SOME OF THESE are classics, some are just weird things I liked...see what you think! I'm not doing this to rip anyone off or infringe copyright, so please don't prosecute me 8)

In no particular order...

My favourite Siegfried Sassoon poems...too many to put on this page 8)

And a few of my fave sonnets...

And some A E Housman poems...

And the rest -

OVERHEARD ON A SALT MARSH (Harold Munro)
.
Nymph, nymph, what are your beads?
Green glass, goblin. Why do you stare at them?
Give them me.
No.
Give them me, give them me.
No.
Then I will howl all night in the reeds,
Lie in the mud and howl for them.
.
Goblin, why do you love them so?
They are better than stars or water
Better than voices of winds that sing,
Better than any man's fair daughter,
Your green glass beads on a silver ring.
.
Hush, I stole them out of the moon.
.
Give me your beads, I want them.
No.
I will howl in a deep lagoon
For your green glass beads, I love them so.
Give them me. Give them.
No.
.

 

EPIC (Patrick Kavanagh)
.
I have lived in important places, times
When great events were decided, who owned
That half-a-rood of rock, a no-man's-land
Surrounded by our pitchfork-armed claims.
I heard the Duffys shouting "Damn your soul"
And old McCabe stripped to the waist, seen
Step-the-plot defying blue-cast steel -
"Here is the march along these iron stones."
That was the year of the Munich bother. Which
Was more important? I inclined
To lose my faith in Ballyrush and Gortin
Till Homer's ghost came whispering to my mind.
He said "I made the Iliad from such
A local row. Gods make their own importance."

 

YOU'D BETTER BELIEVE HIM (I ca'n't find the author's name anywhere 8( )
.
Discovered an old rocking-horse in Woolworth's
He tried to feed it but without much luck.
So he stroked it, had a long conversation about
The trees it came from, the attics it had visited.
Tried to take it out then
But the store detective he
Called the store manager who
Called the police who in court next morning said
"He acted strangely when arrested,
His statement read simply, 'I believe in rocking-horses'
We have reason to believe him mad."
"Quite so," said the prosecution,
"Bring in the rocking-horse as evidence."
"I'm afraid it's escaped, sir," said the store manager.
"Left a hoofprint as evidence
On the skull of the store detective."
"Quite so," said the prosecution, fearful of the neighing
Out in the corridor.

 

JOB WILKS AND THE RIVER (Michael Coady)
.
"...of the 56th regiment, who died accidentally by drowning, at Carrick-on-Suir, 17 July 1868, in his 28th year."
.
I feel that I know you, Job Wilks -
No imperial trooper swaggering
these servile Tipperary streets
before my grandfather drew breath,
but a country lad out of Hardy
drunk on payday and pining for Wessex,
flirting with Carrick girls
in fetid laneways after dark
out of step on parade to Sunday service
with comrades who loved you enough
to raise out of soldiers' pay this stone
which would halt my feet among nettles
now that jackdaws are free in the chancel,
Communion plate lies deep
in the dark of a bank vault,
and spinster daughter of the last rector,
in a home for the aged,
whispers all night to an only brother
dead these forty years in Burma.
.
How commonplace, Job Wilks, how strange
that this should be where
it would end for you, twenty-eight
summers after the midwife washed you.
With that first immersion
you took your part
in the music of what happens,
and an Irish river was flowing
to meet you, make you intimate clay
of my town.
.
On a July day of imperial sun
did your deluged eyes find
vision of Wessex, as Suir water
sang in your brain?
.
I know the same river you knew, Job,
the same sky and hill and stone bridge:
I hope there were Carrick girls with tears
for a country lad out of Hardy,
drunk on payday and pining
for Wessex.

 

FRONTIER (Stephen Vincent Benet)
.
Hear the wind
Blow through the buffalo grass
Blow over wild-grape and brier
This was frontier, and this,
and this, your house, was frontier.
There were footprints upon the hill,
And men lie buried under,
Tamers of earth and rivers.
They died at the end of labour,
Forgotten is the name.

 

LANDSCAPE WITH FIGURES (Frank Ormsby)
.
What haunts me is a farmhouse among trees
Seen from a bus window, a girl
With a suitcase climbing a long hill
And a woman waiting.
The time the bus took to reach and pass
The lane's entrance nothing was settled,
The girl still climbing and the woman still
On the long hill's summit.
.
Men were not present. Neither in the fields
That sloped from hedges, nor beyond the wall
That marked the yard's limits
Was there sign of hens, or hands working.
No sight that might have softened
On the eye the scene's
Relentlessness.
.
Nothing had happened, yet the minute spoke
And the scene spoke and the silence,
And oppressed as air does, loading
For a storm's release.
.
All lanes and houses
Secretive in trees and gaunt hills' jawlines
Turn my thoughts again
To that day's journey and the thing I saw
And could not fathom. Struck with the same dread
I seem to share in sense, not detail,
What was heavy there:
Sadness of dim places, obscure lives,
Ends and beginnings,
Such extremities.

