An Invitation To Join In

In sharing this Poetry page with friends and well-wishers my hope is to stimulate a dialogue about poetry.

I invite you to submit, via the Contact page, a favourite published poem which you have read so that we can share it here. It would be greatly appreciated if you'd add a few words on what it is you like about the poem. 

Art History

They made the grey stone
Blossom, setting it on a branch
Of the mind; airy cathedrals
Grew, trembling at the tip
Of their breathing; delicate palaces
Hung motionless in the gold,
Unbelievable sunrise.  They praised
With rapt forms such as the blind hand
Dreamed, journeying to its sad
Nuptials.  We come too late
On the scene, pelted with the stone
Flowers' bitter confetti.

R.S. Thomas
(from ' Collected Poems 1945-1990, J.M. Dent, 1993)

Poem posted on Wednesday 30th December 2020 (originally posted on 7th July 2018).

To My Mother

Most near, most dear, most loved and most far,
Under the window where I often found her
Sitting as huge as Asia, seismic with laughter,
Gin and chicken helpless in her Irish hand,
Irresistible as Rabelais, most tender for
The lame dogs and hurt birds that surround her, -
She is a procession no one can follow after
But be like a little dog following a brass band.

She will not glance up at the bomber, or condescend
To drop her gin and scuttle to a cellar,
But lean on the mahogany table like a mountain
Whom only faith can move, and so I send
O all my faith, and all my love to tell her
That she will move from mourning into morning.

George Barker
(1913 - 1991)

Poem posted on Saturday 26th December 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 4th July 2018).

On the Grasshopper and Cricket

The poetry of earth is never dead:
When all the birds are faint with the hot sun,
And hide in cooling trees, a voice will run
From hedge to hedge about the new-mown mead;
That is the Grasshopper's - he takes the lead
In summer luxury, - he has never done
With his delights; for when tired out with fun
He rests at ease beneath some pleasant weed.
The poetry of earth is ceasing never:
On a lone winter evening, when the frost
Has wrought a silence, from the stove there shrills
The Cricket's song, in warmth increasing ever,
And seems to one in drowsiness half lost,
The Grasshopper's among some grassy hills.

John Keats
(1795 - 1821)

Poem posted on Thursday 24th December 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 30th June 2018).

Suggesting this work by American poet Raymond Carver, LJ Watson says:-

"... I wanted to send over one of my favourite poems. It's a Raymond Carver and it made me think of the Summer Solstice and celebrating the longest day of the year. Also I love how Carver is so succinct with his words yet still conveys so much meaning and such a vivid story.  I hope you like it."

Suppose I Say Summer

Suppose I say summer,
write the word "hummingbird",
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill to the box.
When you open my letter you will recall those days and how much, just how
much, I love you.

Raymond Carver

I'm sure our readers will appreciate this poem, LJ, and I hope be moved to send us the text of one of their own favourite published poems. Maurice.

Poem posted on Saturday 19th December 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 27th June 2018).

Jack Sparling writes:-

"I thought I'd share a poem that stuck with me when I read it at school, I like the themes of growing up and independence using Batman's sidekick Robin metaphorically."

Kid

Batman, big shot, when you gave the order
to grow up, then let me loose to wander
leeward, freely through the wild blue yonder
as you liked to say, or ditched me, rather,
in the gutter ... well, I turned the corner.
Now I've scotched that 'he was like a father
to me' rumour, sacked it, blown the cover
on that 'he was like an elder brother'
story, let the cat out on that caper
with the married woman, how you took her
downtown on expenses in the motor.
Holy robin-redbreast-nest-egg-shocker!
Holy roll-me-over-in the-clover,
I'm not playing ball boy any longer
Batman, now I've doffed that off-the-shoulder
Sherwood-Forest-green and scarlet number
for a pair of jeans and crew-neck jumper;
now I'm taller, harder, stronger, older.
Batman, it makes a marvellous picture:
you without a shadow, stewing over
chicken giblets in the pressure cooker,
next to nothing in the walk-in larder,
punching the palm of your hand all winter,
you baby, now I'm the real boy wonder.

Simon Armitage

Thank you for sharing this favourite with us, Jack.

Poem posted on Wednesday 16th December (originally posted on 23rd June 2018).

Welcome to Wales

Come to Wales
To be buried: the undertaker
Will arrange it for you.  We have
The sites and a long line
Of clients going back
To the first milkman who watered
His honour.  How they endow
Our country with their polished
Memorials!  No one lives
In our villages, but they dream
Of returning from the rigours
Of the pound's climate.  Why not
Try it?  We can always raise
Some mourners, and the amens
Are ready.  This is what
Chapels are for; their varnish
Wears well and will go
With most coffins.  Let us
Quote you; our terms
Are the lowest, and we offer,
Dirt cheap, a place where
It is lovely to lie.

R.S.Thomas
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990', J.M. Dent, 1993)

Poem posted on Saturday 12th December 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 20th June 2018).

Slate

Drawn from his fold on the mean mountain
the brittle man of Wales shuffles blank dominoes
and builds, on the shards of his father's dreams,
this meaner mountain, where grieving winds

polish the grim sarcophagus at Blaenau Ffestiniog.
We watch - but from a decent distance - the dismembering
of another's way of life, hewn, sawn, split and split again
to a wafer thin, then leaving the man spitting the dust

of his own drear day, well entertained we drive away
past trim rhododendron mountains, to tea and toast
on a silver tray with damask cloth at Betws-y-Coed,
and ladies with trim white hair and brown moustaches.

Maurice Rutherford
(from 'Slipping The Tugs')

Poem posted on Wednesday 9th December 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 16th June 2018).

At Blaenwern

Sunday started with a buzzard trepanning
the treetops across the valley's head.
A wren sharpened its quick knife
on the bright steel of day.
In clear tones a chaffinch ministered matins
without a trace of dialect, and magpies
debated the case for black and white.

The sunlit afternoon was witnessed,
in Jehovah's name, by two young men,
one black, one white; black spoke the word
while white held the watchtower.
A rabbit plundered the private plot
and we forgave its trespass,
on Sunday at Blaenwern.

Maurice Rutherford
(from 'Slipping The Tugs')

Poem posted on Saturday 5th December 2020 (originally posted on 13th June 2018).

Approaches

We began by being very close.
Moving nearer I found
he was further off, presence
being replaced by shadow;

the nearer the light, the larger
the shadow.  Imagine the torment
of the discovery that it was growing
small.  Is there a leak somewhere

in the mind that would comprehend
him?  Not even to be able to say,
pointing: Here Godhead was spilled.
I had a belief once that even

a human being left his stain
in places where he had occurred.
Now it is all clinical light
pouring into the interstices

where mystery could linger
questioning credentials of the divine
fossil, sterilising our thought
for its launching into its own outer space.

R.S. Thomas
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990, J.M. Dent, 1993.  For biog details see 'They' posted Sat. 28.10.17)

Poem posted on Saturday 28th November 2020 (originally posted on 9th June 2018).

A Worm fed on the Heart of Corinth

A worm fed on the heart of Corinth,
Babylon and Rome:
Not Paris raped tall Helen,
But this incestuous worm,
Who lured her vivid beauty
To this amorphous sleep.
England! famous as Helen
Is thy betrothal sung
To him the shadowless,
More amorous than Solomon.

Isaac Rosenberg
1890 - 1918

Note:
For biographical detail scroll back to 'Returning, We hear the Larks', posted Wed 1st November 2017.

Poem posted on Wednesday 25th November 2020 (originally posted on 6th June 2018).

On the Other Side of the Door

On the other side of the door
I can be a different me,
As smart and as brave and as funny or strong
As a person could want to be.
There's nothing too hard for me to do,
There's no place I can't explore
Because everything can happen
On the other side of the door.

On the other side of the door
I don't have to go alone.
If you come, too, we can sail tall ships
And fly where the wind has flown.
And wherever we go, it is almost sure
We'll find what we were looking for
Because everything can happen
On the other side of the door.

Jeff Moss

Note:
Jeffrey Arnold Moss (1942 - 1998) was an American composer, lyricist and playwright, best known as the writer of the TV programme 'Sesame Street'.

Poem posted on Saturday 21st November 2020 (originally posted on 2nd June 2018).

At the Railway Station, Upway

   'There is not much I can do,
   For I have no money that's quite my own!'
   Spoke the pitying child -
A little boy with a violin
At the station before the train came in, -
But I can play my fiddle to you,
And a nice one 'tis, and good in tone!'

   The man in the handcuffs smiled;
The constable looked, and he smiled, too,
   As the fiddle began to twang;
And the man in the handcuffs suddenly sang
      With grimful glee:
     'This life so free
     Is the thing for me!'
And the constable smiled, and said no word,
As if unconscious of what he heard;
And so they went on till the train came in -
The convict, and boy with the violin.

Thomas Hardy

Poem posted on Wednesday 18th November 2020 (originally posted on 30th May 2018).

Einstein's Brain

I heard that they've got Einstein's brain
just sitting in a jar.
I don't know where they keep it,
but I hope it isn't far.

I need to go and borrow it
to help me with this test.
I've answered twenty questions
but on every one I guessed.

If someone asks you where I've gone,
then kindly please explain
I'll be right back; I've just gone out
to look for Einstein's brain.

Kenn Nesbitt
American Children's Poet Laureate, 2013.

Poem posted on Saturday 14th November 2020 (originally posted on 26th May 2018).

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod.  All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue, deaf even to the hoots
Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick boys!- An ecstasy of fumbling
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.-
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under the green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come coughing from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,-
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen
(1893 - 1918)

Notes:
Some poems fit comfortably into seasonal slots: today's poem, kindly shared with us by Charlotte Jenkins, doesn't fit comfortably into any time slot; nor should it.

Wilfred Edward Slater Owen was born in Oswestry, Shropshire.  From the age of nineteen he became immersed in poetry; his sole ambition, to be a poet. The 'Great War' made him a soldier poet. Sadly, he was killed by a bullet on 4th November 1918, just a week before the armistice.  Arguably the greatest of our WW1 poets, he is one of sixteen commemorated on a stone in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, on which is carved, in Owen's own words, 'My subject is war, and the pity of war. The Poetry is in the pity'.

Poem posted on Wednesday 11th November 2020 (originally posted on 23rd May 2018).

Solo in Three Parts

Indian
boy is brown and blessed
with a wheelchair, arms and hands
for manoeuvring it, and knees
to grip the cello. When the wheelchair stops
his hands tune the cello to the wind
and the strings are his voice.

Ugandan
boy is black and blessed
with ostrich legs; his arms and hands
ebony back-scratchers, just one
is strong enough to hold the begging bowl
that plays a hollow tune
and his belly is the echo.

Vietnamese
boy is blond and blessed
with a father in Wisconsin
who fought his war and went.
This child of dust holds a paper cornet
of peanuts for sale at Ho Chi Minh,
and listens for the music in the wind.

Maurice Rutherford
(from 'Slipping The Tugs')

Note:
Written after seeing three separate, though not disparate, harrowing items on TV world news, in the very early 1980s. 

Poem posted on Saturday 7th November 2020 (originally posted on 19th May 2018).

Time
(i.m. Alice Maud Gray, 1890 - 1970)

Often she calls us back to her
time, ten shillings a week and all
the fresh air of a sooty Hull street,
guarding herself against neighbours,
two bricks in her half-starved grate;
time fear changed its name
from Zeppelin to Relief Office,
her sewing machine indispensable
luxury, gone for a child's new shoes;
Time of her once higher-standing
headstrong on an unglued wooden chair
stippling the stairway walls two-tone
distemper, old gold going modern;
time humming-happy crotcheting
the milk-white woollen poodle
to dress her bottle of cologne
with love she handed down;
time and time again a trim size ten,
vulnerable, tough as a hill-bred cob,
sniffing in rain and wind,
tongue sharp as her brain;
time with her at our table
where again today she sits in
on talk from Rawcliffe Grove
to East Mount Avenue; how
we'd walk her to her bus for home,
the mystery of the dark
Italian eyes her secret
kept beyond our lost goodbyes.

Maurice Rutherford
(from 'And Saturday Is Christmas', Shoestring Press, 2011)

Poem posted on Wednesday 4th October 2020 (originally posted on 16th May 2018).

Letter to N.Y.

In your letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays, and after the plays
what other pleasures are you pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

Wheat, not oats, dear.  I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

Elizabeth Bishop

Note:
Elizabeth Bishop was born on 8th February 1911 in Worcester, Massachusetts, USA, and when she was only eight months old her father died.  Five years later her mother, having become mentally ill, was institutionalised to live the rest of her life in an asylum.  Elizabeth was to endure an unsettled childhood and youth being shuttled from pillar to post to live with one faction of the family after another, some in straitened circumstances, others more well-to-do.  Against this background it is hardly surprising that there was never a close relationship between mother and daughter.  As an adult, Elizabeth settled in Boston, Mass., where she died on 6th October 1979, a successful poet and Pulizer Prize winner.
'Letter to N.Y.' is written as a letter about a letter which doesn't yet exist other than in the fretful imaginings of the poet.  As such, its composition is, in the best sense of the word, clever.  An admirable achievement! 

Poem posted on Saturday 31st October 2020 (originally posted on 12th May 2018).

Bee!  I'm expecting you!

Bee! I'm expecting you!
Was saying yesterday
To somebody you know
That you were due -

The Frogs got Home last Week -
Are settled and at work -
Birds, mostly black -
The Clover warm and thick -

You'll get my letter by
The seventeenth; Reply
Or better, be with me -
Yours, Fly.

Emily Dickinson

Note:
Emily Elizabeth Dickinson was born on 10th December 1830 at the family home in Amherst, Massachusetts, USA.  She never married, and was destined to live a reclusive life writing her own brand of poetry which publishers felt obliged to tweak in line with with convention.  She grew to favour dressing in white, and when she died on 15th May 1886, she was buried in a white coffin in the West Cemetery, Triangle Street, Amherst.  Dickinson's poetry gained in popularity after her death, and is still widely quoted today.

Poem posted on Wednesday 28th October 2020 (originally posted on 9th May 2018).

Seaside Golf [2]

How low it flew, how left it flew,
It hit the dry-stone wall
And plunging, disappeared from view
A shining brand new ball -
I'd hit the damned thing on the head,
It made me wish that I were dead.

And up the fairway, steep and long,
I mourned my gloomy plight;
I played an iron sure and strong,
A fraction to the right,
I knew that when I reached my ball
I'd find it underneath the wall.

And so I did. I chipped it low
And thinned it past the pin
And to and fro, and to and fro
I tried to get it in;
Until, intoning oaths obscene
I holed it out in seventeen.

Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
They really get me down;
In-coming tides, Atlantic waves
I wish that I could drown
And Sloane Street voices in the air
And black retrievers everywhere.

Sir Robin Butler

Poem posted on Saturday 24th October 2020 (originally posted on 5th May 2018).

Seaside Golf

How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It cleared the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker's back -
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.

And down the fairway, far along
It glowed a lonely white;
I played an iron sure and strong
And clipp'd it out of sight,
And spite of grassy banks between
I knew I'd find it on the green.

And so I did. It lay content
two paces from the pin;
A steady putt and then it went
Oh, most securely in.
The very turf rejoiced to see
That quite unprecedented three.

Ah! Seaweed smells from sandy caves
And thyme and mist in whiffs,
In-coming tide, Atlantic waves
Slapping the sunny cliffs,
Lark song and sea sounds on the air
And splendour, splendour everywhere.

Sir John Betjeman

Note: This poem was suggested by my very good friend John (Tiger) Alderton, as also is the riposte due to follow on Saturday.

Poem posted on Wednesday 21st October 2030 (originally posted on 2nd May 2018).

The Hippopotamus's Birthday

He has opened all his parcels
but the biggest and the last.
His hopes are at their highest
And his heart is beating fast
O happy hippopotamus
What lovely gift is there?
He cuts the string. The world stands still.
A pair of boots appear!

O little hippopotamus,
The sorrows of the small!
He dropped two tears to mingle
With the flowing Senegal;
And the 'Thank you' that he uttered
Was the saddest ever heard
In the Senegambian jungle
From the mouth of beast or bird.

