Poetry

A Travelling Bird

 

Flitting across the waves and shallow straits,

High ecstasy she glides in graceful flight,

From lands afar, from royal kingdoms borne

Sheer mystery beyond the common sight.

 

Petitely formed, a ball of beak and bone,

Thy size shall never match thy wisdom sought

By restless souls forbidden yet to know

And break the crest of animated thought. 

                                                                  [1969, In praise of Hardy', Shelley' and Keats's dickies]

 

 

House

 

I leant upon a high crack’d ledge

When sulky summer was concrete-grey

And heard the break of house music

I knew t’was here to stay.  

 

[2011  cf. Hardy’s A Darkling Thrush

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.]

 

[At the advent of House Music 1988/1989 the author was sharing a small room on a high floor of a block of flats Edmonton, north London, overlooking a busy dual-carriageway]

 

 

 

Down on the Ones

 

Here lies the dust of time spent cast

In forms of regulated lives,

Moulded by the mass have past

The ones the mass could not drive,

Rich law courts play – the poor are tried –

If wrong hands hold the gambling dice

Then history will ever lie,

Shields and spears can'st ne’re entice

The free to end their search in vain,

Reward the patient ones with gold,

When dying echoes Life’s refrain

We may one day know or be told.

Here lies the dust of some waif’s dream

They turn their own to mix with strife,

Plagued with sorrow will ever seem

They cannot win the game of Life.  

                                                     [1981]

 

 

 

Don’t

 

There was a time

I could have said

Wooder bin better

To stay in bed.

But now I say,

‘Let’s get up!’

Why?

Dunno.

Give up.