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Best Famous Long And Short Of It Poems

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Written by Kenneth Slessor | Create an image from this poem

Five Bells

 Time that is moved by little fidget wheels 
Is not my time, the flood that does not flow. 
Between the double and the single bell 
Of a ship's hour, between a round of bells 
From the dark warship riding there below, 
I have lived many lives, and this one life 
Of Joe, long dead, who lives between five bells. 

Deep and dissolving verticals of light 
Ferry the falls of moonshine down. Five bells 
Coldly rung out in a machine's voice. Night and water 
Pour to one rip of darkness, the Harbour floats 
In the air, the Cross hangs upside-down in water. 

Why do I think of you, dead man, why thieve 
These profitless lodgings from the flukes of thought 
Anchored in Time? You have gone from earth, 
Gone even from the meaning of a name; 
Yet something's there, yet something forms its lips 
And hits and cries against the ports of space, 
Beating their sides to make its fury heard. 

Are you shouting at me, dead man, squeezing your face 
In agonies of speech on speechless panes? 
Cry louder, beat the windows, bawl your name! 

But I hear nothing, nothing...only bells, 
Five bells, the bumpkin calculus of Time. 
Your echoes die, your voice is dowsed by Life, 
There's not a mouth can fly the pygmy strait - 
Nothing except the memory of some bones 
Long shoved away, and sucked away, in mud; 
And unimportant things you might have done, 
Or once I thought you did; but you forgot, 
And all have now forgotten - looks and words 
And slops of beer; your coat with buttons off, 
Your gaunt chin and pricked eye, and raging tales 
Of Irish kings and English perfidy, 
And dirtier perfidy of publicans 
Groaning to God from Darlinghurst. 
Five bells. 

Then I saw the road, I heard the thunder 
Tumble, and felt the talons of the rain 
The night we came to Moorebank in slab-dark, 
So dark you bore no body, had no face, 
But a sheer voice that rattled out of air 
(As now you'd cry if I could break the glass), 
A voice that spoke beside me in the bush, 
Loud for a breath or bitten off by wind, 
Of Milton, melons, and the Rights of Man, 
And blowing flutes, and how Tahitian girls 
Are brown and angry-tongued, and Sydney girls 
Are white and angry-tongued, or so you'd found. 
But all I heard was words that didn't join 
So Milton became melons, melons girls, 
And fifty mouths, it seemed, were out that night, 
And in each tree an Ear was bending down, 
Or something that had just run, gone behind the grass, 
When blank and bone-white, like a maniac's thought, 
The naphtha-flash of lightning slit the sky, 
Knifing the dark with deathly photographs. 
There's not so many with so poor a purse 
Or fierce a need, must fare by night like that, 
Five miles in darkness on a country track, 
But when you do, that's what you think. 
Five bells. 

In Melbourne, your appetite had gone, 
Your angers too; they had been leeched away 
By the soft archery of summer rains 
And the sponge-paws of wetness, the slow damp 
That stuck the leaves of living, snailed the mind, 
And showed your bones, that had been sharp with rage, 
The sodden ectasies of rectitude. 
I thought of what you'd written in faint ink, 
Your journal with the sawn-off lock, that stayed behind 
With other things you left, all without use, 
All without meaning now, except a sign 
That someone had been living who now was dead: 
"At Labassa. Room 6 x 8 
On top of the tower; because of this, very dark 
And cold in winter. Everything has been stowed 
Into this room - 500 books all shapes 
And colours, dealt across the floor 
And over sills and on the laps of chairs; 
Guns, photoes of many differant things 
And differant curioes that I obtained..." 

In Sydney, by the spent aquarium-flare 
Of penny gaslight on pink wallpaper, 
We argued about blowing up the world, 
But you were living backward, so each night 
You crept a moment closer to the breast, 
And they were living, all of them, those frames 
And shapes of flesh that had perplexed your youth, 
And most your father, the old man gone blind, 
With fingers always round a fiddle's neck, 
That graveyard mason whose fair monuments 
And tablets cut with dreams of piety 
Rest on the bosoms of a thousand men 
Staked bone by bone, in quiet astonishment 
At cargoes they had never thought to bear, 
These funeral-cakes of sweet and sculptured stone. 

