Poems

• I met a traveller from an antique land, Who said —“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand, Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown, And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
• And on the pedestal, these words appear: My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings; Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair! Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
• Not a red rose or a satin heart.

  I give you an onion.

  It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

  It promises light

  like the careful undressing of love.

  Here. It will blind you with tears like a lover. It will make your reflection a wobbling photo of grief.

  I am trying to be truthful.

  Not a cute card or a kissogram.

  I give you an onion. Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips, possessive and faithful as we are, for as long as we are.

  Take it. Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring, if you like. Lethal. Its scent will cling to your fingers, cling to your knife.
• If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; A body of England’s, breathing English air, Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home.
• And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.
• I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed. Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat. The convenience of the high trees! The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray Are of advantage to me; And the earth's face upward for my inspection. My feet are locked upon the rough bark. It took the whole of Creation To produce my foot, my each feather: Now I hold Creation in my foot
• Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -I kill where I please because it is all mine. There is no sophistry in my body: My manners are tearing off heads -The allotment of death. For the one path of my flight is direct Through the bones of the living. No arguments assert my right: The sun is behind me. Nothing has changed since I began. My eye has permitted no change. I am going to keep things like this.
• How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. I love thee to the depth and breadth and height My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight For the ends of being and ideal grace .I love thee to the level of every day’s Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. I love thee freely, as men strive for right. I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
• I love thee with the passion put to use In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith. I love thee with a love I seemed to lose With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath, Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose, I shall but love thee better after death.
• For years after the farmers found them - the wasted young, turning up under their plough blades as they tended the land back into itself. A chit of bone, the china plate of a shoulder blade, the relic of a finger, the blown and broken bird's egg of a skull, all mimicked now in flint, breaking blue in white across this field where they were told to walk not run towards the wood and its nesting machine guns. And now even the earth stands sentinel, reaching back into itself for reminders of what happened like a wound working a foreign body to the surface of the skin.
• This morning, twenty men were buried in one long grave, a broken mosaic of bone linked arm in arm, their skeletons paused mid dance-macabre in boots that outlasted them, their socketed heads tilted back at an angle and their jaws, those that have them, dropped open. as if the notes they had sung have only now, with this unearthing, slipped from their absent tongues.