E.V. Rieu

Note: E.V. Rieu was celebrated for his translation of Homer's classic 'The Odyssey', but here, in a lighter moment, he shares his own brand of humour.

Poem posted on Saturday 17th October 2020 (originally posted on 28th April 2018).

A Peasant

Evans?  Yes, many a time
I came down his bare flight
Of stairs into the gaunt kitchen
With its wood fire, where crickets sang
Accompaniment to the black kettle's
Whine, and so into the cold
Dark to smother in the thick tide
Of night that drifted about the walls
Of his stark farm on the hill ridge.

It was not the dark filling my eyes
And mouth appalled me; not even the drip
Of rain like blood from the one tree
Weather-tortured.  It was the dark
Silting the veins of that sick man
I left stranded on the vast
And lonely shore of his bleak bed.

R.S.Thomas
(from 'Poetry For Supper', 1958)

Note: for biog detail scroll to 'They', Sat 28 Oct 2017.

Poem posted on Wednesday 14th October 2020 (originally posted on 25th April 2018).

The Skye Boat Song

Speed, bonny boat, like a bird on the wing
Onward, the sailors cry!
Carry the lad that's born to be king
Over the sea to Skye.

Loud the winds cry, loud the waves roar,
Thunderclaps rend the air.
Baffled our foes stand by the shore.
Follow they will not dare.

Many's the lad fought on that day
well the claymore could wield,
When the night came silently lay
Dead on Culloden's field.

Burned are our homes, exile and death
Scatter the loyal men.
Yet ere the sword cool in the sheath
Scotland will rise again!

Sir Harold Boulton
(from 'A Poem for Every Night of the Year', Macmillan Children's Books, 2016)

Note:
The Battle of Culloden was fought on 16th April 1746 between a British Loyalist army under command of the Duke of Cumberland and a Scottish force commanded by Charles Edward Stuart (Bonnie Prince Charlie).  Stuart was the 'young pretender' to the British crown, which had been seized from his grandfather King James II in the 'Glorious Revolution' of 1688.  'The Skye Boat Song' paints a romantic image of Charles's flight after his defeat.

Poem posted on Saturday 10th October 2020 (originally posted on 21st April 2018).

The Hurt Boy and the Birds

The hurt boy talked to the birds
and fed them the crumbs of his heart.

It was not easy to find the words
for secrets he held underneath his skin.
The hurt boy spoke of a bully's fist
that made his face a bruised moon -
his spectacles stamped to ruin.

It was not easy to find the words
for things that nightly hissed
as if his pillow was a hide-away for creepy-crawlies -
the note sent to the girl he fancied
held high in mockery.

But the boy talked to the birds
and their feathers gave him welcome -

Their wings taught him new ways to become.

John Agard
Afro-Guayanese poet and playwright, now living in Britain.
Holder of the Queen'd Gold Medal for Poetry.

Poem posted on Wednesday 7th October 2020 (originally posted on 18th April 2018).

Awakening

The Buddha sat silently
under a tree.
He sat and he waited
determinedly.

He sat like a statue
and scarcely stirred.
Out of his lips
came never a word.

He sat through the hours
of an Orient night,
and, just at the edges
of opening light,

up in the heaven,
so sharp and so far, 
glimmered the spark
of a wakening star.

Sitting in stillness,
the sight that he saw
pierced him through
to the innermost core.

And all he could say
in his moment of bliss
was simply and purely
'What is this?'.

Tony Mitton
(from 'A Poem for Every Night of the Year', Macmillan Children's Books, 2016).

Note:
Tony Mitton's introduction to this poem explains, 'The story has been passed down that the Buddha (Saddhartha Gautama) achieved a sudden and powerful experience of understanding after many years of study and practice.  Exhausted by the efforts he had made to get to grips with the meaning of his life, he gave up and sat down under the Bodhi tree, vowing not to get up until some answer presented itself to him.  After sitting all night in meditation he caught sight of the morning star rising.  The clarity and power of the moment that followed is sometimes called his Enlightenment (or Awakening).  In spite of his already great learning and wisdom, all he could say in response to the experience was, 'What is this?'. '.

Poem posted on Saturday 3rd October 2020 (originally posted on 14th April 2018).

The Fertile Year

Don't let them kid you being old's all sad,
nine weepy apertures, rheumatic pains -
they'll come of course but, till they do, be glad
for one who's found senility brings gains.

The writer's trough cuts deep and leaves behind
its threat of more, though, buoyed by caring friends,
can be survived; one surfaces to find
that paucities, like plethoras, have ends.

Blank days and workbooks, as they fill with love
and words of love, become the panacea
long sought; a recharged pen begins to move
inquisitive along the fertile year,
age peels away, reveals a young man's brain
and maybe, on the page, a poem again.

Maurice Rutherford
(from 'And Saturday Is Christmas', Shoestring Press, 2011)

Note:
Were I publishing this poem today for the first time, I should be pleased to add an 's' at the title's end.  Although, the writing has changed; become shorter.  But then, so has the writer.

Poem posted on Wednesday 30th September 2020 (originally posted on 11th April 2018).

Of Mere Being

The palm at the end of the mind,
Beyond the last thought, rises
In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird
Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason
That makes us happy or unhappy.
The bird sings.  Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space.
The wind moves slowly in the branches.
The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Wallace Stevens
(1879 - 1955)

Notes:

Wallace Stevens, American prize-winning poet and philosopher of aesthetics, was born in Reading, Pennsylvania,USA on 2nd October 1855.  As one of America's most widely read and respected poets, he was also thought of by some as one of the most purposely difficult poets.  I doubt many would call 'Of Mere Being' an easy poem, but whether or not it is intentionally difficult is debatable.  It would be interesting to have Readers' Comments on this.  Could the word 'mere' of the title equate to 'utter', 'simple' or 'pure'?  Does 'the palm' mean an aim, destination or some kind of reward?  Why is the wind moving slowly?  Is this because it's weakening, dying down, just as imagination and all further thought concludes in death?  As a classical scholar, Stevens might be said to have written in a mind-zone beyond the average so, wilfully difficult or not, he certainly sets his readers a stiff questionnaire.  But are we ourselves making the poem difficult?  Is 'Of Mere Being' simply making us mindful of the fact that from the moment we begin to be (to live) we are simultaneously beginning not to be (to die)? 

Wallace Stevens died on 2nd August 1955 and was buried in Cedar Hill Cemetery, Hartford, Connecticut, USA.

Poem posted on Saturday 26th September 2020 (originally posted on 7th April 2018).

Each In His Own Tongue

A fire mist and a planet -
A crystal and a cell -
A jellyfish and a saurian,
And caves where the cavemen dwell;
Then a sense of law and beauty,
And a face turned from the clod -
Some call it Evolution.
And others call it God.

A haze on the far horizon,
The infinite, tender sky,
The ripe, rich tint of the cornfields,
And the wild geese sailing high;
And all over upland and lowland
The charm of the goldenrod -
Some of us call it Autumn,
And others call it God.

Like tides on a crescent sea beach,
When the moon is new and thin,
Into our hearts high yearnings
Come swelling and surging in -
Come from the mystic ocean,
Whose rim no foot has trod -
Some of us call it Longing,
And others call it God.

A picket posted on duty,
A mother starved for her brood,
Socrates drinking the hemlock,
And Jesus on the rood;
And millions who, humbled and homeless,
The straight, hard pathway plod -
Some call it Consecration
And others call it God.

W.H. Carruth

Notes:
William Herbert Carruth, American educator and poet, was born in Osawatomie, Kansas on 5th April 1859 and died on 15th December 1924.  He taught at the University of  Kansas and at Stanford University.  The poem we post today is a favourite, worldwide.

Poem posted on Wednesday 23rd September 2020 (originally posted on 4th April 2018).

Loveliest of Trees

Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Wearing white for Eastertide.

Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.

And since to look at things in bloom
Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlands I will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.

A.E. Housman
(1859 - 1936)

Notes:
Alfred Edward Housman was born on 26th March 1859 at Bromsgrove, Worcestershire, England.  Classical scholar and poet, he became professor of Latin, first at University College, London, and later at the University of Cambridge. He is renowned as the author of 'A Shropshire Lad', a cycle of 63 poems, which was turned down by the first publisher to whom he offered the book. He must personally have rated the work highly because he then subscribed to its publication. His persistence was rewarded when, after a slow start, 'A Shropshire Lad' went on to win wide and lasting acclaim.
Housman died on 30th April 1936 at Cambridge.  His ashes are buried just outside St. Laurence's Church, Ludlow, Shropshire, England.

Poem posted on Saturday 19th September 2020 (originally posted on 31st March 2018).

He and She

When he came in, she was there.
When she looked at him,
he smiled.  There were lights
in time's wave breaking
on an eternal shore.

Seated at table -
no need for the fracture
of the room's silence; noiselessly
they conversed.  Thoughts mingling
were lit up, gold
particles in the mind's stream.

Were there currents between them?
Why, when he thought darkly,
would the nerves play
at her lips' brim?  What was the heart's depth?
There were fathoms in her,
too, and sometimes he crossed
them and landed and was not repulsed.

R.S. Thomas
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990', J.M. Dent, 1993)

Note:
For bio details scroll back to 'They', posted 28. 10. 2017.

Poem posted on Wednesday 16th September 2020 (originally posted on 28th March 2018).

Love Song

You've got nice knees.
Your black shoes shine like taxis.
You are the opposite of
all farting and foulness.
Your exciting hair
is like a special moss,
on your chest are two soft medals
like pink half-crowns under your dress.
Your smell is far beyond
the perfumes at parties,
your eyes nail me
on a cross of waiting.  Hard is
the way of the worshipper.
But the heart line on my hand
foretold you;
in your army of lovers
I am a private soldier.

Charles Causley

Poem posted on Saturday 12th September 2020 (originally posted on 24th March 2018).

A Slice of Wedding Cake

Why have such scores of lovely, gifted girls
   Married impossible men?
Simple self-sacrifice may be ruled out,
   And missionary endeavour, nine times out of ten.

Repeat "impossible men": not merely rustic,
   Foul-tempered or depraved
(Dramatic foils chosen to show the world
   How well women behave, and always have behaved).

Impossible men: idle, illiterate,
   Self-pitying, dirty, sly,
For whose appearance even in City parks
   Excuses must be made to casual passers-by.

Has God's supply of tolerable husbands
   Fallen, in fact,  so low?
Or do I always over-value woman
   At the expense of man?
                                                  Do I?
                                                               It might be so.

Robert Graves
(1895 - 1985)
From 'Collected Poems', Carcanet Press.

Poem posted on Wednesday 9th September 2020 (originally posted on 21st March 2018).

The Throstle

'Summer is coming, summer is coming,
   I know it, I know it, I know it.
Light again, leaf again, life again, love again,'
   Yes, my wild little poet.
Sing the new year in under the blue,
   Last year you sang it as gladly.
'New, new, new, new'!  Is it then so new
   That you should carol so madly?
'Love again, song again,nest again.'
   Never a prophet so crazy!
And hardly a daisy as yet, little friend,
   See, there is hardly a daisy.
Here again, here, here, here, happy year'!
   O warble unchidden, unbidden!
Summer is coming, is coming, my dear,
   And all the winters are hidden.

Alfred Tennyson

Notes:
Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire on 6th August 1809.  He was educated at Louth Grammar School and Trinity College, Cambridge, but returned to Lincolnshire without taking a degree, due to his father's death. In 1829 he was awarded the Cambridge Chancellor's Gold Medal for one of his early pieces, 'Timbuktu'.  Tennyson was Poet Laureate from 1850 until his death in Lurgashall, Essex on 16th October 1892.  

Poem posted on Saturday 5th September 2020 (originally posted on 17th March 2018).

The Butterfly

This evening in the twilight's gloom
A butterfly flew in my room
Oh what beauty, oh what grace,
Who needs visitors from outer space?

Spike Milligan

"This second poem", suggests Paul Collins, "reflects the lover of nature, another side of a complex man.  The comedy is not far away.  Other poems reflect his concern for nature and how we use it".

Note:
For biographical details scroll back to 'To a Sorrowing Daughter', posted Saturday 17th February 2018.

Poem posted on Wednesday 2nd September 2020 (originally posted on 14th March 2018).

Missing

Less said the better.
The bill unpaid, the dead letter,
No roses at the end
Of Smith, my friend.

Last words don't matter,
And there are none to flatter.
Words will not fill the post
Of Smith, the ghost.

For Smith, our brother,
Only son of loving mother,
The ocean lifted, stirred,
Leaving no word.

John Pudney

John Sleigh Pudney was born in Langley Marish on 19th January 1909 and educated at Gresham's School, Holt.  He worked for some time as an estate agent and, as a journalist, for the BBC and the News Chronicle.  In WW2 he served with the Royal Air Force.
Pudney wrote short stories and poetry.  He died on 10th November 1977.

Poem posted on Saturday 29th August 2020 (originally posted on 10th March 2018).

Metamorphoses

The girl in trousers wheeling a red baby
Stops to look in the window of a bread-shop.
One wants to tell her that it's all steam-
Baked muck, but really there's no chance
Of stopping her buying a bogus
Farm-house cob.  Reassuring to think
That anyway it will be transformed
To wholesome milk, just as somehow she
Has gathered herself together from
The chaos of parturition and
Appears now with a lacquered bouffant
Top-knot and her old wiles unimpaired.
Why should one trouble to disguise the
Origin of the terrifying
Earth-mother, that lies in wait for men
With her odours of bergamot
Plasma, and her soft rind filled with tripes?

Roy Fuller

Notes:
Roy Broadbent Fuller was born in Failsworth, Lancashire on 11th February 1912 and brought up in Blackpool.  He made a successful career in the legal profession as a lawyer working for the Woolwich  Equitable Building Society.  A prize-winning poet, his first publication was 'Poems' in 1939.  From 1941 to 1946 he served as an officer in the Royal Navy.  Fuller died on 27th September 1991. 

Poem posted on Wednesday 26th August 2020 ( originally posted on 7th March 2018).

Vocabulary

Ruminations, illuminations!
Vocabulary, sing for me,
in your cage of time,
restless on the bone's perch.

You are dust; then a bird
with new feathers, but always
beating at the mind's bars.
A new Noah, I despatch

you to alight awhile
on steel branches; then call
you home, looking for the metallic
gleam of a new poem in your bill.

R.S. Thomas
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990, J.M. Dent, 1993)

Poem posted on Saturday 22nd August 2020 (originally posted on 3rd March 2018).

Hen Under Bay-Tree

A squalid, empty-headed Hen,
Resolved to rear a private brood,
Has stolen from the social pen
To this, the noblest solitude.

She feels this tree is magical.
She knows that spice, beneath her breast
That sweet dry death; for after all
Her cradle was the holy East.

Alert she sits, and all alone;
She breathes a time-defying air:
Above her, songbirds many a one
Shake the dark spire, and carol there.

Unworthy and unwitting, yet
She keeps love's vigil glorious;
Immovably her faith is set,
The plant of honour is her house.

Ruth Pitter

Poem posted on Wednesday 19th August 2020 (originally posted on 28th February 2018).

Unposted

Dear friend unknown,
why send me your poems?
We are brothers, I admit;
but they are no good.
I see why you wrote them,
but why send them?  Why not
bury them, as a cat its faeces?
You confuse charity and art.
They have not equal claims,
though the absence of either
will smell more or less the same.

I use my imagination:
I see a cramped hand gripping
a bent pen, or, worse perhaps,
it was with your foot you wrote.
You wait in an iron bed
for my reply.  My letter
could be the purse of gold
you pay your way with past
the giant, Despair.
                                  I lower my standards
and let truth hit me squarely
between the eyes.  'These are great
poems,' I write, and see heaven's
slums with their rags flying,
cripples brandishing their crutches,
and the one, innocent of scansion,
who knows charity is short
and the poem for ever, suffering
my dark lie with all the blandness
with which the round moon suffers an eclipse.

R.S. Thomas
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990', J.M. Dent, 1993)

Poem posted on Saturday 15th August 2020 (originally posted on 24th February 2018).