Where have you gone? The tide is over you, 
The turn of midnight water's over you, 
As Time is over you, and mystery, 
And memory, the flood that does not flow. 
You have no suburb, like those easier dead 
In private berths of dissolution laid - 
The tide goes over, the waves ride over you 
And let their shadows down like shining hair, 
But they are Water; and the sea-pinks bend 
Like lilies in your teeth, but they are Weed; 
And you are only part of an Idea. 
I felt the wet push its black thumb-balls in, 
The night you died, I felt your eardrums crack, 
And the short agony, the longer dream, 
The Nothing that was neither long nor short; 
But I was bound, and could not go that way, 
But I was blind, and could not feel your hand. 
If I could find an answer, could only find 
Your meaning, or could say why you were here 
Who now are gone, what purpose gave you breath 
Or seized it back, might I not hear your voice? 

I looked out my window in the dark 
At waves with diamond quills and combs of light 
That arched their mackerel-backs and smacked the sand 
In the moon's drench, that straight enormous glaze, 
And ships far off asleep, and Harbour-buoys 
Tossing their fireballs wearily each to each, 
And tried to hear your voice, but all I heard 
Was a boat's whistle, and the scraping squeal 
Of seabirds' voices far away, and bells, 
Five bells. Five bells coldly ringing out. 
Five bells.


Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

The Days Go By

 for Daniel Weissbort

Some poems meant only for my eyes

About a grief I can’t let go

But I want to, want to throw

It away like an old worn-out cloak

Or screw up like a ball of over-written

Trash and toss into the corner bin.

I said it must come up or out

I don't know which but either way

Will do, I know I can't write in the vein

Of ‘Bridge’ this time, it takes an optimistic view,

Bright day stuff, sunlight on

Roundhay Park's Childrens’ Day 

Or just wandering round the streets

With Margaret, occasionally stopping

To whisper or to kiss.

Now over sixty I wonder

How and where to go from here 

Daniel your rolled out verse 

Unending Kaddish gave me hints

But what can you or anyone say

About our son, the other one, who from

Such a bright childhood came to such

A death-in-life?

Dreamless sleep is better than the consciousness

Of bitter days; I sit in silent prayer and read

Of Job, the Prodigal, the Sermon on the Mount.

I read and think and sigh aloud to my silent,

Silent self. I write him letters long or short

About the weather or a book I've read and hope

His studies are kept up. I can’t say ‘How much

Do you drink? Is it more or less or just the same?’

Its your own life

But then its partly one we shared for years

From birth along a road I thought we went

Along as one. Some years ago I sensed a change,

An invisible glass wall between us, between

It seemed you and everyone, the way friends

Hurried past, patting your shoulder in passing,

A joke in the pub, the Leeds boy who'd made good

Then threw it all away for drink.

Your boxed-up books, texts in five languages

Or six, the well-thumbed classics worn cassettes

Of Bach, Tippett’s ‘Knot Garden’, invitation

Cards, the total waste, my own and your’s and her’s.

Love does not seem an answer

That you want to know,

The hours, the years of waiting

Gather loss on loss until

My hopes are brief as days

That rush and go like speeding trains

That never stop. You drink, I pay,

You ramble through an odd text-book

And go and eat and drink and talk

And lose your way, then phone

‘To set things straight’ but nothing’s

Ever straight with you, the binges

Start and stop, a local train that

Locals know will never go beyond

The halt where only you get off.
Written by Heather McHugh | Create an image from this poem

Ghoti

 The gh comes from rough, the o from women's,
and the ti from unmentionables--presto:
there's the perfect English instance of
unlovablility--complete

with fish. Our wish was for a better
revelation: for a correspondence--
if not lexical, at least
phonetic; if not with Madonna

then at least with Mary Magdalene.
Instead we get the sheer
opacity of things: an accident
of incident, a tracery of history: the dung

inside the dungarees, the jock strap for a codpiece, and
the ruined patches bordering the lip. One boot (high-heeled) could make
Sorrento sorry, Capri corny, even little Italy
a little ill. Low-cased, a lover looks

one over--eggs without ease, semen without oars--
and there, on board, tricked out in fur and fin,
the landlubber who wound up captain. Where's it going,
this our (H)MS? More west? More forth? The quest

itself is at a long and short behest: it's wound
in winds. (Take rough from seas, and women from the shore,
unmentionables out of mind). We're here
for something rich, beyond

appearances. What do I mean? (What can one say?)
A minute of millenium, unculminating
stint, a stonishment: my god, what's
utterable? Gargah, gatto, goat. Us animals is made

to seine and trawl and drag and gaff
our way across the earth. The earth, it rolls.
We dig, lay lines, book arguably
perfect passages. But earth remains untranslated,

unplumbed. A million herring run where we
catch here a freckle, there a pock; the depths to which things live
words only glint at. Terns in flight work up
what fond minds might

call syntax. As for that
semantic antic in the distance, is it
whiskered fish, finned cat? Don't settle
just for two. Some bottomographies are

brooded over, and some skies swum through. . .
Written by Edgar Bowers | Create an image from this poem

