British Literature Poetry Packet, Fall 2018

By or before Wednesday 10/10, you will be choosing a poem to work with for declamation and your creative project. You will be working with this poem closely for the next few weeks so it is important that you choose a poem you find intriguing.

In this packet, you will find 40 poems to choose from. If none of these appeal to you, you may research and find a poem independently. However, your chosen poem must meet the below criteria and you must meet one-on-one with your magistra to get her approval.

Independently chosen poems must be:● 20th century or contemporary (from 1900 to the present)● Originally written in English from Great Britain, the Caribbean, Africa, India, etc)● Between 100-200 words in length● From an appropriate & reliable source (such as Poetry Foundation, Poets.org, The Poetry Society,

The Paris Review, other reputable literary magazine, etc..)● Approved by your magistra

Table of ContentsPatience Agbabi (b. 1965) ..................................................... 2

● “Unfinished Business”W.H. Auden (1907-1973) ....................................................... 3

● “Musee des Beaux ArtsEavan Boland (b. 1944) ....................................................... 3-8

● “Irish Poetry”● “Making Up”● “Degas’s Laundresses”● “That the Science of Cartography is Limited”

Kwame Dawes (b. 1962) .................................................. 8- 11● “A Way of Seeing”● “Land Ho”● “Natural”● “Ode to the Clothesline”

Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955) .............................................. 12-13● “Last Post”● “Originally”

Lorna Goodison (b.1947) “Ground Doves” “The Lace Seller” “Speak of the Advent of New Light”

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013) ...................................... 15-19● “Mid-Term Break”● “The Skunk”● “Digging”● “Postscript”● “Personal Helicon”

Kendel Hippolyte (b. 1952) .......................................... 19-21 “Hurricane” “Like Wind” “The Piper’s Song”

Ted Hughes (1930-1998) .............................................. 21-22 “Pike”

Ishion Hutchinson (b.1983)…………………………..….23-24 “Phaeton” “Second Return”

Jackie Kay (b.1961).................,,........................................ 24-25 “Castletown, Isle of Man” “Late Love”

Thomas Kinsella (b. 1928) ...................................................26 “Mirror in February”

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) ............................................. 26-27● “MCMXIV”

Rachel Manley (b. 1947) .................................................. 27-28● “Memory”

Kei Miller (b. 1978) ........................................................... 28-31● “Hymn to the Birds”● “”My Mother’s Atlas of Dolls”● “Place Name”

Andrew Motion [b. 1952)…………………………………..31 “Anne Frank Huis”

Alice Oswald (b. 1966) ............................................................ 32● “A Short Story of Falling”

Sudeep Sen (b. 1964) ........................................................ 32-34● “Kargil”

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) ...........................................34-35● “Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”

Derek Walcott (1930-2017) ......................................... 35-36● “Islands”● “Sea Canes”

1

Patience Agbabi (b. 1965)

“Unfinished Business” by Patience Agbabi

Conveniently, cowardice and forgiveness look identical at a certaindistance. Time steals your nerve. – Jonathan Nolan, Memento

That night, it rained so hardit was biblical. The Thames sunk the promenade,spewing up so much low life.It’s a week since they beat up my wife,put five holes in my daughter. I know who they are.I know why. I’m three shots away from the parked carin a blacked-out car park. My wife cries,Revenge too sweet attracts flies.Even blushed with bruises she looks good. She’s lyingon the bed, next to me. Honey, I’m fine.Tonight I caught her, hands clasped, kneeling,still from a crime scene.I didn’t bring my wife to Gravesend for this.What stops me, cowardice?None of them, even Joe, has the right to live.How can I forgive?

How can I forgivenone of them? Even Joe has the right to live.What stops me, cowardice?I didn’t bring my wife to Gravesend for thisstill from a crime scene.Tonight I caught her, hands clasped, kneelingon the bed next to me. Honey, I’m fine.Even blushed with bruises she looks good. She’s lying.Revenge too sweet attracts fliesin a blacked-out car park. My wife cries.I know why. I’m three shots away from the parked carput five holes in my daughter. I know who they are.It’s a week since they beat up my wife,spewing up so much low lifeit was biblical. The Thames sunk the promenadethat night, it rained so hard.(Word count: 242)

2

W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

“Musee des Beaux Arts”by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,The old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position: how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.(Word count: 184)

Eavan Boland (b. 1944)

“Irish Poetry”by Eavan Boland

For Michael Hartnett

We always knew there was no Orpheus in Ireland. No music stored at the doors of hell. No god to make it. No wild beasts to weep and lie down to it.

