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Best Famous Screens Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Screens poems. This is a select list of the best famous Screens poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Screens poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of screens poems.

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Written by Christina Rossetti | Create an image from this poem

In an Artists Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases,
     One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
     We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress,
     A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens,
     A saint, an angel—every canvas means
The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night,
     And she with true kind eyes looks back on him,
Fair as the moon and joyful as the light:
     Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim;
No as she is, but was when hope shone bright;
     Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.


Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

To The Sound Of Violins

 Give me life at its most garish

Friday night in the Square, pink sequins dazzle

And dance on clubbers bare to the midriff

Young men in crisp shirts and pressed pants

‘Dress code smart’ gyrate to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

And sing along its lyrics to the throng of which I’m one

My shorts, shoulder bag and white beard

Making me stand out in the teeming swarm

Of teens and twenties this foetid Friday night

On my way from the ward where our son paces

And fulminates I throw myself into the drowning

Tide of Friday to be rescued by sheer normality.

The mill girl with her mates asks anxiously

"Are you on your own? Come and join us

What’s your name?" Age has driven my shyness away 

As I join the crowd beneath the turning purple screens 

Bannered ‘****** lasts for ever’ and sip unending 

Halves of bitter, as I circulate among the crowd, 

Being complete in itself and out for a good night out,

A relief from factory, shop floor and market stall

Running from the reality of the ward where my son 

Pounds the ledge with his fist and seems out to blast

My very existence with words like bullets.

The need to anaesthetise the pain resurfaces 

Again and again. In Leeds City Square where 

Pugin’s church, the Black Prince and the Central Post Office

In its Edwardian grandeur are startled by the arching spumes

Or white water fountains and the steel barricades of Novotel

Rise from the ruins of a sixties office block.

I hurry past and join Boar Lane’s Friday crew

From Keighley and Dewsbury’s mills, hesitating

At the thought of being told I’m past my 

Sell-by-date and turned away by the West Indian

Bouncers, black-suited and city-council badged

Who checked my bag but smiled at ‘The Lights of 

Leeds’ and ‘Poets of Our Time’ tucked away as carefully as condoms-

Was it guns or drugs they were after

I wondered as I crossed the bare boards to the bar.

I stayed near the fruit machine which no-one played,

Where the crowd was thickest, the noise drowned out the pain

‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’ the chorus rang

The girls joined in but the young men knew 

The words no more than me. Dancing as we knew it 

In the sixties has gone, you do your own thing

And follow the beat, hampered by my bag

I just kept going, letting the music and the crowd

Hold me, my camera eye moving in search, in search…

What I’m searching for I don’t know

Searching’s a way of life that has to grow

"All of us who are patients here are searchers after truth"

My son kept saying, his legs shaking from the side effects

Of God-knows- what, pacing the tiny ward kitchen cum smoking room,

Denouncing his ‘illegal section’ and ‘poisonous medication’

To an audience of one.

The prospect of TV, Seroxat and Diazepan fazed me:

I was beyond unravelling Meltzer on differentiation 

Of self and object or Rosine Josef Perelberg on ‘Dreaming and Thinking’

Or even the simpler ‘Rise and Crisis of Psychoanalysis in the United States’ 

So I went out with West Yorkshire on a Friday night.

Nothing dramatic happened; perhaps I’m a little too used

To acute wards or worse where chairs fly across rooms,

Windows disintegrate and double doors are triple locked

And every nurse carries a white panic button and black pager

To pinpoint the moment’s crisis. Normality was a bit of adrenaline,

A wild therapy that drew me in, sanity had won the night.

"Are you on your own, love? Come and join us"

People kept asking if I was alright and why 

I had that damned great shoulder bag. I was introduced

To three young men about to tie the knot, a handsome lothario

In his midforties winked at me constantly,

Dancing with practised ease with sixteen year olds

Who all seemed to know him and determined to show him.

Three hours passed in as many minutes and then the crowds

Disappeared to catch the last bus home. The young aren’t 

As black as they are painted, one I danced with reminded me

Of how Margaret would have been at sixteen

With straw gold hair Yeats would have immortalised.

