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
Runs to no compass point
But starts within the human heart
Where travellers in twos may go
As for a while it winds beside
A man-made road then veers aside
We met at a cross-roads once and journeyed
Together for a while across a moor
And then on horseback sadly you waved adieu....Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
What ghosts haunt
These streets of perpetual night?
Riverbanks fractured with splinters of glass condominiums
For nouveam riche merchant bankers
Black-tied bouncers man clubland glitz casinos
Novotel, Valley Park Motel, the Hilton:
Hot tubs, saunas, swim spas, en suite
Satellite TV, conference rooms, disco dinners.
I knew Len, the tubby taxi man
With his retirement dreams of visiting
The world’s great galleries:
‘Titian, Leonardo, Goya,
I’ve lived all my life...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
for Ken Kesey and his merry pranksters in a bus called ‘Further...’
Dear _______ and here’s where the problem begins
For who shall I address this letter to?
Friends are few and very special, muses in the main
I must confess, the first I lost just fifty years ago.
Perhaps the best.
I searched for years and wrote en route
‘Bridge Over the Aire’ after that...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
We were three weeks
Into term, Sheila,
When you came
Through the classroom door;
Forty-four children
Bent over books,
Copying Roethke’s
‘The Lost Son’.
You wrote your
First poem on the ‘Moses’
Of Michelangelo.
Words cut like stone.
I taught you Greek
But your painting of
‘The Essence of the Rose’
Was pure Platonic form.
You drew the masks
Of Comedy and Tragedy
In perfect harmony.
Having seen neither;
So Socrates was right.
Those who have the Spirit’s gift
Will one...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
When I come from the Smoke to visit my son on the ward
I see you everywhere: by the station, by the neon sign of ‘Squares’
By every shopping mall. Leeds seems to have more of you than anywhere:
How do you stand there for so many hours in freezing winds
When most you solicit hurry by, saying to themselves, as do I,
‘Charity...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Leeds this silent solemn Sunday
Tempest Road is clear of all
But wistful birds, parked cars
And vagrant trees.
The surgery and pharmacy are shuttered tight
"Get your medication straight into your bag",
The friendly GP gravely warned, "The junks
Lay in wait to grab and run from those no longer young
The building site’s scaffolding of bone
Masks pristine piles of bricks where
May winds mourn and moan...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
When my mam had to go
Up north to look after gran,
Margaret’s mam said I could
Stop with them; while they were
Sorting it out Margaret looked
Away, pretending to go all shy
But there was a gleam in her eye,
Anyway it was the six weeks’
Holiday and six weeks with
Margaret night and day was a
Sun and blue sky heaven to my
Ten-year old heart.. the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I have no camera but imagination’s tinted glass
I cannot pass this crumbling dry stone wall
Without a break to catch the vistas of the chain of Pennine hills
That splash their shades of colour like mercury in the rising glass.
The June sun focuses upon the vivid grass,
The elder’s pale amber, the Victoria Tower’s finger
On the pulse of past shared walks, Emley’s...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
Empty chocolate boxes, a pillowcase with an orange at the bottom,
Nuts and tinsel with its idiosyncratic rustle and brilliant sheen
And the reflection in it of paper-chains hand-made and stuck with
Flour-paste stretching from the light-bowl to every corner of the room.
Father Christmas himself was plastic and his vast stomach painted red
With a bulging sack behind his back and he was...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I struggled through streets of
Bricked-up, boarded-up houses,
Mostly burned-out, keeping
To the middle of the road,
Watching the abandoned gardens
With here and there a house
Still lived in, curtained
Against the daylight and distantly
I saw the iron railings of the school
I’d taught in thirty years before.
The same brick buildings, hop scotch
Squares and rounders posts
And the sign, ‘Welcome to Wyther Park
Primary School’. The wooden prefabs
Where...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Richard Chessick, John Gedo, James Grotstein and Vamik Voltan
What darknesses have you lit up for me
What depths of infinite space plumbed
With your finely honed probes
What days of unending distress lightened
With your wisdom, skills and jouissance?