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But I remember an evening when the sky was dark at four.when ice had seized every part of the city and we sat talking-- the air making a wreath for our cups of tea.

And you began to speak of our own gods. Our heartbroken pantheon:

No Attic light for them and no Herodotus but thin rain and dogfish and the stopgap of the sharp cliffs they spent their winters on.

And the pitch-black Atlantic night. And how the sound of a bird's wing in a lost language sounded.

You made the noise for me. Made it again. until I could see the flight of it: suddenly

the silvery, lithe rivers of your southwest lay down in silence and the savage acres no one could predict were all at ease, soothed and quiet and

listening to you, as I was. As if to music, as if to peace.(Word Count: 184)

“Making Up”by Eavan Boland

My naked face;I wake to it.How it’s dulsed and shrouded!It’s a cloud,

a dull pre-dawn.But I’ll soon see to thatI push the blusher up,

I raddle and I prinkpinking bone

4

till my eyes

area rouge-washedflush on water.now the base

pales and wastes.Light thins from ear to chin,whitening in

the ocean shinemirror setof my eyesthat I fledge

In old darks.I grease and fullmy mouth.It won’t stay shut:

I lookin the glass.My face is made,it says:

take nothing, nothingat its face value:legendary seas,nakedness,

that up and stucklassitudeof thigh and buttockthat they prayed to --

it’s a trick.mythsare made by men.The truth of this

wave-raiding

5

sea-heavingmade-uptale

of a facefrom the sourceof the morningis my own:

Mine are the rouge pots,the hot pinks,the fledgedand edgy mixof light and waterout of whichI dawn.(Word Count: 167)

“Degas’s Laundresses”by Eavan Boland

You rise, you dawnroll-sleeved Aphrodites,out of a camisole of brine,a linen pit of stitches,silking the fitted sheetsaway from you like waves.

You seam dreams in the foldsof wash from which freshesthe whiff and reach of fieldswhere it bleached and stiffened.Your chat’s sabbatical:brides, wedding outfits,

a pleasure of leisured womenare sweated into the folds,The neat heaps of linen.Now the drag of the clasp.Your wrists basket your waist.You round to the square weight.

6

Wait. There behind you.A man. There behind you.Whatever you do don’t turn.Why is he watching you?Whatever you do don’t turn.Whatever you do don’t turn.

See he takes his easestaking his easel so,clowly sharpening charcoal,closing his eyes just so,slowly smiling as ifso slowly he is

unbandaging his mind.Surely a good laundresswould understand its twists,its white turnsits blind designs --

it’s your winding sheet.(Word count: 161)

“That the Science of Cartography is Limited”by Eavan Boland

—and not simply by the fact that this shading of forest cannot show the fragrance of balsam,the gloom of cypressesis what I wish to prove.

When you and I were first in love we droveto the borders of Connachtand entered a wood there.

Look down you said: this was once a famine road.

I looked down at the ivy and the scutch grassrough-cast stone haddisappeared into as you told mein the second winter of their ordeal, in

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1847, when the crop had failed twice,Relief Committees gavethe starving Irish such roads as this to build.

Where they died, there the road endedand ends still and when I take downthe map of this island, it is never soI can say here is the masterful, the apt rendering of

the spherical as flat, noran ingenious design which persuades a curveinto a planebut to tell myself again that

the line which says woodland and cries hungerand gives out among sweet pine and cypress,and finds no horizon

will not be there.(Word count: 193)

Kwame Dawes (b. 1962)

“A Way of Seeing” by Kwame Dawes

It all comes from this dark dirt,memory as casual as a laborer.

Remembrances of ancestorskept in trinkets, tiny remains

that would madden anthropologistswith their namelessness.

No records, just smells of storiespassing through most tenuous links,

trusting in the birthing of seed from seed;this calabash bowl of Great-grand

8

Martha, born a slave’s child;this bundle of socks, unused

thick woolen things for the snow—he died, Uncle Felix, before the ship

pushed off the Kingston wharf,nosing for winter, for London.