People seemed to guess I was haunted by an inner demon

I’d tried to leave in the raftered lofts of City Square

But failed to. Girls from sixteen to twenty six kept grabbing me

And making me dance and I found my teenage inhibitions

Gone at sixty-one and wildly gyrated to ‘Sex Bomb, Sex Bomb’

Egged on by the throng by the fruit machine and continuous

Thumbs-up signs from passing men. I had to forgo

A cheerful group of Aussies were intent on taking me clubbing

"I’d get killed or turned into a pumpkin

If I get home after midnight" I quipped to their delight

But being there had somehow put things right.
Written by Edwin Arlington Robinson | Create an image from this poem

Octaves

 I 

We thrill too strangely at the master's touch;
We shrink too sadly from the larger self
Which for its own completeness agitates
And undetermines us; we do not feel -- 
We dare not feel it yet -- the splendid shame
Of uncreated failure; we forget,
The while we groan, that God's accomplishment
Is always and unfailingly at hand. 

II 

Tumultuously void of a clean scheme
Whereon to build, whereof to formulate,
The legion life that riots in mankind
Goes ever plunging upward, up and down,
Most like some crazy regiment at arms,
Undisciplined of aught but Ignorance,
And ever led resourcelessly along
To brainless carnage by drunk trumpeters. 

III 

To me the groaning of world-worshippers
Rings like a lonely music played in hell
By one with art enough to cleave the walls
Of heaven with his cadence, but without
The wisdom or the will to comprehend
The strangeness of his own perversity,
And all without the courage to deny
The profit and the pride of his defeat. 

IV 

While we are drilled in error, we are lost
Alike to truth and usefulness. We think
We are great warriors now, and we can brag
Like Titans; but the world is growing young,
And we, the fools of time, are growing with it: -- 
We do not fight to-day, we only die;
We are too proud of death, and too ashamed
Of God, to know enough to be alive. 

V 

There is one battle-field whereon we fall
Triumphant and unconquered; but, alas!
We are too fleshly fearful of ourselves
To fight there till our days are whirled and blurred
By sorrow, and the ministering wheels
Of anguish take us eastward, where the clouds
Of human gloom are lost against the gleam
That shines on Thought's impenetrable mail. 

VI 

When we shall hear no more the cradle-songs
Of ages -- when the timeless hymns of Love
Defeat them and outsound them -- we shall know
The rapture of that large release which all
Right science comprehends; and we shall read,
With unoppressed and unoffended eyes,
That record of All-Soul whereon God writes
In everlasting runes the truth of Him. 

VII 

The guerdon of new childhood is repose: -- 
Once he has read the primer of right thought,
A man may claim between two smithy strokes
Beatitude enough to realize
God's parallel completeness in the vague
And incommensurable excellence
That equitably uncreates itself
And makes a whirlwind of the Universe. 

VIII 

There is no loneliness: -- no matter where
We go, nor whence we come, nor what good friends
Forsake us in the seeming, we are all
At one with a complete companionship;
And though forlornly joyless be the ways
We travel, the compensate spirit-gleams
Of Wisdom shaft the darkness here and there,
Like scattered lamps in unfrequented streets. 

IX 

When one that you and I had all but sworn
To be the purest thing God ever made
Bewilders us until at last it seems
An angel has come back restigmatized, -- 
Faith wavers, and we wonder what there is
On earth to make us faithful any more,
But never are quite wise enough to know
The wisdom that is in that wonderment. 

X 

Where does a dead man go? -- The dead man dies;
But the free life that would no longer feed
On fagots of outburned and shattered flesh
Wakes to a thrilled invisible advance,
Unchained (or fettered else) of memory;
And when the dead man goes it seems to me
'T were better for us all to do away
With weeping, and be glad that he is gone. 

XI 

So through the dusk of dead, blank-legended,
And unremunerative years we search
To get where life begins, and still we groan
Because we do not find the living spark
Where no spark ever was; and thus we die,
Still searching, like poor old astronomers
Who totter off to bed and go to sleep,
To dream of untriangulated stars. 

XII 

With conscious eyes not yet sincere enough
To pierce the glimmered cloud that fluctuates
Between me and the glorifying light
That screens itself with knowledge, I discern
The searching rays of wisdom that reach through
The mist of shame's infirm credulity,
And infinitely wonder if hard words
Like mine have any message for the dead. 

