Today's poet

[Alf]

The Red and the Black

We sat up late, talking -
thinking of the screams of the tortured
and the last silence of starving children,
seeing the faces of bigots and murderers.

Then sleep.

And there was the morning, smiling
in the dance of everything. The collared doves
guzzled the Rowan berries and the sea
washed in, so gently, so tenderly.
Our neighbours greeted us
with humour and friendliness.

World why do you do this to us,
giving us the poison with one hand
and the bread of life with another?

And reason sits helpless at its desk,
adding accounts that never balance,
finding no excuse for anything.

Norman MacCaig

[Mossdog]

The Fist


The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Derek Walcott

There's something rather sad and desperate in those lines Alf. Derek was probably having more than his fair share of heartache I'm guessing.

[Mossdog]

Someone’s Coming Back

Now that the summer has emptied
and laughter’s warned against possessions
and the swans have drifted from the rivers,
like one coming back from a long journey
no longer certain of his country
or of its tangled past and sorrows,
I am wanting to return to you.

When love affairs can no longer be distinguished from song
and the warm petals drop without regret,
and our pasts are hung in a dream of ruins,
I am wanting to come near to you.

For now the lark’s song has grown visible
and all that was dark is ever possible,
and the morning grabs me by the heart and screams,
'O taste me! Taste me please!'

And so I taste. And the tongue is nude,
and eyes awake; the clear blood hums
a tune to which the world might dance;
and love which often lived in vaguer forms
bubbles up through sorrow and laughing, screams:
'Oh taste me! Taste me please!'

Brian Patten

[Alf]

Someone’s Coming Back

Now that the summer has emptied
and laughter’s warned against possessions
and the swans have drifted from the rivers,
like one coming back from a long journey
no longer certain of his country
or of its tangled past and sorrows,
I am wanting to return to you.

When love affairs can no longer be distinguished from song
and the warm petals drop without regret,
and our pasts are hung in a dream of ruins,
I am wanting to come near to you.

For now the lark’s song has grown visible
and all that was dark is ever possible,
and the morning grabs me by the heart and screams,
'O taste me! Taste me please!'

And so I taste. And the tongue is nude,
and eyes awake; the clear blood hums
a tune to which the world might dance;
and love which often lived in vaguer forms
bubbles up through sorrow and laughing, screams:
'Oh taste me! Taste me please!'

Brian Patten

I enjoyed that one Mossy. Brian Patten is very popular on the thread at the moment.

[Alf]

I have been reading quite a bit of Norman MacCaig recently and this one must have been written with Fellrunners in mind


Descent from the Green Corrie

The climb's all right, it's the descent that kills you.
Knees become fists that don't know how to clench
And thighs are strings in parallel.
Gravity's still your enemy - it drills you
With your own backbone - its love is all to wrench
You down on screes or boggy asphodel

And the elation that for a moment fills you
Beside the misty cairn’s that lesser thing
A memory of it. Its not
The punishing climb, it’s the descent that kills you
However sweetly the valley thrushes sing
And shadows darken with the peace they’ve brought.

Norman MacCaig

[Hes]

Ooo, thanks Alf, Norman MacCaig is a favourite of mine! (I enjoyed Mossy's Patten too)

Stolly and I found a kingfisher's perch on a run recently and I've been back several times and each time I've caught it darting up the river, bright as an Amazonian butterfly. Stunning birds!

Kingfisher

That kingfisher jewelling upstream
seems to leave a streak of itself
in the bright air. The trees
are all the better for its passing.

It's not a mineral eater, though it looks it.
It doesn't nip nicks out of the edges
of rainbows. - It dives
into the burly water, then, perched
on a Japanese bough, gulps
into its own incandescence
a wisp of minnow, a warrior stickleback.
- Or it vanishes into its burrow, resplendent
Samurai, returning home
to his stinking slum


By Norman MacCaig

[freckle]

The Fist


The fist clenched round my heart
loosens a little, and I gasp
brightness; but it tightens
again. When have I ever not loved
the pain of love? But this has moved

past love to mania. This has the strong
clench of the madman, this is
gripping the ledge of unreason, before
plunging howling into the abyss.

Hold hard then, heart. This way at least you live.

Derek Walcott

Great choice Alf one of my favourite walcott poems :-)

[freckle]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXaRT8CXmGE&feature=related

[Alf]

Treeless landscape


Except in grooves of streams, armpits of hills,
Here’s a bald, bare land, weathered half away.
It pokes its bony blades clean through its skin
And chucks the light up from grey knucklebones,
Tattering the eye, that’s teased with flowers and stones.

Something to do with time has all to do
With shape and size. The million shapes of time,
Its millions of appearances are the true
Mountain and moor and tingling water drop
That runs and hangs and shakes time towards a stop.

Prowling like cats on levels of the air
These buzzards mew, or pounce: one vole the less,
One alteration more in time, or space.
But nothing’s happened, all is in control
Unless you are the buzzard or the vole.

Yet, all the same, it’s weathered half away.
Time’s no procrastinator. The land thrusts
A rotting elbow up. It makes a place
By sinking into it, and buzzards fly
To be a buzzard and create a sky.


Norman MacCaig

[Alf]

Can't put down my book of Norman MacCaig poems at the moment. He has been described as the opposite of Ted Hughes in the ways he describes animals and birds but I like both their approaches to the subject.

Greenshank

His single note - one can't help calling it
piping, one can't help
calling it plaintive - slides droopingly down
no more than a semitone, but is filled
with an octave of loneliness, with the whole sad scale
of desolation.

He won't leave us. He keeps flying
fifty yards and perching
on a rock or a small hummock,
drawing attention to himself.
Then he calls and calls
and flies on again
in a flight
roundshouldered but dashing,
skulking yet bold.

Cuckoo, phoenix, nightingale,
you are no truer emblems
than this bird is.
He is the melancholy that flies
in the weathers of my mind,
He is the loneliness that calls to me there
in a semitone
of desolate octaves.

Norman MacCaig