Favourite Poems and Prose.

ooops

;o D

One man’s remorse is another’s reminiscence,
so to helpmake a happy terrestial ball
I’d best be having a clear conscience,
with a mind engaged in maturing late
or resign to having no conscience at all.
If mindrots early –
thats down to fate.

( made up from bits of Ogden Nash and put in 7/8 stylee )

Love’s Reality

I walk, I trust, with open eyes;
I’ve travelled half my worldly course;
And in the way behind me lies
Much vanity and some remorse;
I’ve lived to feel how pride may part
Spirits, tho’ matched like hand and glove;
I’ve blushed for love’s abode, the heart;
But have not disbelieved in love;
Nor unto love, sole mortal thing
Or worth immortal, done the wrong
To count it, with the rest that sing,
Unworthy of a serious song;
And love is my reward: for now,
When most of dead’ning time complain,
The myrtle blooms upon my brow,
Its odour quickens all my brain.

Coventry Patmore

SLOW DANCE

Have you ever watched kids
On a merry-go-round?
Or listened to the rain
Slapping on the ground?
Ever followed a butterfly’s erratic flight?
Or gazed at the sun into the fading night?
You better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Do you run through each day
On the fly?
When you ask How are you?
Do you hear the reply?
When the day is done
Do you lie in your bed
With the next hundred chores
Running through your head?
You’d better slow down
Don’t dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won’t last.

Ever told your child,
We’ll do it tomorrow?
And in your haste,
Not see his sorrow?
Ever lost touch,
Let a good friendship die
Cause you never had time
To call and say,”Hi”
You’d better slow down.
Don’t dance so fast.
Time is short.
The music won’t last.

When you run so fast to get somewhere
You miss half the fun of getting there.
When you worry and hurry through your day,
It is like an unopened gift….
Thrown away.
Life is not a race.
Do take it slower
Hear the music
Before the song is over.

That Old-Time Religion

God and His angels stroll in the garden
before turning in for the night.
They’ve adopted the style
of rich and gifted young Englishmen this evening
and also, bizarrely even for them, decided that they’ll speak
in nothing but Sumerian to each other
which all are agreed was a truly heavenly language.

It isn’t long before God starts boasting,
in Sumerian of course, that He’s the only Being He knows
Who knows by heart The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich,
and is about to prove it when Lucifer intercedes
to make the points that

a) they’ve all agreed to speak Sumerian, which was never the
tongue of that estimable poem, and that unless He wants to
pay the usual forfeit, which wouldn’t really be consonant
with his Divinity, He’s better give up the idea;

b) should he decide to do it into
instantaneous and perfect Sumerian metres,
a feat of which they’re all aware He’s capable,
He wouldn’t be proving His grasp of the original
and would run the risk of them thinking Him a show-off;

& c) since He, God, and not Arthur Hugh Clough must be regarded
as the only true author of The Bothie, as of all things,
he, Satan, doesn’t see what the point of it would be anyway.

In the silence which follows the Creator is keenly aware
of the voice of the nightingale, then murmurs of consensus,
then much delighted laughter from the angels.

Lucifer bows.

The nightingale stops singing.

God sighs. He could really do without these bi/tches sometimes
but then where would He be ?

As if to answer this question to Himself
He withdraws to the farthest reaches of the garden
and leans on the parapet, smoking in fitful gloom,
for what seems like an eternity.
He lights each gasper from the butt of His last
then flicks the glowing end far into the dark,
displeased at His foreknowledge of where it will fall.
To KNOW what his more intelligent creatures have thought
of these lights that appear in August out of Perseus
and not to have disabused them of it, as He’s always meant to,
is unforgivable. He gazes in their direction in the dark
and gives them His Word that soon He will change all that,
silent at first, then whispered, then shouted in Sumerian.

Peter Didsbury

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