However long the sentence passed on you,
The term served here will, you assume, be taken
Into consideration; you have proved,
Surely, a model prisoner?
The worst is finding where your fault lay
In all its pettiness; do you regret
It was not some cardinal, outrageous sin
That drew crowds to the gibbet?
THE STRAYED MESSAGE
Characteristic, nevertheless strange:
Something went badly wrong at the Exchange,
And my private message to you, in full detail,
Got broadcast over eleven frequencies
With the usual, though disquieting, consequences
Of a torrential amatory fan-mail.
SONG: THE SUNDIAL’S LAMENT
(Air: The Groves of Blarney)
Since much at home on
My face and gnomon,
The sun refuses
Daylight to increase;
Yet certain powers dare
Miscount my hours there
Though sun and shadow
Still collogue in peace.
These rogues aspire
To act Hezekiah
For whom Isaiah
In a day of trial,
All for delaying
His end by praying
Turned back the shadow
On my honest dial.
Nay, Sirs, though willing
To abase the shilling
From noble twelvepence
To the half of ten,
Pray go no further
On this path of murther:
If hours be Dismalized,
Sure, I’m finished then.
POEM: A REMINDER
Capital letters prompting every line,
Lines printed down the centre of each page,
Clear spaces between groups of these, combine
In a convention of respectable age
To mean: ‘Read carefully. Each word we chose
Has rhythm and sound and sense. This is not prose.’
poem: a reminder
capitallett
-ers prompting ev
-eryline lines printed down the
cen
-tre of each page clear
spaces between
groups of these combine in a con
of respectable age to mean read
care
-fully each word we chose has
rhythm and
sound and
sense this is
notprose
ANTORCHA Y CORONA, 1968
Píndaro no soy, sino caballero
De San Patricio; y nuestro santo
Siglos atrás se hizo mejicano.
Todos aquí alaban las mujeres
Y con razón, como divinos seres –
Por eso entrará en mis deberes
A vuestra Olimpiada mejicana
El origen explicar de la corona:
En su principio fué femenina….
Antes que Hercules con paso largo
Metros midiera para el estadio
Miles de esfuerzos así alentado –
Ya antes, digo, allí existia
Otra carrera mas apasionada
La cual presidia la Diosa Hera.
La virgen que, a su fraternidad
Supero con maxima velocidad
Ganaba el premio de la santidad:
La corona de olivo…. Me perdonará
El respetable, si de Atalanta
Sueño, la corredora engañada
Con tres manzanas, pero de oro fino….
Y si los mitos griegos hoy resumo
Es que parecen de acuerdo pleno,
A la inventora primeval del juego,
A la Santa Madre, más honores dando
Que no a su portero deportivo.
En tres cientas trece Olimpiadas
Este nego la entrada a las damas
Amenazandolas, ai, con espadas!
Aquí, por fin, brindemos por la linda
Enriqueta de Basilio: la primera
Que nos honra con antorcha y corona.*
TORCH AND CROWN, 1968
(English translation of the foregoing)
No Pindar, I, but a poor gentleman
Of Irish race. Patrick, our learned saint,
Centuries past made himself Mexican.
And with sound reason, as divine beings,
I therefore owe it you as my clear duty
At your Olympics, here in Mexico,
To explain the origin of the olive crown:
In the Golden Age women alone could wear it.
Long before Hercules with his huge stride
Paced out the circuit of a stadium,
Provoking men to incalculable efforts,
Long, long before, in Argos, had been run
Even more passionately, a girls’ foot race
Under the watchful eye of Mother Hera.
The inspired runner who outstripped all rivals
Of her sorority and finished first
Bore off that coveted and holy prize –
The olive crown. Ladies and gentlemen,
Forgive me if I brood on Atalanta,
A champion quarter-miler tricked one day
By three gold apples tumbled on her track;
And if I plague you with these ancient myths
That is because none of them disagrees
In paying higher honours to the foundress
Of all competitive sport – the Holy Mother –
Than to her sportive janitor, Hercules.
Three hundred and thirteen Olympic Games
Hercules held, though warning off all ladies,
Even as audience, with the naked sword!
So homage to Enriqueta de Basilio
Of Mexico, the first girl who has ever
Honoured these Games with torch and olive crown!
