Best Famous Camera Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Camera poems. This is a select list of the best famous Camera poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Camera poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of camera poems.

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• All Famous Camera Poems

Written by Adrienne Rich | Cartographies of Silence 1. A conversation begins with a lie. and each speaker of the so-called common language feels the ice-floe split, the drift apart as if powerless, as if up against a force of nature A poem can being with a lie. And be torn up. A conversation has other laws recharges itself with its own false energy, Cannot be torn up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself. Inscribes with its unreturning stylus the isolation it denies. 2. The classical music station playing hour upon hour in the apartment the picking up and picking up and again picking up the telephone The syllables uttering the old script over and over The loneliness of the liar living in the formal network of the lie twisting the dials to drown the terror beneath the unsaid word 3. The technology of silence The rituals, etiquette the blurring of terms silence not absence of words or music or even raw sounds Silence can be a plan rigorously executed the blueprint of a life It is a presence it has a history a form Do not confuse it with any kind of absence 4. How calm, how inoffensive these words begin to seem to me though begun in grief and anger Can I break through this film of the abstract without wounding myself or you there is enough pain here This is why the classical of the jazz music station plays? to give a ground of meaning to our pain? 5. The silence strips bare: In Dreyer's Passion of Joan Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography mutely surveyed by the camera If there were a poetry where this could happen not as blank space or as words stretched like skin over meaningsof a night through which two people have talked till dawn. 6. The scream of an illegitimate voice It has ceased to hear itself, therefore it asks itself How do I exist? This was the silence I wanted to break in you I had questions but you would not answer I had answers but you could not use them The is useless to you and perhaps to others 7. It was an old theme even for me: Language cannot do everything- chalk it on the walls where the dead poets lie in their mausoleums If at the will of the poet the poem could turn into a thing a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head alight with dew If it could simply look you in the face with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn till you, and I who long to make this thing, were finally clarified together in its stare 8. No. Let me have this dust, these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words moving with ferocious accuracy like the blind child's fingers or the newborn infant's mouth violent with hunger No one can give me, I have long ago taken this method whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue If from time to time I envy the pure annunciation to the eye the visio beatifica if from time to time I long to turn like the Eleusinian hierophant holding up a single ear of grain for the return to the concrete and everlasting world what in fact I keep choosing are these words, these whispers, conversations from which time after time the truth breaks moist and green.

Written by Barry Tebb | To The Sound Of Violins Give me life at its most garish Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants ‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard Making me stand out in the teeming swarm Of teens and twenties this foetid Friday night On my way from the ward where our son paces And fulminates I throw myself into the drowning Tide of Friday to be rescued by sheer normality. The mill girl with her mates asks anxiously "Are you on your own? Come and join us What’s your name?" Age has driven my shyness away As I join the crowd beneath the turning purple screens Bannered ‘****** lasts for ever’ and sip unending Halves of bitter, as I circulate among the crowd, Being complete in itself and out for a good night out, A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall Running from the reality of the ward where my son Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast My very existence with words like bullets. The need to anaesthetise the pain resurfaces Again and again. In Leeds City Square where Pugin’s church, the Black Prince and the Central Post Office In its Edwardian grandeur are startled by the arching spumes Or white water fountains and the steel barricades of Novotel Rise from the ruins of a sixties office block. I hurry past and join Boar Lane’s Friday crew From Keighley and Dewsbury’s mills, hesitating At the thought of being told I’m past my Sell-by-date and turned away by the West Indian Bouncers, black-suited and city-council badged Who checked my bag but smiled at ‘The Lights of Leeds’ and ‘Poets of Our Time’ tucked away as carefully as condoms- Was it guns or drugs they were after I wondered as I crossed the bare boards to the bar. I stayed near