Winning Words

by William Sieghart

  I like to lie in their arms,

  I like to be held and tightly kissed,

  Safe from all alarms.

  I like to laugh and be happy

  With a beautiful beautiful kiss,

  I tell you, in all the world

  There is no bliss like this.

  CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

  A Christmas Carol

  In the bleak mid-winter

  Frosty wind made moan,

  Earth stood hard as iron,

  Water like a stone;

  Snow had fallen, snow on snow,

  Snow on snow,

  In the bleak mid-winter

  Long ago.

  Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him

  Nor earth sustain;

  Heaven and earth shall flee away

  When He comes to reign:

  In the bleak mid-winter

  A stable-place sufficed

  The Lord God Almighty

  Jesus Christ.

  Enough for Him whom cherubim

  Worship night and day,

  A breastful of milk

  And a mangerful of hay;

  Enough for Him whom angels

  Fall down before,

  The ox and ass and camel

  Which adore.

  Angels and archangels

  May have gathered there,

  Cherubim and seraphim

  Throng’d the air,

  But only His mother

  In her maiden bliss

  Worshipped the Beloved

  With a kiss.

  What can I give Him,

  Poor as I am?

  If I were a shepherd

  I would bring a lamb,

  If I were a wise man

  I would do my part, –

  Yet what I can I give Him,

  Give my heart.

  J. R. R. TOLKIEN

  All that is gold does not glitter,

  Not all those who wander are lost;

  The old that is strong does not wither,

  Deep roots are not reached by the frost.

  From the ashes a fire shall be woken,

  A light from the shadows shall spring;

  Renewed shall be blade that was broken,

  The crownless again shall be king.

  ELIZABETH BISHOP

  One Art

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master;

  so many things seem filled with the intent

  to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

  Lose something every day. Accept the fluster

  of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  Then practice losing farther, losing faster:

  places, and names, and where it was you meant

  to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

  I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or

  next-to-last, of three loved houses went.

  The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

  I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,

  some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.

  I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

  – Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture

  I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident

  the art of losing’s not too hard to master

  though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

  JOHN MASEFIELD

  An Epilogue

  I have seen flowers come in stony places

  And kind things done by men with ugly faces,

  And the gold cup won by the worst horse at the races,

  So I trust, too.

  THOMAS HARDY

  Afterwards

  When the Present has latched its postern behind my tremulous stay,

  And the May month flaps its glad green leaves like wings,

  Delicate-filmed as new-spun silk, will the neighbours say,

  ‘He was a man who used to notice such things’?

  If it be in the dusk when, like an eyelid’s soundless blink,

  The dewfall-hawk comes crossing the shades to alight

  Upon the wind-warped upland thorn, a gazer may think,

  ‘To him this must have been a familiar sight.’

  If I pass during some nocturnal blackness, mothy and warm,

  When the hedgehog travels furtively over the lawn,

  One may say, ‘He strove that such innocent creatures should come to no harm,

  But he could do little for them; and now he is gone.’

  If, when hearing that I have been stilled at last, they stand at the door,

  Watching the full-starred heavens that winter sees,

  Will this thought rise on those who will meet my face no more,

  ‘He was one who had an eye for such mysteries’?

  And will any say when my bell of quittance is heard in the gloom,

  And a crossing breeze cuts a pause in its outrollings,

  Till they rise again, as they were a new bell’s boom,

  ‘He hears it not now, but used to notice such things’?

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  from Henry V

  Act III, Scene i

  Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more,

  Or close the wall up with our English dead.

  In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

  As modest stillness and humility,

  But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

  Then imitate the action of the tiger.

  Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,

  Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage.

  Then lend the eye a terrible aspect,

  Let it pry through the portage of the head

  Like the brass cannon, let the brow o’erwhelm it

  As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock

  O’erhang and jutty his confounded base,

  Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

  Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide,

  Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit

  To his full height. On, on, you noblest English,

  Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof,

  Fathers that like so many Alexanders

  Have in these parts from morn till even fought,

  And sheathed their swords for lack of argument.

  Dishonour not your mothers; now attest

  That those whom you called fathers did beget you.