XIII 

I grant you friendship is a royal thing,
But none shall ever know that royalty
For what it is till he has realized
His best friend in himself. 'T is then, perforce,
That man's unfettered faith indemnifies
Of its own conscious freedom the old shame,
And love's revealed infinitude supplants
Of its own wealth and wisdom the old scorn. 

XIV 

Though the sick beast infect us, we are fraught
Forever with indissoluble Truth,
Wherein redress reveals itself divine,
Transitional, transcendent. Grief and loss,
Disease and desolation, are the dreams
Of wasted excellence; and every dream
Has in it something of an ageless fact
That flouts deformity and laughs at years. 

XV 

We lack the courage to be where we are: -- 
We love too much to travel on old roads,
To triumph on old fields; we love too much
To consecrate the magic of dead things,
And yieldingly to linger by long walls
Of ruin, where the ruinous moonlight
That sheds a lying glory on old stones
Befriends us with a wizard's enmity. 

XVI 

Something as one with eyes that look below
The battle-smoke to glimpse the foeman's charge,
We through the dust of downward years may scan
The onslaught that awaits this idiot world
Where blood pays blood for nothing, and where life
Pays life to madness, till at last the ports
Of gilded helplessness be battered through
By the still crash of salvatory steel. 

XVII 

To you that sit with Sorrow like chained slaves,
And wonder if the night will ever come,
I would say this: The night will never come,
And sorrow is not always. But my words
Are not enough; your eyes are not enough;
The soul itself must insulate the Real,
Or ever you do cherish in this life -- 
In this life or in any life -- repose. 

XVIII 

Like a white wall whereon forever breaks
Unsatisfied the tumult of green seas,
Man's unconjectured godliness rebukes
With its imperial silence the lost waves
Of insufficient grief. This mortal surge
That beats against us now is nothing else
Than plangent ignorance. Truth neither shakes
Nor wavers; but the world shakes, and we shriek. 

XIX 

Nor jewelled phrase nor mere mellifluous rhyme
Reverberates aright, or ever shall,
One cadence of that infinite plain-song
Which is itself all music. Stronger notes
Than any that have ever touched the world
Must ring to tell it -- ring like hammer-blows,
Right-echoed of a chime primordial,
On anvils, in the gleaming of God's forge. 

XX 

The prophet of dead words defeats himself:
Whoever would acknowledge and include
The foregleam and the glory of the real,
Must work with something else than pen and ink
And painful preparation: he must work
With unseen implements that have no names,
And he must win withal, to do that work,
Good fortitude, clean wisdom, and strong skill. 

XXI 

To curse the chilled insistence of the dawn
Because the free gleam lingers; to defraud
The constant opportunity that lives
Unchallenged in all sorrow; to forget
For this large prodigality of gold
That larger generosity of thought, -- 
These are the fleshly clogs of human greed,
The fundamental blunders of mankind. 

XXII 

Forebodings are the fiends of Recreance;
The master of the moment, the clean seer
Of ages, too securely scans what is,
Ever to be appalled at what is not;
He sees beyond the groaning borough lines
Of Hell, God's highways gleaming, and he knows
That Love's complete communion is the end
Of anguish to the liberated man. 

XXIII 

Here by the windy docks I stand alone,
But yet companioned. There the vessel goes,
And there my friend goes with it; but the wake
That melts and ebbs between that friend and me
Love's earnest is of Life's all-purposeful
And all-triumphant sailing, when the ships
Of Wisdom loose their fretful chains and swing
Forever from the crumbled wharves of Time.
Written by Carl Sandburg | Create an image from this poem

Smoke and Steel

 SMOKE of the fields in spring is one,
Smoke of the leaves in autumn another.
Smoke of a steel-mill roof or a battleship funnel,
They all go up in a line with a smokestack,
Or they twist … in the slow twist … of the wind.

If the north wind comes they run to the south.
If the west wind comes they run to the east.
 By this sign
 all smokes
 know each other.
Smoke of the fields in spring and leaves in autumn,
Smoke of the finished steel, chilled and blue,
By the oath of work they swear: “I know you.”

