broadcast me a joyful noise

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In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If poetry could tell it backwards, true, begin
that moment shrapnel scythed you to the stinking mud
but you get up, amazed, watch bled bad blood
run upwards from the slime into its wounds;
see lines and lines of British boys rewind
back to their trenches, kiss the photographs from home-
mothers, sweethearts, sisters, younger brothers
not entering the story now
to die and die and die.
Dulce- No- Decorum- No- Pro patria mori.
You walk away.

You walk away; drop your gun (fixed bayonet)
like all your mates do too-
Harry, Tommy, Wilfred, Edward, Bert-
and light a cigarette.
There's coffee in the square,
warm French bread
and all those thousands dead
are shaking dried mud from their hair
and queuing up for home. Freshly alive,
a lad plays Tipperary to the crowd, released
from History; the glistening, healthy horses fit for heroes, kings.

You lean against a wall,
your several million lives still possible
and crammed with love, work, children, talent, English beer, good food.
You see the poet tuck away his pocket-book and smile.
If poetry could truly tell it backwards,
then it would.

- Carol Ann Duffy

(written upon the deaths of the last English survivors of WWI)

Even though I am, as usual, not in the mood to be reminded.

~

Words, Wide Night

Somewhere, on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is how it feels, or how it feels in words.

- Carol Ann Duffy

This is the poem I ransacked gleefully when writing when our falsehoods are divided. AUDEN. TEMPEST. YES.


Preface

(The Stage Manager to the Critics)

The aged catch their breath,
For the nonchalant couple go
Waltzing across the tightrope
As if there were no death
Or hope of falling down;
The wounded cry as the clown
Doubles his meaning; and O
How the dear little children laugh
When the drums roll and the lovely
Lady is sawn in half.

O what authority gives
Existence its surprise?
Science is happy to answer
That the ghosts who haunt our lives
Are handy with mirrors and wire,
That song and sugar and fire,
Courage and come-hither eyes
Have a genius for taking pains.
But how does one think up a habit?
Our wonder, our terror remains.

Art opens the fishiest eye
To the Flesh and the Devil who heat
The Chamber of Temptation
Where heroes roar and die.
We are wet with sympathy now;
Thanks for the evening; but how
Shall we satisfy when we meet,
Between Shall-I and I-Will,
The lion's mouth whose hunger
No metaphors can fill?

Well, who in his own backyard
Has not opened his heart to the smiling
Secret he cannot quote?
Which goes to show that the Bard
Was sober when he wrote
That this world of fact we love
Is insubstantial stuff:
All the rest is silence
On the other side of the wall;
And the silence ripeness,
And the ripeness all.

- from 'The Sea and the Mirror' by W.H. Auden

I thought I'd take advantage of the when you see this, post a poem in your journal meme, which has been floating half-heartedly around my flist recently, to talk about Carol Ann Duffy, who is the UK's current (and first female, and first openly gay) Poet Laureate. I first heard about her tangentally in a post of foreverdirt's, and looked her up on Wikipedia, and then liked the sound of her so much that I went and borrowed a couple of slim poetry collections of hers from the uni library.

And so I whole-heartedly and without reservation recommend The World's Wife, a collection of thirty-something poems about the women passed over, ignored, unwritten and unrecognised by history & myth. I think this is something relevant to many of our interests, perhaps? Anyway, it's very sly and often funny and sometimes heartbreaking, and Duffy can do things with language that make me want to howl with envy. Some of the poems are short and pointed (Mrs Charles Darwin, Mrs Icarus) and others are longer. When naming my favourite I'm torn between Queen Herod and the one I'm going to post now; it's the first in the book and, it's easy to tell, the most personal.


Little Red-Cap

At childhood's end, the houses petered out
into playing fields, the factory, allotments
kept, like mistresses, by kneeling married men,
the silent railway line, the hermit's caravan,
till you came at last to the edge of the woods.
It was there that I first clapped eyes on the wolf.

( He stood in a clearing, reading his verse out loud )

I'm actually feeling quite pretty at the moment. My legs are firm-ish, my stomach is flat, my skin is less disastrous than usual, and although I'd still much prefer being a dark brunette again, I've discovered that I hate my natural hair colour far less than I thought. It's that time of the month, so my boobs are looking quite respectable, even if they do feel like someone's been tenderising them with a meat mallet while I'm asleep. And every time I suspect that my eyes are too close together, I remind myself that it could be worse: I could be Lleyton Hewitt. And he married a soap star 0.0035 seconds after meeting her, so there's hope for us mere mortals yet.

I spent yesterday morning (don't laugh) at university reading academic commentary on The Tempest, even though I had to use my friend's library card to borrow books because hey, apparently graduation means you're not meant to be taking books out of the uni library any more. WHO'D HAVE THUNKIT.

Anyway, I have this enormous keenness for poems inspired by that play, and yesterday I fell in utter love with W.H. Auden's The Sea and the Mirror which is a commentary on Tempest IN POEM FORM, I'm not even kidding, it's like beautiful meta-infused fanfic BY AUDEN, and every character's POV is a different poetical form, like a villanelle or a sestina. I tried to order my own copy from the Co-op but even I will not pay $28 for a single poem, no matter how awesome. And it's too long to type up in its entirety from the library copy. The hunt is on, universe. I am going to own a hard copy of this poem if it kills me.

I did type up some bits of it, though, in order to impart to you its awesomeness:

( W.H. Auden -- The Sea and the Mirror )