Written by
Rudyard Kipling |
Where the sober-colored cultivator smiles
On his byles;
Where the cholera, the cyclone, and the crow
Come and go;
Where the merchant deals in indigo and tea,
Hides and ghi;
Where the Babu drops inflammatory hints
In his prints;
Stands a City -- Charnock chose it -- packed away
Near a Bay --
By the Sewage rendered fetid, by the sewer
Made impure,
By the Sunderbunds unwholesome, by the swamp
Moist and damp;
And the City and the Viceroy, as we see,
Don't agree.
Once, two hundered years ago, the trader came
Meek and tame.
Where his timid foot first halted, there he stayed,
Till mere trade
Grew to Empire, and he sent his armies forth
South and North
Till the country from Peshawur to Ceylon
Was his own.
Thus the midday halt of Charnock -- more's the pity!
Grew a City.
As the fungus sprouts chaotic from its bed,
So it spread --
Chance-directed, chance-erected, laid and built
On the silt --
Palace, byre, hovel -- poverty and pride --
Side by side;
And, above the packed and pestilential town,
Death looked down.
But the Rulers in that City by the Sea
Turned to flee --
Fled, with each returning spring-tide from its ills
To the Hills.
From the clammy fogs of morning, from the blaze
Of old days,
From the sickness of the noontide, from the heat,
Beat retreat;
For the country from Peshawur to Ceylon
Was their own.
But the Merchant risked the perils of the Plain
For his gain.
Now the resting-place of Charnock, 'neath the palms,
Asks an alms,
And the burden of its lamentation is, Briefly, this:
"Because for certain months, we boil and stew,
So should you.
Cast the Viceroy and his Council, to perspire
In our fire!"
And for answer to the argument, in vain
We explain
That an amateur Saint Lawrence cannot fry:
"All must fry!"
That the Merchant risks the perils of the Plain
For gain.
Nor can Rulers rule a house that men grow rich in,
From its kitchen.
Let the Babu drop inflammatory hints
In his prints;
And mature -- consistent soul -- his plan for stealing
To Darjeeling:
Let the Merchant seek, who makes his silver pile,
England's isle;
Let the City Charnock pitched on -- evil day!
Go Her way.
Though the argosies of Asia at Her doors
Heap their stores,
Though Her enterprise and energy secure
Income sure,
Though "out-station orders punctually obeyed"
Swell Her trade --
Still, for rule, administration, and the rest,
Simla's best.
|
Written 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 thirsty beasts
Of night quenched as the furnaces
Of Hunslet where Hudswell Clarke’s locos
Rust in their skeletal sheds, rails skewed
To graveyards platforms and now instead
Skyscrapers circle the city, cranes, aeroplanes,
Electric trains but even they cannot hinder
Branches bursting with semen
Seraphic cloud sanctuaries shunting
Us homeward to the beckoning moors.
II
Brenda Williams
Leeds voices soothe the turbulence
‘Ey’ ‘sithee’ and ‘love’, lastingly lilt
From cradle to grave, from backstreet
On the social, our son, beat his way
To Eton, Balliol, to Calcatta’s Shantiniketan
And all the way back to a locked ward.
While I in the meantime fondly fiddled
With rhyme and unreason, publishing pamphlets
And Leeds Poetry Weekly while under the bane
Of his tragic illness, poet and mother,
You were driven from pillar to post
By the taunting yobbery of your family
And the crass insensitivity of wild therapy
To the smoking dark of despair,
Locked in your flat in the Abbey Road
With seven cats and poetry.
O stop and strop your bladed darkness
On the rock of ages while plangent tollings
Mock your cradled rockings, knock by knock.
III
Debjani Chatterjee
In these doom-laden days
You are steady as a pilot nursing tired ships homeward
Through churning seas
Where grey gulls scream
Forlornly and for ever.
I am the red-neck,
Bear-headed blaster
Shifting sheer rock
To rape the ore of poetry’s plunder
Or bulldozing trees to glean mines of silver
While you sail serenely onward
Ever the diplomat’s daughter
Toujours de la politesse.
