The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  Our holy ground and pray

  Him to make germinate

  The scattered, ambushed

  Flesh of labourers,

  Stockinged corpses

  Laid out in the farmyards,

  Tell-tale skin and teeth

  Flecking the sleepers

  Of four young brothers, trailed

  For miles along the lines.

  III

  Something of his sad freedom

  As he rode the tumbril

  Should come to me, driving,

  Saying the names

  Tollund, Grabaulle, Nebelgard,

  Watching the pointing hands

  Of country people,

  Not knowing their tongue.

  Out there in Jutland

  In the old man-killing parishes

  I will feel lost,

  Unhappy and at home.

  SEAMUS HEANEY Broagh

  Riverbank, the long rigs

  ending in broad docken

  and a canopied pad

  down to the ford.

  The garden mould

  bruised easily, the shower

  gathering in your heelmark

  was the black O

  in Broagh,

  its low tattoo

  among the windy boortrees

  and rhubarb-blades

  ended almost

  suddenly, like that last

  gh the strangers found

  difficult to manage.

  DOUGLAS DUNN Modern Love

  It is summer, and we are in a house

  That is not ours, sitting at a table

  Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,

  The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull

  To sleep the under-tens and invalids,

  The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,

  The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.

  Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better

  Happiness than this, not much to show for love

  Than how we are, or how this evening is,

  Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive

  In a domestic love, seemingly alone.

  All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight.

  Looking forward to a visit from the cat.

  ÉILEAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN Swineherd

  When all this is over, said the swineherd,

  I mean to retire, where

  Nobody will have heard about my special skills

  And conversation is mainly about the weather.

  I intend to learn how to make coffee, at least as well

  As the Portuguese lay-sister in the kitchen

  And polish the brass fenders every day.

  I want to lie awake at night

  Listening to cream crawling to the top of the jug

  And the water lying soft in the cistern.

  I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines

  And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks,

  Where it gets dark early in summer

  And the apple-blossom is allowed to wither on the bough.

  ÉILEAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN The Second Voyage

  Odysseus rested on his oar and saw

  The ruffled foreheads of the waves

  Crocodiling and mincing past: he rammed

  The oar between their jaws and looked down

  In the simmering sea where scribbles of weed defined

  Uncertain depth, and the slim fishes progressed

  In fatal formation, and thought

  If there was a single

  Streak of decency in these waves now, they’d be ridged

  Pocked and dented with the battering they’ve had,

  And we could name them as Adam named the beasts,

  Saluting a new one with dismay, or a notorious one

  With admiration; they’d notice us passing

  And rejoice at our shipwreck, but these

  Have less character than sheep and need more patience.

  I know what I’ll do he said;

  I’ll park my ship in the crook of a long pier

  (And I’ll take you with me he said to the oar)

  I’ll face the rising ground and walk away

  From tidal waters, up riverbeds

  Where herons parcel out the miles of stream,

  Over gaps in the hills, through warm

  Silent valleys, and when I meet a farmer

  Bold enough to look me in the eye

  With ‘where are you off to with that long

  Winnowing fan over your shoulder?’

  There I will stand still

  And I’ll plant you for a gatepost or a hitching-post

  And leave you as a tidemark. I can go back

  And organise my house then.

  But the profound

  Unfenced valleys of the ocean still held him;

  He had only the oar to make them keep their distance;

  The sea was still frying under the ship’s side.

  He considered the water-lilies, and thought about fountains

  Spraying as wide as willows in empty squares,

  The sugarstick of water clattering into the kettle,

  The flat lakes bisecting the rushes. He remembered spiders and frogs

  Housekeeping at the roadside in brown trickles floored with mud,

  Horsetroughs, the black canal, pale swans at dark:

  His face grew damp with tears that tasted

  Like his own sweat or the insults of the sea.

  1973 THOMAS KINSELLA Hen Woman

  The noon heat in the yard

  smelled of stillness and coming thunder.

  A hen scratched and picked at the shore.

  It stopped, its body crouched and puffed out.

  The brooding silence seemed to say ‘Hush…’

  The cottage door opened,

  a black hole

  in a whitewashed wall so bright

  the eyes narrowed.

  Inside, a clock murmured ‘Gong…’

  (I had felt all this before…)

  She hurried out in her slippers

  muttering, her face dark with anger,

  and gathered the hen up jerking

  languidly. Her hand fumbled.

  Too late. Too late.

  It fixed me with its pebble eyes

  (seeing what mad blur?).

  A white egg showed in the sphincter;

  mouth and beak opened together;

  and time stood still.

  Nothing moved: bird or woman,

  fumbled or fumbling – locked there

  (as I must have been) gaping.

  *

  There was a tiny movement at my feet,

  tiny and mechanical; I looked down.

  A beetle like a bronze leaf

  was inching across the cement,

  clasping with small tarsi

  a ball of dung bigger than its body.

  The serrated brow pressed the ground humbly,

  lifted in a short stare, bowed again;

  the dung-ball advanced minutely,

  losing a few fragments,

  specks of staleness and freshness.

