Tree Hung with Fairy Lights
It's not additions but extensions give
A thing it's further self,
Changed from within:
Blossom's a sort of leaf, as nail is skin.
But decoration contradicts the tree.
I love you best (and know
It's love, not lust)
When clothed in nothing but your altered dust.
Norman McCaig.
I may have been guilty of playing to the gallery with that one :sneaky:Originally Posted by Hes
Can I have permission too? What a beautiful sad poem.
I loved the MacCaig poems Hes so as I was watching some waxwings on Winterwatch the other night here is another MacCaig poem which suits them nicely.
Waxwing
Waxwing, smart gentleman, gaudy bank manager
in your leafy bank, your swept-back crest
is the only thing about you that looks wind blown
Do you never face down-wind
or fly across the grain of a breeze?
Do you look with hauteur
when the grebe’s crest frays sideways
and the lapwing’s top-knot unravels?
I watch you choking down
plump, crimson berries – and the bank manager becomes
a lorry driver in a hurry
gobbling and gulping
in the wayside café of this branchy cotoneaster
So many colours being busy at once!
Such a dandified gluttony!
You flirt to another branch:
and the wax blob berry on your either side
winks among the clusters.
Norman MacCaig
Poetry causing problems again:
Click on the V for the poem, the forum censor prevents the posting on this thread (here is a sample)
V by Tony Harrison
This graveyard on the brink of Beeston Hill's
the place I may well rest if there's a spot
under the rose roots and the daffodils
by which dad dignified the family plot.
If buried ashes saw then I'd survey
the places I learned Latin, and learned Greek,
and left, the ground where Leeds United play
but disappoint their fans week after week,
which makes them lose their sense of self-esteem
and taking a short cut home through these graves here
they reassert the glory of their team
by spraying words on tombstones, pissed on beer.
This graveyard stands above a worked-out pit.
Subsidence makes the obelisks all list.
One leaning left's marked ****, one right's marked SHIT
sprayed by some peeved supporter who was pissed.
Last edited by XRunner; 16-01-2013 at 12:35 AM.
I hadn't realised the poem was that long, I must have only read snippets of it before. Obviously a lot of anger and pity, not just about the desecration of the graves but the lives of the people that did the desecration. I think I have posted his poem about his father's death before but here it is.
Turns
I thought it made me look more 'working class'
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!)
All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR) ,
his cap turned inside up beside his head,
smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folks might think
he wanted charity for dropping dead.
He never begged. For nowt! Death's reticence
crowns his life, and me, I'm opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.
Tony Harrison
Getting prepared for Burns night XRunner ?
That's lovely Alf! I really do like his bird poems and I'm desperate to see some waxwings. I've been looking out for them. Saw some last year on rosehips at the end of a friend's lane, such gorgeous exotic looking birds.
Apparently the berry crop in Scandinavia is a lot less this year so more Waxwings have been coming over to Britain to eat ours.
TRUE WAYS OF KNOWING
Not an ounce excessive, not an inch too little,
Our easy reciprocations. You let me know
The way a boat would feel, if it could feel,
The intimate support of water.
The news you bring me has been news forever,
So that I understand what a stone would say
If only a stone could speak. Is it sad a grassblade
Can't know how it is lovely?
Is it sad that you can't know, except by hearsay
(My gossiping failing words) that you are the way
A water is that can clench its palm and crumple
A boat's confiding timbers?
But that's excessive, and too little. Knowing
The way a circle would describe its roundness,
We touch two selves and feel, complete and gentle,
The intimate support of being.
The way that flight would feel a bird flying
(If it could feel) is the way a space that's in
A stone that's in water would know itself
If it had our way of knowing.
Norman MacCaig
Am Yisrael Chai
thats just uber cool..."the intimate support of water" such a visceral and elegant line ...nice one mossy
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
~ Mary Oliver ~
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