the fruit machine which no-one played, Where the crowd was thickest, the noise drowned out the pain ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ the chorus rang The girls joined in but the young men knew The words no more than me. Dancing as we knew it In the sixties has gone, you do your own thing And follow the beat, hampered by my bag I just kept going, letting the music and the crowd Hold me, my camera eye moving in search, in search… What I’m searching for I don’t know Searching’s a way of life that has to grow "All of us who are patients here are searchers after truth" My son kept saying, his legs shaking from the side effects Of God-knows- what, pacing the tiny ward kitchen cum smoking room, Denouncing his ‘illegal section’ and ‘poisonous medication’ To an audience of one. The prospect of TV, Seroxat and Diazepan fazed me: I was beyond unravelling Meltzer on differentiation Of self and object or Rosine Josef Perelberg on ‘Dreaming and Thinking’ Or even the simpler ‘Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States’ So I went out with West Yorkshire on a Friday night. Nothing dramatic happened; perhaps I’m a little too used To acute wards or worse where chairs fly across rooms, Windows disintegrate and double doors are triple locked And every nurse carries a white panic button and black pager To pinpoint the moment’s crisis. Normality was a bit of adrenaline, A wild therapy that drew me in, sanity had won the night. "Are you on your own, love? Come and join us" People kept asking if I was alright and why I had that damned great shoulder bag. I was introduced To three young men about to tie the knot, a handsome lothario In his midforties winked at me constantly, Dancing with practised ease with sixteen year olds Who all seemed to know him and determined to show him. Three hours passed in as many minutes and then the crowds Disappeared to catch the last bus home. The young aren’t As black as they are painted, one I danced with reminded me Of how Margaret would have been at sixteen With straw gold hair Yeats would have immortalised. People seemed to guess I was haunted by an inner demon I’d tried to leave in the raftered lofts of City Square But failed to. Girls from sixteen to twenty six kept grabbing me And making me dance and I found my teenage inhibitions Gone at sixty-one and wildly gyrated to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ Egged on by the throng by the fruit machine and continuous Thumbs-up signs from passing men. I had to forgo A cheerful group of Aussies were intent on taking me clubbing "I’d get killed or turned into a pumpkin If I get home after midnight" I quipped to their delight But being there had somehow put things right.

Written by Adrienne Rich | Diving into the Wreck First having read the book of myths, and loaded the camera, and checked the edge of the knife-blade, I put on the body-armor of black rubber the absurd flippers the grave and awkward mask. I am having to do this not like Cousteau with his assiduous team aboard the sun-flooded schooner but here alone. There is a ladder. The ladder is always there hanging innocently close to the side of the schooner. We know what it is for, we who have used it. Otherwise it is a piece of maritime floss some sundry equipment. I go down. Rung after rung and still the oxygen immerses me the blue light the clear atoms of our human air. I go down. My flippers cripple me, I crawl like an insect down the ladder and there is no one to tell me when the ocean will begin. First the air is blue and then it is bluer and then green and then black I am blacking out and yet my mask is powerful it pumps my blood with power the sea is another story the sea is not a question of power I have to learn alone to turn my body without force in the deep element. And now: it is easy to forget what I came for among so many who have always lived here swaying their crenellated fans between the reefs and besides you breathe differently down here. I came to explore the wreck. The words are purposes. The words are maps. I came to see the damage that was done and the treasures that prevail. I stroke the beam of my lamp slowly along the flank of something more permanent than fish or weed the thing I came for: the wreck and not the story of the wreck the thing itself and not the myth the drowned face always staring toward the sun the evidence of damage worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty the ribs of the disaster curving their assertion among the tentative haunters. This is the place. And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair streams black, the merman in his armored body. We circle silently about the wreck we dive into the hold. I am she: I am he whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes whose breasts still bear the stress whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies obscurely inside barrels half-wedged and left to rot we are the half-destroyed instruments that once held to a course the water-eaten log the fouled compass We are, I am, you are by cowardice or courage the one who find our way back to this scene carrying a knife, a camera a book of myths in which our names do not appear.

