The Penguin Book of English Verse

by Paul Keegan

  You could get them still by writing a few cheques.’

  So I look at others, what they do with theirs:

  They certainly don’t keep it upstairs.

  By now they’ve a second house and car and wife:

  Clearly money has something to do with life

  – In fact, they’ve a lot in common, if you enquire:

  You can’t put off being young until you retire,

  And however you bank your screw, the money you save

  Won’t in the end buy you more than a shave.

  I listen to money singing. It’s like looking down

  From long french windows at a provincial town,

  The slums, the canal, the churches ornate and mad

  In the evening sun. It is intensely sad.

  PHILIP LARKIN from Livings

  II

  Seventy feet down

  The sea explodes upwards,

  Relapsing, to slaver

  Off landing-stage steps –

  Running suds, rejoice!

  Rocks writhe back to sight.

  Mussels, limpets,

  Husband their tenacity

  In the freezing slither –

  Creatures, I cherish you!

  By day, sky builds

  Grape-dark over the salt

  Unsown stirring fields.

  Radio rubs its legs,

  Telling me of elsewhere:

  Barometers falling,

  Ports wind-shuttered,

  Fleets pent like hounds,

  Fires in humped inns

  Kippering sea-pictures –

  Keep it all off!

  By night, snow swerves

  (O loose moth world)

  Through the stare travelling

  Leather-black waters.

  Guarded by brilliance

  I set plate and spoon,

  And after, divining cards.

  Lit shelved liners

  Grope like mad worlds westward.

  PHILIP LARKIN The Explosion

  On the day of the explosion

  Shadows pointed towards the pithead:

  In the sun the slagheap slept.

  Down the lane came men in pitboots

  Coughing oath-edged talk and pipe-smoke,

  Shouldering off the freshened silence.

  One chased after rabbits; lost them;

  Came back with a nest of lark’s eggs;

  Showed them; lodged them in the grasses.

  So they passed in beards and moleskins,

  Fathers, brothers, nicknames, laughter,

  Through the tall gates standing open.

  At noon, there came a tremor; cows

  Stopped chewing for a second; sun,

  Scarfed as in a heat-haze, dimmed.

  The dead go on before us, they

  Are sitting in God’s house in comfort,

  We shall see them face to face –

  Plain as lettering in the chapels

  It was said, and for a second

  Wives saw men of the explosion

  Larger than in life they managed –

  Gold as on a coin, or walking

  Somehow from the sun towards them,

  One showing the eggs unbroken.

  PADRAIC FALLON A Bit of Brass

  A horn hung on an oak;

  And he, the big overplus, the hero

  Destined, sounds the famous note, invokes

  Cascading Gods and

  His own death boat.

  I did lift

  A bit of battered brass once to my mouth,

  May 1915, after

  A day’s rain

  in the townwalled field where the Volunteers

  Drilled;

  That evening the wet overhang had daunted all,

  Bugler and mate

  Gossiped under a leaking branch, sounding

  An occasional call,

  Joe Egan, Josie Rooney;

  Dear Posterity, I was there.

  Echoes hung

  Solidly in the drowned green beechtrees,

  Hardly swinging;

  Call after call brought no one to the field,

  That is no man alive;

  The mates gave up and I purloined the thing;

  Squawk, a couple of fancy tootles,

  Then out of Me minus

  It came, the soaring

  Thing;

  Just once.

  It could be it still hangs

  In the May over

  Leonards and the Pound Walk, just waiting

  Those fellows, the long striders

  Gods or men

  To take the field.

  (1983)

  SEAMUS HEANEY from Singing School 1975

  6 Exposure

  It is December in Wicklow:

  Alders dripping, birches

  Inheriting the last light,

  The ash tree cold to look at.

  A comet that was lost

  Should be visible at sunset,

  Those million tons of light

  Like a glimmer of haws and rose-hips,

  And I sometimes see a falling star.

  If I could come on meteorite!

  Instead I walk through damp leaves,

  Husks, the spent flukes of autumn,

  Imagining a hero

  On some muddy compound,

  His gift like a slingstone

  Whirled for the desperate.

  How did I end up like this?

  I often think of my friends’

  Beautiful prismatic counselling

  And the anvil brains of some who hate me

  As I sit weighing and weighing

  My responsible tristia.

  For what? For the ear? For the people?

  For what is said behind-backs?

  Rain comes down through the alders,

  Its low conducive voices

  Mutter about let-downs and erosions

  And yet each drop recalls

  The diamond absolutes.

