Written by
Craig Raine |
(for Rona, Jeremy, Sam & Grace)
All the lizards are asleep--
perched pagodas with tiny triangular tiles,
each milky lid a steamed-up window.
Inside, the heart repeats itself like a sleepy gong,
summoning nothing to nothing.
In winter time, the zoo reverts to metaphor,
God's poetry of boredom:
the cobra knits her Fair-Isle skin,
rattlers titter over the same joke.
All of them endlessly finish spaghetti.
The python runs down like a spring,
and time stops on some ancient Sabbath.
Pythagorean bees are shut inside the hive,
which hymns and hums like Sunday chapel--
drowsy thoughts in a wrinkled brain.
The fire's gone out--
crocodiles lie like wet beams,
cross-hatched by flames that no one can remember.
Grasshoppers shiver, chafe their limbs
and try to keep warm,
crouching on their marks perpetually.
The African cricket is trussed like a cold chicken:
the sneeze of movement returns it to the same position,
in the same body.
There is no change.
The rumple-headed lion has nowhere to go
and snoozes in his grimy combinations.
A chaise lounge with missing castors,
the walrus is stuck forever on his rock.
Sleepily, the seals play crib,
scoring on their upper lips.
The chimps kill fleas and time,
sewing nothing to nothing
Five o'clock--perhaps.
Vultures in their shabby Sunday suits
fidget with broken umbrellas,
while the ape beats his breast
and yodels out repentance.
Their feet are an awful dream of bunions--
but the buffalo's brazil nut bugle-horns
can never sound reveille.
|
Written by
Paul Muldoon |
Even as we speak, there's a smoker's cough
from behind the whitethorn hedge: we stop dead in our tracks;
a distant tingle of water into a trough.
In the past half-hour—since a cattle truck
all but sent us shuffling off this mortal coil—
we've consoled ourselves with the dregs
of a bottle of Redbreast.
Had Hawthorne been a Gael,
I insist, the scarlet A on Hester Prynne
would have stood for "Alcohol.
"
This must be the same truck whose taillights burn
so dimly, as if caked with dirt,
three or four hundred yards along the boreen
(a diminutive form of the Gaelic bóthar, "a road,"
from bó, "a cow," and thar
meaning, in this case, something like "athwart,"
"boreen" has entered English "through the air"
despite the protestations of the O.
E.
D.
):
why, though, should one taillight flash and flare
then flicker-fade
to an afterimage of tourmaline
set in a dark part-jet, part-jasper or -jade?
That smoker's cough again: it triggers off from drumlin
to drumlin an emphysemantiphon
of cows.
They hoist themselves onto their trampoline
and steady themselves and straight away divine
water in some far-flung spot
to which they then gravely incline.
This is no Devon
cow-coterie, by the way, whey-faced, with Spode
hooves and horns: nor are they the metaphysicattle of Japan
that have merely to anticipate
scoring a bull's-eye and, lo, it happens;
these are earth-flesh, earth-blood, salt of the earth,
whose talismans are their own jawbones
buried under threshold and hearth.
For though they trace themselves to the kith and kine
that presided over the birth
of Christ (so carry their calves a full nine
months and boast liquorice
cachous on their tongues), they belong more to the line
that's tramped these cwms and corries
since Cuchulainn tramped Aoife.
Again the flash.
Again the fade.
However I might allegorize
some oscaraboscarabinary bevy
of cattle there's no getting round this cattle truck,
one light on the blink, laden with what? Microwaves? Hi-fis?
Oscaraboscarabinary: a twin, entwined, a tree, a Tuareg;
a double dung-beetle; a plain
and simple hi-firing party; an off-the-back-of-a-lorry drogue?
Enough of Colette and Céline, Céline and Paul Celan:
enough of whether Nabokov
taught at Wellesley or Wesleyan.
Now let us talk of slaughter and the slain,
the helicopter gunship, the mighty Kalashnikov:
let's rest for a while in a place where a cow has lain.
|
Written by
John Betjeman |
The flag that hung half-mast today
Seemed animate with being
As if it knew for who it flew
And will no more be seeing.
He loved each corner of the links-
The stream at the eleventh,
The grey-green bents, the pale sea-pinks,
The prospect from the seventh;
To the ninth tee the uphill climb,
A grass and sandy stairway,
And at the top the scent of thyme
And long extent of fairway.
He knew how on a summer day
The sea's deep blue grew deeper,
How evening shadows over Bray
Made that round hill look steeper.