 

SONG OF HOPE (Cecil Rajendra)
.
At that hour
when the sun
slinks off
behind hills
and night
- a panther -
crouches
ready to spring
upon our un-
suspecting city
.
i want to sing
the coiled desires
of this land
the caged dreams
of forgotten men
.
i want to sing
of all that was
but no longer is
of all that never was
but
could have been
.
i want to sing
the obsidian
unspelled hopes
of our children
i want to sing
to remind us
never to despair
that every hour
every minute
somewhere on the face
of this earth
it is glorious morning

 

SURPRISED BY JOY (William Wordsworth)
.
Surprised by Joy - impatient as the wind
I turned to share the transport - oh! with whom
But Thee, deep buried in the silent tomb
That spot which no vicissitude can find?
Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind -
But how could I forget thee? Through what power
Even for the least division of an hour
Have I been so beguiled as to be blind
To my most grievous loss! - that thought's return
Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore,
Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn,
Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more;
That neither present time nor years unborn
Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.

 

PERSONAL HELICON (Seamus Heaney)
.
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 smell
Of waterweed, fungus, and damp moss.
.
One, in a backyard, 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.

 

WHEN ALL THE OTHERS (Seamus Heaney)
.
When all the others were away at Mass
I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one
Like solder weeping off the soldering iron;
Cold comforts set between us, things to share
Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes
From each other's work would bring us to our senses.
.
So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying
And some were responding and some crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head
Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives -
Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

 

THE COOL THAT CAME OFF SHEETS (Seamus Heaney)
.
The cool that came off sheets just off the line
Made me think the damp must still be in them
But when I took my corners of the linen
And pulled against her, first straight down the hem
And then diagonally, then flapped and shook
The fabric like a sail in a crosswind,
They made a dried-out undulating thwack
So we'd stretch and fold and end up hand to hand
For a split second as if nothing had happened
For nothing had that had not always happened
Beforehand, day by day, just touch and go,
Coming close again by holding back
In moves where I was x and she was o
Inscribed in sheets she'd sewn from ripped-out flour sacks.

 

UNDER THE TABLE (Brendan Kenneally)
.
There was a bomb-scare at the Last Supper
We were tucking into the bread and wine
When the phone rang in an abrasive manner
And someone said in a Cork accent at th'other end of the line
.
Dat dere was a big hoor of a bomb in de room, boy.
Unpardonable, I thought. Nothing excused it.
Zebedee found the bomb in a bag under the table.
Jesus defused it.
.
After that opening shock the evening went well
Peter got sloshed and showed his old
Tendency to pull rank.
.
I told him, in the vaults of my mind, to go to hell
And brooded on my tentative efforts to open
An account in a Swiss bank.

 

A REFUSAL TO MOURN (Dylan Thomas)
.
Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness
.
and I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
and the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn
.
The majesty and burning of the child's death
I shall not murder the mankind of her going
With a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of her breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.
.
Deep with the first dead lies London's daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The dust beyond age, the dark veins of her mother
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.

 

THOSE WINTER SUNDAYS (Robert Hayden)
.
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labour in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No-one ever thanked him.
.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
.
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
Of love's austere and lonely offices?

 

ANOTHER SEPTEMBER (Thomas Kinsella)
.
Dreams fled away, this country bedroom, raw
With the touch of the dawn, wrapped in a minor peace,
Hears through an open window the garden draw
Long pitch-black breaths, lay bare its apple trees,
Ripe pear trees, brambles, windfall-sweetened soil,
Exhale rough sweetness against the starry slates.
Nearer the river sleeps St John's, all toil
Locked fast inside a dream with iron gates.
.
Domestic Autumn, like an animal
Long used to handling by those countrymen,
Rubs her kind hide against the bedroom wall
Sensing a fragrant child come back again
- not this half-tolerated consciousness
that plants its grammar in her yielding weather
But that unspeaking daughter, growing less
Familiar where we fell asleep together.
.
Wakeful moth-wings blunder near a chair,
Toss their light shells at the glass, and go
To inhabit the living starlight. Stranded hair
Stirs on the still linen. It is as though
The black breathing that billows her sleep, her name,
Drugged under judgment, waned and - bearing daggers
And balances - down the lampless darkness they came,
Moving like women: Justice, Truth, such figures.

 

A SONG FOR SIMEON (TS Eliot)
.
Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and
The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;
The stubborn season has made stand.
My life is light, waiting for the death wind,
Like a feather on the back of my hand.
Dust in sunlight and memory in corners
Wait for the wind that chills toward the dead land.
.
Grant us Thy peace.
I have walked many years in this city,
Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,
Have given and taken honour and ease.
There never went any neglected from my door.
Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children's children
When the time of sorrow is come?
They will take to the goat's path and the fox's home,
Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.
.
Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentations
Grant us Thy peace.
Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,
Before the hour of maternal sorrow,
Now at this birth season of decease,
Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,
Grant Israel's consolation
To one who has eighty years and no tomorrow.
.
According to Thy word.
They shall praise thee and suffer in every generation
With glory and derision,
Light upon light, mounting the saint's stair.
Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,
Not for me the ultimate vision.
Grant me Thy peace.
(And a sword shall pierce the heart
thine also.)