Hunted and hissed from the center
Deep down long ago when God made us over,
Deep down are the cinders we came from—
You and I and our heads of smoke.

Some of the smokes God dropped on the job
Cross on the sky and count our years
And sing in the secrets of our numbers;
Sing their dawns and sing their evenings,
Sing an old log-fire song:

You may put the damper up,
You may put the damper down,
The smoke goes up the chimney just the same.

Smoke of a city sunset skyline,
Smoke of a country dusk horizon—
 They cross on the sky and count our years.

Smoke of a brick-red dust
 Winds on a spiral
 Out of the stacks
For a hidden and glimpsing moon.
This, said the bar-iron shed to the blooming mill,
This is the slang of coal and steel.
The day-gang hands it to the night-gang,
The night-gang hands it back.

Stammer at the slang of this—
Let us understand half of it.
 In the rolling mills and sheet mills,
 In the harr and boom of the blast fires,
 The smoke changes its shadow
 And men change their shadow;
 A ******, a wop, a bohunk changes.

 A bar of steel—it is only
Smoke at the heart of it, smoke and the blood of a man.
A runner of fire ran in it, ran out, ran somewhere else,
And left—smoke and the blood of a man
And the finished steel, chilled and blue.

So fire runs in, runs out, runs somewhere else again,
And the bar of steel is a gun, a wheel, a nail, a shovel,
A rudder under the sea, a steering-gear in the sky;
And always dark in the heart and through it,
 Smoke and the blood of a man.
Pittsburg, Youngstown, Gary—they make their steel with men.

In the blood of men and the ink of chimneys
The smoke nights write their oaths:
Smoke into steel and blood into steel;
Homestead, Braddock, Birmingham, they make their steel with men.
Smoke and blood is the mix of steel.

 The birdmen drone
 in the blue; it is steel
 a motor sings and zooms.

Steel barb-wire around The Works.
Steel guns in the holsters of the guards at the gates of The Works.
Steel ore-boats bring the loads clawed from the earth by steel, lifted and lugged by arms of steel, sung on its way by the clanking clam-shells.
The runners now, the handlers now, are steel; they dig and clutch and haul; they hoist their automatic knuckles from job to job; they are steel making steel.
Fire and dust and air fight in the furnaces; the pour is timed, the billets wriggle; the clinkers are dumped:
Liners on the sea, skyscrapers on the land; diving steel in the sea, climbing steel in the sky.

Finders in the dark, you Steve with a dinner bucket, you Steve clumping in the dusk on the sidewalks with an evening paper for the woman and kids, you Steve with your head wondering where we all end up—
Finders in the dark, Steve: I hook my arm in cinder sleeves; we go down the street together; it is all the same to us; you Steve and the rest of us end on the same stars; we all wear a hat in hell together, in hell or heaven.

Smoke nights now, Steve.
Smoke, smoke, lost in the sieves of yesterday;
Dumped again to the scoops and hooks today.
Smoke like the clocks and whistles, always.
 Smoke nights now.
 To-morrow something else.

Luck moons come and go:
Five men swim in a pot of red steel.
Their bones are kneaded into the bread of steel:
Their bones are knocked into coils and anvils
And the sucking plungers of sea-fighting turbines.
Look for them in the woven frame of a wireless station.
So ghosts hide in steel like heavy-armed men in mirrors.
Peepers, skulkers—they shadow-dance in laughing tombs.
They are always there and they never answer.

One of them said: “I like my job, the company is good to me, America is a wonderful country.”
One: “Jesus, my bones ache; the company is a liar; this is a free country, like hell.”
One: “I got a girl, a peach; we save up and go on a farm and raise pigs and be the boss ourselves.”
And the others were roughneck singers a long ways from home.
Look for them back of a steel vault door.

They laugh at the cost.
They lift the birdmen into the blue.
It is steel a motor sings and zooms.

In the subway plugs and drums,
In the slow hydraulic drills, in gumbo or gravel,
Under dynamo shafts in the webs of armature spiders,
They shadow-dance and laugh at the cost.