Written by Larry Levis | The Widening Spell Of Leaves --The Carpathian Frontier, October, 1968 --for my brother Once, in a foreign country, I was suddenly ill. I was driving south toward a large city famous For so little it had a replica, in concrete, In two-thirds scale, of the Arc de Triomphe stuck In the midst of traffic, & obstructing it. But the city was hours away, beyond the hills Shaped like the bodies of sleeping women. Often I had to slow down for herds of goats Or cattle milling on those narrow roads, & for The narrower, lost, stone streets of villages I passed through. The pains in my stomach had grown Gradually sharper & more frequent as the day Wore on, & now a fever had set up house. In the villages there wasn't much point in asking Anyone for help. In those places, where tanks Were bivouacked in shade on their way back From some routine exercise along The Danube, even food was scarce that year. And the languages shifted for no clear reason From two hard quarries of Slavic into German, Then to a shred of Latin spliced with oohs And hisses. Even when I tried the simplest phrases, The peasants passing over those uneven stones Paused just long enough to look up once, Uncomprehendingly. Then they turned Quickly away, vanishing quietly into that Moment, like bark chips whirled downriver. It was autumn. Beyond each village the wind Threw gusts of yellowing leaves across the road. The goats I passed were thin, gray; their hind legs, Caked with dried ****, seesawed along-- Not even mild contempt in their expressionless, Pale eyes, & their brays like the scraping of metal. Except for one village that had a kind Of museum where I stopped to rest, & saw A dead Scythian soldier under glass, Turning to dust while holding a small sword At attention forever, there wasn't much to look at. Wind, leaves, goats, the higher passes Locked in stone, the peasants with their fate Embroidering a stillness into them, And a spell over all things in that landscape, Like . . . That was the trouble; it couldn't be Compared to anything else, not even the sleep Of some asylum at a wood's edge with the sound Of a pond's spillway beside it. But as each cramp Grew worse & lasted longer than the one before, It was hard to keep myself aloof from the threadbare World walking on that road. After all, Even as they moved, the peasants, the herds of goats And cattle, the spiralling leaves, at least were part Of that spell, that stillness. After a while, The villages grew even poorer, then thinned out, Then vanished entirely. An hour later, There were no longer even the goats, only wind, Then more & more leaves blown over the road, sometimes Covering it completely for a second. And yet, except for a random oak or some brush Writhing out of the ravine I drove beside, The trees had thinned into rock, into large, Tough blonde rosettes of fading pasture grass. Then that gave out in a bare plateau. . . . And then, Easing the Dacia down a winding grade In second gear, rounding a long, funneled curve-- In a complete stillness of yellow leaves filling A wide field--like something thoughtlessly, Mistakenly erased, the road simply ended. I stopped the car. There was no wind now. I expected that, & though I was sick & lost, I wasn't afraid. I should have been afraid. To this day I don't know why I wasn't. I could hear time cease, the field quietly widen. I could feel the spreading stillness of the place Moving like something I'd witnessed as a child, Like the ancient, armored leisure of some reptile Gliding, gray-yellow, into the slightly tepid, Unidentical gray-brown stillness of the water-- Something blank & unresponsive in its tough, Pimpled skin--seen only a moment, then unseen As it submerged to rest on mud, or glided just Beneath the lustreless, calm yellow leaves That clustered along a log, or floated there In broken ringlets, held by a gray froth On the opaque, unbroken surface of the pond, Which reflected nothing, no one. And then I remembered. When I was a child, our neighbors would disappear. And there wasn't a pond of crocodiles at all. And they hadn't moved. They couldn't move. They Lived in the small, fenced-off backwater Of a canal. I'd never seen them alive. They Were in still photographs taken on the Ivory Coast. I saw them only once in a studio when I was a child in a city I once loved. I was afraid until our neighbor, a photographer, Explained it all to me, explained how far Away they were, how harmless; how they were praised In rituals as "powers." But they had no "powers," He said. The next week he vanished. I thought Someone had cast a spell & that the crocodiles Swam out of the pictures on the wall & grew Silently & multiplied & then turned into Shadows resting on the banks of lakes & streams Or took the shapes of fallen logs in campgrounds In the mountains. They ate our neighbor, Mr. Hirata. They ate his whole family. That is what I believed, Then. . .that someone had cast a spell. I did not Know childhood was a spell, or that then there Had been another spell, too quiet to hear, Entering my city, entering the dust we ate. . . . No one knew it then. No one could see it, Though it spread through lawnless miles of housing tracts, And the new, bare, treeless streets; it slipped Into the vacant rows of warehouses & picked The padlocked doors of working-class bars And union halls & shuttered, empty diners. And how it clung! (forever, if one had noticed) To the brothel with the pastel tassels on the shade Of an unlit table lamp. Farther in, it feasted On the decaying light of failing shopping centers; It spilled into the older, tree-lined neighborhoods, Into warm houses, sealing itself into books Of bedtime stories read each night by fathers-- The books lying open to the flat, neglected Light of dawn; & it settled like dust on windowsills Downtown, filling the smug cafés, schools, Banks, offices, taverns, gymnasiums, hotels, Newsstands, courtrooms, opium parlors, Basque Restaurants, Armenian steam baths, French bakeries, & two of the florists' shops-- Their plate glass windows smashed forever. Finally it tried to infiltrate the exact Center of my city, a small square bordered With palm trees, olives, cypresses, a square Where no one gathered, not even thieves or lovers. It was a place which no longer had any purpose, But held itself aloof, I thought, the way A deaf aunt might, from opinions, styles, gossip. I liked it there. It was completely lifeless, Sad & clear in what seemed always a perfect, Windless noon. I saw it first as a child, Looking down at it from that as yet Unvandalized, makeshift studio. I remember leaning my right cheek against A striped beach ball so that Mr. Hirata-- Who was Japanese, who would be sent the next week To a place called Manzanar, a detention camp Hidden in stunted pines almost above The Sierra timberline--could take my picture. I remember the way he lovingly relished Each camera angle, the unwobbling tripod, The way he checked each aperture against The light meter, in love with all things That were not accidental, & I remember The care he took when focusing; how He tried two different lens filters before He found the one appropriate for that Sensual, late, slow blush of afternoon Falling through the one broad bay window. I remember holding still & looking down Into the square because he asked me to; Because my mother & father had asked me please To obey & be patient & allow the man-- Whose business was failing anyway by then-- To work as long as he wished to without any Irritations or annoyances before He would have to spend these years, my father said, Far away, in snow, & without his cameras. But Mr. Hirata did not work. He played. His toys gleamed there. That much was clear to me . . . . That was the day I decided I would never work. It felt like a conversion. Play was sacred. My father waited behind us on a sofa made From car seats. One spring kept nosing through. I remember the camera opening into the light . . . . And I remember the dark after, the studio closed, The cameras stolen, slivers of glass from the smashed Bay window littering the unsanded floors, And the square below it bathed in sunlight . . . . All this Before Mr. Hirata died, months later, From complications following pneumonia. His death, a letter from a camp official said, Was purely accidental. I didn't believe it. Diseases were wise. Diseases, like the polio My sister had endured, floating paralyzed And strapped into her wheelchair all through That war, seemed too precise. Like photographs . . . Except disease left nothing. Disease was like And equation that drank up light & never ended, Not even in summer. Before my fever broke, And the pains lessened, I could actually see Myself, in the exact center of that square. How still it had become in my absence, & how Immaculate, windless, sunlit. I could see The outline of every leaf on the nearest tree, See it more clearly than ever, more clearly than I had seen anything before in my whole life: Against the modest, dark gray, solemn trunk, The leaves were becoming only what they had to be-- Calm, yellow, things in themselves & nothing More--& frankly they were nothing in themselves, Nothing except their little reassurance Of persisting for a few more days, or returning The year after, & the year after that, & every Year following--estranged from us by now--& clear, So clear not one in a thousand trembled; hushed And always coming back--steadfast, orderly, Taciturn, oblivious--until the end of Time.

