If I let my heart be broken by a stranger
Is it impossible to believe
Or if loving at the first of sights
Not embarrassingly naive
Or if I claimed to know of true intentions
From a flurried passing gaze
Or if from but a fleeted greeting
Be colorfully amazed
Or if to me it makes no difference
Instants or many years
Or if without specifics
Commute your pain into my tears
Or if clairvoyantly I see the way
Of two becoming one
Or if to me it's always been shone
Like the everlasting sun
Or if you could only know me wholly
Now the way I see your soul
Or if it would only take forever
Fervorous ardor full
The Clockhouse's A. E. Housman Suite at Halloween
Alfred Edward Housman's apparition
Recites "A quieter place than Clun(ton)
Where doomsday may thunder and lighten"*
A E Housman's ghost does frighten
In the Arvon Clockhouse Retreat
Downstairs, stays a lass with time to write
Upstairs, stays a poet in the A E Housman Suite
Housman's ghost is an awesome sight
Ghostly pacing, floorboards creak mysteriously
The lass disturbed in the night
Hearing strange noises clairvoyantly
Seeks answers in the daylight
Is it a Halloween trick or a treat?
* Poem 50 (L) from A E Housman's "A Shropshire Lad"
Bull and Bullock
The other night abed, Father,
propped upon an elbow, dropped
and died. Earlier that week, Mother
gave me Anthony to hold when
Father threw a fist, missed
and bellowed through the door.
I did not see the biggest of them
bear him back. But at the wake
they spoke of how he ran,
fell across a fence and swayed there.
I was in another room,
giving Mother Anthony to hold,
and I remember how,
clairvoyantly for once,
she wept there.
Donal Mahoney
Looking for the formal definition, structure, and history of this poetry form? Visit the Poetry Dictionary entry below. Then return to explore how PoetrySoup members bring the form to life through their own poems.