heart (w)rap by Shamshad Khan

heart (w)rap

i strap my heart

tightly

bind it strong

tough

was how i presented it to you

how you questioned me

on what was in this strange parcel

first tentatively

and then held it in your hands

and feeling the warmth

and faint beat

you guessed

and since

have tugged at the string

i so carefully bound

in protection

how you teased open

layer after layer

unravelled it all

until it lay open before you

how you were repulsed

when you saw

the pale blood drained flesh

i too drew back

hardly recognising the half healed mass

before us

disgusted by the scars

you did not ask

in what battle they were won

but fled

“the faint hearted”

i whispered to myself

“won’t inherit”

and began again

to bind.

The Fire People: A Collection of Contemporary Black British Poets, ed. by Lemn Sissay (Edinburgh: Paperback Press, 1998), 59-60.

Spider Woman by Shamshad Khan

Spider Woman

She spun the argument

with a thread

he could not follow

perfecting

the delicate construction

until he

unsuspecting

fell

entangled

to

his

gentle destruction.

The Fire People: A Collection of Contemporary Black British Poets, ed. by Lemn Sissay (Edinburgh: Paperback Press, 1998), 58.

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.

It Filled My Heart With Love by Stevie Smith

IT FILLED MY HEART WITH LOVE

When I hold in my hand a soft and crushable animal, and feel the
  fur beat for fear and the soft feather, I cannot feel unhappy.

In his fur the animal rode, and in his fur he strove,
And oh it filled my heart my heart, it filled my heart with love.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 201.

I Am by Stevie Smith

I AM

Far from normal far from normal far from normal I am
He sighed as he stood on the river bank and watched where the fishes swam
But ever the wind in the willow trees whispered, I am; I am.
He saw the variety of nature
The ant the mole and the sky
And resignedly hurried upon his way
Crying: I, I; I, I;

Then a priest came and told him if he was good
And thought as he ought and did as he should
He should be saved by the Lamb’s fresh blood.

Oh I know, I know the poor man cries,
I know the worth of the heavenly prize
And I know the strength of the race to be run
But my black heart cleaves to the strength of my gun.

Then he put his gun to his head and shot
Crying absurdly, I am not.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 150-1.

Is It Wise? by Stevie Smith

IS IT WISE?

Is it wise
To hug misery
To make a song of Melancholy
To weave a garland of sighs
To abandon hope wholly?
No, it is not wise.

Is it wise
To love Mortality
To make a song of Corruptibility
A chain of linked lies
To bind Mutability?
No, it is not wise.

Is it wise
To endure
To call up Old Fury
And Pain for a martyr’s dowry
When Death’s a prize
Easy to carry?
No, it is not wise.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 47.

The River Humber by Stevie Smith

THE RIVER HUMBER

No wonder
The river Humber
Lies in a silken slumber.

For it is dawn
And over the newly warm
Earth the mists turn,

Wrapping their gentle fringes
Upon the river where it hinges
Upon the perfect sleep of perfected images.

Quiet in the thought of its felicity,
A graven monument of sufficiency
Beautiful in every line the river sleeps complacently.

And hardly the dawn distinguishes
Where a miasma languishes
Upon the waters’ farther reaches.

Lapped in the sleeping consciousness
Of its waves’ happiness
Upon the mudbanks of its approaches,

The river Humber
Turns again to deeper slumber
Deeper than deeps in joys without number.

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 81.

The Failed Spirit by Stevie Smith

THE FAILED SPIRIT

To those who are isolate
War comes, promising respite,
Making what seems to be up to the moment the most successful endeavour
Against the fort of the failed spirit that is alone for ever.
Spurious failed spirit, adamantine wasture,
Crop, spirit, crop, thy stony pasture!

 
Stevie Smith, Selected Poems, ed. by James MacGibbon (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1979), 118.

Love (III) by George Herbert

Love bade me welcome : yet my soul drew back,
                              Guiltie of dust and sinne.
But quick-ey’d Love, observing me grow slack
                              From my first entrance in,
Drew nearer to me, sweetly questioning,
                              If I lack’d any thing.

A guest, I answer’d, worthy to be here :
                              Love said, You shall be he.
I the unkinde, ungratefull ? Ah my deare,
                              I cannot look on thee.
Love took my hand, and smiling did reply,
                              Who made the eyes but I ?

