Category Poem

Unrhymed, unrhythmical, the chatter goes: Yet no one hears his own remarks as prose. Beneath each topic tunelessly discussed The ground-bass is reciprocal mistrust. The names in fashion shuttling to and fro Yield, when deciphered, messages of woe. You cannot…

At last the secret is out, as it always must come in the end, the delicious story is ripe to tell to tell to the intimate friend; over the tea-cups and into the square the tongues has its desire; still…

Certainly our city with its byres of poverty down to The river’s edge, its cathedral, its engines, its dogs; Here is the cosmopolitan cooking And the light alloys and the glass. Built by the conscience-stricken, the weapon-making, By us. Wild…

As the poets have mournfully sung, Death takes the innocent young, The rolling-in-money, The screamingly-funny, And those who are very well hung.

As I walked out one evening, Walking down Bristol Street, The crowds upon the pavement Were fields of harvest wheat. And down by the brimming river I heard a lover sing Under an arch of the railway: ‘Love has no…

Each lover has some theory of his own About the difference between the ache Of being with his love, and being alone: Why what, when dreaming, is dear flesh and bone That really stirs the senses, when awake, Appears a…

For us like any other fugitive, Like the numberless flowers that cannot number And all the beasts that need not remember, It is today in which we live. So many try to say Not Now, So many have forgotten how…

If all a top physicist knowsAbout the Truth be true,Then, for all the so-and-so’s,Futility and grime,Our common world contains,We have a better timeThan the Greater Nebulae do,Or the atoms in our brains. Marriage is rarely blissBut, surely it would be…

Henry Adams Was mortally afraid of Madams: In a disorderly house He sat quiet as a mouse. Mallarmé Had too much to say: He could never quite Leave the paper white. Thomas the Rymer Was probably a social climber: He…