[toybulldog]

Memory of My Father

Every old man I see
Reminds me of my father
When he had fallen in love with death
One time when sheaves were gathered.

That man I saw in Gardner Street
Stumble in the kerb was one,
He stared at me half-eyed,
I might have been his son.

And I remember the musician
Faltering over his fiddle
In Bayswater, London,
He too set me the riddle.

Every old man I see
In October-coloured weather
Seems to say to me:
‘I was once your father.’

Patrick Kavanagh

[toybulldog]

The Legs

There was this road,
And it led up-hill,
And it led down-hill,
And round and in and out.

And the traffic was legs,
Legs from the knees down,
Coming and going,
Never pausing.

And the gutters gurgled
With the rain’s overflow,
And the sticks on the pavement
Blindly tapped and tapped.

What drew the legs along
Was the never-stopping.
And the senseless, frightening
Fate of being legs.

Legs for the road,
The road for legs,
Resolutely nowhere
In both directions.

My legs at least
Were not in that rout:
On grass by the roadside
Entire I stood,

Watching the unstoppable
Legs go by
With never a stumble
Between step and step.

Though my smile was broad
The legs could not see,
Though my laugh was loud
The legs could not hear.

My head dizzied, then:
I wondered suddenly,
Might I too be a walker
From the knees down ?

Gently I touched my shins.
The doubt unchained them:
They had run in twenty puddles
Before I regained them.

Robert Graves

[toybulldog]

How to Kill

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: ‘Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill’.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the waves of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost.

The weightless mosquito touches
her tiny shadow on the stone,
and with how like, how infinite
a lightness, man and shadow meet.
They fuse. A shadow is a man
when the mosquito death approaches.

Keith Douglas

[toybulldog]

Fable

Once upon a time
there was a lonely wolf
lonelier than the angels.

He happened to come to a village,
He fell in love with the first house he saw.

Already he loved its walls
the caresses of its bricklayers.
But the windows stopped him.

In the room sat people.
Apart from God nobody ever
found them so beautiful
as this child-like beast.

So at night he went into the house.
He stopped in the middle of the room
and never moved from there any more.

He stood all through the night, with wide eyes
and on into the morning when he was beaten to death.

(translated by Ted Hughes from the Hungarian)
Detail from the KZ-Oratorio, Dark Heaven
Janos Pilinszky

[toybulldog]

The Cable Ship

We fished up the Atlantic Cable one day between the Barbadoes and the Tortugas,
held up our lanterns
and put some rubber over the wound in its back,
latitude 15 degrees north, longitude 61 degrees west.
When we laid our ear down to the gnawed place
we could hear something humming inside the cable.

‘It’s some millionaires in Montreal and St John
talking over the price of Cuban sugar, and ways to
reduce our wages,’ one of us said.

For a long time we stood there thinking, in a circle of lanterns,
we’re all patient cable fishermen,
then we let the coated cable fall back
to its place in the sea.

(translated from the Swedish)
Harry Edmund Martinson

[toybulldog]

@cath 55 wrote:

goes n builds anderson shelter to put me lap top in ……….

At the Bomb Testing Site

At noon in the desert a panting lizard
waited for history, its elbows tense,
watching the curve of a particular road
as if something might happen.

It was looking at something farther off
than people could see, an important scene
acted in stone for little selves
at the flute end of consequences.

There was just a continent without much on it
under a sky that never cared less.
Ready for a change, the elbows waited.
The hands gripped hard on the desert.

William Stafford

[toybulldog]

lol I know

yes the ‘rub of the green’ will always even out over a Premiership season. Always, and that tends to minimise these saturday night talking points.

Cup matches are different

[toybulldog]

@poppet wrote:

I wish Mims, thanks for the compilment though. Im not sure if your being sarcastic Toy but apology accepted.

Love Poppet

I wasn’t and thought I had explained

anyway, ty

love me

[toybulldog]

don’t know ya but well done and he’s lovely xx

[toybulldog]

pete I’m usually bored to feck by your siggys, but that one is amazing.

sorry, yeah Rob Styles, another one to go against the wall blind-folded. Although maybe in his case he won’t need a blindfold huh ?

[Author]

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