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The Messenger

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on January 11, 2012 by telescoper

The thing, he said, would come in the night at three
From the old churchyard on the hill below;
But crouching by an oak fire’s wholesome glow,
I tried to tell myself it could not be.

Surely, I mused, it was pleasantry
Devised by one who did not truly know
The Elder Sign, bequeathed from long ago,
That sets the fumbling forms of darkness free.

He had not meant it – no – but still I lit
Another lamp as starry Leo climbed
Out of the Seekonk, and a steeple chimed
Three – and the firelight faded, bit by bit.

Then at the door that cautious rattling came –
And the mad truth devoured me like a flame!

by Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890-1937).

 

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One Cigarette

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on January 6, 2012 by telescoper

No smoke without you, my fire.
After you left,
your cigarette glowed on in my ashtray
and sent up a long thread of such quiet grey
I smiled to wonder who would believe its signal
of so much love. One cigarette
in the non-smoker’s tray.
As the last spire
trembles up, a sudden draught
blows it winding into my face.
Is it smell, is it taste?
You are here again, and I am drunk on your tobacco lips.
Out with the light.
Let the smoke lie back in the dark.
Till I hear the very ash
sigh down among the flowers of brass
I’ll breathe, and long past midnight, your last kiss.

by Edwin Morgan (1920-2010)

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The Old Year

Posted in Poetry with tags , on January 1, 2012 by telescoper

The Old Year’s gone away
To nothingness and night:
We cannot find him all the day
Nor hear him in the night:
He left no footstep, mark or place
In either shade or sun:
The last year he’d a neighbour’s face,
In this he’s known as none.

All nothing everywhere:
Mists we on mornings see
Have more substance when they’re here
And more of form than he.
He was a friend by every fire,
In every cot and hall –
A guest to every heart’s desire,
And now he’s nought at all.

Old papers thrown away,
Old garments cast aside,
The talk of yesterday,
All things identified;
But times once torn away
No voices can recall:
The eve of New Year’s Day
Left the Old Year lost to all.

by John Clare (1793-1864).

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Parliament Hill Fields

Posted in Poetry with tags , on December 30, 2011 by telescoper

On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
The round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous;
Nobody can tell what I lack.

Gulls have threaded the river’s mud bed back
To this crest of grass.  Inland, they argue,
Settling and stirring like blown paper
Or the hands of an invalid.  The wan
Sun manages to strike such tin glints

From the linked ponds that my eyes wince
And brim; the city melts like sugar.
A crocodile of small girls
Knotting and stopping, ill-assorted, in blue uniforms,
Opens to swallow me.  I’m a stone, a stick,

One child drops a barrette of pink plastic;
None of them seem to notice.
Their shrill, gravelly gossip’s funneled off.
Now silence after silence offers itself.
The wind stops my breath like a bandage.

Southward, over Kentish Town, an ashen smudge
Swaddles roof and tree.
It could be a snowfield or a cloudbank.
I suppose it’s pointless to think of you at all.
Already your doll grip lets go.

The tumulus, even at noon, guards its black shadow:
You know me less constant,
Ghost of a leaf, ghost of a bird.
I circle the writhen trees.  I am too happy.
These faithful dark-boughed cypresses

Brood, rooted in their heaped losses.
Your cry fades like the cry of a gnat.
I lose sight of you on your blind journey,
While the heath grass glitters and the spindling rivulets
Unspool and spend themselves.  My mind runs with them,

Pooling in heel-prints, fumbling pebble and stem.
The day empties its images
Like a cup or a room.  The moon’s crook whitens,
Thin as the skin seaming a scar.
Now, on the nursery wall,

The blue night plants, the little pale blue hill
In your sister’s birthday picture start to glow.
The orange pompons, the Egyptian papyrus
Light up.  Each rabbit-eared
Blue shrub behind the glass

Exhales an indigo nimbus,
A sort of cellophane balloon.
The old dregs, the old difficulties take me to wife.
Gulls stiffen to their chill vigil in the drafty half-light;
I enter the lit house.

