Aromatic or stinky folds,
Customary is the game.
On velvety linen or dirty sheets,
Love is all the same.
Freeze the event in your mind,
In a tale or poetry,
Canvas it or sculpt it,
Choreograph, song or melody.
Down earth, love is need,
A primal instinct ready to claw,
The inevitable event of seclusion,
When hands become the paw.
I witnessed the hardiest crows in the system shattered by
immorality, trembling neurotic wreak,
slogging themselves through welfare cheques at twilight
searching for a sturdy foundation,
fork-tongued politicians yearning for the popular vote
persuasion to sugary elixir in the cogs of time,
whose destitution and disorder and listless gaze and wired up
intaking in the psychological coldness of
sterile sanitoriums
For God’s sake hold your tongue, and let me love,
Or chide my palsy, or my gout,
My five grey hairs, or ruin’d fortune flout,
With wealth your state, your mind with arts improve,
Take you a course, get you a place,
Observe his Honour, or his Grace,
Or the King’s real, or his stamped face
Contemplate, what you will,
The tune of Adowa
Drives Yaa to frenzy,
Her legs alternate–
they close,
they cross,
they open,
they part.
Oh, what a dancer,
The dancer of Adowa.
Her trunk goes–
to the left,
to the right,
to the front,
to the back.
Lo! Death has reared himself a throne
In a strange city lying alone
Far down within the dim West,
Where the good and the bad and the worst and the best
Have gone to their eternal rest.
There shrines and palaces and towers
(Time-eaten towers that tremble not!)
Resemble nothing that is ours.
Around, by lifting winds forgot,
Resignedly beneath
You are the one, the unbeatable of all time
When motion is still and helpless
When companions are scarce and wobble
When hope seems not to motivate and sightless
You are the one, who emerges sagaciously like a brighter moon.
You are the one, coming and the crests arise
Like a rainbow crescent in the sky
Like a supple wind gentle
The snails have made a garden of green lace:
broderie anglaise from the cabbages,
chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils-
I see already that I lift the blind
upon a woman’s wardrobe of the mind.
Such female whimsy floats about me like
a kind of tulle, a flimsy mesh,
while feet in gumboots pace the rectangles-
garden abstracted, geometry awash-
an
Old pirates, yes they rob I
– sold I to the merchant ships;
minutes after they took I
from the bottom-less pit.
But my hand was made strong
by the hand of the Almighty;
we forward in this generation
– triumphantly.
.
Won’t you help to sing these songs of freedom?
’cause all I ever had: redemption songs, redemption songs.
OF THE DESERTED MAIDEN TO HER LOVER .
Go! go! thou hast forgotten all
Thine early vows, so false, so vain!
Thy faithless love I’d not recall,
Could one word make thee mine again!
I lov’d thee with the fondest zeal
That ever warm’d a youthful heart;
And still my prayer is for thy weal,
Although so chang’d, so cold thou art.
While
This faded lip may oft to thee
As gay a smile, my Anna, wear,
As when in youth, from sorrow free,
I only shed the transient tear.
And oft chill Autumn’s varying day,
Resembles April’s genial hours;
And glitters with the noontide ray,
Though oftener dark with clouds and showers.
1.
Spirit here that reignest!
Spirit here that painest!
Spirit here that burneth!
Spirit here that mourneth!
Spirit! I bow
My forehead low,
Enshaded with thy pinions!
Spirit! I look
All passion struck,
Into thy pale dominions!
I went into a public-‘ouse to get a pint o’ beer,
The publican ‘e up an’ sez, “We serve no red-coats here.”
The girls be’ind the bar they laughed an’ giggled fit to die,
I outs into the street again an’ to myself sez I:
O it’s Tommy this, an’ Tommy that, an’ “Tommy, go away”;
But it’s “Thank you,
Upon this Primrose hill,
Where, if Heav’n would distil
A shower of rain, each several drop might go
To his own primrose, and grow manna so;
And where their form and their infinity
Make a terrestrial Galaxy,
As the small stars do in the sky:
I walk to find a true Love; and I see
That ’tis not a mere
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
You whom I could not save
Listen to me.
Try to understand this simple speech as I would be ashamed of another.
I swear, there is in me no wizardry of words.
I speak to you with silence like a cloud or a tree.
What strengthened me, for you was lethal.
You mixed up farewell to an epoch with the beginning
In the greenest of our valleys
By good angels tenanted,
Once a fair and stately palace—
Radiant palace—reared its head.
In the monarch Thought’s dominion,
It stood there!
Never seraph spread a pinion
Over fabric half so fair!
Banners yellow, glorious, golden,
On its roof did float and flow
(This—all this—was in the olden
Time long ago)
It wasn’t holy so let us not praise gods.
Let us not look to them for bread,
nor the cup that changed water to wine.
Let us look to the bend of the road
that reaches. A silver blur across
the skyline, woman standing on the farm.
In her grasp, the shine that is seed,
that is beginning. She will work
the
Once it smiled a silent dell
Where the people did not dwell;
They had gone unto the wars,
Trusting to the mild-eyed stars,
Nightly, from their azure towers,
To keep watch above the flowers,
In the midst of which all day
The red sun-light lazily lay.
Now each visitor shall confess
The sad valley’s restlessness.
Nothing there is motionless—
Nothing
Holy Father in heaven,
My parents have done enough,
But if I should think about their struggle and luckless,
It seems I should not grow old again.
They have till the soil,
It seems the earth is annoyed with them,
They have gone into the sea,
It seems the brackish sea has porous their net.
Living in slums like leeches,
Wandering about like a bird without shelter.
Area boys, sons of the soil, snail has no blood;
The senior brothers of mendicants,
That is what you call us.
You say we are drinkers, patriotic smokers,
You mean the drunker that speaks mumbo-jumbo
