Lines composed upon Hearing News of the Retirement of Mr Alastair Cook from International Cricket

So.
Farewell then,
Alastair
Cook.

I hear that
You are going
To retire from
Test Match
Cricket.

Does that mean
You will go
Back
To doing
Letter from
America?

by Peter Coles (aged 55 ¼)

Follow @telescoper

Advertisements

On His Queerness

When I was young and wanted to see the sights,
They told me: ‘Cast an eye over the Roman Camp
If you care to.
But plan to spend most of your day at the Aquarium –
Because, after all, the Aquarium –
Well, I mean to say, the Aquarium –
Till you’ve seen the Aquarium you ain’t seen nothing.’

So I cast my eye over
The Roman Camp –
And that old Roman Camp,
That old, old Roman Camp
Got me
Interested.

So that now, near closing-time,
I find that I still know nothing –
And am still not even sorry that I know nothing –
About fish.

by Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986)

Follow @telescoper

 

The Old Stoic – by Emily Jane Brontë

Today, 30th July 2018, is the 200th anniversary of the birth of Emily Jane Brontë. There are many items celebrating her life in circulation on this day, most of them concentrating on her most famous work, her only novel Wuthering Heights, published under the pseudonym Ellis Bell in 1847. But Emily Brontë was also a fine poet, as indeed were her sisters Anne and Charlotte, so I thought I’d post a poem by her here. Much of her poetry is dominated by images of death and suffering, and her own health was affected by the harsh conditions in which she lived; she died of tuberculosis at the at the age of just 30.

Riches I hold in light esteem,
And Love I laugh to scorn;
And lust of fame was but a dream,
That vanished with the morn:

And if I pray, the only prayer
That moves my lips for me
Is, “Leave the heart that now I bear,
And give me liberty!”

Yes, as my swift days near their goal:
‘Tis all that I implore;
In life and death a chainless soul,
With courage to endure.

Follow @telescoper

Law like Love – W.H. Auden

Law, say the gardeners, is the sun,
Law is the one
All gardeners obey
To-morrow, yesterday, to-day.

Law is the wisdom of the old,
The impotent grandfathers feebly scold;
The grandchildren put out a treble tongue,
Law is the senses of the young.

Law, says the priest with a priestly look,
Expounding to an unpriestly people,
Law is the words in my priestly book,
Law is my pulpit and my steeple.

Law, says the judge as he looks down his nose,
Speaking clearly and most severely,
Law is as I’ve told you before,
Law is as you know I suppose,
Law is but let me explain it once more,
Law is The Law.

Yet law-abiding scholars write:
Law is neither wrong nor right,
Law is only crimes
Punished by places and by times,
Law is the clothes men wear
Anytime, anywhere,
Law is Good morning and Good night.

Others say, Law is our Fate;
Others say, Law is our State;
Others say, others say
Law is no more,
Law has gone away.

And always the loud angry crowd,
Very angry and very loud,
Law is We,
And always the soft idiot softly Me.

If we, dear, know we know no more
Than they about the Law,
If I no more than you
Know what we should and should not do
Except that all agree
Gladly or miserably
That the Law is
And that all know this
If therefore thinking it absurd
To identify Law with some other word,
Unlike so many men
I cannot say Law is again,

No more than they can we suppress
The universal wish to guess
Or slip out of our own position
Into an unconcerned condition.
Although I can at least confine
Your vanity and mine
To stating timidly
A timid similarity,
We shall boast anyway:
Like love I say.

Like love we don’t know where or why,
Like love we can’t compel or fly,
Like love we often weep,
Like love we seldom keep.

by W.H. Auden (1907-1973)

Follow @telescoper

The Workman’s Friend

When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night –
A pint of plain* is your only man.

When money’s tight and hard to get
And your horse has also ran,
When all you have is a heap of debt –
A pint of plain is your only man.

When health is bad and your heart feels strange,
And your face is pale and wan,
When doctors say you need a change,
A pint of plain is your only man.

When food is scarce and your larder bare
And no rashers grease your pan,
When hunger grows as your meals are rare –
A pint of plain is your only man.

In time of trouble and lousey strife,
You have still got a darlint plan
You still can turn to a brighter life –
A pint of plain is your only man.

 

by Flann O’Brien (aka Brian O’Nolan; 1911-1966)

 

*plain here means `stout’ (e..g Guinness).

Follow @telescoper

 

June, by Francis Ledwidge

Broom out the floor now, lay the fender by,
And plant this bee-sucked bough of woodbine there,
And let the window down. The butterfly
Floats in upon the sunbeam, and the fair
Tanned face of June, the nomad gipsy, laughs
Above her widespread wares, the while she tells
The farmers’ fortunes in the fields, and quaffs
The water from the spider-peopled wells.
The hedges are all drowned in green grass seas,
And bobbing poppies flare like Elmo’s light,
While siren-like the pollen-staind bees
Drone in the clover depths. And up the height
The cuckoo’s voice is hoarse and broke with joy.
And on the lowland crops the crows make raid,
Nor fear the clappers of the farmer’s boy,
Who sleeps, like drunken Noah, in the shad
And loop this red rose in that hazel ring
That snares your little ear, for June is short
And we must joy in it and dance and sing,
And from her bounty draw her rosy worth.
Ay! soon the swallows will be flying south,
The wind wheel north to gather in the snow,
Even the roses spilt on youth’s red mouth
Will soon blow down the road all roses go.

by Francis Ledwidge (1887-1917*)

*One of Ireland’s foremost poets of the First World War, Ledwidge was killed in action on 31st July 1917 at the Battle of Passchendaele.

Follow @telescoper

The Absence, by R.S. Thomas

It is this great absence
that is like a presence, that compels
me to address it without hope
of a reply. It is a room I enter

from which someone has just
gone, the vestibule for the arrival
of one who has not yet come.
I modernise the anachronism

of my language, but he is no more here
than before. Genes and molecules
have no more power to call
him up than the incense of the Hebrews

at their altars. My equations fail
as my words do. What resources have I
other than the emptiness without him of my whole
being, a vacuum he may not abhor?

by R.S. Thomas (1913-2000)

Follow @telescoper