- Teatime Prize
- Nov 1, 2008
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A violent death is the last thing that'll happen to you.
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Some great poems in this thread :3
Paul Durcan — The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious posted:
There — but for the clutch of luck — go I.
At daybreak — in the arctic fog of a February daybreak —
Shoulder-length helmets in the watchtowers of the concentration camp
Caught me out in the intersecting arcs of the swirling searchlights.
There were at least a zillion of us caught out there —
Like ladybirds under a boulder —
But under the microscope each of us was unique,
Unique and we broke for cover, crazily breasting
The barbed wire and some of us made it
To the forest edge, but many of us did not
Make it, although their unborn children did —
Such as you whom the camp commandant branded
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. Jesus, break his fall:
There — but for the clutch of luck — go we all.
In fact, poetry is generally brilliant.
Tomas Transtromer — Tracks posted:
2 a.m.: moonlight. The train has stopped
out in the middle of the plain. Far away, points of light in a town,
flickering coldly at the horizon.
As when a man has gone into a dream so deep
he’ll never remember having been there
when he comes back to his room.
As when someone has gone into an illness so deep
everything his days were becomes a few flickering points, a swarm,
cold and tiny at the horizon.
The train is standing quite still.
2 a.m.: bright moonlight, few stars.
So hard to choose just a few.
Stephen Dunn — Mother, Father, Robert Henley who hanged himself in the ninth grade, et al posted:
I’ve sensed ghosts more than once,
their presence
a kind of plucking from the memorious air.
Always they reveal themselves as lost,
surviving
on what’s loose in me, some last words
I never said, some I did. I’ve heard
they can’t live
if fully embraced, if taken fully in,
yet I do nothing but listen to their
wingless hovering,
the everything they never say.
If only I could give them what they need,
no, if only
I could convince myself these things
must die as naturally as apples
on the apple tree…
but that’s in Nature, which is never
wrong, just thoughtless and without shame.
Okay, another.
Fleur Adcock posted:
There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.
Maybe just one more, my favourite poet...
Simon Armitage — Gooseberry Season posted:
Which reminds me. He appeared
at noon, asking for water. He’d walked from town
after losing his job, leaving a note for his wife and his brother
and locking his dog in the coal bunker.
We made him a bed
and he slept till Monday.
A week went by and he hung up his coat.
Then a month, and not a stroke of work, a word of thanks,
a farthing of rent or a sign of him leaving.
One evening he mentioned a recipe
for smooth, seedless gooseberry sorbet
but by then I was tired of him: taking pocket money
from my boy at cards, sucking up to my wife and on his last night
sizing up my daughter. He was smoking my pipe
as we stirred his supper.
Where does the hand become the wrist?
Where does the neck become the shoulder? The watershed
and then the weight, whatever turns up and tips us over that razor’s edge
between something and nothing, between
one and the other.
I could have told him this
but didn’t bother. We ran him a bath
and held him under, dried him off and dressed him
and loaded him into the back of the pick-up.
Then we drove without headlights
to the county boundary,
dropped the tailgate, and after my boy
had been through his pockets we dragged him like a mattress
across the meadow and on the count of four
threw him over the border.
This is not general knowledge, except
in gooseberry season, which reminds me, and at the table
I have been known to raise an eyebrow, or scoop the sorbet
into five equal portions, for the hell of it.
I mention this for a good reason.
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