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The
Mini-Anthology
Copyright of poems
included in the Mini-Anthology belongs to the authors.
In Praise of Rust
(after John Ruskin)
Oxide of iron, painting
soil and sand
in russett, amber and
a hundred golds,
veining Italian marble
with its sun,
spills colour over
drabness, brush-stroke fold
of new-ploughed earth, sheds light upon the land.
Dark iron flows through
arteries and stains
the little world of man
with crimson, floods
vitality into our limbs,
and runs
with tell-tale blushes
to our cheeks. Bright blood
breathes oxygen to fireour
mabrled veins.
The rust we curse on razor blade and knife
tints Scottish pebbles, precious jasper, stones
we value for their beauty. Every one
is alchemised from deathly monotones
by this brown mystery, the dust of life.
Barbara Daniels
Strange Birds
I listen to strange
birds. They cry in sorrow
I think, behind
the fences in the park.
Usual shrieks at home
In the Amazon
I guess, but here up
north they somehow harrow
my heart or lift some
bone or buried spark
of what in my young
time
was my perception.
Protracted peering cries,
bald cries that keen,
terse cries they may
not even know they mean -
and all around the
lake
they glitteringly ache.
Michael Axtell
Roman Temple
Abandoned by its god,
bereft of worshippers,
The ruined temple rises
on the valley's rim.
Sparrows lark among
its flaking capitols, and
Henbane sprigs the
roofless sanctuary walls.
Now, the light of evening
on its crumbling face,
It sits serene, like
some old man outside his door,
Whose way it is to
listen to the summer sounds
Of distant sheep and
the singing of a few late birds.
Janet Faraday
Sacrifices
These things are very
dear to me -
Red berries which the
hawthorns yield,
A midnight frost, the
simple compline bell,
And goosegrass plumes
which grace each fallow field.
But I would give these
treasures up,
Yes, every one, to
have you always near.
Four things I long to
see once more -
Blue spectral fogs
that whirl and race,
And rushes stirred
by carp, and heathered hills;
The moon that wears
its craters as a face ...
But I would wave these
visions by,
Forsake them all, if
you would smile for me.
Gary Bills
Golgotha
A round skull, deep
in the grave,
Adam at rest:
Root and flower, gentle,
aloof,
grew from his breast.
Silent his bones, graven
in time,
settled and still.
Shaken by blood, anointed
with fear,
he woke on that hill.
Kate Foley
The Song of the Wind
I am sleepy yet and
blind
But I have heard the
wind
Calling, and how the
chattering leaves
Go whispering just
behind.
All hollow with the
thirst of days
They turn on freckled
wings;
And though spring comes,
the wind remains
In my ears, and the
song he sings.
For even as he took
the dry
Cracked words of dying
leaves,
He took the thoughts
that I had swept
In their pyramids of
sheaves;
And I was left in a
field of death
Where the sun had lately
shone,
And only the echo of
the wind
Trailed softly and
was gone.
Pamela Constantine
Summer Afternoon
(after the French
of Renée Vivien)
Coolness glides through
the apple-trees.
In the depth of the
verdure the brook sings
The confused drone
that fills a hive of bees
With gentle murmurings.
Under the sun the summer
grasses fade.
The rose, expiring
after the harsh ravage
Of the heat, languishes
towards the shade.
Sleep drips from the foliage.
M.A.Porter
Loss
Someone has stolen my golden dish,
the wine, the honey and the wheat,
and I must take an empty bowl
and beg for leavings in the street.
Someone has stolen my silver flute
That charmed the thrushes from the bough,
and all that certainty of sound
is silence now.
Someone has stolen the
living fire
that blazed where mourning
ashes lie
upon the hearth. In dark,
in cold,
I in my need have only
- I.
Through the thick silence
I may at last
hear whirling, wheeling
planets sing.
Out of the void a golden
rose
with flame at its heart
may spring.
Meg Seaton
Frosty Evening
Evening like an opal lies
about the faintly glowing
skies,
touching with rose and
amethyst
the frost-cold mist.
Chaste landscape, icily
austere,
keeps watch by Beauty's
frozen bier
clamped down beneath the
hardened ground
beyond the reach of sound.
In rigid Death's cold interval,
'neath purity's unyielding
pall,
the undefeated earth lies
deep
in undisturbéd
sleep.
Gladys Noble
Winter in a Suburb
Its naked white garden
refrigerates this house
In a crazy tall terrace
faltering up a hill,
Roofed for congregations
of birds, shadow-haunted by the mouse,
Ancient shelter of Love
and the Muses - and here we are still.
Here we are with a cat,
now, working the winter out;
Mounting, descending our
desert of stairs in clumpy boots.
How beautiful flitters
the snow! Time congeals; a thin doubt,
Dream-vexed in sleep,
mutters, wriggles out faint roots.
Dream-vexed in heavy quilts
the nights are got through.
Air-phantoms, cold-engendered,
frosty armies fling
Ice-prick spears at gelid
glass, sky-bitten brick; undo
Memory, and hope, and
the rising hour, crippled on the wing.