  Be copy now to men of grosser blood,

  And teach them how to war. And you, good yeomen,

  Whose limbs were made in England, show us here

  The mettle of your pasture; let us swear

  That you are worth your breeding – which I doubt not,

  For there is none of you so mean and base

  That hath not noble lustre in your eyes.

  I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips,

  Straining upon the start. The game’s afoot.

  Follow your spirit, and upon this charge

  Cry, ‘God for Harry! England and Saint George!’

  CLARE POLLARD

  Thinking of England

  And let the lesson to be – to be yersel’s,

  Ye needna fash gin it’s to be ocht else.

  To be yersel’s – and to mak’ that worth bein’ …

  Hugh MacDiarmid

  ‘A Drunk Man Looks at a Thistle’

  Let me take you on a journey to a foreign land …

  William Hague

  I

  Dusk-light; the news tells of another train derailed,

  and shoppers buying up the shops, and livestock

  being herded to the chop – their chops unfit to eat –

  and politicians once more putting foot to mouth.

  Through my east-end window –

  over the tangled tree,

  the council houses: some sardined with children,

  catering-sized gallon tubs of cooking oil empty bes
ide their bins;

  some sheltering one of the three million children still in poverty;

  some sold to Thatcher’s fortunate –

  now worth hundreds of thousands, more,

  with rents devised to make even the well-off poor –

  over the kids and dogs on a hanky of grass,

  the burnt-out car, the hush-hush trendy warehouse bar,

  ISLAM UNITE scrawled on a wall –

  a man’s voice trails its skittering wail across the sky,

  and all around me people are preparing to pray

  to a God to whom I am one of the damned.

  II

  And what did our great-grandmothers taste?

  Perhaps pie and mash and jellied eels, or hash, pease pudding,

  cobbler, cottage pie,

  pasties and pickled eggs.

  When I was small there was still Spam and jellied ham –

  semolina, parkin, treacle tart.

  Why have we not stood with our mothers,

  floured and flushed beside the oven door,

  watching our first Yorkshire puddings:

  how their globed bellies swell?

  Why was this not passed daughter to daughter?

  When did the passing stop?

  When did we choose to steal instead

  from the daughters of all those we have hated or hurt:

  gnocchi, noodles, couscous, naan, falafel, jerk?

  For dinner I have chicken dupiaza from a foil tray –

  how fitting England’s national dish is not homemade but takeaway.

  Through thrift – the rent is due – I boil my own rice up,

  long-grain American.

  III

  You’re so fortunate, they would exclaim, as I took photographs

  of them beside King’s Chapel, or of willows washing

  their hair in the Cam, to have all of this history around you.

  England’s history is medieval pogroms;

  it is Elizabeth, her skin a crust of Dover-white,

  loosing galleons to pillage fruits, tobacco, men.

  The bulging-eyed thieves swinging to the crowd’s delight

  metres from Shakespeare’s Globe;

  stripping the churches;

  Becket bleeding buckets on the floor;

  and work-houses for the poor,

  and the slave-trade; and raping the wife –

  lie back and think of … crinolines, Crimea.

  Missionaries hacking their one true path through the jungle.

  Winston swearing: We will fight them on the beaches!

  These people held the cargo of my genes within their blood.

  Not all were good.

  But how can I be held up as accountable?

  And yet, all of the good they earned, and blessed me with

  brings with it blame. Today I filled a form in –

  ticked White British with a cringe of shame.

  I am educated, middle-class, housed, well.

  I am fat and rich on history’s hell.

  IV

  I remember bracken, and heather, and a gusty, gutsy

  wind, and a plastic tub of windberries that filled

  and emptied, its ink writing a whodunit on my face.

  I remember Southport, where granny said fine ladies had once

  gone to purchase linens, and the best. Catching the miniature

  train down to Happy-Land, and my name in wet sand,

  and my grandfather towelling the sand off my legs,

  and then our picnic in the car – tinned salmon sandwiches,

  a flask of tea, crosswords. A Penguin biscuit.

  I remember sitting in an American bar having to squint

  to read about abortion laws by the dim candlelight,

  and sipping my six-dollar Cosmopolitan – with a dollar tip –

  and thinking of our local; its open fire, the rain

  on its windows, and you in it. Maybe on a Sunday

  after a walk on the heath, and lamb with mint sauce,

  and thinking how I never could leave.

