favouritest poems
Love is feeling cold in the back of vans
Love is a fanclub with only two fans
Love is walking holding paintstained hands
Love is.
Love is fish and chips on winter nights
Love is blankets full of strange delights
Love is when you don't put out the light
Love is.
Love is the presents in Christmas shops
Love is when you're feeling Top of the Pops
Love is what happens when the music stops
Love is.
Love is white panties lying all forlorn
Love is pink nightdresses still slightly warm
Love is when you have to leave at dawn
Love is.
Love is you and love is me
Love is prison and love is free
Love's what's there when you are away from me
Love is...
(Adrian Henri)
mother the wardrobe is full of infantrymen
i did i asked them
but they snarled saying it was a man's life
mother there's a centurion tank in the parlour
i did i asked the officer
but he laughed saying 'Queen's regulations'
(piano was out of tune anyway)
mother polish your identity bracelet
there is a mushroom cloud in the back garden
i did i tried to bring in the cat
but it simply came to pieces in my hand
i did i tried to whitewash the windows
but there weren't any
i did i tried to hide under the stairs
but i couldn't get in for the civil defence leaders
i did i tried ringing candid camera
but they crossed their hearts
i went for a policemen but they were looting the town
i went out for a fire engine but they were all upside down
i went out for a priest but they were all on their knees
mother don't just lie there, say something please
mother don't just lie there, say something please
(Roger McGough)
Without you there would be
no landscapes/no stations/no houses
no chipshops/no quiet villages/no seagulls
on beaches/no hopscotch on pavements/no night/no morning/
there'd be no city no country
Without you.
(Without You extract, Adrian Henri)
There's little in taking or giving,
There's little in water or wine;
This living, this living, this living
Was never a project of mine.
Oh, hard is the struggle, and sparse is
The gain of the one at the top,
For art is a form of catharsis,
And love is a permanent flop,
And work is the province of cattle,
And rest's for a clam in a shell,
So I'm thinking of throwing the battle-
Would you kindly direct me to hell?
(Coda, Dorothy Parker)
There’ll always be the floating end of nights
which started off inside the grumbling car
and rolled towards the city. At the lights
you’d see your dreams all shrunk up as a scar
you’d never seen before. There, on your hand.
- A fleck, a flaw still biting at the skin
which bled each time you sold out what you’d planned
and told yourself that somehow you’d still win.
You’re half-surprised, that compromise should show
itself so boldly against your tightening fist
but still there’s nothing that you didn’t know
life’s just a string of chances, each one missed.
The light has turned to green, your right foot falls
your car your life, exhausted, coughs and stalls.
(L. Perera)
I was six when
Mama was careless
she sent me to school
alone
five days a week
One day I was
kidnapped by a band
of Western philosophers
armed with glossy-pictured
textbooks and registered reputations
'Holder of BA
and MA degrees'
I was held in a classroom
guarded by Churchill and Garibaldi
pinned up on one was
and
Hitler and Mao dictating
from the other
Guevara pointed a revolution
at my brains
from his 'Guerilla Warfare'
Each three-month term
they sent threats to
my Mama and Papa
Mama and Papa loved
their son and
paid ransom fees
each time
Each time
Mama and Papa grew
poorer and poorer
and my kidnappers grew
richer and richer
I grew whiter and
whiter
On my release
fifteen years after
I was handed
(among loud applause
from fellow victims)
a piece of paper
to decorate my walls
certifying my release.
(Kidnapped, Ruperake Petaia)
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters
and the diameter of its effective range about seven meters,
with four dead and eleven wounded.
And around these, in a larger circle
of pain and time, two hospitals are scattered
and one graveyard. But the young woman
who was buried in the city she came from,
at a distance of more than a hundred kilometers,
enlarges the circle considerably,
and the solitary man mourning her death
at the distant shores of a country far across the sea
includes the entire world in the circle.
And I won’t even mention the crying of orphans
that reaches up to the throne of God and
beyond, making
a circle with no end and no God.
(The Diameter of the Bomb, Yehuda Amichai)
What a sight for my eyes
to see you in sleep.
Could it stop the sun rise
hearing you weep?
You're not seen, you're not heard
but I stand by my word.
Came a thousand miles
just to catch you while you're smiling.
What a day for laughter
and walking at night.
Me following after, your hand holding tight.
And the memory stays clear with the song that you hear.
If I can but make
the words awake the feeling.
What a reason for waiting
and dreaming of dreams.
So here's hoping you've faith in impossible schemes,
that are born in the sigh of the wind blowing by
while the dimming light brings the end to a night of loving.
(Reasons For Waiting, Ian Anderson)
My mouth hovers across your breasts
in the short grey winter afternoon
in this bed we are delicate
and touch so hot with joy we amaze ourselves
tough and delicate we play rings
around each other our daytime candle burns
with its peculiar light and if the snow
begins to fall outside filling the branches
and if the night falls without announcement
there are the pleasures of winter
sudden, wild and delicate your fingers
exact my tongue exact at the same moment
stopping to laugh at a joke
my love hot on your scent on the cusp of winter
(DH Lawrence)
4.
Most of our love from the age of nine
took the form of jokes and mute
loyalty: you fought a girl
who said she’d knock me down
we did each other’s homework
wrote letters kept in touch, untouching
lied about our lives: I wearing
the face of the proper marriage
you the face of the independent woman
We cleaved to each other across that space
fingering webs
of love and estrangement till the day
the gynecologist touched your breast
and found a palpable hardness
…
6.
You are every woman I have ever loved
and disavowed
a bloody incandescent chord strung out
across years, tracts of space
How can I reconcile this passion
with our modesty
your calvinist heritage
my girlhood frozen into forms
how can I go on this mission
without you
you, who might have told me
everything you feel is true?
(excperts from A Woman Dead in Her Forties, Adrienne Rich)
1.
My body opens over San Francisco like the day-
light raining down each pore crying the change of light
I am not with her I have been waking off and on
all night to that pain not simple absence but
the presence of the past destructive
to living here and now Yet if I could instruct
myself, if you could learn to learn from pain
even as it grasps us if the mind, the mind that lives
in this body could refuse to let itself be crushed
in that grasp it would loosen Pain would have to stand
off from me and listen its dark breath still on me
but the mind could begin to speak to pain
and pain would have to answer:
We are older now
we have met before these are my hands before your eyes
my figure blotting out all that is not mine
I am the pain of division creator of divisions
it is I who blot your lover from you
and not the time-zones nor the miles
It is not separation that calls me forth but I
who am separation And remember
I have no existence Apart from you
2.
I believe I am choosing something new
not to suffer uselessly yet still to feel
Does the infant memorize the body of the mother
and create her in absence? or simply cry
primordial loneliness? does the bed of the stream
once diverted mourning remember wetness?
But we, we live so much in these
configurations of the past I choose
to separate her from my past we have not shared
I choose not to suffer uselessly
to detect primordial pain as it stalks toward me
flashing its bleak torch in my eyes blotting out
her particular being the details of her love
I will not be divided from her or from myself
by myths of separation
while her mind and body in Manhattan are more with me
than the smell of eucalyptus coolly burning on these hills
3.
The world tells me I am its creature
I am raked by eyes brushed by hands
I want to crawl into her for refuge lay my head
in the space between her breast and shoulder
abnegating power for love
as women have done or hiding
from power in her love like a man
I refuse these givens the splitting
between love and action I am choosing
not to suffer uselessly and not to use her
I choose to love this time for once
with all my intelligence
(Splittings,
commentary to come later cos cbf right now
:D