Carol Ann Duffy

The Windows

How do you earn a life going on

Behind yellow windows, writing at night

The Latin names of plants for a garden,

Opening the front door to a wet dog?

Those you love forgive you, clearly,

With steaming casseroles and red wine.

It’s the same film down all the suburban streets,

It’s a Wonderful Life. How do you learn it?

What you hear – the doorbell’s familiar chime.

What you touch – the clean, warm towels.

What you see what you smell what you taste

All tangible to the stranger passing your gate.

There you are again, in a room where those early hyacinths

Surely sweeten the air, and the right words wait

In the dictionaries, on the tip of the tongue you touch

In a kiss, drawing your crimson curtains now

Against dark hours. And again, in a kitchen,

The window ajar, sometimes the sound of your radio

Or the scent of your food, and a cat in your arms, a child in your arms, a lover. Such vivid flowers.

In New Selected Poems by Carol Ann Duffy, Picador 2004

Kathleen Jamie

Moon

Last night, when the moon

slipped into my attic room

as an oblong of light,

I sensed she’d come to commiserate.

It was August. She traveled

with a small valise

of darkness, and the first few stars

returning to the northern sky,

and my room, it seemed,

had missed her. She pretended

an interest in the bookcase

while other objects

stirred, as in a rock pool,

with unexpected life:

strings of beads in their green bowl gleamed,

the paper-crowded desk;

the books, too, appeared inclined

to open and confess.

Being sure the moon

harbored some intention,

I waited; watched for an age

her cool gaze shift

first toward a flower sketch

pinned on the far wall

then glide down to recline

along the pinewood floor,

before I’d had enough. Moon,

I said, We’re both scarred now.

Are they quite beyond you,

the simple words of love? Say them.

You are not my mother;

with my mother, I waited unto death.

Source: Poetry (October 2012)

Julio Cortazar

Autumn Summary

 

In evening’s dome each bird is a point of memory.
It’s amazing sometimes how the year's fervor
returns, returns without a body, returns for no reason at all,
how beauty, so brief in its violent love,
saves us an echo as night falls.

And so, what can you do but stand there slack-armed,
your heart overloaded and that taste of dust
that was a rose or a road—
Flight outflies the wing.
Without humility you know this remnant
was wrung from the dark by the work of silence?
that the branch in your hand, the dark tear
are your inheritance, the man with his story,
the lamp shining its light.

John Siddique

Ivy Moon

At the end were only words.
The words survived our flesh.

The you said, let it be dark,
and it was dark,

and I said as long as there
are words we go on.

There is no separating out.
Speak in to the dark and it is good,

and we made a firm promise of
those words, there will be no division.

We took back the day and night.
Undid our concepts of heaven and hell.

Spun the day and the night back
into the clock.

Let us be dark, without image.
No longer trying to see what is good.

John Siddique Recital Salt Publishing 2009

Keats and Shelley

On Saturday we went to Keats-Shelley House to hear English actor Julian Sands read from KSH's own edition of Keats' and Shelley's poems (for which he also wrote the preface, and was kind enough to sign after the perfomance).

KSH is a tiny museum right next to the Spanish Steps, where Keats lived and died in 1821. The museum has beautifully preserved the house as it was in Keats' time, including the small bedroom and bed where he died of tuberculosis.

Julian Sands gave a wonderful performance, informal and friendly, infused with his enthusiasm for Keats and Shelley's work and sensitive to the nuances of language and meaning. I love reading poetry, but 'On First looking into Chapman's Homer', 'Ozymandias', 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' and 'To a Skylark' are almost over-familiar to those of us who studied literature in the 20th century, and my tastes have moved on to other writers, in and outside the canon. But hearing someone read these poems with passion and understanding and vigour was almost like hearing them for the first time, but with a delicious layer of knowing, and remembering what is was like to discover them as a teenager.

The last poem of the Keats section of the program was one I hadn't seen before - his last poem, a fragment written in the margins of a manuscript, short, unfinished but full of potent images of mortality and contradictions- is it chilling and/or comforting?

This living hand, now warm and capable
Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold
And in the icy silence of the tomb,
So haunt thy days and chilly thy dreaming nights
That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood
So in my veins red life might stream again,
And thou be conscience-calmed—see here it is—
I hold it towards you.