He never used the socks, justhad them buried with him.

So, sometimes forgetting the panoramathese poems focus like a tunnel,

to a way of seeing time past,a way of seeing the dead.

(Word count: 120)

“Land Ho” by Kwame Dawes

I cannot speak the languagesspoken in that vessel,cannot read the beadspromising salvation.

I know this only,that when the green of landappeared like lightafter the horror of this crossing,

we straightened our backsand faced the simplicityof new days with flame.I know I have the blood of survivors

coursing through my veins;I know the lament of our lossmust warm us again and againdown in the belly of the whale,

9

here in the belly of the whalewhere we are still searching for homes.

(Word count: 97)

“Ode to the Clothesline”by Kwame Dawes

After Alfred Stieglitz

Not so much the missing of thingsbut the nostalgia of colors, their music,

the ordinary revelation of a family’s lifecaught in the flop and dance, a jig,

if you will, of their layers, outer and inner skins,the secret things so close to the body,

the taste, the salt and sweet of blood, and shit,and piss, and then, rinsed and scrubbed, leaving

beneath the astringent scent of soapa musky marker of self for strays

to smell or imagine as they walkpast the parade of the living

on taut lines, propped by poleswith nails for a hook, above

the startling green of grass and hedge,the barefaced concrete steps,

the sky, inscrutable as a wall;this is what one carries as a kind

of sweetness — the labor of brown hands,elbow-deep in suds, the rituals

of cleansing, the humility of a darning

10

or a frayed crotch, the dignity

of cleanliness, the democracy of truth,the way we lived our lives in the open.(Word Count: 170)

“Natural” by Kwame Dawes

For Bob Marley

In the silence, the silence ofa new void of morning, I tastethe bitter weed of loss, like mauby,like a forerunner to my own loss —staring at the open autopsied corpseof the body that housed my father,lamenting only that which may have been,lamenting that sometimes we diebefore poetic justice can mete its magic:Oh the things that could have been!The dead young are impossible equations.Morning, morning. I walk along the leaf-strewn avenues of the campus, a sun-specked day; the blessed light on my upturned facemaking me think of the confession you madeat Cane River where on the rocks you laid your head,there in desolate places to make your bed,to make music; I find the stones heretake to the alchemy of poetry so well.I walk like a poet in search of remembrances.The slip of my memory gathers imagesand tosses them among the turning leavesto let fall something like rainon a blazing hot day, rainwater touchingsoft asphalt and making steam as sweetand reassuring as incense in the sanctuary.

(Word count: 187)

11

Carol Ann Duffy (b. 1955)

“Last Post”by Carol Ann Duffy

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning,

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, beginthat moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud…but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad bloodrun upwards from the slime into its wounds;see lines and lines of British boys rewindback to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home--mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothersnot entering the story nowto die and die and die.Dulce — No — Decorum — No— Pro patria mori.You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)like all your mates do too --Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert --and light a cigarette.there’s coffee in the square,warm French bread,and all those thousands deadare shaking dried mud from their hairand queuing up for home. Freshly alive,a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, releasedfrom History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

you lean against a wall,your several million lives still possibleand crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.you see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.

if poetry could truly tell it backwards,then it would.(Word count: 202)

12

“Originally”by Carol Ann Duffy

We came from our own country in a red roomwhich fell through the fields, our mother singingour father’s name to the turn of the wheels.My brothers cried, one of them bawling, Home,Home, as the miles rushed back to the city,the street, the house, the vacant roomswhere we didn’t live any more. I staredat the eyes of a blind toy, holding its paw.

All childhood is an emigration. Some are slow,leaving you standing, resigned, up an avenuewhere no one you know stays. Others are sudden.Your accent wrong. Corners, which seem familiar,leading to unimagined pebble-dashed estates, big boyseating worms and shouting words you don’t understand.My parents’ anxiety stirred like a loose toothin my head. I want our own country, I said.

But then you forget, or don’t recall, or change,and, seeing your brother swallow a slug, feel onlya skelf of shame. I remember my tongueshedding its skin like a snake, my voicein the classroom sounding just like the rest. Do I only thinkI lost a river, culture, speech, sense of first spaceand the right place? Now, Where do you come from?strangers ask. Originally? And I hesitate. (Word count: 205))

Lorna Goodison (b. 1947)

“Ground Doves” by Lorna Goodison

Small querulous birdsfeathers like swatches of earthgraced with wings,opt for walking.

