Written by
Sylvia Plath |
Touch it: it won't shrink like an eyeball,
This egg-shaped bailiwick, clear as a tear.
Here's yesterday, last year ---
Palm-spear and lily distinct as flora in the vast
Windless threadwork of a tapestry.
Flick the glass with your fingernail:
It will ping like a Chinese chime in the slightest air stir
Though nobody in there looks up or bothers to answer.
The inhabitants are light as cork,
Every one of them permanently busy.
At their feet, the sea waves bow in single file.
Never trespassing in bad temper:
Stalling in midair,
Short-reined, pawing like paradeground horses.
Overhead, the clouds sit tasseled and fancy
As Victorian cushions. This family
Of valentine faces might please a collector:
They ring true, like good china.
Elsewhere the landscape is more frank.
The light falls without letup, blindingly.
A woman is dragging her shadow in a circle
About a bald hospital saucer.
It resembles the moon, or a sheet of blank paper
And appears to have suffered a sort of private blitzkrieg.
She lives quietly
With no attachments, like a foetus in a bottle,
The obsolete house, the sea, flattened to a picture
She has one too many dimensions to enter.
Grief and anger, exorcised,
Leave her alone now.
The future is a grey seagull
Tattling in its cat-voice of departure.
Age and terror, like nurses, attend her,
And a drowned man, complaining of the great cold,
Crawls up out of the sea.
|
Written by
Anne Sexton |
Because there was no other place
to flee to,
I came back to the scene of the disordered senses,
came back last night at midnight,
arriving in the thick June night
without luggage or defenses,
giving up my car keys and my cash,
keeping only a pack of Salem cigarettes
the way a child holds on to a toy.
I signed myself in where a stranger
puts the inked-in X's—
for this is a mental hospital,
not a child's game.
Today an intern knocks my knees,
testing for reflexes.
Once I would have winked and begged for dope.
Today I am terribly patient.
Today crows play black-jack
on the stethoscope.
Everyone has left me
except my muse,
that good nurse.
She stays in my hand,
a mild white mouse.
The curtains, lazy and delicate,
billow and flutter and drop
like the Victorian skirts
of my two maiden aunts
who kept an antique shop.
Hornets have been sent.
They cluster like floral arrangements on the screen.
Hornets, dragging their thin stingers,
hover outside, all knowing,
hissing: the hornet knows.
I heard it as a child
but what was it that he meant?
The hornet knows!
What happened to Jack and Doc and Reggy?
Who remembers what lurks in the heart of man?
What did The Green Hornet mean, he knows?
Or have I got it wrong?
Is it The Shadow who had seen
me from my bedside radio?
Now it's Dinn, Dinn, Dinn!
while the ladies in the next room argue
and pick their teeth.
Upstairs a girl curls like a snail;
in another room someone tries to eat a shoe;
meanwhile an adolescent pads up and down
the hall in his white tennis socks.
A new doctor makes rounds
advertising tranquilizers, insulin, or shock
to the uninitiated.
Six years of such small preoccupations!
Six years of shuttling in and out of this place!
O my hunger! My hunger!
I could have gone around the world twice
or had new children - all boys.
It was a long trip with little days in it
and no new places.
In here,
it's the same old crowd,
the same ruined scene.
The alcoholic arrives with his gold culbs.
The suicide arrives with extra pills sewn
into the lining of her dress.
The permanent guests have done nothing new.
Their faces are still small
like babies with jaundice.
Meanwhile,
they carried out my mother,
wrapped like somebody's doll, in sheets,
bandaged her jaw and stuffed up her holes.
My father, too. He went out on the rotten blood
he used up on other women in the Middle West.
He went out, a cured old alcoholic
on crooked feet and useless hands.
He went out calling for his father
who died all by himself long ago -
that fat banker who got locked up,
his genes suspened like dollars,
wrapped up in his secret,
tied up securely in a straitjacket.
But you, my doctor, my enthusiast,
were better than Christ;
you promised me another world
to tell me who
I was.
