Poems by Dylan Thomas

Poems

• A Child's Christmas in Wales Read Poem Log in to favourite

  One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
  
  All the Christmases roll down toward the two-tongued sea, like a cold and headlong moon bundling down the sky that was our street; and they stop at the rim of the ice-edged fish-freezing waves, and I plunge my hands in the snow and bring out whatever I can find.
  
  In goes my hand into that wool-white bell-tongued ball of holidays resting at the rim of the carol-singing sea, and out come Mrs.
  
  Prothero and the firemen.
  
  It was on the afternoon of the Christmas Eve, and I was in Mrs.
  
  Prothero's garden, waiting for cats, with her son Jim.
  
  It was snowing.
  
  It was always snowing at Christmas.
  
  December, in my memory, is white as Lapland, though there were no reindeers.
  
  But there were cats.
  
  Patient, cold and callous, our hands wrapped in socks, we waited to snowball the cats.
  
  Sleek and long as jaguars and horrible-whiskered, spitting and snarling, they would slink and sidle over the white back-garden walls, and the lynx-eyed hunters, Jim and I, fur-capped and moccasined trappers from Hudson Bay, off Mumbles Road, would hurl our deadly snowballs at the green of their eyes.
  
  The wise cats never appeared.
  
  We were so still, Eskimo-footed arctic marksmen in the muffling silence of the eternal snows - eternal, ever since Wednesday - that we never heard Mrs.
  
  Prothero's first cry from her igloo at the bottom of the garden.
  
  Or, if we heard it at all, it was, to us, like the far-off challenge of our enemy and prey, the neighbor's polar cat.
  
  But soon the voice grew louder.
  
  "Fire!" cried Mrs.
  
  Prothero, and she beat the dinner-gong.
  
  And we ran down the garden, with the snowballs in our arms, toward the house; and smoke, indeed, was pouring out of the dining-room, and the gong was bombilating, and Mrs.
  
  Prothero was announcing ruin like a town crier in Pompeii.
  
  This was better than all the cats in Wales standing on the wall in a row.
  
  We bounded into the house, laden with snowballs, and stopped at the open door of the smoke-filled room.
  
  Something was burning all right; perhaps it was Mr.
  
  Prothero, who always slept there after midday dinner with a newspaper over his face.
  
  But he was standing in the middle of the room, saying, "A fine Christmas!" and smacking at the smoke with a slipper.
  
  "Call the fire brigade," cried Mrs.
  
  Prothero as she beat the gong.
  
  "There won't be there," said Mr.
  
  Prothero, "it's Christmas.
  
  "
  There was no fire to be seen, only clouds of smoke and Mr.
  
  Prothero standing in the middle of them, waving his slipper as though he were conducting.
  
  "Do something," he said.
  
  And we threw all our snowballs into the smoke - I think we missed Mr.
  
  Prothero - and ran out of the house to the telephone box.
  
  "Let's call the police as well," Jim said.
  
  "And the ambulance.
  
  " "And Ernie Jenkins, he likes fires.
  
  "
  But we only called the fire brigade, and soon the fire engine came and three tall men in helmets brought a hose into the house and Mr.
  
  Prothero got out just in time before they turned it on.
  
  Nobody could have had a noisier Christmas Eve.
  
  And when the firemen turned off the hose and were standing in the wet, smoky room, Jim's Aunt, Miss.
  
  Prothero, came downstairs and peered in at them.
  
  Jim and I waited, very quietly, to hear what she would say to them.
  
  She said the right thing, always.
  
  She looked at the three tall firemen in their shining helmets, standing among the smoke and cinders and dissolving snowballs, and she said, "Would you like anything to read?
  
  "
  Years and years ago, when I was a boy, when there were wolves in Wales, and birds the color of red-flannel petticoats whisked past the harp-shaped hills, when we sang and wallowed all night and day in caves that smelt like Sunday afternoons in damp front farmhouse parlors, and we chased, with the jawbones of deacons, the English and the bears, before the motor car, before the wheel, before the duchess-faced horse, when we rode the daft and happy hills bareback, it snowed and it snowed.
  
  But here a small boy says: "It snowed last year, too.
  
  I made a snowman and my brother knocked it down and I knocked my brother down and then we had tea.
  
  "
  "But that was not the same snow," I say.
  
  "Our snow was not only shaken from white wash buckets down the sky, it came shawling out of the ground and swam and drifted out of the arms and hands and bodies of the trees; snow grew overnight on the roofs of the houses like a pure and grandfather moss, minutely -ivied the walls and settled on the postman, opening the gate, like a dumb, numb thunder-storm of white, torn Christmas cards.
  
  "
  "Were there postmen then, too?
  
  "
  "With sprinkling eyes and wind-cherried noses, on spread, frozen feet they crunched up to the doors and mittened on them manfully.
  
  But all that the children could hear was a ringing of bells.
  
  "
  "You mean that the postman went rat-a-tat-tat and the doors rang?
  
  "
  "I mean that the bells the children could hear were inside them.
  
  "
  "I only hear thunder sometimes, never bells.
  
  "
  "There were church bells, too.
  
  "
  "Inside them?
  
  "
  "No, no, no, in the bat-black, snow-white belfries, tugged by bishops and storks.
  
  And they rang their tidings over the bandaged town, over the frozen foam of the powder and ice-cream hills, over the crackling sea.
  
  It seemed that all the churches boomed for joy under my window; and the weathercocks crew for Christmas, on our fence.
  
  "
  "Get back to the postmen"
  "They were just ordinary postmen, found of walking and dogs and Christmas and the snow.
  
  They knocked on the doors with blue knuckles .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "Ours has got a black knocker.
  
  .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  "
  "And then they stood on the white Welcome mat in the little, drifted porches and huffed and puffed, making ghosts with their breath, and jogged from foot to foot like small boys wanting to go out.
  
  "
  "And then the presents?
  
  "
  "And then the Presents, after the Christmas box.
  
  And the cold postman, with a rose on his button-nose, tingled down the tea-tray-slithered run of the chilly glinting hill.
  
  He went in his ice-bound boots like a man on fishmonger's slabs.
  
  "He wagged his bag like a frozen camel's hump, dizzily turned the corner on one foot, and, by God, he was gone.
  
  "
  "Get back to the Presents.
  
  "
  "There were the Useful Presents: engulfing mufflers of the old coach days, and mittens made for giant sloths; zebra scarfs of a substance like silky gum that could be tug-o'-warred down to the galoshes; blinding tam-o'-shanters like patchwork tea cozies and bunny-suited busbies and balaclavas for victims of head-shrinking tribes; from aunts who always wore wool next to the skin there were mustached and rasping vests that made you wonder why the aunts had any skin left at all; and once I had a little crocheted nose bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us.
  
  And pictureless books in which small boys, though warned with quotations not to, would skate on Farmer Giles' pond and did and drowned; and books that told me everything about the wasp, except why.
  
  "
  "Go on the Useless Presents.
  
  "
  "Bags of moist and many-colored jelly babies and a folded flag and a false nose and a tram-conductor's cap and a machine that punched tickets and rang a bell; never a catapult; once, by mistake that no one could explain, a little hatchet; and a celluloid duck that made, when you pressed it, a most unducklike sound, a mewing moo that an ambitious cat might make who wished to be a cow; and a painting book in which I could make the grass, the trees, the sea and the animals any colour I pleased, and still the dazzling sky-blue sheep are grazing in the red field under the rainbow-billed and pea-green birds.
  
  Hardboileds, toffee, fudge and allsorts, crunches, cracknels, humbugs, glaciers, marzipan, and butterwelsh for the Welsh.
  
  And troops of bright tin soldiers who, if they could not fight, could always run.
  
  And Snakes-and-Families and Happy Ladders.
  
  And Easy Hobbi-Games for Little Engineers, complete with instructions.
  
  Oh, easy for Leonardo! And a whistle to make the dogs bark to wake up the old man next door to make him beat on the wall with his stick to shake our picture off the wall.
  
  And a packet of cigarettes: you put one in your mouth and you stood at the corner of the street and you waited for hours, in vain, for an old lady to scold you for smoking a cigarette, and then with a smirk you ate it.
  
  And then it was breakfast under the balloons.
  
  "
  "Were there Uncles like in our house?
  
  "
  "There are always Uncles at Christmas.
  
  The same Uncles.
  
  And on Christmas morning, with dog-disturbing whistle and sugar fags, I would scour the swatched town for the news of the little world, and find always a dead bird by the Post Office or by the white deserted swings; perhaps a robin, all but one of his fires out.
  
  Men and women wading or scooping back from chapel, with taproom noses and wind-bussed cheeks, all albinos, huddles their stiff black jarring feathers against the irreligious snow.
  
  Mistletoe hung from the gas brackets in all the front parlors; there was sherry and walnuts and bottled beer and crackers by the dessertspoons; and cats in their fur-abouts watched the fires; and the high-heaped fire spat, all ready for the chestnuts and the mulling pokers.
  
  Some few large men sat in the front parlors, without their collars, Uncles almost certainly, trying their new cigars, holding them out judiciously at arms' length, returning them to their mouths, coughing, then holding them out again as though waiting for the explosion; and some few small aunts, not wanted in the kitchen, nor anywhere else for that matter, sat on the very edge of their chairs, poised and brittle, afraid to break, like faded cups and saucers.
  
  "
  Not many those mornings trod the piling streets: an old man always, fawn-bowlered, yellow-gloved and, at this time of year, with spats of snow, would take his constitutional to the white bowling green and back, as he would take it wet or fire on Christmas Day or Doomsday; sometimes two hale young men, with big pipes blazing, no overcoats and wind blown scarfs, would trudge, unspeaking, down to the forlorn sea, to work up an appetite, to blow away the fumes, who knows, to walk into the waves until nothing of them was left but the two furling smoke clouds of their inextinguishable briars.
  
  Then I would be slap-dashing home, the gravy smell of the dinners of others, the bird smell, the brandy, the pudding and mince, coiling up to my nostrils, when out of a snow-clogged side lane would come a boy the spit of myself, with a pink-tipped cigarette and the violet past of a black eye, cocky as a bullfinch, leering all to himself.
  
  I hated him on sight and sound, and would be about to put my dog whistle to my lips and blow him off the face of Christmas when suddenly he, with a violet wink, put his whistle to his lips and blew so stridently, so high, so exquisitely loud, that gobbling faces, their cheeks bulged with goose, would press against their tinsled windows, the whole length of the white echoing street.
  
  For dinner we had turkey and blazing pudding, and after dinner the Uncles sat in front of the fire, loosened all buttons, put their large moist hands over their watch chains, groaned a little and slept.
  
  Mothers, aunts and sisters scuttled to and fro, bearing tureens.
  
  Auntie Bessie, who had already been frightened, twice, by a clock-work mouse, whimpered at the sideboard and had some elderberry wine.
  
  The dog was sick.
  
  Auntie Dosie had to have three aspirins, but Auntie Hannah, who liked port, stood in the middle of the snowbound back yard, singing like a big-bosomed thrush.
  
  I would blow up balloons to see how big they would blow up to; and, when they burst, which they all did, the Uncles jumped and rumbled.
  
  In the rich and heavy afternoon, the Uncles breathing like dolphins and the snow descending, I would sit among festoons and Chinese lanterns and nibble dates and try to make a model man-o'-war, following the Instructions for Little Engineers, and produce what might be mistaken for a sea-going tramcar.
  
  Or I would go out, my bright new boots squeaking, into the white world, on to the seaward hill, to call on Jim and Dan and Jack and to pad through the still streets, leaving huge footprints on the hidden pavements.
  
  "I bet people will think there's been hippos.
  
  "
  "What would you do if you saw a hippo coming down our street?
  
  "
  "I'd go like this, bang! I'd throw him over the railings and roll him down the hill and then I'd tickle him under the ear and he'd wag his tail.
  
  "
  "What would you do if you saw two hippos?
  
  "
  Iron-flanked and bellowing he-hippos clanked and battered through the scudding snow toward us as we passed Mr.
  
  Daniel's house.
  
  "Let's post Mr.
  
  Daniel a snow-ball through his letter box.
  
  "
  "Let's write things in the snow.
  
  "
  "Let's write, 'Mr.
  
  Daniel looks like a spaniel' all over his lawn.
  
  "
  Or we walked on the white shore.
  
  "Can the fishes see it's snowing?
  
  "
  The silent one-clouded heavens drifted on to the sea.
  
  Now we were snow-blind travelers lost on the north hills, and vast dewlapped dogs, with flasks round their necks, ambled and shambled up to us, baying "Excelsior.
  
  " We returned home through the poor streets where only a few children fumbled with bare red fingers in the wheel-rutted snow and cat-called after us, their voices fading away, as we trudged uphill, into the cries of the dock birds and the hooting of ships out in the whirling bay.
  
  And then, at tea the recovered Uncles would be jolly; and the ice cake loomed in the center of the table like a marble grave.
  
  Auntie Hannah laced her tea with rum, because it was only once a year.
  
  Bring out the tall tales now that we told by the fire as the gaslight bubbled like a diver.
  
  Ghosts whooed like owls in the long nights when I dared not look over my shoulder; animals lurked in the cubbyhole under the stairs and the gas meter ticked.
  
  And I remember that we went singing carols once, when there wasn't the shaving of a moon to light the flying streets.
  
  At the end of a long road was a drive that led to a large house, and we stumbled up the darkness of the drive that night, each one of us afraid, each one holding a stone in his hand in case, and all of us too brave to say a word.
  
  The wind through the trees made noises as of old and unpleasant and maybe webfooted men wheezing in caves.
  
  We reached the black bulk of the house.
  
  "What shall we give them?
  
  Hark the Herald?
  
  "
  "No," Jack said, "Good King Wencelas.
  
  I'll count three.
  
  " One, two three, and we began to sing, our voices high and seemingly distant in the snow-felted darkness round the house that was occupied by nobody we knew.
  
  We stood close together, near the dark door.
  
  Good King Wencelas looked out On the Feast of Stephen .
  
  .
  
  .
  
  And then a small, dry voice, like the voice of someone who has not spoken for a long time, joined our singing: a small, dry, eggshell voice from the other side of the door: a small dry voice through the keyhole.
  
  And when we stopped running we were outside our house; the front room was lovely; balloons floated under the hot-water-bottle-gulping gas; everything was good again and shone over the town.
  
  "Perhaps it was a ghost," Jim said.
  
  "Perhaps it was trolls," Dan said, who was always reading.
  
  "Let's go in and see if there's any jelly left," Jack said.
  
  And we did that.
  
  Always on Christmas night there was music.
  
  An uncle played the fiddle, a cousin sang "Cherry Ripe," and another uncle sang "Drake's Drum.
  
  " It was very warm in the little house.
  
  Auntie Hannah, who had got on to the parsnip wine, sang a song about Bleeding Hearts and Death, and then another in which she said her heart was like a Bird's Nest; and then everybody laughed again; and then I went to bed.
  
  Looking through my bedroom window, out into the moonlight and the unending smoke-colored snow, I could see the lights in the windows of all the other houses on our hill and hear the music rising from them up the long, steady falling night.
  
  I turned the gas down, I got into bed.
  
  I said some words to the close and holy darkness, and then I slept.

• A Grief Ago Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A grief ago,
  She who was who I hold, the fats and the flower,
  Or, water-lammed, from the scythe-sided thorn,
  Hell wind and sea,
  A stem cementing, wrestled up the tower,
  Rose maid and male,
  Or, master venus, through the paddler's bowl
  Sailed up the sun;
  Who is my grief,
  A chrysalis unwrinkling on the iron,
  Wrenched by my fingerman, the leaden bud
  Shot through the leaf,
  Was who was folded on the rod the aaron
  Road east to plague,
  The horn and ball of water on the frog
  Housed in the side.
  
  And she who lies,
  Like exodus a chapter from the garden,
  Brand of the lily's anger on her ring,
  Tugged through the days
  Her ropes of heritage, the wars of pardon,
  On field and sand
  The twelve triangles of the cherub wind
  Engraving going.
  
  Who then is she,
  She holding me?
  
  The people's sea drives on her,
  Drives out the father from the caesared camp;
  The dens of shape
  Shape all her whelps with the long voice of water,
  That she I have,
  The country-handed grave boxed into love,
  Rise before dark.
  
  The night is near,
  A nitric shape that leaps her, time and acid;
  I tell her this: before the suncock cast
  Her bone to fire,
  Let her inhale her dead, through seed and solid
  Draw in their seas,
  So cross her hand with their grave gipsy eyes,
  And close her fist.

• A Letter To My Aunt Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A Letter To My Aunt Discussing The Correct Approach To Modern Poetry
  To you, my aunt, who would explore
  The literary Chankley Bore,
  The paths are hard, for you are not
  A literary Hottentot
  But just a kind and cultured dame
  Who knows not Eliot (to her shame).
  
  Fie on you, aunt, that you should see
  No genius in David G.
  
  ,
  No elemental form and sound
  In T.
  
  S.
  
  E.
  
  and Ezra Pound.
  
  Fie on you, aunt! I'll show you how
  To elevate your middle brow,
  And how to scale and see the sights
  From modernist Parnassian heights.
  
  First buy a hat, no Paris model
  But one the Swiss wear when they yodel,
  A bowler thing with one or two
  Feathers to conceal the view;
  And then in sandals walk the street
  (All modern painters use their feet
  For painting, on their canvas strips,
  Their wives or mothers, minus hips).
  
  Perhaps it would be best if you
  Created something very new,
  A dirty novel done in Erse
  Or written backwards in Welsh verse,
  Or paintings on the backs of vests,
  Or Sanskrit psalms on lepers' chests.
  
  But if this proved imposs-i-ble
  Perhaps it would be just as well,
  For you could then write what you please,
  And modern verse is done with ease.
  
  Do not forget that 'limpet' rhymes
  With 'strumpet' in these troubled times,
  And commas are the worst of crimes;
  Few understand the works of Cummings,
  And few James Joyce's mental slummings,
  And few young Auden's coded chatter;
  But then it is the few that matter.
  
  Never be lucid, never state,
  If you would be regarded great,
  The simplest thought or sentiment,
  (For thought, we know, is decadent);
  Never omit such vital words
  As belly, genitals and ——-,
  For these are things that play a part
  (And what a part) in all good art.
  
  Remember this: each rose is wormy,
  And every lovely woman's germy;
  Remember this: that love depends
  On how the Gallic letter bends;
  Remember, too, that life is hell
  And even heaven has a smell
  Of putrefying angels who
  Make deadly whoopee in the blue.
  
  These things remembered, what can stop
  A poet going to the top?
  
  A final word: before you start
  The convulsions of your art,
  Remove your brains, take out your heart;
  Minus these curses, you can be
  A genius like David G.
  
  Take courage, aunt, and send your stuff
  To Geoffrey Grigson with my luff,
  And may I yet live to admire
  How well your poems light the fire.
  
  (unknown book)

• A Process In The Weather Of The Heart Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A process in the weather of the heart
  Turns damp to dry; the golden shot
  Storms in the freezing tomb.
  
  A weather in the quarter of the veins
  Turns night to day; blood in their suns
  Lights up the living worm.
  
  A process in the eye forewarns
  The bones of blindness; and the womb
  Drives in a death as life leaks out.
  
  A darkness in the weather of the eye
  Is half its light; the fathomed sea
  Breaks on unangled land.
  
  The seed that makes a forest of the loin
  Forks half its fruit; and half drops down,
  Slow in a sleeping wind.
  
  A weather in the flesh and bone
  Is damp and dry; the quick and dead
  Move like two ghosts before the eye.
  
  A process in the weather of the world
  Turns ghost to ghost; each mothered child
  Sits in their double shade.
  
  A process blows the moon into the sun,
  Pulls down the shabby curtains of the skin;
  And the heart gives up its dead.

• A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Never until the mankind making
  Bird beast and flower
  Fathering and all humbling darkness
  Tells with silence the last light breaking
  And the still hour
  Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
  And I must enter again the round
  Zion of the water bead
  And the synagogue of the ear of corn
  Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
  Or sow my salt seed
  In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
  The majesty and burning of the child's death.
  
  I shall not murder
  The mankind of her going with a grave truth
  Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
  With any further
  Elegy of innocence and youth.
  
  Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
  Robed in the long friends,
  The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
  Secret by the unmourning water
  Of the riding Thames.
  
  After the first death, there is no other.

• A Saint About To Fall Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A saint about to fall,
  The stained flats of heaven hit and razed
  To the kissed kite hems of his shawl,
  On the last street wave praised
  The unwinding, song by rock,
  Of the woven wall
  Of his father's house in the sands,
  The vanishing of the musical ship-work and the chucked bells,
  The wound-down cough of the blood-counting clock
  Behind a face of hands,
  On the angelic etna of the last whirring featherlands,
  Wind-heeled foot in the hole of a fireball,
  Hymned his shrivelling flock,
  On the last rick's tip by spilled wine-wells
  Sang heaven hungry and the quick
  Cut Christbread spitting vinegar and all
  The mazes of his praise and envious tongue were worked in flames and shells.
  
