Day: August 5, 2017

And shines from  beds of seas unknown and aged

The  white streaked evening clouds hung like draped  sheets
Momentous like a sign of  pain and rage
Now night has come embroidered with deceit

And I was filled with dangerous conceit
That I myself   created this great  stage
The  white streaked evening clouds hung like draped  sheets

The sun has drowned  itself in waters deep
And shines from  beds of seas unknown and aged
Now night has come embroidered with deceit

So all is monotone and thus discreet
The man by his wife’s grave  in silence prays
The  white streaked evening clouds hang like draped  sheets

There is no moon , this darkness to complete
And all the colours in the  house are greyed
Now night has come embroidered with deceit

Pride and envy have this love decayed
And therefore its offspring are long delayed
The  white streaked evening clouds hung like  marriage  sheets
Thus night has come embroidered with deceit

 

 

 

Holy Sonnets: Batter my heart, three-person’d God

Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you
As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;
That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend
Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.
I, like an usurp’d town to another due,
Labor to admit you, but oh, to no end;
Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,
But is captiv’d, and proves weak or untrue.
Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain,
But am betroth’d unto your enemy;
Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,
Take me to you, imprison me, for I,
Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,
Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

Eating poetry

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Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.
There is no happiness like mine.
I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees.
Her eyes are sad
and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone.
The light is dim.
The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll,
their blond legs burn like brush.
The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand.
When I get on my knees and lick her hand,
she screams.
I am a new man.
I snarl at her and bark.
I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
Mark Strand, “Eating Poetry” from Selected Poems. Copyright © 1979, 1980 by Mark Strand. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of R

And musing  all day sends us into a trance

A kidney  infection makes oldies seem crazed
Delirium ,visions and rushes of rage
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

A lack of agility  means we can’t dance
And musing  all day sends us into a trance
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

We seem to get shorter and fatter as well
I can’t ride my bike as my eyes are unwell
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

I’ve forgotten the topology  and shape of a  man
I’ve burned  the front table and eight non-stick pans
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

The doctor helped me up a when I lay on the couch
He pressed on my kidneys and I gave a shout
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

More  polite  than the English,  more white than the Scots
They come here to help us as we need them  lots
It’s wonderful being   so  old and gay
It’s wonderful being so old.

As poetic as Snowdon, as rhythmic as flow
The Welsh suffered so when they closed the old coal
Is it wonderful being so old and gay?
Is it wonderful being so old?

I don’t feel so well as mi Mam used to say
I can’t kneel down easy so now I can’t pray
Is it wonderful leading old fogeys astray?
Yeah, it’s wonderful being so old

Between the wars” it stopped.

Too old for cold, I stand, now against the hedge,
Watching the snowflakes in the glare of neon street lights.
Darkness has come early, and I think of country uplands and huddled sheep.
On Salisbury Plain, shepherds watched their flocks
Just as in Bethlehem two thousand years before,
And then, exactly when?
“Between the wars” it stopped. Now we know there is no “Between the wars”.
And who decided
To cull the sheep and shepherds and the space for kindness?
Now that same Plain still exists ,but banned
And closed to human-kind,
For bombs , not wombs
Nor for birth of lamb ,nor gypsy child, nor Saviour
Where would He go today

The worms and beetles care no more

Ante mortem, let us trust
For in the grave we turn to dust
Yet in life the poor are cursed
Our treatment post mortem is just.

The worms and beetles care no more
For the rich than for the poor.
They are happy to devour
Bankers, despots,every hour.

Ante mortem, greed does win
Houses built of gold and sin
But God, who lives in each within,
Cares no more for gold thann tin

If post mortem we are judged
Why does the rich person grudge?
Why do we refuse to budge
Up until the final nudge?

Throw away your heavy goods
Live like daisies by the woods.
Fear not hurricane nor floods
As daises grow even in mud.

More dependent on all power
We trust in madmen’s city towers.
Yet One told us to live like flowers…
And enjoy our life for an hour.

Perception is no privilege.
We each have the wits to judge.
See and note where you have smudged
What your creation would allege.

Post and ante, even now
The currents of our hearts allow…
The inner sea which has its flow
To take us where we need to go

The out of hours doctors

If you go down to Urgent Care, do not be surprised
The doctor’s from Siberia, and he has kindly eyes
Or sometimes they’re from Timbuctoo, and dark as Eden’s wise.
Yet if they flee from our madness, our weekend care may die.

I felt so bad, I thought it’s nerves, but no, my kidney’s  tried.
The panic and the nasty thoughts will soon be  overlaid
The Trimopethrin  will cure me; I will now survive
So no more visits no more stress , thank God I am alive.

The letter of Ted Hughes

https://www.lrb.co.uk/v29/n23/tom-paulin/entrepreneurship

 

“Hughes’s prose in his letters is always urgent and compulsive, but there are moments of tender observation, as in a letter to Edna Wholey in 1950, where he says he

heard a commotion in the hedge, and after a while, out trundled a hedgehog, merry as you like, and obviously out for a good time. I thought he might make a jolly companion for an evening so I brought him in. After a while I noticed he had disappeared and later heard a noise just like the sobbing of a little child, but very faint, and it continued for long enough. I traced it to a pile of boxes, and there was my comrade, with his nose pressed in a pool of tears, and his face all wet, and snivelling and snuffling his heart out. I could have kissed him for compassion. I don’t know why I’m so sympathetic towards hedgehogs.

Such moments are like dummy runs for poems, and they remind us of the animist tenderness in Hughes’s writing, a tenderness that plays against his celebration of feral power. It’s like the last line of a short early poem ‘Snowdrop’ – ‘Her pale head heavy as metal’ – where nature and human artifice come gently together.

Inevitably, though, it is biographical interest that these letters stimulate. We catch Hughes’s early undergraduate life at Cambridge in 1952, when, writing to his sister, Olwyn, he says that sometimes he thinks Cambridge is ‘wonderful’, at others ‘a ditch full of clear cold water where all the frogs have died. It is a bird without feathers; a purse without money; an old dry apple, or the gutters run pure claret.’ This sounds very like Lawrence, except for the balancing, divided attitude. Hughes, it’s clear, is the most important writer to emerge from English Nonconformism since Lawrence. Like him Hughes writes to the moment with a voracious intensity. Yet in an unusually assured comment on the Anglican Swift (he was only 22) he tells Olwyn that Swift is the ‘only stylist’. Swift’s excellence is a talent for ‘clarity simplicity and power’ (note the lack of commas as in ‘mud water fire and air’). Swift’s writing is ‘the bedrock from which every writer must start’.”

In praise of difficult poetry

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http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/culturebox/2007/04/in_praise_of_difficult_poetry.html

This time, let’s take up a serious issue: the stupid and defeatist idea that poetry, especially modern or contemporary poetry, ought to be less “difficult.” Should poets write in ways that are more genial, simple, and folksy, like the now-unreadable work of Edgar Guest (1888-1959)? Guest’s Heap o’ Livin’ sold more than a million copies (in the days when a million copies was a lot), and he had his own weekly radio show. But Guest’s popularity is history, while every day people still read the peculiar, demanding poems of Guest’s approximate contemporaries Marianne Moore and Wallace Stevens. People still read the poems of Moore and Stevens because they don’t wear out, because they surprise and entice us—and maybe, in part, because they are difficult?