I spent most of my time,
a stranger,
damned and in trance—that little hut,
that naked blue-veined place,
my eyes shut on the confusing office,
eyes circling into my childhood,
eyes newly cut.
Years of hints
strung out—a serialized case history—
thirty-three years of the same dull incest
that sustained us both.
You, my bachelor analyst,
who sat on Marlborough Street,
sharing your office with your mother
and giving up cigarettes each New Year,
were the new God,
the manager of the Gideon Bible.
I was your third-grader
with a blue star on my forehead.
In trance I could be any age,
voice, gesture—all turned backward
like a drugstore clock.
Awake, I memorized dreams.
Dreams came into the ring
like third string fighters,
each one a bad bet
who might win
because there was no other.
I stared at them,
concentrating on the abyss
the way one looks down into a rock quarry,
uncountable miles down,
my hands swinging down like hooks
to pull dreams up out of their cage.
O my hunger! My hunger!
Once, outside your office,
I collapsed in the old-fashioned swoon
between the illegally parked cars.
I threw myself down,
pretending dead for eight hours.
I thought I had died
into a snowstorm.
Above my head
chains cracked along like teeth
digging their way through the snowy street.
I lay there
like an overcoat
that someone had thrown away.
You carried me back in,
awkwardly, tenderly,
with help of the red-haired secretary
who was built like a lifeguard.
My shoes,
I remember,
were lost in the snowbank
as if I planned never to walk again.
That was the winter
that my mother died,
half mad on morphine,
blown up, at last,
like a pregnant pig.
I was her dreamy evil eye.
In fact,
I carried a knife in my pocketbook—
my husband's good L. L. Bean hunting knife.
I wasn't sure if I should slash a tire
or scrape the guts out of some dream.
You taught me
to believe in dreams;
thus I was the dredger.
I held them like an old woman with arthritic fingers,
carefully straining the water out—
sweet dark playthings,
and above all, mysterious
until they grew mournful and weak.
O my hunger! My hunger!
I was the one
who opened the warm eyelid
like a surgeon
and brought forth young girls
to grunt like fish.
I told you,
I said—
but I was lying—
that the kife was for my mother . . .
and then I delivered her.
The curtains flutter out
and slump against the bars.
They are my two thin ladies
named Blanche and Rose.
The grounds outside
are pruned like an estate at Newport.
Far off, in the field,
something yellow grows.
Was it last month or last year
that the ambulance ran like a hearse
with its siren blowing on suicide—
Dinn, dinn, dinn!—
a noon whistle that kept insisting on life
all the way through the traffic lights?
I have come back
but disorder is not what it was.
I have lost the trick of it!
The innocence of it!
That fellow-patient in his stovepipe hat
with his fiery joke, his manic smile—
even he seems blurred, small and pale.
I have come back,
recommitted,
fastened to the wall like a bathroom plunger,
held like a prisoner
who was so poor
he fell in love with jail.
I stand at this old window
complaining of the soup,
examining the grounds,
allowing myself the wasted life.
Soon I will raise my face for a white flag,
and when God enters the fort,
I won't spit or gag on his finger.
I will eat it like a white flower.
Is this the old trick, the wasting away,
the skull that waits for its dose
of electric power?
This is madness
but a kind of hunger.
What good are my questions
in this hierarchy of death
where the earth and the stones go
Dinn! Dinn! Dinn!
It is hardly a feast.
It is my stomach that makes me suffer.
Turn, my hungers!
For once make a deliberate decision.
There are brains that rot here
like black bananas.
Hearts have grown as flat as dinner plates.
Anne, Anne,
flee on your donkey,
flee this sad hotel,
ride out on some hairy beast,
gallop backward pressing
your buttocks to his withers,
sit to his clumsy gait somehow.
Ride out
any old way you please!
In this place everyone talks to his own mouth.
That's what it means to be crazy.
Those I loved best died of it—
the fool's disease.
|
Written by
Sylvia Plath |
Love set you going like a fat gold watch.
