Written by
Christopher Smart |
In ev'ry age, and each profession,
Men err the most by prepossession;
But when the thing is clearly shown,
And fairly stated, fully known,
We soon applaud what we deride,
And penitence succeeds to pride.--
A certain Baron on a day
Having a mind to show away,
Invited all the wits and wags,
Foot, Massey, Shuter, Yates, and Skeggs,
And built a large commodious stage,
For the Choice Spirits of the age;
But above all, among the rest,
There came a Genius who profess'd
To have a curious trick in store,
Which never was perform'd before.
Thro' all the town this soon got air,
And the whole house was like a fair;
But soon his entry as he made,
Without a prompter, or parade,
'Twas all expectance, all suspense,
And silence gagg'd the audience.
He hid his head behind his wig,
With with such truth took off* a Pig, [imitated]
All swore 'twas serious, and no joke,
For doubtless underneath his cloak,
He had conceal'd some grunting elf,
Or was a real hog himself.
A search was made, no pig was found--
With thund'ring claps the seats resound,
And pit and box and galleries roar,
With--"O rare! bravo!" and "Encore!"
Old Roger Grouse, a country clown,
Who yet knew something of the town,
Beheld the mimic and his whim,
And on the morrow challeng'd him.
Declaring to each beau and bunter
That he'd out-grunt th'egregious grunter.
The morrow came--the crowd was greater--
But prejudice and rank ill-nature
Usurp'd the minds of men and wenches,
Who came to hiss, and break the benches.
The mimic took his usual station,
And squeak'd with general approbation.
"Again, encore! encore!" they cry--
'Twas quite the thing--'twas very high;
Old Grouse conceal'd, amidst the racket,
A real Pig berneath his jacket--
Then forth he came--and with his nail
He pinch'd the urchin by the tail.
The tortur'd Pig from out his throat,
Produc'd the genuine nat'ral note.
All bellow'd out--"'Twas very sad!
Sure never stuff was half so bad!
That like a Pig!"--each cry'd in scoff,
"Pshaw! Nonsense! Blockhead! Off! Off! Off!"
The mimic was extoll'd, and Grouse
Was hiss'd and catcall'd from the house.--
"Soft ye, a word before I go,"
Quoth honest Hodge--and stooping low
Produc'd the Pig, and thus aloud
Bespoke the stupid, partial crowd:
"Behold, and learn from this poor creature,
How much you Critics know of Nature."
|
Written by
Emily Dickinson |
A little Dog that wags his tail
And knows no other joy
Of such a little Dog am I
Reminded by a Boy
Who gambols all the living Day
Without an earthly cause
Because he is a little Boy
I honestly suppose --
The Cat that in the Corner dwells
Her martial Day forgot
The Mouse but a Tradition now
Of her desireless Lot
Another class remind me
Who neither please nor play
But not to make a "bit of noise"
Beseech each little Boy --
|
Written by
Anne Sexton |
For months my hand was sealed off
in a tin box. Nothing was there but the subway railings.
Perhaps it is bruised, I thought,
and that is why they have locked it up.
You could tell time by this, I thought,
like a clock, by its five knuckles
and the thin underground veins.
It lay there like an unconscious woman
fed by tubes she knew not of.
The hand had collapse,
a small wood pigeon
that had gone into seclusion.
I turned it over and the palm was old,
its lines traced like fine needlepoint
and stitched up into fingers.
It was fat and soft and blind in places.
Nothing but vulnerable.
And all this is metaphor.
An ordinary hand -- just lonely
for something to touch
that touches back.
The dog won't do it.
Her tail wags in the swamp for a frog.
I'm no better than a case of dog food.
She owns her own hunger.
My sisters won't do it.
They live in school except for buttons
and tears running down like lemonade.
My father won't do it.
He comes in the house and even at night
he lives in a machine made by my mother
and well oiled by his job, his job.
The trouble is
that I'd let my gestures freeze.
The trouble was not
in the kitchen or the tulips
but only in my head, my head.
Then all this became history.
Your hand found mine.
Life rushed to my fingers like a blood clot.
Oh, my carpenter,
the fingers are rebuilt.
They dance with yours.
They dance in the attic and in Vienna.
My hand is alive all over America.
Not even death will stop it,
death shedding her blood.
Nothing will stop it, for this is the kingdom
and the kingdom come.
|
Written by
T Wignesan |
for Eric Mottram
"Nur wenn das Herz erschlossen,
Dann ist die Erde schön."
Goethe.
I
An important thing in living
Is to know when to go;
He who does not know this
Has not far to go,
Though death may come and go
When you do not know.
Come, give me your hand,
Together shoulder and cheek to shoulder
We'll go, sour kana in cheeks
And in the mornings cherry sticks
To gum: the infectious chilli smiles
Over touch-me-not thorns, crushing snails
From banana leaves, past
Clawing outstretched arms of the bougainvilias
To stone the salt-bite mangoes.
