Famous Minarets Poems by Famous Poets

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...ANDS OF MY CHILDHOOD



1



I am leaving the holy city of Leeds

For the last time for the first time

Leaded domes of minarets in Kirkgate

Market, the onion-dome of Ellerby Lane

School, the lands of my childhood empty

Or gone. Market stalls under wrought

Iron balconies strewn with roses and

Green imitation grass, a girl as beautiful

As the sun who might be Margaret’s

Daughter or Margaret herself half a

Lifetime earlier, with straw-gold hair

The colour of lank Febru...Read more of this...

...earth looks
 like a Jaffa orange
 turning gold in the sun...
By what magic have I
 climbed off the ground
 hundreds of minarets high,
and yet to gaze down at the earth
 my mouth still waters...


FROM THE AUTHOR'S NOTEBOOK


Now our plane swims
 within the hot winds
 swarming over Africa.
Seen from above,
 Africa looks like a huge violin.
I swear
they're playing Tchaikovsky on a cello
 on the angry dark island
 of Africa.
And waiving his long hairy arms,
 a gorilla is sobbin...Read more of this...

...amid the
 ruins
 of
 Nineveh! you ascending Mount Ararat! 
You foot-worn pilgrim welcoming the far-away sparkle of the minarets of Mecca! 
You sheiks along the stretch from Suez to Bab-el-mandeb, ruling your families and tribes!

You olive-grower tending your fruit on fields of Nazareth, Damascus, or Lake Tiberias!
You Thibet trader on the wide inland, or bargaining in the shops of Lassa! 
You Japanese man or woman! you liver in Madagascar, Ceylon, Sumatra, Borneo! 
All you ...Read more of this...

...a window-pane
On an Autumn night of sobbing rain.
Then it would run like a steady stream
Under pinnacled bridges where minarets gleam,
Or lap the air like the lapping tide
Where a marble staircase lifts its wide
Green-spotted steps to a garden gate,
And a waning moon is sinking straight
Down to a black and ominous sea,
While a nightingale sings in a lemon tree.
I walked as though some opiate
Had stung and dulled my brain, a state
Acute and slumbrous. It grew late.
We stopped...Read more of this...

...loaf and smoke at ease
They toil and toil and toil.

I think of shrines in Hindustan,
Of cloistral glooms in Spain,
Of minarets in Ispahan,
Of St. Sophia's fane,
Of convent towers in Palestine,
Of temples in Cathay,
And as I stretch and sip my wine
They pray and pray and pray.

And so my dreams I dwell within,
And visions come and go,
And life is passing like a Cin-
Ematographic Show;
Till just as surely as my pipe
Is underneath my nose,
Amid my visions rich and ripe
I doze ...Read more of this...

...e ye might, in peaceful cheer, 
 Mirror upon your waters clear, 
 Semlin! thy Gothic steeples dear, 
 And thy bright minarets, Belgrade! 
 
 Fraser's Magazine 


 




...Read more of this...

...off. Ah, if only the sky 
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me]. 

*** 
Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting 
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel 
Soldiers piss—under the watchful eye of a tank— 
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in 
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass... 

*** 
[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim’s face 
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the 
Gas c...Read more of this...

...Hark, I hear the bells of Westgate,
I will tell you what they sigh,
Where those minarets and steeples
Prick the open Thanet sky.

Happy bells of eighteen-ninety,
Bursting from your freestone tower!
Recalling laurel, shrubs and privet,
Red geraniums in flower.

Feet that scamper on the asphalt
Through the Borough Council grass,
Till they hide inside the shelter
Bright with ironwork and glass,

Striving chains of ordered children
Purple b...Read more of this...

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