Minerva by C. H. Sisson

Minerva

If silence were enough

I might well have it here,

And yet the word will puff

And blow until I hear

As it climbs the vast hill

From the dark pit where none

Can apprehend it till

It sees the distant sun.

In the pit only sleep;

In the sun only death:

One moment on the steep

It draws a waking breath.

I go to meet it where

It touches life at full:

‘Salut, mon fils, mon frère,

Touch hands, but do no pull.’

You pull, and I go down

Where silence holds me fast.

I pull, and with a frown

You mutter and push past.

Only a moment’s poise

Gives us a common mind,

Mere silence and mere noise

Shown up as being blind,

As when, before a form

Containing all I seek,

I recognise a norm

And do not try to speak.

C. H. Sisson, Antidotes (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), 36.

Looking by C. H. Sisson

Looking

Look, looker, if you will,

But what you see,

That shape, that colour, still

Is no-wise me.

So beauty is a dream

And ugliness the same:

To seem, to seem, to seem

Is all that’s in a name.


C. H. Sisson, Antidotes (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), 40.

The Birth of Venus by C. H. Sisson

The Birth of Venus

So she stepped naked on to the shore and broke

Into a thousand pieces as she awoke

To life in sunlight, and forgot the sea.

The spray blinded all to her symmetry.

Imagination saw a pearly flesh;

The hand that touched it found it cool and fresh,

And moulded it, complete from top to toe.

A liar then asserted that it was so.

C. H. Sisson, Antidotes (Manchester: Carcanet, 1991), 28.

Evolution by Edwin Brock

EVOLUTION

One wave

sucking the shingle

and three birds

in a white sky

one man

and one idea

two workmen

and a concrete mixer

one wave

shingle

white walls

bird and sky

two workmen

and a concrete mixer

white walls

wave and windows

bird and sky

wave and white rooms

walls and windows

lights and sky

five hundred men

and a computer

desks and days

white walls

lights and

one computer

rooms and men

lights

one computer

desks and days

rooms and windows

desks and lights

lights and days

and days and rooms

desks and rooms

days and lights

daylight in

dayrooms

and days

in desks

and days

in days

and one man

mad

dreaming of

one wave

sucking the shingle

and three birds

in a wide sky

Edwin Brock, A Cold Day at the Zoo (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1970), 16-7.

Autobiography by Edwin Brock

AUTOBIOGRAPHY

Draw three sides

of a square

cap it with

an inverted vee

call it a house

imagine the house

inhabited

call it a home

pin this picture

to a wall

travel by the sea

throw stones

for dogs

eat sleep

arrange things

until

quietly by the sea

the dogs

die

and the stones

have gone

then travel

inland

to three sides

of a square

capped with

an inverted vee

imagine it

inhabited

and arrive

Edwin Brock, A Cold Day at the Zoo (London: Rapp and Whiting, 1970), 11.

Fragment of a Greek Tragedy by A. E. Housman

              Fragment of a Greek Tragedy

                                        Alcmaeon, Chorus

CHO.     O SUITABLY-attired-in-leather-boots

               Head of a traveller, wherefore seeking whom

               Whence by what way how purposed art thou come

               To this well-nightingaled vicinity?

               My object in inquiring is to know.

               But if you happen to be deaf and dumb

               And do not understand a word I say,

               Then wave your hand, to signify as much.

ALC.      I journeyed hither a Bœtian road.

CHO.     Sailing on horseback, or with feet for oars?

ALC.      Plying with speed my partnership of legs.

CHO.     Beneath a shining or a rainy Zeus?

ALC.      Mud's sister, not himself, adorns my shoes.

CHO.     To learn your name would not displease me much.

ALC.      Not all that men desire do they obtain.

CHO.     Might I then hear at what thy presence shoots?

ALC.      A shepherd's questioned mouth informed me that—

CHO.     What?  for I know not yet what you will say—

ALC.      Nor will you ever, if you interrupt.

CHO.     Proceed, and I will hold my speechless tongue.

ALC.      —This house was Eriphyla's, no one’s else.

CHO.     Nor did he shame his throat with hateful lies.

ALC.      May I then enter, passing through the door?

CHO.     Go, chase into the house a lucky foot,

               And, O my son, be, on the one hand, good,

               And do not, on the other hand, be bad;

               For that is very much the safest plan.

ALC.      I go into the house with heels and speed.

                                                      Chorus

                    In speculation                                                             Strophe

               I would not willingly acquire a name

                    For ill-digested thought;

                    But after pondering much

               To this conclusion I at last have come:

                    Life is uncertain.

                    This truth I have written deep

                    In my reflective midriff

                    On tablets not of wax,

               Nor with a pen did I inscribe it there,

               For many reasons:  Life, I say, is not

                    A stranger to uncertainty.

               Not from the flight of omen-yelling fowls

                    This fact did I discover,

               Nor did the Delphic tripod bark it out,

                    Nor yet Dodona.

               Its native ingenuity sufficed

                    My self-taught diaphragm.

                    Why should I mention                                                Antistrophe

               The Inachean daughter, loved of Zeus?

                    Her whom of old the gods,

                    More provident than kind,

               Provided with four hoofs, two horns, one tail,

                    A gift not asked for,

                    And sent her forth to learn

                    The unfamiliar science

                    Of how to chew the cud.

               She therefore, all about the Argive fields,

               Went cropping pale green grass and nettle-tops,

                    Nor did they disagree with her.

               But yet, howe'er nutritious, such repasts

                    I do not hanker after:

               Never may Cypris for her seat select

                    My dappled liver!

               Why should I mention Io?  Why indeed?

                    I have no notion why.

                    But now does my boding heart,                                 Epode

                    Unhired, unaccompanied, sing

                    A strain not meet for the dance.

                    Yea even the palace appears

                    To my yoke of circular eyes

                    (The right, nor omit I the left)

                    Like a slaughterhouse, so to speak,

                    Garnished with woolly deaths

                    And many shipwrecks of cows.

               I therefore in a Cissian strain lament;

                    And to the rapid,

               Loud, linen-tattering thumps upon my chest

                    Resounds in concert

               The battering of my unlucky head.

               ERIPHYLA (within). O, I am smitten with a hatchet's jaw;

               And that in deed and not in word alone.

CHO.     I thought I heard a sound within the house

               Unlike the voice of one that jumps for joy.

ERI.        He splits my skull, not in a friendly way,

               Once more: he purposes to kill me dead.

CHO.     I would not be reputed rash, but yet

               I doubt if all be gay within the house.

ERI.        O! O! another stroke! that makes the third.

               He stabs me to the heart against my wish.

CHO.     If that be so, thy state of health is poor;

               But thine arithmetic is quite correct.

The New Oxford Book of Light Verse, ed. by Kingsley Amis (Oxford, London, New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 176-9.