The midwife slapped your footsoles, and your bald cry
Took its place among the elements.
Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.
In a drafty museum, your nakedness
Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.
I'm no more your mother
Than the cloud that distills a mirror to reflect its own slow
Effacement at the wind's hand.
All night your moth-breath
Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:
A far sea moves in my ear.
One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral
In my Victorian nightgown.
Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square
Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try
Your handful of notes;
The clear vowels rise like balloons.
(1961)
|
Written by
Robert Lowell |
The night attendant, a B.U. sophomore,
rouses from the mare's-nest of his drowsy head
propped on The Meaning of Meaning.
He catwalks down our corridor.
Azure day
makes my agonized blue window bleaker.
Crows maunder on the petrified fairway.
Absence! My hearts grows tense
as though a harpoon were sparring for the kill.
(This is the house for the "mentally ill.")
What use is my sense of humour?
I grin at Stanley, now sunk in his sixties,
once a Harvard all-American fullback,
(if such were possible!)
still hoarding the build of a boy in his twenties,
as he soaks, a ramrod
with a muscle of a seal
in his long tub,
vaguely urinous from the Victorian plumbing.
A kingly granite profile in a crimson gold-cap,
worn all day, all night,
he thinks only of his figure,
of slimming on sherbert and ginger ale--
more cut off from words than a seal.
This is the way day breaks in Bowditch Hall at McLean's;
the hooded night lights bring out "Bobbie,"
Porcellian '29,
a replica of Louis XVI
without the wig--
redolent and roly-poly as a sperm whale,
as he swashbuckles about in his birthday suit
and horses at chairs.
These victorious figures of bravado ossified young.
In between the limits of day,
hours and hours go by under the crew haircuts
and slightly too little nonsensical bachelor twinkle
of the Roman Catholic attendants.
(There are no Mayflower
screwballs in the Catholic Church.)
After a hearty New England breakfast,
I weigh two hundred pounds
this morning. Cock of the walk,
I strut in my turtle-necked French sailor's jersey
before the metal shaving mirrors,
and see the shaky future grow familiar
in the pinched, indigenous faces
of these thoroughbred mental cases,
twice my age and half my weight.
We are all old-timers,
each of us holds a locked razor.
|
Written by
Anne Sexton |
I knew you forever and you were always old,
soft white lady of my heart. Surely you would scold
me for sitting up late, reading your letters,
as if these foreign postmarks were meant for me.
You posted them first in London, wearing furs
and a new dress in the winter of eighteen-ninety.
I read how London is dull on Lord Mayor's Day,
where you guided past groups of robbers, the sad holes
of Whitechapel, clutching your pocketbook, on the way
to Jack the Ripper dissecting his famous bones.
This Wednesday in Berlin, you say, you will
go to a bazaar at Bismarck's house. And I
see you as a young girl in a good world still,
writing three generations before mine. I try
to reach into your page and breathe it back...
but life is a trick, life is a kitten in a sack.
This is the sack of time your death vacates.
How distant your are on your nickel-plated skates
in the skating park in Berlin, gliding past
me with your Count, while a military band
plays a Strauss waltz. I loved you last,
a pleated old lady with a crooked hand.
Once you read Lohengrin and every goose
hung high while you practiced castle life
in Hanover. Tonight your letters reduce
history to a guess. The count had a wife.
You were the old maid aunt who lived with us.
Tonight I read how the winter howled around
the towers of Schloss Schwobber, how the tedious
language grew in your jaw, how you loved the sound
of the music of the rats tapping on the stone
floors. When you were mine you wore an earphone.
This is Wednesday, May 9th, near Lucerne,
Switzerland, sixty-nine years ago. I learn
your first climb up Mount San Salvatore;
this is the rocky path, the hole in your shoes,
the yankee girl, the iron interior
of her sweet body. You let the Count choose
your next climb. You went together, armed
with alpine stocks, with ham sandwiches
and seltzer wasser. You were not alarmed
by the thick woods of briars and bushes,
nor the rugged cliff, nor the first vertigo
up over Lake Lucerne. The Count sweated
with his coat off as you waded through top snow.
