Poetry

[johncorrigan]

Stars and Planets

Norman MacCaig

Thanks Am - I was standing in Waterstone's in Dundee last week thinking that my Norman MacCaig selected poems, though wondrous, is no longer enough - I need some more. In the meantime, I read this one, as always in awe...he really is my favourite:

Small Lochs

He's obsessed with clocks, she with politics,
He with motor cars, she with Amber and jet.
There's something to be obsessed with for all of us.
Mine is lochs, the smaller the better.
I look at the big ones – Loch Ness, Loch Lomond,
Loch Shin, Loch Tay – and I bow respectfully,
but they are too grand to be invited home.
How can I treat them in the way they'd expect?

But the Dog Loch runs in eights when I go walking.
The cat Loch purrs on the windowsill. I wade
along Princes Street through Loch na Barrack.
In smoky bars I tell them like beads.

And don't think it's just the big ones that are lordily named
I met one once and when I asked what she was called
the little thing said (without blushing, mind you)
The Loch Of The Corrie Of The Green Waterfalls.

I know they are just H2O in a hollow.
Yet not much time passes without me thinking of them.
Dandling lilies and talking sleepily
And standing huge mountains on their watery heads.

Norman MacCaig
December 1974.

[jayne lee wilson]

Chinese Watercolour


a foaming spring
in deep green shadow
a wagtail tensed
to snap and swallow

narcissi pose delicate heads
to the shock
the onrush
cut water splitting
and glittering like the drive

of light through the atmosphere
the mountain's nerve
a constant roar and tinkle
in endless descent

the pulsing stillness
holds here in paint
rock bird and flower
attend
on water

(Jayne Lee Wilson, unpublished)

[jayne lee wilson]

after THAT juvenilia, time for the real thing:

Fable
Janos Pilinszky, translated from the Hungarian by Ted Hughes

Once upon a time
there was a lonely wolf
lonelier than the angels

He happened to come to a village
He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls
the caresses of its bricklayers.
But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.
Apart from God nobody ever
Found them so beautiful
As this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.
He stopped in the middle of the room
and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes
and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.

[aeolium]

Watching the strange combination of infantilism, military discipline, bombast and grandiosity of the Winter Olympics opening ceremony yesterday made me think of this Auden poem, Under Which Lyre, which he subtitled A Reactionary Tract For Our Times (the times being 1946). It's too long to reproduce here, so here is a recording of Auden reading it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZE_bhSUgG8

The text can be followed here:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/under-which-lyre-3/

I think the last stanzas - the "Hermetic Decalogue" - make Hermes sound too like Apollo - but I like the antithesis Auden sets up between the two temperaments.

[Padraig]

[B]Chinese Watercolour

............

the pulsing stillness
holds here in paint
rock bird and flower
attend
on water

(Jayne Lee Wilson, unpublished)

Brave Jayne Lee Wilson,
How you can paint
How your words sing
How cleverly quaint
In form-changing,
Brave Jayne Lee Wilson!

(with very humble apologies to Dear Lizbie Browne and Thomas Hardy)

The ending still comes as a surprise, after the movement and sound of the start.

[Padraig]

I didn't think I would have been replying to myself, but sure there's no better person.

For the day that it is - Lá fhéile Vailintín sona.

Written in the summer of 1866 when he was 26, this poem by Thomas Hardy was not intended as a Valentine; but it could have been!
Her Definition

I lingered through the night to break of day,
Nor once did sleep extend a wing to me,
Intently busied with a vast array
Of epithets that should outfigure thee.

Full-featured terms - all fitless - hastened by,
And this sole speech remained: "That maiden mine!" -
Debarred from due description then did I
Perceive the indefinite phrase could yet define.

As common chests encasing wares of price
Are borne with tenderness through halls of state,
For what they cover, so the poor device
Of homely wording I could tolerate,
Knowing its unadornment held as freight
The sweetest image outside Paradise.

[jayne lee wilson]

Sorry Padraig, I sent you a PM about your earlier comments on my poem - I didn't want to promote my own thread-killing wares any further! But thanks again anyway...

"Nor once did sleep extend a wing to me"...

I know that feeling far too well!

[amateur51]

Before Time Altered Them


They were full of sadness at their parting.
That wasn’t what they themselves wanted: it was circumstances.
The need to earn a living forced one of them
to go far away—New York or Canada.
The love they felt wasn’t, of course, what it once had been;
the attraction between them had gradually diminished,
the attraction had diminished a great deal.
But to be separated, that wasn’t what they themselves wanted.
It was circumstances. Or maybe Fate
appeared as an artist and parted them now,
before their feeling died out completely, before Time altered them:
the one seeming to remain for the other always what he was,
the exquisite young man of twenty-four.





Translated by Edmund Keeley/Philip Sherrard

(C.P. Cavafy, Collected Poems. Translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard. Edited by George Savidis. Revised Edition. Princeton University Press, 1992)

[Tevot]

On a clear day

From Telegraph Hill you can see for miles on a clear day.

Today is May 7,

1965.

Overhead flying in perfect formation, three F101's play at war.

The morning papers are already yellow.
Their headlines threaten me from ten yards away.
And I can't even read.

Is it true the Marines have landed?

I keep walking. What else can I do...?
I think of the sod huts of homesteaders in the Dakotas.
I am haunted by the ghost of Coolidge and the Daughters of the American Revolution.

Imagine!
The American Revolution!
Bunker Hill, the long winter of '77, Washington crossing the Delaware...

It's all over...

Now we are crossing the Red Sea - we
the Egyptians.

........................................

Clemens Starck

[jayne lee wilson]

A thrush in the syringa sings.

"Hunger ruffles my wings, fear,
lust, familiar things.

