Written by
Etheridge Knight |
Exchange in greed the ungraceful signs.
Thrust
The thick notes between green apple breasts.
Then the shadow of the devil descends,
The violent space cries and angel eyes,
Large and dark, retreat in innocence and in ice.
(Run sister run—the Bugga man comes!)
The violent space cries silently,
Like you cried wide years ago
In another space, speckled by the sun
And the leaves of a green plum tree,
And you were stung
By a red wasp and we flew home.
(Run sister run—the Bugga man comes!)
Well, hell, lil sis, wasps still sting.
You are all of seventeen and as alone now
In your pain as you were with the sting
On your brow.
Well, ****.
lil sis, here we are:
You and I and this poem.
And what should I do? should I squat
In the dust and make strange markings on the ground?
Shall I chant a spell to drive the demon away?
(Run sister run—the Bugga man comes!)
In the beginning you were the Virgin Mary,
And you are the Virgin Mary now.
But somewhere between Nazareth and Bethlehem
You lost your name in the nameless void.
"O Mary don't you weep don't you moan"
O Mary shake your butt to the violent juke,
Absord the demon puke and watch the whites eyes pop,
(Run sister run—the Bugga man comes!)
And what do I do.
I boil my tears in a twisted spoon
And dance like an angel on the point of a needle.
I sit counting syllables like Midas gold.
I am not bold.
I cannot yet take hold of the demon
And lift his weight from you black belly,
So I grab the air and sing my song.
(But the air cannot stand my singing long.
)
|
Written by
Craig Raine |
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings --
they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.
I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.
Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:
then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.
Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.
Model T is a room with the lock inside --
a key is turned to free the world
for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.
But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.
In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.
If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep
with sounds.
And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.
Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly.
Adults go to a punishment room
with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises
alone.
No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.
At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.
|
Written by
Louise Gluck |
Night covers the pond with its wing.
Under the ringed moon I can make out
your face swimming among minnows and the small
echoing stars.
In the night air
the surface of the pond is metal.
Within, your eyes are open.
They contain
a memory I recognize, as though
we had been children together.
Our ponies
grazed on the hill, they were gray
with white markings.
Now they graze
with the dead who wait
like children under their granite breastplates,
lucid and helpless:
The hills are far away.
They rise up
blacker than childhood.
What do you think of, lying so quietly
by the water? When you look that way I want
to touch you, but do not, seeing
as in another life we were of the same blood.
|
Written by
Sir Henry Newbolt |
We loved our nightjar, but she would not stay with us.
We had found her lying as dead, but soft and warm,
Under the apple tree beside the old thatched wall.
Two days we kept her in a basket by the fire,
Fed her, and thought she well might live – till suddenly
I the very moment of most confiding hope
She arised herself all tense, qivered and drooped and died.
Tears sprang into my eyes- why not? The heart of man
Soon sets itself to love a living companion,
The more so if by chance it asks some care of him.
And this one had the kind of loveliness that goes
Far deeper than the optic nerve- full fathom five
To the soul’socean cave, where Wonder and Reason
Tell their alternate dreams of how the world was made.
So wonderful she was-her wings the wings of night
But powdered here and therewith tiny golden clouds
And wave-line markings like sea-ripples on the sand.
O how I wish I might never forget that bird-
Never!
But even now, like all beauty of earth,
She is fading from me into the dusk of Time.
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