The scent of apple cake

BY Marge Piercy

My mother cooked as drudgery
the same fifteen dishes round
and round like a donkey bound
to a millstone grinding dust.

My mother baked as a dance,
the flour falling from the sifter
in a rain of fine white pollen.
The sugar was sweet snow.

The dough beneath her palms
was the warm flesh of a baby
when they were all hers before
their wills sprouted like mushrooms.

Cookies she formed in rows
on the baking sheets, oatmeal,
molasses, lemon, chocolate chip,
delights anyone could love.

Love was in short supply,
but pies were obedient to her
command of their pastry, crisp
holding the sweetness within.

Desserts were her reward for endless
cleaning in the acid yellow cloud
of Detroit, begging dollars from
my father, mending, darning, bleaching.

In the oven she made sweetness
where otherwise there was none.

A Decade

BY Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread —
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

Poem

BY William Carlos Williams

As the cat
climbed over
the top of

the jamcloset
first the right
forefoot

carefully
then the hind
stepped down

into the pit of
the empty
flowerpot

On the Balcony

BY D.H. Lawrence

In front of the sombre mountains, a faint, lost ribbon of rainbow;
And between us and it, the thunder;
And down below in the green wheat, the labourers
Stand like dark stumps, still in the green wheat.

You are near to me, and your naked feet in their sandals
And through the scent of the balcony’s naked timber
I distinguish the scent of your hair: so now the limber
Lightning falls from heaven.

Adown the pale-green glacier river floats
A dark boat through the gloom–and whither?
The thunder roars. But still we have each other!
The naked lightning in the heavens dither
And disappear–what have we but each other?
The boat has gone.

If you were coming in the Fall

BY Emily Dickinson

If you were coming in the fall,
I’d brush the summer by
With half a smile and half a spurn,
As housewives do a fly.

If I could see you in a year,
I’d wind the months in balls,
And put them each in separate drawers,
Until their time befalls.

If only centuries delayed,
I’d count them on my hand,
Subtracting till my fingers dropped
Into Van Diemen’s land.

If certain, when this life was out,
That yours and mine should be,
I’d toss it yonder like a rind,
And taste eternity.

But now, all ignorant of the length
Of time’s uncertain wing,
It goads me, like the goblin bee,
That will not state its sting.

A Song on the End of the World

BY Czeslaw Milosz

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

On Roofs of Terry Street

BY Douglas Dunn

Television aerials, Chinese characters
In the lower sky, wave gently in the smoke.

Nest-building sparrows peck at moss,
Urban flora and fauna, soft, unscrupulous.

Rain drying on the slates shines sometimes.
A builder is repairing someone’s leaking roof.

He kneels upright to rest his back.
His trowel catches the light and becomes precious.

Daystar

BY Rita Dove

She wanted a little room for thinking;
but she saw diapers steaming on the line,
a doll slumped behind the door.

So she lugged a chair behind the garage
to sit out the children’s naps.

Sometimes there were things to watch –
the pinched armor of a vanished cricket,
a floating maple leaf. Other days
she stared until she was assured
when she closed her eyes
she’d see only her own vivid blood.

She had an hour, at best, before Liza appeared
pouting from the top of the stairs.
And just what was mother doing
out back with the field mice? Why,

building a palace. Later
that night when Thomas rolled over and
lurched into her, she would open her eyes
and think of the place that was hers
for an hour – where
she was nothing,
pure nothing, in the middle of the day.

Money-Madness

BY D.H. Lawrence

Money is our madness, our vast collective madness.

And of course, if the multitude is mad
the individual carries his own grain of insanity around with him.

I doubt if any man living hands out a pound note with-out a pang;
and a real tremor, if he hands out a ten-pound note.

We quail, money makes us quail.
It has got us down, we grovel before it in strange terror.
And no wonder, for money has a fearful cruel power among men.

But it is not money we are so terrified of,
it is the collective money-madness of mankind.
For mankind says with one voice: How much is he worth?
Has he no money? Then let him eat dirt, and go cold.–

And if I have no money, they will give me a little bread
so I do not die,
but they will make me eat dirt with it.
I shall have to eat dirt, I shall have to eat dirt
if I have no money.

It is that that I am frightened of.
And that fear can become a delirium.
It is fear of my money-mad fellow-men.

