The Poetry Thread

[Snopper]

Into my heart on air that kills

From yon far country blows:

What are those blue remembered hills,

What spires, what farms are those?

 

That is the land of lost content,

I see it shining plain,

The happy highways where I went

And cannot come again

 

(A Shropshire Lad - AE Houseman)

 

Always makes me pine for the fair lanes and days of my Hampshire boyhood.......

[Nordic Saint]

If Life’s a Lousy Picture, Why Not Leave Before the End

 

Don’t worry

One night we’ll find that deserted Kinema

The torches extinguished

The Cornish ripples locked away in the safe

The tornoff tickets chucked

In the tornoff shotbin

The projectionist gone home to his nightmare

 

Don’t worry

That film will still be running

(the one about the sunset)

& we’ll find two horses

tethered in the front stalls

& we’ll mount

& we’ll ride off

into

our

 

happy

ending

 

 

by Roger McGough 1969

[Snopper]

I went to schoolo in Hythe with `Billy Scammell` who became William Scammell - a leading poet, critic and biographer. One of his poems described life for a boy in a small `village by the sea`.........

 

GREEN OVER BLUE

The village by the sea

was deadly boring to a boy

for waves struck at the pier

only because the pier was there and great liners sailed

off to encounter the world

 

leaving their agitated wash

fraying the shallows of the beach

where seagulls muscled in

on a dead salmon

bruised quiet as mud, then

clapped off screeching

 

like Baptists. The second coming

if there was to be one

took the form of wave or leaf

or swimmable New Forest

streams, a fallen log across

that clear and meditative face.

 

What can be done with a tree

but climb it? And a rusty yew

that won`t turn into Robin`s bow

or bend across a naked knee.

with hazel arrows, hard to fledge,

cut green and perfect from the hedge?

 

Old Fraser had barbed wire

tweeds, club tie, an arctic glare

all week. His short black cane

barked even the hardest palm.

You weren`t to shout. On Poppy Day

he wore his medals. Penelope

 

Young, the robin of our class.

God gave to smile at me at last.

She offered up her face. I bit

a portion of her apple cheek

and chewed it half a lifetime, till

I`d grown around that secret smile –

 

the russet and the leaf that hides

its growing. Still the waves

lap at me. If not sea it was

the Cotswolds or the northern fells

for cities rose and fell in a flash

and my flesh was somehow grass

 

imprinted on that village hue;

in either case green over blue

chasing each other, as the weight

of tides broke on the Isle of Wight

or shadows of low jets were thrown

like tomahawks across Old Man.

 

Love in a mist, love`s origin

In sudden hapless parenting –

what grey roof or pavement could

assuage a heart, as well as mud?

I`ve circled all the globe, I`ve

known the rich and grown a slave,

 

pitched my tent in New York`s glare,

been to Japan, been everywhere

that offered spells to educate

a stubborn mind, a backward heart

lost now to all but that low roar

in wind, the sea upon the shore.