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[Sashadroogie]

Break of Day in the Trenches

The darkness crumbles away -
It is the same old druid Time as ever.
Only a live thing leaps my hand -
A *beep* sardonic rat -
As I pull the parapet's poppy
To stick behind my ear.
Droll rat, they would shoot you if they knew
Your cosmopolitan sympathies
(And God knows what antipathies).
Now you have touched this English hand
You will do the same to a German -
Soon, no doubt, if it be your pleasure
To cross the sleeping green between.
It seems you inwardly grin as you pass
Strong eyes, fine limbs, haughty athletes
Less chanced than you for life;
Bonds to the whims of murder,
Sprawled in the bowels of the earth,
The torn fields of France.
What do you see in our eyes
At the shrieking iron and flame
Hurled through still heavens?
What quaver - what heart aghast?
Poppies whose roots are in man's veins
Drop, and are ever dropping;
But mine in my ear is safe,
Just a little white with the dust.

Isaac Rosenberg

[Sashadroogie]

Dulce Et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep.
Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod.
All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.
GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!
An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.
If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen

[osen77]

Bundles

I have thought of beaches, fields,
Tears, Laughter.

I have thought of homes put up -
And blown away.

I have thought of meetings and for
Every meeting a good-by.

I have thought of stars going alone,
Orioles in pairs, sunsets in blundering
Wistful deaths.

I have wanted to let go and cross over
To a next star, a last star.

I have asked to be left a few tears
And some laughter.

Carl Sandburg

[Sashadroogie]

Excellent! Cheers. We have surprisingly few American poets here.

[Sashadroogie]

Rhapsody on a Windy Night


TWELVE o'clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, "Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin."

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
"Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter."
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child's eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
"Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain."
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars."

The lamp said,
"Four o'clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life."

The last twist of the knife.

T.S. Eliot

[Sashadroogie]

The Wild Geese

'Oh, tell me what was on yer road, ye roarin' norlan
As ye cam' blawin' frae the land that's niver frae my mind?
My feet they trayvel England, but I'm deein' for the north—'
'My man, I heard the siller tides rin up the Firth o' Forth.'
'Aye, Wind, I ken them well eneuch, and fine they fa' and rise,
And fain I'd feel the creepin' mist on yonder shore that lies,
But tell me, ere ye passed them by, what saw ye on the way ?'
'My man, I rocked the rovin' gulls that sail abune the Tay.'

'But saw ye naethin', leein' Wind, afore ye cam' to Fife?
There's muckle lyin' yont the Tay that's mair to me nor life.'
'My man, I swept the Angus braes ye haena trod for years—'
'O Wind, forgie a hameless loon that canna see for tears!—'

'And far abune the Angus straths I saw the wild geese flee,
A lang, lang skein o' beatin' wings wi' their heids towards the sea,
And aye their cryin' voices trailed ahint them on the air—'
'O Wind, hae maircy, haud yer whisht, for I daurna listen mair!'

Violet Jacob

[osen77]

Clouds of Evening

Enormous cloud-mountains that form over Point Lobos and into the sunset,
Figures of fire on the walls of tonight's storm,
Foam of gold in gorges of fire, and the great file of warrior angels:
Dreams gathering in the curdled brain of the earth-
The sky the brain-vault - on the threshold of sleep: poor earth, you, like your children
By inordinate desires tortured, make dreams?
Storms more enormous, wars nobler, more toppling mountains, more jeweled waters, more free
Fires on impossible headlands … as a poor girl
Wishing her lover taller and more desirous, and herself maned with gold,
Dreams the world right, in the cold bed, about dawn,
Dreams are beautiful: the slaves of form are beautiful also;
I have grown to believe
A stone is a better pillow than many visions.

Robinson Jeffers

[Mushkilla]

Is there anybody out there?
Would you care if there were?
Under a red flag of pretend.
They are horse and you are spur.

A man named Karl once wrote a book.
And it looked real good on paper.
But it's one thing for a man to take a look.
And another thing to rape her.