by Silvia Plath (1931-1963)

Here is (part of) the poet’s own introduction to this intensely moving poem, which was written shortly after Sylvia Plath suffered a miscarriage in 1961:

I imagine the landscape of Parliament Hill Fields in London seen by a person overwhelmed by an emotion so powerful as to colour and distort  the scenery. The speaker here is caught between the old and the new year, between the grief caused by the loss of a child, and the joy aroused by the knowledge of an only child safe at home. Gradually the  first images of blankness and absence give way to images of convalescence and healing as the woman turns, a bit stiffly  and with difficulty, from her sense of bereavement to the vital and demanding part of her world which still survives.

And here is Sylvia Plath reading it:

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Sea Christmas

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on December 21, 2011 by telescoper

This is the wrong Christmas
in the right place: mistletoe
water there is no kissing
under; the soused holly

of the wrack, and birds coming
to the bird-table with
no red on their breast. All
night it has snowed

foam on the splintering
beaches, but the dawn-
wind carries it away, load
after load, and look,

the sand at the year’s
solstice is young flesh
on a green crib, product
of an immaculate conception.

by R.S. Thomas (1913-2000).

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December Blues

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on December 20, 2011 by telescoper

At the bad time, nothing betrays outwardly the harsh findings,
The studies and hospital records. Carols play.

Sitting upright in the transit system, the widow-like women
Wait, hands folded in their laps, as monumental as bread.

In the shopping center lots, lights mounted on cold standards
Tower and stir, condensing the blue vapour

Of the stars; between the rows of cars people in coats walk
Bundling packages in their arms or holding the hands of children.

Across the highway, where a town thickens by the tracks
With stores open late and creches in front of the churches,

Even in the bars a businesslike set of the face keeps off
The nostalgic pitfall of the carols, tugging. In bed,

How low and still the people lie, some awake, holding the carols
Consciously at bay, Oh Little Town, enveloped in unease.

by Robert Pinsky (b. 1940)

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Before an Examination

Posted in Poetry with tags , on December 12, 2011 by telescoper

The little letters dance across the page,
Flaunt and retire, and trick the tired eyes;
Sick of the strain, the glaring light, I rise
Yawning and stretching, full of empty rage
At the dull maunderings of a long dead sage,
Fling up the windows, fling aside his lies;
Choosing to breathe, not stifle and be wise,
And let the air pour in upon my cage.

The breeze blows cool and there are stars and stars
Beyond the dark, soft masses of the elms
That whisper things in windy tones and light.
They seem to wheel for dim, celestial wars;
And I — I hear the clash of silver helms
Ring icy-clear from the far deeps of night.

by Stephen Vincent Benét (1898-1943)

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Doomsday

Posted in Poetry with tags , , on December 8, 2011 by telescoper

The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans
Atop the broken universal clock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Our painted stages fall apart by scenes
While all the actors halt in mortal shock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

Streets crack through in havoc-split ravines
As the doomstruck city crumbles block by block:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Fractured glass flies down in smithereens;
Our lucky relics have been put in hock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans.

The monkey’s wrench has blasted all machines;
We never thought to hear the holy cock:
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

Too late to ask if end was worth the means,
Too late to calculate the toppling stock:
The idiot bird leaps out and drunken leans,
The hour is crowed in lunatic thirteens.

by Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)

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R.I.P. Christopher Logue (1926-2011)

Posted in Jazz, Poetry with tags , , , on December 6, 2011 by telescoper

During my enforced separation from the internet I heard the sad news of the death of the poet and political activist Christopher Logue. I therefore decided to repost the following poems, which first appeared on this blog on 3rd May 2009. Logue himself performed them with a Jazz group led by the drummer Tony Kinsey and I first heard them so long ago I can’t remember when. Anyway I’m immensely proud that my blog post made it into the references on Logue’s wikipedia page – and, before you ask, no I didn’t put it there myself!