13

The female onessport surprising underslipstrimmed with stunning passementerie.Braided arabesques

scalloping round their hemsbut that is rarely shown, exceptfor when they bend to scramblefor stale bread crumbs

they have come to expect as due.Ground doves make you uneasybecause there was a timewhen you too walked

and saved your wingsand would not reach highfor the sweet riskinside the lips of hibiscus

but saved your wings,and scrambled for used breadand left over things….

(Word count: 98)

“The Lace Seller”by Lorna Goodison

There is a woman selling cards of laceand loops of ribbonInside the elbow of a downtown square.Her mother before her sold american apples,crisp deep white flesh, packed tightwithin glowing thin red wineskins.

This woman’s concerns filter upthrough my dreamswhen I lie bathed and folded in clean sheets,for she lies on one thin hot sheets, bed pushed up against the door for fear of “kick-down”and always she sleeps lightly.

14

This woman has a son (so do I)except it was the police who kicked her door downletting the thick night in, seizing him. Lace money cannot stretch to pay Lawyer.When I think of her son, Lord please cover the head of my own. (Word count: 123)

“Speak of the Advent of New Light” by Lorna Goodison

On a night of no stars it will sparkfrom the friction of a homeless woman’s shoeslipping along the pavement as she stoopsto stir her evening meal of trickledownin a paintpan over a fire of damp rubbish.

Simultaneously it will glow phosphorescentin the cupped palms of a night fishermanas he bends to test the waters off the baynear surrender, the wonder of the living waterbearing footprints and currents of fresh beginnings.

And small children will come in from playpulling like kites behind them luminousstreamers of light, infused with such colorsas never the prism of the eye has reflected. New light succeeding dark is certain, is expected. (Word count: 116)

Seamus Heaney (1939-2013)

“Mid-Term Break” by Seamus Heaney

I sat all morning in the college sick bayCounting bells knelling classes to a close.At two o'clock our neighbours drove me home.

15

In the porch I met my father crying—He had always taken funerals in his stride—And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pramWhen I came in, and I was embarrassedBy old men standing up to shake my hand

And tell me they were 'sorry for my trouble'.Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,Away at school, as my mother held my hand

In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.At ten o'clock the ambulance arrivedWith the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

Next morning I went up into the room. SnowdropsAnd candles soothed the bedside; I saw himFor the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,He lay in the four-foot box as in his cot.No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

A four-foot box, a foot for every year.(Word count: 184)

“The Skunk”by Seamus Heaney

Up, black, striped and damasked like the chasubleAt a funeral mass, the skunk’s tailParaded the skunk. Night after nightI expected her like a visitor.

The refrigerator whinnied into silence.My desk light softened beyond the verandah.Small oranges loomed in the orange tree.I began to be tense as a voyeur.

After eleven years I was composingLove-letters again, broaching the word ‘wife’

16

Like a stored cask, as if its slender vowelHad mutated into the night earth and air

Of California. The beautiful, uselessTang of eucalyptus spelt your absense.The aftermath of a mouthful of wineWas like inhaling you off a cold pillow.

And there she was, the intent and glamorous,Ordinary, mysterious skunk,Mythologized, demythologized,Snuffing the boards five feet beyond me.

It all came back to me last night, stirredBy the sootfall of your things at bedtime,Your head-down, tail-up hunt in a bottom drawerFor the black plunge-line nightdress.(Word count: 159)

“Digging”by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound When the spade sinks into gravelly ground: My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds Bends low, comes up twenty years away Stooping in rhythm through potato drills Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft Against the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deepTo scatter new potatoes that we picked,Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade. Just like his old man.