M.L. McCarthy
Violets
Consider how the violets
you smell this spring
In your forest-bound garden
of rocks
Convey the same surprising
scent that Sappho
Smelled some twenty centuries
ago.
While empires crumble and
epics fade,
The scent of the violet
Drawn from the indifferent
dust
Proclaims the same enduring
news:
The mute and fragrant
gospel of the grass.
Cornel Lengyel
Pheasants
Along a lane where never
stirred
(Unless the cuckoo called
his lover)
More than a brown or nameless
bird,
Glimpsing a cock with
painted hood
Or mottle-feathered hen
take cover,
Was how I falsely understood
Someone kept chickens
in the wood.
Now loudly in pursuit of
sport
Beyond the wood the echoes
ring:
Dogs bark, guns twin-report;
And pheasant, crow and
pigeon rise,
Save for a brace that
with limp wing
Hangs from the hunter's
belt, or lies
Too sound asleep with
open eyes.
Roger Taylor
Lac d'Artouste
Whether you come or not,
the water falls
down granite slopes and
foxglove-fingered mauves:
pink-tinted blanket of
the Pyrenees,
where irises, like flames
of midnight, seize
the day with sudden disbelief
in pain.
Whether I'll see these
slabs of slate again,
marble, and gentian, and
the wind-plucked blue
of mountain lake (them,
any more than you)
remains, as ever, a moot
point - as so
all speculation on eternities,
on the immortal soul,
mine, yours, hers, his
and its -
the neuter Nature's with the N
spelt large for clearer
comprehension. When
will I return, if ever?
- or will you?
Henny Kleiner
Aqua
Full-bodied springs
From a Roman's mouth
Water that sings
A song of the south.
Crystalline cool
From the oak-leaved earth,
This cup is full
Of Lucullan mirth.
Crystalling clear
In a cup of clay,
Water quaffed here
Has a fine bouquet.
Thomas Ansell
In Webster Groves, Missouri
In a back yard, in Webster
Groves, Missouri,
a young man could consider
his lot confining.
He would see more of himself
than shirts and socks,
and something less familiar
than the tired
path to the fishpond.
Well, that's the way it
is with a young man -
and a young man is right
to get away,
as far away as Athens
if he gets the chance,
and not stay put there,
either, if he can avoid it.
He will come to regret
his decision,
it may be:
which is not to say he
was any better off
in Webster Groves, Missouri.
Knute Skinner
From the Sea
I'll go no further up this
coast
Where rocks cling numbly
to the shore.
The night, and sadness,
turn me home,
And dawn will bring me
here no more.
But I will carry
back the waves,
A slight brown girl who
sat alone,
The vastness of this swelling
sea -
All etched like scrimshaw
on my bone.
Bradley Strahan
Compulsion
The sea repeats its ceaseless
rush to land;
Sun burnishing, until
it stings the eye,
Undrinkable acres, barren
miles of sand.
Dazed by a grid of light
and sound, I stand
By splintering waves,
attempt to fathom why
The sea repeats its ceaseless
rush to land.
Futility? Or has it all
been planned? -
This echoing expanse of
naked sky,
Undrinkable acres, barren
miles of sand.
In floods the answer: a
compulsive hand
That can't erase its errors
yet must try:
The sea repeats its ceaseless
rush to land.
Once it flung gasping misfits
up to strand
Them small upon the shingle,
high and dry.
Undrinkable acres, barren
miles of sand
Fed them. Unable still
to understand
How, after all these years,
they didn't die,
The sea repeats its ceaseless
rush to land -
Undrinkable acres, barren
miles of sand.
Colin Rowbotham
The Moon Is Down
The moon is down, no clouds
are in the sky.
The earth is dark - an
empty bowl in space;
And here's my chance to
look into the face
Of sleeping heaven with
unguarded eye;
To wander through the dippered
stars and spy
Out Cygnus in his elegance
and grace,
Or follow Sagittarius
in his pace
Up the ecliptic to a throne
on high;
To peer across the stardrifts
to the heart
Of distances beyond imagining,
And see galactic pinwheels
as they start
To turn and spread their
arms and dance and sing
How light wells out of
darkness by the art
Of nothingness and night's
eternal spring.
Jon Taylor
On Parting
You seem a sad forgotten
flower
Plucked from some placid
fairy-place,
Flushed and flecked with
fear, your dreaming flower's face,
Damp with dew and dread;
A savage bleeding bloom,
your hue
A streaming eye and swollen
eyelid red.
That I might stay
another blessed hour
To kiss the tears from
parted petal-lips,
Take further refuge in
your fairy power
Another day, one last
good night,
And hold a hand more bright
and sweet, now lost,
Than even love is sweet
and bright.
Kevin Roberts
Forever Autumn
The robin sings a
Season of its own:
a sad refrain -
Belonging yet apart.
I scarce can say
Exactly what is wrong:
Why spring is edged
with ice -
Why summer's throng
Of foliage and flower
Still turns the eye
Unerringly from light.
How thin this song
and sad!
How drawn it seems
From cold-condensing air
-
As if a strand as
Tenuous as silk
To float and fade
Through gossamers
of mist.
Mervyn Linford
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