Written by
Laure-Anne Bosselaar |
amidst swirling wine
and flickers of silver guests quote
Dante, Brecht, Kant and each other.
I wait in the hall after not
powdering my nose, trying to re-
compose that woman who’ll
graciously take her place
at the table and won’t tell her hosts:
I looked into your bedroom
and closets, smelled your
“Obsession” and “Brut,” sat
on your bed, imagined you
in those spotless sheets, looked
long into the sad eyes of your son
staring at your walls from his frame.
I tried to smile at myself
in your mirrors, wondering if you
smile that way too: those resilient
little smiles one smiles
at one’s self before facing the day,
or another long night ahead —
guests coming for dinner.
So I wait in this hall because
there are nights it’s hard
not to blurt out Stop! Stop
our babble: Pulitzer, Wall Street, sex,
Dante, politics, wars, have some Chianti...
let’s stop and talk. Of our thirsts
and obsessions, our bedrooms
and closets, the brutes in our mirrors,
the eyes of our sons.
There is time yet — let’s talk.
I am starving.
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Written by
Laurie Lee |
Far-fetched with tales of other worlds and ways,
My skin well-oiled with wines of the Levant,
I set my face into a filial smile
To greet the pale, domestic kiss of Kent.
But shall I never learn? That gawky girl,
Recalled so primly in my foreign thoughts,
Becomes again the green-haired queen of love
Whose wanton form dilates as it delights.
Her rolling tidal landscape floods the eye
And drowns Chianti in a dusky stream;
he flower-flecked grasses swim with simple horses,
The hedges choke with roses fat as cream.
So do I breathe the hayblown airs of home,
And watch the sea-green elms drip birds and shadows,
And as the twilight nets the plunging sun
My heart's keel slides to rest among the meadows.
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Written by
Robert William Service |
Ah me! How hard is destiny!
If we could only know. . . .
I bought my son from Sicily
A score of years ago;
I haled him from our sunny vale
To streets of din and squalor,
And left it to professors pale
To make of him a scholar.
Had he remained a peasant lad,
A shepherd on the hill,
like golden faun in goatskin clad
He might be singing still;
He would have made the flock his care
And lept with gay reliance
On thymy heights, unwitting there
Was such a thing as science.
He would have crooned to his guitar,
Draughts of chianti drinking;
A better destiny by far
Than reading, writing, thinking.
So bent above his books was he,
His thirst for knowledge slaking,
He did not realize that we
Are worm-food in the making.
Ambition got him in its grip
And inched him to his doom;
Fate granted him a fellowship,
Then graved for him a tomb.
"Beneath my feet I can't allow
The grass to grow," he said;
And toiled so tirelessly that now
It grows above his head.
His honour scrolls shall feed the flame,
They mean no more to me;
His ashes I with bitter blame
Will take to Sicily.
And there I'll weep with heart bereft,
By groves and sunny rills,
And wish my laughing boy I'd left
A shepherd on the hills.
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