Written by
Shel Silverstein |
There is a place where the sidewalk ends
And before the street begins,
And there the grass grows soft and white,
And there the sun burns crimson bright,
And there the moon-bird rests from his flight
To cool in the peppermint wind.
Let us leave this place where the smoke blows black
And the dark street winds and bends.
Past the pits where the asphalt flowers grow
We shall walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And watch where the chalk-white arrows go
To the place where the sidewalk ends.
Yes we'll walk with a walk that is measured and slow,
And we'll go where the chalk-white arrows go,
For the children, they mark, and the children, they know
The place where the sidewalk ends.
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Written by
Judith Wright |
The rows of cells are unroofed,
a flute for the wind's mouth,
who comes with a breath of ice
from the blue caves of the south.
O dark and fierce day:
the wind like an angry bee
hunts for the black honey
in the pits of the hollow sea.
Waves of shadow wash
the empty shell bone-bare,
and like a bone it sings
a bitter song of air.
Who built and laboured here?
The wind and the sea say
-Their cold nest is broken
and they are blown away-
They did not breed nor love,
each in his cell alone
cried as the wind now cries
through this flute of stone.
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Written by
Barry Tebb |
Memories bursting like tears or waves
On some lonely Adriatic shore
Beating again and again
Threshings of green sea foam
Flecked like the marble Leonardo
Chipped for his ‘Moses’.
And my tears came as suddenly
In that dream, criss-crossed
With memory and desire.
Grandad Nicky had worked
Down the pits for a pittance
To bring up his six children
But nothing left over for more
Than a few nuts and an orange
For six Christmas stockings
So hopefully hung, weighted by pennies,
Stretched across the black mantle.
So Lawrence-like and yet not, grandad
A strict Methodist who read only a vast Bible
Hunched in his fireside chair insisting
On chapel three times on Sundays.
Only in retirement did joy and wisdom
Enter him, abandoning chapel he took
To the Friends or Quakers as they called them then
And somehow at seventy the inner light
Consumed him.
Gruff but kind was my impression:
He would take me for walks
Along abandoned railways to the shutdown
Pipeworks where my three uncles
Worked their early manhood through.
It would have delighted Auden and perhaps
That was the bridge between us
Though we were of different generations
And by the time I began to write he had died.
All are gone except some few who may live still
But in their dotage.
After my mother’s funeral
None wanted contact: I had been judged in my absence
And found wanting.
Durham was not my county,
Hardly my country, memories from childhood
Of Hunwick Village with its single cobbled street
Of squat stone cottages and paved yards
With earth closets and stacks of sawn logs
Perfuming the air with their sap
In a way only French poets could say
And that is why we have no word but clich?
‘Reflect’ or ‘make come alive’ or other earthbound
Anglicanisms; yet it is there in Valery Larbaud
‘J’ai senti pour la premiere fois toute la douceur de vivre’-
I experienced for the first time all the joy of living.
I quote of their plenitude to mock the absurdity
Of English poets who have no time for Francophiles
Better the ‘O altitudo’ of earlier generations –
Wallace Stevens’ "French and English
Are one language indivisible.
"
That scent of sawdust, the milkcart the pony pulled
Each morning over the cobbles, the earthenware jug
I carried to be filled, ladle by shining ladle,
From the great churns and there were birds singing
In the still blue over the fields beyond the village
But because I was city-bred I could not name them.
I write to please myself: ‘Only other poets read poems’
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Written by
Weldon Kees |
Under the bunker, where the reek of kerosene
Prepared the marriage rite, leader and whore,
Imperfect kindling even in this wind, burn on.
Someone in uniform hums Brahms.
Servants prepare
Eyewitness stories as the night comes down, as smoking coals await
Boots on the stone, the occupying troops.
Howl ministers.
Deep in Kyffhauser Mountain's underground,
The Holy Roman Emperor snores on, in sleep enduring
Seven centuries.
His long red beard
Grows through the table to the floor.
He moves a little.
Far in the labyrinth, low thunder rumbles and dies out.
Twitch and lie still.
Is Hitler now in the Himalayas?
We are in Cleveland, or Sioux Falls.
The architecture
Seems like Omaha, the air pumped in from Düsseldorf.
Cold rain keeps dripping just outside the bars.
The testicles
Burst on the table as the commissar
Untwists the vise, removes his gloves, puts down
Izvestia.
(Old saboteurs, controlled by Trotsky's
Scheming and unconquered ghost, still threaten Novgorod.
)
--And not far from the pits, these bones of ours,
Burned, bleached, and splintering, are shoveled, ready for the fields.
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Written by
Carl Sandburg |
IA STORM of white petals,
Buds throwing open baby fists
Into hands of broad flowers.
IIRed roses running upward,
Clambering to the clutches of life
Soaked in crimson.
IIIRabbles of tattered leaves
Holding golden flimsy hopes
Against the tramplings
Into the pits and gullies.
IVHoarfrost and silence:
Only the muffling
Of winds dark and lonesome—
Great lullabies to the long sleepers.
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Written by
Rg Gregory |
you may get fed up with me
she says (seing herself slightly)
fearing old age in a woman
must render her blightly
old age’s eyes he thinks
see only old-agely
she lifted him from the pits
and has come to him sagely
so much she offers him now
so he takes to her wisely
she’s been his steady arm
since they re-met surprisely
love has consumed them both
without hiccough and calmly
say - the words of their hearts
present themselves psalmly
you may get fed up with me
she says (rating herself lowly)
not in this life he cries
in awe of her soully
the years they have left sing loud
not measurable timely
o they will to give to each other
in all manners sublimely
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