We must have some money
to save us from eating dirt.

And this is all wrong.

Bread should be free,
shelter should be free,
fire should be free
to all and anybody, all and anybody, all over the world.

We must regain our sanity about money
before we start killing one another about it.
It’s one thing or the other.

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

BY James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

Warning

BY Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

from ‘Chopin’

BY Amy Lowell

The cat and I
Together in the sultry night
Waited.
He greatly desired a mouse;
I, an idea.
Neither ambition was gratified.
So we watched
In a stiff and painful expectation.
Little breezes pattered among the trees,
And thin stars ticked at us
Faintly,
Exhausted pulses
Squeezing through mist.

Those others, I said!
And my mind rang hollow as I tapped it
Winky, I said,
Do all other cats catch their mice?

A poem

BY Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen

When I die I will return to seek
The moments I did not live by the sea.

‘ghost wanted: young, willing’

BY Bruce Dawe

Dear Sir,
With reference to yours of the 7th inst.,
I wish to apply for the vacancy
Faith or requited love has created in your staff.
The following are my qualifications: namely,
A dozen years in various threadbare lodgings,
Which have sharpened a doubtless natural melancholy
To that point of keenness where it needs but little
Time to adapt itself to the particular
Idiosyncrasies of bad plumbing and worn stairs…

It might be as well to mention at this juncture
That over this period I have acquired the necessary
Sense of impermanence without which
No prospective ghost can make his way in the world,
Having studied, to this end, in sundry dwellings,
The alluvial deposits of past species
(Hair-pins and empty scent-bottles, and on walls
The pencilling of long-disconnected telephone numbers);
And, pressing cold lips to jaundiced mirrors, found there
(As with the dead) no momentary clouding.

In addition, I must state that in the field
Of practical experience I have eaten
A thousand meals in bright fly-spotted cafes,
Sharing my morsel of pathos with a throng
Of vacant-eyed habitues, where the only
Thing that is substantial is the bill,
And drawn by the blind nickel-and-chrome benevolence
Of cinema foyers, watched my flickering counterparts
Live out their depthless lives, while lovers mocked
Their phantasms from the true world of the stalls.

In closing I assure you that should this
Application be successful I will prove
Most satisfactory in whatever post
You choose to place me,

bearing in mind, of course,

That, being by nature still a mere apprentice,
Only you, Death, can make me journey-man…

Renewal

BY Ovid

Full sail, I voyage
Over the boundless ocean, and I tell you
Nothing is permanent in all the world.
All things are fluent; every image forms,
Wandering through change. Time is itself a river
In constant movement, and the hours flow by
Like water, wave on wave, pursued, pursuing,
Forever fugitive, forever new.
That which has not been, is not; that which was not,
Begins to be; motion and moment always
In process of renewal. Look, the night,
Worn out, aims toward the brightness, and the sun’s glory
Succeeds the dark. The colour of the sky
Is different at midnight, when tired things
Lie all at rest, from what it is at morning
When Lucifer rides his snowy horse, before
Aurora paints the sky for Phoebes’s coming.

Pot Roast

BY Mark Strand

I gaze upon the roast,
that is sliced and laid out
on my plate,
and over it
I spoon the juices
of carrot and onion.
And for once I do not regret
the passage of time.

I sit by a window
that looks
on the soot-stained brick of buildings
and do not care that I see
no living thing—not a bird,
not a branch in bloom,
not a soul moving
in the rooms
behind the dark panes.
These days when there is little
to love or to praise
one could do worse
than yield
to the power of food.
So I bend

to inhale
the steam that rises
from my plate, and I think
of the first time
I tasted a roast
like this.
It was years ago
in Seabright,
Nova Scotia;
my mother leaned
over my dish and filled it
and when I finished
filled it again.
I remember the gravy,
its odor of garlic and celery,
and sopping it up
with pieces of bread.

And now
I taste it again.
The meat of memory.
The meat of no change.
I raise my fork
and I eat.

