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Let it be forgotten, as a flower is forgotten,
Forgotten as a fire that once was singing gold.
Let it be forgotten forever and ever,
Time is a kind friend, he will make us old.
If anyone asks, say it was forgotten
Long and long ago,
As a flower, as a fire, as a hushed footfall
In a long-forgotten snow.
Sarah Teasdale
Places I love come back to me like music,
Hush me and heal me when I am very tired;
I see the oak woods at Saxton's flaming
In a flare of crimson by the frost newly fired;
And I am thirsty for the spring in the valley
As for a kiss ungiven and long desired.
I know a bright world of snowy hills at Boonton,
A blue and white dazzling light on everything one sees,
The ice-covered branches of the hemlocks sparkle
Bending low and tinkling in the sharp thin breeze,
And iridescent crystals fall and crackle on the snow-crust
With the winter sun drawing cold blue shadows from the trees.
Violet now, in veil on veil of evening
The hills across from Cromwell grow dreamy and far;
A wood-thrush is singing soft as a viol
In the heart of the hollow where the dark pools are;
The primrose has opened her pale yellow flowers
And heaven is lighting star after star.
Places I love come back to me like music --
Mid-ocean, midnight, the waves buzz drowsily;
In the ship's deep churning the eerie phosphorescence
Is like the souls of people who were drowned at sea,
And I can hear a man's voice, speaking, hushed, insistent,
At midnight, in mid-ocean, hour on hour to me.
Sarah Teasdale
Back to Teasdale - a superb writer of love poems.
THE TREE OF SONG
I sang my songs for the rest,
For you I am still;
The tree of my song is bare
On its shining hill.
For you came like a lordly wind,
And the leaves were whirled
Far as forgotten things
Past the rim of the world.
The tree of my song stands bare
Against the blue --
I gave my songs to the rest,
Myself to you.
Sarah Teasdale
It is some time since I last posted a poem by Mark Strand, but here is one for you today.
GIVING MYSELF UP
I give up my eyes which are glass eggs.
I give up my tongue.
I give up my mouth which is the contstant dream of my tongue.
I give up my throat which is the sleeve of my voice.
I give up my heart which is a burning apple.
I give up my lungs which are trees that have never seen the moon.
I give up my smell which is that of a stone traveling through rain.
I give up my hands which are ten wishes.
I give up my arms which have wanted to leave me anyway.
I give up my legs which are lovers only at night.
I give up my buttocks which are the moons of childhood.
I give up my penis which whispers encouragement to my thighs.
I give up my clothes which are walls that blow in the wind
and I give up the ghost that lives in them.
I give up. I give up.
And you will have none of it because already I am beginning
again without anything.
Mark Strand
Philip Levine began to write poetry while he was going to night school at Wayne University in Detroit and working days at one of that city's automobile manufacturing plants.
His poems often reflect the lives of factory workers in Detroit and this one is typical of his subjects and style.
It reminds me very much of the closing of the Lancashire cotton mills in the early 1930s, when 35,000 workers suddenly found themselves without employment.
AN ABANDONED FACTORY, DETROIT
The gates are chained, the barbed-wire fencing stands,
An iron authority against the snow,
And this grey monument to common sense
Resists the weather. Fears of idle hands,
Of protest, men in league, and of the slow
Corrosion of their minds, still charge this fence.
Beyond, through broken windows one can see
Where the great presses paused between their strokes
And thus remain, in air suspended, caught
In the sure margin of eternity.
The cast-iron wheels have stopped; one counts the spokes
Which movement blurred, the struts inertia fought,
And estimates the loss of human power,
Experienced and slow, the loss of years,
The gradual decay of dignity.
Men lived within these foundries, hour by hour;
Nothing they forged outlived the rusted gears
Which might have served to grind their eulogy.
Philip Levine
Philip Levine (b. January 10, 1928, Detroit, Michigan) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning American poet.