'To My Readers'

Here is my house. There is the Sun and the garden with beehives.
You are passing along the road, peering through the slats of my gate
Expecting me to speak. Where shall I start?
Believe me, please, believe me,
one could talk as long as one wants to, about anything:
of Destiny and the snake of goodwill,
of archangels tilling
the land of man,
of heavens towards which we aspire,
of hatred and fall, of sadness and Calvary,
but, above all, about the great passage.
Yet our words are only the tears of those who wished
so much to cry and could not.
Bitter are all those words
and that is why, please, allow me
to pass in silence amongst you,
crossing your road, eyes closed.

Lucian Blaga
(1895 - 1961)

Requesting this poem by his native countryman, Mihai Andrei wrote, "I found this website recently and must say I'm getting really fond of it.  I would like to share one of my favourite poems, initially written in Romanian but here is the English translation.  I hope you too will enjoy the poem".  Thank you Mihai, I do, and I'm sure our readers will welcome it.

Notes:
Lucian Blaga was born on 9th May 1895 in Lancram near Alba Iulia, Austria-Hungary, later to become Romania.  A widely published philosopher and poet, he was elected a titular member of the Romanian Academy in 1936. Blaga died on 6th May 1961 in Cluj and was buried in Lancram.

Poem posted on Wednesday 12th August 2020 (originally posted in 21st February 2018).

To a Sorrowing Daughter

My darling trembling child,
What ails you?
Please give me your burden,
Give me your sorrow,
Let it bend me to the earth,
I will not fail you,
Ask me to take death,
I will do it.
Anything to stop those
scorching tears.

Spike Milligan
(1918 - 2002)

In suggesting this poem Paul Collins writes that it is "from Spike Milligan's 'Hidden Words' published by Penguin ,a collection of his work over many years and reflecting his varied character.  The comedian and comic genius I remember. The troubled man I also remember.  I didn't learn of the loving father.  There are several poems in the collection that reflect this side of Spike".

Notes:
Terence Alan Milligan, KBE, British-Irish comedian, musician, poet and playwright was born on 16th April 1919 in Ahmadnagar, India where his father was serving in the British Indian Army, and his early education was at schools in Poona and Rangoon.  Later, when the family returned to UK, disliking his first name, and having heard the then popular band of 'Spike Jones and his City Slickers' on Radio Luxembourg, in place of 'Terence' he took on  that of 'Spike'.  A self-taught musician, playing drums, guitar and trumpet, Milligan was said to have perfect pitch and the ability to croon like Bing Crosby.
During WW2, Milligan served in the Royal Artillery (as also did Harry Secombe, with whom he was later to collaborate in writing the ground-breaking radio comedy 'The Goon Show') and Spike saw service in North Africa and Italy.
For most of his life, Milligan suffered extreme bipolar disorder, but never lost his gift for making people laugh.  When he died on 27th February 2002, he was buried at St. Thomas church, Winchelsea, East Sussex, having,in preparation, written his own epitaph," I told you I was Ill', but the Chichester diocese refused to allow it, and a compromise of 'Love, Light, Peace', in both Irish and English, was carved on his headstone.  We don't know if Milligan would have known this, but Hans Magnus Ensenberger wrote, "The boundaries of art can be defined quite precisely.  By the censor."  A sad thought, but true, QED.

Poem posted on Saturday 8th August 2020 (originally posted on 17th February 2018).

Tinnitus

Maybe it was always there.
Like that house you've walked past
on your way to work, oblivious
to its red door all these years.
A swarm of bees first registered
in a moment of stillness, buzzing
between your ears.  Or what others
call ringing, whirring, whistling,
even a neighbour banging
in the upstairs flat.  Or maybe
it's just the way silence sounds.
We use the same words - sadness,
tinnitus, red - without knowing
if we mean the same thing,
stranded, each of us, inside our heads
as we listen to phantom sounds
and signal to one another
across a great gulf of air.

Ruth Sharman
(from 'The High Window', Issue 5)

Poem posted on Wednesday 5th August 2020 (originally posted on 14th February 2018).

Russians

How silly that soldier is pointing his gun at the wood:
he doesn't know it isn't any good.
You see, the cold and cruel northern wind
has frozen the whole battalion where they stand.

That's never a corporal: even now he's frozen
you could see he's only a commercial artist
whom they took and put those clothes on,
and told him he was one of the smartest.

Even now they're in ice it's easy to know
what a shock it was, a long shock
that's been coming home to them wherever they go,
with their mazy minds taking stock.

Walk among the innocuous parade
and touch them if you like, they're properly stayed:
keep out of their line of sight and they won't look.
Think of them as waxworks, or think they're struck

with a dumb immobile spell,
to wake in a thousand years with the sweet force
of spring upon them in the merry world.  Well,
at least forget what happens when it thaws.

Keith Douglas
(1920 - 1944)
From 'Collected Poems', Faber and Faber Ltd.

Poem posted on Saturday 1st August 2020 (originally posted on 10th February 2018).

Don't Bother, I'll Do It Myself
(On bringing up teenagers)

Now I've had his report saying "Just the right sort!
Motivated; a jolly good show!
He's keen, energetic, determined, athletic!"
Well, where is he?  Where did he go?

Could this sleeper, this blob, help with one little job?
And exhibit some vigour and health?
I would wake him and ask, it's too much of a task,
So don't bother, I'll do it myself.

In his bedroom I stand with the Pledge in my hand,
And it's tricky to know where to start,
But one thing's for sure, that I can't see the floor,
The place has been taken apart.

Buying food, off I dash, and the plastic I flash,
Round the vast supermarket I fly,
I was straight when I went, but finish up bent
By the weight of the shopping I buy.

I have lost all my charms, grown orang-utan arms,
As I lope along clearing each shelf,
So it would have been great if you'd washed up your plate,
But don't bother, I'll do it myself!

Pam Ayers
(from 'Surgically Enhanced', Hodder & Stoughton Ltd., 2006)

Poem posted on Wednesday 29th July 2020 (originally posted on 7th February 2018).

At the Edge of the Wood

First, boys out of school went out of their way home
To detonate the windows; each smash
Piping with delight and skipping with fright
Of a ghost of the old man popping over his hedge,
Shrieking and nodding from the gate.
Then the game palled, since it was only breaking the silence.
The rain sluiced through the starred gaps,
Crept up walls and into the brick; frost bit and munched;
Weeds craned in and leant on the doors.
Now it is a plot without trees let into the wood
Piled high with tangle and tousle
Buried parapets and roots picking at the last mortar
Though the chimney still stands sheathed in leaves
And you can see for the time being where in a nook
A briony burst its pot with a shower of roots
And back through the press of shrubs and stems
Deep-coils into the woods.

Peter Redgrove  (1932 - 2003)
From 'Contemporary Verse', OUP 1981.

Notes:
Peter William Redgrove, poet, novelist, science journalist and playwright, was among the most prolific writers in mid 20th century England.  Born on 2nd January 1933 at Kingston upon Thames, Surrey, UK, he was educated at Taunton School and Queens' College, Cambridge.  Winner of a number of awards, Redgrove died on 16th June, 2003.

Poem posted on Saturday 25th July 2020 (originally posted on 3rd February 2018).

Love After Love 

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart. 
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 
peel your own image from the mirror. 
Sit. Feast on your life.

Derek Walcott
(1930 - 2017)

"We often describe life as being like a journey in which there is always movement and change.  This can be in terms of the stages of life through which we move - it is also an internal spiritual journey deep into ourselves to learn firstly to understand, then to accept and finally to love ourselves in all our humanness.  The West Indian poet, Derek Walcott, captures this sense of inner journeying in his lovely poem, Love after Love.  He describes the destination as being able to 'greet yourself arriving at your own door' where 'you will love again the stranger who was yourself.'  This is surely a journey worth taking and the ultimate home coming!
I love this poem."
These are the words written by Shelagh Devereux in support of  a poem she holds very dearly.  There is nothing left for me to say, except that I'm pleased to commend to you both Walcott's poem and Shelagh's insightful presentation.

Notes:
Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC, was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright.  Born on 23rd January 1930 at Castries, Saint Lucia, West Indies.  Among his numerous awards was the Queen's Medal for Poetry and he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1992.  Over the years, Walcott held many teaching posts including Professor of Poetry, University of Essex.  He died on 17th March 2017 in Cap Estate, St. Lucia, was given a state funeral and buried in Morne Fortuné, south of Castries.

Poem posted on Wednesday 22nd June 2020 (originally posted on 31st January 2018).

Lettera al mondo (bozza)

Non temo la morte

ma quanto lascerò
incompiuto

Lascio al futuro
una bozza del presente
e l'ultima pagina bianca

[...]

Portate alla mia tomba
fiori di carta
per ogni poesia mai scritta

Carlotta Pederzani

English Translation:

Letter to the world (draft)

I'm not afraid of death

but how much I shall leave
unfinished

I leave to the future
a draft of the present
and the last page blank

[...]

Bring to my grave
flowers of paper
for all the unwritten poems

Translator: Maurice Rutherford

Poem posted on Saturday 18th July 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 27th January 2018).

A Poet

Disgust tempered by an exquisite
charity, wrapping life's claws
in purest linen - this man
has history to supper,
eats with a supreme tact
from the courses offered to him.

Waiting at table
are the twin graces, patience
and truth, with the candles'
irises in soft clusters
flowering on thin stalks.

Where did he come from?
Pupating against the time
he was needed, he emerged
with wings furled, unrecognised
by the pundits; has spread
them now elegantly
to dazzle, curtains drawn
with a new nonchalance
between barbarism and ourselves.

Patron without condescension
of the art, he teaches flight's
true purpose, which is,
sensitive but not too blinded
by some inner radiance, to be
in delicatest orbit about it.

R.S. Thomas
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990', J.M.Dent, 1993)

Poem posted on Wednesday 15th July 2020 (originally posted on 24th January 2018).

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Robert Frost

Note: For biographical information see Frost's 'The Road Not Taken', posted Wed 29th Nov 2017.

This deceptively profound poem was sent in by Chris Marchese, and it is a pleasure to share it with you. Regrettably, Chris didn't give us an insight into how the poem moves him and why it is a favourite of his.  I know why I find it a powerful work, but I'd welcome your own response for posting on these pages. 

Poem posted on Saturday 11th July 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 20th January 2018).

There Are Some Men

There are some men
who should have mountains
to bear their names to time.

Grave-markers are not high enough
or green,
and sons go far away
to lose the fist
their father's hand will always seem.

I had a friend:
he lived and died in mighty silence
and with dignity,
left no book, son, or lover to mourn.

Nor is this a mourning-song
but only a naming of this mountain
on which I walk,
fragrant, dark and softly white
under the pale of mist.
I name this mountain after him.

Leonard Cohen
1934 - 2016

Notes:
Sending us this poem on the same day an acquaintance of his was killed in a car crash, Brian Jones writes, "Feeling a bit melancholy...He was someone I kept running into again and again and we always hit it off.  I meant to have them over for dinner and now, poof, they just aren't there to invite to dinner anymore.  Crazy.   Whilst in this melancholic mood, I opened up randomly to this page in a Leonard Cohen poetry book:"

In thanking Brian for both the poem and his explanation of its sudden increase in importance to him, I'm once more reminded - if ever I needed reminding - of the power of poetry/song/music to help us come to terms and cope with our microscopic place in this vast, 'crazy' world.  Our heartache at any time, unique as it feels to us, is immediately shown to be universal, part of the human package.  Fortunately for us, a similar case might be argued for joyous artistic creations. 

Leonard Norman Cohen CC GOQ was born on 21 September 1934 in Westmount, Quebec, Canada.  Poet, songwriter and novelist, he must be well-known the world over, if mostly for his musical work and his published poems.  He died on 7 November 2016 at his home in Los Angeles, USA.

Poem posted on Wednesday 8th July 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 17th January 2018).

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?

Robert Hayden

Notes:
Robert Hayden (originally Asa Bundy Sheffey) was born on 4th August 1913 in Detroit, Michigan, USA and died on 25th February 1980 in Ann Arbor, Michigan.  His parents having separated before his birth, he was fostered by neighbours named Hayden and brought up in a Detroit ghetto known locally as 'Paradise Valley'.  The Hayden's home was blighted by anger, arguments, beatings and constant fear, the effects of which stayed with Robert throughout his life.  In youth he suffered from depressions and, probably seeking some kind of relief, he found refuge in books, and became a voracious reader.  He attended Detroit City College.  Later, studying for a Master's degree, he worked under W.H. Auden.  Various teaching posts followed and he worked as poet, essayist and  educator.  From 1976 - 1978 he served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, later to be known simply as US Poet Laureate - an honour he had previously declined.
'Those Winter Sundays', from Collected Poems of Robert Hayden edited by Frederick Glaysher, 1966.

Requesting this poem Susan Benton writes, "I love the detail in this poem, the cold and bleak words:- blueblack cold, cracked, ached, splintering, breaking, chronic anger, austere.
For me it suggests the naivety and complacency of youth, accepting without expressing appreciation the acts of fatherly love routinely performed".

Poem posted on Saturday 4th July 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 13th January 2018).

Two poetic observations on thawing:-

Thaw

A field snapped with frost and stitched with brittle docks,
a metal gate where I hung, still, like the horses there -

the grey standing gentle over the bay mare, held
inside their listening; wick-wick of a pigeon,

the chat of a jackdaw flock. Each second was a frozen bead,
but lovely to the touch. Once, he barely whisked his tail,

I watched. Then shifting my weight against the gate,
both turned and the mare lifted, nut-bright, out of her dream

then came slowly, and again on, slowly; the sky stretched
drum-skin, the sun low and sucked to a thin sweet.

She looked to the grey as if to say, should I? and a man
came, walking his dog. The mare whickered. Grand !

said the man. It is, I said, some strange thing thawing,
and she brought me her breath, timid to my hand.

Sally Goldsmith

Notes:
Sally Goldsmith is an author writing in a number of genres including plays and features for BBC Radio 4, among them two Sony Radio Award winners.  Her poem 'Thaw' won a commendation in the National Poetry Competition, 2012.

Thaw

Over the land freckled with snow half-thawed
The speculating rooks at their nests cawed
And saw from the elm-tops, delicate as flower of grass,
What we below could not see, Winter pass.

Edward Thomas

Poems posted on Wednesday 1st July 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 10th January 2018).

Sleet Storm on the Merritt Parkway

I look out at the white sleet covering the still streets
As we drive through Scarsdale -
The sleet began falling as we left Connecticut,
And the winter leaves swirled in the wet air after cars
Like hands suddenly turned over in a conversation.
Now the frost has nearly buried the short grass of March.
Seeing the sheets of sleet untouched on the wide streets,
I think of the many comfortable homes stretching for miles,
Two and three stories, solid, with polished floors,
With white curtains in the upstairs bedrooms,
And small perfume flagons of black glass on the window sills,
And warm bathrooms with guest towels, and electric lights -
What a magnificent place for a child to grow up!
And yet the children end in the river of price-fixing,
Or in the snowy field of the insane asylum.
The sleet falls - so many cars moving toward New York -
Last night we argued about the Marines invading Guatemala in 1947,
The United Fruit Company had one water spigot for 200 families,
And the ideals of America, our freedom to criticize,
The slave systems of Rome and Greece, and no one agreed.

Robert Bly

Notes:
Robert Elwood Bly, born in Minnesota, USA in 1926, is a poet who likes poetry read aloud.  He listens to his own language as he writes, and doesn't stand in the way of natural idiom, rhyme, alliteration or the play of opposites as they occur.  Listen to the playful sibilance of line 7; note the sudden substitution, childhood innocence replaced by the asylum field, and all the contradictions implicit in the closing few lines.   And if you didn't notice the guest towels along the way, reflect that a good proportion of this poem existed in the imagination of the poem's speaker travelling along a motorway for passenger cars only, without the distraction of heavy goods vehicles, and space to ponder the human condition, the striving for comfort in the harshness of winter, both the seasonal one and the one we each separately travel toward.

Robert Bly's books are published by Harper & Row, Inc., New York.

Poem posted on Saturday 27th June 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 6th January 2018).

My Country 

The love of field and coppice
Of green and shaded lanes, 
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins. 
Strong love of grey-blue distance, 
Brown streams and soft, dim skies
I know, but cannot share it, 
My love is otherwise. 