ARMISTICE DAY, 1918
What’s all this hubbub and yelling,
Commotion and scamper of feet,
With ear-splitting clatter of kettles and cans,
Wild laughter down Mafeking Street?
O, those are the kids whom we fought for
(You might think they’d been scoffing our rum)
With flags that they waved when we marched off to war
In the rapture of bugle and drum.
Now they’ll hang Kaiser Bill from a lamp-post,
Von Tirpitz they’ll hang from a tree….
We’ve been promised a ‘Land Fit for Heroes’ –
What heroes we heroes must be!
And the guns that we took from the Fritzes,
That we paid for with rivers of blood,
Look, they’re hauling them down to Old Battersea Bridge
Where they’ll topple them, souse, in the mud!
But there’s old men and women in corners
With tears falling fast on their cheeks,
There’s the armless and legless and sightless –
It’s seldom that one of them speaks.
And there’s flappers gone drunk and indecent
Their skirts kilted up to the thigh,
The constables lifting no hand in reproof
And the chaplain averting his eye….
When the days of rejoicing are over,
When the flags are stowed safely away,
They will dream of another wild ‘War to End Wars’
And another wild Armistice day.
But the boys who were killed in the trenches,
Who fought with no rage and no rant,
We left them stretched out on their pallets of mud
Low down with the worm and the ant.
THE MOTES
You like to joke about young love
Because (let me be just)
In your dead courts and corridors
Motes dance upon no sunbeams
But settle down as dust.
&nbs
p; From Poems About Love
(1969)
IF AND WHEN
She hates an if, know that for sure:
Whether in cunning or self-torture,
Your ifs anticipate the when
That womankind conceals from men.
From Poems 1968–1970
(1970)
SONG: THE SIGIL
Stumbling up an unfamiliar stairway
Between my past and future
And overtaken by the shadowy mind
Of a girl dancing for love,
I glanced over my shoulder.
She had read my secret name, that was no doubt,
For which how could I blame her?
Her future paired so gently with my own,
Her past so innocently,
It flung me in a fever.
Thereupon, as on every strange occasion,
The past relived its future
With what outdid all hopes and fantasies –
How could I not concede
My sigil in its favour?
SONG: TWINNED HEART
Challenged once more to reunite,
Perfect in every limb
But screened against the intrusive light
By ghosts and cherubim,
I call your beauty to my bed,
My pride you call to yours
And cruel rain down pours,
With both of us prepared to wake
Each in a bed apart,
True to a spell no power can break:
The beat of a twinned heart.
SONG: OLIVE TREE
Call down a blessing
On that green sapling,
A sudden blessing
For true love’s sake
On that green sapling
Framed by our window
With her leaves twinkling
As we lie awake.
Two birds flew from her
In the eye of morning
Their folded feathers
In the sun to shake.
Augury recorded,
Vision rewarded
With an arrow flying
With a sudden sting,
With a sure blessing,
With a double dart,
With a starry ring,
With music from the mountains
In the air, in the heart
This bright May morning
Re-echoing.
SONG: ONCE MORE
These quiet months of watching for
An endless moment of once more
May not be shortened,
But while we share them at a distance,
In irreproachable persistence,
Are strangely brightened.
And these long hours of perfect sleep
When company in love we keep,
By time unstraitened,
Yield us a third of the whole year
In which to embrace each other here,
Sleeping together, watching for
An endless moment of once more
By dreams enlightened.
SONG: VICTIMS OF CALUMNY
Equally innocent,
Confused by evil,
Pondering the event,
Aloof and penitent,
With hearts left sore
By a cruel calumny,
With eyes half-open now
To its warped history,
But undeceivably
Both in love once more.
LOVE GIFTS
Though love be gained only by truth in love
Never by gifts, yet there are gifts of love
That match or enhance beauty, that indeed
Fetch beauty with them. Always the man gives,
Never the woman – unless flowers or berries
Or pebbles from the shore.
She welcomes jewels
To ponder and pore over tremblingly
By candlelight. ‘Why does he love me so,
Divining my concealed necessities?’
And afterwards (there is no afterwards
In perfect love, nor further call for gifts)
Writes: ‘How you spoil me!’, meaning: ‘You are mine’,
But sends him cornflowers, pinks and columbine.
