Sitting in front of us, laughing

                                      by Kate Tempest

Thirteen

The boys have football and skate ramps.

They can ride BMX

and play basketball in the courts by the flats until midnight.

The girls have shame.

One day,

when we are grown and we have minds of our own,

we will be kind women, with nice smiles and families and jobs.

And we will sit,

with the weight of our lives and our pain

pushing our bodies down into the bus seats,

and we will see thirteen-year-old girls for what will seem like the first

       time since we've been them,

and they will be sitting on front of us, laughing

into their hands at our shoes or our jackets,

      and rolling their eyes at each other.

While out of the window, in the sunshine,

the boys will be cheering each other on,

and daring each other to jump higher and higher.

School

We wander into school, happy children;

kind and bright and interested in things.

We don't yet know the horrors of the building.

The hatred it will teach. The boredom it will bring.

Soon we'll learn to disappear in public.

We'll learn that getting by is good enough.

We'll learn the way it feels to see injustice,

and shut our mouths in case it comes for us.

We'll learn to never think but copy blindly,

To ally with the mean and keep them near.

We'll learn to not be talented or clever,

and the most important lessons

for success in a career:

How to follow orders when you're bordering

on nausea and you're bored and

insecure and dwarfed by fear.

From Kate Tempest, Hold Your Own, 2014. Winner of the Ted Hughes Award for Poetry.

The Goshawk

by T. H. White

The Goshawk

Chapter I

Tuesday

When I first saw him he was a round thing like a clothes basket covered with sacking. But he was tumultuous and frightening, repulsive in the same way as snakes are frightening to people who do not know them, or dangerous as the sudden movement of a toad by the door step when one goes out at night with a lantern into the dew. The sacking had been sewn with string, and he was bumping against it from underneath: bump, bump, bump, incessantly, with more than a nint of lunacy. The basket pulsed like a big heart in fever. It gave our weird cries of protest, hysterical, terrified, but furious and authoritative. It would have eaten anybody alive.

Imagine what his life had been till then. When he was an infant, still unable ot fly and untidy with bits of fluff, still that kind of mottled, motive and gaping toad which confronts us when we look into birds' nests in May: when, moreover, he was a citizen of Germany, so far away: a glaring man had come to his mother's nest with a basket like this one, and had stuffed him it. He had never seen a human being, never been confined in such a box, which smelled of darkness and manufacture and the stink of man. It must have been like death – the thing which we can never know beforehand – as, with clumsy talons groping for an unnatural foothold, his fledgeling consciousness was hunched and bundled in the oblong alien surroundingness. The gutteral voices, the un-birdlike den he was taken to, the scaly hands which bound him, the second basket, the smell and noise of the motor car, at the unbearable, measured clamour of the aircraft which bounced those skidding talons on the untrustworthy woven floor all the way to England: heat, fear, noise, hunger, the reverse of nature: with these to stomach, terrified, but still nobly and madly defiant, the eyas goshawk had arrived at my small cottage in his accursed basket – a wild and adolescent creature whose father and mother in eagles' nests had fed him with bloody meet still quivering with life, a foreigner from far black pine slopes, where a bundle of precipitous sticks and some white droppings, with a few bones and feathers splashed over the tree foot, had been to him the ancestral heritage. He was born to fly, sloping sideways, free among the verdure of that Teutonic upland, to murder with his fierce feet and to consume with that curved Persian beak, who now hopped up and down in the clothes basket with a kind of imperious precocity, the impatience of a spoiled but noble heir apparent to the Holy Roman Empire.

I picked up the clothes basket in a gingerly way and carried it to the barn. The workman's cottage which I lived in had been built under Queen Victoria, with barn and pigsty and bakehouse, and it had once been inhabited by a gamekeeper. There in the wood, long agon when Englishmen lived their own sports, instead of competing at games with tedious abstract tennis bats and cricket sticks and golfing mallets as they do today, the keeper who lived in the cottage had reared his pheasants. There was no wire netting in his days, and the windows of the low barn were enclosed with wooden slats, nailed criss-cross, a diamond lattice work. I put Gos down in the barn, in his basket, and was splitting a rabbit's head to get at the brain, when two friends whose sad employment I had lately followed came to take me to a public house for the last time. The hawk came out of the basket already strong on the wing, beat up to the rafters, while his master, armed with two pairs of leather gloves on each hand, cowered near the floor – and then there was no more time. I had intended to put a pair of jesses on him at once, but he flew up before I had pulled myself together: and it was only when the great bundle of young feathers was perching on the rafters that one could see the jesses already on him. Jesses were what they called the thongs about his feet. Jessed but not belled, perched at the top of the old gamekeeper's loft, baleful and extraordinary, I left the goshawk to settle down: while we three went out to the public house for a kind of last supper, at which none was more impatient of translation than the departing guest.

I never saw another butterfly

The Butterfly

                                        by  Pavel Friedman

The last, the very last,
So richly, brightly, dazzlingly yellow
Perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing
against a white stone…

Such, such a yellow
Is carried lightly ‘way up high.
It went away I’m sure because it wished to
kiss the world goodbye.

For seven weeks I’ve lived in here,
Penned up inside this ghetto
But I have found my people here.
The dandelions call to me
And the white chestnut candles in the court.
Only I never saw another butterfly.

That butterfly was the last one.
Butterflies don’t live in here,
In the ghetto.

Beyond the bay, the infant-bearing sea

                                     by Rowan Williams

Swansea Bay: Dylan at 100

1.