  Glory cracked like a flea.
  
  The sun-leaved holy candlewoods
  Drivelled down to one singeing tree
  With a stub of black buds,
  The sweet, fish-gilled boats bringing blood
  Lurched through a scuttled sea
  With a hold of leeches and straws,
  Heaven fell with his fall and one crocked bell beat the left air.
  
  O wake in me in my house in the mud
  Of the crotch of the squawking shores,
  Flicked from the carbolic city puzzle in a bed of sores
  The scudding base of the familiar sky,
  The lofty roots of the clouds.
  
  From an odd room in a split house stare,
  Milk in your mouth, at the sour floods
  That bury the sweet street slowly, see
  The skull of the earth is barbed with a war of burning brains and hair.
  
  Strike in the time-bomb town,
  Raise the live rafters of the eardrum,
  Throw your fear a parcel of stone
  Through the dark asylum,
  Lapped among herods wail
  As their blade marches in
  That the eyes are already murdered,
  The stocked heart is forced, and agony has another mouth to feed.
  
  O wake to see, after a noble fall,
  The old mud hatch again, the horrid
  Woe drip from the dishrag hands and the pressed sponge of the forehead,
  The breath draw back like a bolt through white oil
  And a stranger enter like iron.
  
  Cry joy that hits witchlike midwife second
  Bullies into rough seas you so gentle
  And makes with a flick of the thumb and sun
  A thundering bullring of your silent and girl-circled island.

• A Winter's Tale Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It is a winter's tale
  That the snow blind twilight ferries over the lakes
  And floating fields from the farm in the cup of the vales,
  Gliding windless through the hand folded flakes,
  The pale breath of cattle at the stealthy sail,
  And the stars falling cold,
  And the smell of hay in the snow, and the far owl
  Warning among the folds, and the frozen hold
  Flocked with the sheep white smoke of the farm house cowl
  In the river wended vales where the tale was told.
  
  Once when the world turned old
  On a star of faith pure as the drifting bread,
  As the food and flames of the snow, a man unrolled
  The scrolls of fire that burned in his heart and head,
  Torn and alone in a farm house in a fold
  Of fields.
  
  And burning then
  In his firelit island ringed by the winged snow
  And the dung hills white as wool and the hen
  Roosts sleeping chill till the flame of the cock crow
  Combs through the mantled yards and the morning men
  Stumble out with their spades,
  The cattle stirring, the mousing cat stepping shy,
  The puffed birds hopping and hunting, the milkmaids
  Gentle in their clogs over the fallen sky,
  And all the woken farm at its white trades,
  He knelt, he wept, he prayed,
  By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light
  And the cup and the cut bread in the dancing shade,
  In the muffled house, in the quick of night,
  At the point of love, forsaken and afraid.
  
  He knelt on the cold stones,
  He wept form the crest of grief, he prayed to the veiled sky
  May his hunger go howling on bare white bones
  Past the statues of the stables and the sky roofed sties
  And the duck pond glass and the blinding byres alone
  Into the home of prayers
  And fires where he should prowl down the cloud
  Of his snow blind love and rush in the white lairs.
  
  His naked need struck him howling and bowed
  Though no sound flowed down the hand folded air
  But only the wind strung
  Hunger of birds in the fields of the bread of water, tossed
  In high corn and the harvest melting on their tongues.
  
  And his nameless need bound him burning and lost
  When cold as snow he should run the wended vales among
  The rivers mouthed in night,
  And drown in the drifts of his need, and lie curled caught
  In the always desiring centre of the white
  Inhuman cradle and the bride bed forever sought
  By the believer lost and the hurled outcast of light.
  
  Deliver him, he cried,
  By losing him all in love, and cast his need
  Alone and naked in the engulfing bride,
  Never to flourish in the fields of the white seed
  Or flower under the time dying flesh astride.
  
  Listen.
  
  The minstrels sing
  In the departed villages.
  
  The nightingale,
  Dust in the buried wood, flies on the grains of her wings
  And spells on the winds of the dead his winter's tale.
  
  The voice of the dust of water from the withered spring
  Is telling.
  
  The wizened
  Stream with bells and baying water bounds.
  
  The dew rings
  On the gristed leaves and the long gone glistening
  Parish of snow.
  
  The carved mouths in the rock are wind swept strings.
  
  Time sings through the intricately dead snow drop.
  
  Listen.
  
  It was a hand or sound
  In the long ago land that glided the dark door wide
  And there outside on the bread of the ground
  A she bird rose and rayed like a burning bride.
  
  A she bird dawned, and her breast with snow and scarlet downed.
  
  Look.
  
  And the dancers move
  On the departed, snow bushed green, wanton in moon light
  As a dust of pigeons.
  
  Exulting, the grave hooved
  Horses, centaur dead, turn and tread the drenched white
  Paddocks in the farms of birds.
  
  The dead oak walks for love.
  
  The carved limbs in the rock
  Leap, as to trumpets.
  
  Calligraphy of the old
  Leaves is dancing.
  
  Lines of age on the stones weave in a flock.
  
  And the harp shaped voice of the water's dust plucks in a fold
  Of fields.
  
  For love, the long ago she bird rises.
  
  Look.
  
  And the wild wings were raised
  Above her folded head, and the soft feathered voice
  Was flying through the house as though the she bird praised
  And all the elements of the slow fall rejoiced
  That a man knelt alone in the cup of the vales,
  In the mantle and calm,
  By the spit and the black pot in the log bright light.
  
  And the sky of birds in the plumed voice charmed
  Him up and he ran like a wind after the kindling flight
  Past the blind barns and byres of the windless farm.
  
  In the poles of the year
  When black birds died like priests in the cloaked hedge row
  And over the cloth of counties the far hills rode near,
  Under the one leaved trees ran a scarecrow of snow
  And fast through the drifts of the thickets antlered like deer,
  Rags and prayers down the knee-
  Deep hillocks and loud on the numbed lakes,
  All night lost and long wading in the wake of the she-
  Bird through the times and lands and tribes of the slow flakes.
  
  Listen and look where she sails the goose plucked sea,
  The sky, the bird, the bride,
  The cloud, the need, the planted stars, the joy beyond
  The fields of seed and the time dying flesh astride,
  The heavens, the heaven, the grave, the burning font.
  
  In the far ago land the door of his death glided wide,
  And the bird descended.
  
  On a bread white hill over the cupped farm
  And the lakes and floating fields and the river wended
  Vales where he prayed to come to the last harm
  And the home of prayers and fires, the tale ended.
  
  The dancing perishes
  On the white, no longer growing green, and, minstrel dead,
  The singing breaks in the snow shoed villages of wishes
  That once cut the figures of birds on the deep bread
  And over the glazed lakes skated the shapes of fishes
  Flying.
  
  The rite is shorn
  Of nightingale and centaur dead horse.
  
  The springs wither
  Back.
  
  Lines of age sleep on the stones till trumpeting dawn.
  
  Exultation lies down.
  
  Time buries the spring weather
  That belled and bounded with the fossil and the dew reborn.
  
  For the bird lay bedded
  In a choir of wings, as though she slept or died,
  And the wings glided wide and he was hymned and wedded,
  And through the thighs of the engulfing bride,
  The woman breasted and the heaven headed
  Bird, he was brought low,
  Burning in the bride bed of love, in the whirl-
  Pool at the wanting centre, in the folds
  Of paradise, in the spun bud of the world.
  
  And she rose with him flowering in her melting snow.

• After The Funeral (In Memory Of Ann Jones) Read Poem Log in to favourite

  After the funeral, mule praises, brays,
  Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
  Tap happily of one peg in the thick
  Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black,
  The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves,
  Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,
  Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat
  In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves,
  That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout'
  After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles
  In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,
  I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone
  In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann
  Whose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddles
  Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun
  (Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly
  Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop;
  She would not have me sinking in the holy
  Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
  And need no druid of her broken body).
  
  But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all
  The seas to service that her wood-tongued virtue
  Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
  Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods
  That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel,
  Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
  
  Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
  With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull
  Is carved from her in a room with a wet window
  In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year.
  
  I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
  Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare
  Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow,
  Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain;
  And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
  
  These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
  Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm
  Storm me forever over her grave until
  The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
  And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.

• All All And All Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  All all and all the dry worlds lever,
  Stage of the ice, the solid ocean,
  All from the oil, the pound of lava.
  
  City of spring, the governed flower,
  Turns in the earth that turns the ashen
  Towns around on a wheel of fire.
  
  How now my flesh, my naked fellow,
  Dug of the sea, the glanded morrow,
  Worm in the scalp, the staked and fallow.
  
  All all and all, the corpse's lover,
  Skinny as sin, the foaming marrow,
  All of the flesh, the dry worlds lever.
  
  II
  Fear not the waking world, my mortal,
  Fear not the flat, synthetic blood,
  Nor the heart in the ribbing metal.
  
  Fear not the tread, the seeded milling,
  The trigger and scythe, the bridal blade,
  Nor the flint in the lover's mauling.
  
  Man of my flesh, the jawbone riven,
  Know now the flesh's lock and vice,
  And the cage for the scythe-eyed raver.
  
  Know, O my bone, the jointed lever,
  Fear not the screws that turn the voice,
  And the face to the driven lover.
  
  III
  All all and all the dry worlds couple,
  Ghost with her ghost, contagious man
  With the womb of his shapeless people.
  
  All that shapes from the caul and suckle,
  Stroke of mechanical flesh on mine,
  Square in these worlds the mortal circle.
  
  Flower, flower the people's fusion,
  O light in zenith, the coupled bud,
  And the flame in the flesh's vision.
  
  Out of the sea, the drive of oil,
  Socket and grave, the brassy blood,
  Flower, flower, all all and all.

• All That I Owe The Fellows Of The Grave Read Poem Log in to favourite

  All that I owe the fellows of the grave
  And all the dead bequeathed from pale estates
  Lies in the fortuned bone, the flask of blood,
  Like senna stirs along the ravaged roots.
  
  O all I owe is all the flesh inherits,
  My fathers' loves that pull upon my nerves,
  My sisters tears that sing upon my head
  My brothers' blood that salts my open wounds
  Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop,
  My fallen filled, that had the hint of death,
  Heir to the telling senses that alone
  Acquaint the flesh with a remembered itch,
  I round this heritage as rounds the sun
  His winy sky, and , as the candles moon,
  Cast light upon my weather.
  
  I am heir
  To women who have twisted their last smile,
  To children who were suckled on a plague,
  To young adorers dying on a kiss.
  
  All such disease I doctor in my blood,
  And all such love's a shrub sown in the breath.
  
  Then look, my eyes, upon this bonehead fortune
  And browse upon the postures of the dead;
  All night and day I eye the ragged globe
  Through periscopes rightsighted from the grave;
  All night and day I wander in these same
  Wax clothes that wax upon the ageing ribs;
  All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.
  
  Then look, my heart, upon the scarlet trove,
  And look, my grain, upon the falling wheat;
  All night my fortune slumbers in its sheet.

• Altarwise By Owl-Light Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Altarwise by owl-light in the half-way house
  The gentleman lay graveward with his furies;
  Abaddon in the hangnail cracked from Adam,
  And, from his fork, a dog among the fairies,
  The atlas-eater with a jaw for news,
  Bit out the mandrake with to-morrows scream.
  
  Then, penny-eyed, that gentlemen of wounds,
  Old cock from nowheres and the heaven's egg,
  With bones unbuttoned to the half-way winds,
  Hatched from the windy salvage on one leg,
  Scraped at my cradle in a walking word
  That night of time under the Christward shelter:
  I am the long world's gentlemen, he said,
  And share my bed with Capricorn and Cancer.
  
  Death is all metaphors, shape in one history;
  The child that sucketh long is shooting up,
  The planet-ducted pelican of circles
  Weans on an artery the genders strip;
  Child of the short spark in a shapeless country
  Soon sets alight a long stick from the cradle;
  The horizontal cross-bones of Abaddon,
  You by the cavern over the black stairs,
  Rung bone and blade, the verticals of Adam,
  And, manned by midnight, Jacob to the stars.
  
  Hairs of your head, then said the hollow agent,
  Are but the roots of nettles and feathers
  Over the groundwork's thrusting through a pavement
  And hemlock-headed in the wood of weathers.
  
  First there was the lamb on knocking knees
  And three dead seasons on a climbing grave
  That Adam's wether in the flock of horns,
  Butt of the tree-tailed worm that mounted Eve,
  Horned down with skullfoot and the skull of toes
  On thunderous pavements in the garden of time;
  Rip of the vaults, I took my marrow-ladle
  Out of the wrinkled undertaker's van,
  And, Rip Van Winkle from a timeless cradle,
  Dipped me breast-deep in the descending bone;
  The black ram, shuffling of the year, old winter,
  Alone alive among his mutton fold,
  We rung our weathering changes on the ladder,
  Said the antipodes, and twice spring chimed.
  
  What is the metre of the dictionary?
  
  The size of genesis?
  
  the short spark's gender?
  
  Shade without shape?
  
  the shape of the Pharaohs echo?
  
  (My shape of age nagging the wounded whisper.
  
  )
  Which sixth of wind blew out the burning gentry?
  
  (Questions are hunchbacks to the poker marrow.
  
  )
  What of a bamboo man among your acres?
  
  Corset the boneyards for a crooked boy?
  
  Button your bodice on a hump of splinters,
  My camel's eyes will needle through the shroud.
  
  Loves reflection of the mushroom features,
  Still snapped by night in the bread-sided field,
  Once close-up smiling in the wall of pictures,
  Arc-lamped thrown back upon the cutting flood.

• Among Those Killed In The Dawn Raid Was A Man Aged A Hundred Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When the morning was waking over the war
  He put on his clothes and stepped out and he died,
  The locks yawned loose and a blast blew them wide,
  He dropped where he loved on the burst pavement stone
  And the funeral grains of the slaughtered floor.
  
  Tell his street on its back he stopped a sun
  And the craters of his eyes grew springshots and fire
  When all the keys shot from the locks, and rang.
  
  Dig no more for the chains of his grey-haired heart.
  
  The heavenly ambulance drawn by a wound
  Assembling waits for the spade's ring on the cage.
  
  O keep his bones away from the common cart,
  The morning is flying on the wings of his age
  And a hundred storks perch on the sun's right hand.

• And Death Shall Have No Dominion Read Poem Log in to favourite

  And death shall have no dominion.
  
  Dead men naked they shall be one
  With the man in the wind and the west moon;
  When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
  They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
  Though they go mad they shall be sane,
  Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
  Though lovers be lost love shall not;
  And death shall have no dominion.
  
  And death shall have no dominion.
  
  Under the windings of the sea
  They lying long shall not die windily;
  Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
  Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
  Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
  And the unicorn evils run them through;
  Split all ends up they shan't crack;
  And death shall have no dominion.
  
  And death shall have no dominion.
  
  No more may gulls cry at their ears
  Or waves break loud on the seashore;
  Where blew a flower may a flower no more
  Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
  Through they be mad and dead as nails,
  Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
  Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
  And death shall have no dominion.

• Author's Prologue Read Poem Log in to favourite

  This day winding down now
  At God speeded summer's end
  In the torrent salmon sun,
  In my seashaken house
  On a breakneck of rocks
  Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
  Froth, flute, fin, and quill
  At a wood's dancing hoof,
  By scummed, starfish sands
  With their fishwife cross
  Gulls, pipers, cockles, and sails,
  Out there, crow black, men
  Tackled with clouds, who kneel
  To the sunset nets,
  Geese nearly in heaven, boys
  Stabbing, and herons, and shells
  That speak seven seas,
  Eternal waters away
  From the cities of nine
  Days' night whose towers will catch
  In the religious wind
  Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
  At poor peace I sing
  To you strangers (though song
  Is a burning and crested act,
  The fire of birds in
  The world's turning wood,
  For my swan, splay sounds),
  Out of these seathumbed leaves
  That will fly and fall
  Like leaves of trees and as soon
  Crumble and undie
  Into the dogdayed night.
  
  Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
  And the dumb swans drub blue
  My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
  This rumpus of shapes
  For you to know
  How I, a spining man,
  Glory also this star, bird
  Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
  
  Hark: I trumpet the place,
  From fish to jumping hill! Look:
  I build my bellowing ark
  To the best of my love
  As the flood begins,
  Out of the fountainhead
  Of fear, rage read, manalive,
  Molten and mountainous to stream
  Over the wound asleep
  Sheep white hollow farms
  To Wales in my arms.
  
  Hoo, there, in castle keep,
  You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
  The flickering runs and dive
  The dingle furred deer dead!
  Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
  O my ruffled ring dove
  In the hooting, nearly dark
  With Welsh and reverent rook,
  Coo rooning the woods' praise,
  Who moons her blue notes from her nest
  Down to the curlew herd!
  Ho, hullaballoing clan
  Agape, with woe
  In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
  Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
  Whisking hare! who
  Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
  Clangour as I hew and smite
  (A clash of anvils for my
  Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
  On a tounged puffball)
  But animals thick as theives
  On God's rough tumbling grounds
  (Hail to His beasthood!).
  
  Beasts who sleep good and thin,
  Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked
  Hollow farms in a throng
  Of waters cluck and cling,
  And barnroofs cockcrow war!
  O kingdom of neighbors finned
  Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
  Work ark and the moonshine
  Drinking Noah of the bay,
  With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
  Only the drowned deep bells
  Of sheep and churches noise
  Poor peace as the sun sets
  And dark shoals every holy field.
  
  We will ride out alone, and then,
  Under the stars of Wales,
  Cry, Multiudes of arks! Across
  The water lidded lands,
  Manned with their loves they'll move,
  Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
  
  Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
  Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
  Tom tit and Dai mouse!
  My ark sings in the sun
  At God speeded summer's end
  And the flood flowers now.

• Ballad Of The Long-Legged Bait Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The bows glided down, and the coast
  Blackened with birds took a last look
  At his thrashing hair and whale-blue eye;
  The trodden town rang its cobbles for luck.
  
  Then good-bye to the fishermanned
  Boat with its anchor free and fast
  As a bird hooking over the sea,
  High and dry by the top of the mast,
  Whispered the affectionate sand
  And the bulwarks of the dazzled quay.
  
  For my sake sail, and never look back,
  Said the looking land.
  
  Sails drank the wind, and white as milk
  He sped into the drinking dark;
  The sun shipwrecked west on a pearl
  And the moon swam out of its hulk.
  
  Funnels and masts went by in a whirl.
  
  Good-bye to the man on the sea-legged deck
  To the gold gut that sings on his reel
  To the bait that stalked out of the sack,
  For we saw him throw to the swift flood
  A girl alive with his hooks through her lips;
  All the fishes were rayed in blood,
  Said the dwindling ships.
  
  Good-bye to chimneys and funnels,
  Old wives that spin in the smoke,
  He was blind to the eyes of candles
  In the praying windows of waves
  But heard his bait buck in the wake
  And tussle in a shoal of loves.
  
  Now cast down your rod, for the whole
  Of the sea is hilly with whales,
  She longs among horses and angels,
  The rainbow-fish bend in her joys,
  Floated the lost cathedral
  Chimes of the rocked buoys.
  
  Where the anchor rode like a gull
  Miles over the moonstruck boat
  A squall of birds bellowed and fell,
  A cloud blew the rain from its throat;
  He saw the storm smoke out to kill
  With fuming bows and ram of ice,
  Fire on starlight, rake Jesu's stream;
  And nothing shone on the water's face
  But the oil and bubble of the moon,
  Plunging and piercing in his course
  The lured fish under the foam
  Witnessed with a kiss.
  
  Whales in the wake like capes and Alps
  Quaked the sick sea and snouted deep,
  Deep the great bushed bait with raining lips
  Slipped the fins of those humpbacked tons
  And fled their love in a weaving dip.
  
  Oh, Jericho was falling in their lungs!
  She nipped and dived in the nick of love,
  Spun on a spout like a long-legged ball
  Till every beast blared down in a swerve
  Till every turtle crushed from his shell
  Till every bone in the rushing grave
  Rose and crowed and fell!
  Good luck to the hand on the rod,
  There is thunder under its thumbs;
  Gold gut is a lightning thread,
  His fiery reel sings off its flames,
  The whirled boat in the burn of his blood
  Is crying from nets to knives,
  Oh the shearwater birds and their boatsized brood
  Oh the bulls of Biscay and their calves
  Are making under the green, laid veil
  The long-legged beautiful bait their wives.
  
  Break the black news and paint on a sail
  Huge weddings in the waves,
  Over the wakeward-flashing spray
  Over the gardens of the floor
  Clash out the mounting dolphin's day,
  My mast is a bell-spire,
  Strike and smoothe, for my decks are drums,
  Sing through the water-spoken prow
  The octopus walking into her limbs
  The polar eagle with his tread of snow.
  
  From salt-lipped beak to the kick of the stern
  Sing how the seal has kissed her dead!
  The long, laid minute's bride drifts on
  Old in her cruel bed.
  