The ovens light a red dome.
Spools of fire wind and wind.
Quadrangles of crimson sputter.
The lashes of dying maroon let down.
Fire and wind wash out the slag.
Forever the slag gets washed in fire and wind.
The anthem learned by the steel is:
 Do this or go hungry.
Look for our rust on a plow.
Listen to us in a threshing-engine razz.
Look at our job in the running wagon wheat.

Fire and wind wash at the slag.
Box-cars, clocks, steam-shovels, churns, pistons, boilers, scissors—
Oh, the sleeping slag from the mountains, the slag-heavy pig-iron will go down many roads.
Men will stab and shoot with it, and make butter and tunnel rivers, and mow hay in swaths, and slit hogs and skin beeves, and steer airplanes across North America, Europe, Asia, round the world.

Hacked from a hard rock country, broken and baked in mills and smelters, the rusty dust waits
Till the clean hard weave of its atoms cripples and blunts the drills chewing a hole in it.
The steel of its plinths and flanges is reckoned, O God, in one-millionth of an inch.

Once when I saw the curves of fire, the rough scarf women dancing,
Dancing out of the flues and smoke-stacks—flying hair of fire, flying feet upside down;
Buckets and baskets of fire exploding and chortling, fire running wild out of the steady and fastened ovens;
Sparks cracking a harr-harr-huff from a solar-plexus of rock-ribs of the earth taking a laugh for themselves;
Ears and noses of fire, gibbering gorilla arms of fire, gold mud-pies, gold bird-wings, red jackets riding purple mules, scarlet autocrats tumbling from the humps of camels, assassinated czars straddling vermillion balloons;
I saw then the fires flash one by one: good-by: then smoke, smoke;
And in the screens the great sisters of night and cool stars, sitting women arranging their hair,
Waiting in the sky, waiting with slow easy eyes, waiting and half-murmuring:
 “Since you know all
 and I know nothing,
 tell me what I dreamed last night.”

Pearl cobwebs in the windy rain,
in only a flicker of wind,
are caught and lost and never known again.

A pool of moonshine comes and waits,
but never waits long: the wind picks up
loose gold like this and is gone.

A bar of steel sleeps and looks slant-eyed
on the pearl cobwebs, the pools of moonshine;
sleeps slant-eyed a million years,
sleeps with a coat of rust, a vest of moths,
a shirt of gathering sod and loam.

The wind never bothers … a bar of steel.
The wind picks only .. pearl cobwebs .. pools of moonshine.
Written by Robert Frost | Create an image from this poem