Tread carefully through this durian kampong
For the ripe season has pricked many a sole.
II
la la la tham'-pong
Let's go running intermittent
To the spitting, clucking rubber fruit
And bamboo lashes through the silent graves,
Fresh sod, red mounds, knee stuck, incensing joss sticks
All night long burning, exhuming, expelling the spirit.
Let's scour, hiding behind the lowing boughs of the hibiscus
Skirting the school-green parapet thorny fields.
Let us now squawk, piercing the sultry, humid blanket
In the shrill wakeful tarzan tones,
Paddle high on.the swings
Naked thighs, testicles dry.
Let us now vanish panting on the climbing slopes
Bare breasted, steaming rolling with perspiration,
Biting with lalang burn.
Let us now go and stand under the school
Water tap, thrashing water to and fro.
Then steal through the towkay's
Barbed compound to pluck the hairy
Eyeing rambutans, blood red, parang in hand,
And caoutchouc pungent with peeling.
Now scurrying through the estate glades
Crunching, kicking autumnal rubber leavings,
Kneading, rolling milky latex balls,
Now standing to water by the corner garden post.
III
This is the land of the convectional rains
Which vie on the monsoon back scrubbing streets
This is the land at half-past four
The rainbow rubs the chilli face of the afternoon
And an evening-morning pervades the dripping, weeping
Rain tree, and gushing, tumbling, sewerless rain drains
Sub-cutaneously eddy sampan fed, muddy, fingerless rivers
Down with crocodile logs to the Malacca Sea.
This is the land of stately dipterocarp, casuarina
And coco-palms reeding north easterly over ancient rites
Of turtle bound breeding sands.
This is the land of the chignoned swaying bottoms
Of sarong-kebaya, sari and cheongsam.
The residual perch of promises
That threw the meek in within
The legs of the over-eager fledgelings.
The land since the Carnatic conquerors
Shovelling at the bottom of the offering mountains
The bounceable verdure brought to its bowers
The three adventurers.
A land frozen in a thousand
Climatic, communal ages
Wags its primordial bushy tail to the Himalayas
Within a three cornered monsoon sea -
In reincarnate churches
And cracker carousels.
The stranglehold of boasting strutting pedigrees
And infidel hordes of marauding thieves,
Where pullulant ideals
Long rocketed in other climes
Ride flat-foot on flat tyres.
IV
Let us go then, hurrying by
Second show nights and jogget parks
Listening to the distant whinings of wayangs
Down the sidewalk frying stalls on Campbell Road
Cheong-Kee mee and queh teow plates
Sateh, rojak and kachang puteh
(rediffusion vigil plates)
Let us then dash to the Madras stalls
To the five cent lye chee slakes.
la la la step stepping
Each in his own inordinate step
Shuffling the terang bulan.
Blindly buzzes the bee
Criss-crossing
Weep, rain tree, weep
The grass untrampled with laughter
In the noonday sobering shade.
Go Cheena-becha Kling-qui Sakai
V
Has it not occurred to you how I sat with you
dear sister, counting the chicking back of the
evening train by the window sill and then
got up to wind my way down the snake infested rail
to shoo shoo the cows home to brood
while you gee geaed the chicks to coop
and did we not then plan of a farm
a green milking farm to warm the palm
then turned to scratch the itch over in our minds
lay down on the floors, mat aside
our thoughts to cushion heads
whilst dug tapioca roots heaped the dream
and we lay scrapping the kernel-less
fiber shelled coconuts
O Bhama, my goatless daughter kid
how I nursed you with the callow calves
those mutual moments forced in these common lives
and then, that day when they sold you
the blistering shirtless sun never flinching
an eye, defiant I stood caressing your creamy coat
and all you could say was a hopeless baaa..a..aa
and then, then, that day as we came over the mountains
two kids you led to the thorny brush, business bent
the eye-balling bharata natyam
VI
O masters of my fading August dream
For should you take this life from me
Know you any better
Than when children we have joyously romped
Down and deep in the August river
Washing on the mountain tin.
Now on the growing granite's precipitous face
In our vigilant wassail
Remember the children downstream playing
Where your own little voices are speechless lingering
Let it not be simply said that a river flows
to flourish a land
More than that he who is high at the source
take heed:
For a river putrid in the cradle is worse
than the plunging flooding rain.
And the eclectic monsoons may have come
Have gathered and may have gone
While the senses still within torrid membranes
thap-po-ng
thap-pong
thap-pong
|
Written by
Dylan Thomas |
Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
Would wither up, an any boy of love
Look twice before he fell from grace.
The features in their private dark
Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come
And from her lips the faded pigments fall,
The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.
I have been told to reason by the heart,
But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
I have been told to reason by the pulse,
And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace
Till field and roof lie level and the same
So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman
Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.
