0009 Mild And Bitter Thoughts
and I'm sitting in the pub,
fruitful source of people-watching verse,
(Jake will know it)
collecting the strength to walking-stick home
or that's the story,
chilling out,
glass half empty,
heart half full,
a benign haze of love
for all the people in the pub
mingling with an universal love
suspectly
opposite, two sepia photographs
of local scenes, which the thoughtful pub chain
use to decorate the walls:
both are of the local, semi-rural, Tube station;
one's from 1905ish so I'd I guess
from the floor-length skirts,
the birds'-nest hats; I wonder
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Gertrude Stein is interviewed on American poetry
and there was the knocking on the door
that we were expecting
and it was the man
that we were expecting
with the questions we were expecting
to which answers were expected
by those who expect answers
as if life were like that
which for writers it is not
yes, tea was drunk
and after tea the tape recorder set up
so that what I said
I would continue to say
somewhere else
even when I changed my mind
here and nowhere else
and he said Ms Stein
what do you think of American poetry
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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They also loved
‘We only love if we have first been loved.’
Aye, there’s the rub.
The teenager, her room walled round
with rock and pop stars who, it seems,
all smile their open, deep-eyed smiles
just for her… twists, red-eyed, on the bed,
hammers the pillow with clenched fists…
the boy she loved has dumped her;
she gave him all her love, and now
he’s taken it, so she’s got no love left,
not now, not forever, in her life..
Here in the tidy convent, where
everything seems polished, even the faces,
the nun kneels. Her veil hides her face; is she young or old?
She is very still. We may not know her thoughts.
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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John Betjeman, Poet
Six distinguished men, soaked to the skin,
others with the ladies following,
a coffin, underslung,
a walk of half a mile along a rough churchgoing path,
the coffin swinging like a cradle,
in driving Cornish rain;
an almost merry funeral,
green and flowered with thought,
full of the memory of laughter
There’s a photo – he's
about two or three years old –
this is a child born
with fear on his face
at having been born
to death; (the cradle
swinging like a coffin) :
instead of looking at the
birdie in the camera, it’s the void he sees.
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Worldwide Web Of Mind
The spider with which, with whom,
I share the sunshine of these late summer days
and the front garden – though in truth,
the silver filigree denies me two-thirds of it,
so broad the span of this ambitious engineer –
the spider which or who has grown so large
that its claws are some rapacious hawk in miniature,
almost scary in their taloned, threatening curve,
and which yesterday sat immobile in the centre of its web
either sleeping, or awaiting, or perhaps both,
is not there today; and I recall that yesterday
it had a silvery bag attached to it, which now I guess
could be some exquisite womb worn like a jewelled pride
which needs no protection..the web’s undamaged
so surely no marauding bird has pecked the spider
from the undamaged centre of this web?
Where has the spider chosen, for its special day,
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Death visits in the garden, in the night
‘The dead man was a six-foot ex-heavyweight,
funding his unpaid youth club work
by working as security in a night-club;
shot for gently warning
a smoker in the garden; no witnesses
have come forward… the dead man’s brother
was a probation officer; now, from despair,
a crime prevention officer…’
Committees meet, look serious, nod…
are the crime figures up or down this year?
but the ones who could enlighten us
just how it is, are the inarticulate…
‘I worshipped my Dad, always so sharp-dressed,
gold watch, rings, bracelet, all that stuff…
but we didn’t see enough of him…
he had several ladies.. he’d appear,
unannounced, every few weeks with
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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In Praise of Praise
Good dog…! ’…
Your faithful hound closes his eyelids
for a fraction longer - could this be bliss
so pure that humans rarely know it? –
rests his head for a few moments
on your knee; twitches tail, just once,
to indicate the words received:
the one phrase which, it's said,
(quietly; almost, to yourself)
completely understood and shared
by man and dog: fulfilment
of the karma of companionship..
*
Yesterday, I was praised.. or rather,
there was praise for something
that was enacted through me..
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Philanderin' and phillarkin': How to be a Modern Poet We All Love
Just two things. Write so that we can
understand you while lurching in public transport
book in hand and understand you because
you’re like us but imaginative and funny with it
and make us think; but no fancy stuff:
we want to be sure you’ve been there,
done it, got it down on paper
and that it’s the same there as we’ve been;
and the other thing but it’s not essential:
the better you write, the more we are reassured
by a colourful life well OK scandalous:
a rich and very varied sex life would be good:
a day with Paris, a week with Princess X
then three weeks with some anonymous scrubber
(no gender discrimination here by the way)
would play well. And if 50% of your liaisons
refused to talk (e.g. it was brief but profound)
we could read avidly and then hate the other 50% who told all..
but that doesn’t mean that a vigorous sex life
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0427 We'd never have guessed..
There’s so much
we never know,
would never have guessed,
never asked,
and now regret that
we never asked,
about what it was like for ‘them’
before we were born…
I can’t remember exactly
how old I was – eight? - when I knew
that Mum couldn’t possibly
have been my mother.
She was so innocent, so simple, yet
so quietly organised,
so sensible, so unlike me
- who was unlike Dad anyway, didn’t he remind me -
that she could never
have had.. sex? .. with Dad..
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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The Watchman of Dark Christmas Night
The brazier’s glowing coals lit up his eyes.
I asked the watchman as he guarded time:
tell me, watchman, of the truth of Night..
he said: when I had conquered all the tasks of day,
I took night-watching as the sternest test,
to seek the weakness, and to seek the strength
which I might find there in my deepest self..
In darkest night, I lost myself – or so
I thought I had: for every night,
as the third hour after midnight moves
into the fourth hour, there came a time
when all one held as precious to oneself,
all joy and consolation, all the point of life
was taken from me… then I felt
myself an abject, faithless wretch..
for it seemed that even God
is in repose, in that abyss of time..
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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