The Mountain

 The mountain held the town as in a shadow 
I saw so much before I slept there once: 
I noticed that I missed stars in the west, 
Where its black body cut into the sky. 
Near me it seemed: I felt it like a wall 
Behind which I was sheltered from a wind. 
And yet between the town and it I found, 
When I walked forth at dawn to see new things, 
Were fields, a river, and beyond, more fields. 
The river at the time was fallen away, 
And made a widespread brawl on cobble-stones; 
But the signs showed what it had done in spring; 
Good grass-land gullied out, and in the grass 
Ridges of sand, and driftwood stripped of bark. 
I crossed the river and swung round the mountain. 
And there I met a man who moved so slow 
With white-faced oxen in a heavy cart, 
It seemed no hand to stop him altogether. 
"What town is this?" I asked. 
"This? Lunenburg." 
Then I was wrong: the town of my sojourn, 
Beyond the bridge, was not that of the mountain, 
But only felt at night its shadowy presence. 
"Where is your village? Very far from here?" 
"There is no village--only scattered farms. 
We were but sixty voters last election. 
We can't in nature grow to many more: 
That thing takes all the room!" He moved his goad. 
The mountain stood there to be pointed at. 
Pasture ran up the side a little way, 
And then there was a wall of trees with trunks: 
After that only tops of trees, and cliffs 
Imperfectly concealed among the leaves. 
A dry ravine emerged from under boughs 
Into the pasture. 
"That looks like a path. 
Is that the way to reach the top from here?-- 
Not for this morning, but some other time: 
I must be getting back to breakfast now." 
"I don't advise your trying from this side. 
There is no proper path, but those that have 
Been up, I understand, have climbed from Ladd's. 
That's five miles back. You can't mistake the place: 
They logged it there last winter some way up. 
I'd take you, but I'm bound the other way." 
"You've never climbed it?" 
"I've been on the sides 
Deer-hunting and trout-fishing. There's a brook 
That starts up on it somewhere--I've heard say 
Right on the top, tip-top--a curious thing. 
But what would interest you about the brook, 
It's always cold in summer, warm in winter. 
One of the great sights going is to see 
It steam in winter like an ox's breath, 
Until the bushes all along its banks 
Are inch-deep with the frosty spines and bristles-- 
You know the kind. Then let the sun shine on it!" 
"There ought to be a view around the world 
From such a mountain--if it isn't wooded 
Clear to the top." I saw through leafy screens 
Great granite terraces in sun and shadow, 
Shelves one could rest a knee on getting up-- 
With depths behind him sheer a hundred feet; 
Or turn and sit on and look out and down, 
With little ferns in crevices at his elbow. 
"As to that I can't say. But there's the spring, 
Right on the summit, almost like a fountain. 
That ought to be worth seeing." 
"If it's there. 
You never saw it?" 
"I guess there's no doubt 
About its being there. I never saw it. 
It may not be right on the very top: 
It wouldn't have to be a long way down 
To have some head of water from above, 
And a good distance down might not be noticed 
By anyone who'd come a long way up. 
One time I asked a fellow climbing it 
To look and tell me later how it was." 
"What did he say?" 
"He said there was a lake 
Somewhere in Ireland on a mountain top." 
"But a lake's different. What about the spring?" 
"He never got up high enough to see. 
That's why I don't advise your trying this side. 
He tried this side. I've always meant to go 
And look myself, but you know how it is: 
It doesn't seem so much to climb a mountain 
You've worked around the foot of all your life. 
What would I do? Go in my overalls, 
With a big stick, the same as when the cows 
Haven't come down to the bars at milking time? 
Or with a shotgun for a stray black bear? 
'Twouldn't seem real to climb for climbing it." 
"I shouldn't climb it if I didn't want to-- 
Not for the sake of climbing. What's its name?" 
"We call it Hor: I don't know if that's right." 
"Can one walk around it? Would it be too far?" 
"You can drive round and keep in Lunenburg, 
But it's as much as ever you can do, 
The boundary lines keep in so close to it. 
Hor is the township, and the township's Hor-- 
And a few houses sprinkled round the foot, 
Like boulders broken off the upper cliff, 
Rolled out a little farther than the rest." 
"Warm in December, cold in June, you say?" 
"I don't suppose the water's changed at all. 
You and I know enough to know it's warm 
Compared with cold, and cold compared with warm. 
But all the fun's in how you say a thing." 
"You've lived here all your life?" 
"Ever since Hor 
Was no bigger than a----" What, I did not hear. 
He drew the oxen toward him with light touches 
Of his slim goad on nose and offside flank, 
Gave them their marching orders and was moving.


Written by Jennifer Reeser | Create an image from this poem

Civic Centre (for Kathryn)

 Moscow ballet at seven in the evening.
You look at everything. You lay your cheek
against my shoulder, smoothing down my sleeve,
the Russian blizzards somehow less than bleak,
portrayed with whimsy on the backdrop screens
in dolloped watercolors as they are.
I ask if you know what their movement means.
You wish our situation not so far.

And everywhere, the audience defies
convention and conformity, some dressed
as though they had been made to improvise
at the last minute, some in black-tie best.

You’re happy, in new satin, having run
your fingers countless times from hip to hem –
Anastasia, whereas I am anyone
in tan, beside a jade and garnet gem.

With clarity and ease like these a-stage,
comparison with any else in life
seems but the smart annoyance of an age,
scissors beside a blunted paperknife.

