Barry Tebb Poems
A collection of select Barry Tebb famous poems that were written by Barry Tebb or written about the poet by other famous poets. PoetrySoup is a comprehensive educational resource of the greatest poems and poets on history.
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by
Barry Tebb
Any poets about or bored muses fancying a day out?
Rainy, windy, cold Leeds City Station
Half-way through its slow chaotic transformation
Contractors’ morning break, overalls, hard hats and harness
Flood McDonalds where I sip my tea and try to translate Val?ry.
London has everything except my bardic inspiration
I’ve only to step off the coach in Leeds and it whistles
Its bravuras down every wind,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
It brings to mind Swift leaving a fortune to Dublin
‘For the founding of a lunatic asylum - no place needs it more’.
The breathing beauty of the moors and cheap accommodation
Drew me but the total barbarity of the town stopped me from
Writing a single line: from the hideous facade of its railway
Station - Betjeman must have been drunk or mad...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
THE KINGDOM OF MY HEART
1
The halcyon settled on the Aire of our days
Kingfisher-blue it broke my heart in two
Shall I forget you? Shall I forget you?
I am the mad poet first love
You never got over
You are my blue-eyed
Madonna virgin bride
I shall carve ‘MG loves BT’
On the bark of every
Wind-bent tree in
East End Park
2
The park itself will blossom
And...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Arriving for a reading an hour too early:
Ruefully, the general manager stopped putting out the chairs.
“You don’t get any help these days. I have
To sort out everything from furniture to faxes.
Why not wander round the park? There are ducks
And benches where you can sit and watch.”
I realized it was going to be a hungry evening
With not even a packet...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Why is it that in dreams I have visited -
As teacher or pupil - almost every college and school
In our once so green and pleasant land?
Hardly a subject from art to anthropology I have not
In dream seminar or floating spinning classroom
Studied or tried my prentice hand at, or learned
At the sandalled feet of some guru; as this minute
I returned...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I
Through my bedroom window
The coal carts jolted over the cobbles
A slow heavy rhythm full,
Light and fast returning empty.
The coal office manager was a dwarf
With sixty year old skin
On a ten year old’s body and
Hornrims on a wizened wizard’s face.
The enormous shire horses neighed
In warning if you went near,
Their polished brasses gleaming,
Their worn blinkers waxed;
When they brought in lorries
A two...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Let us, this December night, leave the ring
Of heat, the lapping flames around the fire’s heart,
Move with bodies tensed against the light
Towards the moon’s pull and the cloud’s hand.
Arms of angels hold us, lend our bodies
Height of stars and the planets’ whirl,
Grant us sufficiency of light so we may enter
The twisting lanes to lost villages.
So we may stare in...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
This is one spring you will not see.
The fifty roses of your spray
Smelt soft across that February day
Where trees, heavy as only crematoria
Can bear, sloped down the fallen banks
To where we waited in the chapel, me
Clutching Father Kevin’s hand, remembering
My given grace and faith renewed
In answer to my prayers, Brenda in tears,
And Joyce the sister of my years, Kim
And...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I want a true history of my city
**** THE DE LACY FAMILY AND DOUBLE
**** JOHN OF GAUNT ESPECIALLY
And all his descendants
With their particular vilenesses -
I met one in the sixties
Who had all the coldness of Himmler
So svelte and adored by the cognoscenti.
I want a history responsive
To the needs of the working-class
One that will minute the back-to-backs
Spread over the city...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
As milled silver I was welcome
In every gutter, tinkling over cobbles
I rang the truth loudly on solid-oak counters
And tills tolled for me clear as bells.
Boldly I gave myself to many,
Slipped from moist palm to pocket,
Pirouetting without points, jingling
With dull coppers and important keys.
First I was lost in a hundred
Children’s essays, found myself
With pearls in secret pockets,
Counterfeit and shiny.
Then I...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
The grain of the exposed boards
Speaks through the wall of the years
We are back in our cottage
On the wind-swathed hills
Watching late winter dawns
Gather like kindled flame.
We are back with those winter dusks, -
The hyaline air hung in darkness
And a vale of stars, waking in blankets
Laid on bare boards, making a fire
From our dreams.
We are walking through mist
On snow-skirled roads,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
(Goya, an old man in exile, looks at his self-portrait)
A bull’s neck, still much needed,
Deserving exile or the guillotine,
‘Because you are an artist we forgave you’,
Thus his royal highness gave thanks,
My fingers itching for brush and canvas,
Floury cheeks and rouge, legs a donkey would be ashamed of,
A wife who’s been to bed with everything in Madrid.
First I was ‘untalented’,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
How I loathe this land of my exile,
Concrete upon concrete,
Steel upon steel,
Glass upon glass
In massed battalions
And no way back.