Written by Billy Collins | Consolation How agreeable it is not to be touring Italy this summer, wandering her cities and ascending her torrid hilltowns. How much better to cruise these local, familiar streets, fully grasping the meaning of every roadsign and billboard and all the sudden hand gestures of my compatriots. There are no abbeys here, no crumbling frescoes or famous domes and there is no need to memorize a succession of kings or tour the dripping corners of a dungeon. No need to stand around a sarcophagus, see Napoleon's little bed on Elba, or view the bones of a saint under glass. How much better to command the simple precinct of home than be dwarfed by pillar, arch, and basilica. Why hide my head in phrase books and wrinkled maps? Why feed scenery into a hungry, one-eyes camera eager to eat the world one monument at a time? Instead of slouching in a café ignorant of the word for ice, I will head down to the coffee shop and the waitress known as Dot. I will slide into the flow of the morning paper, all language barriers down, rivers of idiom running freely, eggs over easy on the way. And after breakfast, I will not have to find someone willing to photograph me with my arm around the owner. I will not puzzle over the bill or record in a journal what I had to eat and how the sun came in the window. It is enough to climb back into the car as if it were the great car of English itself and sounding my loud vernacular horn, speed off down a road that will never lead to Rome, not even Bologna.

Written by Linda Pastan | The Happiest Day It was early May, I think a moment of lilac or dogwood when so many promises are made it hardly matters if a few are broken. My mother and father still hovered in the background, part of the scenery like the houses I had grown up in, and if they would be torn down later that was something I knew but didn't believe. Our children were asleep or playing, the youngest as new as the new smell of the lilacs, and how could I have guessed their roots were shallow and would be easily transplanted. I didn't even guess that I was happy. The small irritations that are like salt on melon were what I dwelt on, though in truth they simply made the fruit taste sweeter. So we sat on the porch in the cool morning, sipping hot coffee. Behind the news of the day-- strikes and small wars, a fire somewhere-- I could see the top of your dark head and thought not of public conflagrations but of how it would feel on my bare shoulder. If someone could stop the camera then... if someone could only stop the camera and ask me: are you happy? perhaps I would have noticed how the morning shone in the reflected color of lilac. Yes, I might have said and offered a steaming cup of coffee.

Written by Dejan Stojanovic | Old and New If an ancient man saw planes two thousand years ago He would've thought they were birds Or angels from another world Or messengers from other planets. Every new machine would have surprised him— The car, TV, radio, phone, camera. He would've thought he was a savage Who didn't understand. If he saw a computer, Watching people talking on the internet, He would have thought it was a civilization Much more advanced and ahead of his. And if he stayed longer among the messengers He would have learned that every child had the knowledge And understanding of these things Or how to use all of them. Yet, after a while, he would have noticed That none of them were advanced enough To be labeled as those who know more Than the one who said: I know nothing.

Written by Delmore Schwartz | A Dream Of Whitman Paraphrased Recognized And Made More Vivid By Renoir Twenty-eight naked young women bathed by the shore Or near the bank of a woodland lake Twenty-eight girls and all of them comely Worthy of Mack Sennett's camera and Florenz Ziegfield's Foolish Follies. They splashed and swam with the wondrous unconsciousness Of their youth and beauty In the full spontaneity and summer of the fieshes of awareness Heightened, intensified and softened By the soft and the silk of the waters Blooded made ready by the energy set afire by the nakedness of the body, Electrified: deified: undenied. A young man of thirty years beholds them from a distance. He lives in the dungeon of ten million dollars. He is rich, handsome and empty standing behind the linen curtains Beholding them. Which girl does he think most desirable, most beautiful? They are all equally beautiful and desirable from the gold distance. For if poverty darkens discrimination and makes perception too vivid, The gold of wealth is also a form of blindness. For has not a Frenchman said, Although this is America... What he has said is not entirely relevant, That a naked woman is a proof of the existence of God. Where is he going? Is he going to be among them to splash and to laugh with them? They did not see him although he saw them and was there among them. He saw them as he would not have seen them had they been conscious Of him or conscious of men in complete depravation: This is his enchantment and impoverishment As he possesses them in gaze only. . . .He felt the wood secrecy, he knew the June softness The warmth surrounding him crackled Held in by the mansard roof mansion He glimpsed the shadowy light on last year's brittle leaves fallen, Looked over and overlooked, glimpsed by the fall of death, Winter's mourning and the May's renewal.

