la, comme le vent varie
A son plaisir sans cesser nous charie,
Plus becquetez d'oiseaulx que dez a couldre.
Ne soiez donc de nostre confrarie
Mis priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

Prince Jesus qui sur tous a maistrie
Garde qu'Enfer n'ait de nous seigneurie.
A luy n'ayons que faire ne que souldre.
Hommes, icy n'a point de mocquerie;
Mais priez Dieu que tous nous vueille absouldre.

-- Francois Villon

 

[apollo & co.]

e.e. cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite new a thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones,and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like,slowly stroking the,shocking fuzz
of your electric fur,and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh....and eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill

of under me you quite so new.

 

[jerseymonkey]

Five Ways To Kill A Man
Edwin Brock

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man.
You can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince, and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no-one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

 

[isvicthere?]

the sick rose

o rose thou art sick
the invisible worm
which flies in the night
in the howling storm
has found out thy bed
of crimson joy
and his dark secret love
doth thy life destroy

by William Blake

 

[vanityvehicle]

September 1, 1939
W. H. Auden


------------------------------------------------------------------------



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 deaf,
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.

Defenceless 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.

 

[Donna Ferentes]

Remembering that poem on a certain day about seventeen months ago (and I was far from the only one) had the additional virtue of inducing me to read Thucydides.

 

[vanityvehicle]

Yup. Thought it might be a bit topical.

 

[Yossarian]

Last Words
Philip Levine

If the shoe fell from the other foot
who would hear? If the door
opened onto a pure darkness
and it was no dream? If your life
ended the way a book ends
with half a blank page and the survivors
gone off to Africa or madness?
If my life ended in late spring
of 1964 while I walked alone
back down the mountain road?
I sing an old song to myself. I study
the way the snow remains, gray
and damp, in the deep shadows of the firs.
I wonder if the bike is safe hidden
just off the highway. Up ahead
the road, black and winding, falls
away, and there is the valley where
I lived half of my life, spectral
and calm. I sigh with gratitude,
and then I feel an odd pain rising
through the back of my head,
and my eyes go dark. I bend forward
and place my palms on something rough,
the black asphalt or a field of stubble,
and the movement is that of the penitent
just before he stands to his full height
with the knowledge of his enormity.
For that moment which will survive
the burning of all the small pockets
of fat and oil that are the soul,
I am the soul stretching into
the furthest reaches of my fingers
and beyond, glowing like ten candles
in the vault of night for anyone
who could see, even though it is
12:40 in the afternoon and I
have passed from darkness into sunlight
so fierce the sweat streams down
into my eyes. I did not rise.
A wind or a stray animal or a group
of kids dragged me to the side
of the road and turned me over
so that my open eyes could flood heaven.
My clothes went skittering down
the road without me, ballooning
out into any shape, giddy
with release. My coins, my rings,
the keys to my house shattered
like ice and fell into the mountain
thorns and grasses, little bright points
that make you think there is magic
in everything you see. No, it can't
be, you say, for someone is speaking
calmly to you in a voice you know.
Someone alive and confident has put
each of these words down exactly
as he wants them on the page.
You have lived through years
of denial, of public lies, of death
falling like snow on any head
it chooses. You're not a child.
You know the real thing. I am
here, as I always was, faithful
to a need to speak even when all
you hear is a light current of air
tickling your ear. Perhaps.
But what if that dried bundle
of leaves and dirt were not dirt
and leaves but the spent wafer
of a desire to be human? Stop the car,
turn off the engine, and stand
in the silence above your life. See
how the grass mirrors fire, how
a wind rides up the hillside
steadily toward you until it surges
into your ears like breath coming
and going, released from its bondage
to blood or speech and denying nothing.