I love a sunburnt country, 
A land of sweeping plains, 
Of ragged mountain ranges, 
Of droughts and flooding rains. 
I love her far horizons, 
I love her jewel-sea, 
Her beauty and her terror
The wide brown land for me! 

The stark white ring-barked forests, 
All tragic to the moon, 
The sapphire-misted mountains, 
The hot gold hush of noon, 
Green tangle of the brushes
Where lithe lianas coil, 
And orchids deck the tree-tops, 
And ferns the warm dark soil. 

Core of my heart, my country! 
Her pitiless blue sky, 
When, sick at heart, around us
We see the cattle die
But then the grey clouds gather, 
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army, 
The steady soaking rain. 

Core of my heart, my country! 
Land of the rainbow gold, 
For flood and fire and famine
She pays us back threefold. 
Over the thirsty paddocks, 
Watch, after many days, 
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze ... 

An opal-hearted country, 
A wilful, lavish land
All you who have not loved her, 
You will not understand
though Earth holds many splendours, 
Wherever I may die, 
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly. 

Dorothea Mackellar
(1885 - 1968)

Notes:
'My Country' was requested by John Rutherford (Family? Yes, a nephew), who wrote that it is one of the poems "on the concept of home that touch my emotions and help me to peer a little better through the mists of confusion about what this life is all about, particularly the sense of longing that we often feel for something or somewhere or someone that we do not have currently in our lives."

Isobel Marion Dorothea Mackellar OBE, Australian poet and fiction writer was born on 1st July 1885 at Point Piper, Sydney. Her poem 'My Country' quickly became a widely know favourite in Australia, the opening lines of stanza 2 becoming almost a second national anthem, so deeply did it touch the population's spirit.  Dorothea was active in Sydney literary circles throughout the 1930s but it later life poor health brought an end to her writing and for her last 11 years she lived in a nursing home in Randwick, where she died on 14th January 1968.  She was buried in Waverley cemetery on the eastern outskirts of Sydney, Australia, her own beloved "brown country".

Poem posted on Wednesday 24th June 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 3rd January 2018).

The Last Day

When the last day comes
A ploughman in Europe will look over his shoulder
And see the hard furrows of earth
Finally behind him, he will watch his shadow
Run back into his spine.

It will be morning
For the first time, and the long night
Will be seen for what it is,
A black flag trembling in the sunlight.
On the last day

Our stories will be rewritten
Each from the end,
And each will end the same;
You will hear the fields and rivers clap
And under the trees

Old bones
Will cover themselves with flesh;
Spears, bullets, will pluck themselves
From wounds already healed,
Women will clasp their sons as men

And men will look
Into their palms and find them empty;
There will be time
For us to say the right things at last,
To look into our enemy's face

And see ourselves,
Forgiven now, before the books flower in flames,
The mirrors return our faces,
And everything is stripped from us,
Even our names.

Kevin Hart

Notes:
Kevin John Hart was born on 5th July 1954.  An Anglo-Australian theologian, philosopher and poet, his poem 'The Last Day' was published in 'Flame Tree', Selected Poems, Bloodaxe/Paperbark, 2003.

As we approach the last day of 2017 we wish you good health and happiness in the New Year and beyond.

Poem posted on Saturday 20th June 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 30th December 2017).

The Donkey

When fishes flew and forests walked
   And figs grew upon thorn,
Some moment when the moon was blood
   Then surely I was born.

With monstrous head and sickening cry
   And ears like errant wings,
The devil's walking parody
   On all four-footed things.

The tattered outlaw of the earth,
   Of ancient crooked will;
Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
   I keep my secret still.

Fools!  For I also had my hour;
   One far fierce hour and sweet:
There was a shout about my ears,
   And palms before my feet.

G. K. Chesterton
(1874-1936)

Notes:
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in Kensington, London on 29th May 1874 and died in Beaconsfield, Bucks., on 14th June 1936. Of the many roles available within the Fellowship of Letters, from philosopher to poet and back again, few were excluded from his repertoire, the sum total of which crowned him with the reputation of 'Prince of Paradox'.  You might consider his 'Donkey' a strong contestant for the jewel in this crown?
If you happen to be in Buckinghamshire you could pay your respects at his grave in the Roman Catholic Cemetery, Beaconsfield.
'The Donkey' was published in 'Collected Poems of G. K. Chesterton', Dodd, Mead & Company, 1927. 

Poem posted on Wednesday 17th June 2020 (originally posted on 27th December 2017).

Santa Claus
in a department store

Wolsey, or possibly John of Gaunt,
Was the best thing I did. Come over here,
Behind the Christmas crib.  (I'm not supposed
To let the children see me having tea.)
To tell the truth I'm glad of this engagement.
Dozens applied, but all they said was Thank you,
We'll stick to Mr. Borthwick.
It's nice to feel one has given satisfaction.
Time was I had it all at my finger-tips,
Could plant a whisper in the back of the pit,
Or hold them breathless with the authority
Of absolute repose - a skill despised, 
Not seen, in your day.  It amounts to this:
Technique's no more than the bare bones. There are some
Unwittingly instil the faith that Man
Is greater than he knows. This I fell short of.
   You never met my wife. You are too young.
She often came with me on tour.  One night
At Nottingham, got back from the show, and there
She was.  I knew at once what made her do it.
She had resented me for years.  No, not
Myself, but what she knew was in me, my
Belief in - Sir, forgive me if I say
My 'art', for I had shown, you'll understand,
Some promise. To use her word, she felt herself
'Usurped', and by degrees, unconsciously,
She managed somehow to diminish me,
Parch all my vital streams.  A look would do it.
I was a kind of shrunken river-bed
Littered with tins, old tyres, and bicycle frames.

   Well, that was years ago, and by then too late
To start afresh. Yet all the while I loved her.
Explain that if you can... By all means, madam,
Those clocks are very popular this year.
I'll call the man in charge.  No, there's no risk
Of damage.  They pack the cuckoo separately.

Christopher Hassall

Notes: 
Christopher Vernon Hassall was born in London on 21st March 1912 and died in Rochester, Kent on 25th April 1963.  Between these dates, after education at Wadham, Oxford, he worked as actor, dramatist, librettist, lyricist and poet, yet his name is nowhere near as widely known as that of Ivor Novello to whom he became understudy, and it was during this period that Novello invited him to write the lyrics for his show, 'Glamorous Night' (1935).  People of my age might remember hearing their parents singing 'Shine Through My Dreams' whilst doing the veggies in the kitchen or, later from 'The Dancing Years', 'I Can Give You The Starlight' filtering with the Friday night steam from the bathroom.  Hassall's lyrics, if not his name, became sung the world over.
From such a life, it is easy to imagine the strong but mixed emotions behind the speaker's outpourings in 'Santa Claus'.
Hassall lived at Tonford Manor by the river Stour on the outskirts of Canterbury.  He died suffering a heart attack in a railway carriage at Rochester, Kent, after having run to catch the train to London to see his daughter dance in a Royal Ballet School performance at Covent Garden.

We feel sure that Christopher Hassall and all our posted poets would join us in wishing you comfort at Christmas.

Poem posted on Saturday 13th June 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 23rd December 2017).

Journey of the Magi

   'A cold coming we had of it,
Just the worst time of the year
For a journey, and such a long journey:
The ways deep and weather sharp,
The very dead of winter.'
And the camels galled, sore-footed, refractory,
Lying down in the melted snow.
There were times we regretted
The summer palaces on slopes, the terraces,
And the silken girls bringing sherbet.
Then the camel men cursing and grumbling
And running away, and wanting their liquor and women,
And the night-fires going out, and the lack of shelters,
And the cities hostile and the towns unfriendly
And the villages dirty and charging high prices:
A hard time we had of it.
At the end we preferred to travel all night,
Sleeping in snatches,
With the voices singing in our ears, saying
That this was all folly.

   Then at dawn we came down to a temperate valley,
Wet, below the snow line, smelling of vegetation,
With a running stream and a water-mill beating the darkness,
And three trees on the low sky.
And an old white horse galloped away in the meadow.
Then we came to a tavern with vine-leaves over the lintel,
Six hands at an open door dicing for pieces of silver,
And feet kicking the empty wine-skins.
But there was no information, and so we continued
And arrived that evening, not a moment too soon
Finding the place; it was (you may say) satisfactory.

   All this was a long time ago, I remember,
And I would do it again, but set down
This set down
This: were we led all that way for
Birth or Death?  There was a birth, certainly,
We had evidence and no doubt.  I had seen birth and death,
But had thought they were different; this Birth was
Hard and bitter agony for us, like Death, our death.
We returned to our palaces, these Kingdoms,
But no longer at ease here, in the old dispensation,
With an alien people clutching their goods.
I should be glad of another death.

T.S. Eliot
(1888 - 1965)

Notes:
Of Thomas Stearns Eliot, OM, his life and his poetry, the plethora of available writings is so huge that, laid out line by line, it would probably reach from here to his birth-place in St. Louis, Missouri, USA; but you wouldn't arrive in time for Christmas.  What more need be said?

Poem posted on Wednesday 10th June 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 20th December 2017).

Christmas at the Orphanage

But if they'd give us toys and twice the stuff
most parents splurge on the average kid,
orphans, I submit, need more than enough;
in fact, stacks wrapped with our names nearly hid
the tree where sparkling allotments yearly
guaranteed a lack of - what? - family? -

I knew exactly what it was I wanted:
(did each boy there feel the same denials?)
to share my pals' tearing open their piles
meant sealing the self, the child that wanted
to scream at all You stole those gifts from me;
whose birthday is worth such words?  The wish-lists
they'd made us write out in May lay granted
against starred branches.  I said I'm sorry.

Bill Knott
(1940 - 2014)

Notes:
William Kilborn Knott was born on 17th February 1940 in Carson City, USA.  Poet and writer, he taught at Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts for some 25 years and published many books of poetry, winning him the Iowa Poetry Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship.  He died on 12th March 2014.

Postscript: you may have a Christmas wish-list of your own, and we are delighted to tell you that Santa Claus himself is planning to visit this website in good time for Christmas, so best keep a lookout !

Poem posted on Saturday 6th June 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 16th December 2017).

Invictus

Out of the night that covers me,
   Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
   For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
   I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
   My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
   Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
   Finds, and shall find, me unafraid.

It matters not how strait  the gate,
   How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate:
   I am the captain of my soul.

W.E. Henley
(1849 - 1903)

Notes:
William Ernest Henley, poet, critic and editor, was born on 23rd August 1849 in Gloucester, England and died on11th July 1903 in Woking, England.  His childhood was marred by illness and from the age of about twelve he suffered from tuberculosis of the bone in his left leg which had to be amputated below the knee when in his late teens.  Strong spirited, he overcame this disability and developed into a well-built broad-shouldered man of verve and vitality, cheerful and active despite the need of a crutch.  He was a friend of Robert Louis Stevenson, author of 'Treasure Island', who readily confessed having based the character Long John Silver on the crutchéd Henley.
Invictus (Latin: unconquered), the word, has become widely written, seen and heard recently and the deeds performed by amputees and otherwise disabled people, under its title, have filled sports arenas and TV screens the world over, raising the spirits and endeavours of the more fortunate among us.  Henley's poem becomes a powerful mantra.

Poem posted on Wednesday 3rd June 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 13th December 2017).

Too Much of a Fag

Observe the poor old smoker,
How sheepishly he stands
Upon the frozen pavement,
A fag cupped in his hands.
His clothes are never fragrant,
His breath is never clean,
He is shunned by his companions
And hooked on nicotine.

See down the blasted alleyway,
Whipped by each rainy gust,
He cowers into doorways,
Inhaling, craved with lust.
His respiratory system,
If he could just have looked,
Is black as all damnation
And like his goose...
Is cooked.

Pam Ayres
(from 'Surgically Enhanced', Hodder & Stoughton Ltd, 2006)

Note:
Pam Ayres brings closer up to date the ongoing concern with 'the weed' which Raymond Tallis wrote about in 'Player's' Please', posted here on Wednesday 25th January 2017.

Poem posted on Saturday 30th May 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 9th December 2017).

On the Farm

There was Dai Puw.  He was no good.
They put him in the fields to dock swedes,
And took the knife from him when he came home
At late evening with a grin
Like the slash of a knife on his face.

There was Llew Puw, and he was no good.
Every evening after the ploughing
With the big tractor he would sit in his chair,
And stare into the tangled fire garden,
Opening his slow lips like a snail.

There was Huw Puw, too.  What shall I say?
I have heard him whistling in the hedges
On and on, as though winter
Would never again leave those fields,
And all the trees were deformed.

And lastly there was the girl:
Beauty under some spell of the beast.
Her pale face was the lantern
By which they read in life's dark book
The shrill sentence: God is love.

R.S. Thomas
(1913-2000)

Notes:
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990, J.M. Dent, 1993)
Please see 'They' (posted Sat 28 Oct 17) for biog note.

Poem posted on Wednesday 27th May 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 6th December 2017).

Walking Away

It is eighteen years ago, almost to the day -
A sunny day with the leaves just turning,
The touch-lines new-ruled - since I watched you play
Your first game of football, then, like a satellite
Wrenched from its orbit, go drifting away

Behind a scatter of boys.  I can see
You walking away from me towards the school
With the pathos of a half-fledged thing set free
Into a wilderness, the gait of one
Who finds no path where the path should be.

That hesitant figure, eddying away
Like a winged seed loosened from its parent stem,
Has something I never quite grasp to convey
About nature's give-and-take - the small, the scorching
Ordeals which fire one's irresolute clay.

I have had worse partings, but none that so
Gnaws at my mind still.  Perhaps it is roughly
Saying what God alone could perfectly show -
How selfhood begins with a walking away,
And love is proved in the letting go.

C. Day Lewis
(1904 - 1972)

Notes:
Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (with or without the hyphen which was introduced by Cecil's father coupling his own birth surname Day with his adoptive father's name Lewis; Cecil himself later dropped the hyphen) was an Anglo-Irish poet born in Ballintubbert, Ireland.  Brought up in London, he was educated at Sherborne School and Wadham College, Oxford.  He was UK poet laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972.  He is buried at St. Michael's church, Stinsford, Dorset.
His poem 'Walking Away' adequately speaks for itself and, no doubt, for millions more.

Poem posted on Saturday 23rd May 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 2nd December 2017).

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

Robert Frost
(1874 - 1963)

Notes:
Robert Lee Frost was born on 26th March 1874 in San Francisco, California, USA. and died on 29th January 1963 in Boston, Massachusetts.  His life took him to a number of addresses in the States and he spent some time in England where among the friends he made was Edward Thomas.  Frost became one of America's best loved poets and in 1961 was made poet laureate of Vermont.  His appeal was international; he had, and still has a sizeable following in the UK.
Of 'The Road Not Taken' he said that it was open to misinterpretation but he had based the poem's speaker on his friend Edward Thomas, a person who, whichever road he went, would feel sorry for not having chosen the alternative route/decision/action.  Some readers see in the narrative the intention to encourage them towards free-thinking, not to follow the crowd and meekly go with the flow.
The poem certainly works on me because it spreads the cards onto the table, leaves me to choose, but never tells me whether I've won or lost.
And still I return to the table. 

Poem posted on Wednesday 20th May 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 29th November 2017).

The Way Through The Woods

They shut the road through the woods
Seventy years ago.
Weather and rain have undone it again,
And now you would never know
There was once a road through the woods
Before they planted the trees.
It is underneath the coppice and heath,
And the thin anemones.
Only the keeper sees
That, where the ring-dove broods
And the badgers roll at ease,
There was once a road through the woods.

Yet, if you enter the woods
Of a summer evening late,
When the night-air cools on the trout-ringed pools
Where the otter whistles his mate,
(They fear not men in the woods,
Because they see so few);
You will hear the beat of a horse's feet,
And the swish of a skirt in the dew,
Steadily cantering through
The misty solitudes,
As though they perfectly knew
The old lost road through the woods...
But there is no road through the woods.

Rudyard Kipling
(1865-1936)

Notes:
For notes on Kipling, please see 'The Storm Cone', posted Wednesday 27th December 2016.

Poem posted on Saturday 16th May 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 25th November 2017).