17

My grandfather cut more turf in a dayThan any other man on Toner’s bog.Once I carried him milk in a bottleCorked sloppily with paper. He straightened upTo drink it, then fell to right awayNicking and slicing neatly, heaving sodsOver his shoulder, going down and downFor the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edgeThrough living roots awaken in my head.But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I’ll dig with it.(Word count: 217)

“Postscript”by Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out westInto County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,In September or October, when the windAnd the light are working off each otherSo that the ocean on one side is wildWith foam and glitter, and inland among stonesThe surface of a slate-grey lake is litBy the earthed lightening of flock of swans,Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,Their fully-grown headstrong-looking headsTucked or cresting or busy underwater.Useless to think you'll park or capture itMore thoroughly. You are neither here nor there,A hurry through which known and strange things passAs big soft buffetings come at the car sidewaysAnd catch the heart off guard and blow it open.(Word count: 132)

18

“Personal Helicon”by Seamus Heaney

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top. I savoured the rich crash when a bucket Plummeted down at the end of a rope. So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch Fructified like any aquarium. When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call With a clean new music in it. And one Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime, To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme To see myself, to set the darkness echoing. (Word count: 161)

Kendel Hippolyte (b. 1952)

“Hurricane”by Kendel Hippolyte

Fanatic, reeling in a dervish dance,grappling at trees, mountains, homes, the other rooted things,flailing away surfaces, trying to clutch beginnings,only desperate for stillness, for a godlike glance

19

that will absolve this rage into a larger whole, reveal — if even afterward — that there is some meaning to all these walls broken, fences uprooted, the people leaning on each other, some naked almost, from the sudden cold, the hurricane wields its violence by accident, straining to reach an absence at the centre, chasing a vision hidden in the chaos, and that restless searching always brings a havoc to us till a god’s eye, seeing our hard fences shatter,

acknowledges this driven heretic a saint.(Word count: 117)

“Like Wind” by Kendel Hippolyte

Hardest to understand is that here too are seasons:times of the harrowing of spirit, the dry days of no hope, the Lenten times when everything is fallow, waiting for the grace of rain. To understand is to knowthat dying is a season also.And knowing this you rest in the integrity of the unhandled world, the manifest of inexhaustibility of things, how trees keep dying into fruit, how fruit keep dying into trees again without complaint, how there is, always, earth.But that understanding is a season also, is a grace.It comes like wind, like wind you can not grasp it. And if in its visitation, for the lives duration of a moment, you see that everything — grass, lilies, the least hair on your head —is moved by the same breath,give thanks.(Word count: 138)

“The Piper’s Song” by Kendell Hippolye

The piper was nearby;everyone seemed suddenly restless,listening; there wassomething subtly disturbing

20

but hard to place. Tensionlike when a race was on.All seemed the same, just that no one looked you in the face.Not the children squeaking off to school.Not the scurrying clerks in the rush hour.Not the beady-eyed salesmen.No one. Listening.

They heard it. Rich Yankee-Doodle trillcalling them. They could not be still,scuttling after the notes. A chaseof creeping bodies, a sneaking swarm swelling into a racethat no one knew the start of, end of, or how to stoprunning not to fall, running till someone, going downhill,asked: “What is this place? Who’s the guy with the pipe?What’s he doing? He playing for free? Who’s playing?”

They stopped. Deadquiet for a moment. Then the melody, more slowly, funeral pace,wailed long and shrill.(Word count: 149)

Ted Hughes (1930-1998)

“Pike” -- must be excerpted!by Ted Hughes

Pike, three inches long, perfectPike in all parts, green tigering the gold.Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.They dance on the surface among the flies.

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur,Over a bed of emerald, silhouetteOf submarine delicacy and horror.A hundred feet long in their world.

In ponds, under the heat-struck lily pads-Gloom of their stillness:Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

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The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangsNot to be changed at this date:A life subdued to its instrument;The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

Three we kept behind glass,Jungled in weed: three inches, four,And four and a half: fed fry to them-Suddenly there were two. Finally one

With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.And indeed they spare nobody.Two, six pounds each, over two feet longHigh and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-The same iron in this eyeThough its film shrank in death.

A pond I fished, fifty yards across,Whose lilies and muscular tenchHad outlasted every visible stoneOf the monastery that planted them-

Stilled legendary depth:It was as deep as England. It heldPike too immense to stir, so immense and oldThat past nightfall I dared not cast

But silently cast and fishedWith the hair frozen on my headFor what might move, for what eye might move.The still splashes on the dark pond,

Owls hushing the floating woodsFrail on my ear against the dreamDarkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,That rose slowly toward me, watching.