A thumb drawn down, smearing the grey wash,

storm pillars float over a December morning,

            the sun still tipping rocks with liquid

out at the headland. In the bay swells urge

this way and that; a dark patch swings

out from the sea wall, pushes the pushing current

sideways, the lanes of water tilting by inches

under the lurid morning, heaving this way and that

beneath the mottled skin and pinching it into the long

blade of a wave, the knife under the cloth

ready to slice. Watching, you have no notion

how it all runs, the hidden weights swinging

and striking, passing their messages, hidden

as the pulses under the scalp, behind the eyes,

that sometimes pinch themselves into a sharp

fold, into an edge, as if the buried cranial dances

gathered themselves to cut, for a moment, at

the skull's dry case and break through in white curls.

2.

I sang in my chains. I listened for the pushing swell

of light in the country yards, the undertow

of bliss that still cuts at the cloth, at the bone,

at all the tired shrouds. I listened

for the tide retreating and the small lick and splash

of breeze on the trickles between corrugated sand,

for the silent footfall of pacing birds, processing

to their office. Beyond the bay, the infant-bearing sea

slips further off, the next room is quiet and the sun

whispers hoarsely. When I call in my dream for it,

my voice is small and the knife strains bluntly

at the knotted cloth. Watching the swell again

at whispering liquid sunrise, I have no answer

when I wonder how the world's sand runs

out of grace and the dark moods of the water

jostle each other; I cannot tell if they will gather

ever again, severing the milky web that holds me

mortally. Do not go. Now as I was

From Rowan Williams, The Other Mountain.

I am not yet born

                           by Louis MacNeice

Prayer Before Birth

I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
my life when they murder by means of my
hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
waves call me to folly and the desert calls
me to doom and the beggar refuses
my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
one face, a thing, and against all those
who would dissipate my entirety, would
blow me like thistledown hither and
thither or hither and thither
like water held in the
hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me. 

From poemhunter.com/poem/prayer-before-birth/

         

In Jerusalem stone cries to stone

                            by James Fenton

                       JERUSALEM

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone,
And the interrogation will not die
For there is no eternal city
And there is no pity
And there is nothing underneath the sky
No rainbow and no guarantee –
There is no covenant between your God and me.
2
It is superb in the air.
Suffering is everywhere
And each man wears his suffering like a skin.
My history is proud.
Mine is not allowed.
This is the cistern where all wars begin,
The laughter from the armoured car.
This is the man who won’t believe you’re what you are.
3
This is your fault.
This is a crusader vault.
The Brook of Kidron flows from Mea She’arim.
I will pray for you.
I will tell you what to do.
I’ll stone you. I shall break your every limb.
Oh, I am not afraid of you,
But maybe I should fear the things you make me do.
4
This is not Golgotha.
This is the Holy Sepulchre,
The Emperor Hadrian’s temple to a love
Which he did not much share.
Golgotha could be anywhere.
Jerusalem itself is on the move.
It leaps and leaps from hill to hill
And as it makes its way it also makes its will.
5
The city was sacked.
Jordan was driven back.
The pious Christians burned the Jews alive.
This is a minaret.
I’m not finished yet.
We’re waiting for reinforcements to arrive.
What was your mother’s real name?
Would it be safe today to go to Bethlehem?
6
This is the Garden Tomb.
No, this is the Garden Tomb.
This is Utopia.
I came here from Ethiopia.
This hole is where the flying carpet dropped
The Prophet off to pray one night
And from here one hour later he resumed his flight.
7
Who packed your bag?
I packed my bag.
Where was your uncle’s mother’s sister born?
Have you ever met an Arab?
Yes, I am a scarab.
I am a worm. I am a thing of scorn.
I cry Impure from street to street
And see my degradation in the eyes I meet.
8
I am your enemy.
This is Gethsemane.
The broken graves look to the Temple Mount.
Tell me now, tell me when
When shall we all rise again?
Shall I be first in that great body count?
When shall the tribes be gathered in?
When, tell me, when shall the Last Things begin?
9
You are in error.
This is terror.
This is your banishment. This land is mine.
This is what you earn.
This is the Law of No Return.
This is the sour dough, this the sweet wine.
This is my history, this my race
And this unhappy man threw acid in my face.
10
Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone.
These are the warrior archaeologists.
This is us and that is them.
This is Jerusalem.
These are dying men with tattooed wrists.
Do this and I’ll destroy your home.
I have destroyed your home.  You have destroyed my home.

From thepoetryplace.wordpress.com/2008/07/23/jerusalem/

Slips of information

                                   By Jennifer Militello

Antisocial Media

It's easier to computer than to crash. It's easier

to computer than to hold a hand or knit

a winter together from headlights on the highway.

It's easier to computer and be a hybrid and

cross from bowels and eardrums into hours

lit and roaring by light freight. The chapters

there can tell you an octopus has three hearts,

that snails breath through their feet. It is easier

to have no arms or breath, to position through

colors and jumps shoreless as steam. No

surfaces. No verbs to be. No mussels

or bellows or congestion or caffeine.

No lens to focus, no Rome to burn. Who can

do when the roots are so untidy and

the branches rack like antlers against other

branches. It's easier to computer than

to guess at a savior. Than to whisper slips

of information to the flesh. Let language construct

mere dewdrops of light. Let the circuitry

gauge the need and make it clean and make it

so heady it is erected, a remedy, in its ease.

There is no destination. No grave in place of a person

loved in the past, no identity classified, factual, no glass

to break open in the fisted hand, no cracked windshield,

no hurricane. Or there is, but it is closed inside its box

smaller than the box for roses, dead and moldered

by the time they reach the door, delivered only once.

From The American Poetry Review, March/April. 2015.