A Cartesian life co-odinated
The year is 1607; the place, the lodgings
of the Jesuit College Royal Henri-le-Grand
at La Fleche; it’s evening;
around a flickering candle
three boys of eleven years,
bright young faces against black robes,
bright eyes, lit in each pupil by the candle flame;
too young yet to be tired
by their day of such demanding study,
they laugh over a game
designed to improve their knowledge
of the Latin terms that they must learn:
the one whose father is a High Court judge
of course knows most; yet is most bored;
such is a father’s ambition for his son…
the game, easily constructed without expense:
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Don't you wish your soul was larger? (Advt.)
You were born with a little pink soul.
That didn’t seem to matter for your first ten years or so.
Then you started to compare it with what
other boys had swinging for them…
and of course, how girls were different,
but managed in their own private way…
then you discovered girls, bigtime. Well, for you, smalltime...
They didn’t mind the modest size of your soul, at first;
then they started giggling together, and
favoured some other guy like crazy
since it got around that he had a huge swinging soul
and knew just how to use it.
Now you’ve got a partner, and she doesn’t say anything
because she knows you’re very sensitive about this
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0126 A Longstanding Question
It’s rather a delicate personal matter…
I could of course say I’m just asking for a friend…
but I guess You’d see through that, from what I hear…
I wouldn’t trouble You, but
it’s not a question that concerned Adam
since he had no comparative physiology
any more than he had comparative theology…
so it didn’t matter a figleaf to him…
and Moses had the bigger picture in mind, and in his position
had to keep up with the Tablets
to use a medical term which
we might refer to later…
as for Jesus, well it didn’t affect him personally, of course,
even as Son of Man,
unless of course the Da Vinci Code is true
but I’d rather not pursue such maudlin thoughts
with You…
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Good v. Evil - watch the rematch in the comfort of your own home!
But hold on a minute –
who set this league up?
Is it a fair game? Are the teams
equally matched? Have they
both got wealthy sponsors?
Can they both afford those
international mercenaries?
Is it - excuse the metaphor -
a level playing field? …
Some say it’s the oldest
religion in the world, with
the largest number of current
devotees.. even those of us
who say we’re agnostic, atheist, or
never got the voting paper,
secretly keep its shrine, deep
in our hearts…
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0281 A mid-Atlantic voice
It's said in Indian circles that the years of retirement
are the time when men choose the occupation
of their next life. So I'm sitting here on a fine Sunday
in a quiet London suburb, the very day when the geraniums
have decided that they and the sun are into
a long-term relationship, sitting wondering whether
I'd like to be an American poet next time around.
It seems on the surface very tempting:
for economic survival, teaching creative writing
in a medium-profile college where I guess
they get on well with their students
and discuss in a class of about twenty-one
Pamela Anderson's implants and their removal
in an urbane, witty, jokes-and-depth way;
they live with a happy family in a happy house
and rejoice - as poets, unacknowledged legislators of mankind -
in the safety, the relaxed glory, of being typical Americans yet
with full liberal license nay duty to criticise or reject or even fulminate against the American Way of Life.
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Sin
Language is a blessing and a curse –
sometimes uniting, sometimes dividing,
sometimes an arrow, sometimes blown blossoms,
misplaced seeds..
How can we of the Western world
imagine what it’s like to speak a tongue,
as Persians, Hebrews, Aramaics, Arabs
are so blessed that they possess –
where words remember that they come from One
whose word is law, whose word is love;
so words are true at every level of understanding:
say ‘name’ or ‘kingdom’; ‘bread’; or ‘dust’:
a golden ladder from the heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven; we as dust beneath
the chariot wheel, as it drives over
this old potter’s yard; cracking discarded potsherds
back to dust, to mud, to clay, to future pots –
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Dear Will Shakespeare
Dear Will,
How are things out there?
just thought you'd like to know,
that you're eleventh on the Top Poets list
as of today (though I should mention
that the hittership is 75% from
the New World that you just foresaw
before you 'closed your book'; not
that that's relevant - they speak an
English, isn't that great, which is nearer
to your own sound than the strangled
glottal stops of Cheapside Thames-side these sorry days) ...
So to the list: and so you'll understand
that no offence is meant, etcetera...
top dog today is Sheldon Silverstein -
the sort of oddball who lives down the street
just where the sidewalk ends,
whom your children hang around with all the time -
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0205 Front porch days
London, six o'clock in June, two-o-o-five:
These streets were built in nineteen-five or thereabouts
in unimaginative grid, on London clay and previous watercress beds
by builders and those, quote, 'developers',
whose sudden stroke of luck was that the Tube line was diverted
and foreshortened, now to pass this way all overground;
it took a century, and climate change, to prove
that cracked-out summer clay and winter watercourse,
and building onto earth, are not the best foundation...
but these terraces of modest houses
(alternate houses gabled, bayed, to suggest they're twice the size)
have stood the test of time, when, often, underpinned;
intended for the aspirational working-class,
they've now become, these last few years,
'first homes' for the equally aspirational middle-class;
tonight the streets are nose-to-tail with silent, gleaming
four-wheelers looking down their grilles
at nifty runabouts - some, I regret to say,
parked where suburban front-gardens once declared respectability
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0256 What are those kids up to?
It’s in a quiet corner to itself
away from the grandiose creations of the
Italian Renaissance gallery, so
you can stand undisturbed to wonder
just what’s going on?
A small painting: in a peaceful
green and hilly summer countryside,
not a soul in sight except
these three – children? - their faces under
their hoodies seem known to each other
but shadowed, small, not asking to be
known to us; absorbed, maybe learning, and
they’re enacting, in this remote spot,
the Crucifixion
Jesus hanging patiently up there, a bit like
a kid trying it out for himself to see
what it feels like (and there was a case, a kid
a few years back, on Hampstead Heath,
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Metaphors, Similes and stuff - Pooh Bear Explains
Christopher Robin and Pooh walked slowly down the path in the woods, treading on the occasional crackly twig.
'CR...' said Pooh, 'What's a Poeh Tree? Is it the same as a Poem, or a hum? '
'Well, Pooh, the very very best Poeh Tree in the world is your own:
'Isn't it funny
how bears like hunny?
It's what I call rum-ti-tum-itry. Everyone likes rum-ti-tum-itry. Even grown-ups. Rum-ti-tum-itry is friendly. Rum-ti-tum-itry is like two friends walking together. Like you and me, Pooh. Which makes you the very best rum-ti-tum-iter in the world...'
'That's tum as in...? ' asked the Very Stout Bear, cautiously.
'As in a Hum' said Christopher Robin. 'But then there's other things in Poetry such as Truth, and Other People Reading It And Nodding. And Similes. And Metaphors. There's a lot in Poetry.'
'What's a Simile, CR? ' asked Pooh. It sounded like what bees said just before they landed on something, like a hunny jar, or Pooh's nose.
'It's when you say something is like something else, to help people imagine it.' said CR.
Pooh had a Think. A Pondery sort of Think.
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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