He is the Distinguished Poet in Residence for the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
HOUSE OF SILENCE
The winter sun, golden and tired,
settles on the irregular army
of bottles. Outside the trucks
jostle toward the open road,
outside it's Saturday afternoon,
and young women in black pass by
arm in arm. This bar
is the house of silence, and we drink
to silence without raising our voices
in the old way. We drink to doors
that don't open, to the four walls
that dose their eyes, hands that run,
fingers that count change, toes
that add up to ten. Suspended
as we are between our business
and our rest, we feel the sudden peace
of wine and the agony of stale bread.
Columbus sailed from here 30 years ago
and never wrote home. On Saturdays
like this the phone still rings for him.
Philip Levine
IMPLOSIONS
The world's
not wanton
only wild and wavering
I wanted to choose words that even you
would have to be changed by
Take the word
of my pulse, loving and ordinary
Send out your signals, hoist
your dark scribbled flags
but take
my hand
All wars are useless to the dead
My hands are knotted in the rope
and I cannot sound the bell
My hands are frozen to the switch
and I cannot throw it
The foot is in the wheel
When it's finished and we're lying
in a stubble of blistered flowers
eyes gaping, mouths staring
dusted with crushed arterial blues
I'll have done nothing
even for you?
Adrienne Rich
FALLEN CITIES
I gathered with a careless hand,
There where the waters night and day
Are languid in the idle bay,
A little heap of golden sand;
And, as I saw it, in my sight
Awoke a vision brief and bright,
A city in a pleasant land.
I saw no mound of earth, but fair
Turrets and domes and citadels,
With murmuring of many bells;
The spires were white in the blue air,
And men by thousands went and came,
Rapid and restless, and like flame
Blown by their passions here and there.
With careless hand I swept away
The little mound before I knew;
The visioned city vanished too,
And fall'n beneath my fingers lay.
Ah God! how many hast Thou seen,
Cities that are not and have been,
By silent hill and idle bay!
Gerald Gould (1885-1936)
Gerald Gould (1885 – 1936) was an English writer, journalist and essayist and poet.
Much of his poetry remains buried in the columns of newspapers and periodicals. The few collections that appeared, although well reviewed by contemporaries, are long out of print.
I have only been able to find two of his poems, this today and another tomorrow.
This is the horror that, night after night,
Sits grinning on my pillow -- that I meant
To mix the peace of being innocent
With the warm thrill of seeking out delight:
This is the final blasphemy, the blight
On all pure purpose and divine intent --
To dress the selfish thought, the indolent,
In the priest's sable or the angel's white.
For God's sake, if you sin, take pleasure in it,
And do it for the pleasure. Do not say:
'Behold the spirit's liberty! -- a minute
Will see the earthly vesture break away
And God shine through.' Say: 'Here's a sin -- I'll sin it;
And there's the price of sinning -- and I'll pay.'
Gerald Gould
I am contnuing my interest in contemporay American writers with this poem by Adrienne Rich.
I shall not attempt to explain it.
It is . . . . whatever it means to YOU - in your experience of life and relationships.
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
Adrienne Rich
More Mackey
CLEOPATRA
my body
she says
was roses once
and reeds from the Nile
my blood was resin wine,
and my hair a skein
of black silk
I wanted to be
a pyramid once
standing alone in the desert
I wanted to be a fertile river
I wanted to be the moon
I wanted to stay
ten years old
forever
sink my roots in the mud
become a papyrus
make a scroll of myself
and never marry
when I was a girl
I was a hieroglyph
but now I'm a whore
to Caesar
now I dance topless
in a leopard skin
G string
Queen of the Nile
Priestess of Isis
twirling tassels
with silicone breasts
bigger than beach balls
never having any power
of my own
I've learned to seduce it
generals
emperors
business men
politicians
and professors
stand in line
to powder my ass
I wanted to be
a pyramid once
I wanted to be
the moon
now at night
sometimes
I feel
death
crawl towards me
on its belly
Mary Mackey
I am turning to a contemporary American poet, Mary Mackey, who was born and raised in Indianapolis, Indiana, and is related through her father's family to Mark Twain.
She graduated from Harvard and received her Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of Michigan.
During the early 1970s she lived in the rain forests of Costa Rica. She is now professor of English and Writer in Residence at California State University, Sacramento.
