It is an abhorrent thing

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1. The Price Of Parting Will they be there for you when you die? Will they hold your hands and cry until you’ve breathed Your last? Is it too much to ask? While love is free In tearful task the price of parting wears A mask of pain which none would feign To gladly greet. Yet love abed with death […]...
2. Breton Wife A Wintertide we had been wed When Jan went off to sea; And now the laurel rose is red And I wait on the quay. His berthing boat I watch with dread, For where, oh where is he? “Weep not, brave lass,” the Skipper said; “Return to you he will; In hospital he lies abed […]...
3. Sonnet CXII Your love and pity doth the impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamp’d upon my brow; For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you o’er-green my bad, my good allow? You are my all the world, and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue: None else to […]...
4. Sonnet 112: Your love and pity doth th' impression fill Your love and pity doth th’ impression fill Which vulgar scandal stamped upon my brow; For what care I who calls me well or ill, So you o’ergreen my bad, my good allow? You are my all the world, and I must strive To know my shames and praises from your tongue; None else to […]...
5. The Gift “He gave her class. She gave him sex.” Katharine Hepburn on Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers He gave her money. She gave him head. He gave her tips on “aggressive growth” mutual funds. She gave him a red rose and a little statue of eros. He gave her Genesis 2 (21-23). She gave him Genesis […]...
6. Five O'Clock Shadow This is the time of day when we in the Mens’s ward Think “one more surge of the pain and I give up the fight.” Whe he who strggles for breath can struggle less strongly: This is the time of day which is worse than night. A haze of thunder hangs on the hospital rose-beds, […]...
7. Netley 47 army hospital Rheumatic fever Bed-tied many weeks Too embarrassed to ask for bedpan The rigmarole of screens and knowing attention – for my pains Severe constipation And bleeding piles Am led away to be injected Crouching Waist-down undressed Upon a marble table Being shaved the wrong end (easy talk between doctor and nurse) The needle […]...
8. In Darkness Must all of worth be travailled for, and those Life’s brightest stars rise from a troubled sea? Must years go by in sad uncertainty Leaving us doubting whose the conquering blows, Are we or Fate the victors? Time which shows All inner meanings will reveal, but we Shall never know the upshot. Ours to be […]...
9. Small Breaths No matter that my heart sinks, Sighs, with the weight of skeletons- Paths I forgot to follow Have slowly sealed Rooms go unrecognised For fear of change And I cry at the uncertainty of rainbows. All the daydreams I stole, Refusing to give them back Are stored as silver dust And each day is a […]...
10. The Womb Up from the evil day Of wattle and of woad, Along man’s weary way Dark Pain has been the goad. Back from the age of stone, Within his brutish brain, What pleasure he has known Is ease from Pain. Behold in Pain the force That haled Man from the Pit, And set him such a […]...
11. Sonnet 02: Time Does Not Bring Relief; You All Have Lied Time does not bring relief; you all have lied Who told me time would ease me of my pain! I miss him in the weeping of the rain; I want him at the shrinking of the tide; The old snows melt from every mountain-side, And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane; But last […]...
12. JIMMY ( A Poem in Remembrance) Bhaskar Roy Barman Jimmy, A black, snub-nosed bitch, a jaw shoved out, Your eyes throwing forward a wrinkled reproachful look, Your fur so brindled as to give one to understand You were not pure, Receded into oblivion. Suddenly you intruded into our memory When we were observing the third death […]...
13. Softened by Time's consummate plush Softened by Time’s consummate plush, How sleek the woe appears That threatened childhood’s citadel And undermined the years. Bisected now, by bleaker griefs, We envy the despair That devastated childhood’s realm, So easy to repair....
14. The Hero of Rorke's Drift Twas at the camp of Rorke’s Drift, and at tea-time, And busily engaged in culinary operations was a private of the line; But suddenly he paused, for he heard a clattering din, When instantly two men on horseback drew rein beside him. “News from the front!” said one, “Awful news!” said the other, “Of which, […]...
15. Nothing ever is the same Gnashing teeth, A grinding meet Of molars crashing Cuspid on cuspid And the fracture of a piece, Of pressure not intense but awkward In an anxious, unintended sense, Then giving way, the rapid play Of tongue immediate with censure Seeking each deformity, The gross enormity – a shard of tooth Hard and loose embedded with […]...
16. The Poor Children Take heed of this small child of earth; He is great; he hath in him God most high. Children before their fleshly birth Are lights alive in the blue sky. In our light bitter world of wrong They come; God gives us them awhile. His speech is in their stammering tongue, And his forgiveness in […]...
17. Water makes many Beds Water makes many Beds For those averse to sleep Its awful chamber open stands Its Curtains blandly sweep Abhorrent is the Rest In undulating Rooms Whose Amplitude no end invades Whose Axis never comes....
18. August 17th Good for visiting hospitals or charitable work. Take some time to attend to your health. Surely I will be disquieted By the hospital, that body zone Bodies wrapped in elastic bands, Bodies cased in wood or used like telephones, Bodies crucified up onto their crutches, Bodies wearing rubber bags between their legs, Bodies vomiting up […]...
19. For Richmond's Garden Wall WHEN Thomas set this tablet here, Time laughed at the vain chanticleer; And ere the moss had dimmed the stone, Time had defaced that garrison. Now I in turn keep watch and ward In my red house, in my walled yard Of sunflowers, sitting here at ease With friends and my bright canvases. But hark, […]...
20. The Last Words Of My English Grandmother There were some dirty plates And a glass of milk Beside her on a small table Near the rank, disheveled bed- Wrinkled and nearly blind She lay and snored Rousing with anger in her tones To cry for food, Gimme something to eat- They’re starving me- I’m all right I won’t go To the hospital. […]...