(Word count: 296)

22

Ishion Hutchinson (b.1983)

“Phaeton” by Ishion Hutchinson

Ground-levelled, behind a line drawn,he took aim at a circle of precious marbles,precise, interrupting the passing ants,the shot was fired, and if they had known,the other boys, that before speaking, the poetof old had also bent and stroked the earth,dividing himself from his people—if they had known any poet—they wouldhave stopped him before the sun burstfrom his fingers, scattering glass beads.

They found him with an empty third eyethe bullet drilled into his forehead, a deafhole, knowing only its own darkness therein the parched-grass field; flies whirred, unwavering,a sun chariot's axle-songs, heat rose a mirrorbefore his skull, and his mouth opened,amazed to this mask, its bleached-stillness,like a stone lit from the inside, fadedas a moon marked in the dust—at this face,his mouth opened, amazed, stayed open.(Word count: 144)

“Second Return” by Ishion Hutchinson

Let the cerement of light, the silent snowcovering the bells frozen in the towers, speak

a country of tired bays, where rain hesitatesto break the seamless yellow of toil; let this

coffin-shaped light balance on the negativecompass, the shock and stun, the heart's

sudden brace for a jealous thunder, childhood's

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hands clapping in the assembly of absence,rejoicing in the clarity of hunger and fired clay.

Let the hands be wings to lift out of watera rippled name—jangle of bells—left untended,

like a wheat field, swath of light, violetstains, the night someone wiped their hands

on. Let the stray goat be recalled, and the mango tree violated for its bastard fruit, recall

the army of cane flags that marched through dreams, saluted by silver-edge cutlasses

at morning. O envy of sea, binding and separating islands, husk envy at every accents' core, their fiber glint after rum flasks break their seals and rivers let down their hair between shallow gullies.

Let not the blank of winter forgets the buried glass; let it pull blood out of any pilgrim who goes there

and marks a way back by the body's scent and light, distended by a melting brook. (Word count: 201)

Jackie Kay (b. 1961)

“Castletown, Isle of Man”by Jackie Kay

How strange the way old lovers move into the present,tense, and catch you off guard; you tell mewhen you were here last you’d taken the steam train to a placewhose name you’ve forgotten, and found a tapas bar.Going to that island is like going back to the past.

Once we would have drunk a glass of red togetherin the Garrison, or waved in unison at the motherand child in that back garden waving at this steam train.

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I see what you mean, I think to myself, I see what you mean,waving on my own to the time before I was born.

These days we travel to the same places alone:first you, then me, to this small, half-way island.I pick up your scent round the narrow cobbled streets,the medieval castle grounds, through the Market Square:I stare at the dreamy boats coming into the harbour,

then conjure you, my ex-lover, in the Old House of Keys:walking along the long and dimly-lit corridor,across the stone floor – candle in hand – to friendshipcarrying the low flame of the past, still flickering, just the same,into the present, to the place that has no satisfactory name.(Word count: 204)

“Late Reply”by Jackie Kay

How they strut about, people in love,how tall they grow, pleased with themselves,their hair, glossy, their skin shining.They don't remember who they have been.

How filmic they are just for this time.How important they've become – secret, abovethe order of things, the dreary mundane.Every church bell ringing, a fresh sign.

How dull the lot that are not in love.Their clothes shabby, their skin lustreless;how clueless they are, hair a mess; how they trudgeup and down streets in the rain,

remembering one kiss in a dark alley,a touch in a changing-room, if lucky, a lovely waitfor the phone to ring, maybe, baby.The past with its rush of velvet, its secret hush

already miles away, dimming now, in the late day.(Word count: 130)

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Thomas Kinsella (b. 1928)

“Mirror in February”by Thomas Kinsella

The day dawns, with scent of must and rain,Of opened soil, dark trees, dry bedroom air.Under the fading lamp, half dressed - my brainIdling on some compulsive fantasy - I towel my shaven jaw and stop, and stare,Riveted by a dark exhausted eye,A dry downturning mouth.

It seems again that it is time to learn,In this untiring, crumbling place of growthTo which, for the time being, I return.Now plainly in the mirror of my soulI read that I have looked my last on youthAnd little more; for they are not made wholeThat reach the age of Christ.