Written by Marriott Edgar | The Channel Swimmer Would you hear a Wild tale of adventure Of a hero who tackled the sea, A super-man swimming the ocean, Then hark to the tale of Joe Lee. Our Channel, our own Straits of Dover Had heen swum by an alien lot: Our British-born swimmers had tried it, But that was as far as they'd got. So great was the outcry in England, Darts Players neglected their beer, And the Chanc'Ior proclaimed from the Woolsack As Joe Lee were the chap for this 'ere. For in swimming baths all round the country Joe were noted for daring and strength; Quite often he'd dived in the deep end, And thought nothing of swimming a length. So they wrote him, C/o Workhouse Master, Joe were spending the summer with him, And promised him two Christmas puddings If over the Channel he'd swim. Joe jumped into t' breach like an 'ero, He said, "All their fears I'll relieve, And it isn't their puddings I'm after, As I told them last Christmas Eve. "Though many have tackled the Channel From Grisnez to Dover that is, For the honour and glory of England I'll swim from Dover to Gris-niz." As soon as his words were made public The newspapers gathered around And offered to give him a pension If he lost both his legs and got drowned. He borrowed a tug from the Navy To swim in the shelter alee, The Wireless folk lent him a wavelength, And the Water Board lent him the sea. His wife strapped a mascot around him, The tears to his eyes gently stole; 'Twere some guiness corks she had collected And stitched to an old camisole. He entered the water at daybreak, A man with a camera stood near, He said "Hurry up and get in, lad, You're spoiling my view of the pier." At last he were in, he were swimming With a beautiful overarm stroke, When the men on the tug saw with horror That the rope he were tied to had broke. Then down came a fog, thick as treacle, The tug looked so distant and dim A voice shouted "Help, I am drowning," Joe listened and found it were him. The tug circled round till they found him, They hauled him aboard like a sack, Tied a new tow-rope around him, Smacked him and then threw him back. 'Twere at sunset, or just a bit later, That he realized all wasn't right, For the tow-rope were trailing behind him And the noose round his waist getting tight. One hasty glance over his shoulder, He saw in a flash what were wrong. The Captain had shut off his engine, Joe were towing the Tugboat along. On and on through the darkness he paddled Till he knew he were very near in By the way he kept bumping the bottom And hitting the stones with his chin. Was it Grisniz he'd reached?... No, it wasn't, The treacherous tide in its track Had carried him half-way to Blackpool And he had to walk all the way back.

