Poetry

Your poems are like a dark city centre.

Your novel, your stories, your journals, your letters, are suburbs

Of this big city.

The hotels are lit like office blocks all night

With scholars, priests, pilgrims. It's at night

Sometimes I drive through. I just find

Myself driving through, going slow, simply

Roaming in my own darkness, pondering

What you did. Nearly always

I glimpse you - at some crossing,

Staring upwards, lost, sixty year old.

...

by Ted Hughes

Mossy and thumping, bare of logic, red:

why do they say your other head

and not your other heart?

The snack cakes of Smut Wonderland

turn Alice smaller than her dress. She stirs,

nude in the folds of so much baby blue.

To think, they called this lesser art.

I ate mostly orders then, and you—

you were thinking with your other heart.

I took in a dog the way some might take in

a dress (I had become just skin).

It coughed. I cried for it

to stop, I fed it meat, its malady

recurrent and untreatable. I had

to give it up, like some bum body part

whose incidental benefit

the human form has out-evolved. Don’t start.

That dog: I called it Help, and I cried for it.

Your Other Heart

BY NATALIE SHAPERO

Sweetheart, for such a day

One mustn’t grudge the score;

Here, then, it’s all to pay,

It’s Good-night at the door.

Good-night and good dreams to you,—

Do you remember the picture-book thieves

Who left two children sleeping in a wood the long night through,

And how the birds came down and covered them with leaves?

So you and I should have slept,—But now,

Oh, what a lonely head!

With just the shadow of a waving bough

In the moonlight over your bed.

Fin de Fête

BY CHARLOTTE MEW

A poem I keep forgetting to write

Is about the stars,

How I see them in their order

Even without the chair and bear and the sisters,

In their astronomic presence of great space,

And how beyond and behind my eyes they are moving,

Exploding to spirals under extremest pressure.

Having not mathematics, my head

Bursts with anguish of not understanding.

The poem I forget to write is bursting fragments

Of a tortured victim, far from me

In his galaxy of minds bent upon him,

In the oblivion of his headline status

Crumpled and exploding as incomparable

As a star, yet present in its light.

I forget to write.

Josephine Miles,

Tales

I could tell you stories

from the edge of understanding

there are worlds you haven't seen

and words you've never spoken

not to me at least and

when the shutters draw

with the end of day

remember this moment for something

that has never happened before

arrived with the thunder

we light another cigarette

finish the wine

and write the tale

in smoke

~ K. Rolly ~

This present tragedy will eventually

turn into myth, and in the mist

of that later telling the bell tolling

now will be a symbol, or, at least,

a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those

loose changes, the rearrangement of

hearts, just parts of old lives

patched together, gathered into

a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see

the outline there: her fingertips

touching his, the faint fusion

of two bodies breaking into light.

“Naming the Stars” from Naming the Stars by Joyce Sutphen

Now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;

Nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;

Nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font.

The firefly wakens; waken thou with me.

Now droops the milk-white peacock like a ghost,

And like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars,

And all thy heart lies open unto me.

Now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves

A shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

Now folds the lily all her sweetness up,

And slips into the bosom of the lake.

So fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip

Into my bosom and be lost in me.

The Princess: Now Sleeps the Crimson Petal

BY ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

If the moon smiled, she would resemble you.

You leave the same impression

Of something beautiful, but annihilating.

Sylvia Plath

No one can see the pain that we hide,alone

Theyre happy for us to keep it inside,

Our fear is our own; they dont want to know,

Why sould we involve them; why should it show.

You live your whole life in confusion and fear,

The need to feel something unbearably near,

Half of you living, Half of you gone,

And inside you know what your doing is wrong.

The things that can help, the things that may heal,

Are the flame or the blade and the sting of the steel,

The destruction of skin means the death of your soul,

But theres nowhere to run when your living alone.

by Mushi-No-Iki

To A Butterfly

I

When Summer's End Is Nighing

by A. E. Housman (1859-1936)

When summer's end is nighing

And skies at evening cloud,

I muse on change and fortune

And all the feats I vowed

When I was young and proud.

The weathercock at sunset

Would lose the slanted ray,

And I would climb the beacon

That looked to Wales away

And saw the last of day.

From hill and cloud and heaven

The hues of evening died;

Night welled through lane and hollow

And hushed the countryside,

But I had youth and pride.

And I with earth and nightfall

In converse high would stand,

Late, till the west was ashen

And darkness hard at hand,

And the eye lost the land.

The year might age, and cloudy

The lessening day might close,

But air of other summers

Breathed from beyond the snows,

And I had hope of those.

They came and were and are not

And come no more anew;

And all the years and seasons

That ever can ensue

Must now be worse and few.

So here's an end of roaming

On eves when autumn nighs:

The ear too fondly listens

For summer's parting sighs,

And then the heart replies.

LEAVING

Dead from the neck up,

Not so bad a place to be.

Living in my heart.

LITTLE COSMIC DUST POEM (1983)

John Haines

Out of the debris of dying stars,

this rain of particles

that waters the waste with brightness...

The sea-wave of atoms hurrying home,

collapse of the giant,

unstable guest who cannot stay...

The sun's heart reddens and expands,

his mighty aspiration is lasting,

as the shell of his substanace

one day will be white with frost.

In the radiant field of Orion

great hordes of stars are forming,

just as we see every night,

fiery and faithful to the end.

Out of the cold and fleeing dust

that is never and always,

the silence and waste to come...

This arm, this hand,

my voice, your face, this love.

Naming The Stars

by Joyce Sutphen

This present tragedy will eventually

turn into myth, and in the mist

of that later telling the bell tolling

now will be a symbol, or, at least,

a sign of something long since lost.

This will be another one of those

loose changes, the rearrangement of

hearts, just parts of old lives

patched together, gathered into

a dim constellation, small consolation.

Look, we will say, you can almost see

the outline there: her fingertips

touching his, the faint fusion

of two bodies breaking into light.

I Have Dreamed of You so Much by Robert Desnos

I have dreamed of you so much that you are no longer real.

Is there still time for me to reach your breathing body, to kiss your mouth and make

your dear voice come alive again?

I have dreamed of you so much that my arms, grown used to being crossed on my

chest as I hugged your shadow, would perhaps not bend to the shape of your body.

For faced with the real form of what has haunted me and governed me for so many

days and years, I would surely become a shadow.

O scales of feeling.

I have dreamed of you so much that surely there is no more time for me to wake up.

I sleep on my feet prey to all the forms of life and love, and you, the only one who

counts for me today, I can no more touch your face and lips than touch the lips and

face of some passerby.

I have dreamed of you so much, have walked so much, talked so much, slept so much

with your phantom, that perhaps the only thing left for me is to become a phantom

among phantoms, a shadow a hundred times more shadow than the shadow the

moves and goes on moving, brightly, over the sundial of your life.

Between what I see and what I say,

between what I say and what I keep silent,

between what I keep silent and what I dream,

between what I dream and what I forget:

poetry.

Octavio Paz

You will hear thunder and remember me,

And think: she wanted storms. The rim

Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,

And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

That day in Moscow, it will all come true,

when, for the last time, I take my leave,

And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,

Leaving my shadow still to be with you.

~Anna Akhmatova