21. Blind It’s okay if the world goes with Venetian; Who cares what Italians don’t see? Or with Man’s Bluff (a temporary problem Healed by shrieks and cheating) or with date: Three hours of squirming repaid by laughs for years. But when an old woman, already deaf, Wakes from a night of headaches, and the dark Won’t […]...
22. Dream Song 94: Ill lay he long, upon this last return Ill lay he long, upon this last return, Unvisited. The doctors put everything in the hospital Into reluctant Henry And the nurses took it out & put it back, Smiling like fiends, with their eternal ‘we.’ Henry did a slow burn, Collapsing his dialogue to their white ears & shiny on the flanges. Sanka he […]...
23. My Garden The world is sadly sick, they say, And plagued by woe and pain. But look! How looms my garden gay, With blooms in golden reign! With lyric music in the air, Of joy fulfilled in song, I can’t believe that anywhere Is hate and harm and wrong. A paradise my garden is, And there my […]...
24. Why should we hurry why indeed? Why should we hurry why indeed? When every way we fly We are molested equally By immortality. No respite from the inference That this which is begun, Though where its labors lie A bland uncertainty Besets the sight This mighty night...
25. Love Again Love again: wanking at ten past three (Surely he’s taken her home by now?), The bedroom hot as a bakery, The drink gone dead, without showing how To meet tomorrow, and afterwards, And the usual pain, like dysentery. Someone else feeling her breasts and cunt, Someone else drowned in that lash-wide stare, And me supposed […]...
26. Dedication To Christina G. Rossetti Songs light as these may sound, though deep and strong The heart spake through them, scarce should hope to please Ears tuned to strains of loftier thoughts than throng Songs light as these. Yet grace may set their sometime doubt at ease, Nor need their too rash reverence fear to wrong The shrine it serves […]...
27. Harvest Day is the hero’s shield, Achilles’ field, The light days are the angels. We the seed. Against eternal light and gorgon’s face Day is the shield And we the grass Native to fields of iron, and skies of brass....
28. Anseo When the master was calling the roll At the primary school in Collegelands, You were meant to call back Anseo And raise your hand As your name occurred. Anseo, meaning here, here and now, All present and correct, Was the first word of Irish I spoke. The last name on the ledger Belonged to Joseph […]...
29. On A Wedding Anniversary The sky is torn across This ragged anniversary of two Who moved for three years in tune Down the long walks of their vows. Now their love lies a loss And Love and his patients roar on a chain; From every tune or crater Carrying cloud, Death strikes their house. Too late in the wrong […]...
30. Introspection If you go deep Into the heart What do you find there? Fear, fear, Fear of the jaws of the rock, Fear of the teeth and splinters of iron that tear Flesh from the bone, and the moist Blood, running unfelt From the wound, and the hand Suddenly moist and red. If you go deep […]...
31. Good neighbours To my shame I’ve been mending fences again… A quaint habit I inherited from my father; He would rather fix a fence than parley Repair, and that it is where our views diverged. He said fences were meant to make good Neighbours. In the intervening years I had it Wrong, believing a fence was a […]...
32. Dead poet I’m sure it would be easier to survive as a dead poet, I mean it in the surmise that I won’t be tempted To revise or rewrite the poem I wrote last night, or the Poems I wrote last week (which make me cringe when I Read them again), or when I read poetry of […]...
33. The Second Oldest Story Go I must along my ways Though my heart be ragged, Dripping bitter through the days, Festering, and jagged. Smile I must at every twinge, Kiss, to time its throbbing; He that tears a heart to fringe Hates the noise of sobbing. Weep, my love, till Heaven hears; Curse and moan and languish. While I […]...
34. 442. Remorseful Apology THE FRIEND whom, wild from Wisdom’s way, The fumes of wine infuriate send, (Not moony madness more astray) Who but deplores that hapless friend? Mine was th’ insensate frenzied part, Ah! why should I such scenes outlive? Scenes so abhorrent to my heart!- ‘Tis thine to pity and forgive....
35. Butterfly Butterfly, the wind blows sea-ward, strong beyond the garden-wall! Butterfly, why do you settle on my shoe, and sip the dirt on my shoe, Lifting your veined wings, lifting them? big white butterfly! Already it is October, and the wind blows strong to the sea From the hills where snow must have fallen, the wind […]...
36. Sweetness Of The Decent Night They talked to me again today, they spoke in gentle tones And said the things I ought to hear then lead me where The frangipani flowered; they said the heady scent was meant To soothe the wicked wounds I wore, to ease the twisted scars That tore my inner peace. The power was overwhelming and […]...
37. Limbo The sole true Something This! In Limbo Den It frightens Ghosts as Ghosts here frighten men For skimming in the wake it mock’d the care Of the old Boat-God for his Farthing Fare ; Tho’ Irus’ Ghost itself he ne’er frown’d blacker on, The skin and skin-pent Druggist crost the Acheron, Styx, and with Puriphlegethon […]...
38. Maturity A stationary sense… as, I suppose, I shall have, till my single body grows Inaccurate, tired; Then I shall start to feel the backward pull Take over, sickening and masterful – Some say, desired. And this must be the prime of life… I blink, As if at pain; for it is pain, to think This […]...
39. To Catullus My brother, my Valerius, dearest head Of all whose crowning bay-leaves crown their mother Rome, in the notes first heard of thine I read My brother. No dust that death or time can strew may smother Love and the sense of kinship inly bred From loves and hates at one with one another. To thee […]...
40. "It was wrong to do this," said the angel “It was wrong to do this,” said the angel. “You should live like a flower, Holding malice like a puppy, Waging war like a lambkin.” “Not so,” quoth the man Who had no fear of spirits; “It is only wrong for angels Who can live like the flowers, Holding malice like the puppies, Waging war […]...