Variations on an Elizabethan Theme

 Long days, short nights, this Southern summer 
Fixes the mind within its timeless place. 
 Athwart pale limbs the brazen hummer 
Hangs and is gone, warm sound its quickened space. 

 Butterfly weed and cardinal flower, 
Orange and red, with indigo the band, 
 Perfect themselves unto the hour. 
And blood suffused within the sunlit hand, 

 Within the glistening eye the dew, 
Are slow with their slow moving. Watch their passing, 
 As lightly the shade covers you: 
All colors and all shapes enrich its massing. 

 Once I endured such gentle season. 
Blood-root, trillium, sweet flag, and swamp aster— 
 In their mild urgency, the reason 
Knew each and kept each chosen from disaster. 

 Now even dusk destroys; the bright 
Leucotho? dissolves before the eyes 
 And poised upon the reach of light 
Leaves only what no reasoning dare surmise. 

 Dim isolation holds the sense 
Of being, intimate as breathing; around, 
 Voices, unmeasured and intense, 
Throb with the heart below the edge of sound.
Written by Amy Lowell | Create an image from this poem

Sancta Maria Succurre Miseris

 Dear Virgin Mary, far away,
Look down from Heaven while I pray.
Open your golden casement high,
And lean way out beyond the sky.
I am so little, it may be
A task for you to harken me.
O Lady Mary, I have bought
A candle, as the good priest taught.
I only had one penny, so
Old Goody Jenkins let it go.
It is a little bent, you see.
But Oh, be merciful to me!
I have not anything to give,
Yet I so long for him to live.
A year ago he sailed away
And not a word unto today.
I've strained my eyes from the sea-wall
But never does he come at all.
Other ships have entered port
Their voyages finished, long or short,
And other sailors have received
Their welcomes, while I sat and grieved.
My heart is bursting for his hail,
O Virgin, let me spy his sail.
~Hull down on the edge of a sun-soaked sea
Sparkle the bellying sails for me.
Taut to the push of a rousing wind
Shaking the sea till it foams behind,
The tightened rigging is shrill with the song:
"We are back again who were gone so long."~
One afternoon I bumped my head.
I sat on a post and wished I were dead
Like father and mother, for no one cared
Whither I went or how I fared.
A man's voice said, "My little lad,
Here's a bit of a toy to make you glad."
Then I opened my eyes and saw him plain,
With his sleeves rolled up, and the dark blue stain
Of tattooed skin, where a flock of quail
Flew up to his shoulder and met the tail
Of a dragon curled, all pink and green,
Which sprawled on his back, when it was seen.
He held out his hand and gave to me
The most marvellous top which could ever be.
It had ivory eyes, and jet-black rings,
And a red stone carved into little wings,
All joined by a twisted golden line,
And set in the brown wood, even and fine.
Forgive me, Lady, I have not brought
My treasure to you as I ought,
But he said to keep it for his sake
And comfort myself with it, and take
Joy in its spinning, and so I do.
It couldn't mean quite the same to you.
Every day I met him there,
Where the fisher-nets dry in the sunny air.
He told me stories of courts and kings,
Of storms at sea, of lots of things.
The top he said was a sort of sign
That something in the big world was mine.
~Blue and white on a sun-shot ocean.
Against the horizon a glint in motion.
Full in the grasp of a shoving wind,
Trailing her bubbles of foam behind,
Singing and shouting to port she races,
A flying harp, with her sheets and braces.~
O Queen of Heaven, give me heed,
I am in very utmost need.
He loved me, he was all I had,
And when he came it made the sad
Thoughts disappear. This very day
Send his ship home to me I pray.
I'll be a priest, if you want it so,
I'll work till I have enough to go
And study Latin to say the prayers
On the rosary our old priest wears.
I wished to be a sailor too,
But I will give myself to you.
I'll never even spin my top,
But put it away in a box. I'll stop
Whistling the sailor-songs he taught.
I'll save my pennies till I have bought
A silver heart in the market square,
I've seen some beautiful, white ones there.
I'll give up all I want to do
And do whatever you tell me to.
Heavenly Lady, take away
All the games I like to play,
Take my life to fill the score,
Only bring him back once more!
~The poplars shiver and turn their leaves,
And the wind through the belfry moans and grieves.
The gray dust whirls in the market square,
And the silver hearts are covered with care
By thick tarpaulins. Once again
The bay is black under heavy rain.~
The Queen of Heaven has shut her door.
A little boy weeps and prays no more.


