User:Marskell/Poems

You can find these poems elsewhere, of course. I post them here because I posted them once before to mark a personal event and because I hope others might read them for the first time.


 * Funeral Blues


 * Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone.
 * Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
 * Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
 * Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.


 * Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
 * Scribbling in the sky the message He is Dead,
 * Put crêpe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
 * Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.


 * He was my North, my South, my East and West,
 * My working week and my Sunday rest
 * My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
 * I thought that love would last forever, I was wrong.


 * The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
 * Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun.
 * Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
 * For nothing now can ever come to any good.


 * — W.H. Auden


 * For my father


 * This side of the truth


 * This side of the truth,
 * You may not see, my son,
 * King of your blue eyes
 * In the blinding country of youth,
 * That all is undone,
 * Under the unminding skies,
 * Of innocence and guilt
 * Before you move to make
 * One gesture of the heart or head,
 * Is gathered and spilt
 * Into the winding dark
 * Like the dust of the dead.


 * Good and bad, two ways
 * Of moving about your death
 * By the grinding sea,
 * King of your heart in the blind days,
 * Blow away like breath,
 * Go crying through you and me
 * And the souls of all men
 * Into the innocent
 * Dark, and the guilty dark, and good
 * Death, and bad death, and then
 * In the last element
 * Fly like the stars' blood


 * Like the sun's tears,
 * Like the moon's seed, rubbish
 * And fire, the flying rant
 * Of the sky, king of your first year.
 * And the wicked wish,
 * Down the beginning of plants
 * And animals and birds,
 * Water and Light, the earth and sky,
 * Is cast before you move,
 * And all your deeds and words,
 * Each truth, each lie,
 * Die in unjudging love.


 * — Dylan Thomas


 * For Ethan John and his namesake. He held you in his heart, if not in his hands.

Mann suggests that when Cortés arrived with his guns, germs, and steel to conquer the Aztecs (or Mexica) an American flowering of non-supernatural thought and philosophy may have been destroyed at the same time. Agnosticism and monotheism were emerging from shamanism and animism, a process wasted when Tenochtitlan burned.

Or almost wasted. Attributed to Nezahualcoyotl:

''Not forever on earth; only a little while here. Be it jade, it shatters. Be it gold, it breaks. Be it quetzal feather, it tears apart. Not forever on earth; only a little while here.''