Written by
Barry Tebb |
Lavender musk rose from the volume I was reading through,
The college crest impressed in gold, tooled gold lettering on the spine.
It was not mine but my son’s, jammed in the corner of a cardboard box
With dozens more; just one box of a score, stored in a heap
Across my ex-wife’s floor, our son gone far, as far as Samarkand and Ind
To where his strange imaginings had led, to heat and dust, some lust
To know Bengali, to translate Tagore, or just, for all we know,
Stroll round those sordid alleys and bazaars and ask for toddy
If it’s still the same and say it in a tongue they know.
The Classics books lay everywhere around the flat, so many that my mind
Grew numb. Heavy, dusty dictionaries of Mandarin and Greek,
Crumbling Victorian commentaries where every men and de was weighed
And weighed again, and then, through a scholar’s gloss on Aristotle,
That single sentence glowed, ‘And thus we see nobility of soul
Comes only with the conquering of loss’; meaning shimmered in that empty space
Where we believed there was no way to resurrect two sons we’d watched grow up,
One lost to oriental heat and dust, the other to a fate of wards.
It seemed that rainy April Sunday in the musty book-lined rooms
Of Brenda’s flat, mourning the death of Beethoven, her favourite cat,
Watching Mozart’s ginger fur, his plaintive tone of loss, whether
Some miscreant albatross was laid across our deck, or bound around
The ship, or tangled about whatever destiny we moved towards
Across that frozen sea of dark extremity; fatigued as if our barque
Had hardly stirred for all those years of strife, for all the times
We’d set the compass right, sorted through those heaped up charts
And with fingers weary and bleary-eyed retraced our course.
The books, a thousand books that lined the walls:
Plato’s chariot racing across the empty sky,
Sartre’s waiters dancing like angels on the heads of pins,
And Wittgenstein, nodding in his smoke-filled Cambridge den,
Dreaming of a school room in the Austrian hills and walks
In mountain air, wondering why he wasn’t there.
We wondered, too, at what, if anything we knew, trying to sift some
Single fact that might elicit hope from loss, enough to get us through
Another year with other griefs to come, we knew. Some, by a little,
Through God’s grace or chance or simple will, we might delay.
More likely we would have no say. By words or actions who can stay
The rolling balls across the table’s baize, the click of ball on ball,
The line of bottles in the hall?
We heard the ticking of the Roman -figured clock
My mother made us take when all was lost,
Together until the last breath had flown
Into the blue empyrean with her soul.
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Written by
Paul Laurence Dunbar |
A song for the unsung heroes who rose in the country's need,
When the life of the land was threatened by the slaver's cruel greed,
For the men who came from the cornfield, who came from the plough and the flail,
Who rallied round when they heard the sound of the mighty man of the rail.
They laid them down in the valleys, they laid them down in the wood,
And the world looked on at the work they did, and whispered, "It is good."[Pg 197]
They fought their way on the hillside, they fought their way in the glen,
And God looked down on their sinews brown, and said, "I have made them men."
They went to the blue lines gladly, and the blue lines took them in,
And the men who saw their muskets' fire thought not of their dusky skin.
The gray lines rose and melted beneath their scathing showers,
And they said, "'T is true, they have force to do, these old slave boys of ours."
Ah, Wagner saw their glory, and Pillow knew their blood,
That poured on a nation's altar, a sacrificial flood.
Port Hudson heard their war-cry that smote its smoke-filled air,
And the old free fires of their savage sires again were kindled there.
They laid them down where the rivers the greening valleys gem.
And the song of the thund'rous cannon was their sole requiem,
And the great smoke wreath that mingled its hue with the dusky cloud,
Was the flag that furled o'er a saddened world, and the sheet that made their shroud.
Oh, Mighty God of the Battles Who held them in Thy hand,
Who gave them strength through the whole day's length, to fight for their native land,
They are lying dead on the hillsides, they are lying dead on the plain,
And we have not fire to smite the lyre and sing them one brief strain.
Give, Thou, some seer the power to sing them in their might,
The men who feared the master's whip, but did not fear the fight;
That he may tell of their virtues as minstrels did of old,
Till the pride of face and the hate of race grow obsolete and cold.
