A Poison Tree

 I was angry with my friend:

 I told my wrath, my wrath did end.

 I was angry with my foe:

 I told it not, my wrath did grow.

 And I water'd it in fears,

 Night & morning with my tears;

 And I sunned it with smiles,

 And with soft deceitful wiles.

 And it grew both day and night,

 Till it bore an apple bright;

 And my foe beheld it shine,

 And he knew that it was mine,

 And into my garden stole

 When the night had veil'd the pole:

 In the morning glad I see

 My foe outstretch'd beneath the tree.

William Blake from "Songs of Experience"

Stones

They who have shared a life

Fling words like stones

With fierce precision, with intent to do

Maximum damage. They both know

Each other's tender places, once laid bare

In mutual delight. Each apart

Bleeds inwardly. They will not show their wounds.

They who have shared a death

Have less to say:

They stand together by that awful door

Like children, cold hands touching, as they wait

For some stern word of blame that never comes.

An aching silence. The vibrating string

Stretches and snaps.

Their fingers slip apart.

Stones

Litter the ground.

Pauline Burton

Coffee In Heaven

    You'll be greeted

 by a nice cup of coffee

 when you get to heaven

 and strains of angelic harmony.

    But wouldn't you be devastated

 if they only serve decaffeinated

 while from the percolators of hell

    your soul was assaulted

 by Satan's fresh espresso smell?

 John Agard

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

 Billy Collins

Bloody Men

Bloody men are like bloody buses -

You wait for about a year

And as soon as one approaches your stop

Two or three others appear.

You look at them flashing their indicators,

Offering you a ride.

You're trying to read their destinations,

You haven't much time to decide.

If you make a mistake, there is no turning back.

Jump off and you'll stand there and gaze

While the cars and the taxis and lorries go by

And the minutes and hours and days.

Wendy Cope

Nothing Gold Can Stay

 Nature's first green is gold,

 Her hardest hue to hold.

 Her early leaf's a flower;

 But only so an hour.

 Then leaf subsides to leaf.

 So Eden sank to grief,

 So dawn goes down to day.

 Nothing gold can stay.

 Robert Frost

The Thought Fox

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:

Something else is alive

Besides the clock's loneliness

And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:

Something more near

Though deeper within darkness

Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow,

A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;

Two eyes serve a movement, that now

And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow

Between trees, and warily a lame

Shadow lags by stump and in hollow

Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,

A widening deepening greenness,

Brilliantly, concentratedly,

Coming about its own business

Till, with sudden sharp hot stink of fox

It enters the dark hole of the head.

The window is starless still; the clock ticks,

The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Freedom Day

Having bought the story of responsibility

I now try to change it at the warehouse

for a better story. But the warehouse has only

out-dated, defective and very expensive

stories in stock. I go up and down the aisles.

Nothing works. Each falls apart

just as I pick it up and turn on its engine.

Many bear labels saying made

in Greece or Italy or Britain

or the United States of America.

It doesn't matter. Those made in China,

Japan, Malaysia or Singapore

are also rusting. Their engines sputter

instead of roar and small parts rattle,

fall out like broken twigs. The aisles

radiate all around, seeming to lead

everywhere. I am growing tired.

The small high windows are streaked

with cobwebs and partially covered

by more boxes full of old stories.

What should I do now?

Shirley Geok-lin Lim

Lonely to alone

Let us move from lonely to alone

Walk into crowded spaces and be one of them

Any them

Go back to the same place until they expect our face

Salesgirls, bartenders, bank-tellers

All the public people

The counters that tick for anyone, everyone

You know the man who runs the corner shop

And the guard with no name who knows you by your floor

Give friendly strangers the same you give strange friends

From love to rugby to poetry, don’t join the club

Don’t deceive, don’t divide

Home is where the heart is and the heart is full of habit

Hum the school songs that failed to teach you to love your country

Pack up your loneliness and shift it from place to place

Into the unknown

Voices at the other end of random phone numbers

Leave your eyes on in the dark

Stare back

Sleepwalk

Mani Rao

My Love Is like to Ice

My love is like to ice, and I to fire:

How comes it then that this her cold so great

Is not dissolved through my so hot desire,

But harder grows the more I her entreat?