  I am neither internee nor informer;

  An inner émigré, grown long-haired

  And thoughtful; a wood-kerne

  Escaped from the massacre,

  Taking protective colouring

  From bole and bark, feeling

  Every wind that blows;

  Who, blowing up these sparks

  For their meagre heat, have missed

  The once-in-a-lifetime portent,

  The comet’s pulsing rose.

  DEREK MAHON The Snow Party

  Basho, coming

  To the city of Nagoya,

  Is asked to a snow party.

  There is a tinkling of china

  And tea into china;

  There are introductions.

  Then everyone

  Crowds to the window

  To watch the falling snow.

  Snow is falling on Nagoya

  And farther south

  On the tiles of Kyoto.

  Eastward, beyond Irago,

  It is falling

  Like leaves on the cold sea.

  Elsewhere they are burning

  Witches and heretics

  In the boiling squares,

  Thousands have died since dawn

  In the service

  Of barbarous kings;

  But there is silence

  In the houses of Nagoya

  And the hills of Ise.

  DEREK MAHON A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford

  Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.

  – Seferis, Mythistorema

  for J. G. Farrell

  Even now there are places where a thought might grow –

  Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned

  To a slow clock of condensation,

  An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter

  Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,

  Indian compounds where the wind dances

  And a door bangs with diminished confidence,

  Lime crevices behind rippl
ing rainbarrels,

  Dog corners for bone burials;

  And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

  Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,

  Among the bathtubs and the washbasins

  A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

  This is the one star in their firmament

  Or frames a star within a star.

  What should they do there but desire?

  So many days beyond the rhododendrons

  With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,

  They have learnt patience and silence

  Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

  They have been waiting for us in a foetor

  Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,

  Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure

  Of the expropriated mycologist.

  He never came back, and light since then

  Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.

  Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew

  And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –

  A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue

  Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

  There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking

  Into the earth that nourished it;

  And nightmares, born of these and the grim

  Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.

  Those nearest the door grow strong –

  ‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’

  The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling

  Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning

  For their deliverance, have been so long

  Expectant that there is left only the posture.

  A half century, without visitors, in the dark –

  Poor preparation for the cracking lock

  And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,

  Powdery prisoners of the old regime,

  Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought

  And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream

  At the flash-bulb firing squad we wake them with

  Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.

  Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,

  They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

  They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,

  To do something, to speak on their behalf

  Or at least not to close the door again.

  Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

  ‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,

  ‘Let the god not abandon us

  Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

  We too had our lives to live.

  You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,

  Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’

  D. J. ENRIGHT Remembrance Sunday

  The autumn leaves that strew the brooks

  Lie thick as legions.

  Only a dog limps past,

  Lifting a wounded leg.

  Was it the rocket hurt it?

  Asks a child.

  And next comes Xmas,

  Reflects the mother in the silence,

  When X was born or hurt or died.

  JOHN FULLER Wild Raspberries

  Wild raspberries gathered in a silent valley

  The distance of a casual whistle from

  A roofless ruin, luminous under sprays

  Like faery casques or the dulled red of lanterns

  When the flame is low and the wax runs into the paper,

  Little lanterns in the silence of crushed grasses

  Or waiting chaises with a footman’s lights,

  Curtains hooked aside from the surprising

  Plump facets padded like dusty cushions

  On which we ride with fingers intertwined

  Through green spiky tunnels, the coach swaying

  As it plunges down and the tongues slip together,

  The jewels fall to the floor to be lost forever,

  The glass shatters and the heart suddenly leaps

  To hear one long last sigh from an old blind house

  That settles further into its prickly fronds,

  Speaking of nothing, of love nor of reproaches,

  Remembering nothing, harbouring no ghosts,

  Saving us nothing at all but raspberries.

  1976 MICHAEL LONGLEY Man Lying on a Wall

  Homage to L. S. Lowry

  You could draw a straight line from the heels,

  Through calves, buttocks and shoulderblades

  To the back of the head: pressure points

  That bear the enormous weight of the sky.

  Should you take away the supporting structure

  The result would be a miracle or

  An extremely clever conjuring trick.

  As it is, the man lying on the wall

  Is wearing the serious expression

  Of popes and kings in their final slumber,

  His deportment not dissimilar to

  Their stiff, reluctant exits from this world

  Above the shoulders of the multitude.

  It is difficult to judge whether or not

  He is sleeping or merely disinclined

  To arrive punctually at the office

  Or to return home in time for his tea.

  He is wearing a pinstripe suit, black shoes

  And a bowler hat: on the pavement

  Below him, like a relic or something

  He is trying to forget, his briefcase

  With everybody’s initials on it.

  ELMA MITCHELL Thoughts after Ruskin

  Women reminded him of lilies and roses.

  Me they remind rather of blood and soap,

  Armed with a warm rag, assaulting noses,