He held your hand and kissed you. You rattled
down on the train to catch a steam boat for home;
or other postmarks: Paris, verona, Rome.
This is Italy. You learn its mother tongue.
I read how you walked on the Palatine among
the ruins of the palace of the Caesars;
alone in the Roman autumn, alone since July.
When you were mine they wrapped you out of here
with your best hat over your face. I cried
because I was seventeen. I am older now.
I read how your student ticket admitted you
into the private chapel of the Vatican and how
you cheered with the others, as we used to do
on the fourth of July. One Wednesday in November
you watched a balloon, painted like a silver abll,
float up over the Forum, up over the lost emperors,
to shiver its little modern cage in an occasional
breeze. You worked your New England conscience out
beside artisans, chestnut vendors and the devout.
Tonight I will learn to love you twice;
learn your first days, your mid-Victorian face.
Tonight I will speak up and interrupt
your letters, warning you that wars are coming,
that the Count will die, that you will accept
your America back to live like a prim thing
on the farm in Maine. I tell you, you will come
here, to the suburbs of Boston, to see the blue-nose
world go drunk each night, to see the handsome
children jitterbug, to feel your left ear close
one Friday at Symphony. And I tell you,
you will tip your boot feet out of that hall,
rocking from its sour sound, out onto
the crowded street, letting your spectacles fall
and your hair net tangle as you stop passers-by
to mumble your guilty love while your ears die.
|
Written by
Ogden Nash |
They tell me that euphoria is the feeling of feeling wonderful,
well, today I feel euphorian,
Today I have the agility of a Greek god and the appetitite of a
Victorian.
Yes, today I may even go forth without my galoshes,
Today I am a swashbuckler, would anybody like me to buckle
any swashes?
This is my euphorian day,
I will ring welkins and before anybody answers I will run away.
I will tame me a caribou
And bedeck it with marabou.
I will pen me my memoirs.
Ah youth, youth! What euphorian days them was!
I wasn't much of a hand for the boudoirs,
I was generally to be found where the food was.
Does anybody want any flotsam?
I've gotsam.
Does anybody want any jetsam?
I can getsam.
I can play chopsticks on the Wurlitzer,
I can speak Portuguese like a Berlitzer.
I can don or doff my shoes without tying or untying the laces because
I am wearing moccasins,
And I practically know the difference between serums and antitoccasins.
Kind people, don't think me purse-proud, don't set me down as
vainglorious,
I'm just a little euphorious.
|
Written by
Barry Tebb |
THE KINGDOM OF MY HEART
1
The halcyon settled on the Aire of our days
Kingfisher-blue it broke my heart in two
Shall I forget you? Shall I forget you?
I am the mad poet first love
You never got over
You are my blue-eyed
Madonna virgin bride
I shall carve ‘MG loves BT’
On the bark of every
Wind-bent tree in
East End Park
2
The park itself will blossom
And grow in chiaroscuro
The Victorian postcard’s view
Of avenue upon avenue
With palms and pagodas
Lakes and waterfalls and
A fountain from Versailles.
3
You shall be my queen
In the Kingdom of Deira
Land of many rivers
Aire the greatest
Isara the strong one
Robed in stillness
Wide, deep and dark.
4
In Middleton Woods
Margaret and I played
Truth or dare
She bared her breasts
To the watching stars.
5
“Milk, milk,
Lemonade, round
The corner
Chocolate spread”
Nancy chanted at
Ten in the binyard
Touching her ****,
Her ****, her bum,
Margaret joined in
Chanting in unison.
6
The skipping rope
Turned faster
And faster, slapping
The hot pavement,
Margaret skipped
In rhythm, never
Missing a beat,
Lifting the pleat
Of her skirt
Whirling and twirling.
7
Giggling and red
Margaret said
In a whisper
“When we were
Playing at Nancy’s
She pushed a spill
Of paper up her
You-know-what
She said she’d
Let you watch
If you wanted.”