My mind moves to a far-off place
To a hill-top where the wind is my succour,
Its blow and howl and rage
Over the springing turf and heather
Calms as the song of a mother
And the last light’s glimmer....Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
They have my own fear of the dark,
Tupapau - spirits of the dead they call it;
Returning late with oil I found fear of it
Had spread my vabine naked on the bed.
Manao-Taipapau means ‘she thinks of the spectre’
Or ‘the spectre is thinking of her’, either way
She is afraid; I marvel at a tongue so readily ambiguous,
Lying across her forked thigh.
I...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
For Barbara
I step off the pavement
like a precipice
Engage the darting sunshafts
in a duel
In the wall’s shadow I web
my prints to pattern
The moist stone virgins.
The lawns are white-coated
their throats red
With berries and bird-song;
in petrified gardens
Hyacinth tongues lip the wall.
Leaf mould muffles my heel-taps
the enormous trees totter
In the hyaline air; I hear the
Sunday strollers in their
Mist-making walks, pressing through them
like some...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I
You buy my freedom with your love.
With every book you catalogue or stamp
My imagination hacks a strand from the hawser
That for three years has held it
In the grubbing estuary of mud and time.
Your early waking with tired eyes
And late return at evening, all
Contribute to the store of images
I love you for: the irony being
Your job is worse than mine
Your...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Someone has been tearing up the autumn,
Its ripped leaves ripple across the road
Flip liked hinged cards in the moist grass.
The rain-varnished houses vanish in smoke,
Drift on the air like blown-out breath in gusts:
So we forget frog-ponds and nut-gatherers,
Remember instead that weather’s for us
Who know too well its intentions, wind-keen,
Intense as the first frost hardening
Stubble grass to a tacky ice-blanket
Listen!...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Rivers, tow paths, caravan parks
From Kirkstall to Keighley
The track’s ribbon flaps
Like Margaret’s whirling and twirling
At ten with her pink-tied hair
And blue-check patterned frock
O my lost beloved
Mills fall like doomed fortresses
Their domes topple, stopped clocks
Chime midnight forever and ever
Amen to the lost hegemony of mill girls
Flocking through dawn fog, their clogs clacking,
Their beauty, only Vermeer could capture
O my lost beloved
In...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Through the windows the sun’s light
Turns to amber, the moon’s to jade;
All night long I lie awake, wondering
How much your stunned heart can take.
That moment’s ‘sudden interminable splendour’,
Our love kept up through the years of stress,
Strange dark-haired creature, the light over the water
Burns and beckons through our emptiness....Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I was a good father to my people,
Their houses among the terraced hills
Adored God every day, grape-clusters on the vines
Made Christ’s blood richer in the goblet
My father gave me: the chased silver had vines
Round the stem and Cellini made it,
‘Let him take it to Rome’, he had said,
‘The Pope will adore it.’ The backs of my people
Bent as I...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Poems do not always satisfy the soul,
The feel of cobbles underfoot is at this moment more
Than all of Shakespeare’s sonnets, the unending vistas
Of the moor, an infinity of purity that excels even Mallarm?.
I sit on the cracked steps to the church, sipping tea
With my eye on the Black Bull where Bramwell worshipped
Until a mobile phone playing ‘The Bluebells of...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Composed of chalk dust,
Pencil shavings and
The sharp odour
Of stale urine;
It meets me now and then
Creeping down a creosoted corridor
Or waiting to be banged
With the dust from piles of books
On top of a cupboard.
The double desks heeled with iron
Having long been replaced;
The steel-nibbed pens and
Ink watered to pale grey
Gone too: the cane’s bamboo bite
Has nothing left to bite on
And David’s...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
L’orage qui s’attarde, le lit d?fait
Yves Bonnefoy
Here am I, lying lacklustre in an unmade bed
A Sunday in December while all Leeds lies in around me
In the silent streets, frost on roof slates, gas fires
And kettles whistle as I read Bonnefoy on the eternal.
Too tired to fantasize, unsummoned images float by,
Feebly I snatch at them to comply with...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I
Living in a land
Where only the dying correspond
I am borne on the wings of love
II
I cannot join in a poem
The interstices of clouds
I watched a lapwing
Hover in the air
Glide in an arc
Veer from the sheer cliff
III
Who shall I meet
On this journey to eternity?
Alone and yet not alone
The dust of immortality
Lies in strangers’ eyes
Girls in all the beauty
Of their youth,...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
( I )
for ‘JC’ of the TLS
Nightmare of metropolitan amalgam
Grand Hotel and myself as a guest there
Lost with my room rifled, my belongings scattered,
Purse, diary and vital list of numbers gone –
Vague sad memories of mam n’dad
Leeds 1942 back-to-back with shared outside lav.
Hosannas of sweet May mornings
Whitsun glory of lilac blooming
Sixty years on I run and run
From death,...Read more of this...