Conquistadores of the unconscious
For three decades how often have I come to you
And from your teachings gathered the manna
Of meaning eluding me alone in...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Wires toss in the wind, shrubs flap
And the tap on windows wakes us
To March’s mistral madness:
I see white crocuses amid the rain....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
Lavender musk rose from the volume I was reading through,
The college crest impressed in gold, tooled gold lettering on the spine.
It was not mine but my son’s, jammed in the corner of a cardboard box
With dozens more; just one box of a score, stored in a heap
Across my ex-wife’s floor, our son gone far, as far as Samarkand and...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Shell-shocked from Korea
A grenade that left him
The platoon’s only survivor,
Put him in Stanley Royd
For thirty years.
He tailored there
And out on weekend leaves
He made and mended
Everybody’s clothes,
Crying copiously
While he sewed.
When they cleared out
The chronic cases
Uncle Bob came home,
Shopping for Edna,
Doing the garden;
When the lodger left
Without a word, the police
Searched his room,
The garden shed,
Even the chest freezer.
Oesophageal cancer
Is very final.
John, his...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
(May I lie in peace)
Let there be grass and trees to blow
And fold me in their shadow
Branches to shake and leaves
Turn brown, fall and lie fallow.
Let there be moorlands swept by wind
And raked by rain, purple splashes of heather
In autumn and sturdy boulders our forefathers
Carved their names on, emerald and slippery with moss
And pebble-strewn sheep-tracks crossing ditch and dyke
Where...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
for Brenda
Your blue dressing-gown
Lying on the chair back
Like a tired arm....Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
You were the one I wanted most to know
So like yet unlike, like fire and snow,
The casual voice, the sharp invective,
The barbed wit, the lapsed Irish Protestant
Who never gave a ****, crossed the palms
Of the great and good with coins hot with contempt
For the fakers and the tricksters whose poetry
Deftly bent to fashion’s latest slant.
You wrote from the heart,...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
Here is a silence I had not hoped for
This side of paradise, I am an old believer
In nature’s bounty as God’s grace
To us poor mortals, fretting and fuming
At frustrated lust or the scent of fame
Coming too late to make a difference
Blue with white vertebrae of cloud forms
Riming the spectrum of green dark of poplars
Lined like soldiers, paler the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
From the French of Andr? Fr?naud
France was born there and it is from there she sings
Of Joan of Ark and Varlin both.
We must dig deep, o motherland,
Beneath those heavy cobbles.
Country of the Commune, so dear to me,
My very own which make my blood burn
And that same blood will one day flow again
Between those very stones.
It is there when I...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
I
Eddie Linden
Dear Eddie we’ve not met
Except upon the written page
And at your age the wonder
Is that you write at all
When so many have gone under
Or been split asunder by narcissistic humours
Blunder following blunder
Barker and Graham, godfathering my verse
Bearing me cloud-handed to Haworth moor
From my chained metropolitan moorings,
O hyaline March morning with Leeds
At its thrusting best, the...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Memories bursting like tears or waves
On some lonely Adriatic shore
Beating again and again
Threshings of green sea foam
Flecked like the marble Leonardo
Chipped for his ‘Moses’.
And my tears came as suddenly
In that dream, criss-crossed
With memory and desire.
Grandad Nicky had worked
Down the pits for a pittance
To bring up his six children
But nothing left over for more
Than a few nuts and an orange
For...Read more of this...
by
Barry Tebb
Dawn’s my Mr Right, already
Cocks have crowed, birds flown from nests,
The neon lights of Leeds last night still
Sovereign in my sights, limousines and
Pink baloons, tee shirts with green stencilled
Dates of wedding days to come, the worn dance floor,
Jingling arcades where chrome fendered fruit machines
Rest on plush carpets like the ghosts of fifties Chevies,
Dreams for sale on boulevards where forget-me-nots
Are...Read more of this...