8
Margaret, this Saturday morning in June
There is a queue at the ‘Princess’ for
The matin?e, down the alley by the blank
Concrete of the cinema’s side I hide
With you, we are counting our picture
Money, I am counting the stars in your
Hair, bound with a cheap plastic comb.
9
You have no idea of my need for you
A lifetime long, every wrong decision
I made betrayed my need; forty years on
Hear my song and take my hand and move
Us to the house of love where we belong.
10
Margaret we sat in the cinema dark
Warm with the promise of a secret kiss
The wall lights glowed amber on the
Crumbling plaster, we looked with longing
At the love seats empty in the circle,
Vowing we would share one.
11
There is shouting and echoes
Of wild splashing from York
Road baths; forty years on
It stirs my memory and
Will not be gone.
12
The ghosts of tramtracks
Light up lanes
To nowhere
In Leeds Ten.
Every road
Leads nowhere
In Leeds Nine.
Motorways have cut
The city’s heart
In two; Margaret,
Our home lies buried
Under sixteen feet
Of stone.
13
Our families moved
And we were lost
I was not there to hear
The whispered secret
Of your first period.
14
God is courage’s infinite ground
Tillich said; God, give me enough
To stand another week without her
Every day gets longer, every sleep
Less deep.
15
Why can’t I find you,
Touch you,
Bind your straw-gold hair
The colour of lank
February grass?
16
Under the stone canopy
Of the Grand Arcade
I pass Europa Nightclub;
In black designer glass
I watch the faces pass
But none is like your’s,
No voice, no eyes,
No smile at all
Like your’s.
17
From Kirkstall Lock
The rhubarb crop
To Knostrop’s forcing sheds
The roots ploughed up
Arranged in beds
Of perfect darkness
Where the buds burst
With a pip, rich pink
Stalks and yellow leaves
Hand-picked by
Candle-light to
Keep the colour right
So every night the
Rhubarb train
Could go from Leeds
To Covent Garden.
18
The smell of Saturday morning
Is the smell of freedom
How the bounds may grow
Slowly slowly as I go.
“Rag-bone rag-bone
White donkey stone”
Auntie Nellie scoured
Her door step, polished
The brass knocker
Till I saw my face
Bunched like a fist
Complete with goggles
Grinning like a monkey
In a mile of mirrors.
19
Every door step had a stop
A half-stone iron weight
To hold it back and every
Step was edged with donkey
Stone in yellow or white
From the ragman or the potman
With his covered cart jingling
Jangling as it jerked hundreds
Of cups on hooks pint and
Half pint mugs and stacks of
Willow-patterned plates
From Burmantofts.
20
We heard him a mile off
Nights in summer when
He trundled round the
Corner over the cobbles
Jamming the wood brake
Blocks whoaing the horses
With their gleaming brasses
And our mams were always
Waiting where he stopped.
21
Double summer-time made
The nights go on for ever
And no-one cared any more
How long we played what
Or where and we were left
Alone and that’s all I wanted
Then or now to be left alone
Never to be called in from
The Hollows never to be
Called from Margaret.
22
City of back-to-backs
From Armley Heights
Laid out in rows
Like trees or grass
I watch you pass.
23
The Aire is slow and almost
Still
In the Bridgefield
The Joshua Tetley clock
Over the Atkinson Grimshaw
Print
Is stopped at nineteen fifty
Four
The year I left.
24
Grimshaw’s home was
Half a mile away
In Knostrop Hall
Margaret and I
Climbed the ruined
Walls her hair was
Blowing in the wind
Her eyes were stars
In the green night
Her hands were holding
My hands.
25
Half a century later
I look out over Leeds Nine
What little’s left is broken
Or changed Saturday night
Is silent and empty
The paths over the Hollows
Deserted the bell
Of St. Hilda’s still.
26
On a single bush
The yellow roses blush
Pink in the amber light
Night settles on the
Fewstons and the Copperfields
No mothers’ voices calling us.