Based on good and pure ideas.
But like love giving away to lust.
A goverment of the people.
Is not something you can trust.

A Man of Steel once said .
"One death is a tragedy; one million is a statistic."
Was he just being realistic?
Or was 20 million too much.
That he just simply lost touch.
And like Ned Kelly thought "life was such".

What of the man named Mao?
You never here of him now.
Killed seven times more than Hitler.
So if the shoe fits ya'.
When you think red, think dead and don't bow.

[Sashadroogie]

Yes, thank you. We've had this neo-nazi drivel before. Straight from Stormfront, even with the same misspellings...

Hasn't improved in the re-telling.

[Sashadroogie]

Silentium

Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard...
take in their song and speak no word.

Fyodor Tyutchev

[Mushkilla]

I Sit By the Window.

said fate plays a game without a score,
and who needs fish if you've got caviar?
The triumph of the Gothic style would come to pass
and turn you on--no need for coke, or grass.
I sit by the window. Outside, an aspen.
When I loved, I loved deeply. It wasn't often.

I said the forest's only part of a tree.
Who needs the whole girl if you've got her knee?
Sick of the dust raised by the modern era,
the Russian eye would rest on an Estonian spire.
I sit by the window. The dishes are done.
I was happy here. But I won't be again.

I wrote: The bulb looks at the flower in fear,
and love, as an act, lacks a verb; the zer-
o Euclid thought the vanishing point became
wasn't math--it was the nothingness of Time.
I sit by the window. And while I sit
my youth comes back. Sometimes I'd smile. Or spit.

I said that the leaf may destory the bud;
what's fertile falls in fallow soil--a dud;
that on the flat field, the unshadowed plain
nature spills the seeds of trees in vain.
I sit by the window. Hands lock my knees.
My heavy shadow's my squat company.

My song was out of tune, my voice was cracked,
but at least no chorus can ever sing it back.
That talk like this reaps no reward bewilders
no one--no one's legs rest on my sholders.
I sit by the window in the dark. Like an express,
the waves behind the wavelike curtain crash.

A loyal subject of these second-rate years,
I proudly admit that my finest ideas
are second-rate, and may the future take them
as trophies of my struggle against suffocation.
I sit in the dark. And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

-- Joseph Brodsky, Exiled Russian Poet Who Won Nobel, and Died at the age of 55 .

[Sashadroogie]

Much better! A real poet. Not that trashy skinhead nonsense posted before.

[Mushkilla]

Indeed, Joseph Brodsky is a real poet, but your Comrades in 1964 called him "a pseudo-poet in velveteen trousers" who failed to fulfil his "constitutional duty to work honestly for the good of the motherland.
He was charged with social parasitism and his poems were described as "pornographic and anti-Soviet.". He was jailed and put in a mental institution.
The trial judge asked "Who has recognized you as a poet? Who has enrolled you in the ranks of poets?" — "No one," Brodsky replied, "Who enrolled me in the ranks of the human race?".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Brodsky

[Sashadroogie]

How many other poets in how many other countries had to suffer? That's their lot. That's where the art comes from. And in Russia it is a deadly serious art. Worth killing and dying for. Brodsky isn't the only one. Far from it.

Now, I wonder who the bonehead was who wrote your previous offering? How much did he suffer?

[Mushkilla]

A man came to a Barber
To cut his hair
The man started to say
God is so merciful
that I found a way
to express myself in gleeful.
The Barber said
"I don't believe in God".
The man asked:
"why don't you believe in God"?
Barber replied, 'because God doesn't exist'.
The man said "he does".
Baber replied "he doesn't".
Then the man said "no more argument,
You will find the way one day".
The man just went out
Noticed a man with long dirty hair
came back to Barber and said
"The Barber doesn't exist"
"What! I just cut you hair"! Barber exclaimed
"If you do then this man woldn't have long dirty hair".
Barber said "he needs to come to me to cut his hair".
The man replied: "Exactly! the same way
You have to look for God to find his existance,
And ask yourself where to find his essence".
The Barbar didn't have an answer
Just said " You are so cleaver"

Farida Amin