Poemunity — your poem community

Now you are strong And we are but grapes aching with ripeness. Crush us! Squeeze from us all the brave life Contained in these full skins. But ours is a subtle strength Potent with centuries of yearning, Of being kegged and shut away In dark forgotten places. We shall endure To steal your senses In that lonely twilight Of your winter’s grief.

Now, youth, the hour of thy dread passion comes; Thy lovely things must all be laid away; And thou, as others, must face the riven day Unstirred by rattle of the rolling drums, Or bugles' strident cry. When mere noise numbs The sense of being, the sick soul doth sway, Remember thy great craft's honour, that they may say Nothing in shame of poets. Then the crumbs Of praise the little versemen joyed to take Shall be forgotten; then they must know we are, For all our skill in words, equal in might And strong of mettle as those we honoured; make The name of poet terrible in just war, And like a crown of honour upon the fight.

Uncles who burst on childhood, from the East, Blown from air, like bearded ghosts arriving, And are, indeed, a kind of guessed-at ghost Through mumbled names at dinner-tables moving, Bearers of parrots, bonfires of blazing stones, Their pockets fat with riches out of reason, Meerschaum and sharks’-teeth, ropes of China coins, And weeds and seeds and berries blowzed with poison— So, from the baleful Kimberleys of thought, From the mad continent of dreams, you wander, Spending your trophies at our bloodless feet, Mocking our fortunes with more desperate plunder; So with your boomerangs of rhyme you come, With blossoms wrenched from sweet and deadly branches, And we, pale Crusoes in the moment’s tomb, Watch, turn aside, and touch again those riches, Nor ask what beaches of the mind you trod, What skies endured, and unimagined rivers, Or whiteness trenched by what mysterious tide, And aching silence of the Never-Nevers; Watch, turn aside, and touch with easy faith Your chest of miracles, but counting nothing, Or dumbly, that you stole them out of death, Out of death’s pyramids, to prove us breathing. We breathe, who beat the sides of emptiness, We live, who die by statute in steel hearses, We dance, whose only posture gives us grace To squeeze the greasy udders of our purses— (Look in this harsher glass, and I will show you The daylight after the darkness, and the morning After the midnight, and after the night the day After the year after, terribly returning). We live by these, your masks and images, We breathe in this, your quick and borrowed body; But you take passage on the ruffian seas, And you are vanished in the dark already.

Child of distress, who meet’st the bitter scorn Of fellow-men to happier prospects born, Doomed Art and Nature’s various stores to see Flow in full cups of joy—and not for thee; Who seest the rich, to heaven and fate resigned, Bear thy afflictions with a patient mind; Whose bursting heart disdains unjust control, Who feel’st oppression’s iron in thy soul, Who dragg’st the load of faint and feeble years, Whose bread is anguish, and whose water tears; Bear, bear thy wrongs—fulfill thy destined hour, Bend thy meek neck beneath the foot of Power; But when thou feel’st the great deliverer nigh, And thy freed spirit mounting seeks the sky, Let no vain fears thy parting hour molest, No whispered terrors shake thy quiet breast: Think not their threats can work thy future woe, Nor deem the Lord above like lords below;— Safe in the bosom of that love repose By whom the sun gives light, the ocean flows; Prepare to meet a Father undismayed, Nor fear the God whom priests and kings have made.

When I remember plain heroic strength And shining virtue shown by Ypres pools, Then read the blither written by knaves for fools In praise of English soldiers lying at length, Who purely dream what England shall be made Gloriously new, free of the old stains By us, who pay the price that must be paid, Will freeze all winter over Ypres plains. Our silly dreams of peace you put aside And brotherhood of man, for you will see An armed mistress, braggart of the tide, Her children slaves, under your mastery. We'll have a word there too, and forge a knife, Will cut the cancer threatens England's life.

White hail pelting the frozen bog, I’m stuck in the first line of January, following my host’s dog on his walk through the stone century, around the quarry, slices of marble and mud, past a herd of miners exhaling smoke, past a barn smelling of merde, and back to where I’m stuck and broke. The fucking dog barks at the night, mad at the stars all his life and then again. I rethink kicking him out, but being cool, I let him in.

Mother rain, manifold, measureless, falling on fallow, on field and forest, on house-roof, low hovel, high tower, downwelling waters all-washing, wider than cities, softer than sisterhood, vaster than countrysides, calming, recalling: return to us, teaching our troubled souls in your ceaseless descent to fall, to be fellow, to feel to the root, to sink in, to heal, to sweeten the sea.

Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my book in hand, To read it well: that is, to understand.

I want you with me, and yet you are the end of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms have become public? How we glance to see if— who? Who did you imagine? Surely we’re not here alone, you and I. I’ve been wandering where the cold tracks of language collapse into cinders, unburnable trash. Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold of meteors before their avalanches of farewell. If you asked me what words a voice like this one says in parting, I’d say,I’m sweeping an empty factory toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia. I’m just a broom, sweeping.

Whenever I look out at the snowy mountains at this hour and speak directly into the ear of the sky, it’s you I’m thinking of. You’re like the spirits the children invent to inhabit the stuffed horse and the doll. I don’t know who hears me. I don’t know who speaks when the horse speaks.