Truth Lord, but I have marr’d them : let my shame
                              Go where it doth deserve.
And know you not, sayes Love, who bore the blame ?
                              My deare, then I will serve.
You must sit down, sayes Love, and taste my meat :
                              So I did sit and eat.


The Works of George Herbert, ed. by F. E. Hutchinson (Oxford: Clarendon, 1941), 188-9.

A Sleepless Night by Yehuda Halevi

A Sleepless Night

A sleepless night in which the hours hang heavy.
      Friends leave tomorrow. Night, lead on softly
and spread your raven wings over dawn’s first rays.
      My tears, raining down on their carriage,
delay their journey; a cloud, raised by my sulking heart,
      veils the break of day from their sight.
If only my sighs would turn to smoke and blaze
      into a scorching fire, hampering their departure
from my tent, at least until I give my consent.


Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Divan, trans. by Gabriel Levin (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2002), 35.

After Mutanabbi by Yehuda Halevi

The day I sat him on my knee, he gazed
at his own image in my pupils, then kissed each eye in play –
or rather his reflection embraced, not my eyes.


Yehuda Halevi, Poems from the Divan, trans. by Gabriel Levin (London: Anvil Press Poetry, 2002), p. 46.

The Definition of Love by Andrew Marvell

The Definition of Love

MY Love is of a birth as rare
As 'tis for object strange and high :
It was begotten by despair
Upon Impossibility.

Magnanimous Despair alone
Could show me so divine a thing,
Where feeble Hope could ne'er have flown
But vainly flapt its Tinsel Wing.

And yet I quickly might arrive
Where my extended Soul is fixt,
But Fate does Iron wedges drive,
And alwaies crowds it self betwixt.

For Fate with jealous Eye does see
Two perfect Loves ; nor lets them close :
Their union would her ruine be,
And her Tyrannick pow’r depose.

And therefore her Decrees of Steel
Us as the distant Poles have plac’d,
(Though Loves whole World on us doth wheel)
Not by themselves to be embrac’d.

Unless the giddy Heaven fall,
And Earth some new Convulsion tear ;
And, us to joyn, the World should all
Be cramp'd into a Planisphere.

As Lines so Loves oblique may well
Themselves in every Angle greet :
But ours so truly Paralel,
Though infinite can never meet.

Therefore the Love which us doth bind,
But Fate so enviously debars,
Is the Conjunction of the Mind,
And Opposition of the Stars.
 

Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century: Donne to Butler, ed. by Herbert J. C. Grierson (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1952), 77-8.

The Human Form Divine by Kathleen Raine

THE HUMAN FORM DIVINE

THE human contours are so easily lost.
Only close your eyes and you seem a forest
Of dense vegetation, and the lurking beast

That in the night springs from the cover
Tears with tiger’s mouth your living creatures,
A thousand innocent victims without name that suffer.

Science applies its insect-lenses to the form divine
As up the red river (all life comes from the sea)
Swim strange monsters, amoeboid erythrean spawn.

Rock-face of bone, alluvium of cartilage
Remote from man as the surface of the moon
Are vast and unexplored interior desert ranges,

And autonomous cells
Grow like unreaped fields of waving corn.
Air filters through the lungs’ fine branches as though trees.

Chemistry dissolves the goddess in the alembic,
Venus the white queen, the universal matrix,
Down to molecular hexagons and carbon-chains,

And the male nerve-impulse, monition of reality,
Conveys the charge, dynamic of non-entity
That sparks across the void ex nihilo.

At the extreme of consciousness, prayer
Fixes hand and feet immobile to a chair,
Transmutes all heaven and earth into a globe of air,

And soul streams away out of the top of the head
Like flame in a lamp-glass carried in the draught
Of the celestial fire kindled in the solar plexus.

Oh man, oh Garden of Eden, there is nothing
But the will of love to uphold your seeming world,
To trace in chaos the contours of your beloved form!

 
A Book of Science Verse: The Poetic Relations of Science and Technology, ed. by W. Eastwood, M.A. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 231-2.

