This poem is almost not great . . . nope, it's great. I am looking for poems about misery, if anyone has suggestions.
Vintage
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public
doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
Saturday, May 02, 2009
Monday, April 06, 2009
Alice Oswald, great poet
Alice Oswald, a poem you should know if you do not (she is British and not yet famous), has just published a new long poem. Here is an excerpt of A SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN, published by Faber & Faber on March 5, 2009. I haven't check yet but I am sure you can buy it at alibris.com.
The excerpt. .. the poem is set at night, on the River Severn (Alice loves nature):
A SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN
Flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
One among many moodswung creatures
That have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry of an Estuary
Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour
All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden
Full of lake offerings and slabs of light
Which then unwills itself to listen
All you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall
All you mudswarms ranging up and down
I notice you are very alert and worn out
Skulking about and grabbing what you can
Listen this is not the ordinary surface river
This is not river at all this is something
Like a huge repeating mechanism
Banging and banging the jetty
Very hard to define, most close in kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using no other sails than their shining wings
Yes this is the moon this hurrying
Muscular unsolid unstillness
This endless wavering in whose engine
I too am living.
The excerpt. .. the poem is set at night, on the River Severn (Alice loves nature):
A SLEEPWALK ON THE SEVERN
Flat stone sometimes lit sometimes not
One among many moodswung creatures
That have settled in this beautiful
Uncountry of an Estuary
Swans pitching your wings
In the reedy layby of a vacancy
Where the house of the sea
Can be set up quickly and taken down in an hour
All you flooded and stranded weeds whose workplace
Is both a barren mudsite and a speeded up garden
Full of lake offerings and slabs of light
Which then unwills itself to listen
All you crabs in the dark alleys of the wall
All you mudswarms ranging up and down
I notice you are very alert and worn out
Skulking about and grabbing what you can
Listen this is not the ordinary surface river
This is not river at all this is something
Like a huge repeating mechanism
Banging and banging the jetty
Very hard to define, most close in kind
To the mighty angels of purgatory
Who come solar-powered into darkness
Using no other sails than their shining wings
Yes this is the moon this hurrying
Muscular unsolid unstillness
This endless wavering in whose engine
I too am living.