“Sit up. Pay close attention. Sugar Plum
is dancing with such dignity,” I tell
you, half-disheartened, when I hear you hum,
you know Tchaikovsky’s symphony so well.
Written by Du Fu | Create an image from this poem

In Abbot Zan's Room at Dayun Temple: Four Poems (1)

Heart at water essence land Clothes wet spring rain time Penetrate gate utmost walk slowly Large court really tranquil appointment Reach door open again close Hit bell vegetarian meal at here Cream enhance develop nature Diet give support decline Hold arm be many days Open heart without shame evasion Golden oriole pass structure Purple dove descend lattice screen Humble think reach place suit Flower beside go self slow Tangxiu raise me sickness Smile ask write poem
My heart is in a world of water and crystal, My clothes are damp in this time of spring rains. Through the gates I slowly walk to the end, The great court the appointed tranquil space. I reach the doors- they open and shut again, Now strikes the bell- the meal time has arrived. This cream will help one's nature strengthen and grow, The diet gives support in my decline. We've grasped each other's arms so many days, And opened our hearts without shame or evasion. Golden orioles flit across the beams, Purple doves descend from lattice screens. Myself, I think I've found a place that suits, I walk by flowers at my own slow pace. Tangxiu lifts me from my sickly state, And smiling, asks me to write a poem.
Written by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope | Create an image from this poem

The Commination

 He that is filthy let him be filthy still. 
Rev. 22.11 

Like John on Patmos, brooding on the Four 
Last Things, I meditate the ruin of friends 
Whose loss, Lord, brings this grand new curse to mind 
Now send me foes worth cursing, or send more 
- Since means should be proportionate to ends - 
For mine are few and of the piddling kind: 

Drivellers, snivellers, writers of bad verse, 
Backbiting bitches, snipers from a pew, 
Small turds from the great **** of self-esteem; 
On such as these I would not waste my curse. 
God send me soon the enemy or two 
Fit for the wrath of God, of whom I dream: 

Some Caliban of Culture, some absurd 
Messiah of the Paranoiac State, 
Some Educator wallowing in his slime, 
Some Prophet of the Uncreating Word 
Monsters a man might reasonably hate, 
Masters of Progress, Leaders of our Time; 

But chiefly the Suborners: Common Tout 
And Punk, the Advertiser, him I mean 
And his smooth hatchet-man, the Technocrat. 
Them let my malediction single out, 
These modern Dives with their talking screen 
Who lick the sores of Lazarus and grow fat, 

Licensed to pimp, solicit and procure 
Here in my house, to foul my feast, to bawl 
Their wares while I am talking with my friend, 
To pour into my ears a public sewer 
Of all the Strumpet Muses sell and all 
That prostituted science has to vend. 

In this great Sodom of a world, which turns 
The treasure of the Intellect to dust 
And every gift to some perverted use, 
What wonder if the human spirit learns 
Recourses of despair or of disgust, 
Abortion, suicide and self-abuse. 

But let me laugh, Lord; let me crack and strain 
The belly of this derision till it burst; 
For I have seen too much, have lived too long 
A citizen of Sodom to refrain, 
And in the stye of Science, from the first, 
Have watched the pearls of Circe drop on dung. 

Let me not curse my children, nor in rage 
Mock at the just, the helpless and the poor, 
Foot-fast in Sodom's rat-trap; make me bold 
To turn on the Despoilers all their age 
Invents: damnations never felt before 
And hells more horrible than hot and cold. 

And, since in Heaven creatures purified 
Rational, free, perfected in their kinds 
Contemplate God and see Him face to face 
In Hell, for sure, spirits transmogrified, 
Paralysed wills and parasitic minds 
Mirror their own corruption and disgrace. 

Now let this curse fall on my enemies 
My enemies, Lord, but all mankind's as well 
Prophets and panders of their golden calf; 
Let Justice fit them all in their degrees; 
Let them, still living, know that state of hell, 
And let me see them perish, Lord, and laugh. 

Let them be glued to television screens 
Till their minds fester and the trash they see 
Worm their dry hearts away to crackling shells; 
Let ends be so revenged upon their means 
That all that once was human grows to be 
A flaccid mass of phototropic cells; 

Let the dog love his vomit still, the swine 
Squelch in the slough; and let their only speech 
Be Babel; let the specious lies they bred 
Taste on their tongues like intellectual wine 
Let sung commercials surfeit them, till each 
Goggles with nausea in his nauseous bed. 

