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. 

I could write you reams
still unchronicled by this
old man on his dreams.

Accompanying watercolour portrait of me painted by my talented daughter Jeannie Clarke  - you can see more of her work here.

Haiku posted on Wednesday 10th March 2021 (originally posted on 5th September 2018).

On A Thin Gold Chain

Opals have storms in them, the legend goes:
They brim with water held in place by force
To stir the dawn, to liquefy the rose,
To make the sky flow.  They are cursed, of course:
Great beauty often is.  But they are blessed
As well, so long as she herself gives light
Who wears them.  Shoulders bare, you were the guest
At the garden table on a summer night
Whose face lent splendour to the candle flame
While that slight trinket echoing your eyes
Swam in its colours.  What a long, long game
We've played.  Quick now, before somebody dies:
Have you still got that pendant?  Can I see?
And have you kept it dark to punish me?

Clive James

Poem posted on Saturday 6th March 2021 (originally posted on 1st September 2018).

Kneeling

Moments of great calm,
Kneeling before an altar
Of wood in a stone church
In summer, waiting for the God
To speak; the air a staircase
For silence; the sun's light
Ringing me, as though I acted
A great role.  And the audiences
Still; all that close throng
Of spirits waiting, as I, 
For the message.
Prompt me, God;
But not yet.  When I speak,
Though it be you who speak
Through me, something is lost.
The meaning is in the waiting.

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

Notes:
Please see 'They' (posted Sat. 28th Oct 17)

Poem posted on Wednesday 3rd March 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 29th August 2018).

A Dutch Landscape for Isla McGuire

I was telling you what Fromentin said
about walking around inside the painting
when, half-blind, you pulled out a spyglass
and settled at an irrelevant distance.

Two weeks later when we said goodbye,
your gaze sought me inside myself
like someone peering through a telescope
across dark fields.

You saw your patients through their sleep
as if the body, now unframed, were space
unfolding into space, field in field.
And somewhere in the dark, the child.

How long the sky retains its brightness
when sky is so much of it.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Poem posted on Saturday 27th February 2021 (originally posted on 25th August 2018).

When You Are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

William Butler Yeats

Notes: ‘When you are old and grey and full of sleep' is the opening line of this fascinating poem of unrequited love, by W.B. Yeats. I cannot claim fully to 'understand' every line and nuance, but the poem's speaker is male and he's addressing the lady he loves. The alliterative phrase 'glad grace' refers to that time of life when one is at their- in this case, her - prime. He is saying that his love for her will last, but seems to suggest that her youth and beauty will fade away.  When he hides 'amid a crowd of stars', does he mean heaven? I'd ask you, dear reader, to write in with your own thoughts on this beautiful poem.

Poem posted on Wednesday 24th February 2021.

Our Love

Only our love hath no decay;
This no tomorrow hath, nor yesterday,
Running it never runs from us away,
But truly keeps  his first, last, everlasting day.

John Donne
-from 'The Anniversary'
 

Poem posted on Sunday 21st January 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 22nd August 2018).

Nimrod

Some marched, some sailed, some flew to join the war,
And not a few were brought home on their shields.
My heart is with those voiceless ones.  They were
The harvest of the broken-hearted fields,
And I drew fortune from their bitter lack
Of any luck.  Silent, my father stands
Before me now, as if he had come back,
While this lament, whose beauty never ends,
Not even with its final grandeur, casts
Its nets of melody to hold me still
Beneath his empty eyes.  How long it lasts,
That spell, though it is just a little while.
Then he is gone again.  The world returns:
Babylon, where the Tower of Babel burns.

Clive James

Poem posted on Wednesday 17th February 2021 (originally posted on Saturday 18th August 2018).

Kata

A dance between movement and space,
between image and imperative.
Each step an arrival
of the familiar within the unknown.
The gravity of form
and the mechanism of each gesture
as profound ad dissolved
as the body's memory of a stranger
who said nothing but in passing
met with you in stillness
wanting to go no faster than this.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Poem posted on Saturday 13th February 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 15th August 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: Housmen's poem is, I think, very cleverly written, in the true sense of the word clever. The poem's speaker sees the tree white with blossom and then white with snow. We might say this is the poetic equivalent of '2 for the price of 1'.  A lovely poem; I hope you like it.

Poem posted on Wednesday 10th February 2021.

Windows Is Shutting Down

Windows is shutting down, and grammar are
On their last leg.  So what am we to do?
A letter of complaint go just so far,
Proving the only one in step are you.

Better, perhaps, to simply let it goes.
A sentence have to be screwed pretty bad
Before they gets to where you doesnt knows
The meaning what it must of meant to had.

The meteor have it.  Extinction spread,
But evolution do not stop for that.
A mutant languages rise from the dead
And all them rules is suddenly old hat.

Too bad for we, us what has had so long
The best seat from the only game in town.
But there it am, and whom can say its wrong?
Those are the break.  Windows is shutting down.