Introduction to 'The Person from Porlock':

At the close of the eighteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, aged 25, wrote his poem 'Kubla  Khan'; it was 54 lines in length.  His story about it was that living in a cottage between Linton and Porlock, Devon, with this poem in progress on his work-desk, he had fallen ill, taken an anodyne - two grains of opium - and slipped into a deep sleep in which all the images of Xanadu rose up before him, and on waking he sat down to transcribe the full poem of around 300 lines he had dreamt.  Unfortunately he was disturbed by "a person from Porlock on business" who stayed for over an hour, by which time his dream had faded beyond memory.  Hence the brief poem as it exists today, to Coleridge's lasting disappointment.  

Stevie Smith's poem casts doubt on the veracity of this account and sees it all from an amusing yet wistful angle:-

Thoughts about the Person from Porlock 

Coleridge received the Person from Porlock
And ever after called him a curse,
Then why did he hurry to let him in?
He could have hid in the house.

It was not right of Coleridge in fact it was wrong
(but often we all do wrong).
As the truth is I think he was already stuck
With Kubla Khan.

He was weeping and wailing: I'm finished, finished,
I shall never write another word of it,
When along comes the Person from Porlock
And takes the blame for it.

It was not right, it was wrong, 
But often we all do wrong.

May we enquire the name of the Person from Porlock?
Why, Porson, didn't you know?
He lived at the bottom of Porlock Hill.
So had a long way to go.

He wasn't much in the social sense
Though his grandmother was a warlock,
One of the Rutlandshire ones I fancy
And nothing to do with Porlock,.

And he lived at the bottom of the hill as I said
And had a cat named Flo,
And had a cat named Flo.  

I long for the Person from Porlock
To bring my thoughts to an end,
I am growing impatient to see him
I think of him as a friend.

Often I look out of the window
Often I run to the gate.
I think, he will come this evening,
I think it is rather late.

I am hungry to be interrupted
For ever and ever amen.
O Person from Porlock come quickly
And bring my thoughts to an end.

Stevie Smith
(from 'Selected Poems', 1962, Longmans)

Notes:
For biographical note on Stevie Smith please see 'Valuable' (posted Wed 25.10.17)

Poem posted on Wednesday 13th May 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 22nd November 2017).

Eastbourne

'Dio salvi il re', intonano le trombe
da un padiglione erto su palafitte
che aprono il varco al mare quando sale
a distruggere peste
umide di cavalli nella sabbia
del litorale.

Eugenio Montale
(1896 - 1981)

English translation:

'God save the king', intone the trumpets
from a pavilion built upon stilts
which open the way for the rising tide
to obliterate the damp hoofprints of horses
in the sand along the shore.

Translator: Maurice Rutherford

Notes:
Eugenio Montale was born In Genoa, Italy, where his father was a merchant, and lived the later part of his life in Milan.  He was regarded as the foremost Italian poet of his time and in 1975 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.  In the late 1940s he spent some time in Britain and it is likely that is when this poem was written out of his impression of a visit to Eastbourne, East Sussex, where he paused by the pavilion on the pier.  George VI was still on the throne at that time, so Montale would be correct in interpreting the anthem to 'il re' (the king) and not the queen as we know it today.   During this period he also wrote 'Vento Sulla Mezzaluna, Edinburgo 1948', translated as 'Wind On The Crescent', (scroll back to Poetry, Sat 8th Oct, 2016). 

Poem posted on Saturday 9th May 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 18th November 2017).

A Marriage

We met
      under a shower
of bird-notes.
      Fifty years passed,
love's moment
      in a world in
servitude to time.
      She was young;
I kissed with my eyes
      closed and opened
them on her wrinkles.
      'Come,' said death,
choosing her as his
      partner for
the last dance. And she,
      who in life
had done everything
      with a bird's grace,
opened her bill now
      for the shedding
of one sigh no
      heavier than a feather.

R. S. Thomas
(from 'Collected Poems 1945-1990', J.M.Dent, 1993)

Notes:
Thanks to Susan Benton who, when requesting this poem wrote that it is among her favourites, which share the qualities of "...expressing succinctly with carefully chosen, but no extraneous words, beautiful but simple thoughts."  Yes, this certainly can be said of 'A Marriage', and I like the cliff-hanging effect adding power to the poem by a masterly use of caesura holding the sense of the narrative over between lines.  A poem to treasure.  Both Susan and I and, I dare add, other readers would welcome your own comments.

(For biographical notes on Thomas, please see his poem 'They', posted Sat. 28.10.17.)

Poem posted on Wednesday 6th May 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 15th November 2017).

Meeting At Night

The grey sea and the long black land;
And the yellow half-moon large and low;
And the startled little waves that leap
In fiery ringlets from their sleep,
As I gain the cove with pushing prow,
And quench its speed i' the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;
Three fields to cross till a farm appears;
A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch
And blue spurt of a lighted match,
And a voice less loud thro' its joys and fears,
Than the two hearts beating each to each.

Robert Browning
(1812-1889)

Notes:
Robert Browning was born in Camberwell, London on 7th May 1812 and died at his home in Venice, Italy on 12th September 1889.  He was educated at University College, London.  His poem 'Meeting at Night' was first published in his 'Dramatic Romances and Lyrics' together with, among others, an even shorter complementary poem 'Parting at Morning'.  Written in 1845, they were being worked on during Browning's courtship of Elizabeth Barrett, their romantic association became a highlight in the gossip of the literary classes in Britain, and the poem we post today was considered the most sensual romantic poem of the times.  I like the way suspense increases as we realize and become party to the thrill of doing a daring 'naughty' when we hear the scratch/and see the blue spurt of a lighted match.  An exciting and cleverly crafted poem.
Browning is buried in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, London.

You might like to search for 'Parting at Morning' and share your surprise with us? That would be nice.

Poem posted on Saturday 2nd May 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 11th November 2017).

The Quiet Men

They boast, of deeds performed the night before,
of conquests in dark alleys of their minds,
of gallons drunk and women satisfied,
erecting pedestals and laying claims
on which to build their reputations high
in upmanship and camaraderie.

By day they learn the drills and skills of war,
defile dead ground, find trees with bushy tops
as aids to indication; march at ease,
sing ribaldry and urinate the lanes,
but never ask the question burning deep
beyond the chilling sweat, preceding sleep.

These were the quiet men before they came -
from homes like yours and mine one may suppose -
and on this battle-eve some say their prayers,
and most are virgins if the truth be told;
tomorrow there'll be taller tales to tell
and quieter men for telling them as well.

Maurice Rutherford
('And Saturday is Christmas', Shoestring Press, 2011)

On a lighter note: 'And Saturday is Christmas' (Poetry) and 'Marshalled Musings' (Prose) have both been reprinted and are again available from Shoestring Press.

Poem posted on Wednesday 29th April 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 8th November 2017).

The General

'Good-morning; good-morning!' the general said
When we met him last week on the way to the line.
Now the soldiers he smiled at are most of 'em dead,
And we're cursing his staff for incompetent swine.
'He's a cheery old card,' grunted Harry to Jack
As they slogged up to Arras with rifle and pack.

But he did for them both by his plan of attack.

Siegfried Sassoon
(1886-1967)

Notes:
So much has been written about Siegfried Sassoon and I won't repeat or add to it here, other than to say that he and Wilfred Owen were among those committed to military psychiatric hospitals mentioned in my notes to Isaac Rosenberg's poem 'Returning, We Hear the Larks'.  Their names, and that of Ivor Gurney, were also among the 16 war poets later to be honoured in stone in Westminster Abbey.

Poem posted on Saturday 25th April 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 4th November 2017).

Returning, We Hear the Larks

Sombre the night is.
And though we have our lives, we know
What sinister threat lies there.

Dragging these anguished limbs, we only know
This poison-blasted track opens on our camp -
On a little safe sleep.

But hark! - joy - strange joy.
Lo! heights of night ringing with unseen larks.
Music showering our upturned list'ning faces.

Death could drop from the dark
As easily as song -
But song only dropped,
Like a blind man's dreams on the sand
By dangerous tides,
Like a girl's dark hair for she dreams no ruin lies there,
Or her kisses where a serpent hides.

Isaac Rosenberg
(1890-1918)

Notes:
Isaac Rosenberg was born in Bristol on 25th November 1890 to Jewish Lithuanian immigrants to Britain; the family later moved to Stepney, London.  After doing well at school, Isaac, with interests in poetry and visual arts, started an apprenticeship with Fleet Street engraver Carl Hentschel and attended evening classes at Birkbeck  College, but after finding financial assistance, left the apprenticeship to study at the School of Fine Art, University College, London.  
At some stage Rosenburg was afflicted by chronic bronchitis and, having a sister living in South Africa, went in 1914 to join her, hoping the warmer climate would suit him better.  This move seems to have been effective and, feeling better, he returned to Britain in March 1915 looking to find employment as an artist.  Unsuccessful, and with Britain at war, he enlisted in the army, allotting half his pay home to his mother.  He is recorded as saying, "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons.  Nothing can justify war.  I suppose we just all fight to get the trouble over."   I imagine that most service volunteers would include this sentiment, together with a handful of other fears - because fears they were - troubling the volunteering population, if they analysed their motives.
Rosenberg's active service experiences in France would have been generally in line with what history has recorded as the norm under the Top Brass's hokey cokey, 'in- out, in-out' front line manning policy of  'Test 'em To Destruction', which saw so many 'failures' incarcerated in UK mental hospitals, where I doubt they met any of their Generals.   Rosenberg along with a number of his unit, the King's Own Royal Lancaster Regiment, was killed at Fampoux, north-east of Arras on 1st April, 1918.
What remains of this important poet?  He is among the 16 war poets whose names are engraved on a memorial stone in Westminster Abbey.  But I think he would have placed the visual arts above the poems, and might have applauded, and been proud of the hanging of his self-portraits which can be viewed in the National Gallery, London.

Poem posted on Wednesday 22nd April 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 1st November 2017).

They

I take their hands,
Hard hands.  There is no love
For such, only a willed
Gentleness.  Negligible men
From the village, from the small
Holdings, they bring their grief
Sullenly to my back door,
And are speechless.  Seeing them
In the wind with the light's
Halo, watching their eyes
Blur, I know the reason
They cry, their worsting
By one whom they will fight.
Daily the sky mirrors
The water, the water the
Sky.  Daily I take their side
In their quarrel, calling their faults
Mine.  How do I serve so
This being they have shut out
Of their houses, their thoughts, their lives?

R. S. Thomas

Notes:
Ronald Stuart Thomas was born on 29th March 1913 in Cardiff and died on 25th September 2000 in Pentrefelin near Criccieth, Wales.  He read Latin at Bangor University before being trained and ordained as a priest in The Church In Wales, then worked as a priest until his retirement, living on a miserably small income.  Married, a son recalls childhood in an unheated house where the winter could record freezing temperatures.  It seems that Thomas senior accepted willingly these spartan conditions and at one stage banned further use of the family's only luxury, the vacuum cleaner, because it was too noisy.
R.S. Thomas did not start to learn his native language until the age of 30, by then too late to change from writing in English.  More's the pity.  However, he went on to write over 1,500 poems, many I've never read and others I shouldn't want to be without, one of which is 'They'.  What I love about these poems written by a practising priest is the voice of absolute honesty in which he continues to question his own faith in a god as difficult to get close to as was he himself.  But his love, like that for his parishioners, is unfailing.

When in 1955 Thomas's fourth book, 'Song At The Year's Turning' was published, it carried this endorsement from John Betjeman: "The name which has the honour to introduce this fine poet to a wider audience will be forgotten long before that of R.S. Thomas."
Well, I can't forecast for the world, but Thomas's name will be remembered again on this website.  If you have a favourite of his, you could be the one to flag it up for us.

Poem posted on Saturday 18th April 2020 (originally posted on Sunday 29th October 2017).

Valuable
(After reading two paragraphs in a newspaper)

All these illegitimate babies...
Oh, girls, girls,
Silly little cheap things,
Why do you not put some value on yourselves,
Learn to say, No?
Did nobody teach you?
Nobody teaches anybody to say No nowadays,
People should teach people to say No.

O poor panther,
oh you poor black animal, 
At large for a few moments in a school for young children in Paris,
Now in your cage again,
How your great eyes bulge with bewilderment,
There is something there that accuses us,
In your angry and innocent eyes,
Something that says:
I am too valuable to be kept in a cage.

Oh these illegitimate babies!
Oh girls, girls,
Silly little valuable things,
You should have said, No, I am valuable,
And again, It is because I am valuable
I say, No.

Girls, you are valuable,
And you, Panther, you are valuable,
But the girls say: I shall be alone
If I say 'I am valuable', and other people do not say it of me,
I shall be alone, there is no comfort there.
No, it is not comforting but it is valuable,
And if everybody says it in the end
It will be comforting.  And for the panther too,
If verybody says he is valuable
It will be comforting for him.

Stevie Smith
(1902-1971)

Notes:
Stevie Smith has said that her love of drawing is sometimes also the inspiration for a poem: at other times she would be moved to respond poetically to whatever she's recently been reading.  Her poem 'Valuable' is a good example of the latter, resulting in a clever interplay of two disparate subjects, its message brought into ever-sharpening focus through the repetitive lens of the poem's title word.  We are left in no doubt of the poet's abhorrence of the causes in these two human failings.

Facts concerning Stevie Smith and me you didn't need to know: Stevie was born at 34 De-la-Pole Avenue, Hull; Stevie's father deserted his family and ran away to sea.  I was born at number 100 in nextdoor Albert Avenue, Hull 20 years later; my maternal grandfather deserted his family and ran away to sea.  Make of this what you will, but I'd like to think they'd heard a whisper about the advent of I.T., of mobile, inescapable, interminable 'news' broadcasting, and they were bunking off from all the forthcoming Brexit brouhaha.  But then we each have our own hoard of history we're unable to rewrite - don't we?
 

Poem posted on Wednesday 15th April 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 25th October 2017). 

The Constant Lover

Out upon it!  I have lov'd
  Three whole days together;
And I am like to love three more,
  If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings,
  Ere he shall discover
In the whole wide world again
  Such a constant lover.

But the spite on't is, no praise
  Is due at all to me:
Love with me had made no stays,
  Had it any been but she.

Had it any been but she,
  And that very face,
There had been at least ere this
  A dozen dozen in her place.

John Suckling
(1609 - after May 1641)

Notes:
Sir John Suckling was one of the 17th century 'Cavalier Poets' (much favoured by King Charles 1st and Queen Henrietta Maria) who seems to have packed a lot into his short life including taking part in a failed plot to free Thomas Wentworth 1st Earl of Stafford from the Tower of London, then fleeing to France in a hurry where, deprived of any income and fearing poverty, he is said to have committed suicide by poison, sometime after May, 1641.  He was buried in a Protestant Cemetery in Paris.  He might have bequeathed pleasure to more people by his invention of the board/card game Cribbage than by his poetry.  Cribbage, or 'Crib', gave birth to the phrases 'level pegging' and 'pegging out'.
But back to his poem, which gives me no clue as to where it fits into his life or, if not his own, the life of the poem's speaker yet which when first I read it, without any biographical knowledge, left me thinking that here was much more to ponder beyond the interpretation of  an old style use of the English language.   Forget the biography: leave me the poem to work on - and, of course, the good fortune to get on 'level pegging' with the accepted meaning of constancy. 
 

Poem posted on Saturday 11th April 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 21st October 2017).

States of Play
Humber Street Gallery, July 2017

We move up close
to blow gently
on paper discs -
lemon pink mauve
blue lights blush then
fade.  More breaths on
floating muslins.
We watch as they
illuminate
briefly before
returning to
the start.
    Friendship's
like this: whispered
exhalations
make it glow, the
luminescence
behind the mesh
of our daily
lives waiting for
that one small sigh.