  Over the graveyard in the water
  Mountains and galleries beneath
  Nightingale and hyena
  Rejoicing for that drifting death
  Sing and howl through sand and anemone
  Valley and sahara in a shell,
  Oh all the wanting flesh his enemy
  Thrown to the sea in the shell of a girl
  Is old as water and plain as an eel;
  Always good-bye to the long-legged bread
  Scattered in the paths of his heels
  For the salty birds fluttered and fed
  And the tall grains foamed in their bills;
  Always good-bye to the fires of the face,
  For the crab-backed dead on the sea-bed rose
  And scuttled over her eyes,
  The blind, clawed stare is cold as sleet.
  
  The tempter under the eyelid
  Who shows to the selves asleep
  Mast-high moon-white women naked
  Walking in wishes and lovely for shame
  Is dumb and gone with his flame of brides.
  
  Susannah's drowned in the bearded stream
  And no-one stirs at Sheba's side
  But the hungry kings of the tides;
  Sin who had a woman's shape
  Sleeps till Silence blows on a cloud
  And all the lifted waters walk and leap.
  
  Lucifer that bird's dropping
  Out of the sides of the north
  Has melted away and is lost
  Is always lost in her vaulted breath,
  Venus lies star-struck in her wound
  And the sensual ruins make
  Seasons over the liquid world,
  White springs in the dark.
  
  Always good-bye, cried the voices through the shell,
  Good-bye always, for the flesh is cast
  And the fisherman winds his reel
  With no more desire than a ghost.
  
  Always good luck, praised the finned in the feather
  Bird after dark and the laughing fish
  As the sails drank up the hail of thunder
  And the long-tailed lightning lit his catch.
  
  The boat swims into the six-year weather,
  A wind throws a shadow and it freezes fast.
  
  See what the gold gut drags from under
  Mountains and galleries to the crest!
  See what clings to hair and skull
  As the boat skims on with drinking wings!
  The statues of great rain stand still,
  And the flakes fall like hills.
  
  Sing and strike his heavy haul
  Toppling up the boatside in a snow of light!
  His decks are drenched with miracles.
  
  Oh miracle of fishes! The long dead bite!
  Out of the urn a size of a man
  Out of the room the weight of his trouble
  Out of the house that holds a town
  In the continent of a fossil
  One by one in dust and shawl,
  Dry as echoes and insect-faced,
  His fathers cling to the hand of the girl
  And the dead hand leads the past,
  Leads them as children and as air
  On to the blindly tossing tops;
  The centuries throw back their hair
  And the old men sing from newborn lips:
  Time is bearing another son.
  
  Kill Time! She turns in her pain!
  The oak is felled in the acorn
  And the hawk in the egg kills the wren.
  
  He who blew the great fire in
  And died on a hiss of flames
  Or walked the earth in the evening
  Counting the denials of the grains
  Clings to her drifting hair, and climbs;
  And he who taught their lips to sing
  Weeps like the risen sun among
  The liquid choirs of his tribes.
  
  The rod bends low, divining land,
  And through the sundered water crawls
  A garden holding to her hand
  With birds and animals
  With men and women and waterfalls
  Trees cool and dry in the whirlpool of ships
  And stunned and still on the green, laid veil
  Sand with legends in its virgin laps
  And prophets loud on the burned dunes;
  Insects and valleys hold her thighs hard,
  Times and places grip her breast bone,
  She is breaking with seasons and clouds;
  Round her trailed wrist fresh water weaves,
  with moving fish and rounded stones
  Up and down the greater waves
  A separate river breathes and runs;
  Strike and sing his catch of fields
  For the surge is sown with barley,
  The cattle graze on the covered foam,
  The hills have footed the waves away,
  With wild sea fillies and soaking bridles
  With salty colts and gales in their limbs
  All the horses of his haul of miracles
  Gallop through the arched, green farms,
  Trot and gallop with gulls upon them
  And thunderbolts in their manes.
  
  O Rome and Sodom To-morrow and London
  The country tide is cobbled with towns
  And steeples pierce the cloud on her shoulder
  And the streets that the fisherman combed
  When his long-legged flesh was a wind on fire
  And his loin was a hunting flame
  Coil from the thoroughfares of her hair
  And terribly lead him home alive
  Lead her prodigal home to his terror,
  The furious ox-killing house of love.
  
  Down, down, down, under the ground,
  Under the floating villages,
  Turns the moon-chained and water-wound
  Metropolis of fishes,
  There is nothing left of the sea but its sound,
  Under the earth the loud sea walks,
  In deathbeds of orchards the boat dies down
  And the bait is drowned among hayricks,
  Land, land, land, nothing remains
  Of the pacing, famous sea but its speech,
  And into its talkative seven tombs
  The anchor dives through the floors of a church.
  
  Good-bye, good luck, struck the sun and the moon,
  To the fisherman lost on the land.
  
  He stands alone in the door of his home,
  With his long-legged heart in his hand.

• Because The Pleasure-Bird Whistles Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
  Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
  
  Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer
  The supper and knives of a mood.
  
  In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year
  That clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,
  An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,
  Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,
  Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair
  In a wind that plucked a goose,
  Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,
  Rounds to look at the red, wagged root.
  
  Because there stands, one story out of the bum city,
  That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea
  Secretly in statuary,
  Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,
  Not spin to stare at an old year
  Toppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries
  Like the mauled pictures of boys?
  
  The salt person and blasted place
  I furnish with the meat of a fable;
  If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble
  An upright man in the antipodes
  Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:
  Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

• Before I Knocked Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Before I knocked and flesh let enter,
  With liquid hands tapped on the womb,
  I who was as shapeless as the water
  That shaped the Jordan near my home
  Was brother to Mnetha's daughter
  And sister to the fathering worm.
  
  I who was deaf to spring and summer,
  Who knew not sun nor moon by name,
  Felt thud beneath my flesh's armour,
  As yet was in a molten form
  The leaden stars, the rainy hammer
  Swung by my father from his dome.
  
  I knew the message of the winter,
  The darted hail, the childish snow,
  And the wind was my sister suitor;
  Wind in me leaped, the hellborn dew;
  My veins flowed with the Eastern weather;
  Ungotten I knew night and day.
  
  As yet ungotten, I did suffer;
  The rack of dreams my lily bones
  Did twist into a living cipher,
  And flesh was snipped to cross the lines
  Of gallow crosses on the liver
  And brambles in the wringing brains.
  
  My throat knew thirst before the structure
  Of skin and vein around the well
  Where words and water make a mixture
  Unfailing till the blood runs foul;
  My heart knew love, my belly hunger;
  I smelt the maggot in my stool.
  
  And time cast forth my mortal creature
  To drift or drown upon the seas
  Acquainted with the salt adventure
  Of tides that never touch the shores.
  
  I who was rich was made the richer
  By sipping at the vine of days.
  
  I, born of flesh and ghost, was neither
  A ghost nor man, but mortal ghost.
  
  And I was struck down by death's feather.
  
  I was a mortal to the last
  Long breath that carried to my father
  The message of his dying christ.
  
  You who bow down at cross and altar,
  Remember me and pity Him
  Who took my flesh and bone for armour
  And doublecrossed my mother's womb.

• Being But Men Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Being but men, we walked into the trees
  Afraid, letting our syllables be soft
  For fear of waking the rooks,
  For fear of coming
  Noiselessly into a world of wings and cries.
  
  If we were children we might climb,
  Catch the rooks sleeping, and break no twig,
  And, after the soft ascent,
  Thrust out our heads above the branches
  To wonder at the unfailing stars.
  
  Out of confusion, as the way is,
  And the wonder, that man knows,
  Out of the chaos would come bliss.
  
  That, then, is loveliness, we said,
  Children in wonder watching the stars,
  Is the aim and the end.
  
  Being but men, we walked into the trees.

• Ceremony After A Fire Raid Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  Myselves
  The grievers
  Grieve
  Among the street burned to tireless death
  A child of a few hours
  With its kneading mouth
  Charred on the black breast of the grave
  The mother dug, and its arms full of fires.
  
  Begin
  With singing
  Sing
  Darkness kindled back into beginning
  When the caught tongue nodded blind,
  A star was broken
  Into the centuries of the child
  Myselves grieve now, and miracles cannot atone.
  
  Forgive
  Us forgive
  Us your death that myselves the believers
  May hold it in a great flood
  Till the blood shall spurt,
  And the dust shall sing like a bird
  As the grains blow, as your death grows, through our heart.
  
  Crying
  Your dying
  Cry,
  Child beyond cockcrow, by the fire-dwarfed
  Street we chant the flying sea
  In the body bereft.
  
  Love is the last light spoken.
  
  Oh
  Seed of sons in the loin of the black husk left.
  
  II
  I know not whether
  Adam or Eve, the adorned holy bullock
  Or the white ewe lamb
  Or the chosen virgin
  Laid in her snow
  On the altar of London,
  Was the first to die
  In the cinder of the little skull,
  O bride and bride groom
  O Adam and Eve together
  Lying in the lull
  Under the sad breast of the head stone
  White as the skeleton
  Of the garden of Eden.
  
  I know the legend
  Of Adam and Eve is never for a second
  Silent in my service
  Over the dead infants
  Over the one
  Child who was priest and servants,
  Word, singers, and tongue
  In the cinder of the little skull,
  Who was the serpent's
  Night fall and the fruit like a sun,
  Man and woman undone,
  Beginning crumbled back to darkness
  Bare as nurseries
  Of the garden of wilderness.
  
  III
  Into the organpipes and steeples
  Of the luminous cathedrals,
  Into the weathercocks' molten mouths
  Rippling in twelve-winded circles,
  Into the dead clock burning the hour
  Over the urn of sabbaths
  Over the whirling ditch of daybreak
  Over the sun's hovel and the slum of fire
  And the golden pavements laid in requiems,
  Into the bread in a wheatfield of flames,
  Into the wine burning like brandy,
  The masses of the sea
  The masses of the sea under
  The masses of the infant-bearing sea
  Erupt, fountain, and enter to utter for ever
  Glory glory glory
  The sundering ultimate kingdom of genesis' thunder.

• Clown In The Moon Read Poem Log in to favourite

  My tears are like the quiet drift
  Of petals from some magic rose;
  And all my grief flows from the rift
  Of unremembered skies and snows.
  
  I think, that if I touched the earth,
  It would crumble;
  It is so sad and beautiful,
  So tremulously like a dream.

• Deaths And Entrances Read Poem Log in to favourite

  On almost the incendiary eve
  Of several near deaths,
  When one at the great least of your best loved
  And always known must leave
  Lions and fires of his flying breath,
  Of your immortal friends
  Who'd raise the organs of the counted dust
  To shoot and sing your praise,
  One who called deepest down shall hold his peace
  That cannot sink or cease
  Endlessly to his wound
  In many married London's estranging grief.
  
  On almost the incendiary eve
  When at your lips and keys,
  Locking, unlocking, the murdered strangers weave,
  One who is most unknown,
  Your polestar neighbour, sun of another street,
  Will dive up to his tears.
  
  He'll bathe his raining blood in the male sea
  Who strode for your own dead
  And wind his globe out of your water thread
  And load the throats of shells
  with every cry since light
  Flashed first across his thunderclapping eyes.
  
  On almost the incendiary eve
  Of deaths and entrances,
  When near and strange wounded on London's waves
  Have sought your single grave,
  One enemy, of many, who knows well
  Your heart is luminous
  In the watched dark, quivering through locks and caves,
  Will pull the thunderbolts
  To shut the sun, plunge, mount your darkened keys
  And sear just riders back,
  Until that one loved least
  Looms the last Samson of your zodiac.

• Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
  Because their words had forked no lightning they
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
  And learn, too late, they grieve it on its way,
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  And you, my father, there on the sad height,
  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
  
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

• Do You Not Father Me Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Do you not father me, nor the erected arm
  For my tall tower's sake cast in her stone?
  
  Do you not mother me, nor, as I am,
  The lovers' house, lie suffering my stain?
  
  Do you not sister me, nor the erected crime
  For my tall turrets carry as your sin?
  
  Do you not brother me, nor, as you climb,
  Adore my windows for their summer scene?
  
  Am I not father, too, and the ascending boy,
  The boy of woman and the wanton starer
  Marking the flesh and summer in the bay?
  
  Am I not sister, too, who is my saviour?
  
  Am I not all of you by the directed sea
  Where bird and shell are babbling in my tower?
  
  Am I not you who front the tidy shore,
  Nor roof of sand, nor yet the towering tiler?
  
  You are all these, said she who gave me the long suck,
  All these, he said who sacked the children's town,
  Up rose the Abraham-man, mad for my sake,
  They said, who hacked and humoured, they were mine.
  
  I am, the tower told, felled by a timeless stroke,
  Who razed my wooden folly stands aghast,
  For man-begetters in the dry-as-paste,
  The ringed-sea ghost, rise grimly from the wrack.
  
  Do you not father me on the destroying sand?
  
  You are your sisters' sire, said seaweedy,
  The salt sucked dam and darlings of the land
  Who play the proper gentleman and lady.
  
  Shall I still be love's house on the widdershin earth,
  Woe to the windy masons at my shelter?
  
  Love's house, they answer, and the tower death
  Lie all unknowing of the grave sin-eater.

• Ears In The Turrets Hear Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Ears in the turrets hear
  Hands grumble on the door,
  Eyes in the gables see
  The fingers at the locks.
  
  Shall I unbolt or stay
  Alone till the day I die
  Unseen by stranger-eyes
  In this white house?
  
  Hands, hold you poison or grapes?
  
  Beyond this island bound
  By a thin sea of flesh
  And a bone coast,
  The land lies out of sound
  And the hills out of mind.
  
  No birds or flying fish
  Disturbs this island's rest.
  
  Ears in this island hear
  The wind pass like a fire,
  Eyes in this island see
  Ships anchor off the bay.
  
  Shall I run to the ships
  With the wind in my hair,
  Or stay till the day I die
  And welcome no sailor?
  
  Ships, hold you poison or grapes?
  
  Hands grumble on the door,
  Ships anchor off the bay,
  Rain beats the sand and slates.
  
  Shall I let in the stranger,
  Shall I welcome the sailor,
  Or stay till the day I die?
  
  Hands of the stranger and holds of the ships,
  Hold you poison or grapes?

• Elegy Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Too proud to die; broken and blind he died
  The darkest way, and did not turn away,
  A cold kind man brave in his narrow pride
  On that darkest day, Oh, forever may
  He lie lightly, at last, on the last, crossed
  Hill, under the grass, in love, and there grow
  Young among the long flocks, and never lie lost
  Or still all the numberless days of his death, though
  Above all he longed for his mother's breast
  Which was rest and dust, and in the kind ground
  The darkest justice of death, blind and unblessed.
  
  Let him find no rest but be fathered and found,
  I prayed in the crouching room, by his blind bed,
  In the muted house, one minute before
  Noon, and night, and light.
  
  the rivers of the dead
  Veined his poor hand I held, and I saw
  Through his unseeing eyes to the roots of the sea.
  
  (An old tormented man three-quarters blind,
  I am not too proud to cry that He and he
  Will never never go out of my mind.
  
  All his bones crying, and poor in all but pain,
  Being innocent, he dreaded that he died
  Hating his God, but what he was was plain:
  An old kind man brave in his burning pride.
  
  The sticks of the house were his; his books he owned.
  
  Even as a baby he had never cried;
  Nor did he now, save to his secret wound.
  
  Out of his eyes I saw the last light glide.
  
  Here among the light of the lording sky
  An old man is with me where I go
  Walking in the meadows of his son's eye
  On whom a world of ills came down like snow.
  
  He cried as he died, fearing at last the spheres'
  Last sound, the world going out without a breath:
  Too proud to cry, too frail to check the tears,
  And caught between two nights, blindness and death.
  
  O deepest wound of all that he should die
  On that darkest day.
  
  oh, he could hide
  The tears out of his eyes, too proud to cry.
  
  Until I die he will not leave my side.
  
  )

• Especially When The October Wind Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Especially when the October wind
  With frosty fingers punishes my hair,
  Caught by the crabbing sun I walk on fire
  And cast a shadow crab upon the land,
  By the sea's side, hearing the noise of birds,
  Hearing the raven cough in winter sticks,
  My busy heart who shudders as she talks
  Sheds the syllabic blood and drains her words.
  
  Shut, too, in a tower of words, I mark
  On the horizon walking like the trees
  The wordy shapes of women, and the rows
  Of the star-gestured children in the park.
  
  Some let me make you of the vowelled beeches,
  Some of the oaken voices, from the roots
  Of many a thorny shire tell you notes,
  Some let me make you of the water's speeches.
  
  Behind a pot of ferns the wagging clock
  Tells me the hour's word, the neural meaning
  Flies on the shafted disk, declaims the morning
  And tells the windy weather in the cock.
  
  Some let me make you of the meadow's signs;
  The signal grass that tells me all I know
  Breaks with the wormy winter through the eye.
  
  Some let me tell you of the raven's sins.
  
  Especially when the October wind
  (Some let me make you of autumnal spells,
  The spider-tongued, and the loud hill of Wales)
  With fists of turnips punishes the land,
  Some let me make you of the heartless words.
  
  The heart is drained that, spelling in the scurry
  Of chemic blood, warned of the coming fury.
  
  By the sea's side hear the dark-vowelled birds.

• Find Meat On Bones Read Poem Log in to favourite

  'Find meat on bones that soon have none,
  And drink in the two milked crags,
  The merriest marrow and the dregs
  Before the ladies' breasts are hags
  And the limbs are torn.
  
  Disturb no winding-sheets, my son,
  But when the ladies are cold as stone
  Then hang a ram rose over the rags.
  
  'Rebel against the binding moon
  And the parliament of sky,
  The kingcrafts of the wicked sea,
  Autocracy of night and day,
  Dictatorship of sun.
  
  Rebel against the flesh and bone,
  The word of the blood, the wily skin,
  And the maggot no man can slay.
  
  '
  'The thirst is quenched, the hunger gone,
  And my heart is cracked across;
  My face is haggard in the glass,
  My lips are withered with a kiss,
  My breasts are thin.
  
  A merry girl took me for man,
  I laid her down and told her sin,
  And put beside her a ram rose.
  
  'The maggot that no man can kill
  And the man no rope can hang
  Rebel against my father's dream
  That out of a bower of red swine
  Howls the foul fiend to heel.
  
  I cannot murder, like a fool,
  Season and sunshine, grace and girl,
  Nor can I smother the sweet waking.
  
  '
  Black night still ministers the moon,
  And the sky lays down her laws,
  The sea speaks in a kingly voice,
  Light and dark are no enemies
  But one companion.
  
  'War on the spider and the wren!
  War on the destiny of man!
  Doom on the sun!'
  Before death takes you, O take back this.

• Foster The Light Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Foster the light nor veil the manshaped moon,
  Nor weather winds that blow not down the bone,
  But strip the twelve-winded marrow from his circle;
  Master the night nor serve the snowman's brain
  That shapes each bushy item of the air
  Into a polestar pointed on an icicle.
  
  Murmur of spring nor crush the cockerel's eggs,
  Nor hammer back a season in the figs,
  But graft these four-fruited ridings on your country;
  Farmer in time of frost the burning leagues,
  By red-eyed orchards sow the seeds of snow,
  In your young years the vegetable century.
  
  And father all nor fail the fly-lord's acre,
  Nor sprout on owl-seed like a goblin-sucker,
  But rail with your wizard's ribs the heart-shaped planet;
  Of mortal voices to the ninnies' choir,
  High lord esquire, speak up the singing cloud,
  And pluck a mandrake music from the marrowroot.
  
  Roll unmanly over this turning tuft,
  O ring of seas, nor sorrow as I shift
  From all my mortal lovers with a starboard smile;
  Nor when my love lies in the cross-boned drift
  Naked among the bow-and-arrow birds
  Shall you turn cockwise on a tufted axle.
  
  Who gave these seas their colour in a shape,
  Shaped my clayfellow, and the heaven's ark
  In time at flood filled with his coloured doubles;
  O who is glory in the shapeless maps,
  Now make the world of me as I have made
  A merry manshape of your walking circle.

• From Love's First Fever To Her Plague Read Poem Log in to favourite

  From love's first fever to her plague, from the soft second
  And to the hollow minute of the womb,
  From the unfolding to the scissored caul,
  The time for breast and the green apron age
  When no mouth stirred about the hanging famine,
  All world was one, one windy nothing,
  My world was christened in a stream of milk.
  
  And earth and sky were as one airy hill.
  
  The sun and mood shed one white light.
  
  From the first print of the unshodden foot, the lifting
  Hand, the breaking of the hair,
  From the first scent of the heart, the warning ghost,
  And to the first dumb wonder at the flesh,
  The sun was red, the moon was grey,
  The earth and sky were as two mountains meeting.
  
  The body prospered, teeth in the marrowed gums,
  The growing bones, the rumour of the manseed
  Within the hallowed gland, blood blessed the heart,
  And the four winds, that had long blown as one,
  Shone in my ears the light of sound,
  Called in my eyes the sound of light.
  
  And yellow was the multiplying sand,
  Each golden grain spat life into its fellow,
  Green was the singing house.
  