Or how comes it that my exceeding heat

Is not allayed by her heart-frozen cold,

But that I burn much more in boiling sweat,

And feel my flames augmented manifold?

What more miraculous thing may be told,

That fire, which all things melts, should harden ice,

And ice, which is congealed with senseless cold,

Should kindle fire by wonderful device?

     Such is the power of love in gentle mind,

     That it can alter all the course of kind.

Edmund Spenser (c 1552 - January 16th 1599)

Down With Fanatics!

 If I had my way with violent men

 I'd simmer them in oil,

 I'd fill a pot with bitumen

 And bring them to the boil.

 I execrate the terrorist

 And those who harbour him,

 And if I weren't a moralist

 I'd tear them limb from limb.

 Fanatics are an evil breed

 Whom decent men should shun;

 I'd like to flog them till they bleed,

 Yes, every mother's son,

 I'd like to tie them to a board

 And let them taste the cat,

 While giving praise, oh thank the Lord,

 That I am not like that.

 For we should love the human kind,

 As Jesus taught us to,

 And those who don't should be struck blind

 And beaten black and blue;

 I'd like to roast them in a grill

 And listen to them shriek,

 Then break them on the wheel until

 They turned the other cheek.

         -- Roger Woddis

Words

 Out of us all

 That make rhymes

 Will you choose

 Sometimes -

 As the winds use

 A crack in a wall

 Or a drain,

 Their joy or their pain

 To whistle through -

 Choose me,

 You English words?

 I know you:

 You are light as dreams,

 Tough as oak,

 Precious as gold,

 As poppies and corn,

 Or an old cloak:

 Sweet as our birds 

 To the ear,

 As the burnet rose

 In the heat

 Of Midsummer:

 Strange as the races

 Of dead and unborn:

 Strange and sweet

 Equally,

 And familiar,

 To the eye,

 As the dearest faces

 That a man knows,

 And as lost homes are:

 But though older far

 Than oldest yew, -

 As our hills are, old, -

 Worn new

 Again and again:

 Young as our streams

 After rain:

 And as dear

 As the earth which you prove

 That we love.

 Make me content

 With some sweetness

 From Wales

 Whose nightingales

 Have no wings, -

 From Wiltshire and Kent

 And Herefordshire, -

 And the villages there, -

 From the names, and the things

 No less.

 Let me sometimes dance

 With you,

 Or climb

 Or stand perchance

 In ecstasy,

 Fixed and free

 In a rhyme,

 As poets do.

 Edward Thomas

On Being Asked for a War Poem

 I think it better that in times like these

 A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth

 We have no gift to set a statesman right;

 He has had enough of meddling who can please

 A young girl in the indolence of her youth,          

 Or an old man upon a winter's night.

      -- William Butler Yeats

"No, I'll not take the half"

No, I'll not take the half,

Give me the whole sky! The far-flung earth!

Seas and rivers and mountain avalanches--

All these are mine! I'll accept no less!

No, life, you cannot woo me with a part.

Let it be all or nothing! I can shoulder that!

I don't want happiness by halves,

Nor is half of sorrow what I want.

Yet there's a pillow I would share,

Where gently pressed against a cheek,

Like a helpless star, a falling star,

A ring glimmers on a finger of your hand.

Yevgeny Yevtushenko

Hunting for Poems

I'm hunting poems in the jungle.
When I catch one I shall stab it with my pen
and stick it in my book with spit
and glue. I expect that it will wriggle
For a while, and snarl and struggle to be free.
That‘s the sort of nuisance that a slippery poem can be.

Sometimes I see peaceful poems sleeping in the shade
and when I pounce they wake, bemused
and find themselves stuck firm in place, confused,
and wonder how they got there. But it's too late:
they‘re stuck and find they have no choice
but resignation to their fate.

I'm sad when poems get away:
they let me catch a rippling glimpse,
a tantalising sense of shape and then
dissolve themselves in undergrowth.
I‘m dazzled by a gleaming eye,
a graceful swerve, a rhythmic gait.
My fingers clutch the empty air
my pen stabs sharp - there's nothing there -
the poem‘s gone and it‘s too late.

But the ones that I like best of all
are those that seem compliant.
They let me toy with them like mice
Then eat me like a giant.

Martin Alexander