Planning a Time-Capsule

BY Bruce Dawe

As typical of these times I would include:
a dirty needle and a rip-top can,
pebbled glass from a windscreen, some spent cartridges,
a singlet noose fresh from a prisoner’s neck,
a pamphlet proving
pornography is love, a flask of tears
from battered women (laced with children’s blood),
a cassette-tape of cries from bitter tenants
faced with rent-hikes, a food-voucher
for the many hidden hungry, a door key
to signify the homeless, and a colour-shot
of a billion-dollar Parliament House, a press release
from the Bureau of Statistics showing
things are getting better all the time
– and for their rarity I would include:
a bottle of sand
from an undeveloped foreshore, a whole spadeful
of earth that’s still Australian, a fern-frond
from the last rain-forest, and a feather
from a free-range hen, a breath
of uncontaminated ozone, and a drop (a single drop)
of water as pure as grief…

Poem of the One World

BY Mary Oliver

This morning
the beautiful white heron
was floating along above the water

and then into the sky of this
the one world
we all belong to

where everything
sooner or later
is a part of everything else

which thought made me feel
for a little while
quite beautiful myself.

The More Loving One

BY W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

In Our Woods, Sometimes a Rare Music

BY Mary Oliver

Every spring
I hear the thrush singing
in the glowing woods
he is only passing through.
His voice is deep,
then he lifts it until it seems
to fall from the sky.
I am thrilled.
I am grateful

Then, by the end of morning,
he’s gone, nothing but silence
out of the tree
where he rested for a night.
And this I find acceptable.
Not enough is a poor life.
But too much is, well, too much.
Imagine Verdi or Mahler
every day, all day.
It would exhaust anyone.

Mending a Dress

BY Margaret Scott

I am sitting mending the sleeve of an old dress.
Light from a big yellow lamp falls on a fold
of blue cotton like evening sun, stroking the downy nap
until it smiles. A car hums in the street.
A log stirs in the fire. The dress lies warm in my lap
like a friendly cat. I am not thinking much
about the past when kingfisher blue flashed
at the tail of my eye, dipping through shadow and gleam
in a forest of windows. I am not thinking much
about the future when one day, old and bent,
I’ll find the dress pushed to the bottom of a rag-bag,
its blue brittle and thin as the wings of moths.
I am just poking the needle in and out
bringing together two segments of frayed cloth
under the arm. As I turn the cotton this way
and that I see that I’m making a seam,
a dark line like a straight creek lying between
blue fields where, traffic lulled to a hum,
a comfortable cat smiles and stirs, warm
as a dozing log, where a kingfisher flies in the trees
and moths come down to dance in the golden light
of the present moment.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

BY Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

The Mountain

BY Elizabeth Bishop

At evening, something behind me.
I start for a second, I blench,
or staggeringly halt and burn.
I do not know my age.

In the morning it is different.
An open book confronts me,
too close to read in comfort.
Tell me how old I am.

And then the valleys stuff
impenetrable mists
like cotton in my ears.
I do not know my age.

I do not mean to complain.
They say it is my fault.
Nobody tells me anything.
Tell me how old I am.

The deepest demarcation
can slowly spread and sink
like any blurred tattoo.
I do not know my age.

Shadows fall down; lights climb.
Clambering lights, oh children!

Occasions of mudcrab

BY Judith Rodriguez

…
We land at good airports to mudcrab.
Your ring touches mine — mudcrab!
Our eyes stroke cheeks hair (mudcrab,
someone is jotting a catch on the text mudcrab).
They can’t understand
why we can’t stop grinning over mudcrab!
Your suburb from the back verandah —
mudcrab entirely,
and the sad paper of our fleshly letters.
And the Brecht cassette in the dark’s
pinchgut racket
reels pure high black
live Brisbane basement midnight mudcrab.
…

Happiness

BY Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night. 

It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

Cycle

BY Christopher Reid

As she proffered
that enormous gin and tonic,
the clink of ice-cubes jostling
brought to mind
an amphitheatre
scooped from a sun-lulled hillside,
where a small breeze carried
the scent of lemon trees
and distant jostle of goat-bells,
bringing to mind
an enormous gin and tonic.

A Blessing

BY James Wright

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl’s wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Poetry

BY Pablo Neruda

And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.

I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.

And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.

Days

BY Philip Larkin

What are days for?
Days are where we live
They come, they wake us
Time and time over.
They are to be happy in:
Where can we live but days?

