Ambulances
Philip
LarkinClosed
like confessionals, they thread
Loud noons of cities, giving
back
None of the glances they absorb.
Light glossy grey, arms
on a plaque,
They come to rest at any kerb:
All streets in time
are visited.
Then children strewn on steps or road,
Or
women coming from the shops
Past smells of different dinners,
see
A wild white face that overtops
Red stretcher-blankets
momently
As it is carried in and stowed,
And sense the
solving emptiness
That lies just under all we do,
And for a
second get it whole,
So permanent and blank and true.
The
fastened doors recede. Poor soul,
They whisper at their own
distress;
For borne away in deadened air
May go the sudden
shut of loss
Round something nearly at an end,
And what cohered
in it across
The years, the unique random blend
Of families and
fashions, there
At last begin to loosen. Far
From the
exchange of love to lie
Unreachable inside a room
The traffic
parts to let go by
Brings closer what is left to come,
And
dulls to distance all we are.
Church
Going
By
Philip Larking
Once I am sure there's
nothing going on
I step inside, letting the door thud
shut.
Another church: matting, seats, and stone,
And little
books; sprawlings of flowers, cut
For Sunday, brownish now; some
brass and stuff
Up at the holy end; the small neat organ;
And a
tense, musty, unignorable silence,
Brewed God knows how long.
Hatless, I take off
My cycle-clips in awkward reverence.
Move
forward, run my hand around the font.
From where I stand, the roof
looks almost new -
Cleaned, or restored? Someone would know: I
don't.
Mounting the lectern, I peruse a few
Hectoring
large-scale verses, and pronounce
'Here endeth' much more loudly
than I'd meant.
The echoes snigger briefly. Back at the door
I
sign the book, donate an Irish sixpence,
Reflect the place was not
worth stopping for.
Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And
always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for;
wondering, too,
When churches will fall completely out of use
What
we shall turn them into, if we shall keep
A few cathedrals
chronically on show,
Their parchment, plate and pyx in locked
cases,
And let the rest rent-free to rain and sheep.
Shall we
avoid them as unlucky places?
Or, after dark, will dubious
women come
To make their children touch a particular stone;
Pick
simples for a cancer; or on some
Advised night see walking a dead
one?
Power of some sort will go on
In games, in riddles,
seemingly at random;
But superstition, like belief, must die,
And
what remains when disbelief has gone?
Grass, weedy pavement,
brambles, buttress, sky,
A shape less recognisable each
week,
A purpose more obscure. I wonder who
Will be the last,
the very last, to seek
This place for what it was; one of the
crew
That tap and jot and know what rood-lofts were?
Some
ruin-bibber, randy for antique,
Or Christmas-addict, counting on a
whiff
Of gown-and-bands and organ-pipes and myrrh?
Or will he
be my representative,
Bored, uninformed, knowing the ghostly
silt
Dispersed, yet tending to this cross of ground
Through
suburb scrub because it held unspilt
So long and equably what
since is found
Only in separation - marriage, and birth,
And
death, and thoughts of these - for which was built
This special
shell? For, though I've no idea
What this accoutred frowsty barn
is worth,
It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious
house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our
compulsions meet,
Are recognized, and robed as destinies.
And
that much never can be obsolete,
Since someone will forever be
surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious,
And
gravitating with it to this ground,
Which, he once heard, was
proper to grow wise in,
If only that so many dead lie round.
One Art
by
Elizabeth
Bishop
The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
The force that through the green fuse drives the
flower
by
Dylan
Thomas
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees
Is my destroyer.
And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose
My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks
Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams
Turns mine to wax.
And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins
How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool
Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind
Hauls my shroud sail.
And I am dumb to tell the hanging man
How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head;
Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood
Shall calm her sores.
And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind
How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb
How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
After the Funeral (In memory of Ann Jones)
By Dylan Thomas
After the funeral, mule praises,
brays,
Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap
Tap
happily of one peg in the thick
Grave's foot, blinds down the
lids, the teeth in black,
The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the
sleeves,
Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep,
Shakes
a desolate boy who slits his throat
In the dark of the coffin and
sheds dry leaves,
That breaks one bone to light with a judgment
clout'
After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles
In a
room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern,
I stand, for this
memorial's sake, alone
In the snivelling hours with dead, humped
Ann
Whose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddles
Round the
parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun
(Though this for her
is a monstrous image blindly
Magnified out of praise; her death
was a still drop;
She would not have me sinking in the holy
Flood
of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep
And need no druid
of her broken body).