A song for the unsung heroes who stood the awful test,
When the humblest host that the land could boast went forth to meet the best;
A song for the unsung heroes who fell on the bloody sod,[Pg 198]
Who fought their way from night to day and struggled up to God.
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Written by
Rg Gregory |
however foul the times or difficult the ways are
through those personal morasses this change of age
won’t let a single being (rich or poor) be free from
come spring the trees get on with their blossoming
you’d think they didn’t read the newspapers
you’d think the media hadn’t yet found a way
of getting to them conveying the miserable truths
this creaking into a new century has been unleashing
come this spring (like any other) the ignorant trees
still feel compelled to get on with their blossoming
see all the journalists commentators politicians
shaking their fists from within closed windows
and choking on the fug of their smoke-filled rooms
with all this bitterness about – what are trees doing
getting on with their blossoming – bringing beauty out
that’s a dead word – beauty – no time or place for it
(except on page threes where people go to leer
to forget the miserable world sitting on their doorstep)
come spring how shocking to find trees don’t agree
a bad habit that – to get on with their blossoming
of course it won’t last – three weeks or so it’ll be gone
then we can all go back indoors and forget trees
and how they get on with their blossoming spring in
and bad spring out – there’s no such thing nowadays
as the natural law – blossom on trees – a thing of the past
luckily for each one there’s a small corner in the dark
where a light is stored and a gasp of delight survives
and a song is on the point of again bursting into hearing
at the mere thought of a one-time blossoming tree
come spring – at that precise moment when the tree
decides the winter’s been enough and its light side
should now be burgeoned to the world – then in the quick
of each denying being (wilfully or reluctantly or what)
a blossoming takes place also – is noted and then
put aside – its hope is not forsaken – spring survives
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Written by
Vachel Lindsay |
I opened the ink-well and smoke filled the room.
The smoke formed the giant frog-cat of my doom.
His web feet left dreadful slime tracks on the floor.
He had hammer and nails that he laid by the door.
He sprawled on the table, claw-hands in my hair.
He looked through my heart to the mud that was there.
Like a black-mailer hating his victim he spoke:
"When I see all your squirming I laugh till I choke
Singing of peace. Railing at battle.
Soothing a handful with saccharine prattle.
All the millions of earth have voted for fight.
You are voting for talk, with hands lily white."
He leaped to the floor, then grew seven feet high,
Beautiful, terrible, scorn in his eye:
The Devil Eternal, Apollo grown old,
With beard of bright silver and garments of gold.
"What will you do to end war for good?
Will you stand by the book-case, be nailed to the wood?"
I stretched out my arms. He drove the nails deep,
Silently, coolly. The house was asleep,
I hung for three years, forbidden to die.
I seemed but a shadow the servants passed by.
At the end of the time with hot irons he returned.
"The Quitter Sublime" on my bosom he burned.
As he seared me he hissed: "You are wearing away.
The good angels tell me you leave them today.
You want to come down from the nails in the door.
The victor must hang there three hundred years more.
If any prig-saint would outvote all mankind
He must use an immortally resolute mind.
Think what the saints of Benares endure,
Through infinite birthpangs their courage is sure.
Self-tortured, self-ruled, they build their powers high,
Until they are gods, overmaster the sky."
Then he pulled out the nails. He shouted "Come in."
To heal me there stepped in a lady of sin.
Her hand was in mine. We walked in the sun.
She said: "Now forget them, the Saxon and Hun.
You are dreary and aged and silly and weak.
Let us smell the sweet groves. Let the summertime speak."
We walked to the river. We swam there in state.
I was a serpent. She was my mate.
I forgot in the marsh, as I tumbled about,
That trial in my room, where I did not hold out.
Since I was a serpent, my mate seemed to me
As a mermaiden seems to a fisher at sea,
Or a whisky soaked girl to a whisky soaked king.
I woke. She had turned to a ravening thing
On the table — a buzzard with leperous head.
She tore up my rhymes and my drawings. She said:
"I am your own cheap bankrupt soul.
Will you die for the nations, making them whole?
We joy in the swamp and here we are gay.
Will you bring your fine peace to the nations today?"
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