  The plum my mother picked matured slowly,
  The boy she dropped from darkness at her side
  Into the sided lap of light grew strong,
  Was muscled, matted, wise to the crying thigh,
  And to the voice that, like a voice of hunger,
  Itched in the noise of wind and sun.
  
  And from the first declension of the flesh
  I learnt man's tongue, to twist the shapes of thoughts
  Into the stony idiom of the brain,
  To shade and knit anew the patch of words
  Left by the dead who, in their moonless acre,
  Need no word's warmth.
  
  The root of tongues ends in a spentout cancer,
  That but a name, where maggots have their X.
  
  I learnt the verbs of will, and had my secret;
  The code of night tapped on my tongue;
  What had been one was many sounding minded.
  
  One wound, one mind, spewed out the matter,
  One breast gave suck the fever's issue;
  From the divorcing sky I learnt the double,
  The two-framed globe that spun into a score;
  A million minds gave suck to such a bud
  As forks my eye;
  Youth did condense; the tears of spring
  Dissolved in summer and the hundred seasons;
  One sun, one manna, warmed and fed.

• Grief Thief Of Time Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Grief thief of time crawls off,
  The moon-drawn grave, with the seafaring years,
  The knave of pain steals off
  The sea-halved faith that blew time to his knees,
  The old forget the cries,
  Lean time on tide and times the wind stood rough,
  Call back the castaways
  Riding the sea light on a sunken path,
  The old forget the grief,
  Hack of the cough, the hanging albatross,
  Cast back the bone of youth
  And salt-eyed stumble bedward where she lies
  Who tossed the high tide in a time of stories
  And timelessly lies loving with the thief.
  
  Now Jack my fathers let the time-faced crook,
  Death flashing from his sleeve,
  With swag of bubbles in a seedy sack
  Sneak down the stallion grave,
  Bull's-eye the outlaw through a eunuch crack
  And free the twin-boxed grief,
  No silver whistles chase him down the weeks'
  Dayed peaks to day to death,
  These stolen bubbles have the bites of snakes
  And the undead eye-teeth,
  No third eye probe into a rainbow's sex
  That bridged the human halves,
  All shall remain and on the graveward gulf
  Shape with my fathers' thieves.

• Here In This spring Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Here in this spring, stars float along the void;
  Here in this ornamental winter
  Down pelts the naked weather;
  This summer buries a spring bird.
  
  Symbols are selected from the years'
  Slow rounding of four seasons' coasts,
  In autumn teach three seasons' fires
  And four birds' notes.
  
  I should tell summer from the trees, the worms
  Tell, if at all, the winter's storms
  Or the funeral of the sun;
  I should learn spring by the cuckooing,
  And the slug should teach me destruction.
  
  A worm tells summer better than the clock,
  The slug's a living calendar of days;
  What shall it tell me if a timeless insect
  Says the world wears away?

• Hold Hard The Ancient Minutes Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Hold hard, these ancient minutes in the cuckoo's month,
  Under the lank, fourth folly on Glamorgan's hill,
  As the green blooms ride upward, to the drive of time;
  Time, in a folly's rider, like a county man
  Over the vault of ridings with his hound at heel,
  Drives forth my men, my children, from the hanging south.
  
  Country, your sport is summer, and December's pools
  By crane and water-tower by the seedy trees
  Lie this fifth month unstaked, and the birds have flown;
  Holy hard, my country children in the world if tales,
  The greenwood dying as the deer fall in their tracks,
  The first and steepled season, to the summer's game.
  
  And now the horns of England, in the sound of shape,
  Summon your snowy horsemen, and the four-stringed hill,
  Over the sea-gut loudening, sets a rock alive;
  Hurdles and guns and railings, as the boulders heave,
  Crack like a spring in vice, bone breaking April,
  Spill the lank folly's hunter and the hard-held hope.
  
  Down fall four padding weathers on the scarlet lands,
  Stalking my children's faces with a tail of blood,
  Time, in a rider rising, from the harnessed valley;
  Hold hard, my country darlings, for a hawk descends,
  Golden Glamorgan straightens, to the falling birds.
  
  Your sport is summer as the spring runs angrily.

• Holy Spring Read Poem Log in to favourite

  O
  Out of a bed of love
  When that immortal hospital made one more move to soothe
  The cureless counted body,
  And ruin and his causes
  Over the barbed and shooting sea assumed an army
  And swept into our wounds and houses,
  I climb to greet the war in which I have no heart but only
  That one dark I owe my light,
  Call for confessor and wiser mirror but there is none
  To glow after the god stoning night
  And I am struck as lonely as a holy maker by the sun
  No
  Praise that the spring time is all
  Gabriel and radiant shrubbery as the morning grows joyful
  Out of the woebegone pyre
  And the multitude's sultry tear turns cool on the weeping wall,
  My arising prodigal
  Sun the father his quiver full of the infants of pure fire,
  But blessed be hail and upheaval
  That uncalm still it is sure alone to stand and sing
  Alone in the husk of man's home
  And the mother and toppling house of the holy spring,
  If only for a last time.

• How Shall My Animal Read Poem Log in to favourite

  How shall my animal
  Whose wizard shape I trace in the cavernous skull,
  Vessel of abscesses and exultation's shell,
  Endure burial under the spelling wall,
  The invoked, shrouding veil at the cap of the face,
  Who should be furious,
  Drunk as a vineyard snail, flailed like an octopus,
  Roaring, crawling, quarrel
  With the outside weathers,
  The natural circle of the discovered skies
  Draw down to its weird eyes?
  
  How shall it magnetize,
  Towards the studded male in a bent, midnight blaze
  That melts the lionhead's heel and horseshoe of the heart
  A brute land in the cool top of the country days
  To trot with a loud mate the haybeds of a mile,
  Love and labour and kill
  In quick, sweet, cruel light till the locked ground sprout
  The black, burst sea rejoice,
  The bowels turn turtle,
  Claw of the crabbed veins squeeze from each red particle
  The parched and raging voice?
  
  Fishermen of mermen
  Creep and harp on the tide, sinking their charmed, bent pin
  With bridebait of gold bread, I with a living skein,
  Tongue and ear in the thread, angle the temple-bound
  Curl-locked and animal cavepools of spells and bone,
  Trace out a tentacle,
  Nailed with an open eye, in the bowl of wounds and weed
  To clasp my fury on ground
  And clap its great blood down;
  Never shall beast be born to atlas the few seas
  Or poise the day on a horn.
  
  Sigh long, clay cold, lie shorn,
  Cast high, stunned on gilled stone; sly scissors ground in frost
  Clack through the thicket of strength, love hewn in pillars drops
  With carved bird, saint, and suns the wrackspiked maiden mouth
  Lops, as a bush plumed with flames, the rant of the fierce eye,
  Clips short the gesture of breath.
  
  Die in red feathers when the flying heaven's cut,
  And roll with the knocked earth:
  Lie dry, rest robbed, my beast.
  
  You have kicked from a dark den, leaped up the whinnying light,
  And dug your grave in my breast.

• How Soon The Servant Sun Read Poem Log in to favourite

  How soon the servant sun,
  (Sir morrow mark),
  Can time unriddle, and the cupboard stone,
  (Fog has a bone
  He'll trumpet into meat),
  Unshelve that all my gristles have a gown
  And the naked egg stand straight,
  Sir morrow at his sponge,
  (The wound records),
  The nurse of giants by the cut sea basin,
  (Fog by his spring
  Soaks up the sewing tides),
  Tells you and you, my masters, as his strange
  Man morrow blows through food.
  
  All nerves to serve the sun,
  The rite of light,
  A claw I question from the mouse's bone,
  The long-tailed stone
  Trap I with coil and sheet,
  Let the soil squeal I am the biting man
  And the velvet dead inch out.
  
  How soon my level, lord,
  (Sir morrow stamps
  Two heels of water on the floor of seed),
  Shall raise a lamp
  Or spirit up a cloud,
  Erect a walking centre in the shroud,
  Invisible on the stump
  A leg as long as trees,
  This inward sir,
  Mister and master, darkness for his eyes,
  The womb-eyed, cries,
  And all sweet hell, deaf as an hour's ear,
  Blasts back the trumpet voice.

• I Dreamed My Genesis Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I dreamed my genesis in sweat of sleep, breaking
  Through the rotating shell, strong
  As motor muscle on the drill, driving
  Through vision and the girdered nerve.
  
  From limbs that had the measure of the worm, shuffled
  Off from the creasing flesh, filed
  Through all the irons in the grass, metal
  Of suns in the man-melting night.
  
  Heir to the scalding veins that hold love's drop, costly
  A creature in my bones I
  Rounded my globe of heritage, journey
  In bottom gear through night-geared man.
  
  I dreamed my genesis and died again, shrapnel
  Rammed in the marching heart, hole
  In the stitched wound and clotted wind, muzzled
  Death on the mouth that ate the gas.
  
  Sharp in my second death I marked the hills, harvest
  Of hemlock and the blades, rust
  My blood upon the tempered dead, forcing
  My second struggling from the grass.
  
  And power was contagious in my birth, second
  Rise of the skeleton and
  Rerobing of the naked ghost.
  
  Manhood
  Spat up from the resuffered pain.
  
  I dreamed my genesis in sweat of death, fallen
  Twice in the feeding sea, grown
  Stale of Adam's brine until, vision
  Of new man strength, I seek the sun.

• I Fellowed Sleep Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I fellowed sleep who kissed me in the brain,
  Let fall the tear of time; the sleeper's eye,
  Shifting to light, turned on me like a moon.
  
  So, planning-heeled, I flew along my man
  And dropped on dreaming and the upward sky.
  
  I fled the earth and, naked, climbed the weather,
  Reaching a second ground far from the stars;
  And there we wept I and a ghostly other,
  My mothers-eyed, upon the tops of trees;
  I fled that ground as lightly as a feather.
  
  'My fathers' globe knocks on its nave and sings.
  
  '
  'This that we tread was, too, your father's land.
  
  '
  'But this we tread bears the angelic gangs
  Sweet are their fathered faces in their wings.
  
  '
  'These are but dreaming men.
  
  Breathe, and they fade.
  
  '
  Faded my elbow ghost, the mothers-eyed,
  As, blowing on the angels, I was lost
  On that cloud coast to each grave-grabbing shade;
  I blew the dreaming fellows to their bed
  Where still they sleep unknowing of their ghost.
  
  Then all the matter of the living air
  Raised up a voice, and, climbing on the words,
  I spelt my vision with a hand and hair,
  How light the sleeping on this soily star,
  How deep the waking in the worlded clouds.
  
  There grows the hours' ladder to the sun,
  Each rung a love or losing to the last,
  The inches monkeyed by the blood of man.
  
  And old, mad man still climbing in his ghost,
  My fathers' ghost is climbing in the rain.

• I Have Longed To Move Away Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I have longed to move away
  From the hissing of the spent lie
  And the old terrors' continual cry
  Growing more terrible as the day
  Goes over the hill into the deep sea;
  I have longed to move away
  From the repetition of salutes,
  For there are ghosts in the air
  And ghostly echoes on paper,
  And the thunder of calls and notes.
  
  I have longed to move away but am afraid;
  Some life, yet unspent, might explode
  Out of the old lie burning on the ground,
  And, crackling into the air, leave me half-blind.
  
  Neither by night's ancient fear,
  The parting of hat from hair,
  Pursed lips at the receiver,
  Shall I fall to death's feather.
  
  By these I would not care to die,
  Half convention and half lie.

• I Make This In A Warring Absence Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I make this in a warring absence when
  Each ancient, stone-necked minute of love's season
  Harbours my anchored tongue, slips the quaystone,
  When, praise is blessed, her pride in mast and fountain
  Sailed and set dazzling by the handshaped ocean,
  In that proud sailing tree with branches driven
  Through the last vault and vegetable groyne,
  And this weak house to marrow-columned heaven,
  Is corner-cast, breath's rag, scrawled weed, a vain
  And opium head, crow stalk, puffed, cut, and blown,
  Or like the tide-looped breastknot reefed again
  Or rent ancestrally the roped sea-hymen,
  And, pride is last, is like a child alone
  By magnet winds to her blind mother drawn,
  Bread and milk mansion in a toothless town.
  
  She makes for me a nettle's innocence
  And a silk pigeon's guilt in her proud absence,
  In the molested rocks the shell of virgins,
  The frank, closed pearl, the sea-girls' lineaments
  Glint in the staved and siren-printed caverns,
  Is maiden in the shameful oak, omens
  Whalebed and bulldance, the gold bush of lions,
  Proud as a sucked stone and huge as sandgrains.
  
  These are her contraries: the beast who follows
  With priest's grave foot and hand of five assassins
  Her molten flight up cinder-nesting columns,
  Calls the starved fire herd, is cast in ice,
  Lost in a limp-treed and uneating silence,
  Who scales a hailing hill in her cold flintsteps
  Falls on a ring of summers and locked noons.
  
  I make a weapon of an ass's skeleton
  And walk the warring sands by the dead town.
  
  Cudgel great air, wreck east, and topple sundown,
  Storm her sped heart, hang with beheaded veins
  Its wringing shell, and let her eyelids fasten.
  
  Destruction, picked by birds, brays through the jaw-bone,
  And, for that murder's sake, dark with contagion
  Like an approaching wave I sprawl to ruin.
  
  Ruin, the room of errors, one rood dropped
  Down the stacked sea and water-pillared shade,
  Weighed in rock shroud, is my proud pyramid;
  Where, wound in emerald linen and sharp wind,
  The hero's head lies scraped of every legend,
  Comes love's anatomist with sun-gloved hand
  Who picks the live heart on a diamond.
  
  'His mother's womb had a tongue that lapped up mud,'
  Cried the topless, inchtaped lips from hank and hood
  In that bright anchorground where I lay linened,
  'A lizard darting with black venom's thread
  Doubled, to fork him back, through the lockjaw bed
  And the breath-white, curtained mouth of seed.
  
  '
  'See,' drummed the taut masks, 'how the dead ascend:
  In the groin's endless coil a man is tangled.
  
  '
  These once-blind eyes have breathed a wind of visions,
  The cauldron's root through this once-rindless hand
  Fumed like a tree, and tossed a burning bird;
  With loud, torn tooth and tail and cobweb drum
  The crumpled packs fled past this ghost in bloom,
  And, mild as pardon from a cloud of pride,
  The terrible world my brother bares his skin.
  
  Now in the cloud's big breast lie quiet countries,
  Delivered seas my love from her proud place
  Walks with no wound, nor lightning in her face,
  A calm wind blows that raised the trees like hair
  Once where the soft snow's blood was turned to ice.
  
  And though my love pulls the pale, nippled air,
  Prides of to-morrow suckling in her eyes,
  Yet this I make in a forgiving presence.

• I See The Boys Of Summer Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  I see the boys of summer in their ruin
  Lay the gold tithings barren,
  Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
  There in their heat the winter floods
  Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
  And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.
  
  These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
  Sour the boiling honey;
  The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
  There in the sun the frigid threads
  Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
  The signal moon is zero in their voids.
  
  I see the summer children in their mothers
  Split up the brawned womb's weathers,
  Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
  There in the deep with quartered shades
  Of sun and moon they paint their dams
  As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.
  
  I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
  Stature by seedy shifting,
  Or lame the air with leaping from its hearts;
  There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
  Of love and light bursts in their throats.
  
  O see the pulse of summer in the ice.
  
  II
  But seasons must be challenged or they totter
  Into a chiming quarter
  Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
  There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
  The sleepy man of winter pulls,
  Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.
  
  We are the dark deniers, let us summon
  Death from a summer woman,
  A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
  From the fair dead who flush the sea
  The bright-eyed worm on Davy's lamp,
  And from the planted womb the man of straw.
  
  We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
  Green of the seaweed's iron,
  Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
  Pick the world's ball of wave and froth
  To choke the deserts with her tides,
  And comb the county gardens for a wreath.
  
  In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
  Heigh ho the blood and berry,
  And nail the merry squires to the trees;
  Here love's damp muscle dries and dies,
  Here break a kiss in no love's quarry.
  
  O see the poles of promise in the boys.
  
  III
  I see the boys of summer in their ruin.
  
  Man in his maggot's barren.
  
  And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.
  
  I am the man your father was.
  
  We are the sons of flint and pitch.
  
  O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

• I, In My Intricate Image Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  I, in my intricate image, stride on two levels,
  Forged in man's minerals, the brassy orator
  Laying my ghost in metal,
  The scales of this twin world tread on the double,
  My half ghost in armour hold hard in death's corridor,
  To my man-iron sidle.
  
  Beginning with doom in the bulb, the spring unravels,
  Bright as her spinning-wheels, the colic season
  Worked on a world of petals;
  She threads off the sap and needles, blood and bubble
  Casts to the pine roots, raising man like a mountain
  Out of the naked entrail.
  
  Beginning with doom in the ghost, and the springing marvels,
  Image of images, my metal phantom
  Forcing forth through the harebell,
  My man of leaves and the bronze root, mortal, unmortal,
  I, in my fusion of rose and male motion,
  Create this twin miracle.
  
  This is the fortune of manhood: the natural peril,
  A steeplejack tower, bonerailed and masterless,
  No death more natural;
  Thus the shadowless man or ox, and the pictured devil,
  In seizure of silence commit the dead nuisance.
  
  The natural parallel.
  
  My images stalk the trees and the slant sap's tunnel,
  No tread more perilous, the green steps and spire
  Mount on man's footfall,
  I with the wooden insect in the tree of nettles,
  In the glass bed of grapes with snail and flower,
  Hearing the weather fall.
  
  Intricate manhood of ending, the invalid rivals,
  Voyaging clockwise off the symboled harbour,
  Finding the water final,
  On the consumptives' terrace taking their two farewells,
  Sail on the level, the departing adventure,
  To the sea-blown arrival.
  
  II
  They climb the country pinnacle,
  Twelve winds encounter by the white host at pasture,
  Corner the mounted meadows in the hill corral;
  They see the squirrel stumble,
  The haring snail go giddily round the flower,
  A quarrel of weathers and trees in the windy spiral.
  
  As they dive, the dust settles,
  The cadaverous gravels, falls thick and steadily,
  The highroad of water where the seabear and mackerel
  Turn the long sea arterial
  Turning a petrol face blind to the enemy
  Turning the riderless dead by the channel wall.
  
  (Death instrumental,
  Splitting the long eye open, and the spiral turnkey,
  Your corkscrew grave centred in navel and nipple,
  The neck of the nostril,
  Under the mask and the ether, they making bloody
  The tray of knives, the antiseptic funeral;
  Bring out the black patrol,
  Your monstrous officers and the decaying army,
  The sexton sentinel, garrisoned under thistles,
  A cock-on-a-dunghill
  Crowing to Lazarus the morning is vanity,
  Dust be your saviour under the conjured soil.
  
  )
  As they drown, the chime travels,
  Sweetly the diver's bell in the steeple of spindrift
  Rings out the Dead Sea scale;
  And, clapped in water till the triton dangles,
  Strung by the flaxen whale-weed, from the hangman's raft,
  Hear they the salt glass breakers and the tongues of burial.
  
  (Turn the sea-spindle lateral,
  The grooved land rotating, that the stylus of lightning
  Dazzle this face of voices on the moon-turned table,
  Let the wax disk babble
  Shames and the damp dishonours, the relic scraping.
  
  These are your years' recorders.
  
  The circular world stands still.
  
  )
  III
  They suffer the undead water where the turtle nibbles,
  Come unto sea-stuck towers, at the fibre scaling,
  The flight of the carnal skull
  And the cell-stepped thimble;
  Suffer, my topsy-turvies, that a double angel
  Sprout from the stony lockers like a tree on Aran.
  
  Be by your one ghost pierced, his pointed ferrule,
  Brass and the bodiless image, on a stick of folly
  Star-set at Jacob's angle,
  Smoke hill and hophead's valley,
  And the five-fathomed Hamlet on his father's coral
  Thrusting the tom-thumb vision up the iron mile.
  
  Suffer the slash of vision by the fin-green stubble,
  Be by the ships' sea broken at the manstring anchored
  The stoved bones' voyage downward
  In the shipwreck of muscle;
  Give over, lovers, locking, and the seawax struggle,
  Love like a mist or fire through the bed of eels.
  
  And in the pincers of the boiling circle,
  The sea and instrument, nicked in the locks of time,
  My great blood's iron single
  In the pouring town,
  I, in a wind on fire, from green Adam's cradle,
  No man more magical, clawed out the crocodile.
  
  Man was the scales, the death birds on enamel,
  Tail, Nile, and snout, a saddler of the rushes,
  Time in the hourless houses
  Shaking the sea-hatched skull,
  And, as for oils and ointments on the flying grail,
  All-hollowed man wept for his white apparel.
  
  Man was Cadaver's masker, the harnessing mantle,
  Windily master of man was the rotten fathom,
  My ghost in his metal neptune
  Forged in man's mineral.
  
  This was the god of beginning in the intricate seawhirl,
  And my images roared and rose on heaven's hill.