IV
Daisy Abey
Daisy, dearest of all, safest
And kindest, watcher and warner
Of chaotic corners looming
Round poetry’s boomerang bends
I owe you most a letter
While you are here beside me
Patient as a miller waiting on wind
To drive the great sails
Through summer.
When the muse takes over
I am snatched from order and duty
Blowing routine into a riot of going
And coming, blind, backwards, tip
Over ****, sea waves crashing in suburbia,
Saturnalia in Sutton, headlines of mad poet
Striding naked over moors, roaring
"I am here I am waiting".
V
Jeremy Reed
Niagaras of letters on pink sheets
In sheaths of silver envelopes
Mutually exchanged.
I open your missives
Like undressing a girl in my teens
Undoing the flap like a recalcitrant
Bra strap, the letters stiff as nipples
While I stroke the creviced folds
Of amber and mauve and lick
As I stick stamps like the ********
Of a reluctant virgin, urgent for
Defloration and the pulse of ******.
|
Written 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, rattles the cobbles in Kirkgate Market
Hovers in the drunken brogue of a Dubliner in the chippie
As we share our love of Joyce the Aire becomes the Liffey.
All my three muses have abandoned me.
Daisy in Asia,
Brenda protesting outside the Royal Free, Barbara seeing clients at the C.
A.
B.
Past Saltaire’s Mill, the world’s eighth wonder,
The new electric train whisperglides on wet rails
Past Shipley’s fairy glen and other tourist trails
Past Kirkstall’s abandoned abbey and redundant forge
To Grandma Wild’s in Keighley where I sit and gorge.
I’ve travelled on the Haworth bus so often
The driver chats as if I were a local
But when the rainbow’s lightning flash
Illumines all the valleys there’s a hush
And every pensioner's rheumy eye is rooted
On the gleaming horizon as its mooted
The Bronte’s spirits make the thunder crack
Three cloaked figures converging round the Oakworth track.
Haworth in a storm is a storm indeed
The lashing and the crashing makes the gravestones bleed
The mashing and the bashing makes the light recede
And on the moor top I lose my way and find it
Half a dozen times slipping in the mud and heather
Heather than can stand the thrust of any weather.
Just as suddenly as it had come the storm abated
Extremes demand those verbs so antiquated
Archaic and abhorred and second-rated
Yet still they stand like moorland rocks in mist
And wait as I do till the storm has passed
Buy postcards at the parsonage museum shop
Sit half an hour in the tea room drying off
And pen a word or two to my three muses
Who after all presented their excuses
But nonetheless the three all have their uses.
|
Written by
Vachel Lindsay |
On the road to nowhere
What wild oats did you sow
When you left your father's house
With your cheeks aglow?
Eyes so strained and eager
To see what you might see?
Were you thief or were you fool
Or most nobly free?
Were the tramp-days knightly,
True sowing of wild seed?
Did you dare to make the songs
Vanquished workmen need?
Did you waste much money
To deck a leper's feast?
Love the truth, defy the crowd
Scandalize the priest?
On the road to nowhere
What wild oats did you sow?
Stupids find the nowhere-road
Dusty, grim and slow.
Ere their sowing's ended
They turn them on their track,
Look at the caitiff craven wights
Repentant, hurrying back!
Grown ashamed of nowhere,
Of rags endured for years,
Lust for velvet in their hearts,
Pierced with Mammon's spears,
All but a few fanatics
Give up their darling goal,
Seek to be as others are,
Stultify the soul.
Reapings now confront them,
Glut them, or destroy,
Curious seeds, grain or weeds
Sown with awful joy.
Hurried is their harvest,
They make soft peace with men.
Pilgrims pass.
They care not,
Will not tramp again.
O nowhere, golden nowhere!
Sages and fools go on
To your chaotic ocean,
To your tremendous dawn.
Far in your fair dream-haven,
Is nothing or is all.
.
.
They press on, singing, sowing
Wild deeds without recall!
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