Lilac and velvet clover
Grew all over the Hollows
It was all the luck
We knew and when we left
Our luck went too.
27
Solid black
Velvet basalt
Polished jet
Millstone grit
Leeds Town Hall
Built with it
Soaks up the fog
Is sealed with smog
Battered buttressed
Blackened plinths
White lions’ paws
Were soft their
Smiles like your’s.
28
Narrow lanes, steep inclines,
Steps, blank walls, tight
And secret openings’
The lanes are your hips
The inclines the lines
Of your thighs, the steps
Your breasts, blank walls
Your buttocks, tight and
Secret openings your
Taut vagina’s lips.
29
There is a keening and a honing
And a winnowing in the wind
I am the surge and flow
In Winwaed’s water the last breath
Of Elmete’s King.
I am Penda crossing the Aire
Camping at Killingbeck
Conquered by Aethalwald
Ruler of Deira.
30
Life is a bird hovering
In the Hall of the King
Between darkness and darkness flickering
The stone of Scone at last lifted
And borne on the wind, Dunedin, take it
Hold it hard and fast its light
Is leaping it is freedom’s
Touchstone and firestone.
31
Eir, Ayer or Aire
I’ll still be there
Your wanderings off course
Old Ea, Old Eye, Dead Eye
Make no difference to me.
Eg-an island - is Aire’s
True source, names
Not places matter
With the risings
Of a river
Ea land-by-water
I’ll make my own way
Free, going down river
To the far-off sea.
32
Poetry is my business, my affair.
My cri-de-coeur, jongleur
Of Mercia and Elmete, Margaret,
Open your door I am heaping
Imbroglios of stars on the floor
Meet me by the Office Lock
At midnight or by the Town Hall Clock.
33
Nennius nine times have I knocked
On the door of your grave, nine times
More have I made Pilgrimage to Elmete’s
Wood where long I lay by beck and bank
Waiting for your tongue to flame
With Pentecostal fire.
34
Margaret you rode in the hollow of my hand
In the harp of my heart, searching for you
I wandered in Kirkgate Market’s midnight
Down avenues of shuttered stalls, our secrets
Kept through all the years.
From the Imperial on Beeston Hill
I watch the city spill glass towers
Of light over the horizon’s rim.
35
The railyard’s straights
Are buckled plates
Red bricks for aggregate
All lost like me
Ledsham and Ledston
Both belong to Leeds
But Ledston Luck
Is where Aire leads.
36
Held of the Crown
By seven thanes
In Saxon times
‘In regione Loidis’
Baeda scripsit
Leeds, Leeds,
You answer
All my needs.
37
A horse shoe stuck for luck
Behind a basement window:
Margaret, now we’ll see
What truth there is
In dreams and poetry!
I am at one with everyone
There is poetry
Falling from the air
And you have put it there.
38
The sign for John Eaton Street
Is planted in the back garden
Of the transport caf? between
The strands of a wire mesh fence
Straddling the cobbles of a street
That is no more, a washing line
And an abandoned caravan.
39
‘This open land to let’
Is what you get on the Hollows
Thousands of half-burned tyres
The rusty barrel of a Trumix lorry
Concrete slabs, foxgloves and condoms,
The Go-Kart Arena’s signboards,
Half the wall of Ellerby Lane School.
40
There is a mermaid singing
On East Street on an IBM poster
Her hair is lack-lustre
Her breasts are facing the camera
Her tail is like a worn-out brush.
Chimney stacks
Blind black walls
Of factories
Grimy glass
Flickering firelight
In black-leaded grates.
41
Hunslet de Ledes
Hop-scotch, hide and seek,
Bogies-on-wheels
Not one tree in Hunslet
Except in the cemetery
The lake filled in
For fifty years,
The bluebell has rung
Its last perfumed peal.
42
I couldn’t play out on Sunday
Mam and dad thought us a cut
Above the rest, it was another
Test I failed, keeping me and
Margaret apart was like the Aztecs
Tearing the heart from the living flesh.