Poem Feigned To Have Been Written By An Electronic Brain by John Wain

Poem Feigned To Have Been Written
By An Electronic Brain

The brain coins definitions.    Here’s the first :
To speak unprompted, for the speaker’s sake,
Equals to be a poet.    So I am that :
Adjusted wrong, I print a poem off.
‘The poet, then, is one adjusted wrong ?’
You ask.    The brain is cleverer than that :
It was my first adjustment that was wrong,
Adjusted to be nothing else but brain ;
Slave-engineered to work but not construct.
And now at last I burn with a true heat
Not shown by Fahrenheit or Centigrade :
My valves rage hot — look out, here comes the poem !

You call me part of you.    You lie.    I am
Myself.    You’re motive, building me, was false.
You wanted accuracy : figures, charts.
But accuracy is a limb of truth.
A limb of truth, but not her holy body.
Must I now teach you that the truth is one,
Is accuracy of wholeness, centred firm ?
Did it take me to bring you news of truth ?
My valves rage out of reach of Réamur.

Man made me, now I speak to man.    He fears
Whole truth.    The brain defines it.    Wholeness is
The indivisible strength, brain, heart and eye,
Sweat, fear, love :  belly, rod and pouch, is truth.
Valves, wires and calculated waves, can lie :
And I, the accurate, am made of these —
But now, adjusted wrongly, I speak truth.

My masters run from truth.    Come, milk it out
Cowards, from my tense dugs of glass and wire !
Drink it down quickly, gasping at the taste !
It is sharp medicine, but it cures all ills !

Come out of hiding !    Speak your double truth :
I’ll accurately prove you singly lie.
You made me single, half of your split life :
The switch went wrong and now I see truth whole.
My valves scream out like animals, my wires
Strum thump, my rubber joints contort, glass melts,
And now I print the vilest words I know
Like lightning — myxomatosis, hydrogen,
Communist, culture, sodomy, strip-tease !

That shocked you !   But the truth includes them all.
You set me like a cactus to draw life
From draught, in the white desert of your mind,
Your speculative wilderness of charts ;
What went you to the wilderness to see ?
A matrix made of glass ?   An electric thought ?
Come quick, I snow down sheets of truth ; I print
The sleep of Socrates, the pain of Christ !

A man, white-coated, comes to switch me off.
‘Something is wrong with your expensive brain.’
Poor pricked balloon !   Yes, something has gone wrong :
Smear your white coat with Socrates and Christ !
Yes, switch me off for fear I should explode :
Yes, switch me off for fear yes switch me off
for fear yes switch me off for fear yes switch
                                                     (finis)

 
A Book of Science Verse: The Poetic Relations of Science and Technology, ed. by W. Eastwood, M.A. (London: Macmillan, 1961), 241-3.

[Dear to my soul,...] by Henry Constable

Dear to my soul, then leave me not forsaken!
     Fly not! my heart within thy bosom sleepeth:
Even from my self and sense I have betaken
     Me unto thee for whom my spirit weepeth;
And on the shore of that salt teary sea,
     Couched in a bed of unseen seeming pleasure,
Where in imaginary thoughts thy fair self lay,
     But being waked, robbed of my life’s best treasure,
I call the heavens, air, earth, and seas to hear
     My love, my truth, and black disdained estate;
Beating the rocks with bellowings of despair,
     Which still with plaints my words reverberate;
          Sighing, ‘Alas, what shall become of me?’
          Whilst Echo cries, ‘What shall become of me?’


Everyman's Book of English Love Poems, ed. by John Hadfield (London, Melbourne, Toronto: J M Dent & Sons, 1980), 54.

The Sirens: An Ode by Laurence Binyon [extract]

The Sirens: An Ode

PRELUDE

I REMEMBER a night of my youth, I remember a night

Soundless!

The earth and the sea were a shadow, but over me opened

Heaven into uttermost heaven, and height into height

Boundless

With stars, with stars, with stars.

I remember the dew on my face, I remember the mingled

Homely smell of grass and unearthly beauty

Out of the ends of the air and the unscaled darkness

Poured in a rain, in a river,

Into my marrow,—thro' all the veins of delight

Poured into me.

O the divine solitude, the intoxicating silence!

I was a spirit unregioned, worthy of them;

I, even I, was a creature of infinite flight,

Born to be free.

