Ladles and jellyspoons,
I come before you
to stand behind you
to tell you something
I know nothing about.
Next Thursday, the day after Friday,
there will be a ladies' meeting for men only.
Wear your best clothes,
if you haven't any,
and if you can come, please stay home.
Admission is free,
you can pay at the door.
We'll give you a seat,
you can sit on the floor.
It makes no difference where you sit,
the kid in the gallery
is sure to spit.

Tags:   Ladles and Jellyspoons Anonymous poem

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Let the boy try along this bayonet-blade
How cold steel is, and keen with hunger of blood;
Blue with all malice, like a madman's flash;
And thinly drawn with famishing for flesh.

Lend him to stroke these blind, blunt bullet-leads,
Which long to nuzzle in the hearts of lads,
Or give him cartridges of fine zinc teeth
Sharp with the sharpness of grief and death.

For his teeth seem for laughing round an apple.
There lurk no claws behind his fingers supple;
And God will grow no talons at his heels,
Nor antlers through the thickness of his curls.

Tags:   Arms and the Boy Wilfred Owen poem

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Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

Tags:   Brussels in Winter W H Auden poem

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While the water-wagon’s ringing showers
Sweetened the dust with a woodland smell,
” Past noon, past noon, two sultry hours,”
Drowsily fell
From the schoolhouse clock
In the Isle of Dogs by Millwall Dock.

Mirrored in shadowy windows draped
With ragged net or half-drawn blind
Bowsprits, masts, exactly shaped
To woo or fight the wind,
Like monitors of guilt
By strength and beauty sent,
Disgraced the shameful houses built
To furnish rent.

From the pavements and the roofs
In shimmering volumes wound
The wrinkled heat ;
Distant hammers, wheels and hoofs,
A turbulent pulse of sound,
Southward obscurely beat,
The only utterance of the afternoon,
Till on a sudden in the silent street
An organ-man drew up and ground
The Old Hundredth tune.

Forthwith the pillar of cloud that hides the
past
Burst into flame,
Whose alchemy transmuted house and mast,
Street, dockyard, pier and pile :
By magic sound the Isle of Dogs became
A northern isle
A green isle like a beryl set
In a wine-coloured sea,
Shadowed by mountains where a river met
The ocean’s arm extended royally.

There also in the evening on the shore
An old man ground the Old Hundredth tune,
An old enchanter steeped in human lore,
Sad-eyed, with whitening beard, and visage lank:
Not since and not before,
Under the sunset or the mellowing moon,
Has any hand of man’s conveyed
Such meaning in the turning of a crank.

Sometimes he played
As if his box had been
An organ in an abbey richly lit;
For when the dark invaded day’s demesne.
And the sun set in crimson and in gold ;
When idlers swarmed upon the esplanade,
And a late steamer wheeling towards the quay
Struck founts of silver from the darkling
sea,

The solemn tune arose and shook and rolled
Above the throng,
Above the hum and tramp and bravely knit
All hearts in common memories of song.
Sometimes he played at speed ;
Then the Old Hundredth like a devil’s mass
Instinct with evil thought and evil deed,
Rang out in anguish and remorse. Alas !
That men must know both Heaven and Hell!

Sometimes the melody
Sang with the murmuring surge;
And with the winds would tell
Of peaceful graves and of the passing bell.
Sometimes it pealed across the bay
A high triumphal dirge,
A dirge For the departing undefeated day.

A noble tune, a high becoming mate
Of the capped mountains and the deep broad firth;
A simple tune and great,
The fittest utterance of the voice of earth.

Tags:   In the Isle of Dogs John Davidson poem

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The old farmer, nearing death, asked
To be carried outside and set down
Where he could see a certain field
‘And then I will cry my heart out’, he said.

It troubles me, thinking about that man;
What shape was the field of his crying In Donegal?

I remember a small field in Down, a field
Within fields, shaped like a triangle.
I could have stood there and looked at it
All day long.

And I remember crossing the frontier between
France and Spain at a forbidden point, and seeing
A small triangular field in Spain,
And stopping

Or walking in Ireland down any rutted by-road
To where it hit the highway, there was always
At this turning point and abutment
A still centre, a V-shape of grass
Untouched by cornering traffic.
Where country lads larked at night.

I think I know what the shape of the field was
That made the old man weep.

Tags:   Field Day W R Rodgers poem

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