Written by Emily Dickinson | Create an image from this poem

Image of Light Adieu --

 Image of Light, Adieu --
Thanks for the interview --
So long -- so short --
Preceptor of the whole --
Coeval Cardinal --
Impart -- Depart --
Written by Horace | Create an image from this poem

The touch of Zephyr (SOLVITUR ACRIS HIEMS)

The touch of Zephyr and of Spring has loosen'd Winter's thrall;
       The well-dried keels are wheel'd again to sea:
     The ploughman cares not for his fire, nor cattle for their stall,
       And frost no more is whitening all the lea.
     Now Cytherea leads the dance, the bright moon overhead;
       The Graces and the Nymphs, together knit,
     With rhythmic feet the meadow beat, while Vulcan, fiery red,
       Heats the Cyclopian forge in Aetna's pit.
     'Tis now the time to wreathe the brow with branch of myrtle green,
       Or flowers, just opening to the vernal breeze;
     Now Faunus claims his sacrifice among the shady treen,
       Lambkin or kidling, which soe'er he please.
     Pale Death, impartial, walks his round; he knocks at cottage-gate
       And palace-portal. Sestius, child of bliss!
     How should a mortal's hopes be long, when short his being's date?
         Lo here! the fabulous ghosts, the dark abyss,
     The void of the Plutonian hall, where soon as e'er you go,
         No more for you shall leap the auspicious die
     To seat you on the throne of wine; no more your breast shall glow
       For Lycidas, the star of every eye.
Written by Francesco Petrarch | Create an image from this poem

Sonnet CXIII

SONNET CXIII.

Pommi ove 'l sol occide i fiori e l' erba.

HIS INVINCIBLE CONSTANCY.

Place me where herb and flower the sun has dried,Or where numb winter's grasp holds sterner sway:Place me where Phœbus sheds a temperate ray,Where first he glows, where rests at eventide.Place me in lowly state, in power and pride,Where lour the skies, or where bland zephyrs playPlace me where blind night rules, or lengthened day,In age mature, or in youth's boiling tide:Place me in heaven, or in the abyss profound,On lofty height, or in low vale obscure,A spirit freed, or to the body bound;Bank'd with the great, or all unknown to fame,I still the same will be! the same endure!And my trilustral sighs still breathe the same!
Dacre.
[Pg 143] Place me where Phœbus burns each herb, each flower;Or where cold snows, and frost o'ercome his rays:Place me where rolls his car with temp'rate blaze;In climes that feel not, or that feel his power.Place me where fortune may look bright, or lour;Mid murky airs, or where soft zephyr plays:Place me in night, in long or short-lived days,Where age makes sad, or youth gilds ev'ry hour:Place me on mountains high, in vallies drear,In heaven, on earth, in depths unknown to-day;Whether life fosters still, or flies this clay:Place me where fame is distant, where she's near:Still will I love; nor shall those sighs yet cease,Which thrice five years have robb'd this breast of peace.
Anon. 1777.
Place me where angry Titan burns the Moor,And thirsty Afric fiery monsters brings,Or where the new-born phœnix spreads her wings,And troops of wond'ring birds her flight adore:Place me by Gange, or Ind's empamper'd shore,Where smiling heavens on earth cause double springs:Place me where Neptune's quire of Syrens sings,Or where, made hoarse through cold, he leaves to roar:Me place where Fortune doth her darlings crown,A wonder or a spark in Envy's eye,Or late outrageous fates upon me frown,And pity wailing, see disaster'd me.Affection's print my mind so deep doth prove,I may forget myself, but not my love.
Drummond.

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