Clive James

Poem posted on Saturday 6th February 2021 (originally posted on 11th August 2018).

Gallery

The stillness of paintings!
Move stealthily so
as not to disturb.

They are not asleep.
They keep watch on
our taste.  It is not they

are being looked at
but we by faces
which over the centuries

keep their repose.  Such eyes
they have as steadily,
while crowds come and

crowds go, burn on
with art's crocus flame
in their enamelled sockets.

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

Poem posted on Wednesday 3rd February 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 8th August 2018).

Cabin Baggage

My niece is heading here to stay with us.
Before she leaves home she takes careful stock
Of what she might not know again for years.
The berries (so she writes) have been brought in,
But she'll be gone before the peaches come.
On days of burning sun, the air is tinged
With salt and eucalyptus.  'Why am I
Leaving all this behind?  I feel a fool.'
But I can tell from how she writes things down
The distance will assist her memories
To take full form.  She travels to stay still.
I wish I'd been that smart before I left.
Instead, I have to dig deep for a trace
Of how the beach was red hot underfoot,
The green gold of the Christmas beetle's wing.

Clive James

Poem posted on Sunday 31st January 2021 (originally posted on Saturday 4th August 2018).

Indigo Bunting

A bird that can sing itself to earth as sky mirror
as if to prove there is no fall that is not reflection.
I will not - three notes, ultra coloratura.

On a clear day, life streams violet from black feathers.
Ice takes softer shape, black feathers.
I mean I will not speak of this - this colour - again.

Lavinia Greenlaw

Poem posted on Wednesday 27th January 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 1st August 2018).

By the Cam

Tonight I think this landscape could
   easily swallow me:  I'm smothering
in marshland, wet leaves, brown
   creepers, puddled in
rain and mud, one little gulp and

I'll be gone without a splutter:
   into the night, flood, November, rot and
river-scud.  Scoopwheeled for drainage.
   And by winter the fen will be brittle and
pure again, an odd, tough, red leaf frozen
   out of its year into the ice of the gutter.

Elaine Feinstein

Poem posted on Wednesday 20th January 2021 (originally posted on Saturday 28th July 2018).

Sowing Peas and Singing

Sowing peas and singing,
I heard a thrush chopping
the morning-brittle air into crotchets
and splintering semi-quavers
high above my own
falsetto baritone.
At the end of one cadenza
the thrush slid off its stave
to snatch a worm
one of us had awakened -
captive treble clef
in a pincered beak; replete
the thrush excreted, delicately,
perhaps to emphasize a point,
struck up aloft, regained its higher register
and, with a farewell encore,
stilled my sowing,
killed my singing.

Maurice Rutherford
(from 'Slipping The Tugs') 

Poem posted on Saturday 16th January 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 25th July 2018).

Coleridge

So great a storm I rose in the night,
my mind in the hills, a dream of lateness.
What was it in my countenance
that made them harness thirty horses?
When at last they pulled together
we travelled with such speed and force
the driver threw the reins aside:
'Everything that's for us is against us.
We're going nowhere tonight.'

Lavinia Greenlaw

Poem posted on Wednesday 13th January 2021 (originally posted on Saturday 21st July 2018).

I remember, I remember

I remember, I remember
The house were I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping through at morn:
He never came a wink too soon,
Nor brought too long a day,
But now, I often wish the night
Had borne my breath away!

I remember, I remember
The roses, red and white,
The violets and the lily-cups,
Those flowers made of light!
The lilacs where the robin built,
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday, -
The tree is living yet!

I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing;
My spirit flew in feathers then,
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow!

I remember, I remember
The first trees dark and high;
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky:
It was a childish ignorance,
Bot now 'tis little joy
To know I'm farther off from heav'n
Than when I was a boy.

Thomas Hood
(1799 - 1845)

Poem posted on Saturday 9th January 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 18th July 2018).

Full Moon

She was wearing coral taffeta trousers
Someone had brought her from Isfahan,
And a little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
And the coral-hafted feather fan,
But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,
And skipped in the pool of moon as she ran.

She cared not a rap for all the big planets,
For Betelgeuse or Aldebaran,
And all the big planets cared nothing for her,
That small impertinent charlatan,
But she climbed on a Kentish style in the moonlight,
And laughed at the sky through the sticks if her fan.

Vita Sackville-West
(1892 - 1962)

Poem posted on Wednesday 6th January 2021 (originally posted on Saturday 14th July 2018).

Dawn

Day's fondest moments are at dawn,
Refreshed by his long sleep, the light
Kisses the languid lips of Night
Ere she can rise and hasten on.
All glowing from his dreamless rest
He holds her closely to his breast,
And sees her dusky eyes grow dim,
Till, lo! she dies for love of him.

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
(1850 - 1919)

Poem posted on Saturday 2nd January 2021 (originally posted on Wednesday 11th July 2018).