Sue Wilsea

Notes:
Sue Wilsea, writer, poet and one half of the poetry and performance duo, 'The Hull to Scarborough Line', (Felix Hodcroft is the Scarborough half), lived in Hull for many years before crossing the Humber to Lincolnshire.  Some time ago Sue and Felix wrote and performed a play built around my poetry, with the startling title, 'The Remarkable Mr Rutherford', performances of which I have been doubly privileged to attend in both Hull and Scarborough.  We all three became friends and, albeit spasmodically, still keep in touch.  Sue and I, as émigrés from Hull, sometimes share 'home thoughts', recalling missed neighbours and experiences. When I learned of Sue's visit to one of Hull's City of Culture 2017 events about which she had been moved to write a poem, I asked if I might share it with readers of this website, and was pleased when she consented.  She says, "I wrote the poem because we had visited the exhibition with some friends from Hull, ex neighbours...when our kids were young...and when we get together the years fall away and it never takes long before we're back where we were.  So the blowing on the lights seemed a good metaphor."
I love the juxtaposition of reality and imagination in this poem, and the tender tones in which both are delicately expressed.  This surely is what the exhibition was aiming for: art out of art.

Poem posted on Wednesday 8th April 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 18th October 2017).

Intro to 'A une petite chienne':

On a recent visit to France I was fortunate to spend a whole glorious, long weekend as invited guest in the home of Stella and Philip Buckle. During my stay, when we weren't attending a most memorable wedding ceremony, we had many absorbing conversations on more than as many subjects of which, inevitably, poetry was one.  Stella told me about the local poetry group whose members, both French and British, meet monthly to read and discuss poems in either language.  Stella speaks fluent French and is able to compose her lines, thinking in French and rhyming in French.  I was fascinated.  How could I resist asking her for a poem for this website?  I couldn't, and I'm delighted now to share her poem with you, together with an English version in which Stella has not attempted to emulate the rhythms and rhymes of the original French, preferring to remain true to the essential  narrative.  I am sure that she would welcome your responses to her work, and so should I, and I'd love to receive poems from other French readers and writers of French.

Our warmest thanks go to Stella Buckle for this poem:-
 

A une petite chienne

Coco
Vieille dame du monde des chiennes
Souvent endormi..pas la mienne
Lève sa tête
Pour regarder 'qui viennent?'

Coco...
Comme un ours cabossé,
Voilà...sa façade
Elle remue sa queue
Et demande une promenade

Elle cherche sa laisse
Elle l'a trouve à vitesse
Moi, innocent, naïve
Je regarde avec tendresse!

La porte est fermé
Elle tire la laisse
Ce n'est pas l'intention
de me blesse

Mais je suis traîne par terre
Le talons de mes chaussures
Glissent sur les pavés
Mouillé et dur!

Balancé encore nous continuons
Quelques minutes, cette petite bête
Elle sent l'arôme d'un autre chien
Pas assez loin
Et soudainement
Elle s'arrête.

Et puis elle répète
Une fois, deux fois, trois
J'attends sans résistance
Immobile, comme du bois
Au monde de Coco
Elle est la reine
Explorer extraordinaire
Tous qu'elle voit est la sienne

Sans cérémonie c'est fini la promenade
Elle tourne sa tête dépenaillée  sans regarde
À moi, toujours en retard

J'ai une problème de balance, j'ai peur de tomber
Mais à sa direction je dois succomber
Des montagnes russes elle est conductrice
Nous suivons chaque un toujours ses caprices.

Et quand nous retournons, fatigue, chez elle
Comme une chienne bien âgée évident réelle
Et moi j'ai besoin d'un remontant
Et le prochain fois sans talons incapacitant

Stella Buckle, 2017

To a little lady dog!

Coco
Old lady of the world of dogs
Often asleep...not mine
Lifts her head
To see who's coming

Coco
Like a battered teddy bear
See her facade
She wags her tail
And asks for a walk

She looks for her lead
She finds it quickly
Me, innocent, naive
I look at her tenderly.

The door shut, she pulls on the lead
It's not her intention to harm me
But I am dragged across the ground
The heels of my shoes
Slide on the damp, hard cobbles!

Balanced once more, we continue
For several minutes, this little beast. 
She scents the odour of another dog not far away
And suddenly she stops..

And this she repeats not once, twice but three times.
And I wait patiently. Immobile, wooden
In the world of dogs she feels she is queen
Extraordinary explorer
All she surveys is hers!

Without ceremony the walk is over,
She turns her ragged head without regard
For me, always a bit behind..

I have a problem of balance, I feel I might trip over
But to her direction, I must succumb
She is the driver of this roller coaster
We must follow her caprices.

And when we return, tired, back home
Like an old dog she at last behaves
And me, I need a stiff drink
Note to self
Next time ..don't wear high heels!

Stella Buckle, 2017

Poem posted on Saturday 4th April 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 14th October 2017).

We Don't Know How To Say Goodbye

We don't know how to say goodbye -
We keep wandering arm in arm.
Twilight has begun to fall,
You are pensive and I keep still.

Let's go into a church - we will watch
A funeral, christening, a marriage service,
Without looking at each other, we will leave...
What's wrong with us?

Or let's sit on the trampled snow
Of the graveyard, sighing lightly,
And with your walking stick you'll outline palaces
Where we will be together always.

Anna Akhmatova
(1889 - 1966)
From 'Selected Poems', translated by Richard McKane, Bloodaxe Books, 2006.

Notes:
Anna Akhmatova, Russian modernist poet born in Odessa is noted for her poem 'Requiem', a major work on the tragic theme of Stalinist terror, which placed her outside the contemporary mainstream.  But this translation is of a poem concerned with human love which has attracted the attention of poets down the ages, an emotion most readers will immediately recognise as 'their own'.  It certainly takes me back to my own courtship, as it was then called, and still further to a song written by Frank Loesser and sung by Hoagy Carmichael and Ella Logan around 1938:

'Two Sleepy People'
Here we are, out of cigarettes,
Holding hands and yawning,
See how late it gets,
Two sleepy people by dawn's early light
And too much in love to say good night...
...Two sleepy people with nothing to say,
And too much in love to break away.

Of course, such concerns have been occupying poets across the millennia; at least we know that some five centuries have passed since Shakespeare had Juliet saying to her Romeo:
 "Good night, good night!  Parting is such sweet sorrow,
 That I shall say good night till it be morrow."

You might have a favourite poem you have read on this theme, and personal reflections on its importance in your life; if so, do please spend a few moments to share them with us.

Poem posted on Saturday 28th March 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 11th October 2017).

Lights Out
(i.m. Vernon Scannell)

A friend's gift of your work brings this response
which must be brief because it's getting late,
as I'll be soon and, sadly, you are now.
Dear Vernon, your  Last Post reminds me, once,
at Lumb Bank circa nineteen-eightyeight
we met, when I had hopes you'd teach me how
to fine a poem from a grain of sand.
It doesn't work that way, I should have known
poetic art's not like a tool for hire.
Instead, you showed how best to play the hand
we're dealt in someone else's lines, where tone
and texture help a poem's tempo fire
imagination, captivate the mind.
Maestro, these poems bring to me a kind
of voice-mail sent from Coldenside again
where you declined to trumpet rhymes of yours
and selflessly espoused a nobler cause
re-living Hardy's 'During Wind and Rain',
but while I hear his rose "ript from the wall",
these pages say you haven't died at all
and, worlds away from hills of Heptonstall,
your voice rings clear, beyond the bugle's call.

Maurice Rutherford, from 'And Saturday is Christmas', Shoestring Press, 2011.
 

Poem posted on Wednesday 25th March 2020 (originally posted on Saturday October 7th 2017).

A Pleasure Shared

What a pleasure it is to receive this request from a very close friend, and to share his chosen poem, and some thoughts about it, with you all:-

Old, Old Song

WHEN the world is young, lad,
   And all the trees are green;
And every goose a swan, lad,
   And every lass a queen;
Then hey for boot and horse, lad,
   And round the world away;
Young blood must have its course, lad,
   And every dog his day.

When all the world is old, lad,
   And all the trees are brown;
And all the sport is stale, lad,
   And all the wheels run down;
Creep home, and take your place there,
   The spent and maimed among:
God grant you find one face there,
   You loved when all was young.

Charles Kingsley (1819-1875)
From 'The Water Babies'.

Notes:
'Old, Old Song' is among the favourites of John Alderton who comments upon his choice as follows:-

"The Reverend Charles Kingsley, Social reformer, Professor and lecturer, brave early supporter of Darwin, squirrelled this poem away in 1862, at the end of Chapter Two of his delightful children's story 'The Water Babies'.
Why?  This is not for their very young heads.  Nor is it even for the heads of those lads in the first verse, still in the exuberance and energy of youth.
It can only be appreciated fully by greyed heads which have been in both countries, and can compare.
It is succinct and easily recognised analogy.  A universal truth.  Touching and immediate.  He called it "The Ould Song".  Which hints at a long history, and indeed could easily have been understood in the Thirteenth century, or Third, or at Stonehenge".

- John Alderton

I'm sure readers will join me in thanking John Alderton for sharing this poem and his reflections, and I assure all our readers that their own favourites, with comments, will be equally well received.

Poem posted on Saturday 21st March 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 4th October 2017).

They Say

Now and then in some sound you discover
a different country.  Once in a barn
open and empty my guitar jumped
in my hand.  Often I went back hunting
what happened, but it was always gone.

When we came down through Canada
playing at stampedes in Chilco, and Babine,
and Charlie Lake, there came a time - the drum
and the weather just so.  But in Peace River
it changed and never got that way again.

But there's a country beyond all of those, to be
found and then lost.  You cross borders toward home,
smuggling a whole state legally, glancing
at the wind or the patrol.  They want you
to have it.  They say, 'Song?' and they let it come.

William Stafford
('Contemporary American Poetry', Penguin Books)

Notes:
How wonderful for the survival of the human spirit, that not only the border lines of British Columbia but also those separating provinces throughout Canada, or dividing the states of America; not even Great Walls the world over, or the vast oceans are able to  deter the passage of music.  How inspiriting to remember that music requires no passport, visa or green card, and is its own letter of introduction: 'They Say', indeed, says it all.

Poem posted on Wednesday 18th March 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 30th September 2017).

Autumn Testament (1)

As I come down the mountain from Toro Poutini's house
My feet are sore, being bare, on the sharp stones

And that is a suitable penance.  The dust of the pa road
Is cool, though, and I can see

The axe of the moon shift down behind the trees
Very slowly.  The red light from the windows

Of the church has a ghostly look, and in
This place ghosts are real.  The bees are humming
   loudly

In moonlight in their old hive above the church door
Where I go in to kneel, and come out to make my way

Uphill past a startled horse who plunges in the
   paddock
Above the nunnery.  Now there are one or two

Of the tribe back in the big house - What would you
   have me do,
King Jesus?  Your games with me have turned me into
   a boulder.

James K. Baxter
(1926 - 1972)        
From 'Selected Poems', Carcanet Press Ltd, 2010.

Notes:
James Keir Baxter was born in Dunedin, New Zealand.  The second of his two given names was an expression of his father's respect for Keir Hardie, the founder of the British Labour Party.  Baxter became a prolific writer and traveller, of whose poetry the critic and publisher Michael Schmidt has written "...one of the most precocious poets of the century whose neglect outside of New Zealand is baffling", and  commenting on Baxter's 'Prelude NZ', Schmidt said that he detected "an amalgam of Hopkins, Dylan Thomas and native atavisms.

Poem posted on Saturday 14th March 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 27th September 2017).

Autumn

It is the football season once more
And  the back pages of the Sunday papers
Again show the blurred anguish of goalkeepers.

In Maida Vale, Golders Green and Hampstead
Lamps ripen early in the surprising dusk;
They are furred like stale rinds with a fuzz of mist.

The pavements of Kensington are greasy;
The wind smells of burnt porridge in Bayswater
And the leaves are mushed to silence in the gutter.

The big hotel like an anchored liner
Rides near the park; lit windows hammer the sky.
Like the slow swish of surf the tyres of taxis sigh.

On Ealing Broadway the cinema glows
Warm behind glass while mellow the church clock chimes
As the waiting girls stir in their delicate chains.

Their eyes are polished by the winds,
But the gleam is dumb, empty of joy or anger.
Though the lovers are long in coming the girls still linger.

We are nearing the end of the year.
Under the sombre sleeve the blood ticks faster
And in the dark car of Autumn quick voices whisper.

It is a time of year that's to my taste,
Full of spiced rumours, sharp and velutinous flavours,
Dim with the mist that softens the cruel surfaces,
Makes mirrors vague.  It is the mist that I most favour.

Vernon Scannell
(1922 - 2007)

Notes:
Vernon Scannell, born John Vernon Bain in Spilsby, Lincolnshire, left his local school at age 14 and found work as a junior clerk in an insurance office, having developed the unlikely twin interests of Boxing and Literature.  It wasn't long before WW2 saw him enlisting in the Argyll and Sutherland Highlanders from where he was eventually transferred to the Gordon Highlanders.  He had a chequered military career including action at El Alamein and at Gabes Gap, North Africa; desertion; prison in Alexandria, suspended sentence freeing him to take part in the D-Day landings.  His war was cut short when he was shot in both legs during the battle for Caen. He went AWOL again without waiting for demobilisation when back in the UK and lived as a civilian until found, returned to the Military, court martialled and so on; twists and turns too difficult for biographers accurately to keep tabs on.
In civilian life, while still 'on the run', he studied literature under the lecturer Bonamy Dobrée, won prizes boxing for the university, became an English teacher, award winning poet and author, at some stage being run to earth by the Military Police, jailed and after psychiatric tests freed to write poetry.  Phew!
I of course knew none of this background information when I turned up at Lumb Bank, Heptonstall, West Yorkshire, to a 1980s poetry lovers' course under Scannell's joint tutelage with the young Andrew Motion, during which we shared nothing but good manners and enthusiasm for the subject; nothing, that is, except perhaps a convivial glass or two.
Scannell died at his home in Otley, West Yorkshire after a lengthy illness.  We had shared our year of birth.  I wrote some lines in memory of the poet in him; they will be reproduced here in a future posting. 

Poem posted on Wednesday 11th March 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 23rd September 2017).

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
   Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
   With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss'd cottage trees,
   And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
      To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
   With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
      For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
   Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
   Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,
   Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
      Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
   Steady thy laden head across a brook;
   Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,
      Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring?  Ay, where are they?
   Think not of them, thou hast thy music too, -
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
   And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
   Among the river sallows, borne aloft
      Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
   Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
   The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;
      And  gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

John Keats
(1795 - 1821)

Notes:
John Keats, one of the so-called Romantic Poets which included Byron and Shelley, was born in Moorgate, London, where his father Thomas Keats worked as hostler in the stables of the Swan and Hoop inn, advancing to become the inn manager;  it was here that the family of four children were brought up.  When John was only eight, his father died and the children were sent to live with grandparents in Edmonton.  John, a bright, active lad was enrolled at a boarding school  named Clarke's and here he developed his interest in Classics and History.   Keats started to publish poetry only about four years before his death, and during those years his poetry found little favour among literary critics; popularity only came posthumously.  He died of tuberculosis at the young age of twenty-five in Rome, where he was buried in the Protestant Cemetery.

'To Autumn', I think, although written in a language and style two hundred years old, is one of the few poems in English of which most people remember - or misremember - the opening line.  I feel that no apology is needed for sharing the complete poem, but I shall nevertheless present a more modern picture of Autumn in the next posting.

Poem posted on Saturday 7th March 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 20th September 2017).

Wardour Street

There's a small café off the Avenue
  Where Alphonse, that old sinner, used to fix
  A five-course dinner up at one and six,
And trust to luck and youth to pull him through.
I can't remember much about the wine
  Except that it was ninepence for the quart
  Called claret and was nothing of the sort,
Cheap like the rest and like the rest divine.
But Alphonse, I suppose, is long since sped
  And Madame's knitting needles rusted through
  And even Marguerite, like us she flew
To wait on, waited on by death instead.
Well Alphonse, well Madame, well Marguerite!
They've no more use for us in Wardour Street.