And, lest with them I learn to gibber and gloat, 
Lead me, for Sodom is my city still, 
To seek those hills in which the heart finds ease; 
Give Lot his leave; let Noah build his boat, 
And me and mine, when each has laughed his fill, 
View thy damnation and depart in peace.
Written by Alec Derwent (A D) Hope | Create an image from this poem

Commination

 He that is filthy let him be filthy still. 
Rev. 22.11 

Like John on Patmos, brooding on the Four 
Last Things, I meditate the ruin of friends 
Whose loss, Lord, brings this grand new curse to mind 
Now send me foes worth cursing, or send more 
- Since means should be proportionate to ends - 
For mine are few and of the piddling kind: 

Drivellers, snivellers, writers of bad verse, 
Backbiting bitches, snipers from a pew, 
Small turds from the great **** of self-esteem; 
On such as these I would not waste my curse. 
God send me soon the enemy or two 
Fit for the wrath of God, of whom I dream: 

Some Caliban of Culture, some absurd 
Messiah of the Paranoiac State, 
Some Educator wallowing in his slime, 
Some Prophet of the Uncreating Word 
Monsters a man might reasonably hate, 
Masters of Progress, Leaders of our Time; 

But chiefly the Suborners: Common Tout 
And Punk, the Advertiser, him I mean 
And his smooth hatchet-man, the Technocrat. 
Them let my malediction single out, 
These modern Dives with their talking screen 
Who lick the sores of Lazarus and grow fat, 

Licensed to pimp, solicit and procure 
Here in my house, to foul my feast, to bawl 
Their wares while I am talking with my friend, 
To pour into my ears a public sewer 
Of all the Strumpet Muses sell and all 
That prostituted science has to vend. 

In this great Sodom of a world, which turns 
The treasure of the Intellect to dust 
And every gift to some perverted use, 
What wonder if the human spirit learns 
Recourses of despair or of disgust, 
Abortion, suicide and self-abuse. 

But let me laugh, Lord; let me crack and strain 
The belly of this derision till it burst; 
For I have seen too much, have lived too long 
A citizen of Sodom to refrain, 
And in the stye of Science, from the first, 
Have watched the pearls of Circe drop on dung. 

Let me not curse my children, nor in rage 
Mock at the just, the helpless and the poor, 
Foot-fast in Sodom's rat-trap; make me bold 
To turn on the Despoilers all their age 
Invents: damnations never felt before 
And hells more horrible than hot and cold. 

And, since in Heaven creatures purified 
Rational, free, perfected in their kinds 
Contemplate God and see Him face to face 
In Hell, for sure, spirits transmogrified, 
Paralysed wills and parasitic minds 
Mirror their own corruption and disgrace. 

Now let this curse fall on my enemies 
My enemies, Lord, but all mankind's as well 
Prophets and panders of their golden calf; 
Let Justice fit them all in their degrees; 
Let them, still living, know that state of hell, 
And let me see them perish, Lord, and laugh. 

Let them be glued to television screens 
Till their minds fester and the trash they see 
Worm their dry hearts away to crackling shells; 
Let ends be so revenged upon their means 
That all that once was human grows to be 
A flaccid mass of phototropic cells; 

Let the dog love his vomit still, the swine 
Squelch in the slough; and let their only speech 
Be Babel; let the specious lies they bred 
Taste on their tongues like intellectual wine 
Let sung commercials surfeit them, till each 
Goggles with nausea in his nauseous bed. 

And, lest with them I learn to gibber and gloat, 
Lead me, for Sodom is my city still, 
To seek those hills in which the heart finds ease; 
Give Lot his leave; let Noah build his boat, 
And me and mine, when each has laughed his fill, 
View thy damnation and depart in peace.
Written by Louise Gluck | Create an image from this poem

Lullaby

 It is a summer evening.
The yellow moths sag
against the locked screens
and the faded curtains
suck over the window sills
and from another building
a goat calls in his dreams.
This is the TV parlor
in the best ward at Bedlam.
The night nurse is passing
out the evening pills.
She walks on two erasers,
padding by us one by one.
MY sleeping pill is white.
It is a splendid pearl;
it floats me out of myself,
my stung skin as alien
as a loose bolt of cloth.
I will ignore the bed.
I am linen on a shelf.
Let the others moan in secret;
let each lost butterfly
go home. Old woolen head,
take me like a yellow moth
while the goat calls hush-
a-bye.

Book: Radiant Verses: A Journey Through Inspiring Poetry