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I think these are beautiful poems made even more effective by the musical setting. In fact they are loose re-workings of some of the famous love poems of Pablo Neruda. Logue moved far away from the Neruda’s originals, but put them into impressionistic free verse, which he reads in his plummy English accent, while the band provides appropriate backing for the sentiments of the poetry as well as providing improvised passages in between the verses.

You can listen to the record Red Bird here.

Now read the lyrics:

1.

Lithe girl, brown girl
Sun that makes apples, stiffens the wheat
Made your body a joy
Tongue like a red bird dancing on ivory
To stretch your arm
Sun grabs at your hair
Like water was falling

Tantalize the sun if you dare
It will leave shadows that match you
Everywhere
Lithe girl, brown girl
Nothing draws me towards you
The heat within you beats me home
Like the sun at high noon

Knowing these things
Perhaps through
Knowing these things
I seek you out
Listening for your voice
For the brush of your arms against wheat
For your step among poppies grown underwater
Lithe girl, brown girl

2.

Steep gloom among pine trees
Waves’ surge breaking
Slow lights that interweave
A single bell

As the day’s end falls into your eyes
The earth starts singing in your body
As the waves sing in a white shell
And the rivers sing within you
And I grow outwards on them
As you direct them
Whither you make them run

I follow for you like a hare
Running reared upright to the hunter’s drum
You turn about me like a belt of clouds
the silence, though it is stupid
Mocks the hours I lay
Troubled by…… nothing

Your arms – translucent stones wherein I lie
Exhausted
And future kisses
Die
Lust
Your mysterious voice
Folds close echoes
That shift throughout the night
Much as the wind
Which moves darkly over the profitable fields
Folds down the wheat
From all its height

3.

In the hot depth of summer
The morning is close, storm-filled
Clouds shift –
White rags waving goodbye
Shaken by the frantic wind as it goes and
As it goes
The wind throbs over us
Love-making silenced

Among the trees like a tongue singing
A warning or just singing the wind throbs
And the quick sparrow’s flight is slapped by the wind
Swift thief destructive as waves
Weightless without form
Struck through and through with flame
Which breaks
Soughing its strength out
At the gates of the enormous, silent, summer wind

4.

That you may hear me
My words narrow occasionally
Like gull-tracks in the sand

Or I let them become
Tuneful beads
Mixed with the sound

Of a drunk hawk’s bell
Flick me your wrists…..
Soft as grape skin – yes

Softer than grapeskin I make them
Which is a kind of treachery against the world

Yet
You who clamber
Over all the desolations of mine
Gentle as ivy
Eat the words’ meaning

Before you came to me
Words were all that you now occupy
And now they’re no more these words
Than ever they knew of my sadness

Yet
Sometimes
Force and dead anguish still drags them
And yes

Malevolent dreams still betimes
Overwhelm them and then

In my bruised voice
You hear other bruised voices
Old agues crying out of old mouths

Do not be angry with me
Lest the wave of that anguish
Drown me again

Even as I sit
Threading a collar of beads for your hands
Softer than grape skin
Hung with a drunk hawk’s bell

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Stone Thoughts

Posted in Poetry with tags , on December 1, 2011 by telescoper

I speak cold silent words a stone might speak
If it had words or consciousness,
Watching December moonlight on the mountain peak,
Relieved of mortal hungers, the whole mess
Of needs, desires, ambitions, wishes, hopes.
This stillness in me knows the sky’s abyss,
Reflected by blank snow along bare slopes,
If it had words or consciousness,
Would echo what a thinking stone might say
To praise oblivion words can’t possess
As inorganic muteness goes its way.
There’s no serenity without the thought serene,
Owl-flight without spread wings, honed eyes, hooked beak,
Absence without the meaning absence means.
To rescue bleakness from the bleak,
I speak cold silent words a stone might speak.

by Robert Pack (b. 1929)

 

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