  *

  A mutter of thunder far off

  – time not quite stopped.

  I saw the egg had moved a fraction:

  a tender blank brain

  under torsion, a clean new world.

  As I watched, the mystery completed.

  The black zero of the orifice

  closed to a point

  and the white zero of the egg hung free,

  flecked with greenish brown oils.

  It slowly turned and fell.

  Dreamlike, fussed by her splayed fingers,

  it floated outward, moon-white,

  leaving no trace in the air,

  and began its drop to the shore.

  *

  I feed upon it still, as you see;

  there is no end to that which,

  no
t understood, may yet be noted

  and hoarded in the imagination,

  in the yolk of one’s being, so to speak,

  there to undergo its (quite animal) growth,

  dividing blindly,

  twitching, packed with will,

  searching in its own tissue

  for the structure

  in which it may wake.

  Something that had – clenched

  in its cave – not been

  now was: an egg of being.

  Through what seemed a whole year it fell

  – as it still falls, for me,

  solid and light, the red gold beating

  in its silvery womb,

  alive as the yolk and white

  of my eye; as it will continue

  to fall, probably, until I die,

  through the vast indifferent spaces

  with which I am empty.

  *

  It smashed against the grating

  and slipped down quickly out of sight.

  It was over in a comical flash.

  The soft mucous shell clung a little longer,

  then drained down.

  She stood staring, in black anger.

  Then her eyes came to life, and she laughed

  and let the bird flap away.

  ‘It’s all the one.

  There’s plenty more where that came from!’

  Hen to pan!

  It was a simple world.

  THOMAS KINSELLA Ancestor

  I was going up to say something,

  and stopped. Her profile against the curtains

  was old, and dark like a hunting bird’s.

  It was the way she perched on the high stool,

  staring into herself, with one fist

  gripping the side of the barrier around her desk

  – or her head held by something, from inside.

  And not caring for anything around her

  or anyone there by the shelves.

  I caught a faint smell, musky and queer.

  I may have made some sound – she stopped rocking

  and pressed her fist in her lap; then she stood up

  and shut down the lid of the desk, and turned the key.

  She shoved a small bottle under her aprons

  and came toward me, darkening the passageway.

  Ancestor… among sweet- and fruit-boxes.

  Her black heart…

  Was that a sigh?

  – brushing by me in the shadows,

  with her heaped aprons, through the red hangings

  to the scullery, and down to the back room.

  MICHAEL LONGLEY Wounds

  Here are two pictures from my father’s head –

  I have kept them like secrets until now:

  First, the Ulster Division at the Somme

  Going over the top with ‘Fuck the Pope!’

  ‘No Surrender!’: a boy about to die,

  Screaming ‘Give ’em one for the Shankill!’

  ‘Wilder than Gurkhas’ were my father’s words

  Of admiration and bewilderment.

  Next comes the London-Scottish padre

  Resettling kilts with his swagger-stick,

  With a stylish backhand and a prayer.

  Over a landscape of dead buttocks

  My father followed him for fifty years.

  At last, a belated casualty,

  He said – lead traces flaring till they hurt –

  ‘I am dying for King and Country, slowly.’

  I touched his hand, his thin head I touched.

  Now, with military honours of a kind,

  With his badges, his medals like rainbows,

  His spinning compass, I bury beside him

  Three teenage soldiers, bellies full of

  Bullets and Irish beer, their flies undone.

  A packet of Woodbines I throw in,

  A lucifer, the Sacred Heart of Jesus

  Paralysed as heavy guns put out

  The night-light in a nursery for ever;

  Also a bus-conductor’s uniform –

  He collapsed beside his carpet-slippers

  Without a murmur, shot through the head

  By a shivering boy who wandered in

  Before they could turn the television down

  Or tidy away the supper dishes.

  To the children, to a bewildered wife,

  I think ‘Sorry Missus’ was what he said.

  PAUL MULDOON Wind and Tree

  In the way that the most of the wind

  Happens where there are trees,

  Most of the world is centred

  About ourselves.

  Often where the wind has gathered

  The trees together,

  One tree will take

  Another in her arms and hold.

  Their branches that are grinding

  Madly together,

  It is no real fire.

  They are breaking each other.

  Often I think I should be like

  The single tree, going nowhere,

  Since my own arm could not and would not

  Break the other. Yet by my broken bones

  I tell new weather.

  PHILIP LARKIN This Be the Verse 1974

  They fuck you up, your mum and dad.

  They may not mean to, but they do.

  They fill you with the faults they had

  And add some extra, just for you.

  But they were fucked up in their turn

  By fools in old-style hats and coats,

  Who half the time were soppy-stern

  And half at one another’s throats.

  Man hands on misery to man.

  It deepens like a coastal shelf.

  Get out as early as you can,

  And don’t have any kids yourself.

  PHILIP LARKIN Money

  Quarterly, is it, money reproaches me:

  ‘Why do you let me lie here wastefully?

  I am all you never had of goods and sex.