Written by Barry Tebb | Bridge Over The Aire Book 3 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 grow in chiaroscuro The Victorian postcard’s view Of avenue upon avenue With palms and pagodas Lakes and waterfalls and A fountain from Versailles. 3 You shall be my queen In the Kingdom of Deira Land of many rivers Aire the greatest Isara the strong one Robed in stillness Wide, deep and dark. 4 In Middleton Woods Margaret and I played Truth or dare She bared her breasts To the watching stars. 5 “Milk, milk, Lemonade, round The corner Chocolate spread” Nancy chanted at Ten in the binyard Touching her ****, Her ****, her bum, Margaret joined in Chanting in unison. 6 The skipping rope Turned faster And faster, slapping The hot pavement, Margaret skipped In rhythm, never Missing a beat, Lifting the pleat Of her skirt Whirling and twirling. 7 Giggling and red Margaret said In a whisper “When we were Playing at Nancy’s She pushed a spill Of paper up her You-know-what She said she’d Let you watch If you wanted.” 8 Margaret, this Saturday morning in June There is a queue at the ‘Princess’ for The matin?e, down the alley by the blank Concrete of the cinema’s side I hide With you, we are counting our picture Money, I am counting the stars in your Hair, bound with a cheap plastic comb. 9 You have no idea of my need for you A lifetime long, every wrong decision I made betrayed my need; forty years on Hear my song and take my hand and move Us to the house of love where we belong. 10 Margaret we sat in the cinema dark Warm with the promise of a secret kiss The wall lights glowed amber on the Crumbling plaster, we looked with longing At the love seats empty in the circle, Vowing we would share one. 11 There is shouting and echoes Of wild splashing from York Road baths; forty years on It stirs my memory and Will not be gone. 12 The ghosts of tramtracks Light up lanes To nowhere In Leeds Ten. Every road Leads nowhere In Leeds Nine. Motorways have cut The city’s heart In two; Margaret, Our home lies buried Under sixteen feet Of stone. 13 Our families moved And we were lost I was not there to hear The whispered secret Of your first period. 14 God is courage’s infinite ground Tillich said; God, give me enough To stand another week without her Every day gets longer, every sleep Less deep. 15 Why can’t I find you, Touch you, Bind your straw-gold hair The colour of lank February grass? 16 Under the stone canopy Of the Grand Arcade I pass Europa Nightclub; In black designer glass I watch the faces pass But none is like your’s, No voice, no eyes, No smile at all Like your’s. 17 From Kirkstall Lock The rhubarb crop To Knostrop’s forcing sheds The roots ploughed up Arranged in beds Of perfect darkness Where the buds burst With a pip, rich pink Stalks and yellow leaves Hand-picked by Candle-light to Keep the colour right So every night the Rhubarb train Could go from Leeds To Covent Garden. 18 The smell of Saturday morning Is the smell of freedom How the bounds may grow Slowly slowly as I go. “Rag-bone rag-bone White donkey stone” Auntie Nellie scoured Her door step, polished The brass knocker Till I saw my face Bunched like a fist Complete with goggles Grinning like a monkey In a mile of mirrors. 19 Every door step had a stop A half-stone iron weight To hold it back and every Step was edged with donkey Stone in yellow or white From the ragman or the potman With his covered cart jingling Jangling as it jerked hundreds Of cups on hooks pint and Half pint mugs and stacks of Willow-patterned plates From Burmantofts. 20 We heard him a mile off Nights in summer when He trundled round the Corner over the cobbles Jamming the wood brake Blocks whoaing the horses With their gleaming brasses And our mams were always Waiting where he stopped. 21 Double summer-time made The nights go on for ever And no-one cared any more How long we played what Or where and we were left Alone and that’s all I wanted Then or now to be left alone Never to be called in from The Hollows never to be Called from Margaret. 22 City of back-to-backs From Armley Heights Laid out in rows Like trees or grass I watch you pass. 23 The Aire is slow and almost Still In the Bridgefield The Joshua Tetley clock Over the Atkinson Grimshaw Print Is stopped at nineteen fifty Four The year I left. 24 Grimshaw’s home was Half a mile away In Knostrop Hall Margaret and I Climbed the ruined Walls her hair was Blowing in the wind Her eyes were stars In the green night Her hands were holding My hands. 