• If I Were Tickled By The Rub Of Love Read Poem Log in to favourite

  If I were tickled by the rub of love,
  A rooking girl who stole me for her side,
  Broke through her straws, breaking my bandaged string,
  If the red tickle as the cattle calve
  Still set to scratch a laughter from my lung,
  I would not fear the apple nor the flood
  Nor the bad blood of spring.
  
  Shall it be male or female?
  
  say the cells,
  And drop the plum like fire from the flesh.
  
  If I were tickled by the hatching hair,
  The winging bone that sprouted in the heels,
  The itch of man upon the baby's thigh,
  I would not fear the gallows nor the axe
  Nor the crossed sticks of war.
  
  Shall it be male or female?
  
  say the fingers
  That chalk the walls with greet girls and their men.
  
  I would not fear the muscling-in of love
  If I were tickled by the urchin hungers
  Rehearsing heat upon a raw-edged nerve.
  
  I would not fear the devil in the loin
  Nor the outspoken grave.
  
  If I were tickled by the lovers' rub
  That wipes away not crow's-foot nor the lock
  Of sick old manhood on the fallen jaws,
  Time and the crabs and the sweethearting crib
  Would leave me cold as butter for the flies
  The sea of scums could drown me as it broke
  Dead on the sweethearts' toes.
  
  This world is half the devil's and my own,
  Daft with the drug that's smoking in a girl
  And curling round the bud that forks her eye.
  
  An old man's shank one-marrowed with my bone,
  And all the herrings smelling in the sea,
  I sit and watch the worm beneath my nail
  Wearing the quick away.
  
  And that's the rub, the only rub that tickles.
  
  The knobbly ape that swings along his sex
  From damp love-darkness and the nurse's twist
  Can never raise the midnight of a chuckle,
  Nor when he finds a beauty in the breast
  Of lover, mother, lovers, or his six
  Feet in the rubbing dust.
  
  And what's the rub?
  
  Death's feather on the nerve?
  
  Your mouth, my love, the thistle in the kiss?
  
  My Jack of Christ born thorny on the tree?
  
  The words of death are dryer than his stiff,
  My wordy wounds are printed with your hair.
  
  I would be tickled by the rub that is:
  Man be my metaphor.

• If my head hurt a hair's foot Read Poem Log in to favourite

  'If my head hurt a hair's foot
  Pack back the downed bone.
  
  If the unpricked ball of my breath
  Bump on a spout let the bubbles jump out.
  
  Sooner drop with the worm of the ropes round my throat
  Than bully ill love in the clouted scene.
  
  'All game phrases fit your ring of a cockfight:
  I'll comb the snared woods with a glove on a lamp,
  Peck, sprint, dance on fountains and duck time
  Before I rush in a crouch the ghost with a hammer, air,
  Strike light, and bloody a loud room.
  
  'If my bunched, monkey coming is cruel
  Rage me back to the making house.
  
  My hand unravel
  When you sew the deep door.
  
  The bed is a cross place.
  
  Bend, if my journey ache, direction like an arc or make
  A limp and riderless shape to leap nine thinning months.
  
  '
  'No.
  
  Not for Christ's dazzling bed
  Or a nacreous sleep among soft particles and charms
  My dear would I change my tears or your iron head.
  
  Thrust, my daughter or son, to escape, there is none, none, none,
  Nor when all ponderous heaven's host of waters breaks.
  
  'Now to awake husked of gestures and my joy like a cave
  To the anguish and carrion, to the infant forever unfree,
  O my lost love bounced from a good home;
  The grain that hurries this way from the rim of the grave
  Has a voice and a house, and there and here you must couch and cry.
  
  'Rest beyond choice in the dust-appointed grain,
  At the breast stored with seas.
  
  No return
  Through the waves of the fat streets nor the skeleton's thin ways.
  
  The grave and my calm body are shut to your coming as stone,
  And the endless beginning of prodigies suffers open.
  
  '

• In Country Sleep Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  Never and never, my girl riding far and near
  In the land of the hearthstone tales, and spelled asleep,
  Fear or believe that the wolf in a sheepwhite hood
  Loping and bleating roughly and blithely shall leap,
  My dear, my dear,
  Out of a lair in the flocked leaves in the dew dipped year
  To eat your heart in the house in the rosy wood.
  
  Sleep, good, for ever, slow and deep, spelled rare and wise,
  My girl ranging the night in the rose and shire
  Of the hobnail tales: no gooseherd or swine will turn
  Into a homestall king or hamlet of fire
  And prince of ice
  To court the honeyed heart from your side before sunrise
  In a spinney of ringed boys and ganders, spike and burn,
  Nor the innocent lie in the rooting dingle wooed
  And staved, and riven among plumes my rider weep.
  
  From the broomed witch's spume you are shielded by fern
  And flower of country sleep and the greenwood keep.
  
  Lie fast and soothed,
  Safe be and smooth from the bellows of the rushy brood.
  
  Never, my girl, until tolled to sleep by the stern
  Bell believe or fear that the rustic shade or spell
  Shall harrow and snow the blood while you ride wide and near,
  For who unmanningly haunts the mountain ravened eaves
  Or skulks in the dell moon but moonshine echoing clear
  From the starred well?
  
  A hill touches an angel.
  
  Out of a saint's cell
  The nightbird lauds through nunneries and domes of leaves
  Her robin breasted tree, three Marys in the rays.
  
  _Sanctum sanctorum_ the animal eye of the wood
  In the rain telling its beads, and the gravest ghost
  The owl at its knelling.
  
  Fox and holt kneel before blood.
  
  Now the tales praise
  The star rise at pasture and nightlong the fables graze
  On the lord's-table of the bowing grass.
  
  Fear most
  For ever of all not the wolf in his baaing hood
  Nor the tusked prince, in the ruttish farm, at the rind
  And mire of love, but the Thief as meek as the dew.
  
  The country is holy: O bide in that country kind,
  Know the green good,
  Under the prayer wheeling moon in the rosy wood
  Be shielded by chant and flower and gay may you
  Lie in grace.
  
  Sleep spelled at rest in the lowly house
  In the squirrel nimble grove, under linen and thatch
  And star: held and blessed, though you scour the high four
  Winds, from the dousing shade and the roarer at the latch,
  Cool in your vows.
  
  Yet out of the beaked, web dark and the pouncing boughs
  Be you sure the Thief will seek a way sly and sure
  And sly as snow and meek as dew blown to the thorn,
  This night and each vast night until the stern bell talks
  In the tower and tolls to sleep over the stalls
  Of the hearthstone tales my own, lost love; and the soul walks
  The waters shorn.
  
  This night and each night since the falling star you were born,
  Ever and ever he finds a way, as the snow falls,
  As the rain falls, hail on the fleece, as the vale mist rides
  Through the haygold stalls, as the dew falls on the wind-
  Milled dust of the apple tree and the pounded islands
  Of the morning leaves, as the star falls, as the winged
  Apple seed glides,
  And falls, and flowers in the yawning wound at our sides,
  As the world falls, silent as the cyclone of silence.
  
  II
  Night and the reindeer on the clouds above the haycocks
  And the wings of the great roc ribboned for the fair!
  The leaping saga of prayer! And high, there, on the hare-
  Heeled winds the rooks
  Cawing from their black bethels soaring, the holy books
  Of birds! Among the cocks like fire the red fox
  Burning! Night and the vein of birds in the winged, sloe wrist
  Of the wood! Pastoral beat of blood through the laced leaves!
  The stream from the priest black wristed spinney and sleeves
  Of thistling frost
  Of the nightingale's din and tale! The upgiven ghost
  Of the dingle torn to singing and the surpliced
  Hill of cypresses! The din and tale in the skimmed
  Yard of the buttermilk rain on the pail! The sermon
  Of blood! The bird loud vein! The saga from mermen
  To seraphim
  Leaping! The gospel rooks! All tell, this night, of him
  Who comes as red as the fox and sly as the heeled wind.
  
  Illumination of music! the lulled black-backed
  Gull, on the wave with sand in its eyes! And the foal moves
  Through the shaken greensward lake, silent, on moonshod hooves,
  In the winds' wakes.
  
  Music of elements, that a miracle makes!
  Earth, air, water, fire, singing into the white act,
  The haygold haired, my love asleep, and the rift blue
  Eyed, in the haloed house, in her rareness and hilly
  High riding, held and blessed and true, and so stilly
  Lying the sky
  Might cross its planets, the bell weep, night gather her eyes,
  The Thief fall on the dead like the willy nilly dew,
  Only for the turning of the earth in her holy
  Heart! Slyly, slowly, hearing the wound in her side go
  Round the sun, he comes to my love like the designed snow,
  And truly he
  Flows to the strand of flowers like the dew's ruly sea,
  And surely he sails like the ship shape clouds.
  
  Oh he
  Comes designed to my love to steal not her tide raking
  Wound, nor her riding high, nor her eyes, nor kindled hair,
  But her faith that each vast night and the saga of prayer
  He comes to take
  Her faith that this last night for his unsacred sake
  He comes to leave her in the lawless sun awaking
  Naked and forsaken to grieve he will not come.
  
  Ever and ever by all your vows believe and fear
  My dear this night he comes and night without end my dear
  Since you were born:
  And you shall wake, from country sleep, this dawn and each first dawn,
  Your faith as deathless as the outcry of the ruled sun.

• In My Craft Or Sullen Art Read Poem Log in to favourite

  In my craft or sullen art
  Exercised in the still night
  When only the moon rages
  And the lovers lie abed
  With all their griefs in their arms
  I labour by singing light
  Not for ambition or bread
  Or the strut and trade of charms
  On the ivory stages
  But for the common wages
  Of their most secret heart.
  
  Not for the proud man apart
  From the raging moon I write
  On these spindrift pages
  Nor for the towering dead
  With their nightingales and psalms
  But for the lovers, their arms
  Round the griefs of the ages,
  Who pay no praise or wages
  Nor heed my craft or art.

• In The Beginning Read Poem Log in to favourite

  In the beginning was the three-pointed star,
  One smile of light across the empty face,
  One bough of bone across the rooting air,
  The substance forked that marrowed the first sun,
  And, burning ciphers on the round of space,
  Heaven and hell mixed as they spun.
  
  In the beginning was the pale signature,
  Three-syllabled and starry as the smile,
  And after came the imprints on the water,
  Stamp of the minted face upon the moon;
  The blood that touched the crosstree and the grail
  Touched the first cloud and left a sign.
  
  In the beginning was the mounting fire
  That set alight the weathers from a spark,
  A three-eyed, red-eyed spark, blunt as a flower,
  Life rose and spouted from the rolling seas,
  Burst in the roots, pumped from the earth and rock
  The secret oils that drive the grass.
  
  In the beginning was the word, the word
  That from the solid bases of the light
  Abstracted all the letters of the void;
  And from the cloudy bases of the breath
  The word flowed up, translating to the heart
  First characters of birth and death.
  
  In the beginning was the secret brain.
  
  The brain was celled and soldered in the thought
  Before the pitch was forking to a sun;
  Before the veins were shaking in their sieve,
  Blood shot and scattered to the winds of light
  The ribbed original of love.

• In The White Giant's Thigh Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Through throats where many rivers meet, the curlews cry,
  Under the conceiving moon, on the high chalk hill,
  And there this night I walk in the white giant's thigh
  Where barren as boulders women lie longing still
  To labour and love though they lay down long ago.
  
  Through throats where many many rivers meet, the women pray,
  Pleading in the waded bay for the seed to flow
  Though the names on their weed grown stones are rained away,
  And alone in the night's eternal, curving act
  They yearn with tongues of curlews for the unconceived
  And immemorial sons of the cudgelling, hacked
  Hill.
  
  Who once in gooseskin winter loved all ice leaved
  In the courters' lanes, or twined in the ox roasting sun
  In the wains tonned so high that the wisps of the hay
  Clung to the pitching clouds, or gay with any one
  Young as they in the after milking moonlight lay
  Under the lighted shapes of faith and their moonshade
  Petticoats galed high, or shy with the rough riding boys,
  Now clasp me to their grains in the gigantic glade,
  Who once, green countries since, were a hedgerow of joys.
  
  Time by, their dust was flesh the swineherd rooted sly,
  Flared in the reek of the wiving sty with the rush
  Light of his thighs, spreadeagle to the dunghill sky,
  Or with their orchard man in the core of the sun's bush
  Rough as cows' tongues and thrashed with brambles their buttermilk
  Manes, under the quenchless summer barbed gold to the bone,
  Or rippling soft in the spinney moon as the silk
  And ducked and draked white lake that harps to a hail stone.
  
  Who once were a bloom of wayside brides in the hawed house
  And heard the lewd, wooed field flow to the coming frost,
  The scurrying, furred small friars squeal, in the dowse
  Of day, in the thistle aisles, till the white owl crossed
  Their breast, the vaulting does roister, the horned bucks climb
  Quick in the wood at love, where a torch of foxes foams,
  All birds and beasts of the linked night uproar and chime
  And the mole snout blunt under his pilgrimage of domes,
  Or, butter fat goosegirls, bounced in a gambo bed,
  Their breasts full of honey, under their gander king
  Trounced by his wings in the hissing shippen, long dead
  And gone that barley dark where their clogs danced in the spring,
  And their firefly hairpins flew, and the ricks ran round--
  (But nothing bore, no mouthing babe to the veined hives
  Hugged, and barren and bare on Mother Goose's ground
  They with the simple Jacks were a boulder of wives)--
  Now curlew cry me down to kiss the mouths of their dust.
  
  The dust of their kettles and clocks swings to and fro
  Where the hay rides now or the bracken kitchens rust
  As the arc of the billhooks that flashed the hedges low
  And cut the birds' boughs that the minstrel sap ran red.
  
  They from houses where the harvest kneels, hold me hard,
  Who heard the tall bell sail down the Sundays of the dead
  And the rain wring out its tongues on the faded yard,
  Teach me the love that is evergreen after the fall leaved
  Grave, after Belovéd on the grass gulfed cross is scrubbed
  Off by the sun and Daughters no longer grieved
  Save by their long desires in the fox cubbed
  Streets or hungering in the crumbled wood: to these
  Hale dead and deathless do the women of the hill
  Love for ever meridian through the courters' trees
  And the daughters of darkness flame like Fawkes fires still.

• Incarnate Devil Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Incarnate devil in a talking snake,
  The central plains of Asia in his garden,
  In shaping-time the circle stung awake,
  In shapes of sin forked out the bearded apple,
  And God walked there who was a fiddling warden
  And played down pardon from the heavens' hill.
  
  When we were strangers to the guided seas,
  A handmade moon half holy in a cloud,
  The wisemen tell me that the garden gods
  Twined good and evil on an eastern tree;
  And when the moon rose windily it was
  Black as the beast and paler than the cross.
  
  We in our Eden knew the secret guardian
  In sacred waters that no frost could harden,
  And in the mighty mornings of the earth;
  Hell in a horn of sulphur and the cloven myth,
  All heaven in the midnight of the sun,
  A serpent fiddled in the shaping-time.

• Into Her Lying Down Head Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  Into her lying down head
  His enemies entered bed,
  Under the encumbered eyelid,
  Through the rippled drum of the hair-buried ear;
  And Noah's rekindled now unkind dove
  Flew man-bearing there.
  
  Last night in a raping wave
  Whales unreined from the green grave
  In fountains of origin gave up their love,
  Along her innocence glided
  Jaun aflame and savagely young King Lear,
  Queen Catherine howling bare
  And Samson drowned in his hair,
  The colossal intimacies of silent
  Once seen strangers or shades on a stair;
  There the dark blade and wanton sighing her down
  To a haycock couch and the scythes of his arms
  Rode and whistled a hundred times
  Before the crowing morning climbed;
  Man was the burning England she was sleep-walking, and the enamouring island
  Made her limbs blind by luminous charms,
  Sleep to a newborn sleep in a swaddling loin-leaf stroked and sang
  And his runaway beloved childlike laid in the acorned sand.
  
  II
  There where a numberless tongue
  Wound their room with a male moan,
  His faith around her flew undone
  And darkness hung the walls with baskets of snakes,
  A furnace-nostrilled column-membered
  Super-or-near man
  Resembling to her dulled sense
  The thief of adolescence,
  Early imaginary half remembered
  Oceanic lover alone
  Jealousy cannot forget for all her sakes,
  Made his bad bed in her good
  Night, and enjoyed as he would.
  
  Crying, white gowned, from the middle moonlit stages
  Out to the tiered and hearing tide,
  Close and far she announced the theft of the heart
  In the taken body at many ages,
  Trespasser and broken bride
  Celebrating at her side
  All blood-signed assailing and vanished marriages in which he had no lovely part
  Nor could share, for his pride, to the least
  Mutter and foul wingbeat of the solemnizing nightpriest
  Her holy unholy hours with the always anonymous beast.
  
  III
  Two sand grains together in bed,
  Head to heaven-circling head,
  Singly lie with the whole wide shore,
  The covering sea their nightfall with no names;
  And out of every domed and soil-based shell
  One voice in chains declaims
  The female, deadly, and male
  Libidinous betrayal,
  Golden dissolving under the water veil.
  
  A she bird sleeping brittle by
  Her lover's wings that fold to-morrow's flight,
  Within the nested treefork
  Sings to the treading hawk
  Carrion, paradise, chirrup my bright yolk.
  
  A blade of grass longs with the meadow,
  A stone lies lost and locked in the lark-high hill.
  
  Open as to the air to the naked shadow
  O she lies alone and still,
  Innocent between two wars,
  With the incestuous secret brother in the seconds to perpetuate the stars,
  A man torn up mourns in the sole night.
  
  And the second comers, the severers, the enemies from the deep
  Forgotten dark, rest their pulse and bury their dead in her faithless sleep.

• It Is The Sinners' Dust-Tongued Bell Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It is the sinners' dust-tongued bell claps me to churches
  When, with his torch and hourglass, like a sulpher priest,
  His beast heel cleft in a sandal,
  Time marks a black aisle kindle from the brand of ashes,
  Grief with dishevelled hands tear out the altar ghost
  And a firewind kill the candle.
  
  Over the choir minute I hear the hour chant:
  Time's coral saint and the salt grief drown a foul sepulchre
  And a whirlpool drives the prayerwheel;
  Moonfall and sailing emperor, pale as their tide-print,
  Hear by death's accident the clocked and dashed-down spire
  Strike the sea hour through bellmetal.
  
  There is loud and dark directly under the dumb flame,
  Storm, snow, and fountain in the weather of fireworks,
  Cathedral calm in the pulled house;
  Grief with drenched book and candle christens the cherub time
  From the emerald, still bell; and from the pacing weather-cock
  The voice of bird on coral prays.
  
  Forever it is a white child in the dark-skinned summer
  Out of the font of bone and plants at that stone tocsin
  Scales the blue wall of spirits;
  From blank and leaking winter sails the child in colour,
  Shakes, in crabbed burial shawl, by sorcerer's insect woken,
  Ding dong from the mute turrets.
  
  I mean by time the cast and curfew rascal of our marriage,
  At nightbreak born in the fat side, from an animal bed
  In a holy room in a wave;
  And all love's sinners in sweet cloth kneel to a hyleg image,
  Nutmeg, civet, and sea-parsley serve the plagued groom and bride
  Who have brought forth the urchin grief.

• January 1939 Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Because the pleasure-bird whistles after the hot wires,
  Shall the blind horse sing sweeter?
  
  Convenient bird and beast lie lodged to suffer
  The supper and knives of a mood.
  
  In the sniffed and poured snow on the tip of the tongue of the year
  That clouts the spittle like bubbles with broken rooms,
  An enamoured man alone by the twigs of his eyes, two fires,
  Camped in the drug-white shower of nerves and food,
  Savours the lick of the times through a deadly wood of hair
  In a wind that plucked a goose,
  Nor ever, as the wild tongue breaks its tombs,
  Rounds to look at the red, wagged root.
  
  Because there stands, one story out of the bum city,
  That frozen wife whose juices drift like a fixed sea
  Secretly in statuary,
  Shall I, struck on the hot and rocking street,
  Not spin to stare at an old year
  Toppling and burning in the muddle of towers and galleries
  Like the mauled pictures of boys?
  
  The salt person and blasted place
  I furnish with the meat of a fable.
  
  If the dead starve, their stomachs turn to tumble
  An upright man in the antipodes
  Or spray-based and rock-chested sea:
  Over the past table I repeat this present grace.

• Johnnie Crack And Flossie Snail Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
  Kept their baby in a milking pail
  Flossie Snail and Johnnie Crack
  One would pull it out and one would put it back.
  
  O it's my turn now said Flossie Snail
  To take the baby from the milking pail
  And it's my turn now said Johnnie Crack
  To smack it on the head and put it back.
  
  Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
  Kept their baby in a milking pail
  One would put it back and one would pull it out
  And all it had to drink was ale and stout
  For Johnnie Crack and Flossie Snail
  Always use to say that stout and ale
  Was
  good
  for a baby in a milking pail.
  
  This poem is from Under Milk Wood.

