I’m posting this cheery little poem in honour of England’s batting performance in the first innings against Pakistan this morning..
When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse
to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like the measle-pox:
when death comes
like an iceberg between the shoulder blades,
I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering
what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness?
And therefore I look upon everything
as a brotherhood and a sisterhood,
and I look upon time as no more than an idea,
and I consider eternity as another possibility,
and I think of each life as a flower, as common
as a field daisy, and as singular,
and each name a comfortable music in the mouth,
tending, as all music does, toward silence,
and each body a lion of courage, and something
precious to the earth.
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.
by Mary Oliver (b. 1935)
Follow @telescoperThe 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).
Follow @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)
Follow @telescoperThis 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).
Follow @telescoperAt 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)
Follow @telescoperThe 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)
Follow @telescoperThe 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)
Follow @telescoperDuring 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!
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
All of a sudden it’s November and the arrival of the new month has found me in the mood for a bit of Sylvia Plath. This is November Graveyard, read by the poet herself in that uniquely unsettling voice of hers. Sylvia Plath was born in America but eventually moved to England after she married the poet Ted Hughes. Her accent sounds to me neither American nor British. Her diction, as polished as cut glass but also as brittle, is that of a person striving to re-invent herself. And failing. Her voice sounds to me redolent with alienation, and its coldness gives this reading of this bleak poem an even harder edge than the text alone. Plath took her own life in 1963 and was subsequently buried in the same graveyard referred to in the poem, in Heptonstall, Yorkshire.
The text, as read, differs from some published versions:
The scene stands stubborn: skinflint trees
Hoard last leaves, won’t mourn, wear sackcloth, or turn
To elegiac dryads, and dour grass
Guards the hard-hearted emerald of its grassiness
However the grandiloquent mind may scorn
Such poverty. So no dead men’s cries
Flower forget-me-nots between the stone
Paving this grave ground. Here’s honest rot
To unpick the elaborate heart, pare bone
Free of the fictive vein. When one stark skeleton
Bulks real, all saints’ tongues fall quiet:
Flies watch no resurrections in the sun.
At the essential landscape stare, stare
Till your eyes foist a vision dazzling on the wind:
Whatever lost ghosts flare,
Damned, howling in their shrouds across the moor
Rave on the leash of the starving mind
Which peoples the bare room, the blank, untenanted air.
In the Dark 