25 Half a century later I look out over Leeds Nine What little’s left is broken Or changed Saturday night Is silent and empty The paths over the Hollows Deserted the bell Of St. Hilda’s still. 26 On a single bush The yellow roses blush Pink in the amber light Night settles on the Fewstons and the Copperfields No mothers’ voices calling us. Lilac and velvet clover Grew all over the Hollows It was all the luck We knew and when we left Our luck went too. 27 Solid black Velvet basalt Polished jet Millstone grit Leeds Town Hall Built with it Soaks up the fog Is sealed with smog Battered buttressed Blackened plinths White lions’ paws Were soft their Smiles like your’s. 28 Narrow lanes, steep inclines, Steps, blank walls, tight And secret openings’ The lanes are your hips The inclines the lines Of your thighs, the steps Your breasts, blank walls Your buttocks, tight and Secret openings your Taut vagina’s lips. 29 There is a keening and a honing And a winnowing in the wind I am the surge and flow In Winwaed’s water the last breath Of Elmete’s King. I am Penda crossing the Aire Camping at Killingbeck Conquered by Aethalwald Ruler of Deira. 30 Life is a bird hovering In the Hall of the King Between darkness and darkness flickering The stone of Scone at last lifted And borne on the wind, Dunedin, take it Hold it hard and fast its light Is leaping it is freedom’s Touchstone and firestone. 31 Eir, Ayer or Aire I’ll still be there Your wanderings off course Old Ea, Old Eye, Dead Eye Make no difference to me. Eg-an island - is Aire’s True source, names Not places matter With the risings Of a river Ea land-by-water I’ll make my own way Free, going down river To the far-off sea. 32 Poetry is my business, my affair. My cri-de-coeur, jongleur Of Mercia and Elmete, Margaret, Open your door I am heaping Imbroglios of stars on the floor Meet me by the Office Lock At midnight or by the Town Hall Clock. 33 Nennius nine times have I knocked On the door of your grave, nine times More have I made Pilgrimage to Elmete’s Wood where long I lay by beck and bank Waiting for your tongue to flame With Pentecostal fire. 34 Margaret you rode in the hollow of my hand In the harp of my heart, searching for you I wandered in Kirkgate Market’s midnight Down avenues of shuttered stalls, our secrets Kept through all the years. From the Imperial on Beeston Hill I watch the city spill glass towers Of light over the horizon’s rim. 35 The railyard’s straights Are buckled plates Red bricks for aggregate All lost like me Ledsham and Ledston Both belong to Leeds But Ledston Luck Is where Aire leads. 36 Held of the Crown By seven thanes In Saxon times ‘In regione Loidis’ Baeda scripsit Leeds, Leeds, You answer All my needs. 37 A horse shoe stuck for luck Behind a basement window: Margaret, now we’ll see What truth there is In dreams and poetry! I am at one with everyone There is poetry Falling from the air And you have put it there. 38 The sign for John Eaton Street Is planted in the back garden Of the transport caf? between The strands of a wire mesh fence Straddling the cobbles of a street That is no more, a washing line And an abandoned caravan. 39 ‘This open land to let’ Is what you get on the Hollows Thousands of half-burned tyres The rusty barrel of a Trumix lorry Concrete slabs, foxgloves and condoms, The Go-Kart Arena’s signboards, Half the wall of Ellerby Lane School. 40 There is a mermaid singing On East Street on an IBM poster Her hair is lack-lustre Her breasts are facing the camera Her tail is like a worn-out brush. Chimney stacks Blind black walls Of factories Grimy glass Flickering firelight In black-leaded grates. 41 Hunslet de Ledes Hop-scotch, hide and seek, Bogies-on-wheels Not one tree in Hunslet Except in the cemetery The lake filled in For fifty years, The bluebell has rung Its last perfumed peal. 42 I couldn’t play out on Sunday Mam and dad thought us a cut Above the rest, it was another Test I failed, keeping me and Margaret apart was like the Aztecs Tearing the heart from the living flesh. 43 Father, your office job Didn’t save you From the drugs They never gave you. 44 Isaiah, my son, You made it back From Balliol to Beeston At a run via the Playing fields of Eton. There is a keening and a honing And a winnowing in the wind Winwaed’s water with red bluid blent.