Death thrusts hard. My sons
by hawk's beak, by stones,
trusting weak wings
by cat and weasel, die.

Thunder smothers the sky.
From a shaken bush I
list familiar things,
fear, hunger, lust."

O gay thrush!

(Basil Bunting, from First Book of Odes, 1964)

[Thropplenoggin]

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, lines 1-18


WHAN that Aprille with his shoures soote
The droghte of Marche hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veyne in swich licour,
Of which vertu engendred is the flour;
Whan Zephirus eek with his swete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croppes, and the yonge sonne
Hath in the Ram his halfe cours y-ronne,
And smale fowles maken melodye,
That slepen al the night with open ye,
(So priketh hem nature in hir corages:
Than longen folk to goon on pilgrimages,
And palmers for to seken straunge strondes,
To ferne halwes, couthe in sondry londes;
And specially, from every shires ende
Of Engelond, to Caunterbury they wende,
The holy blisful martir for to seke,
That hem hath holpen, whan that they were seke.

--

The signs of spring always bring this passage to mind, and how Eliot ingeniously skewered this vision of regeneration in the opening lines of The Wasteland.

[Petrushka]

DEATH IN LEAMINGTON

She died in the upstairs bedroom
By the light of the ev'ning star
That shone through the plate glass window
From over Leamington Spa

Beside her the lonely crochet
Lay patiently and unstirred,
But the fingers that would have work'd it
Were dead as the spoken word.

And Nurse came in with the tea-things
Breast high 'mid the stands and chairs-
But Nurse was alone with her own little soul,
And the things were alone with theirs.

She bolted the big round window,
She let the blinds unroll,
She set a match to the mantle,
She covered the fire with coal.

And "Tea!" she said in a tiny voice
"Wake up! It's nearly five"
Oh! Chintzy, chintzy cheeriness,
Half dead and half alive.

Do you know that the stucco is peeling?
Do you know that the heart will stop?
From those yellow Italianate arches
Do you hear the plaster drop?

Nurse looked at the silent bedstead,
At the gray, decaying face,
As the calm of a Leamington ev'ning
Drifted into the place.

She moved the table of bottles
Away from the bed to the wall;
And tiptoeing gently over the stairs
Turned down the gas in the hall.

John Betjeman

[Tevot]

The Fly (Miroslav Holub)




She sat on a willow-trunk
watching
part of the battle of Crecy,
the shouts,
the gasps,
the groans,
the tramping and the tumbling.

During the fourteenth charge
of the French cavalry
she mated
with a brown-eyed male fly
from Vadincourt.

She rubbed her legs together
as she sat on a disembowelled horse
meditating
on the immortality of flies.

With relief she alighted
on the blue tongue
of the Duke of Clervaux.

When silence settled
and only the whisper of decay
softly circled the bodies

and only
a few arms and legs
still twitched jerkily under the trees,

she began to lay her eggs


on the single eye
of Johann Uhr,
the Royal Armourer.

And thus it was
that she was eaten by a swift
fleeing
from the fires of Estrees.

[Petrushka]

Another gem from Betjeman. Very much like his gentle humour mixed in with a slightly darker side.

Diary of a Church Mouse

Here among long-discarded cassocks,
Damp stools, and half-split open hassocks,
Here where the vicar never looks
I nibble through old service books.
Lean and alone I spend my days
Behind this Church of England baize.
I share my dark forgotten room
With two oil-lamps and half a broom.
The cleaner never bothers me,
So here I eat my frugal tea.
My bread is sawdust mixed with straw;
My jam is polish for the floor.
Christmas and Easter may be feasts
For congregations and for priests,
And so may Whitsun. All the same,
They do not fill my meagre frame.
For me the only feast at all
Is Autumn's Harvest Festival,
When I can satisfy my want
With ears of corn around the font.
I climb the eagle's brazen head
To burrow through a loaf of bread.
I scramble up the pulpit stair
And gnaw the marrows hanging there.
It is enjoyable to taste
These items ere they go to waste,
But how annoying when one finds
That other mice with pagan minds
Come into church my food to share
Who have no proper business there.
Two field mice who have no desire
To be baptized, invade the choir.
A large and most unfriendly rat
Comes in to see what we are at.
He says he thinks there is no God
And yet he comes ... it's rather odd.
This year he stole a sheaf of wheat
(It screened our special preacher's seat),
And prosperous mice from fields away
Come in to hear our organ play,
And under cover of its notes
Ate through the altar's sheaf of oats.
A Low Church mouse, who thinks that I
Am too papistical, and High,
Yet somehow doesn't think it wrong
To munch through Harvest Evensong,
While I, who starve the whole year through,
Must share my food with rodents who
Except at this time of the year
Not once inside the church appear.
Within the human world I know
Such goings-on could not be so,
For human beings only do
What their religion tells them to.
They read the Bible every day
And always, night and morning, pray,
And just like me, the good church mouse,
Worship each week in God's own house,
But all the same it's strange to me
How very full the church can be
With people I don't see at all
Except at Harvest Festival.

-- John Betjeman

[Padraig]

Sorry Padraig, I sent you a PM about your earlier comments on my poem - I didn't want to promote my own thread-killing wares any further! But thanks again anyway...

"Nor once did sleep extend a wing to me"...

I know that feeling far too well!

I've just read that PM, thank you. I am sorry that you felt you had to reply further. JLW, I have a big problem with PMs. Though I can read them (provided I get one, which is a very rare occurrence) I can't send any. Please don't say "It's easy."

What a thought to suggest thread killing! I thought it was refreshing to read an original piece, and, as I hinted, "brave"! I'm the one who tried to hang onto the coat tails of Thomas Hardy!
Incidentally, Hardy would have enjoyed your Thrush poem below - can I say he was a man who would have noticed such things?