Mary Mackey's published works include nine novels and four books of poetry and have sold over a million copies, which have been translated into eleven foreign languages including Japanese, Hebrew, and Finnish.
In this poem she asks herself the question: "What did I want from my lovers?"
She suggests several possible answers.
DESIRE
in my dreams
I hold my lovers
next to me all at once
and ask them
what was it I desired?
my hands are full
of their heads
like bunches of cut roses
blond hair, brown hair, red, black,
their eyes are pools of bewilderment
staring up at me
from the bouquet
what was it I desired?
I ask again
was it your bodies?
did I hope by draping
your flesh over me
I could escape
boredom
loneliness
gray hairs shooting
towards me
from the future
like thin arrows?
did I think I could escape,
by taking your breath
into my mouth,
did I think I could escape
the responsibility
of breathing?
what did I desire in you?
sex
knowledge?
power?
love?
did I expect the clouds to
crack
and blue moths to fly out of the stars?
did I expect a voice
to call to me
saying
"Here at last is the answer."
what
I yell at them
shaking my lovers
what did I desire in you?
their ears fall off like petals
they shed their faces
in a pile at my feet
their bewildered eyes
pucker and close
centers of fallen flowers
the last face
floats down
circling in the darkness
at my feet
what did I desire in you? I whisper
the stems of their bodies
dry in my hands
Mary Mackey
I am staying with Shel Silverstein with these few lines.
CROWDED TUB
There are too many kids in this tub
There are too many elbows to scrub
I just washed a behind that I'm sure wasn't mine
There are too many kids in this tub.
Sheldon Allan Silverstein
Said the little boy, "Sometimes I drop my spoon."
Said the old man, "I do that too."
The little boy whispered, "I wet my pants."
"I do that too," laughed the little old man.
Said the little boy, "I often cry."
The old man nodded, "So do I."
"But worst of all," said the boy, "it seems
Grown-ups don't pay attention to me."
And he felt the warmth of a wrinkled old hand.
"I know what you mean," said the little old man.
Shel Silverstein
I have been reprimanded for being too ready to dismiss the work of John Donne.
So I am persevering and here is another of his poems.
THE SUN RISING
Busy old fool, unruly Sun,
Why dost thou thus,
Through windows, and through curtains, call on us ?
Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run ?
Saucy pedantic wretch, go chide
Late school-boys and sour prentices,
Go tell court-huntsmen that the king will ride,
Call country ants to harvest offices ;
Love, all alike, no season knows nor clime,
Nor hours, days, months, which are the rags of time.
Thy beams so reverend, and strong
Why shouldst thou think ?
I could eclipse and cloud them with a wink,
But that I would not lose her sight so long.
If her eyes have not blinded thine,
Look, and to-morrow late tell me,
Whether both th' Indias of spice and mine
Be where thou left'st them, or lie here with me.
Ask for those kings whom thou saw'st yesterday,
And thou shalt hear, "All here in one bed lay."
She's all states, and all princes I ;
Nothing else is ;
Princes do but play us ; compared to this,
All honour's mimic, all wealth alchemy.
Thou, Sun, art half as happy as we,
In that the world's contracted thus ;
Thine age asks ease, and since thy duties be
To warm the world, that's done in warming us.
Shine here to us, and thou art everywhere ;
This bed thy center is, these walls thy sphere.
John Donne
I have been looking around, but I have still not found a worthy successor to Keith Douglas.
Someone suggested that I should feature the Jacobean poet John Donne (1572-1631).
Yes, he has stature, reputation and respect, but I find much of his work sickly over-romantic.
Also, the archaic language is not to everyone's taste.
However, when he adds a touch of humour it is more palatable.
This poem is about an interloper, an intruder in the marital bed!
THE FLEA
Mark but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deny'st me is;
It sucked me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be;
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pampered swells with one blood made of two,
And this, alas, is more than we would do.
Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is;
Though parents grudge, and you, w'are met,
And cloistered in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that, self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.
Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it sucked from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself, nor me the weaker now;
'Tis true, then learn how false fears be:
Just so much honor, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from thee
John Donne
On Saturday last I posted Keith Douglas's comments on the nature of poetry.
Today I turn to the great Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda.
