Food for thought

Sea go dark, dark with wind,
Feet go heavy, heavy with sand,
Thoughts go wild, wild with the sound
Of iron on the old shed, swinging, clanging:
Dark with the wind,
Heavy with the sand,
Wild with the iron that tears at the nail
And the foundering shriek of the gale.

Sylvia Plath -- Crossing the Water

Black lake, black boat, two black, cut-paper people.
Where do the black trees go that drink here?
Their shadows must cover Canada.

A little light is filtering from the water flowers.
Their leaves do not wish to hurry:
They are round and flat and full of dark advice.

Cold worlds shake from the oar.
The spirit of blackness is in us, it is in the fishes.
A snag is lifting a valedictory, pale hand;

Stars among the lillies.
Are you not blinded by such expressionless sirens?
This is the silence of astounded souls.

Phillip Larkin - Days

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 the question
Brings the priest and the doctor
In their long coats
Running over the fields.

Adrian Mitchell - The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry

Back in the caveman days business was fair.
Used to turn up at Wookey Hole,
Plenty of action down the Hole
Nights when it was not raided.
They'd see my beer-gut harp
And the mess at the back of my eyes
And "Right", they'd say, "make poetry".
So I'd slam away at the three basic chords
And go into the act -
A story about sabre-toothed tigers with a comic hero;
A sexy one with an anti-wife-clubbing twist -
Good progressive stuff mainly,
Get ready for the Bronze Age, all that,
And soon it would be "Bring out the wood!"
Yeah, wood. We used to get high on wood.

The Vikings only wanted sagas
Full of gigantic deadheads cutting off each other's vitals
Or Beowulf vs. the Bog People.
The Romans weren't much better
Under all that amour you could tell they were soft
With their central heating
And poets with names like Horace.

Under the Normans the language began to clear
Became a pleasure to write in,
Yes, write in, by now everybody was starting to write down poems.

Well, it saved memorizing and improvizing
And the peasants couldn't get hold of it.
Soon there were hundreds of us
Most of us writing under the name
Of Geoffrey Chaucer.

Then suddenly we were knee-deep in sonnets.
Holished ran a headline:
BONANZA FOR BARDS

It got fantastic -
Looning around from the bear-pit to the Globe
All those freak-outs down the Mermaid,
Kit Marlowe coming on like Richard III,
A virgin Queen in a ginger wig
And English poetry in full whatsit -
Bloody fantastic, but I never found any time
To do any writing till Will finally flipped -
Smoking too much of the special stuff
Sir Walter Raleigh was pushing.

Cromwell's time I spent on cultural committees.

Then Charles the Second swung down from the trees
And it was sexual medley time
And the only verses they wanted
Were epigrams on Chloe's breasts
But I only got published on the back of her left knee-cap.
Next came Pope and Dryden
So I went underground.
Don't mess with the Mafia.

Then suddenly - WOOMF -
It was the Ro-man-tic Re-viv-al
And it didn't matter how you wrote,
All the public wanted was a hairy great image.
Before they'd even print you
You had to smoke opium, die of consumption,
Fall in love with your sister
Or drown in the Mediterranean (not at Brighton).
My publisher said: "I'll have to remainder you
Unless you go live in a lake or something
Like this bloke Wordsworth.

After that there were about
A thousand years of Tennyson
Who got so bored with himself
That he changed his name
To Kipling at half-time.

Strange that Tennyson should be
Remembered for his poems really,
We always thought of him as a golfer.

There hasn't been much time
For poetry since the twenties
What with leaving the Communist Church
To join the Catholic Party
And explaining why in the C.I.A. Monthly.
Finally I was given the chair of Comparative Ambiguity
At Armpit University, Java.
It didn't keep me busy,
But it kept me quiet.
It seemed like poetry had been safely tucked up for the night.

Robert Graves - Flying Crooked

The butterfly, a cabbage-white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has - who knows so well as I? -
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the acrobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.

Craig Raine - A Martian Sends a Postcard Home

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 fky, 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 ones 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. Noone is extempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

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

and about themselves --
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

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