Humbert Wolfe
(1886 - 1940)

Notes:
This sonnet by Wolfe is from 'The Incelestial City' published by Victor Gollancz.
Humbert Wolfe, CB CBE was born in Milan, Italy. His Father, Martin Wolff was of German descent; his mother, Consuela Terraccini, Italian.  Moving early in his life to England, he was brought up in Bradford,West Yorkshire and attended Bradford Grammar School and then Wadham College, Oxford, from where he took up a successful career in the Civil Service, firstly at the Board of Trade and afterwards in the Ministry of Labour.  Always conscious of his Jewish heritage, he converted to Christianity.  Wolfe claimed to be of no political creed, except that it was his general view that money and its possessors should be abolished.
He wrote not only poetry, and among his many works were translations of Heine and others.  He became one of the most popular authors of the 1920s; some of his verses were set to music by Gustav Holst.
Humbert Wolfe died on his 55th birthday and is buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, London.

Poem posted on Wednesday 4th March 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 16th September 2017).

Officers' Mess

It's going to be a thick night tonight (and the night before was a thick one),
I've just seen the Padre disappearing into 'The Cock' for a quick one.
I don't mind telling you this, old boy, we got the Major drinking -
You probably know the amount of gin he's in the habit of sinking -
And then that new MO, came in, the Jewish one, awful fellow,
And his wife, a nice little bit of stuff, dressed in a flaming yellow.
Looked a pretty warmish piece, old boy - no, have this one with me -
They were both so blind (and so was the Major) that they could hardly see.
She had one of those amazing hats and a kind of silver fox fur
(I wouldn't mind betting several fellows have had a go at her).
She made a bee-line for the Major, bloody funny, old boy,
Asked him a lot about horses and India, you know, terribly coy -
And this MO fellow was mopping it up and at last passed right out
(Some silly fool behind his back put a bottle of gin in his stout).
I've never seen a man go down so quick.  Somebody drove him home.
His wife was almost as bad, old boy, said she felt all alone
And nestled up to the Major - it's a great pity you weren't there -
And the Padre was arguing about the order of morning and evening prayer.
Never laughed so much in all my life.  We went on drinking till three.
And this bloody woman was doing her best to sit on the Major's knee!
Let's have the blackout boards put up and turn on the other light.
Yes, I think you can count on that, old boy - tonight'll be a thick night.

Gavin Ewart
(1916 - 1995)
From 'The Poetry of War 1939 -45'. ed. Ian Hamilton.

Notes:
Gavin Buchanan Ewart was born in London and after school there studied at Christ's College, Cambridge, receiving a B.A and an M.A in 1937 and 1942 respectively.  He published his first poem at the young age of 17, but WW2 in which he saw active service in the Royal Artillery brought an interruption and he  didn't resume publishing poems until as late as 1964.  After the war Ewart worked for a while in Publishing and with The British Council; then from 1952 spent the rest of his working life as an Advertising Copywriter.

He seems to have returned to poetry with the poems flowing in full spate, and he went on to produce many collections, quickly becoming a poet much loved for his flamboyant virtuosity and observations on human behaviour, in the course of which his irreverent eroticism led in 1966 to W.H.Smith's banning sales of his book 'The Pleasures of the Flesh' from their shops.  (Well done, old boy, have this one on me; the day job obviously taught you a thing or two about how to bump up demand and watch sales go through the ceiling!).  
It is not recorded whether or not this banning of the book later played any part in the decision by The Putney Society to commemorate the life of a 'Noted Poet', but above the entrance to Kenilworth Court, Putney, London where Ewart had lived, there is a blue plaque bearing his name. 

Poem posted on Saturday 29th February 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 13th September 2017).

The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd

If all the world and love were young,
And truth in every shepherd's tongue,
These pretty pleasures might me move,
To live with thee, and be thy love.

Time drives the flocks from field to fold,
When Rivers rage, and Rocks grow cold,
And Philomel becometh dumb,
The rest complains of cares to come.

The flowers do fade, and wanton fields,
To wayward winter reckoning yields,
A honey tongue, a heart of gall,
Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall.

Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of Roses,
Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies,
Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten:
In folly ripe, in reason rotten.

Thy belt of straw and Ivy buds,
Thy Coral clasps and Amber studs,
All these in me no means can move,
To come to thee, and be thy love.

But could youth last, and love still breed,
Had joys no date, nor age no need,
Then these delights my mind might move,
To live with thee, and be thy love.

Sir Walter Raleigh
(1554 - 1618)

Notes:
Walter Raleigh was born into a Devon land-owning family, with all the associated benefits including education and must have come to understand 'carpe diem' early in life during which, although little is known of his childhood and youth, he certainly filled his adult days with a variety of activities.  Writer, poet, politician, courtier, spy, explorer, the list seems endless - you wonder what he did in his spare time!  Well, he quickly found favour with Queen Elizabeth which must have been a useful asset until the day the queen discovered he had secretly married one of her ladies-in-waiting, Elizabeth Throckmorton, without asking and receiving the Royal permission, and she had the pair marched off to The Tower.  Eventually released, the couple left London to live on Raleigh's inherited estate in Sherborne, Dorset.  Then after the queen's death, Raleigh was accused of taking part in a plot against King James, arrested and again took up a rent-free residency in The Tower from where, in 1616, he was released specifically to head an expedition, his second, in search of gold in El Dorado.  They don't seem to have 'struck it rich', but some of his men came upon a Spanish outpost, entered, plundered and trashed it, which of course didn't go down well when the news hit Spain.  So the Spaniards had to be appeased.  This was where Raleigh's head became sacrificed to the swung axe.

To turn from this bloody, inhuman ending, I'd like to mention two of the more pleasant legacies left to us.  The first is the compelling painting of 'The Boyhood of Raleigh' by John Everett Milais (1871), of which many framed prints were made and one of them hung in the bedroom in which I was suffered as the minor shareholder by my elder brother (Bless you, Dear Ken!) and his trouserpress.
Later as an adult in the 1980s, I heard an hilarious sketch broadcast on CBS by Bob Newhart, of  an imagined telephone conversation between 'nutty Walter' phoning the head of the West Indies Company in England to tell about his wonderful finds in the new world, and the amazement and humorous reactions to Raleigh's description of the use of leaves from  a plant called tobacco must surely be a story-telling classic.  You can hear or read it now on the net.

Poem posted on Wednesday 26th February 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 9th September 2017).

Conforming

Even a free-ranging and far-reaching website sometimes is likely to touch its hat in the direction of Convention.  This week we offer the poetic equivalent of the operatic Cav'n'Pag, in trotting out the old well rehearsed and popular double-act of Marlowe and Raleigh; the curtain raises to Marlowe:

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me, and be my love,
And we will all the pleasures prove
That hills and valleys, dales and fields,
And all the craggy mountains yields.

There we will sit upon the rocks,
Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks
By shallow rivers, to whose falls
Melodious birds sing madrigals.

And I will make thee beds of roses
With a thousand fragrant posies,
A cap of flowers and a kirtle
Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle.

A gown made of the finest wool
Which from our pretty lambs we pull,
Fair lined slippers for the cold,
With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,
With coral clasps and amber studs,
And if these pleasures may thee move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing
For thy delight each May-morning:
If these delights thy mind may move,
Come live with me, and be my love.

Christopher Marlowe
(1564 - 1593)

Notes:
Christopher (Kit) Marlowe was christened in Canterbury on 26th February 1564; there is no record of his birth, which is assumed to have been a couple of days earlier.  He soon went on to make his name as one of the foremost poets of his time; the early Shakespeare, born the same year, was known to have been influenced by Marlowe's writing.  In the troubled climate of religious conflict in England, Marlowe was arrested in May 1593 on a charge of blasphemy contained in his work, and ordered to attend court on a stated date.  However, the court did not sit on that day, so he was summoned to appear daily until it did sit.  During this postponement, Marlowe was mysteriously attacked and stabbed to death, aged not yet thirty.  No reason is given for the assault.
'The Passionate Shepherd' earned a response from Walter Raleigh - see next posting.

Poem posted on Saturday 22nd February 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 6th September 2017).

If Life's a Lousy Picture, Why Not Leave Before the End

Don't worry,
One night we'll find that deserted kinema
The torches extinguished
The cornish ripples locked away in the safe
The tornoff tickets chucked
In the tornoff shotbin
The projectionist gone home to his nightmare

Don't worry
that film will still be running
(the one about the sunset)
& we'll find two horses
tethered in the front stalls
& we'll mount
& we'll ride off
                           into
                                  our
                                         happy
                                                     ending

Roger McGough
(From 'Watchwords',1969)
 

Poem posted on Wednesday 19th February 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 2nd September 2017).

The Lesson

'Your father's gone,' my bald headmaster said.
His shiny dome and brown tobacco jar
Splintered at once in tears.  It wasn't grief.
I cried for knowledge which was bitterer
Than my grief.  For there and then I knew
That grief has uses - that a father dead
Could bind the bully's fist a week or two;
And then I cried for shame, then for relief.

I was a month past ten when I learnt this:
I still remember how the noise was stilled
In school-assembly when my grief came in.
Some goldfish in a bowl quietly sculled
Around their shining prison on its shelf.
They were indifferent.  All the other eyes
Were turned towards me. Somewhere in myself
Pride like a goldfish flashed a sudden fin.

Edward Lucie-Smith
(From 'A tropical Childhood and Other Poems', OUP 1961.

Notes:
Edward Lucie-Smith, English writer, poet, art critic, curator and broadcaster, was born in 1933 at Kingston, Jamaica, moving to UK in 1946.  Educated in Canterbury and Paris, he read History at Merton, Oxford.  He has published more than a hundred books covering an extensive variety of subjects, among the latest a collection of 32 poems, 'Making for the Exit'; at my age, an intriguing title.

Poem posted on Saturday 15th February 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 30th August 2017).

The Watch

I wakened on my hot, hard bed,
Upon the pillow lay my head;
Beneath the pillow I could hear
My little watch was ticking clear.
I thought the throbbing of it went
Like my continual discontent;
I thought it said in every tick:
I am so sick, so sick, so sick;
O Death, come quick, come quick, come quick,
Come quick, come quick, come quick, come quick.

Frances Cornford
(1886 - 1960)

Notes:
Frances Crofts Cornford's poem 'The Watch' was published in her Collected Poems, (Barrie and Jenkins Ltd) and is probably less widely known than her 'To a Fat Lady seen from the Train'.  I don't know at what stage of her life it was written, nor can I picture its provenance against the background of an active Cambridge family life, so to what extent it may be autobiographical, I have no idea.  Frances was a granddaughter of Charles Darwin; this makes her a member of the talented Darwin-Wedgwood family.  An older half-brother was the same Bernard Darwin whose work as a golf writer I used to enjoy so much.
For me, the charm of this short poem is, as so often, its unanswered questions and the seemingly endless seconds it leaves ticking away in the mind towards Death.  But towards whose death? 

Poem posted on Wednesday 12th February 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 26th August 2017).

The Old Couple

The old couple in the brand-new bungalow,
Drugged with the milk of municpal kindness,
Fumble their way to bed.  Oldness at odds
With newness,they nag each other to show
Nothing is altered, despite the strangeness
Of being divorced in sleep by twin-beds,
Side by side like the Departed, above them
The grass-green of candlewick bedspreads.

In a dead neighbourhood, where it is rare
For hooligans to shout or dogs to bark,
A footfall in the quiet air is crisper
Than home-made bread; and the budgerigar
Bats an eyelid, as sensitive to disturbance
As a distant needle is to an earthquake
In the Great Deep, then balances in sleep.
It is silence keeps the old couple awake.

Too old for loving now, but not for love,
The old couple lie, several feet apart,
Their chesty breathing like a muted duet
On wind instruments, trying to think of
Things to hang on to, such as the tinkle
That a budgerigar makes when it shifts
Its feather weight from one leg to another,
The way, on windy nights, linoleum lifts.

F. Pratt Green
(1903 - 2000)

Notes:
The Reverend Fred Pratt Green, CBE, born in Roby, Lancashire, England, was a poet, playwright and also author of many hymns, a lot of which are gathered in the Methodist Hymnal, 'Singing The Faith'.  He is recorded as having averred that hymn singing "is such a dangerous activity...you get this glow which you can mistake for religious experience".  OK, this may very well be so, but judging by the popularity of the BBC Sunday programme 'Songs of Praise' in a land where only a minority are regular church-goers, I think many might answer, "Well, whatever floats your boat", and walk away whistling a hymn the words of which they've never considered.
But back to the poem, which was published in Pratt Green's 'New Poems', (Hutchinson, 1965).  For me its great strength comes from a mind given to a life's ministering to 'the common crowd', a man of intelligence and warmth for all humanity; a man who, like Leigh Hunt's Abou Ben Adhem, would be happy for his name to be written as "...one that loves his fellow-men".
Who could wish for more?

Poem posted on Saturday 8th February 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 23rd August 2017).

Words With Maurice

I sat with Maurice late one cloudy night,
with tangled thoughts ping-ponging through my head.
Picked out his little volume, thought I might
agree some form of settlement. Instead
I found that Maurice showed me through a door,
the rusty key turned stiffly in the lock.
A place I'd lived and died in years before,
while standing in my slippers in the dock.
This esoteric form of mission creep.
My boots back on, I'm marching against sleep.

But where to now? No map, no Google Earth,
no tortured muse to lead me by the hand.
No colour-coded nightmares, just a dearth
of light. Refracted? Maybe. Grains of sand
slow-trickled through the barren months and years
and counted off collective times of trial.
Your list records the triumphs of my peers
My list? A sombre scratch against the dial.
No better place to go to, not just yet.
These lines attest the nature of my debt.

So now I stalk the thing that's stalking me,
and try to get myself back in the game.
I need to write the words which need to be,
I've had my fleeting quarter-hour of fame.
The clouds are gone, the sky is inky-black,
but clearer for it. All at once I sense
my smallness and my greatness. Looking back,
a qualified but welcome recompense.
Now time grows short, there's plenty work to do.
The bag-man's got his marching boots on too.

Brian Mcmanus

- thanks to Brian who sent in this poem!

Posted on Wednesday 5th February 2020.

Tutto ho perduto

Tutto ho perduto dell'infanzia
E non potrò mai più
Smemorami  in un grido.

L'infanzia ho sotterrato
Nel fondo delle notti
E ora spada invisibile,
Mi separa da tutto.

Di me rammmento che esultravo amandoti,
Ed eccomi perduto
In infinito delle notti.

Disperazione che incessante aumenta
La vita non mi è più,
Arrestata in fondo della gola,
Che un roccia di gridi.

Giuseppe Ungaretti
(1888 - 1970)

English translation:

I have lost everything of childhood
And I shall never again be able
To lose memory in a cry.

I have buried childhood
In the depth of nights
And now, by an invisible sword,
I am separated from it all.

 I recall the delight of having loved you,
And here I am, lost
In an infinity of nights.

Hopelessness ever deepening,
Life is now no more for me
Than a rock of sobs
Stuck in my throat.

Translator: Maurice Rutherford

Notes:
Giuseppe Ungaretti, whose parents came from Lucca in Tuscany, Italy, was born in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father was engaged in the excavation and development of the Suez canal.   Modernist poet, critic, academic and essayist, Ungaretti was winner of the Neustadt International Prize for Literature in its inaugural year of 1970.
During WW2 Ungaretti left Egypt for Italy and was received with great honours, but after Mussolini's downfall he was stripped of these accolades because of his fascist sympathies.  Later in his life he developed bronchopneumonia, received treatment in New York City, but died whilst still under medical supervision.  He is buried in Campo Verona, Rome.

I have posted poetry in translation previously, and hope to do so again, and in the absence of requested foreign language favourites, my best chance is in Italian, a language I love to hear and grapple with.  In my youthful, angling days, I would throw cloud-bait and a few tempters upstream in the attempt to draw fish to my chosen swim.  I'd like to find an equally successful way to attract English-speaking Italians or Italian-proficient Brits to this online swim by which I sit and hope.  I don't seek dedicated tuition, but I'd be so grateful to feel a firm, frank, guiding hand on my shoulder, correcting me where I stumble wilfully on.  May that hand please be yours.    

Poem posted on Saturday 1st February 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 19th August 2017).

Worming at Short Beach

Short Beach, reaching
  almost to the horizon, successions
    of sandbars lay bared

to the low tide, the furthest,
  toward which I walked
    over the wormgrounds,

toward which I waded
  through shallow sluices of channel,
    almost indistinct, and now blurred,

a small island of the mind
  I've tried to touch,
    define, and hold.

