Gentle gin
Abiodun Adekoya
Gentle I go
When her glimpse
Attracted my coming back.
Gentle I laid
Hand round her shoulder
And felt the surrounding with lust.
Gentle I go
When her glimpse
Attracted my coming back.
Gentle I laid
Hand round her shoulder
And felt the surrounding with lust.
THERE are white moon daisies in the mist of the meadow
Where the flowered grass scatters its seeds like spray,
There are purple orchis by the wood-ways’ shadow,
There are pale dog-roses by the white highway;
And the grass, the grass is tall, the grass is up for hay,
With daisies white like silver and buttercups like gold,
And it’s
The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crispéd and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year;
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—
It was down by the dank tarn of Auber,
In the
Cease, Laura, cease, suspect no more
This careless heart has learnt to love,
Because on yonder lonely shore
I still at pensive evening rove;
Because of Henry’s worth I speak
With eager warmth and sparkling eye;
Because his favourite haunts I seek,
And still o’erjoyed to meet him fly:….
But, Laura, should my faltering tongue
Refuse to speak in Henry’s praise,
My
Lo! ’t is a gala night
Within the lonesome latter years!
An angel throng, bewinged, bedight
In veils, and drowned in tears,
Sit in a theatre, to see
A play of hopes and fears,
While the orchestra breathes fitfully
The music of the spheres.
Mimes, in the form of God on high,
Mutter and mumble low,
And hither and thither fly—
And the angel Israfel, whose heart-strings are a lute, and who has the sweetest voice of all God’s creatures. —KORAN
In Heaven a spirit doth dwell
“Whose heart-strings are a lute”;
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
Drum of war is still and silent like coma,
Tears mob the land and rent homes apart,
The velocity of their echoes
Travelled far beyond the seas,
Our heroes, the conquerors of many wars,
Returned home and silence like grave.
Masquerades amuse the day
With their best dancing steps,
Over hill, over dale,
Thorough bush, thorough brier,
Over park, over pale,
Thorough flood, thorough fire!
I do wander everywhere,
Swifter than the moon’s sphere;
And I serve the Fairy Queen,
To dew her orbs upon the green;
The cowslips tall her pensioners be;
In their gold coats spots you see;
O children, run, the Cunjah Man,
Him mouth as big as frying-pan,
Him ears am small, him eyes am red,
Him have no tooth in him old head,
Him have him roots, him work him trick,
Him roll him eye, him make you sick–
The Cunjah Man, the Cunjah Man,
O children, run, the Cunjah Man!
Him have a ball of
Human reason is beautiful and invincible.
No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books,
No sentence of banishment can prevail against it.
It establishes the universal ideas in language,
And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice
With capital letters, lie and oppression with small.
It puts what should be above things as they are,
Is an
O God! who by Thy prophet’s hand
Didst smite the rocky brake,
Whence water came, at Thy command,
Thy people’s thirst to slake;
Strike, now, upon this granite wall,
Stern, obdurate, and high;
And let some drops of pity fall
For us who starve and die!
A FRAGMENT OF A TRAGEDY
ACT I.
SCENE I. Field of Battle.
Alarum. Enter King STEPHEN, Knights, and Soldiers.
Stephen. If shame can on a soldier’s vein-swoll’n front
Spread deeper crimson than the battle’s toil,
Blush in your casing helmets! for see, see!
Yonder my chivalry, my pride of war,
Wrench’d with an iron hand from firm array,
Are routed
I am an honest African,
Do not think of me otherwise.
I am not of mixed lineage,
Neither on my mother’s nor father’s side.
However fine other lineage may be,
I am not sprung from it.
I am no Arab nor a European,
I am not of Indian descent.
None on earth is like her,
She that made me breathe.
None on earth is like her,
She that filled my stomach
None on earth is like her,
She that knew why I cried.
None on earth is like her,
She that protected me.
Never get up till the sun gets up,
Or the mists will give you a cold,
And a parrot whose lungs have once been touched
Will never live to be old
Never eat plums that are not quite ripe,
For perhaps they will give you a pain;
And never dispute what the hornbill say,
Or you`ll never dispute again.
Never despise the
Heigho for a glass, heigho for a lass,
A drink and a kiss, I leave you;
Heigho for a friend that sticks till the end —
Good-bye, my lass, don’t you grieve you.
Hurrah for a song that is not too long,
With a jolly roaring chorus,
While our cans beat time to the ringing rhyme
Till the ceiling cracks up
? or John Fletcher.
ORPHEUS with his lute made trees
And the mountain tops that freeze
Bow themselves when he did sing:
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung; as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.
Every thing that heard him play,
Even the billows of the sea,
Hung their heads and then lay by.
Gaily bedight,
A gallant knight,
In sunshine and in shadow,
Had journeyed long,
Singing a song,
In search of Eldorado.
But he grew old—
This knight so bold—
And o’er his heart a shadow—
Fell as he found
No spot of ground
That looked like Eldorado.
An old Hare lived in a house on a hill,
One hundred years old and never was ill;
His ears so long and his eyes so big,
And is leg so spry that he knew everything
About the beasts that walk and the bird’s that sing–
This old Doc Hare,
Who lived up there
In a mighty fine house on
I SAW the Connaught Rangers when they were passing by,
On a spring day, a good day, with gold rifts in the sky.
Themselves were marching steadily along the Liffey quay
An’ I see the young proud look of them as if it were to-day!
The bright lads, the right lads, I have them in my mind,
With the green