Winning Words

by William Sieghart

You may cut me with your eyes,

  You may kill me with your hatefulness,

  But still, like air, I’ll rise.

  Does my sexiness upset you?

  Does it come as a surprise

  That I dance like I’ve got diamonds

  At the meeting of my thighs?

  Out of the huts of history’s shame

  I rise

  Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

  I rise

  I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide,

  Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

  Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

  I rise

  Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

  I rise

  Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

  I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

  I rise

  I rise

  I rise.

  GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

  Pied Beauty

  Glory be to God for dappled things –

  For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

  For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

  Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

  Landscape plotted and pieced – fold, fallow, and plough;

  And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

  All things counter, original, spare, strange;

  Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

  With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

  He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

  Praise him.

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  The Peninsula

  When you have nothing more to say, just drive

  For a day all round the peninsula.

  The sky is tall as over a runway,

  The land without marks, so you will not arrive

  But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

  At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

  The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

  And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

  The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

  That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

  The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

  Islands riding themselves out into the fog,

  And drive back home, still with nothing to say

  Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

  By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

  Water and ground in their extremity.

  WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

  Upon Westminster Bridge

  3 Sept, 1802

  Earth has not anything to show more fair:

  Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

  A sight so touching in its majesty:

  This City now doth like a garment wear

  The beauty of the morning: silent, bare,

  Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

  Open unto the fields, and to the sky,

  All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

  Never did sun more beautifully steep

  In his first splendour valley, rock, or hill;

  Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

  The river glideth at his own sweet will:

  Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

  And all that mighty heart is lying still!

  ANNA AKHMATOVA

  Our Own Land

  There is no one in the world more tearless,

  more proud, more simple than us.

  1922

  We don’t wear it in sacred amulets on our chests.

  We don’t compose hysterical poems about it.

  It does not disturb our bitter dream-sleep.

  It doesn’t seem to be the promised paradise.

  We don’t make of it a soul

  object for sale and barter,

  and we being sick, poverty-stricken, unable to utter a word

  don’t even remember about it.

  Yes, for us it’s mud on galoshes,

  for us it’s crunch on teeth,

  and we mill, mess and crush

  that dust and ashes

  that is not mixed up in anything.

  But we’ll lie in it and be it,

  that’s why, so freely, we call it our own.

  Leningrad, 1961

  translated from the Russian by Richard McKane

  ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

  from In Memoriam A. H. H.

  XXVII

  I envy not in any moods

  The captive void of noble rage,

  The linnet born within the cage,

  That never knew the summer woods:

  I envy not the beast that takes

  His license in the field of time,

  Unfettered by the sense of crime,

  To whom a conscience never wakes;

  Nor, what may count itself as blest,

  The heart that never plighted troth

  But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;

  Nor any want-begotten rest.

  I hold it true, whate’er befall;

  I feel it, when I sorrow most;

  ’Tis better to have loved and lost

  Than never to have loved at all.

  OSCAR HAMMERSTEIN II

  You’ll Never Walk Alone

  Walk on, through the wind

  Walk on, through the rain

  Though your dreams be tossed and blown

  Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart

  And you’ll never walk alone

  You’ll never walk alone

  THE KING JAMES BIBLE

  from The Song of Solomon

  My beloved spake, and said unto me, Rise up,

  my love, my fair one, and come away.

  For lo, the winter is past, the rain is over, and gone.

  The flowers appear on the earth, the time of the

  singing of birds is come, and the voice of the

  turtle is heard in our land.

  The fig tree putteth forth her green figs, and the

  vines with the tender grape give a good smell.

  Arise, my love, my fair one, and come away.

  A. A. MILNE

  The End

  When I was One,

  I had just begun.

  When I was Two,

  I was nearly new.

  When I was Three,

  I was hardly Me.

  When I was Four,

  I was not much more.

  When I was Five,

  I was just alive.

  But now I am Six, I’m as clever as clever.

  So I think I’ll be six now for ever and ever.

  THOM GUNN

  The Hug

  It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined

  Half of the night with our old friend

  Who’d showed us in the end

  To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.

  Already I lay snug,

  And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

  I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,

  Suddenly, from behind,

  In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:

  Your instep to my heel,

  My shoulder-blades against your chest.

  It was not sex, but I could feel

  The whole strength of your body set,

  Or braced, to mine,

  And locking me to you

  As if we were still twenty-two

  When our grand passion had not yet

  Become familial.

  My quick sleep had deleted all

  Of intervening time and place.

  I only knew

  The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

  SUSAN COOLIDGE

  New Every Morning

  Every day is a fresh beginning,

  Listen my soul to the glad refrain.

  And, spite of old sorrows

  And older sinning,

  Troubles forecasted


  And possible pain,

  Take heart with the day and begin again.

  JOHN DONNE

  from Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

  No Man is an Island, entire of it self; every man is a piece of the Continent, a part of the main; if a Clod be washed away by the Sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a Promontory were, as well as if a Manor of thy friends, or of thine own were; Any Man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

  ELEANOR FARJEON

  Morning has broken

  Like the first morning,

  Blackbird has spoken

  Like the first bird.

  Praise for the singing!

  Praise for the morning!

  Praise for them, springing

  Fresh from the Word!

  Sweet the rain’s new fall

  Sunlit from heaven,

  Like the first dewfall

  On the first grass.

  Praise for the sweetness

  Of the wet garden,

  Sprung in completeness

  Where his feet pass.