I have heard may years of telling,
And many years should see some change.
The ball I threw while playing in the park
Has not yet reached the ground.
|
Written by
Walt Whitman |
1
WHO are you, dusky woman, so ancient, hardly human,
With your woolly-white and turban’d head, and bare bony feet?
Why, rising by the roadside here, do you the colors greet?
2
(’Tis while our army lines Carolina’s sand and pines,
Forth from thy hovel door, thou, Ethiopia, com’st to me,
As, under doughty Sherman, I march toward the sea.)
3
Me, master, years a hundred, since from my parents sunder’d,
A little child, they caught me as the savage beast is caught;
Then hither me, across the sea, the cruel slaver brought.
4
No further does she say, but lingering all the day,
Her high-borne turban’d head she wags, and rolls her darkling eye,
And curtseys to the regiments, the guidons moving by.
5
What is it, fateful woman—so blear, hardly human?
Why wag your head, with turban bound—yellow, red and green?
Are the things so strange and marvelous, you see or have seen?
|
Written by
Robert Burns |
GUID speed and furder to you, Johnie,
Guid health, hale han’s, an’ weather bonie;
Now, when ye’re nickin down fu’ cannie
The staff o’ bread,
May ye ne’er want a stoup o’ bran’y
To clear your head.
May Boreas never thresh your rigs,
Nor kick your rickles aff their legs,
Sendin the stuff o’er muirs an’ haggs
Like drivin wrack;
But may the tapmost grain that wags
Come to the sack.
I’m bizzie, too, an’ skelpin at it,
But bitter, daudin showers hae wat it;
Sae my auld stumpie pen I gat it
Wi’ muckle wark,
An’ took my jocteleg an whatt it,
Like ony clark.
It’s now twa month that I’m your debtor,
For your braw, nameless, dateless letter,
Abusin me for harsh ill-nature
On holy men,
While deil a hair yoursel’ ye’re better,
But mair profane.
But let the kirk-folk ring their bells,
Let’s sing about our noble sel’s:
We’ll cry nae jads frae heathen hills
To help, or roose us;
But browster wives an’ whisky stills,
They are the muses.
Your friendship, Sir, I winna quat it,
An’ if ye mak’ objections at it,
Then hand in neive some day we’ll knot it,
An’ witness take,
An’ when wi’ usquabae we’ve wat it
It winna break.
But if the beast an’ branks be spar’d
Till kye be gaun without the herd,
And a’ the vittel in the yard,
An’ theekit right,
I mean your ingle-side to guard
Ae winter night.
Then muse-inspirin’ aqua-vitae
Shall make us baith sae blythe and witty,
Till ye forget ye’re auld an’ gatty,
An’ be as canty
As ye were nine years less than thretty—
Sweet ane an’ twenty!
But stooks are cowpit wi’ the blast,
And now the sinn keeks in the west,
Then I maun rin amang the rest,
An’ quat my chanter;
Sae I subscribe myself’ in haste,
Yours, Rab the Ranter.Sept. 13, 1785.
|
Written by
Henry Lawson |
I long for the streets but the Lord knoweth best,
For there I am never a saint;
There are lovable characters out in the West,
With humour heroic and quaint;
And, be it Up Country, or be it Out Back,
When I shall have gone to my Home,
I trust to be buried 'twixt River and Track
Where my lovable characters roam.
There are lovable characters drag through the scrub,
Where the Optimist ever prevails;
There are lovable characters hang round the pub,
There are lovable jokers at sales
Where the auctioneer's one of the lovable wags
(Maybe from his "order" estranged),
And the beer is on tap, and the pigs in the bags
Of the purchasing cockies are changed.
There were lovable characters out in the West,
Of fifty hot summers, or more,
Who could not be proved, when it came to the test,
Too old to be sent to the war;
They were all forty-five and were orphans, they said,
With no one to keep them, or keep;
And mostly in France, with the world's bravest dead,
Those lovable characters sleep.
I long for the streets, but the Lord knoweth best,
For there I am never a saint;
There are lovable characters out in the West,
With humour heroic and quaint;
And, be it Up Country, or be it Out Back,
When I shall have gone to my Home,
I trust to be buried 'twixt River and Track
Where my lovable characters roam.
|
Written by
Sir Philip Sidney |
His mother dear Cupid offended late,
Because that Mars grown slacker in her love,
With pricking shot he did not throughly more
To keep the pace of their first loving state.
The boy refus'd for fear of Mars's hate,
Who threaten'd stripes, if he his wrath did prove:
But she in chafe him from her lap did shove,
Brake bow, brake shafts, while Cupid weeping sate:
Till that his grandame Nature pityijng it
Of stella's brows make him two better bows,
And in her eyes of arrows infinite.
Oh how for joy he leaps, oh how he crows,
And straight therewith like wags new got to play,
Falls to shrewd turns, and I was in his way.
|