But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call
all
The seas to service that her wood-tongud virtue
Babble like
a bellbuoy over the hymning heads,
Bow down the walls of the
ferned and foxy woods
That her love sing and swing through a brown
chapel,
Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds.
Her
flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue
With the wild
breast and blessed and giant skull
Is carved from her in a room
with a wet window
In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked
year.
I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands
Lie with
religion in their cramp, her threadbare
Whisper in a damp word,
her wits drilled hollow,
Her fist of a face died clenched on a
round pain;
And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone.
These
cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental
Argument of the hewn
voice, gesture and psalm
Storm me forever over her grave until
The
stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love
And the strutting fern
lay seeds on the black sill.
Dylan Thomas
Poem in October
It was my thirtieth year to heaven
Woke to my hearing from harbour and
neighbour wood
And
the mussel pooled and the heron
Priested
shore
The
morning beckon
With water praying and call of seagull
and rook
And the knock of sailing boats on the
net webbed wall
Myself
to set foot
That
second
In
the still sleeping town and set forth.
My
birthday began with the water-
Birds and the birds of the winged
trees flying my name
Above
the farms and the white horses
And
I rose
In
rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all
my days.
High tide and the heron dived when I
took the road
Over
the border
And
the gates
Of
the town closed as the town awoke.
A
springful of larks in a rolling
Cloud and the roadside bushes brimming
with whistling
Blackbirds
and the sun of October
Summery
On
the hill’s shoulder,
Here were fond climates and sweet
singers suddenly
Come in the morning where I wandered
and listened
To
the rain wringing
Wind
blow cold
In
the wood faraway under me.
Pale
rain over the dwindling harbour
And over the sea wet church the size
of a snail
With
its horns through mist and the castle
Brown
as owls
But
all the gardens
Of spring and summer were blooming in
the tall tales
Beyond the border and under the lark
full cloud.
There
could I marvel
My
birthday
Away
but the weather turned around.
It
turned away from the blithe country
And down the other air and the blue
altered sky
Streamed
again a wonder of summer
With
apples
Pears
and red currants
And I saw in the turning so clearly a
child’s
Forgotten mornings when he walked with
his mother
Through
the parables
Of
sun light
And
the legends of the green chapels
And
the twice told fields of infancy
That his tears burned my cheeks and
his heart moved in mine.
These
were the woods the river and sea
Where
a boy
In
the listening
Summertime of the dead whispered the
truth of his joy
To the trees and the stones and the
fish in the tide.
And
the mystery
Sang
alive
Still
in the water and singingbirds.
And
there could I marvel my birthday
Away but the weather turned around.
And the true
Joy
of the long dead child sang burning
In
the sun.
It
was my thirtieth
Year to heaven stood there then in the
summer noon
Though the town below lay leaved with
October blood.
O
may my heart’s truth
Still
be sung
On
this high hill in a year’s turning.
Fern Hill
by Dylan
Thomas
Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
The night above the dingle starry,
Time let me hail and climb
Golden in the heydays of his eyes,
And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns
And once below a time I lordly had the trees and leaves
Trail with daisies and barley
Down the rivers of the windfall light.
And as I was green and carefree, famous among the barns
About the happy yard and singing as the farm was home,
In the sun that is young once only,
Time let me play and be
Golden in the mercy of his means,
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold,
And the sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams.
All the sun long it was running, it was lovely, the hay
Fields high as the house, the tunes from the chimneys, it was air
And playing, lovely and watery
And fire green as grass.
And nightly under the simple stars
As I rode to sleep the owls were bearing the farm away,
All the moon long I heard, blessed among stables, the nightjars
Flying with the ricks, and the horses
Flashing into the dark.
And then to awake, and the farm, like a wanderer white
With the dew, come back, the cock on his shoulder: it was all
Shining, it was Adam and maiden,
The sky gathered again
And the sun grew round that very day.
So it must have been after the birth of the simple light
In the first, spinning place, the spellbound horses walking warm
Out of the whinnying green stable
On to the fields of praise.
And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
In the sun born over and over,
I ran my heedless ways,
My wishes raced through the house high hay
And nothing I cared, at my sky blue trades, that time allows
In all his tuneful turning so few and such morning songs
Before the children green and golden
Follow him out of grace,
Nothing I cared, in the lamb white days, that time would take me
Up to the swallow thronged loft by the shadow of my hand,
In the moon that is always rising,
Nor that riding to sleep
I should hear him fly with the high fields
And wake to the farm forever fled from the childless land.
Oh as I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