• Lament Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When I was a windy boy and a bit
  And the black spit of the chapel fold,
  (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of women),
  I tiptoed shy in the gooseberry wood,
  The rude owl cried like a tell-tale tit,
  I skipped in a blush as the big girls rolled
  Nine-pin down on donkey's common,
  And on seesaw sunday nights I wooed
  Whoever I would with my wicked eyes,
  The whole of the moon I could love and leave
  All the green leaved little weddings' wives
  In the coal black bush and let them grieve.
  
  When I was a gusty man and a half
  And the black beast of the beetles' pews
  (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of bitches),
  Not a boy and a bit in the wick-
  Dipping moon and drunk as a new dropped calf,
  I whistled all night in the twisted flues,
  Midwives grew in the midnight ditches,
  And the sizzling sheets of the town cried, Quick!-
  Whenever I dove in a breast high shoal,
  Wherever I ramped in the clover quilts,
  Whatsoever I did in the coal-
  Black night, I left my quivering prints.
  
  When I was a man you could call a man
  And the black cross of the holy house,
  (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of welcome),
  Brandy and ripe in my bright, bass prime,
  No springtailed tom in the red hot town
  With every simmering woman his mouse
  But a hillocky bull in the swelter
  Of summer come in his great good time
  To the sultry, biding herds, I said,
  Oh, time enough when the blood runs cold,
  And I lie down but to sleep in bed,
  For my sulking, skulking, coal black soul!
  When I was half the man I was
  And serve me right as the preachers warn,
  (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of downfall),
  No flailing calf or cat in a flame
  Or hickory bull in milky grass
  But a black sheep with a crumpled horn,
  At last the soul from its foul mousehole
  Slunk pouting out when the limp time came;
  And I gave my soul a blind, slashed eye,
  Gristle and rind, and a roarers' life,
  And I shoved it into the coal black sky
  To find a woman's soul for a wife.
  
  Now I am a man no more no more
  And a black reward for a roaring life,
  (Sighed the old ram rod, dying of strangers),
  Tidy and cursed in my dove cooed room
  I lie down thin and hear the good bells jaw—
  For, oh, my soul found a sunday wife
  In the coal black sky and she bore angels!
  Harpies around me out of her womb!
  Chastity prays for me, piety sings,
  Innocence sweetens my last black breath,
  Modesty hides my thighs in her wings,
  And all the deadly virtues plague my death!

• Lie Still, Sleep Becalmed Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Lie still, sleep becalmed, sufferer with the wound
  In the throat, burning and turning.
  
  All night afloat
  On the silent sea we have heard the sound
  That came from the wound wrapped in the salt sheet.
  
  Under the mile off moon we trembled listening
  To the sea sound flowing like blood from the loud wound
  And when the salt sheet broke in a storm of singing
  The voices of all the drowned swam on the wind.
  
  Open a pathway through the slow sad sail,
  Throw wide to the wind the gates of the wandering boat
  For my voyage to begin to the end of my wound,
  We heard the sea sound sing, we saw the salt sheet tell.
  
  Lie still, sleep becalmed, hide the mouth in the throat,
  Or we shall obey, and ride with you through the drowned.

• Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Light breaks where no sun shines;
  Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
  Push in their tides;
  And, broken ghosts with glowworms in their heads,
  The things of light
  File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
  
  A candle in the thighs
  Warms youth and seed and burns the seeds of age;
  Where no seed stirs,
  The fruit of man unwrinkles in the stars,
  Bright as a fig;
  Where no wax is, the candle shows its hairs.
  
  Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
  From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
  Slides like a sea;
  Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
  Spout to the rod
  Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
  
  Night in the sockets rounds,
  Like some pitch moon, the limit of the globes;
  Day lights the bone;
  Where no cold is, the skinning gales unpin
  The winter's robes;
  The film of spring is hanging from the lids.
  
  Light breaks on secret lots,
  On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
  When logics die,
  The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
  And blood jumps in the sun;
  Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.

• Limerick Read Poem Log in to favourite

  There was an old bugger called God,
  who got a young virgin in pod.
  
  This disgraceful behaviour
  begot Christ our Saviour,
  who was nailed to a cross, poor old sod.

• Love In The Asylum Read Poem Log in to favourite

  A stranger has come
  To share my room in the house not right in the head,
  A girl mad as birds
  Bolting the night of the door with her arm her plume.
  
  Strait in the mazed bed
  She deludes the heaven-proof house with entering clouds
  Yet she deludes with walking the nightmarish room,
  At large as the dead,
  Or rides the imagined oceans of the male wards.
  
  She has come possessed
  Who admits the delusive light through the bouncing wall,
  Possessed by the skies
  She sleeps in the narrow trough yet she walks the dust
  Yet raves at her will
  On the madhouse boards worn thin by my walking tears.
  
  And taken by light in her arms at long and dear last
  I may without fail
  Suffer the first vision that set fire to the stars.

• My Hero Bares His Nerves Read Poem Log in to favourite

  My hero bares his nerves along my wrist
  That rules from wrist to shoulder,
  Unpacks the head that, like a sleepy ghost,
  Leans on my mortal ruler,
  The proud spine spurning turn and twist.
  
  And these poor nerves so wired to the skull
  Ache on the lovelorn paper
  I hug to love with my unruly scrawl
  That utters all love hunger
  And tells the page the empty ill.
  
  My hero bares my side and sees his heart
  Tread; like a naked Venus,
  The beach of flesh, and wind her bloodred plait;
  Stripping my loin of promise,
  He promises a secret heat.
  
  He holds the wire from this box of nerves
  Praising the mortal error
  Of birth and death, the two sad knaves of thieves,
  And the hunger's emperor;
  He pulls that chain, the cistern moves.

• My World Is Pyramid Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  Half of the fellow father as he doubles
  His sea-sucked Adam in the hollow hulk,
  Half of the fellow mother as she dabbles
  To-morrow's diver in her horny milk,
  Bisected shadows on the thunder's bone
  Bolt for the salt unborn.
  
  The fellow half was frozen as it bubbled
  Corrosive spring out of the iceberg's crop,
  The fellow seed and shadow as it babbled
  The swing of milk was tufted in the pap,
  For half of love was planted in the lost,
  And the unplanted ghost.
  
  The broken halves are fellowed in a cripple,
  The crutch that marrow taps upon their sleep,
  Limp in the street of sea, among the rabble
  Of tide-tongued heads and bladders in the deep,
  And stake the sleepers in the savage grave
  That the vampire laugh.
  
  The patchwork halves were cloven as they scudded
  The wild pigs' wood, and slime upon the trees,
  Sucking the dark, kissed on the cyanide,
  And loosed the braiding adders from their hairs,
  Rotating halves are horning as they drill
  The arterial angel.
  
  What colour is glory?
  
  death's feather?
  
  tremble
  The halves that pierce the pin's point in the air,
  And prick the thumb-stained heaven through the thimble.
  
  The ghost is dumb that stammered in the straw,
  The ghost that hatched his havoc as he flew
  Blinds their cloud-tracking eye.
  
  II
  My world is pyramid.
  
  The padded mummer
  Weeps on the desert ochre and the salt
  Incising summer.
  
  My Egypt's armour buckling in its sheet,
  I scrape through resin to a starry bone
  And a blood parhelion.
  
  My world is cypress, and an English valley.
  
  I piece my flesh that rattled on the yards
  Red in an Austrian volley.
  
  I hear, through dead men's drums, the riddled lads,
  Screwing their bowels from a hill of bones,
  Cry Eloi to the guns.
  
  My grave is watered by the crossing Jordan.
  
  The Arctic scut, and basin of the South,
  Drip on my dead house garden.
  
  Who seek me landward, marking in my mouth
  The straws of Asia, lose me as I turn
  Through the Atlantic corn.
  
  The fellow halves that, cloven as they swivel
  On casting tides, are tangled in the shells,
  Bearding the unborn devil,
  Bleed from my burning fork and smell my heels.
  
  The tongue's of heaven gossip as I glide
  Binding my angel's hood.
  
  Who blows death's feather?
  
  What glory is colour?
  
  I blow the stammel feather in the vein.
  
  The loin is glory in a working pallor.
  
  My clay unsuckled and my salt unborn,
  The secret child, I sift about the sea
  Dry in the half-tracked thigh.

• Not From This Anger Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Not from this anger, anticlimax after
  Refusal struck her loin and the lame flower
  Bent like a beast to lap the singular floods
  In a land strapped by hunger
  Shall she receive a bellyful of weeds
  And bear those tendril hands I touch across
  The agonized, two seas.
  
  Behind my head a square of sky sags over
  The circular smile tossed from lover to lover
  And the golden ball spins out of the skies;
  Not from this anger after
  Refusal struck like a bell under water
  Shall her smile breed that mouth, behind the mirror,
  That burns along my eyes.

• Notes On The Art Of Poetry Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I could never have dreamt that there were such goings-on
  in the world between the covers of books,
  such sandstorms and ice blasts of words,,,
  such staggering peace, such enormous laughter,
  such and so many blinding bright lights,, ,
  splashing all over the pages
  in a million bits and pieces
  all of which were words, words, words,
  and each of which were alive forever
  in its own delight and glory and oddity and light.

• Now Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Now
  Say nay,
  Man dry man,
  Dry lover mine
  The deadrock base and blow the flowered anchor,
  Should he, for centre sake, hop in the dust,
  Forsake, the fool, the hardiness of anger.
  
  Now
  Say nay,
  Sir no say,
  Death to the yes,
  the yes to death, the yesman and the answer,
  Should he who split his children with a cure
  Have brotherless his sister on the handsaw.
  
  Now
  Say nay,
  No say sir
  Yea the dead stir,
  And this, nor this, is shade, the landed crow,
  He lying low with ruin in his ear,
  The cockrel's tide upcasting from the fire.
  
  Now
  Say nay,
  So star fall,
  So the ball fail,
  So solve the mystic sun, the wife of light,
  The sun that leaps on petals through a nought,
  the come-a-cropper rider of the flower.
  
  Now
  Say nay
  A fig for
  The seal of fire,
  Death hairy-heeled and the tapped ghost in wood,
  We make me mystic as the arm of air,
  The two-a-vein, the foreskin, and the cloud.

• O Make Me A Mask Read Poem Log in to favourite

  O make me a mask and a wall to shut from your spies
  Of the sharp, enamelled eyes and the spectacled claws
  Rape and rebellion in the nurseries of my face,
  Gag of dumbstruck tree to block from bare enemies
  The bayonet tongue in this undefended prayerpiece,
  The present mouth, and the sweetly blown trumpet of lies,
  Shaped in old armour and oak the countenance of a dunce
  To shield the glistening brain and blunt the examiners,
  And a tear-stained widower grief drooped from the lashes
  To veil belladonna and let the dry eyes perceive
  Others betray the lamenting lies of their losses
  By the curve of the nude mouth or the laugh up the sleeve.

• On A Wedding Anniversary Read Poem Log in to favourite

  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 rain
  They come together whom their love parted:
  The windows pour into their heart
  And the doors burn in their brain.

• On No Work Of Words Read Poem Log in to favourite

  On no work of words now for three lean months in the
  bloody
  Belly of the rich year and the big purse of my body
  I bitterly take to task my poverty and craft:
  To take to give is all, return what is hungrily given
  Puffing the pounds of manna up through the dew to heaven,
  The lovely gift of the gab bangs back on a blind shaft.
  
  To lift to leave from treasures of man is pleasing death
  That will rake at last all currencies of the marked breath
  And count the taken, forsaken mysteries in a bad dark.
  
  To surrender now is to pay the expensive ogre twice.
  
  Ancient woods of my blood, dash down to the nut of the seas
  If I take to burn or return this world which is each man's
  work.

• On The Marriage Of A Virgin Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Waking alone in a multitude of loves when morning's light
  Surprised in the opening of her nightlong eyes
  His golden yesterday asleep upon the iris
  And this day's sun leapt up the sky out of her thighs
  Was miraculous virginity old as loaves and fishes,
  Though the moment of a miracle is unending lightning
  And the shipyards of Galilee's footprints hide a navy of doves.
  
  No longer will the vibrations of the sun desire on
  Her deepsea pillow where once she married alone,
  Her heart all ears and eyes, lips catching the avalanche
  Of the golden ghost who ringed with his streams her mercury bone,
  Who under the lids of her windows hoisted his golden luggage,
  For a man sleeps where fire leapt down and she learns through his arm
  That other sun, the jealous coursing of the unrivalled blood.

• Once Below A Time Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  Once below a time,
  When my pinned-around-the-spirit
  Cut-to-measure flesh bit,
  Suit for a serial sum
  On the first of each hardship,
  My paid-for slaved-for own too late
  In love torn breeches and blistered jacket
  On the snapping rims of the ashpit,
  In grottoes I worked with birds,
  Spiked with a mastiff collar,
  Tasselled in cellar and snipping shop
  Or decked on a cloud swallower,
  Then swift from a bursting sea with bottlecork boats
  And out-of-perspective sailors,
  In common clay clothes disguised as scales,
  As a he-god's paddling water skirts,
  I astounded the sitting tailors,
  I set back the clock faced tailors,
  Then, bushily swanked in bear wig and tails,
  Hopping hot leaved and feathered
  From the kangaroo foot of the earth,
  From the chill, silent centre
  Trailing the frost bitten cloth,
  Up through the lubber crust of Wales
  I rocketed to astonish
  The flashing needle rock of squatters,
  The criers of Shabby and Shorten,
  The famous stitch droppers.
  
  II
  My silly suit, hardly yet suffered for,
  Around some coffin carrying
  Birdman or told ghost I hung.
  
  And the owl hood, the heel hider,
  Claw fold and hole for the rotten
  Head, deceived, I believed, my maker,
  The cloud perched tailors' master with nerves for cotton.
  
  On the old seas from stories, thrashing my wings,
  Combing with antlers, Columbus on fire,
  I was pierced by the idol tailor's eyes,
  Glared through shark mask and navigating head,
  Cold Nansen's beak on a boat full of gongs,
  To the boy of common thread,
  The bright pretender, the ridiculous sea dandy
  With dry flesh and earth for adorning and bed.
  
  It was sweet to drown in the readymade handy water
  With my cherry capped dangler green as seaweed
  Summoning a child's voice from a webfoot stone,
  Never never oh never to regret the bugle I wore
  On my cleaving arm as I blasted in a wave.
  
  Now shown and mostly bare I would lie down,
  Lie down, lie down and live
  As quiet as a bone.

• Once It Was The Colour Of Saying Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Once it was the colour of saying
  Soaked my table the uglier side of a hill
  With a capsized field where a school sat still
  And a black and white patch of girls grew playing;
  The gentle seaslides of saying I must undo
  That all the charmingly drowned arise to cockcrow and kill.
  
  When I whistled with mitching boys through a reservoir park
  Where at night we stoned the cold and cuckoo
  Lovers in the dirt of their leafy beds,
  The shade of their trees was a word of many shades
  And a lamp of lightning for the poor in the dark;
  Now my saying shall be my undoing,
  And every stone I wind off like a reel.

• Our Eunuch Dreams Read Poem Log in to favourite

  I
  Our eunuch dreams, all seedless in the light,
  Of light and love the tempers of the heart,
  Whack their boys' limbs,
  And, winding-footed in their shawl and sheet,
  Groom the dark brides, the widows of the night
  Fold in their arms.
  
  The shades of girls, all flavoured from their shrouds,
  When sunlight goes are sundered from the worm,
  The bones of men, the broken in their beds,
  By midnight pulleys that unhouse the tomb.
  
  II
  In this our age the gunman and his moll
  Two one-dimensional ghosts, love on a reel,
  Strange to our solid eye,
  And speak their midnight nothings as they swell;
  When cameras shut they hurry to their hole
  down in the yard of day.
  
  They dance between their arclamps and our skull,
  Impose their shots, showing the nights away;
  We watch the show of shadows kiss or kill
  Flavoured of celluloid give love the lie.
  
  III
  Which is the world?
  
  Of our two sleepings, which
  Shall fall awake when cures and their itch
  Raise up this red-eyed earth?
  
  Pack off the shapes of daylight and their starch,
  The sunny gentlemen, the Welshing rich,
  Or drive the night-geared forth.
  
  The photograph is married to the eye,
  Grafts on its bride one-sided skins of truth;
  The dream has sucked the sleeper of his faith
  That shrouded men might marrow as they fly.
  
  IV
  This is the world; the lying likeness of
  Our strips of stuff that tatter as we move
  Loving and being loth;
  The dream that kicks the buried from their sack
  And lets their trash be honoured as the quick.
  
  This is the world.
  
  Have faith.
  
  For we shall be a shouter like the cock,
  Blowing the old dead back; our shots shall smack
  The image from the plates;
  And we shall be fit fellows for a life,
  And who remains shall flower as they love,
  Praise to our faring hearts.

• Out Of The Sighs Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Out of the sighs a little comes,
  But not of grief, for I have knocked down that
  Before the agony; the spirit grows,
  Forgets, and cries;
  A little comes, is tasted and found good;
  All could not disappoint;
  There must, be praised, some certainty,
  If not of loving well, then not,
  And that is true after perpetual defeat.
  
  After such fighting as the weakest know,
  There's more than dying;
  Lose the great pains or stuff the wound,
  He'll ache too long
  Through no regret of leaving woman waiting
  For her soldier stained with spilt words
  That spill such acrid blood.
  
  Were that enough, enough to ease the pain,
  Feeling regret when this is wasted
  That made me happy in the sun,
  How much was happy while it lasted,
  Were vagueness enough and the sweet lies plenty,
  The hollow words could bear all suffering
  And cure me of ills.
  
  Were that enough, bone, blood, and sinew,
  The twisted brain, the fair-formed loin,
  Groping for matter under the dog's plate,
  Man should be cured of distemper.
  
  For all there is to give I offer:
  Crumbs, barn, and halter.

• Over Sir John's Hill Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Over Sir John's hill,
  The hawk on fire hangs still;
  In a hoisted cloud, at drop of dusk, he pulls to his claws
  And gallows, up the rays of his eyes the small birds of the bay
  And the shrill child's play
  Wars
  Of the sparrows and such who swansing, dusk, in wrangling hedges.
  
  And blithely they squawk
  To fiery tyburn over the wrestle of elms until
  The flash the noosed hawk
  Crashes, and slowly the fishing holy stalking heron
  In the river Towy below bows his tilted headstone.
  
  Flash, and the plumes crack,
  And a black cap of jack-
  Daws Sir John's just hill dons, and again the gulled birds hare
  To the hawk on fire, the halter height, over Towy's fins,
  In a whack of wind.
  
  There
  Where the elegiac fisherbird stabs and paddles
  In the pebbly dab-filled
  Shallow and sedge, and 'dilly dilly,' calls the loft hawk,
  'Come and be killed,'
  I open the leaves of the water at a passage
  Of psalms and shadows among the pincered sandcrabs prancing
  And read, in a shell
  Death clear as a bouy's bell:
  All praise of the hawk on fire in hawk-eyed dusk be sung,
  When his viperish fuse hangs looped with flames under the brand
  Wing, and blest shall
  Young
  Green chickens of the bay and bushes cluck, 'dilly dilly,
  Come let us die.
  
  '
  We grieve as the blithe birds, never again, leave shingle and elm,
  The heron and I,
  I young Aesop fabling to the near night by the dingle
  Of eels, saint heron hymning in the shell-hung distant
  Crystal harbour vale
  Where the sea cobbles sail,
  And wharves of water where the walls dance and the white cranes stilt.
  
  It is the heron and I, under judging Sir John's elmed
  Hill, tell-tale the knelled
  Guilt
  Of the led-astray birds whom God, for their breast of whistles,
  Have Mercy on,
  God in his whirlwind silence save, who marks the sparrows hail,
  For their souls' song.
  
  Now the heron grieves in the weeded verge.
  
  Through windows
  Of dusk and water I see the tilting whispering
  Heron, mirrored, go,
  As the snapt feathers snow,
  Fishing in the tear of the Towy.
  
  Only a hoot owl
  Hollows, a grassblade blown in cupped hands, in the looted elms
  And no green cocks or hens
  Shout
  Now on Sir John's hill.
  
  The heron, ankling the scaly
  Lowlands of the waves,
  Makes all the music; and I who hear the tune of the slow,
  Wear-willow river, grave,
  Before the lunge of the night, the notes on this time-shaken
  Stone for the sake of the souls of the slain birds sailing.

• Poem In October Read Poem Log in to favourite

  It was my thirtieth year to heaven
  Woke to my hearing from harbour and neighbour wood
  And the mussel pooled and the heron
  Priested shore
  The morning beckon
  With water praying and call of seagull and rook
  And the knock of sailing boats on the net webbed wall
  Myself to set foot
  That second
  In the still sleeping town and set forth.
  
  My birthday began with the water-
  Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
  Above the farms and the white horses
  And I rose
  In rainy autumn
  And walked abroad in a shower of all my days.
  
  High tide and the heron dived when I took the road
  Over the border
  And the gates
  Of the town closed as the town awoke.
  