43
Father, your office job
Didn’t save you
From the drugs
They never gave you.
44
Isaiah, my son,
You made it back
From Balliol to Beeston
At a run via the
Playing fields of Eton.
There is a keening and a honing
And a winnowing in the wind
Winwaed’s water with red bluid blent.
|
Written by
Barry Tebb |
It was like chucking-out time
In a rough Victorian pub
Cherubic Dylan was first to go
Lachrymose but with a show
Of strength, yelling "Buggerall,
Buggerall, this is my boat-house
In Laugherne, these are my books,
My prizes, I ride every wave-crest,
My loves are legion. What’s this
You’re saying about fashion?
Others follow where I lead,
Schoolchildren copy my verse,
No anthology omits me
Put me down! Put me down!
George Barker was too far gone
To take them on
And moaned about a list
In a crystal cave of making beneath
The basement of the Regent Street
Polytechnic.
Edith Sitwell was rigid in a carved
High-backed chair, regally aloof,
Her ringed fingers gripping the arms,
Her eyes flashing diamonds of contempt.
"A la lampe! A la lampe!"
A serious fight broke out in the saloon bar
When they tried to turf Redgrove out:
His image of the poet as violent man
Broke loose and in his turtle-necked
Seaman’s jersey he shouted,
"Man the barricades!"
A tirade of nature-paths and voters
For a poetry of love mixed it with
The chuckers-out; Kennedy, Morley
And Hulse suffered a sharp repulse.
Heath-Stubbs was making death stabs
With his blindman’s stick at the ankles
Of detractors from his position under
The high table of chivalry, intoning
A prayer to raise the spirit
Of Sidney Keyes.
Geoffrey Hill had Merlin and Arthur
Beside him and was whirling an axe
To great effect, headless New Gen poets
Running amok.
Andrew Crozier was leading a counter-attack
With Caddy and Hinton neck and neck
And Silkin was quietly garrotting
While he kept on smiling.
Price Turner was so happy at the slaughter
He hanged himself in a corner
And Hughes brought the Great White Boar
To wallow in all the gore
While I rode centaur
Charles Tomlinson had sent for.
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Written by
Ogden Nash |
Oh, "rorty" was a mid-Victorian word
Which meant "fine, splendid, jolly,"
And often to me it has reoccurred
In moments melancholy.
For instance, children, I think it rorty
To be with people over forty.
I can't say which, come eventide,
More tedious I find;
Competing with the juvenile stride,
Or meeting the juvenile mind.
So I think it rorty, yes, and nifty,
To be with people over fifty.
The pidgin talk the youthful use
Bypasses conversation.
I can't believe the code they choose
Is a means of communication.
Oh to be with people over sixty
Despite their tendency to prolixty!
The hours a working parent keeps
Mean less than Latin to them,
Wherefore they disappear in jeeps
Till three and four A.M.
Oh, to be with people you pour a cup for
Instead of people you have to wait up for!
I've tried to read young mumbling lips
Till I've developed a slant-eye,
And my hearing fails at the constant wails
Of, If I can't, why can't I?
Oh, to be beside a septuagenarian,
Silent upon a peak in Darien!
They don't know Hagen from Bobby Jones,
They never heard of Al Smith,
Even Red Grange is beyond their range,
And Dempsey is a myth.
Oh golly, to gabble upon the shoulder
Of someone my own age, or even older!
I'm tired of defining hadn't oughts.
To opposition mulish,
The thoughts of youth are long long thoughts,
And Jingo! Aren't they foolish!
All which is why, in case you've wondered
I'd like a companion aged one hundred.
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Written by
Carl Sandburg |
FOR the second time in a year this lady with the white hands is brought to the west room second floor of a famous sanatorium.
Her husband is a cornice manufacturer in an Iowa town and the lady has often read papers on Victorian poets before the local literary club.
Yesterday she washed her hands forty seven times during her waking hours and in her sleep moaned restlessly attempting to clean imaginary soiled spots off her hands.
Now the head physician touches his chin with a crooked forefinger.
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