  V

  Just finishing off the curry, when the football starts.

  An England game. Satellites are readying themselves

  to bounce the match around the globe,

  and prove that we are not the power we were.

  The crowd belts out ‘God Save the Queen’,

  though they do not believe in God or Queen;

  their strips red, white and blue –

  two of these being borrowed hues; loaned colours we use

  to drown out the white noise of ourselves.

  We are the whitest of the white:

  once this meant right –

  Christ’s holy light; the opposite of night, or black –

  but now it only points to lack, the blank of who we are.

  Who ever celebrates St George’s Day?

  And did you hear the one about the Englishman …?

  A friend of mine at home’s a Bolton Wanderers fan:

  they chant White Army.

  VI

  And then the news again, at ten –

  sometimes it makes you want to pack and leave it all:

  the floods, the fuel, the teacher shortage in the schools,

  the bombing of Iraq, the heart attacks, long working hours

  and little sex, racist police, cigarette tax, grants all axed,

  three million children still in poverty,

  the burnt out car, the takeaway,

  the headlines about Krauts, the lager louts,

  the wobbly bridge they built, the colonial guilt,

  the needless pain, the rain, the rain,

  the pogroms, the pink globe, the tangled tree,

  the Raj, the rape, the linens,

  all the endless fucking cups of tea …

  but everyone speaks English now,

  and sometimes, a voice trails its skittering wail across the sky,

  and I feel not just gratitude, but pride.

  ELLA WHEELER WILCOX

  Solitude

  Laugh, and the world laughs with you;

  Weep, and you weep alone;

  For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth,

  But has trouble enough of its own.

  Sing, and the hills will answer;

  Sigh, it is lost on the air;

  The echoes bound to a joyful sound,

  But shrink from voicing care.

  Rejoice, and men will seek you;

  Grieve, and they turn and go;

  They want full measure of all your pleasure,

  But they do not need your woe.

  Be glad, and your friends are many;

  Be sad, and you lose them all, –

  There are none to decline your nectared wine,

  But alone you must drink life’s gall.

  Feast, and your halls are crowded;

  Fast, and the world goes by.

  Succeed and give, and it helps you live,

  But no man can help you die.

  There is room in the halls of pleasure

  For a large and lordly train,

  But one by one we must all file on

  Through the narrow aisles of pain.

  DOROTHY PARKER

  Penelope

  In the pathway of the sun,

  In the footsteps of the breeze,

  Where the world and sky are one,

  He shall ride the silver seas,

  He shall cut the glittering wave.

  I shall sit at home, and rock;

  Rise, to heed a neighbour’s knock;

  Brew my tea, and snip my thread;

  Bleach the linen for my bed.

  They will call him brave.

  ALICE OSWALD

  Wedding

  From time to time our love is like a sail

  and when the sail begins to alternate

  from tack to tack, it’s like a swallowtail

  and when the swallow flies it’s like a coat;


  and if the coat is yours, it has a tear

  like a wide mouth and when the mouth begins

  to draw the wind, it’s like a trumpeter

  and when the trumpet blows, it blows like millions …

  and this, my love, when millions come and go

  beyond the need of us, is like a trick;

  and when the trick begins, it’s like a toe

  tip-toeing on a rope, which is like luck;

  and when the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,

  which is like love, which is like everything.

  ROBERT GRAVES

  Warning to Children

  Children, if you dare to think

  Of the greatness, rareness, muchness,

  Fewness of this precious only

  Endless world in which you say

  You live, you think of things like this:

  Blocks of slate enclosing dappled

  Red and green, enclosing tawny

  Yellow nets, enclosing white

  And black acres of dominoes,

  Where a neat brown paper parcel

  Tempts you to untie the string.

  In the parcel a small island,

  On the island a large tree,

  On the tree a husky fruit.

  Strip the husk and pare the rind off:

  In the kernel you will see

  Blocks of slate enclosed by dappled

  Red and green, enclosed by tawny

  Yellow nets, enclosed by white

  And black acres of dominoes,