  Mine is the sunlight!

  Mine is the morning

  Born of the one light

  Eden saw play!

  Praise with elation,

  Praise every morning,

  God’s re-creation

  Of the new day!

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  from The Tempest

  Act IV, Scene i

  Be cheerful, sir:

  Our revels now are ended. These our actors,

  As I foretold you, were all spirits and

  Are melted into air, into thin air:

  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,

  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,

  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,

  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve

  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,

  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff

  As dreams are made on, and our little life

  Is rounded with a sleep.

  JOHN BURNSIDE

  History

  St Andrews: West Sands; September 2001

  Today

  as we flew the kites

  – the sand spinning off in ribbons along the beach

  and that gasoline smell from Leuchars gusting across

  the golf links;

  the tide far out

  and quail-grey in the distance;

  people

  jogging, or stopping to watch

  as the war planes cambered and turned

  in the morning light –

  today

  – with the news in my mind, and the muffled dread

  of what may come –

  I knelt down in the sand

  with Lucas

  gathering shells

  and pebbles

  finding evidence of life in all this

  driftwork:

  snail shells; shreds of razorfish;

  smudges of weed and flesh on tideworn stone.

  At times I think what makes us who we are

  is neither kinship nor our given states

  but something lost between the world we own

  and what we dream about behind the names

  on days like this

  our lines raised in the wind

  our bodies fixed and anchored to the shore

  and though we are confined by property

  what tethers us to gravity and light

  has most to do with distance and the shapes

  we find in water

  reading from the book

  of silt and tides

  the rose or petrol blue

  of jellyfish and sea anemone

  combining with a child’s

  first nakedness.

  Sometimes I am dizzy with the fear

  of losing everything – the sea, the sky,

  all living creatures, forests, estuaries:

  we trade so much to know the virtual

  we scarcely register the drift and tug

  of other bodies

  scarcely apprehend

  the moment as it happens: shifts of light

  and weather

  and the quiet, local forms

  of history: the fish lodged in the tide

  beyond the sands;

  the long insomnia

  of ornamental carp in public parks

  captive and bright

  and hung in their own

  slow-burning

  transitive gold;

  jamjars of spawn

  and sticklebacks

  or goldfish carried home

  from fairgrounds

  to the hum of radio

  but this is the problem: how to be alive

  in all this gazed-upon and cherished world

  and do no harm

  a toddler on a beach

  sifting wood and dried weed from the sand

  and puzzled by the pattern on a shell

  his parents on the dune slacks with a kite

  plugged into the sky

  all nerve and line

  patient; afraid; but still, through everything

  attentive to the irredeemable.

  W. B. YEATS

  The Song of Wandering Aengus

  I went out to the hazel wood,

  Because a fire was in my head,

  And cut and peeled a hazel wand,

  And hooked a berry to a thread;

  And when white moths were on the wing,

  And moth-like stars were flickering out,

  I dropped the berry in a stream

  And caught a little silver trout.

  When I had laid it on the floor

  I went to blow the fire aflame,

  But something rustled on the floor,

  And some one called me by my name:

  It had become a glimmering girl

  With apple blossom in her hair

  Who called me by my name and ran

  And faded through the brightening air.

  Though I am old with wandering

  Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

  I will find out where she has gone,

  And kiss her lips and take her hands;

  And walk among long dappled grass,

  And pluck till time and times are done

  The silver apples of the moon,

  The golden apples of the sun.

  WILLIAM BLAKE

  Eternity

  He who binds to himself a joy

  Does the wingèd life destroy;

  But he who kisses the joy as it flies

  Lives in eternity’s sun rise.

  CALLIMACHUS

  Heraclitus

  They told me, Heraclitus, they told me you were dead;

  They brought me bitter news to hear and bitter tears to shed.

  I wept as I remembered how often you and I

  Had tired the sun with talking and sent him down the sky.

  And now that thou art lying, my dear old Carian guest,

  A handful of grey ashes, long long ago at rest,

  Still are thy pleasant voices, thy nightingales, awake,

  For Death, he taketh all away, but them he cannot take.

  translated from the Greek by William Johnson Cory

  JAMES FENTON

  Hinterhof

  Stay near to me and I’ll stay near to you –

  As near as you are dear to me will do,

  Near as the rainbow to the rain,

  The west wind to the windowpane,

  As fire to the hearth, as dawn to dew.

  Stay true to me and I’ll stay true to you –

  As true as you are new to me will do,

  New as the rainbow in the spray,

  Utterly new in every way,

  New in the way that what you say is true.

  Stay near to me, stay true to me. I’ll stay
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  As near, as true to you as heart could pray.

  Heart never hoped that one might be

  Half of the things you are to me –

  The dawn, the fire, the rainbow and the day.

  ROBERT BROWNING

  Home-Thoughts, from Abroad

  Oh, to be in England

  Now that April’s there,

  And whoever wakes in England

  Sees, some morning, unaware,

  That the lowest boughs and the brushwood sheaf

  Round the elm-tree bole are in tiny leaf,

  While the chaffinch sings on the orchard bough

  In England – now!

  And after April, when May follows,

  And the whitethroat builds, and all the swallows –

  Hark! where my blossomed pear-tree in the hedge

  Leans to the field and scatters on the clover

  Blossoms and dewdrops – at the bent spray’s edge –

  That’s the wise thrush; he sings each song twice over,