But I remember, as gulls worked
  the water's edge, ripped
    hermits from houses of shell

or in my wake split
  the razors I threw aside,
    I remember, my back against

the sun's blaze, worming that far bar,
  forking close to clumps of sawgrass,
    turning the wet sand over,

breaking the worms' domains
  open to the dark sheen
    of my shadow.

My fork rasped against
  the shells of softclams
    that sprayed small geysers

as I dug, and the wind
  was a thin whisper of scythes
    over the waves.  And now,

all this from a long time ago
  is almost lost
    and goes nowhere, except deeper,

year by year.  But this was the way
  when I worked that far bar,
    the light fell: the sandworms

were blood-red in my shadow
  as I forked them
    into my shadow.

William Heyen
(Vanguard Publishers, New York, USA)

Notes:
This beautifully composed and presented poem by Long Island poet William Heyen captures - as far as it can be captured - the almost lunar working of memory, interweaving visions of the past with what remains of them in the here and now.  'Worming at Short Beach' takes my memory back half a century to a not dissimilar coastal scene far from Connecticut, USA, to the Lincolnshire side of the Humber, England, and to the Sundays spent cockle-picking there, where the shapes of sandbanks and the course of runnels were never two tides alike, the sandscape mirroring memory itself, the mirror distorting, like those which sometimes surprise us in seaside amusement arcades.

Poem posted on Wednesday 29th January 2020 (originally posted on 17th August 2017).

Supervan

Stick a pony in me pocket,
I'll fetch the suitcase from the van,
Cos if you want the best 'uns
But you don't ask questions
Then brother, I'm your man.
Where it all comes from is a mystery,
It's like the changin' of the seasons
And the tides of the sea.
But here's the one that's drivin' me berserk -
Why do only fools and horses work?
La-la-la
La-lala-la
La-la-la
La-lala-la...

We've got some half price cracked ice and miles and miles of carpet tiles,
TVs, deep freeze and David Bowie LPs,
Ball games, gold chains, whatsnames, picture frames and leather goods,
And Trevor Francis track suits from a mush in Shepherds Bush,
Bush, bush, bush, bush, bush, bush, bush...
No Income Tax, no V.A.T.,
No money back, no guarantee,
Black or white, rich or poor.
We'll cut prices at a stroke...
God bless Hooky Street, 
Viva Hooky Street,
Long live Hooky Street,
C'est magnifique, Hooky Street,
Magnifique, Hooky Street,
Hooky Street
                          Hooky Street
                                                    Hooky Street...

John Sullivan, 1981, 'Only Fools and Horses', BBC TV series.

Notes:
If you're now imagining the dear old Reliant Robin three-wheeler, you're in the company of millions who remember the vehicle from their own experience or through the TV screen.  But although the Robin comes immediately to the mind, it was in fact a Reliant Regal Supervan that the Trotter brothers drove around Hooky Street.  For visitors from abroad not familiar with London's Cockney slang, the 'pony' of the lyric's first line is their way of saying £25 (a 'monkey' would mean £500).  Nobody has yet claimed the prize for explaining why!

Poem posted on Saturday 25th January 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 12th August 2017).

As a boy with a richness of needs I wandered

As a boy with a richness of needs I wandered
In car parks and streets, epicure of Lagondas,
Minervas, Invictas, and Hispano Suizas;
And I sampled as roughage and amusing sauce
Little Rovers and Rileys, and the occasional funny
Trojan with chain drive, and the Morris Cowleys
With their modest bonnets, sedate Fiat
Of the nineteen-twenties, and the Alvis, middle-brow
Between the raffish sports car and the family bus.
I was tempted by aircraft too, sniffing
Over The Aeroplane and Flight - those kites,
They seem today, knocked up in a back yard
By young and oily artists who painted with rivets:
Westland Wapiti, Bristol Bulldog, and the great
De Havilland Hercules, invading the desert
And pulsing within its sleep like a troubling nerve;
And surely, I think, as I remember those feasts,
They were days of excitement and lavish surprise?
Where is the tantalizing richness and hazard
Of assertive styling, of crazy rigs,
Now that a car is unremarkably one of a million,
And an aeroplane is a tubular schedule?  I wander
Still in the car parks, but now uneasily,
Thinking that engineering is a sort of evolution -
Out of the fittest come the many merely fit;
And I wonder if I am wrong, or the world, whose aspect
Is nowhere strange, but is nowhere home.

Clifford Dyment
(1914 - 1971)

Notes:
Clifford Henry Dyment FRSL was born in Alfreton, Derbyshire, moving in early childhood to Caerleon-on-Usk on the northern outskirts of the city of Newport, Wales.  Poet, literary editor and journalist, in WW2 he was called upon to make films for the British government.  His poetry is generally known for dealing with countryside topics, so it was rather a surprise to read of his wanderings in city car parks, but such names as Lagonda and Hispano Suiza, marques I haven't heard of since childhood cigarette card collecting days, caught my attention.    Beautifully styled sleek cars - as was the Ferrari whose death was lamented by George MacBeth in his poem posted here back  on 2nd November 2016 - desirable creations I only ever saw on the fag cards.  In those days in our avenue only two of the neighbours owned a car; one a 'modern' Ford 8, and the other a Morris something-or-other, maybe Cowley, built like an upright pianoforte with what they called a Dickie Seat behind the pianist for the sheet-music turner who'd best wear a scarf and a hat with chinstrap.
 
I think Dyment describes and sums up the evolution extremely well.
'As a boy with a richness of needs I wandered' was published in 'Collected Poems' by J.M.Dent & Sons Ltd.

Of course, it isn't only these desirable unaffordable dream cars that find a parking space in the motorists' love and lore; even from the bargain basement there sometimes emerges a certain assemblage of ugliness which, seen through the rheumy eyes of an ageing populace, becomes beautiful enough to bring tears of nostalgic joy - or of laughter.  One such old banger will be remembered in our next posting.

Poem posted on Wednesday 22nd January 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 9th August 2017).

Hay for the Horses

He had driven half  night
From far down San Joaquin
Through Mariposa, up the
Dangerous Mountain roads,
And pulled in at eight a.m.
With his big truckload of hay behind the barn.
With winch and ropes and hooks
We stacked the bales up clean
To splintery redwood rafters
High in the dark, flecks of alfalfa
Whirling through shingle-cracks of light,
Itch of haydust in the sweaty shirt and shoes.
At lunchtime under Black oak
Out in the hot corral
- The old mare nosing lunchpails,
Grasshoppers crackling in the weeds -
"I'm sixty-eight" he said,
"I first bucked hay when I was seventeen.
I thought that day I started,
I sure would hate to do this all my life.
And dammit that's just what
I've gone and done."

Gary Snyder
(From 'Riprap and Cold Mountain Poems', North Point Press, 1958)

Notes:
Gary Snyder, born in San Francisco, 1930, is an American man of letters, widely published travel writer; among his awards, the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, 1985.  There are rich seams to be mined among scree and mountain, and many collectable nuggets in the book where this poem is to be found.

Different country, another kind of grass, two dissimilar poetic approaches, but although Gary Snyder sees through a different lens from that of Molly Holden, each poet brings in knife-edge focus such outstanding detail of, say, the shirt each is viewing; but save a gasp of delight for their pin-sharp perceptions of moist meadow grass newly scythed, and snuff-dry, airborne snippets of alfalfa, (more commonly called lucerne in Britain), sunlit through cracks between the barn-side tiles.

Now with both poems in front of you, we'd love to receive your impressions.  

Poem posted on Saturday 18th January 2020 (originally posted on Saturday 5th August 2017).

More on Grass

Far from Brian Patten's denuded city park to the farmed grasslands of Britain and America, this week's postings offer two reflections on grass grown not for pleasure, but for fodder; here is the first:-

Photograph of Haymaker, 1890

It is not so much the image of the man
that's moving - he pausing from his work
to whet his scythe, trousers tied
below the knee, white shirt lit by
another summer's sun, another century's -

as the sight of the grasses beyond
his last laid swathe, so living yet
upon the moment previous to death;
for as the man stooping straightened up
and bent again they died before his blade.

Sweet hay and gone some seventy years ago
and yet they stand before me in the sun,
stems damp still where their neighbours' fall
uncovered them, succulent and straight,
immediate with moon-daisies.

Molly Holden
(1927 - 1981)

Notes:
Molly Holden was a London-born British poet and Cholmondeley Award winner.  Her maiden name was Gilbert, and she was a granddaughter of the popular children's author Henry Gilbert who published his 'Robin Hood and the Men of the Greenwood' in 1912.  

Critics reviewing Molly Holden's poetry have commented on certain similarities with Thomas Hardy and Edward Thomas, and this can be no bad thing when they add that they see no imitation and that this poet's style is her own.  Her observations draw on a concern for fine detail as she shares with her readers the joy of each fresh discovery.

'Photograph of Haymaker, 1890' was published in 'To Make Me Grieve', Chatto and Windus Ltd, 1968.

Poem posted on Wednesday 15th January 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 2nd August 2017).

Omphaloskepsis - the pro response:

Towards a Definition of Itself
(Excerpts)

When in public, poetry should take off its clothes
and wave to the nearest person in sight.
It should be seen in the company of thieves and lovers
rather than that of journalists and publishers;
on sighting mathematicians it should unhook the algebra
from their minds and replace it with poetry,
on sighting poets it should unhook the poetry from their minds
and replace it with algebra;
it should touch those people who despise being touched;
it should fall in love with children and woo them with fairy tales;
it should wait on the landing for two years for its mates to come home
then go outside and find them all dead;
when the electricity fails it should wear dark glasses
and pretend to be blind;
it should guide those who are safe into the middle of busy roads
and leave them there;
it should scatter woodworm into the bedrooms of all peg-legged men
not being afraid to hurt the innocent;
it should shout "evil, evil, EVIL" from the roofs of stock exchanges;
it should not pretend to be a clerk or a librarian;

...

Poetry should be seen lying by the side of road accidents;
hissing from unlit gas rings;
it should scrawl the nymph's secret on her teacher's blackboard
offering her a worm, saying "inside this is a tiny apple";
at dawn it should leave the bedroom and catch the first bus
home to its wife;
at dusk it should chat up a girl nobody wants;
it should be seen standing on the ledge of a skyscraper,
on a bridge with a brick tied around its heart.
Poetry is the monster hiding in a child's dark room,
it is the scar on a beautiful person's face,
it is the last blade of grass being picked from the city park.

Brian Patten
(Recorded from a broadcast, long ago, in the age of steam radio and the taffling tape-recorder). 

Poem posted on Saturday 11th January 2020 (originally posted on Friday 28th July 2017).

What the Chairman told Tom

Poetry?  It's a hobby.
I run model trains.
Mr Shaw there breeds pigeons.

It's not work.  You don't sweat.
Nobody pays for it.
You could advertise soap.

Art, that's opera; or repertory -
The Desert Song.
Nancy was in the chorus.

But to ask for twelve pounds a week -
married, aren't you -
you've got a nerve.

How could I look a bus conductor
in the face
if I paid you twelve pounds?

Who says it's poetry, anyhow?
My ten year old
can do it and rhyme.

I get three thousand and expenses,
a car, vouchers,
but I am an accountant.

They do what I tell them,
my company.
What do you do?

Nasty little words, nasty long words,
it's unhealthy.
I want to wash when I meet a poet.

They're reds, addicts,
all delinquents.
What you write is rot.

Mr Hines says so, and he's a schoolteacher,
he ought to know.
Go and find work.

Basil Bunting
(1900 - 1985)
From 'Collected Poems, 1969, Fulcrum Press.

Notes:
Basil Cheesman Bunting, British Modernist poet, was born at Scotswood-on-Tyne, Northumberland.  His poetic reputation was sealed by the publication of the widely acclaimed long poem 'Briggflatts' in 1966.
He is noted for his love of music and concern for the sonic nature of poetry and his insistence that poetry "is a sound" and should be read aloud.  A Quaker education contributed towards his pacifist beliefs and in WW1 his application for exclusion from conscription having been refused, he was arrested in 1918, handed over to the Military, court martialled, and imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs and Winchester jails. Yet during WW2 he served with British Military Intelligence in Persia, and afterwards continued his work in intelligence for the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company until, in 1952, he was expelled by Mohammad Mossadegh, who had become prime minister the previous year.  Back in England Bunting worked as a journalist and newspaper correspondent.  He died at Hexham, Northumberland and was buried in the Quaker graveyard at Brigflatts, Sedburgh, Cumbria.

Poem posted on Wednesday 8th January 2020 (originally posted on Wednesday 26th July 2017).

Poppies in July

Little poppies, little hell flames,
Do you do no harm?

You flicker.  I cannot touch you.
I put my hands among the flames.  Nothing burns

And it exhausts me to watch you
Flickering like that, wrinkly and clear red, like the skin of a mouth.

A mouth just bloodied.
Little bloody skirts!

There are fumes I cannot touch.
Where are your opiates, your nauseous capsules?

If I could bleed, or sleep!
If my mouth could marry a hurt like that!

Or your liquors seep to me, in this glass capsule,
Dulling and stilling.

But colorless.  Colorless.

Sylvia Plath
(1932 - 1963)

Notes:
In requesting this poem, Grace Frankish says, I think, all that need be said: "My favourite poem is 'Poppies in July' by Sylvia Plath.  I like the disjointedness of it all, and the dark imagery of things like drugs,infidelity and depression in something as innocent as a poppy."
If you'd like to add to this, please do let us know.
 

Poem posted on Saturday 4th January 2020 (originally posted on Sunday 23rd July 2017).

Stateless

In some nissen-hut of my mind
I have a stacked bed-roll, wooden chair,
suitcase plastered with peeling labels,
and a cheap clock, measuring lethargic days.
I have no papers.  Sometimes I am offered
forged ones, at too high a price.
Now you come, promising real
identity cards.  Forgive me if till they arrive
I think too early to rejoice.

Ruth Bidgood
(From 'Not Without Homage', Christopher Davies, 1975).

Notes:
It always lights my fire when I come across another poem for this website, so you can imagine the warmth of receiving a poem of importance to a poet and written by a much loved poet!  And, what's more, a work which comes new to me.  In suggesting today's poem by Ruth Bidgood, Merryn Williams wrote, "...95 this month and still going strong.  [It is] a poem which I discovered at the beginning of my own poetry-writing career and which has always meant a lot to me".  One can see why.  Published over 40 years ago, this excellent example of poetic multum in parvo well stands the test of time.  'Stateless', I feel, crosses boundaries; it is not only placeless, but also timeless; restless too, blowing in the wind with a high pollen-count.  I, too, am already 'catching the smit'!  In fact the infection had set in by the time I came to the lines "...no papers.  Sometimes I am offered/forged ones, at too high a price.", on the first of a number of readings.  Who amongst us could not shape this hat to fit their own head at certain anxious times in our lives?  How better express resisted temptation?
I draw comfort from the sense that 'Stateless' speaks both from and to all ages, young and old, saying in effect that although we may feel isolated in our present predicament we are, in spirit, not alone. Though our problem may seem insurmountable, the only way out is through, with each of us set to sing a personal Vincero-o-o...! as we strive towards a common goal.  And, for myself, I might add - even if it runs into extra time.  Lovely poem, one to keep with the cologne in the handkerchief drawer or, better still, to carry by heart. Vinceremo-o-o...!
Thank you, Merryn, for sharing this treasured work from a poet you love. It is a great pleasure to be posting the poem on the very day Ruth Bidgood reaches the age of 95! 

We join Merryn in  wishing you a very happy birthday, Ruth!  May your pen be ever restless, your voice always strong.

In the intervening years since 'Not Without Homage', Ruth Bidgood has published around a dozen further titles, 'Land Music/Black Mountains', (Cinnamon Press, 2016) being, I believe, her most recent...but you never know...!

Merryn Williams is the founding editor of 'The Interpreter's House' magazine.  Her latest poetry collection, 'Letter to my Rival' came out from Shoestring Press in 2015.  Merryn is also the editor of 'STRIKE UP THE BAND', Poems for John Lucas at 80.  (Plas Gwyn Books, 2017).

Poem posted on Wednesday 1st January 2020 (originally posted on Thursday 20th July 2017).