Below my window the wakening trees,Hacked clean for better bearing, stand defacedSuffering their brute necessities;And how should the flesh not quail, that span for spanIs mutilated more? In slow distasteI fold my towel with what grace I can,Not young, and not renewable, but man. (Word count: 156)

Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

“MCMXIV”by Philip Larkin

Those long uneven linesStanding as patientlyAs if they were stretched outsideThe Oval or Villa Park,The crowns of hats, the sun

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On moustached archaic facesGrinning as if it were allAn August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleachedEstablished names on the sunblinds,The farthings and sovereigns,And dark-clothed children at playCalled after kings and queens,The tin advertisementsFor cocoa and twist, and the pubsWide open all day;

And the countryside not caring:The place-names all hazed overWith flowering grasses, and fieldsShadowing Domesday linesUnder wheat’s restless silence;The differently-dressed servantsWith tiny rooms in huge houses,The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,Never before or since,As changed itself to pastWithout a word – the menLeaving the gardens tidy,The thousands of marriages,Lasting a little while longer:Never such innocence again.(Word count: 148)

Rachel Manley (b. 1947)

“Memory”by Rachel Manley

The afternoon belongs to my grandfather.You cannot take it awaythough the mind darkensand the children’s laughter

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has strayed like messages.I am near the verandah,lost in my nets of thoughtwhich I brought from age six,a very long way.You cannot sentence memory to death,it returns through the yearslulled into hymns.If i close my eyesTime will forget me;I hear an old lady reading from Rilke,she finds the best lineand explainsthat poets don’t have to rhyme anymore.If i close my eyesmy hands will forget me,I’m up in the plum treenear to the sky;if I leave, I’ll never come back.Here in this distance birds fly,they fly, but they do not sing.The night waits in the housesafe and peaceful as candlesor carts pulled by trusty miles;my grandfather waits in the house.You know, the moon is just a violinthat longs to be repaired.(Word count: 165)

Kei Miller (b. 1978)

“Hymn to the Birds” by Kei Miller

No, not to the birds who know better than ushow to hymn their own songs

rather to words

under which theylock and find their best

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arrangements:to parliaments

of owls: flings of dunlins:lamentations of swans:

tremblings of finches: charmsof hummingbirds: hills of ruffs:

rushes of pochards: chatteringsof choughs: to walk of snipes: commotions of coots:

gulps of swallows: quarrels

of sparrows: to peacocks that strut in ostentations; larks that fly

in exaltations: thrushes that crowd the red-leaf ground

as mutations: also to the pitying of turtledoves:

the unkindness of ravens: the descents of woodpeckes; the murders

of crows; a hymn then not to birds but to words which themselves feel

like feather and wing

and light, as if wereon the delicacy of

such sweet syllabesthat flocks the flight. (Word count: 135)

“My Mother’s Atlas of Dolls”by Kei Miller

Unable to travel, my mother makes usPromise to always bring back dolls

As if glass eyes could bear sufficient Witness to where she has not been,

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The what of the world she has not seen. She gathers them - cloth and porcelain

Pageant - on her whatnot, makes them Stands regal on white doilies, waving

Like queens from their high balconies .Miss Columbia, Miss Holland, Miss Peru

Are just a few who observe, unblinking, The new world about them. I think

Of how we arrange the dead like dolls,Set their arms in precise positions,

How we touch their unseeing eyes; And how they lie so sweetly still

Within their perfect boxes.It may have been the dolls that taught

My mother how to die, how to travelOnce again, how to wave good-bye(Word Count: 138 words)

“Place Name” by Kei Miller

Me-No-Sen-You-N-Come. In plain english: do not enterwithout invitation. For consider the once-upon-a-timeadventures of rude pickney answering to name Goldilocks - nuff-gyal, self-invited into house of bears,assumed at once her colonial right to porridge, to beds and to chairs. The baff-hand child went in just so, noteven a token offering of honey, and just like that proceeded to bruck up things. If only she had pennied the secret names of places. Me-No-Sen-you-no-come:without invitation, you’re not welcome. Or else, comein as you please - just know that this ground , thesebushes, these threes observe you with suspicion many centuries deep.