He knew the ocean mists that rose
And seemed for ever staying,
When moaned the foghorn from Trevose
And nobody was playing;
The flip of cards on winter eves,
The whisky and the scoring,
As trees outside were stripped of leaves
And heavy seas were roaring.
He died when early April light
Showed red his garden sally
And under pale green spears glowed white
His lillies of the valley;
The garden where he used to stand
And where the robin waited
To fly and perch upon his hand
And feed till it was sated.
The Times would never have the space
For Ned's discreet achievements;
The public prints are not the place
For intimate bereavements.
A gentle guest, a willing host,
Affection deeply planted -
It's strange that those we miss the most
Are those we take for granted.
|
Written by
W S Merwin |
Matches among other things that were not allowed
never would be
lying high in a cool blue box
that opened in other hands and there they all were
bodies clean and smooth blue heads white crowns
white sandpaper on the sides of the box scoring
fire after fire gone before
I could hear the scratch and flare
when they were over
and catch the smell of the striking
I knew what the match would feel like
lighting
when I was very young
a fire engine came and parked
in the shadow of the big poplar tree
of Fourth Street one night
keeping its engine running
pumping oxygen to the old woman
in the basement
when she died the red lights went on burning
|
Written by
Thomas Moore |
'Twas grav'd on the Stone of Destiny,
In letters four, and letters three;
And ne'er did the King of the Gulls go by
But those awful letters scar'd his eye;
For he knew that a Prophet Voice had said
"As long as those words by man were read,
The ancient race of the Gulls should ne'er
One hour of peace or plenty share.
"
But years and years successive flew
And the letters still more legible grew, --
At top, a T, an H, an E,
And underneath, D.
E.
B.
T.
Some thought them Hebrew, -- such as Jews,
More skill'd in Scrip than Scripture use;
While some surmis'd 'twas an ancient way
Of keeping accounts, (well known in the day
Of the fam'd Didlerius Jeremias,
Who had thereto a wonderful bias,)
And prov'd in books most learnedly boring,
'Twas called the Pontick way of scoring.
Howe'er this be, there never were yet
Seven letters of the alphabet,
That, 'twixt them form'd so grim a spell,
Or scar'd a Land of Gulls so well,
As did this awful riddle-me-ree
Of T.
H.
E.
D.
E.
B.
T.
Hark! - it is struggling Freedom's cry;
"Help, help, ye nations, or I die;
'Tis freedom's fight, and on the field
Where I expire, your doom is seal'd.
"
The Gull-King hears the awakening call,
He hath summon'd his Peers and Patriots all,
And he asks, "Ye noble Gulls, shall we
Stand basely by at the fall of the Free,
Nor utter a curse, nor deal a blow?"
And they answer, with voice of thunder, "No.
"
Out fly their flashing swords in the air! -
But, -- why do they rest suspended there?
What sudden blight, what baleful charm,
Hath chill'd each eye and check'd each arm?
Alas! some withering hand hath thrown
The veil from off that fatal stone,
And pointing now, with sapless finger,
Showeth where dark those letters linger, --
Letters four, and letters three,
T.
H.
E.
D.
E.
B.
T.
At sight thereof, each lifted brand
Powerless falls from every hand;
In vain the Patriot knits his brow, --
Even talk, his staple, fails him now.
In vain the King like a hero treads,
His Lords of the Treasury shake their heads;
And to all his talk of "brave and free",
No answer getteth His Majesty
But "T.
H.
E.
D.
E.
B.
T.
"
In short, the whole Gull nation feels
The're fairly spell-bound, neck and heels;
And so, in the face of the laughing world,
Must e'en sit down, with banners furled,
Adjourning all their dreams sublime
Of glory and war to -- some other time.
|
Written by
Robert William Service |
I hate my neighbour Widow Green;
I'd like to claw her face;
But if I did she'd make a scene
And run me round the place:
For widows are in way of spleen
A most pugnacious race.
And yet I must do something quick
To keep the hag in line,
Since her red rooster chose to pick
Five lettuce heads of mine:
And so I fed it arsenic
Which it did not decline.
It disappeared, but on my mat
Before a week had sped
I found Mi-mi, my tabby cat
And it was stoney dead;
I diagnosed with weeping that
On strychnine it had fed.
And so I bought a hamburg steak,
Primed it with powdered glass,
And left it for her dog to take
With gulping from the grass:
Since then, although I lie awake
I have not seen it pass.
Well, that's the scoring up to date:
And as I read a text
From Job to justify my hate
I wonder who'll be next?
Somehow I feel that one must die,
Ma Green or I.
|