Ah, solving that question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Rubber

BY Rolf Jacobsen

One pale morning in June at four o’clock
when the country roads were still gray and wet
in their endless tunnels of forest,
a car had passed over the clay
just where the ant came out busily with its pine needle now
and kept wandering around in the big G of “Goodyear”
that was imprinted in the sand of country roads
for a hundred and twenty kilometers.
Pine needles are heavy.
Time after time with its load tottering it slid
back down
and worked its way up again
and slipped back again.
Outward bound across the great, cloud-illumined Sahara.

Black Swans Mating

BY Mike Ladd

At first she is a lone writer
reaching down into the taupe
of the lake.

Feeling for weed-words,
a ribbon of sentence.

Finding a morsel,
she pushes it under herself,
building a book,
a raft for her species.

That black snake of a neck
tripped with red
is constantly scribbling.

Then he arrives, swan-sails in.

She launches
from her self-created island
to glide and moor beside him.

But first the dance.

Chest thumping the water,
beaks dipping,
necks cross-ways and up and back.

And yes, there are times
when in symmetry
they form the outline
of a ruffled heart in black.

He fast treads water
and lifts onto her,
wings thrown back and beating.

At the peak
they honk and almost squeal
then straighten their necks to the sky.

And who is to say
they don’t feel ecstasy,
satisfied lovers
knowing their love
satisfied as well?

Echidna

BY Les Murray

Crumpled in a coign I was milk-tufted with my suckling
till he prickled.
He entered the earth pouch then
and learned ant-ribbon,
the gloss we put like lightning on the brimming ones.
Life is fat is sleep. I feast life on and sleep it,
deep loveself in calm.
I awaken to spikes of food-sheathing, of mulling fertile egg,
of sun, of formic gravels,
of worms, dab hunting, of fanning under quill-ruff when budged:
all are rinds, to sleep.
Corner-footed tongue-scabbard, I am trundling doze
and wherever I put it
is exactly right. Sleep goes there.

Hurry

BY Marie Howe

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I’m sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

The Social Behaviour of Minted Peas

BY Jamie Grant

Contradicting a proverb, the pot
I am watching boils, and resembles
the pool beneath a waterfall.
Then I pour in the frozen peas,
an avalanche of green stones, and at
that the pan no longer trembles.
For a while the peas lie as still
as the stony floor of the sea,
or else like a mountain of skulls
in South East Asia; they wait as
rigidly as an audience
with numbered seats, afraid to move.
Then one pea, on an odd impulse,
breaks away, and, with a skater’s
motion from side to side, ascends
to ride the surface far above
the others, a non-conformist
with a notion all its own.
Another, hesitant at first, glides
up to join it, and others still,
one at a time, cannot resist
the temptation to follow on,
behind the first one who derides
the common and conventional.
And then it is clear there’s a trend,
and all those peas who had hung back
now clamour to be allowed in.
Anxiously they jostle and sprint,
needing to belong in the end
among the upward-mobile pack,
elbowing each other, crowding
up to the air which smells of mint.

Sonnet CXVI

BY William Shakespeare

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.

Syros

BY Tomas Transtromer

In Syros’ harbor abandoned merchant ships lay idle.
Stem by stem by stem. Moored for many years:
CAPE RION, Monrovia.
KRITOS, Andros.
SCOTIA, Panama.

Dark paintings on the water, they have been hung aside.

Like playthings from our childhood, grown gigantic,
that remind us
of what we never became.

XELATROS, Piraeus.
CASSIOPEIA. Monrovia.
The ocean scans them no more.

But when we first came to Syros, it was at night,
we saw stem by stem by stem in moonlight and thought:
what a powerful fleet, what splendid connections!

Selva Oscura

BY Petra White

Hogging both time and world,
soul of another’s
body, making us
as we make it,
no fighting for it,
it blasts doubt out.

Some lovers live each other out,
their love
stretches
beyond their years of beauty or keeps
their beauty, an old woman
wheeling her husband in a chair,
her love, his, flickers
through human cracks
and finds
its way to survive, alive as life, death-bound
no more than they,
sex still in them.

It is early,
we have not crossed each other,
we keep love on our dinner plates, and horror
that rips the mind out
doesn’t come.
What is love
if we can kill it?

Ourselves obscure us, we obscure ourself, there is no distance,
love
the small chunk of light by which
I almost see you.

