The Betrayal

When you were weary, roaming the wide world over,

I gave my fickle heart to a new lover.

Now they tell me that you are lying dead:

O mountains fall on me and hide my head!

 

When you lay burning in the throes of fever,

He vowed me love by the willow-margined river:

Death smote you there – here was your trust betrayed,

O darkness, cover me, I am afraid!

 

Yea, in the hour of your supremest trial,

I laughed with him! The shadow on the dial

Stayed not, aghast at my dread ignorance:

Nor man nor angel looked at me askance.

 

Under the mountains there is peace abiding,

Darkness shall be pavilion for my hiding,

Tears shall blot out the sin of broken faith,

The lips that falsely kissed, shall kiss but Death.

(Alice Furlong)

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

 

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

(Gerard Manley Hopkins)

The Gallows

There was a weasel lived in the sun

With all his family,

Till a keeper shot him with his gun

And hung him up on a tree,

Where he swings in the wind and rain,

In the sun and in the snow,

Without pleasure, without pain,

On the dead oak tree bough.

 

There was a crow who was no sleeper,

But a thief and a murderer

Till a very late hour, and this keeper

Made him one of the things that were,

To hang and flap in rain and wind

In the sun and in the snow.

There are no more sins to be sinned

On the dead oak tree bough.

 

There was a magpie, too,

Had a long tongue and a long tail;

He could both talk and do -

But what did that avail?

He, too, flaps in the wind and rain

Alongside weasel and crow,

Without pleasure, without pain,

On the dead oak tree bough.

 

And many other beasts

And birds, skin, bone, and feather,

Have been taken from their feasts

And hung up there together,

To swing and have endless leisure

In the sun and in the snow,

Without pain, without pleasure,

On the dead oak tree bough.

(Edward Thomas)

Deva

Priya was from some village in Nepal.

They told her she would be a Deva Dassi,

tied a pretty red cord around her neck

and shipped her off in a covered wagon

filled with little Deva Dassis.

Now she is old and scrawny.

 

Ma Hla is from a town in Myanmar.

There, they don’t bother with the Deva Dassi

story, not now. Besides, they’re Buddhists.

They just buy them, load them on a lorry

and take them to the airport.

She has grown tall and slender, a dancer.

 

Lali is from here, Sonagachi.

Which means that unlike Priya and Ma Hla

she is not officially a victim.

(As nor am I, for though I am not local

I came willingly, stay happily.)

Still, Lali is leaving soon. Poor thing, Priya says.

She’s getting married.

 

I’ll be leaving soon, too, I say.

I wiggle and twirl to the blaring radio.

Ma Hla starts crying.

Alright, I won’t go – decide to stay

another year, another couple of years,

see Ma Hla married too. If any man

will have her. They don’t like an ex-whore

to be beautiful. Priya says any mother-in-law

worth her salt will very soon

do something drastic about Ma Hla’s

Burmese beauty. Lali is lucky,

she is plain and a local girl.

 

I am luckier. I can leave.

But shall I, ever?

 

(Kanti Burns)

Kanti

 

There’s sex, and then there’s love. Yet you

confuse the two.

Sex is work, except when it’s with you.

Then it is love.

 

You want to know

how I can come home after sex with ten,

with twenty men, and still want you.

I don’t make love to them. I give them sex,

I give them pleasure, make their dreams

come true. Then make love to you.

 

(Kanti Burns)

Girl’s Song

I went out alone

To sing a song or two,

My fancy on a man,

And you know who.

 

Another came in sight

That on a stick relied

To hold himself upright;

I sat and cried.

 

And that was all my song -

When everything is told,

Saw I an old man young

Or young man old?

(W B Yeats)

from Dover Beach

The sea is calm tonight,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the Straits; – on the French coast, the light

Gleams, and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the ebb meets the moon-blanched sand,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves suck back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

(Matthew Arnold)

I Saw A Chapel All Of Gold

I saw a chapel all of gold

That none did dare to enter in,

And many weeping stood without,

Weeping, mourning, worshipping.

 

I saw a serpent rise between

The white pillars of the door,

And he forc’d & forc’d & forc’d,

Down the golden hinges tore.

 

And along the pavement sweet,

Set with pearls & rubies bright,

All his slimy length he drew,

Till upon the altar white

 

Vomiting his poison out

On the bread & on the wine,

So I turn’d into a sty

And laid me down among the swine.

(William Blake)

My Five Gentlemen

Prostitutes have clients, wives have husbands,

Poets, you will understand, have editors.

A medieval saint had lice which quietly left him

As his body cooled, their sustenance removed from them.

 

I have my five gentlemen, one of whom really was

A gentle man, courteous and kind, his rejection slips

Even appeared to be some kind of acceptance,

His face never seen, his care meticulous and honest.

 

Two was firm, and neatly pruned my lines

Like a competent gardener tidying an unwieldy tree.

Faced with mis-spelt, badly-typed pages,

He was even provoked into swearing mildly at me.

 

Three was a witty man, who wrote letters

On a kind of elegant toilet paper, and seen

At a party looked as practised at his social life

As he was at his poetry, though thickening a little.

 

Four was a shocking surprise. He was not at all

Pretentious. Squinting furtively at him, silent and wary,

I saw this pleasant face, heard a quiet voice, and saw him

Lasting more than a decade or two, a rare animal.

 

Five is dead, of course. His failing health

Was a comfort to me, though not to him,

Naturally. His death removed one more market

For battered goods, and proved a welcome release.

 

Rest in peace, I thought (for I always think kindly

Of the gentlemen who direct me to the pages

I am to sit in). I can only hope to be recycled

And end up more useful than I would appear to be.

(Elizabeth Bartlett)

In time of ‘The Breaking of Nations’

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk.

 

Only thin smoke without flame

From the heaps of couch-grass;

Yet this will go onward the same

Though Dynasties pass.

 

Yonder a maid and her wight

Come whispering by:

War’s annals will fade into night

Ere their story die.

(Thomas Hardy)