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(Word count: 102)

Andrew Motion (b. 1952)

“Anne Frank Huis”by Andrew Motion

Even now, after twice her lifetime of griefand anger in the very place, whoever comesto climb these narrow stairs, discovers howthe bookcase slides aside, then walks throughshadow into sunlit room, can never help but break her secrecy again. Just listeningis a kind of guilt: the Westerkirk repeatsitself outside, as if all time worked roundtowards her fear, and made each strokedie down on guarded streets. Imagine it— four years of whispering, and loneliness,and plotting, day by day, the Allied linein Europe with a yellow chalk. What hopeshe had for ordinary love and interestsurvives her here, displayed above the bed as pictures of her family; some actors;fashions chosen by Princess Elizabeth.And those who stoop to see them findnot only patience missing its reward,but one enduring wish for chances like my own: to leave as simplyas I do, and walk at easeup dusty tree-lined avenues, or watcha silent barge come clear of bridgessettling their reflections in the blue canal.

(Word count: 176)

Alice Oswald (b. 1966)31

“A Short Story of Falling”by Alice Oswald

It is the story of the falling rainto turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer showerto steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributarythat from the ground flows green and momentary

is one of water's wishes and this talehangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

if only I a passerby could passas clear as water through a plume of grass

to find the sunlight hidden at the tipturning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

then I might know like water how to balancethe weight of hope against the light of patience

water which is so raw so earthy-strongand lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

drawn under gravity towards my tongueto cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

which is the story of the falling rainthat rises to the light and falls again (Word count: 161)

Sudeep Sen (b. 1964)

“Kargil”by Sudeep Sen

Ten years on, I came searching for war signs of the past

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expecting remnants — magazine debris,unexploded shells, shrapnel that mark bomb wounds. I came looking for ghosts —people past, skeletons charred,abandoned brick-wood-cement that once housed them. I could only find whispers — whispers among the clamourof a small town outpost in full throttle —everyday chores sketching outward signs of normality and life. In that bustle I spot war-lines of a decade ago,though the storylines are kept buried, wrappedin old newsprint. There is order amid uneasiness — the muezzin’s cry,the monk’s chant — baritones merging in their separateness. At the bus station black coughs of exhaustsmoke-screens everything. The roads meetand after the crossroad ritual diverge,skating along the undotted lines of control.A porous garland with cracked beadsadorns Tiger Hill. Beyond the mountains

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are dark memories,and beyond them no one knows, and beyond themno one wants to know. Even the flight of birds that wing over their crestsdon’t know which feathers to down. Chameleon-likethey fly, tracing perfect parabolas. I look up and calculate their exact arcand find instead, a flawed theorem.

(Word count: 197)

Dylan Thomas (1914-1953)

“Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night”by Dylan Thomas

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 theyDo not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how brightTheir 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 sightBlind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

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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.(Word count: 168)

Derek Walcott (1930-2017)

“Islands”by Derek Walcott

[For Margaret] Merely to name them is the proseOf diarists, to make you a nameFor readers who like travellers praiseTheir beds and beaches as the same;But islands can only existIf we have loved in them. I seek,As climate seeks its style, to writeVerse crisp as sand, clear as sunlight,Cold as the curled wave, ordinaryAs a tumbler of island water;Yet, like a diarist, thereafterI savour their salt-haunted rooms(Your body stirring the creased seaOf crumpled sheets), whose mirrors loseOur huddled, sleeping images,Like words which love had hoped to useErased with the surf’s pages.

So, like a diarist in sand,I mark the peace with which you gracedParticular islands, descendingA narrow star to light the lampsAgainst the night surf’s noises, shieldingA leaping mantle with one hand,Or simply scaling fish for supper,Onions, jack-fish, bread, red-snapper;And on each kiss the harsh sea-taste,And how by moonlight you were made

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To study most the surf’s unyieldingPatience though it seemed a waste.(Word count: 179)

“Sea Canes”by Derek Walcott

Half my friends are dead.I will make you new ones, said earth.No, give me them back, as they were, instead,with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talkfrom the faint surf's dronethrough the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of oceandown that white road alone,or float with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.O earth, the number of friends you keepexceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver;they were the seraph lances of my faith,but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,enduring moonlight, further than despair,strong as the wind, that through dividing canes

brings those we love before us, as they were,with faults and all, not nobler, just there.(Word count: 146)

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