  A springful of larks in a rolling
  Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming with whistling
  Blackbirds and the sun of October
  Summery
  On the hill's shoulder,
  Here were fond climates and sweet singers suddenly
  Come in the morning where I wandered and listened
  To the rain wringing
  Wind blow cold
  In the wood faraway under me.
  
  Pale rain over the dwindling harbour
  And over the sea wet church the size of a snail
  With its horns through mist and the castle
  Brown as owls
  But all the gardens
  Of spring and summer were blooming in the tall tales
  Beyond the border and under the lark full cloud.
  
  There could I marvel
  My birthday
  Away but the weather turned around.
  
  It turned away from the blithe country
  And down the other air and the blue altered sky
  Streamed again a wonder of summer
  With apples
  Pears and red currants
  And I saw in the turning so clearly a child's
  Forgotten mornings when he walked with his mother
  Through the parables
  Of sun light
  And the legends of the green chapels
  And the twice told fields of infancy
  That his tears burned my cheeks and his heart moved in mine.
  
  These were the woods the river and sea
  Where a boy
  In the listening
  Summertime of the dead whispered the truth of his joy
  To the trees and the stones and the fish in the tide.
  
  And the mystery
  Sang alive
  Still in the water and singingbirds.
  
  And there could I marvel my birthday
  Away but the weather turned around.
  
  And the true
  Joy of the long dead child sang burning
  In the sun.
  
  It was my thirtieth
  Year to heaven stood there then in the summer noon
  Though the town below lay leaved with October blood.
  
  O may my heart's truth
  Still be sung
  On this high hill in a year's turning.

• Poem On His Birthday Read Poem Log in to favourite

  In the mustardseed sun,
  By full tilt river and switchback sea
  Where the cormorants scud,
  In his house on stilts high among beaks
  And palavers of birds
  This sandgrain day in the bent bay's grave
  He celebrates and spurns
  His driftwood thirty-fifth wind turned age;
  Herons spire and spear.
  
  Under and round him go
  Flounders, gulls, on their cold, dying trails,
  Doing what they are told,
  Curlews aloud in the congered waves
  Work at their ways to death,
  And the rhymer in the long tongued room,
  Who tolls his birthday bell,
  Toesl towards the ambush of his wounds;
  Herons, stepple stemmed, bless.
  
  In the thistledown fall,
  He sings towards anguish; finches fly
  In the claw tracks of hawks
  On a seizing sky; small fishes glide
  Through wynds and shells of drowned
  Ship towns to pastures of otters.
  
  He
  In his slant, racking house
  And the hewn coils of his trade perceives
  Herons walk in their shroud,
  The livelong river's robe
  Of minnows wreathing around their prayer;
  And far at sea he knows,
  Who slaves to his crouched, eternal end
  Under a serpent cloud,
  Dolphins dyive in their turnturtle dust,
  The rippled seals streak down
  To kill and their own tide daubing blood
  Slides good in the sleek mouth.
  
  In a cavernous, swung
  Wave's silence, wept white angelus knells.
  
  Thirty-five bells sing struck
  On skull and scar where his lovews lie wrecked,
  Steered by the falling stars.
  
  And to-morrow weeps in a blind cage
  Terror will rage apart
  Before chains break to a hammer flame
  And love unbolts the dark
  And freely he goes lost
  In the unknown, famous light of great
  And fabulous, dear God.
  
  Dark is a way and light is a place,
  Heaven that never was
  Nor will be ever is always true,
  And, in that brambled void,
  Plenty as blackberries in the woods
  The dead grow for His joy.
  
  There he might wander bare
  With the spirits of the horseshoe bay
  Or the stars' seashore dead,
  Marrow of eagles, the roots of whales
  And wishbones of wild geese,
  With blessed, unborn God and His Ghost,
  And every soul His priest,
  Gulled and chanter in Young Heaven's fold
  Be at cloud quaking peace,
  But dark is a long way.
  
  He, on the earth of the night, alone
  With all the living, prays,
  Who knows the rocketing wind will blow
  The bones out of the hills,
  And the scythed boulders bleed, and the last
  Rage shattered waters kick
  Masts and fishes to the still quick starts,
  Faithlessly unto Him
  Who is the light of old
  And air shaped Heaven where souls grow wild
  As horses in the foam:
  Oh, let me midlife mourn by the shrined
  And druid herons' vows
  The voyage to ruin I must run,
  Dawn ships clouted aground,
  Yet, though I cry with tumbledown tongue,
  Count my blessings aloud:
  Four elements and five
  Senses, and man a spirit in love
  Thangling through this spun slime
  To his nimbus bell cool kingdom come
  And the lost, moonshine domes,
  And the sea that hides his secret selves
  Deep in its black, base bones,
  Lulling of spheres in the seashell flesh,
  And this last blessing most,
  That the closer I move
  To death, one man through his sundered hulks,
  The louder the sun blooms
  And the tusked, ramshackling sea exults;
  And every wave of the way
  And gale I tackle, the whole world then,
  With more triumphant faith
  That ever was since the world was said,
  Spins its morning of praise,
  I hear the bouncing hills
  Grow larked and greener at berry brown
  Fall and the dew larks sing
  Taller this thunderclap spring, and how
  More spanned with angles ride
  The mansouled fiery islands! Oh,
  Holier then their eyes,
  And my shining men no more alone
  As I sail out to die

• Prologue Read Poem Log in to favourite

  This day winding down now
  At God speeded summer's end
  In the torrent salmon sun,
  In my seashaken house
  On a breakneck of rocks
  Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
  Froth, flute, fin, and quill
  At a wood's dancing hoof,
  By scummed, starfish sands
  With their fishwife cross
  Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
  Out there, crow black, men
  Tackled with clouds, who kneel
  To the sunset nets,
  Geese nearly in heaven, boys
  Stabbing, and herons, and shells
  That speak seven seas,
  Eternal waters away
  From the cities of nine
  Days' night whose towers will catch
  In the religious wind
  Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
  At poor peace I sing
  To you strangers (though song
  Is a burning and crested act,
  The fire of birds in
  The world's turning wood,
  For my swan, splay sounds),
  Out of these seathumbed leaves
  That will fly and fall
  Like leaves of trees and as soon
  Crumble and undie
  Into the dogdayed night.
  
  Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
  And the dumb swans drub blue
  My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
  This rumpus of shapes
  For you to know
  How I, a spining man,
  Glory also this star, bird
  Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
  
  Hark: I trumpet the place,
  From fish to jumping hill! Look:
  I build my bellowing ark
  To the best of my love
  As the flood begins,
  Out of the fountainhead
  Of fear, rage read, manalive,
  Molten and mountainous to stream
  Over the wound asleep
  Sheep white hollow farms
  To Wales in my arms.
  
  Hoo, there, in castle keep,
  You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
  The flickering runs and dive
  The dingle furred deer dead!
  Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
  O my ruffled ring dove
  in the hooting, nearly dark
  With Welsh and reverent rook,
  Coo rooning the woods' praise,
  who moons her blue notes from her nest
  Down to the curlew herd!
  Ho, hullaballoing clan
  Agape, with woe
  In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
  Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
  Whisking hare! who
  Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
  Clangour as I hew and smite
  (A clash of anvils for my
  Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
  On a tongued puffball)
  But animals thick as thieves
  On God's rough tumbling grounds
  (Hail to His beasthood!).
  
  Beasts who sleep good and thin,
  Hist, in hogback woods! The haystacked
  Hollow farms in a throng
  Of waters cluck and cling,
  And barnroofs cockcrow war!
  O kingdom of neighbors finned
  Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
  Work ark and the moonshine
  Drinking Noah of the bay,
  With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
  Only the drowned deep bells
  Of sheep and churches noise
  Poor peace as the sun sets
  And dark shoals every holy field.
  
  We will ride out alone then,
  Under the stars of Wales,
  Cry, multitudes of arks! Across
  The water lidded lands,
  Manned with their loves they'll move
  Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
  
  Hulloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
  Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
  Tom tit and Dai mouse!
  My ark sings in the sun
  At God speeded summer's end
  And the flood flowers now.

• Shall gods be said to thump the clouds Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Shall gods be said to thump the clouds
  When clouds are cursed by thunder,
  Be said to weep when weather howls?
  
  Shall rainbows be their tunics' colour?
  
  When it is rain where are the gods?
  
  Shall it be said they sprinkle water
  From garden cans, or free the floods?
  
  Shall it be said that, venuswise,
  An old god's dugs are pressed and pricked,
  The wet night scolds me like a nurse?
  
  It shall be said that gods are stone.
  
  Shall a dropped stone drum on the ground,
  Flung gravel chime?
  
  Let the stones speak
  With tongues that talk all tongues.

• Should Lanterns Shine Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Should lanterns shine, the holy face,
  Caught in an octagon of unaccustomed light,
  Would wither up, an any boy of love
  Look twice before he fell from grace.
  
  The features in their private dark
  Are formed of flesh, but let the false day come
  And from her lips the faded pigments fall,
  The mummy cloths expose an ancient breast.
  
  I have been told to reason by the heart,
  But heart, like head, leads helplessly;
  I have been told to reason by the pulse,
  And, when it quickens, alter the actions' pace
  Till field and roof lie level and the same
  So fast I move defying time, the quiet gentleman
  Whose beard wags in Egyptian wind.
  
  I have heard may years of telling,
  And many years should see some change.
  
  The ball I threw while playing in the park
  Has not yet reached the ground.

• Sometimes The Sky's Too Bright Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Sometimes the sky's too bright,
  Or has too many clouds or birds,
  And far away's too sharp a sun
  To nourish thinking of him.
  
  Why is my hand too blunt
  To cut in front of me
  My horrid images for me,
  Of over-fruitful smiles,
  The weightless touching of the lip
  I wish to know
  I cannot lift, but can,
  The creature with the angel's face
  Who tells me hurt,
  And sees my body go
  Down into misery?
  
  No stopping.
  
  Put the smile
  Where tears have come to dry.
  
  The angel's hurt is left;
  His telling burns.
  
  Sometimes a woman's heart has salt,
  Or too much blood;
  I tear her breast,
  And see the blood is mine,
  Flowing from her, but mine,
  And then I think
  Perhaps the sky's too bright;
  And watch my hand,
  But do not follow it,
  And feel the pain it gives,
  But do not ache.

• The Conversation Of Prayer Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The conversation of prayers about to be said
  By the child going to bed and the man on the stairs
  Who climbs to his dying love in her high room,
  The one not caring to whom in his sleep he will move
  And the other full of tears that she will be dead,
  Turns in the dark on the sound they know will arise
  Into the answering skies from the green ground,
  From the man on the stairs and the child by his bed.
  
  The sound about to be said in the two prayers
  For the sleep in a safe land and the love who dies
  Will be the same grief flying.
  
  Whom shall they calm?
  
  Shall the child sleep unharmed or the man be crying?
  
  The conversation of prayers about to be said
  Turns on the quick and the dead, and the man on the stair
  To-night shall find no dying but alive and warm
  In the fire of his care his love in the high room.
  
  And the child not caring to whom he climbs his prayer
  Shall drown in a grief as deep as his made grave,
  And mark the dark eyed wave, through the eyes of sleep,
  Dragging him up the stairs to one who lies dead.

• The Force That Through The Green Fuse Drives The Flower Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
  Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
  Is my destroyer.
  
  And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
  My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
  
  The force that drives the water through the rocks
  Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
  Turns mine to wax.
  
  And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
  How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
  
  The hand that whirls the water in the pool
  Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
  Hauls my shroud sail.
  
  And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
  How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
  
  The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
  Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
  Shall calm her sores.
  
  And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
  How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
  
  And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
  How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.

• The Hand That Signed The Paper Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The hand that signed the paper felled a city;
  Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,
  Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;
  These five kings did a king to death.
  
  The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,
  The finger joints are cramped with chalk;
  A goose's quill has put an end to murder
  That put an end to talk.
  
  The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,
  And famine grew, and locusts came;
  Great is the hand that holds dominion over
  Man by a scribbled name.
  
  The five kings count the dead but do not soften
  The crusted wound nor pat the brow;
  A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;
  Hands have no tears to flow.

• The Hunchback In The Park Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The hunchback in the park
  A solitary mister
  Propped between trees and water
  From the opening of the garden lock
  That lets the trees and water enter
  Until the Sunday sombre bell at dark
  Eating bread from a newspaper
  Drinking water from the chained cup
  That the children filled with gravel
  In the fountain basin where I sailed my ship
  Slept at night in a dog kennel
  But nobody chained him up.
  
  Like the park birds he came early
  Like the water he sat down
  And Mister they called Hey mister
  The truant boys from the town
  Running when he had heard them clearly
  On out of sound
  Past lake and rockery
  Laughing when he shook his paper
  Hunchbacked in mockery
  Through the loud zoo of the willow groves
  Dodging the park keeper
  With his stick that picked up leaves.
  
  And the old dog sleeper
  Alone between nurses and swans
  While the boys among willows
  Made the tigers jump out of their eyes
  To roar on the rockery stones
  And the groves were blue with sailors
  Made all day until bell time
  A woman figure without fault
  Straight as a young elm
  Straight and tall from his crooked bones
  That she might stand in the night
  After the locks and chains
  All night in the unmade park
  After the railings and shrubberies
  The birds the grass the trees the lake
  And the wild boys innocent as strawberries
  Had followed the hunchback
  To his kennel in the dark.

• The Seed-At-Zero Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The seed-at-zero shall not storm
  That town of ghosts, the trodden womb,
  With her rampart to his tapping,
  No god-in-hero tumble down
  Like a tower on the town
  Dumbly and divinely stumbling
  Over the manwaging line.
  
  The seed-at-zero shall not storm
  That town of ghosts, the manwaged tomb
  With her rampart to his tapping,
  No god-in-hero tumble down
  Like a tower on the town
  Dumbly and divinely leaping
  Over the warbearing line.
  
  Through the rampart of the sky
  Shall the star-flanked seed be riddled,
  Manna for the rumbling ground,
  Quickening for the riddled sea;
  Settled on a virgin stronghold
  He shall grapple with the guard
  And the keeper of the key.
  
  May a humble village labour
  And a continent deny?
  
  A hemisphere may scold him
  And a green inch be his bearer;
  Let the hero seed find harbour,
  Seaports by a drunken shore
  Have their thirsty sailors hide him.
  
  May be a humble planet labour
  And a continent deny?
  
  A village green may scold him
  And a high sphere be his bearer;
  Let the hero seed find harbour,
  Seaports by a thirsty shore
  Have their drunken sailors hide him.
  
  Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,
  From the foreign fields of space,
  Shall not thunder on the town
  With a star-flanked garrison,
  Nor the cannons of his kingdom
  Shall the hero-in-tomorrow
  Range on the sky-scraping place.
  
  Man-in-seed, in seed-at-zero,
  From the star-flanked fields of space,
  Thunders on the foreign town
  With a sand-bagged garrison,
  Nor the cannons of his kingdom
  Shall the hero-in-to-morrow
  Range from the grave-groping place.

• The Tombstone Told When She Died Read Poem Log in to favourite

  The tombstone told when she died.
  
  Her two surnames stopped me still.
  
  A virgin married at rest.
  
  She married in this pouring place,
  That I struck one day by luck,
  Before I heard in my mother's side
  Or saw in the looking-glass shell
  The rain through her cold heart speak
  And the sun killed in her face.
  
  More the thick stone cannot tell.
  
  Before she lay on a stranger's bed
  With a hand plunged through her hair,
  Or that rainy tongue beat back
  Through the devilish years and innocent deaths
  To the room of a secret child,
  Among men later I heard it said
  She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare
  And her red lips were kissed black,
  She wept in her pain and made mouths,
  Talked and tore though her eyes smiled.
  
  I who saw in a hurried film
  Death and this mad heroine
  Meet once on a mortal wall
  Heard her speak through the chipped beak
  Of the stone bird guarding her:
  I died before bedtime came
  But my womb was bellowing
  And I felt with my bare fall
  A blazing red harsh head tear up
  And the dear floods of his hair.

• Then Was My Neophyte Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Then was my neophyte,
  Child in white blood bent on its knees
  Under the bell of rocks,
  Ducked in the twelve, disciple seas
  The winder of the water-clocks
  Calls a green day and night.
  
  My sea hermaphrodite,
  Snail of man in His ship of fires
  That burn the bitten decks,
  Knew all His horrible desires
  The climber of the water sex
  Calls the green rock of light.
  
  Who in these labyrinths,
  This tidethread and the lane of scales,
  Twine in a moon-blown shell,
  Escapes to the flat cities' sails
  Furled on the fishes' house and hell,
  Nor falls to His green myths?
  
  Stretch the salt photographs,
  The landscape grief, love in His oils
  Mirror from man to whale
  That the green child see like a grail
  Through veil and fin and fire and coil
  Time on the canvas paths.
  
  He films my vanity.
  
  Shot in the wind, by tilted arcs,
  Over the water come
  Children from homes and children's parks
  Who speak on a finger and thumb,
  And the masked, headless boy.
  
  His reels and mystery
  The winder of the clockwise scene
  Wound like a ball of lakes
  Then threw on that tide-hoisted screen
  Love's image till my heartbone breaks
  By a dramatic sea.
  
  Who kills my history?
  
  The year-hedged row is lame with flint,
  Blunt scythe and water blade.
  
  'Who could snap off the shapeless print
  From your to-morrow-treading shade
  With oracle for eye?
  
  '
  Time kills me terribly.
  
  'Time shall not murder you,' He said,
  'Nor the green nought be hurt;
  Who could hack out your unsucked heart,
  O green and unborn and undead?
  
  '
  I saw time murder me.

• There Was A Saviour Read Poem Log in to favourite

  There was a saviour
  Rarer than radium,
  Commoner than water, crueller than truth;
  Children kept from the sun
  Assembled at his tongue
  To hear the golden note turn in a groove,
  Prisoners of wishes locked their eyes
  In the jails and studies of his keyless smiles.
  
  The voice of children says
  From a lost wilderness
  There was calm to be done in his safe unrest,
  When hindering man hurt
  Man, animal, or bird
  We hid our fears in that murdering breath,
  Silence, silence to do, when earth grew loud,
  In lairs and asylums of the tremendous shout.
  
  There was glory to hear
  In the churches of his tears,
  Under his downy arm you sighed as he struck,
  O you who could not cry
  On to the ground when a man died
  Put a tear for joy in the unearthly flood
  And laid your cheek against a cloud-formed shell:
  Now in the dark there is only yourself and myself.
  
  Two proud, blacked brothers cry,
  Winter-locked side by side,
  To this inhospitable hollow year,
  O we who could not stir
  One lean sigh when we heard
  Greed on man beating near and fire neighbour
  But wailed and nested in the sky-blue wall
  Now break a giant tear for the little known fall,
  For the drooping of homes
  That did not nurse our bones,
  Brave deaths of only ones but never found,
  Now see, alone in us,
  Our own true strangers' dust
  Ride through the doors of our unentered house.
  
  Exiled in us we arouse the soft,
  Unclenched, armless, silk and rough love that breaks all rocks.

• This Bread I Break Read Poem Log in to favourite

  This bread I break was once the oat,
  This wine upon a foreign tree
  Plunged in its fruit;
  Man in the day or wine at night
  Laid the crops low, broke the grape's joy.
  
  Once in this time wine the summer blood
  Knocked in the flesh that decked the vine,
  Once in this bread
  The oat was merry in the wind;
  Man broke the sun, pulled the wind down.
  
  This flesh you break, this blood you let
  Make desolation in the vein,
  Were oat and grape
  Born of the sensual root and sap;
  My wine you drink, my bread you snap.

• This Side Of The Truth Read Poem Log in to favourite

  (for Llewelyn)
  This side of the truth,
  You may not see, my son,
  King of your blue eyes
  In the blinding country of youth,
  That all is undone,
  Under the unminding skies,
  Of innocence and guilt
  Before you move to make
  One gesture of the heart or head,
  Is gathered and spilt
  Into the winding dark
  Like the dust of the dead.
  
  Good and bad, two ways
  Of moving about your death
  By the grinding sea,
  King of your heart in the blind days,
  Blow away like breath,
  Go crying through you and me
  And the souls of all men
  Into the innocent
  Dark, and the guilty dark, and good
  Death, and bad death, and then
  In the last element
  Fly like the stars' blood
  Like the sun's tears,
  Like the moon's seed, rubbish
  And fire, the flying rant
  Of the sky, king of your six years.
  
  And the wicked wish,
  Down the beginning of plants
  And animals and birds,
  Water and Light, the earth and sky,
  Is cast before you move,
  And all your deeds and words,
  Each truth, each lie,
  Die in unjudging love.

• To Others Than You Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Friend by enemy I call you out.
  
  You with a bad coin in your socket,
  You my friend there with a winning air
  Who palmed the lie on me when you looked
  Brassily at my shyest secret,
  Enticed with twinkling bits of the eye
  Till the sweet tooth of my love bit dry,
  Rasped at last, and I stumbled and sucked,
  Whom now I conjure to stand as thief
  In the memory worked by mirrors,
  With unforgettably smiling act,
  Quickness of hand in the velvet glove
  And my whole heart under your hammer,
  Were once such a creature, so gay and frank
  A desireless familiar
  I never thought to utter or think
  While you displaced a truth in the air,
  That though I loved them for their faults
  As much as for their good,
  My friends were enemies on stilts
  With their heads in a cunning cloud.

