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Thread: Today's poet

  1. #13401
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    I have written a poem about my experiences living in a cave close to the Tibetan border.

    Wifi signal is poor, so please bare with me if I don't manage to get it all typed out before signal goes.

    Title: Pancakes - Tibetan Border Cave. (R.Shlong 2014)


    • 100g plain flour
    • 2 eggs
    • 300ml semi-skimmed milk
    • 1 tbsp sunflower oil or vegetable, plus extra for frying
    • pinch salt

  2. #13402
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    November

    This is the treacherous month when autumn days
    With summer’s voice come bearing summer’s gifts.
    Beguiled, the pale down-trodden aster lifts
    Her head and blooms again. The soft, warm haze
    Makes moist once more the sere and dusty ways,
    And, creeping through where dead leaves lie in drifts,
    The violet returns. Snow noiseless sifts
    Ere night, an icy shroud, which morning’s rays
    Will idly shine upon and slowly melt,
    Too late to bid the violet live again.
    The treachery, at last, too late, is plain;
    Bare are the places where the sweet flowers dwelt.
    What joy sufficient hath November felt?
    What profit from the violet’s day of pain?

    Helen Hunt Jackson

  3. #13403
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    Dämmerung

    In later life I retired from poetry,
    ploughed the profits
    into a family restaurant
    in the town of Holzminden, in lower Saxony.

    It was small and traditional:
    dark wood panelling, deer antlers,
    linen tablecloths and red candles,
    one beer tap on the bar

    and a dish of the day, usually
    Bauernschnitzel. Weekends were busy,
    pensioners wanting the set meal, though
    year on year takings were falling.

    Some nights the old gang came in—
    Jackie, Max, Lavinia,
    Mike not looking at all himself,
    and I’d close the kitchen,

    hang up my striped apron,
    take a bottle of peach schnapps
    from the top shelf and say,
    “Mind if I join you?”

    “Are we dead yet?” someone would ask.
    Then with a plastic toothpick
    I’d draw blood from my little finger
    to prove we were still among the living.

    From the veranda we’d breathe new scents
    from the perfume distillery over the river,
    or watch the skyline
    for the nuclear twilight.

    Simon Armitage

  4. #13404
    Moderator Mossdog's Avatar
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    Quote Originally Posted by Alf View Post
    November

    This is the treacherous month when autumn days
    With summer’s voice come bearing summer’s gifts.
    Beguiled, the pale down-trodden aster lifts
    Her head and blooms again. The soft, warm haze
    Makes moist once more the sere and dusty ways,
    And, creeping through where dead leaves lie in drifts,
    The violet returns. Snow noiseless sifts
    Ere night, an icy shroud, which morning’s rays
    Will idly shine upon and slowly melt,
    Too late to bid the violet live again
    .
    The treachery, at last, too late, is plain;
    Bare are the places where the sweet flowers dwelt.
    What joy sufficient hath November felt?
    What profit from the violet’s day of pain?

    Helen Hunt Jackson
    That's really wonderful Alf. Particularly apt given this long and sauntering autumn.
    Am Yisrael Chai

  5. #13405
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    I was thumbing through 'The Pleasures of the Damned: Selected poems of Charles Bukowski' in Waterstones today while waiting to meet my son and his girlfriend for some lunch. I will have to drop a hint about it for a crimbo present

    Trashcan Lives

    the wind blows hard tonight
    and it's a cold wind
    and I think about
    the boys on the row.
    I hope some of them have a bottle of
    red.
    it's when you're on the row
    that you notice that
    everything
    is owned
    and that there are locks on
    everything.
    this is the way a democracy
    works:
    you get what you can,
    try to keep that
    and add to it
    if possible.
    this is the way a dictatorship
    works too
    only they either enslave or
    destroy their
    derelicts.
    we just forgot ours.
    in either case
    it's a hard
    cold
    wind.

    Charles Bukowski

  6. #13406
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    millionaires

    you
    no faces
    no faces
    at all
    laughing at nothing—
    let me tell you
    I have drunk in skid row rooms with
    imbecile winos
    whose cause was better
    whose eyes still held some light
    whose voices retained some sensibility,
    and when the morning came
    we were sick but not ill,
    poor but not deluded,
    and we stretched in our beds and rose
    in the late afternoons
    like millionaires.

    Charles Bukowski

  7. #13407
    Moderator Mossdog's Avatar
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    'The Catch'

    For you, the catch wasn't something caught:
    not word or contender, attention or fire.
    Not the almost-missed train, or the sort
    of wave surfers might wait an entire
    lifetime for. Not the promise that leaves
    the old man adrift for days, his boat
    creaking, miles offshore. Nor what cleaves
    the heart in two, that left your throat
    parched and mute for taking pill
    after yellow-green pill, the black-blue
    taste the price you paid to kill
    the two-parts sadness to one-part anger.
    No. The catch was what you could never
    let go. It's what you carried, and still do.

    Ben Wilkinson
    Am Yisrael Chai

  8. #13408
    Moderator Mossdog's Avatar
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    The 'Darkling Thrush'

    I leant upon a coppice gate
    When Frost was spectre-grey,
    And Winter's dregs made desolate
    The weakening eye of day.
    The tangled bine-stems scored the sky
    Like strings of broken lyres,
    And all mankind that haunted nigh
    Had sought their household fires.

    The land's sharp features seemed to be
    The Century's corpse outleant,
    His crypt the cloudy canopy,
    The wind his death-lament.
    The ancient pulse of germ and birth
    Was shrunken hard and dry,
    And every spirit upon earth
    Seemed fervourless as I.

    At once a voice arose among
    The bleak twigs overhead
    In a full-hearted evensong
    Of joy illimited;
    An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
    In blast-beruffled plume,
    Had chosen thus to fling his soul
    Upon the growing gloom.

    So little cause for carolings
    Of such ecstatic sound
    Was written on terrestrial things
    Afar or nigh around,
    That I could think there trembled through
    His happy good-night air
    Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
    And I was unaware.

    Thomas Hardy
    Am Yisrael Chai

  9. #13409
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    Quote Originally Posted by Mossdog View Post
    'The Catch'

    For you, the catch wasn't something caught:
    not word or contender, attention or fire.
    Not the almost-missed train, or the sort
    of wave surfers might wait an entire
    lifetime for. Not the promise that leaves
    the old man adrift for days, his boat
    creaking, miles offshore. Nor what cleaves
    the heart in two, that left your throat
    parched and mute for taking pill
    after yellow-green pill, the black-blue
    taste the price you paid to kill
    the two-parts sadness to one-part anger.
    No. The catch was what you could never
    let go. It's what you carried, and still do.

    Ben Wilkinson
    Very good that Mossy. Ben Wilkinson is a very talented young poet.

  10. #13410
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    The Puzzled Game-Birds

    They are not those who used to feed us
    When we were young--they cannot be -
    These shapes that now bereave and bleed us?
    They are not those who used to feed us, -
    For would they not fair terms concede us?
    - If hearts can house such treachery
    They are not those who used to feed us
    When we were young--they cannot be!

    Thomas Hardy

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