Written by
Allen Ginsberg |
Hey Father Death, I'm flying home
Hey poor man, you're all alone
Hey old daddy, I know where I'm going
Father Death, Don't cry any more
Mama's there, underneath the floor
Brother Death, please mind the store
Old Aunty Death Don't hide your bones
Old Uncle Death I hear your groans
O Sister Death how sweet your moans
O Children Deaths go breathe your breaths
Sobbing breasts'll ease your Deaths
Pain is gone, tears take the rest
Genius Death your art is done
Lover Death your body's gone
Father Death I'm coming home
Guru Death your words are true
Teacher Death I do thank you
For inspiring me to sing this Blues
Buddha Death, I wake with you
Dharma Death, your mind is new
Sangha Death, we'll work it through
Suffering is what was born
Ignorance made me forlorn
Tearful truths I cannot scorn
Father Breath once more farewell
Birth you gave was no thing ill
My heart is still, as time will tell.
July 8, 1976 (Over Lake Michigan)
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Written 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 from an easeled art room with the title
Of my weekly essay, ‘Discuss the links between the work
Of any symbolist poet and Monet.’
O, how slowly I drifted back to consciousness
Probing delightedly the dizzying whitenesses of Mallarm?
Strolling along an avenue of linden trees
Under a Provencal sky of azure
Wet with the scent of jasmine and lavender.
Yet in reality, things could hardly have been more different:
Watching our children grow from their first tottering steps,
Helping to tend them in sickness, learning the basics
Of the healer’s art, taking an old man to a ward,
Listening, listening to how many troubled lives
And to my own, perhaps; seeking to tease a meaning
Or find a thread in the jumbled maze of sorrows
Souls in their turbulence and grief have wandered through.
I even wrote a novel, ‘A Gone World’ I called it,
And helped another with the birth-pangs of her own.
Trying my hand at translation I puzzled the subtle
Metaphors of Reverdy, wandering his midnight landscapes
Of windmills and cross-roads where faith meets fate
And neither will succumb.
I sat in a packed lecture hall while a Lacanian
Misread early Freud through a crooked lens
And for a year turned every seminar to war
To make him see his vision’s fatal flaw.
I poured over cabinets of case histories,
Tried living here and there and met an amah,
Teaching her Auden and Empson. Her tears mingled
With my own at our last hurried meeting
In a crowded tea room, teaching her Klein.
I sat through many a summer watching the children play,
Feeling a hermit’s contentment in his cave,
Contemplating Plato and envisioning that cave
Of his where shadows move against the wall;
And turn to see or fail to see
The need to turn at all.
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Written 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 of crisps in sight.
I parked my friend on a bench and wandered
Down Highgate Hill, realising where I was
From the Waterlow Unit and the Whittington’s A&E.
Some say they know their way by the pubs
But I find psychiatric units more useful.
At a reading like this you never know just who
Might have a do and need some Haldol fast.
(Especially if the poet hovering round sanity’s border
Should chance upon the critic who thinks his Word
Is law and order - the first’s a devotee of a Krishna cult
For rich retirees; the second wrote a good book once
On early Hughes, but goes off if you don’t share his
‘Thought through views’).
In the event the only happening was a turbanned Sikh
Having a go at an Arts Council guru leaning in a stick.
I remembered Martin Bell’s story of how Scannell the boxer
Broke - was it Redgrove’s brolly? - over his head and had
To hide in the Gents till time was called.
James Simmons boasted of how the pint he threw
At Anthony Thwaite hit Geoffrey Hill instead.
O, for the company of the missing and the dead
Martin Bell, Wendy Oliver, Iris and Ted.
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