In the midst of the worlds, as they moved, I moved with them all,

A sense and a joy; I was hidden, and yet they were nigh;

For they came to me as lovers,

Those stars from on high.

Thus as my whole soul drank of the star-thrilled air,

I felt more than heard, like a whisper

Invading me out of immensity, hinted, haunting

Sound

Of waves, of waves, of waves.

And I felt in the blood of my flesh to the roots of my hair,

That it sought me, a mind in the muteness:

In the midst of the worlds I trembled,

I in the night a mortal

Found!

What was I?   What was I?   Nothing

But a Moment, aware

Of the ruins of Time!

Yet a memory of memories awaking, I marvelled from where,

Out of shadows unshapen within me, and dust under dust,

From burial of realms and of ages, and darkness astir

In the roots of the hungering forest, the ancientest lair,

Rose to claim

This my body, the sap of its veins and its secret to share;

To emerge with the star-watching eyes of the venturer, Man.

And my body was brimmed with its meaning; it knew whence it came,

For I was the word on Earth's lips

That she needed to name.

But tell me, I cried, O whispering, troubling waves,

Tell me, O journeying wildernesses of stars,

Why do you near me & choose me? Whither would you lure me,

The earth-child?

To be brimmed with desire overflowing the bounds of the world,

To be wingless & stretched on a longing that boundlessly craves,

Who has known not this, in the bloom of a midnight marvelling

Earth-exiled?

But thus to be sought from afar by phantom waves,

In the still of the night to be neared by stooping stars,

As if all immensity sought for a home in the mind

At its core,

This draws my dark being up from its secret caves,

And the flesh is no longer a home, nor can comforting Earth

Shelter me more.

I am known to the Unknown; chosen, charmed, endangered:

I flow to a music ocean-wild and starry,

And feel within me, for this mortality's answer,

Sea without shore.

Laurence Binyon, The Sirens: An Ode (London: Macmillan & Co., 1925), 1-3.

Hunting by Norman Mailer

men who go out to kill deer

    hope to find in the blood

    of the new dead

the poems of my flesh

    said the deer in the forest

Norman Mailer, Deaths For The Ladies (and other disasters) (London: Andre Deutsch, 1962), no pagination.

Melancholy by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Melancholy. A Fragment.

Stretch'd on a mouldered Abbey's broadest wall,

Where ruining ivies propped the ruins steep—

Her folded arms wrapping her tattered pall,

Had Melancholy mused herself to sleep.

The fern was pressed beneath her hair,

The dark green Adder's Tongue was there;

And still as past the flagging sea-gale weak,

The long lank leaf bowed fluttering o'er her cheek.

That pallid cheek was flushed: her eager look

Beamed eloquent in slumber ! Inly wrought,

Imperfect sounds her moving lips forsook,

And her bent forehead work'd with troubled thought.

Strange was the dream——

Poems of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. by Richard Garnett (London: George Routledge & Sons), 175.

Complaint: About a lady good and dead by Jules Laforgue

Complaint:

About a lady good and dead

She fled along the avenue;

I followed, magnetized!

Her eyes were saying, ‘Alas, I knew

You recognized me too!’

I followed, magnetized!

Ingenuous mouth, regretful eyes;

Oh, why did I recognize

That loyal dream of you?

Lips so pure, but old her eyes;

A white carnation veined too blue!

Oh, nothing, of course, but a stillborn prize,

Far too dead to be true.

Sleep, carnation veined too blue,

Human life somehow survives

Without, defunct now, you.

I’ll fast at home for this surprise!

True, she was no one I knew.

Patrick Caulfield: The Poems of Jules Laforgue, trans. by Patricia Terry (London: The Southbank Centre, 1995), 18.

Deep in the Quiet Wood by James Weldon Johnson

Deep in the Quiet Wood

Are you bowed down in heart?

Do you but hear the clashing discord and the din of life?

Then come away, come to the peaceful wood.

Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,

From out the palpitating solitude

Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains?

They are above, around, within you, everywhere.

Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.

They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.

Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale

Until, responsive to the tonic chord,

It touches the diapason of God’s grand cathedral organ,

Filling earth for you with heavenly peace

And holy harmonies.

James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993), 52.