MANKIND AND OCEAN
You celebrate with kisses the good fortune
Of a new and cloudless moon
(Also the tide’s good fortune),
Content with July fancies
To brown your naked bodies
On the slopes of a sea-dune.
Mankind and Ocean, Ocean and mankind:
Those fatal tricks of temper,
Those crooked acts of murder
Provoked by the wind –
I am no Ocean lover,
Nor can I love mankind.
To love the Ocean is to taste salt,
To drink the blood of sailors,
To watch the waves assault
Mast-high a cliff that shudders
Under their heartless hammers….
Is wind alone at fault?
VIRGIN MIRROR
Souls in virginity joined together
Rest unassailable:
Ours is no undulant fierce rutting fever
But clear unbroken lunar magic able
To mirror loves illimitable.
When first we chose this power of being
I never paused to warn you
What ruinous charms the world was weaving;
I knew you for a child fostered in virtue
And swore no hand could hurt you.
Then should I suffer nightmares now
Lest you, grown somewhat older,
Be lured to accept a worldly where and how,
Carelessly breathing on the virgin mirror,
Clouding love’s face for ever?
SECRET THEATRE
When from your sleepy mind the day’s burden
Falls like a bushel sack on a barn floor,
Be prepared for music, for natural mirages
And for night’s incomparable parade of colour.
Neither of us daring to assume direction
Of an unforeseen and fiery entertainment,
We clutch hands in the seventh row of the stalls
And watch together, quivering, astonished, silent.
It is hours past midnight now; a flute signals
Far off; we mount the stage as though at random,
Boldly ring down the curtain, then dance out our love:
Lost to the outraged, humming auditorium.
HOW IT STARTED
It started, unexpectedly of course,
At a wild midnight dance, in my own garden,
To which indeed I was not invited:
I read: ‘Teen-agers only.’
In the circumstances I stayed away
Until you fetched me out on the tiled floor
Where, acting as an honorary teen-ager,
I kicked off both my shoes.
Since girls like you must set the stage always,
With lonely men for choreographers,
I chose the step, I even called the tune;
And we both danced entranced.
Here the narrator pauses circumspectly,
Knowing me not unpassionate by nature
And the situation far from normal:
Two apple-seeds had sprouted….
Recordable history began again
With you no longer in your late teens
And me socially (once more) my age –
Yet that was where it started.
BRIEF REUNION
Our one foreboding was: we might forget
How strangely close absence had drawn us,
How close once more we must be drawn by parting –
Absence, dark twin of presence!
Nor could such closeness be attained by practice
Of even the most heroic self-deceit:
Only by inbred faculties far wiser
Than any carnal sense –
Progress in which had disciplined us both
To the same doting pride: a stoicism
Which might confuse, at every brief reunion,
Presence with pangs of absence.
And if this pride should overshoot its mark,
Forcing on us a raw indifference
To what might happen when our hearts were fired
By renewed hours of presence?
Could we forget what carnal pangs had seized us
Three summers past in a burst of moonlight,
Making us more possessive of each other
Than either dared concede? – a prescience
Of the vast grief that each sublunary pair
Transmits at last to its chance children
With tears of violence.
THE JUDGES
Crouched on wet shingle at the cove
In day-long search for treasure-trove –
Meaning the loveliest-patterned pebble,
Of any colour imaginable,
Ground and smoothed by a gentle sea –
How seldom, Julia, we agree
On our day’s find: the perfect one
To fetch back home when day is done,
Splendid enough to stupefy
The fiercest, most fastidious eye –
Tossing which back we tell the sea:
‘Work on it one more century!’
LOVE AND NIGHT
Though your professions, ages and conditions
Might seem to any sober person
Irreconcilable,
Yet still you claim the inalienable right
To kiss in corners and exchange long letters
Patterned with well-pierced hearts.
When judges, dazzled by your blazing eyes,
Mistake you both for Seventh Day Adventists
(Heaven rest their innocent souls!)
You smile impassively and say no word –
The why and how of magic being tabu
Even in courts of Law.
Who could have guessed that your unearthly glow
Conceals a power no judgement can subdue,
Nor act of God, nor death?
Your love is not desire but certainty,
Perfect simultaneity,
Inheritance not conquest;
Long silences divide its delicate phases
With simple absence, almost with unbeing,
Before each new resurgence.
Such love has clues to a riddling of the maze:
Should you let fall the thread, grope for it,