Until now I have resisted posting any of the poems of Neruda, as I was often unsure which were originally written in English, or were translations from the Spanish.
However, this one was drawn to my attention by my American friend and fellow poetry enthusiast.
As he says, it perefectly complements Douglas's views and has the added advantage of being "poetry about poetry".
It is about personal 'discovery' by poetry - "Poetry arrived in search of me".
POETRY
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.
Pablo Neruda
Following my obsession with Keith Douglas, I am moving on.
It is difficult to find someone to match or exceed his talent so, for the moment, I am filling-in with favourite standbys.
One of these is Allen Ginsberg.
Much of his work has been described as indecent, decadent - or downright obscene, so I have to select with caution.
However, I don't think this one will offend anyone, although it could benefit from some updating.
Perhaps Iraq and Afghanistan should be thrown into that washing machine alongside Iran and the United States - and the President.
If I were doing my Laundry I'd wash my dirty Iran
I'd throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap,
scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in
the jungle,
I'd wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,
Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,
Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly
Cesium out of Love Canal
Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain the Sludge
out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,
Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little
Clouds so snow returns white as snow,
Cleanse the Hudson, Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie
Then I'd throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood &
Agent Orange,
Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out
the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,
& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an
Aeon till it came out clean
Allen Ginsberg
I know, I know . . . I said yesterday that I was concluding my short series of poems by Keith Douglas - but he won't let me go!
I have bought a copy of his "Complete Poems" and there are several more I would like to post here - but not today.
Instead I have decided to share with you his comments on "What is poetry?"
You may remember that, at my poetry group meeting a week or so ago, the guest speaker (a published poet) said that he would refuse to answer the question.
He then went on to attempt to do just that - and I disagreed with him!
So here is what Keith Douglas had to say - and I much prefer his version.
Oxford 1940.
Poetry is like a man whom, thinking you know all his movements and appearance, you will presently come upon in such a posture that for a moment you can hardly believe it a position of the limbs you know.
So, thinking you have set bounds to the nature of poetry, you shall as soon discover something outside your bounds which they should evidently contain.
The expression 'bad poetry' is meaningless: critics still use it, forgetting that bad poetry is not poetry at all.
Nor can prose and poetry be compared any more than than pictures and pencils: the one is instrument and the other art. Poetry may be written in prose or verse, or spoken extempore.
For it it is anything expressed in words, which appeals to the emotions, either in presenting an image or picture to move them; or by the music of words affecting them through the senses; or in stating some truth whose eternal quality exacts the same reverence as eternity itself.
In its nature poetry is sincere and simple.
Writing which is poetry must say what the writer has himself to say, not what he has observed others to say with effect, nor what he thinks will impress his hearers because it impressed him hearing it.
Nor must he waste any more words over it than a mathematician: every word must work for its keep, in prose, blank verse, or rhyme.
And poetry is to be judged not by what the poet has tried to say; only by what he has said.
Wow! How is that from a 20 year-old?
And what a loss to us all when he was killed in action four years later.
I am concluding my short series of the work of Keith Douglas with this, his last poem.
After fighting in North Africa, he returned to England and started training at a top-security camp for the sea-borne invasion of France.
Two months later, he was in command of a tank troop in the main assault on Gold Beach in Normandy.
As he waited to embark on the journey across the Channel, he started writing 'Actors waiting in the wings of Europe'. It was never finished.
His regiment helped liberate Bayeux and then, on D-Day + 3, arrived outside the little village of St Pierre.
The 24-year-old Douglas and a comrade left their tank and walked towards the village, which was full of Germans. A mortar shell exploded directly above his head, killing him instantly without leaving a mark on his body.
The chaplain buried him by a hedge near where he died.
ACTORS IN THE WINGS OF EUROPE
Actors waiting in the wings of Europe
we already watch the lights on the stage
and listen to the colossal overture begin.
For us entering at the height of the din
it will be hard to hear our thoughts, hard to gauge
how much our conduct owes to fear or fury.
