Today's poet

[freckle]

this is quite something Mossdog, I like the safe sounds too...


Safe Sounds

You like safe sounds:
the dogs lapping at their bowls;
the pop of a cork on a bottle of plonk
as your mother cooks;
the Match of the Day theme tune
and Doctor Who-oo-oo.

Safe sounds:
your name called, two happy syllables
from the bottom to the top of the house;
your daft ring tone; the low gargle
of hot water in bubbles. Half asleep
in the drifting boat of your bed,
you like to hear the big trees
sound like the sea instead.

Carol Ann Duffy[/QUOTE]

[Alf]

Tree

A priest from another land
Fulminated
Against heather, stones and wild water.

Excommunicated the clouds
Damned the wind
Cast the bog pools into outer darkness
Smote the horizons
With the jawbone of emptiness

Till he ran out of breath —

In that teetering moment
Of lungs empty
When only his eye-water protected him
He felt
Heaven and earth moving.

And words left him.
Mind left him. God left him.

Transfigured, bowed —
The lightening conductor
Of a maiming glimpse — the new prophet

Grasped a cry

Ted Hughes

[OneOffPoet]

The Truth of the Matter


I’m not here for a bit of fun
This is not a training run
Not a single thing wrong
My ankles are strong
Fully fit
Ready for it
Start quickly
Run til I’m sickly
And on no account will I just enjoy this one.

"I'll just enjoy this one....". Brilliant. Right up there with, "I'll just get round". Great stuff

[Alf]

The Sluttiest Sheep in England

that never
Get their back ends docked. Who
Doctors their wormy coughs? Maggots
Bring them down in quarry dead ends
And the fluke reigns.

They get by
On the hill subsidy. Splash-black faces
Of psychotic mashams, possessed
By their demonic agates. They clatter
Over worthless moraines, tossing
Their ancient Briton draggle-tassel sheepskins
Or pose, in the rain-smoke, like warriors -

Eyes of the first water
Stare from perfunctory near-bald
Skulls of iguana
Like eyes trapped in helmets -

This lightning-broken huddle of summits
This god-of-what-nobody-wants
In his magnetic heaven
Has sent his angels to stare at you
In the likeness of beggars.

Ted Hughes

[freckle]

Mad Girl's Love Song
Slyvia Plath


"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

[Alf]

Mad Girl's Love Song
Slyvia Plath


"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

That made a nice counterpoint to the Hughes poem freckle

[Alf]

I was reading 'Remains of Elmet' again the other night. The first time I read the book I had hardly ever visited the Calder Valley but since then I know most of the area intimately from running in and around it.

Me and Heptonstall have a lot in common

Heptonstall

- old man
Of the hills, propped out for air
On his wet bench -
Lets his memories leak.

He no longer calls the time of day
Across to Stoodley, soured on that opposite ridge.
And Stoodley has turned his back
On the Museum silence

He ignores Blackstone Edge -
A huddle of wet stones and damp smokes
Decrepit under sunsets.

He no longer asks
Whether Pecket under the East Wind
Is still living.

He raises no hand
Towards Hathershelf. He knows
The day has passed
For reunion with ancestors.

He knows
Midgley will never return.

The mantel clock ticks in the lonely parlour
On the heights road, where the face
Blue with arthritic stasis
And heart good for nothing now
Lies deep in the chair-back, angled
From the window-skylines,

Letting time moan its amnesia
Through the telegraph wires

As the fragments
Of the broken circle of the hills
Drift apart.

Ted Hughes

[Alf]

Sylvia's turn again.....

The Rabbit Catcher

It was a place of force—
The wind gagging my mouth with my own blown hair,
Tearing off my voice, and the sea
Blinding me with its lights, the lives of the dead
Unreeling in it, spreading like oil.

I tasted the malignity of the gorse,
Its black spikes,
The extreme unction of its yellow candle-flowers.
They had an efficiency, a great beauty,
And were extravagant, like torture.

There was only one place to get to.
Simmering, perfumed,
The paths narrowed into the hollow.
And the snares almost effaced themselves—
Zeros, shutting on nothing,

Set close, like birth pangs.
The absence of shrieks
Made a hole in the hot day, a vacancy.
The glassy light was a clear wall,
The thickets quiet.

I felt a still busyness, an intent.
I felt hands round a tea mug, dull, blunt,
Ringing the white china.
How they awaited him, those little deaths!
They waited like sweethearts. They excited him.

And we, too, had a relationship—
Tight wires between us,
Pegs too deep to uproot, and a mind like a ring
Sliding shut on some quick thing,
The constriction killing me also.

Sylvia Plath

[Alf]

Survivors


No doubt they'll soon get well; the shock and strain
Have caused their stammering, disconnected talk.
Of course they're "longing to go out again,"--
These boys with old, scared faces, learning to walk,
They'll soon forget their haunted nights; their cowed
Subjection to the ghosts of friends who died,--
Their dreams that drip with murder; and they'll be proud
Of glorious war that shatter'd all their pride ...
Men who went out to battle, grim and glad;
Children, with eyes that hate you, broken and mad.

Siegfried Sassoon

CRAIGLOCKART,
Oct. 1917.

[Alf]

Goodbye (1942)

So we must say Goodbye, my darling,
And go, as lovers go, for ever;
Tonight remains, to pack and fix on labels
And make an end of lying down together.

I put a final shilling in the gas,
And watch you slip your dress below your knees
And lie so still I hear your rustling comb
Modulate the autumn in the trees.

And all the countless things I shall remember
Lay mummy-cloths of silence round my head;
I fill the carafe with a drink of water;
You say ‘We paid a guinea for this bed,’

And then, ‘We’ll leave some gas, a little warmth
For the next resident, and these dry flowers,’
And turn your face away, afraid to speak
The big word, that Eternity is ours.

Your kisses close my eyes and yet you stare
As though god struck a child with nameless fears;
Perhaps the water glitters and discloses
Time’s chalice and its limpid useless tears.

Everything we renounce except our selves;
Selfishness is the last of all to go;
Our sighs are exhalations of the earth,
Our footprints leave a track across the snow.

We made the universe to be our home,
Our nostrils took the wind to be our breath,
Our hearts are massive towers of delight,
We stride across the seven seas of death.

Yet when all’s done you’ll keep the emerald
I placed upon your finger in the street;
And I will keep the patches that you sewed
On my old battledress tonight, my sweet.

Alun Lewis