• To-Day, This Insect Read Poem Log in to favourite

  To-day, this insect, and the world I breathe,
  Now that my symbols have outelbowed space,
  Time at the city spectacles, and half
  The dear, daft time I take to nudge the sentence,
  In trust and tale I have divided sense,
  Slapped down the guillotine, the blood-red double
  Of head and tail made witnesses to this
  Murder of Eden and green genesis.
  
  The insect certain is the plague of fables.
  
  This story's monster has a serpent caul,
  Blind in the coil scrams round the blazing outline,
  Measures his own length on the garden wall
  And breaks his shell in the last shocked beginning;
  A crocodile before the chrysalis,
  Before the fall from love the flying heartbone,
  Winged like a sabbath ass this children's piece
  Uncredited blows Jericho on Eden.
  
  The insect fable is the certain promise.
  
  Death: death of Hamlet and the nightmare madmen,
  An air-drawn windmill on a wooden horse,
  John's beast, Job's patience, and the fibs of vision,
  Greek in the Irish sea the ageless voice:
  'Adam I love, my madmen's love is endless,
  No tell-tale lover has an end more certain,
  All legends' sweethearts on a tree of stories,
  My cross of tales behind the fabulous curtain.
  
  '

• Twenty Four Years Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Twenty-four years remind the tears of my eyes.
  
  (Bury the dead for fear that they walk to the grave in labour.
  
  )
  In the groin of the natural doorway I crouched like a tailor
  Sewing a shroud for a journey
  By the light of the meat-eating sun.
  
  Dressed to die, the sensual strut begun,
  With my red veins full of money,
  In the final direction of the elementary town
  I advance as long as forever is.

• Unluckily For A Death Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Unluckily for a death
  Waiting with phoenix under
  The pyre yet to be lighted of my sins and days,
  And for the woman in shades
  Saint carved and sensual among the scudding
  Dead and gone, dedicate forever to my self
  Though the brawl of the kiss has not occurred
  On the clay cold mouth, on the fire
  Branded forehead, that could bind
  Her constant, nor the winds of love broken wide
  To the wind the choir and cloister
  Of the wintry nunnery of the order of lust
  Beneath my life, that sighs for the seducer's coming
  In the sun strokes of summer,
  Loving on this sea banged guilt
  My holy lucky body
  Under the cloud against love is caught and held and kissed
  In the mill of the midst
  Of the descending day, the dark our folly,
  Cut to the still star in the order of the quick
  But blessed by such heroic hosts in your every
  Inch and glance that the wound
  Is certain god, and the ceremony of souls
  Is celebrated there, and communion between suns.
  
  Never shall my self chant
  About the saint in shades while the endless breviary
  Turns of your prayed flesh, nor shall I shoo the bird below me:
  The death biding two lie lonely.
  
  I see the tigron in tears
  In the androgynous dark,
  His striped and noon maned tribe striding to holocaust,
  The she mules bear their minotaurs,
  The duck-billed platypus broody in a milk of birds.
  
  I see the wanting nun saint carved in a garb
  Of shades, symbol of desire beyond my hours
  And guilts, great crotch and giant
  Continence.
  
  I see the unfired phoenix, herald
  And heaven crier, arrow now of aspiring
  And the renouncing of islands.
  
  All love but for the full assemblage in flower
  Of the living flesh is monstrous or immortal,
  And the grave its daughters.
  
  Love, my fate got luckily,
  Teaches with no telling
  That the phoenix' bid for heaven and the desire after
  Death in the carved nunnery
  Both shall fail if I bow not to your blessing
  Nor walk in the cool of your mortal garden
  With immortality at my side like Christ the sky.
  
  This I know from the native
  Tongue of your translating eyes.
  
  The young stars told me,
  Hurling into beginning like Christ the child.
  
  Lucklessly she must lie patient
  And the vaulting bird be still.
  
  O my true love, hold me.
  
  In your every inch and glance is the globe of genesis spun,
  And the living earth your sons.
  
  Another poem from the pen of this long dead poet.
  
  Does it stand the text of time?

• Vision And Prayer Read Poem Log in to favourite

  i
  W h o
  A r e  y o u
  Who   is   born
  In   the   next   room
  So   loud    to   my   own
  That  I  can  hear  the  womb
  Opening   and    the    dark   run
  Over the ghost and the dropped son
  Behind  the  wall  thin as a wren’s bone ?
  
  In  the  birth  bloody  room  unknown
  To  the  burn  and  turn  of  time
  And  the  heart  print  of  man
  Bo w s   n o   b a p t i s m
  Bu t   d a r k   a l o n e
  Blessing       on
  The  wild
  Child.
  
  I
  Must   lie
  S t i l l  as  s t o n e
  By     the    wren     bone
  Wall     hearing     the     moan
  Of        the        mother        hidden
  And   the   shadowed   head   of   pain
  Casting     to-morrow     like     a     thorn
  And     the    midwives    of    miracle     sing
  Until      the      turbulent      new      born
  Burns  me  his  name  and  his  flame
  And  the  winged  wall  is  torn
  By     his     torrid      crown
  And  the  dark  thrown
  From     his     loin
  T o    b r i g h t
  L i g h t.
  
  W h e n
  T h e    w r e n
  Bone writhes down
  And    the    first    dawn
  Furied     by     his     stream
  Swarms  on  the  kingdom come
  Of      the      dazzler      of      heaven
  And   the   splashed   mothering   maiden
  Who    bore    him     with     a     bonfire    in
  His mouth and rocked him like a storm
  I   shall     run     lost     in    sudden
  Terror     and     shining     from
  The    once    hooded    room
  C r y i n g     i n     v a i n
  I n  the  c a u l d r o n
  O  f          h  i  s
  K i s s
  I n
  T h e    s p i n
  O f      t h e     s u n
  I n     t h e     s p u m i n g
  Cyclone      of      his      wing
  For    I     was     lost     who     am
  Crying  at  the  man  drenched  throne
  In     the     first     fury    of    his    stream
  A n d  t h e  l i g h t n i n g s  o f  a d o r a t i o n
  Back  to  black  silence  melt  and  mourn
  For   I   was   lost   who   have   come
  To       dumbfounding       haven
  And     the     finding     one
  And    the    high    noon
  Of      his      wound
  Blinds         my
  C r y.
  
  T h e r e
  Crouched bare
  I n   t h e   s h r i n e
  O f      h i s      b l a z i n g
  B r e a s t   I   s h a l l   w a k e n
  To     the     judge     blown     bedlam
  Of       the       uncaged       sea       bottom
  The   cloud    climb   of    the    exhaling    tomb
  And      the      bidden      dust      upsailing
  With    his    flame    in   every   grain.
  
  O       spiral       of       ascension
  From   the   vultured    urn
  Of      the      morning
  Of   man   when
  The     land
  And
  T h e
  B o r n    s e a
  Praised    the    sun
  T h e   fi n d i n g   o n e
  A n d    u p r i g h t    A d a m
  S a n g        u p o n        o r i g i n !
  O    the    wings     of     the    children!
  The   woundward   flight   of   the   ancient
  Young    from    the    canyons    of    oblivion!
  The   sky   stride    of    the   always   slain
  In        battle!        the        happening
  Of     saints    to    their     vision!
  The   world   winding   home!
  And    the    whole    pain
  F l o w s        o p e n
  A n d              I
  D i e .
  
  ii
  In   the   name   of   the   lost   who   glory   in
  The      swinish      plains      of      carrion
  U n d e r    t h e    b u r i a l    s o n g
  Of     the     birds     of     burden
  Heavy   with   the   drowned
  And    the    green    dust
  A n d    b e a r i n g
  The     ghost
  F  r  o  m
  The   ground
  L i k e    p o l l e n
  On   the   black  plume
  And   the   beak   of   slime
  I    pray    though     I     belong
  Not    wholly    to     that    lamenting
  Brethren    for   joy   has   moved   within
  The   inmost    marrow   of    my    heart   bone
  That  he  who  learns  now  the  sun  and  moon
  Of    his    mother’s    milk    may    return
  Before   the   lips   blaze   and   bloom
  To    the    birth    bloody   room
  Behind    the    wall’s    wren
  Bone    and    be   dumb
  And     the    womb
  T h a t   b o r e
  F  o  r
  A l l       m e n
  T h e     a d o r e d
  I n f a n t     l i g h t    o r
  The        dazzling        prison
  Yawn      to       his       upcoming.
  
  In     the    name     of      the    wanton
  Lost    on    the    unchristened    mountain
  In    the    centre     of     dark     I     pray    him
  That  he  let  the  dead  lie  though  they  moan
  For   his   briared   hands   to   hoist   them
  To  the  shrine  of  his  world’s  wound
  And   the   blood   drop's   garden
  E n d u r e     t h e     s t o n e
  Blind   host   to   sleep
  I n    t h e   d a r k
  A n d  d e e p
  R  o  c  k
  A  w  a  k  e
  No   heart   bone
  But    let    it    break
  On  the  mountain  crown
  U n b i d d e n  b y  t h e  s u n
  And  the  beating  dust   be   blown
  Down    to    the    river    rooting    plain
  U n d e r  t h e  n i g h t  f o r e v e r  f a l l i n g.
  
  Forever      falling      night      is      a      known
  Star     and     country     to     the     legion
  Of   sleepers   whose   tongue   I   toll
  T o  m o u r n  h i s  d e l u g i n g
  Light  through  sea  and  soil
  And    we    have    come
  T o    k n o w    a l l
  P   l   a   c   e   s
  W   a   y   s
  M    a    z    e    s
  P   a   s   s   a   g   e   s
  Quarters      and       graves
  O f    t h e    e n d l e s s    f a l l.
  
  N o w       c o m m o n       l a z a r u s
  Of      the      charting      sleepers      prays
  N e v e r      t o      a w a k e      a n d      a r i s e
  For   the   country   of   death   is   the   heart’s   size
  And the star of the lost the shape of the eyes.
  
  In     the     name    of     the    fatherless
  In    the    name    of    the    unborn
  A n d    t h e    u n d e s i r e r s
  Of  midwiving  morning’s
  Hands or instruments
  O  in  the  name
  Of   no   one
  Now  or
  N  o
  O n e   t o
  B e   I   p r a y
  May   the   crimson
  Sun  spin  a  grave  grey
  And    the    colour    of    clay
  Stream    upon     his     martyrdom
  I n   t h e   i n t e r p r e t e d   e v e n i n g
  And   the   known   dark   of   the   earth   amen.
  
  I    turn    the   corner    of    prayer    and    burn
  I n   a   b l e s s i n g   o f   t h e   s u d d e n
  Sun.
  
  In  the  name  of  the  damned
  I   would   turn   back   and   run
  To      the      hidden      land
  But    the    loud    sun
  Christens    down
  T h e     s k y.
  
  I
  Am    found.
  
  O     l e t     h i m
  Scald   me  and  drown
  Me  in  his  world’s  wound.
  
  His    lightening    answers    my
  Cry.
  
  My  voice  burns  in  his  hand.
  
  Now    I    am    lost    in    the    blinding
  One.
  
  The  sun  roars  at  the  prayer’s  end.
  
  November 1944

• Was There A Time Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Was there a time when dancers with their fiddles
  In children's circuses could stay their troubles?
  
  There was a time they could cry over books,
  But time has sent its maggot on their track.
  
  Under the arc of the sky they are unsafe.
  
  What's never known is safest in this life.
  
  Under the skysigns they who have no arms
  have cleanest hands, and, as the heartless ghost
  Alone's unhurt, so the blind man sees best.

• We Lying By Seasand Read Poem Log in to favourite

  We lying by seasand, watching yellow
  And the grave sea, mock who deride
  Who follow the red rivers, hollow
  Alcove of words out of cicada shade,
  For in this yellow grave of sand and sea
  A calling for colour calls with the wind
  That's grave and gay as grave and sea
  Sleeping on either hand.
  
  The lunar silences, the silent tide
  Lapping the still canals, the dry tide-master
  Ribbed between desert and water storm,
  Should cure our ills of the water
  With a one-coloured calm;
  The heavenly music over the sand
  Sounds with the grains as they hurry
  Hiding the golden mountains and mansions
  Of the grave, gay, seaside land.
  
  Bound by a sovereign strip, we lie,
  Watch yellow, wish for wind to blow away
  The strata of the shore and drown red rock;
  But wishes breed not, neither
  Can we fend off rock arrival,
  Lie watching yellow until the golden weather
  Breaks, O my heart's blood, like a heart and hill.

• When All My Five And Country Senses See Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When all my five and country senses see,
  The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
  How, through the halfmoon's vegetable eye,
  Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
  Love in the frost is pared and wintered by,
  The whispering ears will watch love drummed away
  Down breeze and shell to a discordant beach,
  And, lashed to syllables, the lynx tongue cry
  That her fond wounds are mended bitterly.
  
  My nostrils see her breath burn like a bush.
  
  My one and noble heart has witnesses
  In all love's countries, that will grope awake;
  And when blind sleep drops on the spying senses,
  The heart is sensual, though five eyes break.

• When I Woke Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When I woke, the town spoke.
  
  Birds and clocks and cross bells
  Dinned aside the coiling crowd,
  The reptile profligates in a flame,
  Spoilers and pokers of sleep,
  The next-door sea dispelled
  Frogs and satans and woman-luck,
  While a man outside with a billhook,
  Up to his head in his blood,
  Cutting the morning off,
  The warm-veined double of Time
  And his scarving beard from a book,
  Slashed down the last snake as though
  It were a wand or subtle bough,
  Its tongue peeled in the wrap of a leaf.
  
  Every morning I make,
  God in bed, good and bad,
  After a water-face walk,
  The death-stagged scatter-breath
  Mammoth and sparrowfall
  Everybody's earth.
  
  Where birds ride like leaves and boats like ducks
  I heard, this morning, waking,
  Crossly out of the town noises
  A voice in the erected air,
  No prophet-progeny of mine,
  Cry my sea town was breaking.
  
  No Time, spoke the clocks, no God, rang the bells,
  I drew the white sheet over the islands
  And the coins on my eyelids sang like shells.

• When Once The Twilight Locks No Longer Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When once the twilight locks no longer
  Locked in the long worm of my finger
  Nor damned the sea that sped about my fist,
  The mouth of time sucked, like a sponge,
  The milky acid on each hinge,
  And swallowed dry the waters of the breast.
  
  When the galactic sea was sucked
  And all the dry seabed unlocked,
  I sent my creature scouting on the globe,
  That globe itself of hair and bone
  That, sewn to me by nerve and brain,
  Had stringed my flask of matter to his rib.
  
  My fuses are timed to charge his heart,
  He blew like powder to the light
  And held a little sabbath with the sun,
  But when the stars, assuming shape,
  Drew in his eyes the straws of sleep
  He drowned his father's magics in a dream.
  
  All issue armoured, of the grave,
  The redhaired cancer still alive,
  The cataracted eyes that filmed their cloth;
  Some dead undid their bushy jaws,
  And bags of blood let out their flies;
  He had by heart the Christ-cross-row of death.
  
  Sleep navigates the tides of time;
  The dry Sargasso of the tomb
  Gives up its dead to such a working sea;
  And sleep rolls mute above the beds
  Where fishes' food is fed the shades
  Who periscope through flowers to the sky.
  
  When once the twilight screws were turned,
  And mother milk was stiff as sand,
  I sent my own ambassador to light;
  By trick or chance he fell asleep
  And conjured up a carcass shape
  To rob me of my fluids in his heart.
  
  Awake, my sleeper, to the sun,
  A worker in the morning town,
  And leave the poppied pickthank where he lies;
  The fences of the light are down,
  All but the briskest riders thrown
  And worlds hang on the trees.

• When, Like A Running Grave Read Poem Log in to favourite

  When, like a running grave, time tracks you down,
  Your calm and cuddled is a scythe of hairs,
  Love in her gear is slowly through the house,
  Up naked stairs, a turtle in a hearse,
  Hauled to the dome,
  Comes, like a scissors stalking, tailor age,
  Deliver me who timid in my tribe,
  Of love am barer than Cadaver's trap
  Robbed of the foxy tongue, his footed tape
  Of the bone inch
  Deliver me, my masters, head and heart,
  Heart of Cadaver's candle waxes thin,
  When blood, spade-handed, and the logic time
  Drive children up like bruises to the thumb,
  From maid and head,
  For, sunday faced, with dusters in my glove,
  Chaste and the chaser, man with the cockshut eye,
  I, that time's jacket or the coat of ice
  May fail to fasten with a virgin o
  In the straight grave,
  Stride through Cadaver's country in my force,
  My pickbrain masters morsing on the stone
  Despair of blood faith in the maiden's slime,
  Halt among eunuchs, and the nitric stain
  On fork and face.
  
  Time is a foolish fancy, time and fool.
  
  No, no, you lover skull, descending hammer
  Descends, my masters, on the entered honour.
  
  You hero skull, Cadaver in the hangar
  Tells the stick, 'fail.
  
  '
  Joy is no knocking nation, sir and madam,
  The cancer's fashion, or the summer feather
  Lit on the cuddled tree, the cross of fever,
  Not city tar and subway bored to foster
  Man through macadam.
  
  I dump the waxlights in your tower dome.
  
  Joy is the knock of dust, Cadaver's shoot
  Of bud of Adam through his boxy shift,
  Love's twilit nation and the skull of state,
  Sir, is your doom.
  
  Everything ends, the tower ending and,
  (Have with the house of wind), the leaning scene,
  Ball of the foot depending from the sun,
  (Give, summer, over), the cemented skin,
  The actions' end.
  
  All, men my madmen, the unwholesome wind
  With whistler's cough contages, time on track
  Shapes in a cinder death; love for his trick,
  Happy Cadaver's hunger as you take
  The kissproof world.

• Where Once The Waters Of Your Face Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Where once the waters of your face
  Spun to my screws, your dry ghost blows,
  The dead turns up its eye;
  Where once the mermen through your ice
  Pushed up their hair, the dry wind steers
  Through salt and root and roe.
  
  Where once your green knots sank their splice
  Into the tided cord, there goes
  The green unraveller,
  His scissors oiled, his knife hung loose
  To cut the channels at their source
  And lay the wet fruits low.
  
  Invisible, your clocking tides
  Break on the lovebeds of the weeds;
  The weed of love's left dry;
  There round about your stones the shades
  Of children go who, from their voids,
  Cry to the dolphined sea.
  
  Dry as a tomb, your coloured lids
  Shall not be latched while magic glides
  Sage on the earth and sky;
  There shall be corals in your beds
  There shall be serpents in your tides,
  Till all our sea-faiths die.

• Why East Wind Chills Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Why east wind chills and south wind cools
  Shall not be known till windwell dries
  And west's no longer drowned
  In winds that bring the fruit and rind
  Of many a hundred falls;
  Why silk is soft and the stone wounds
  The child shall question all his days,
  Why night-time rain and the breast's blood
  Both quench his thirst he'll have a black reply.
  
  When cometh Jack Frost?
  
  the children ask.
  
  Shall they clasp a comet in their fists?
  
  Not till, from high and low, their dust
  Sprinkles in children's eyes a long-last sleep
  And dusk is crowded with the children's ghosts,
  Shall a white answer echo from the rooftops.
  
  All things are known: the stars' advice
  Calls some content to travel with the winds,
  Though what the stars ask as they round
  Time upon time the towers of the skies
  Is heard but little till the stars go out.
  
  I hear content, and 'Be Content'
  Ring like a handbell through the corridors,
  And 'Know no answer,' and I know
  No answer to the children's cry
  Of echo's answer and the man of frost
  And ghostly comets over the raised fists.

• Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
  Because their words had forked no lightning they
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
  Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
  And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
  Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  
  And you, my father, there on the sad height,
  Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
  
  Do not go gentle into that good night.
  
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

• Poem Read Poem Log in to favourite

  Her tombstone told when she died.
  
  Her two surnames stopped me still.
  
  A virgin married at rest.
  
  She married in this pouring place,
  That I struck one day by luck,
  Before I heard in my mother's side
  Or saw in the looking-glass shell
  The rain through her cold heart speak
  And the sun killed in her face.
  
  More the thick stone cannot tell.
  
  Before she lay in a stranger's bed
  With a hand plunged through her hair,
  Or that rainy tongue beat back
  Through the devilish years and innocent deaths
  To the room of a secret child,
  Among men later I heard it said
  She cried her white-dressed limbs were bare
  And her red lips were kissed black,
  She wept in her pain and made mouths,
  Talked and tore though her eyes smiled.
  
  I who saw in a winding film
  Death and this mad heroine
  Meet once on a mortal wall
  Heard her speak through the chipped beak
  Of the stone bird guarding her:
  I died before bedtime came
  But my womb was bellowing
  And I felt with my bare fall
  A blazing red harsh head tear up
  And the dear floods of his hair.

• Poem on His Birthday [Facs. drafts] Read Poem Log in to favourite