Everyone, I suppose, will use these minutes
to look back, to hear music and recall
what we were doing and saying that year
during our last few months as people, near
the sucking mouth of the day that swallowed us all
into the stomach of a war. Now we are in it
and no more people, just little pieces of food
swirling in an uncomfortable digestive journey,
what we said and did then has a slightly
fairytale quality. There is an excitement
in seeing our ghosts wandering . . .
Keith Douglas
I am indebted to Barney Britton of Durham University for his 2004 comment on the poem:
"These lines are amongst the most moving evocations of the unreality of war, - the approaching conflict becomes some sort of play, - the combatants, like Hamlet's players, hold a mirror up to life, despairing, but at the same time finding comfort like Macbeth, in the insummountable absurdity of their transcience positioned, as actors, trapped between two fates, death or life.
They have become bit-part players, anxiously sweating off-stage, waiting, in their "last few months as people" to take part in a play - a war, whose script they did not write, and have not read.
In this poem Douglas seems to be in no doubt as to his fate, - it is as if the act of writing allows him some release, a respite - during which he can reflect, and see his ghost, 'wandering' amongst the men who will accompany him to his death.
There is a dualism in this and other poems that is also found in the work of other great 'war poets' which results I think, from the creation in writing, of a stable narrative self, safe from the red hot metal which might tear the corporeal body apart at any moment."
You can find further comment at:
Today, another poem by Keith Douglas - perhaps the best-known.
It was read in London on 10th July 2005 at the commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the end of Second World War.
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.
As the processes of earth
strip off the colour of the skin:
take the brown hair and blue eye
and leave me simpler than at birth,
when hairless I came howling in
as the moon entered the cold sky.
Of my skeleton perhaps,
so stripped, a learned man will say
"He was of such a type and intelligence," no more.
Thus when in a year collapse
particular memories, you may
deduce, from the long pain I bore
the opinions I held, who was my foe
and what I left, even my appearance
but incidents will be no guide.
Time's wrong-way telescope will show
a minute man ten years hence
and by distance simplified.
Through that lens see if I seem
substance or nothing: of the world
deserving mention or charitable oblivion,
not by momentary spleen
or love into decision hurled,
leisurely arrive at an opinion.
Remember me when I am dead
and simplify me when I'm dead.
Keith Douglas
Today - more about the English World War II poet who, at the age of 24, died in France a few days after the Normandy landings.
Keith Douglas was born in 1920 in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, the son of Capt. Keith Sholto Douglas, MC (retired) and Marie Josephine Castellain. His mother became unwell and collapsed in 1924 of encephalitis lethargica, never to fully recover.
By 1926, the chicken farm set up by his father failed and Keith was sent to a preparatory school in Guildford.
The family became increasingly poor, and his father had to leave home in early 1928 to seek better employment in Wales. The persistent ill-health of Marie led to the breakdown of the marriage of his parents by the end of that year, and his father remarried in 1930.
Douglas was deeply hurt by his father not communicating with him after 1928, and when Capt. Douglas did write at last in 1938, Keith did not agree to meet him.
In one of his letters written in 1940 Douglas looked back on his childhood: "I lived alone during the most fluid and formative years of my life, and during that time I lived on my imagination, which was so powerful as to persuade me that the things I imagined would come true."
In 1931 he was accepted to Christ's Hospital, Horsham, where education was free and there was monetary assistance to cover all other costs and in 1938 he won an Open Exhibition to Merton College, Oxford in 1938 to read History and English.
The well-known poet Edmund Blunden was his tutor at Merton, and regarded his poetic talent highly. Blunden sent his poems to T. S. Eliot, the doyen of English poetry: Eliot found Douglas impressive.
At Oxford Douglas entered a relationship with a sophisticated Chinese student named Yingcheng. Her own sentiments towards him were less intense, and she refused to marry him. Yingcheng remained the unrequited love of Douglas's life and the source of his best romantic verse, despite his involvements with other women later, most notably Milena.
Within days of the declaration of war in 1939 Douglas reported to an army recruiting centre with the intention of joining a cavalry regiment, but like many others keen to serve he had to wait, and it was not until July 1940 that he started his training.
On 1 February 1941 he passed out from Sandhurst, the officer training school, and was posted to the Second Derbyshire Yeomanry at Ripon. He was shipped to the Middle East in July 1941 and transferred to the Nottinghamshire (Sherwood Rangers) Yeomanry Regiment.