A White Turtle Under a Waterfall

BY Wang Wei

The waterfall on South Mountain hits the rocks,
tosses back its foam with terrifying thunder,
blotting out even face-to-face talk.
Collapsing water and bouncing foam soak blue moss.
old moss so thick
it drowns the spring grass.
Animals are hushed.
Birds fly but don’t sing
yet a white turtle plays on the pool’s sand floor
under riotous spray,
sliding about with the torrents.
The people of the land are benevolent.
No angling or net fishing.
The white turtle lives out its life, naturally.

This be the Verse

BY Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

For a Five-Year-Old

BY Fleur Adcock

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
and we are kind to snails.

A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

BY Craig Raine

Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings –

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly,
but sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside –
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet, they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer openly.
Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone’s pain has a different smell.

At night, when the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves –
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

Worship

BY Antigone Kefala

They ate the soil, slept with it,
the scent coursing their blood
till they were filled with earth,
took the sheep for lovers
prayed in mutilated voices,
in harsh goat tongues they sang
of rocky sites, hard winters
echoes of wind at night
in the rough trees.

The arms of the white statue
on the peak
stretching like giant horns
in the spring sun.

“Once” After Pushkin

BY Carol Rumens

I loved you once. D’you hear a small ‘I love you’
Each time we’re forced to meet? Don’t groan, don’t hide!
A damaged tree can live without a bud:
No one need break the branches and uncover
The green that should have danced, dying inside.
I loved you, knowing I’d never be your lover.
And now? I wish you summers of leaf-shine
And leaf-shade, and a face in dreams above you,
As tender and as innocent as mine.

Seen fleetingly, from a train

BY Bronislaw Maj

Seen fleetingly, from a train:
a foggy evening, strands of smoke
hanging immobile over fields,
the humid blackness of earth, the sun
almost set—against its fading shield,
far away, two dots: women in dark wraps
coming back from church perhaps, perhaps
one tells something to another, some common story,
of sinful lives perhaps—her words
distinct and simple but out of them
one could create everything
again. Keep it in memory, forever:
the sun, ploughed earth, women,
love, evening, those few words
good for the beginning, keep it all—
perhaps tomorrow we will be
somewhere else, altogether.

On a Faded Violet

BY Percy Bysshe Shelley

The colour from the flower is gone,
Which like thy sweet eyes smiled on me;
The odour from the flower is flown,
Which breathed of thee and only thee!

A withered, lifeless, vacant form,
It lies on my abandoned breast,
And mocks the heart which yet is warm
With cold and silent rest.

I weep – my tears revive it not;
I sigh – it breathes no more on me;
Its mute and uncomplaining lot
Is such as mine should be.

Evening Ebb

BY Robinson Jeffers

The ocean has not been so quiet for a long while; five night-herons
Fly shorelong voiceless in the hush of the air
Over the calm of an ebb that almost mirrors their wings.
The sun has gone down, and the water has gone down
From the weed-clad rock, but the distant cloud-wall rises. The
ebb whispers.
Great cloud-shadows float in the opal water.
Through rifts in the screen of the world pale gold gleams, and the
evening
Star suddenly glides like a flying torch.
As if we had not been meant to see her; rehearsing behind
The screen of the world for another audience.

Cat in an Empty Apartment

BY Wislawa Szymborska

Die — you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.

Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.

Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.

Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.

Just sleep and wait.
Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.

Moss Gathering

BY Theodore Rothke

To loosen with all ten fingers held wide and limber
And lift up a patch, dark-green, the kind for lining cemetery baskets,
Thick and cushiony, like an old-fashioned doormat,
The crumbling small hollow sticks on the underside mixed with roots,
And wintergreen berries and leaves still stuck to the top, —
That was moss-gathering.
But something always went out of me when I dug loose those carpets
Of green, or plunged to my elbows in the spongy yellowish moss of the marshes:
And afterwards I always felt mean, jogging back over the logging road,
As if I had broken the natural order of things in that swampland;
Disturbed some rhythm, old and of vast importance,
By pulling off flesh from the living planet;
As if I had committed, against the whole scheme of life, a desecration.

The Lady of Shalott

BY Lord Alfred Tennyson

Part I

On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold and meet the sky;
And thro’ the field the road runs by
To many-tower’d Camelot;
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.

Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Thro’ the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space of flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
The island of Shalott.
…