Posted initially at Cairo and Palestine, he found himself stuck at Headquarters twenty miles behind El Alamein as a camouflage officer as the Second Battle of El Alamein began. At dawn on 24 October 1942, the Regiment advanced, and suffered numerous casualties after being roughly handled by enemy anti-tank guns. Chafing at inactivity, Douglas took off against orders on 27 October, drove to the Regimental HQ in a truck, and reported to the C.O.,Colonel E.O.Kellett, lying that he had been instructed to go to the front. Luckily this escapade did not land him in serious trouble.
Desperately needing officer replacements, the Colonel posted him to A Squadron, and gave him the opportunity to take part as a fighting tanker in the Eighth Army's victorious sweep through North Africa vividly recounted in his beautiful memoir "Alamein to Zem Zem", illustrated with his own drawings.
He returned from North Africa to England in December 1943 and took part in the D-Day invasion of Normandy on 6 June 1944. He was killed by enemy mortar fire on 9 June while the Regiment was advancing from Bayeux. He is buried at the war cemetery at Tilly-sur-Seuilles.
Douglas described his poetic style as 'extrospective'; that is, he focused on external impressions rather than inner emotions. The result is a poetry which, according to his detractors, can be callous in the midst of war's atrocities. For others, Douglas's work is powerful and unsettling because its exact descriptions eschew egotism and shift the burden of emotion from the poet to the reader. His best poetry is generally considered to rank alongside the twentieth-century's finest soldier-poetry.
The poem below, about a dead German soldier, is in memory of all those who fell in WW 2 - on both sides.
VERGISSMEINNICHT
(Forget-me-not)
Three weeks gone and the combatants gone
returning over the nightmare ground
we found the place again, and found
the soldier sprawling in the sun.
The frowning barrel of his gun
overshadowing. As we came on
that day, he hit my tank with one
like the entry of a demon.
Look. Here in the gunpit spoil
the dishonoured picture of his girl
who has put: Steffi. Vergissmeinnicht.
in a copybook gothic script.
We see him almost with content,
abased, and seeming to have paid
and mocked at by his own equipment
that's hard and good when he's decayed.
But she would weep to see today
how on his skin the swart flies move;
the dust upon the paper eye
and the burst stomach like a cave.
For here the lover and killer are mingled
who had one body and one heart.
And death who had the soldier singled
has done the lover mortal hurt.
Keith Douglas
(Biography abridged from Wikipedia)
Yesterday afternoon I was browsing in Waterstone's bookstore and came across a book of verse by the English World War II poet Keith Douglas.
He has been described as "The James Dean or Kurt Cobain of War Poets".
I will tell you more about him tomorrow but, for the time being, it is sufficient to say that he died, aged 24, in France after taking part in the Normandy Landings.
This first poem is entitled "How To Kill"
Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.
Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears
and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.
The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.
Keith Douglas
TRISTICHS
I am concluding my series of poems by David Harsent today with a few examples of his "tristichs" (3 line verses.)
None of them are about war. They are little snap-shot representations of situations or ideas.
I hope at least one appeals to you.
They illustrate the point that less is often more.
What a lot can be said in just a few words!
You passed me a glass of water
into which you had secretly
dipped your finger.
* *
They fed him honey, wine and cheese. They took him
to the arcades. In the Hall of Mirrors he saw
the young god, naked, his boots laced with gold.
**
Black this side and white the other.
Your task - to make it
white this side and black the other.
**
With mother gone he makes his own coffee, he makes
his own bed. He's doing fine. His hands
have grown large, like mother's.
**
The station at night: silent, dark, deserted.
The station-master lights a cigarette.
He unzips and pisses down onto the tracks.
**
The sun finally reaches the backroom window.
Someone shouts outside in the street.
These things seem different to the loveless.
**
Those starlit nights . . . You could hear the apples
falling into the damp grass.
We let the apples lie, but gathered up the sound.
**
The windows shuttered, the house empty apart
from the sleek and naked
absence of your body on the bed.
**
David Harsent
