Collected Poems Anthony Burgess (best pdf reader for ebooks txt) 📖

a damped roar,

Strode on, like beasts that smell their living food.

So I forgot. But, ages older grown,

Revisiting, I caught that distant day.

The sands will stretched, without life and alone,

But one spot the waves had sheered away,

Fearful to touch it. There, as if on stone

Stark and clear-chiselled, that inscription lay.

‘CALM LIES OUR HARBOUR, WHILE THE MAIDEN DAY’

Calm lies our harbour, while the maiden day

Leans forth her arms to night and bids it go,

Smiling, and waits to wake with gentlest glow

Quayside and sea, and tall gaunt ships that sway.

I wait no longer now: wide lies the way,

Unsure, uncharted. Only this I know:

That sea has dubious currents, tides that flow

Frustrating all the havened ancients say…

‘FATHER OF FIRE, WITH BOLD SIMONY’

Father of fire who, with bold simony,

Didst steal the seed, catched high on Olympus

Now in my mind relive that felony

And lean down to my praying, piteous.

Be thou again as brave bounteous

As when thou first didn’t bring that art of heat

To nations bestial still and barbarous,

And fetch a match to light my cigarette.

‘J.B.W.’

J.B.W.,

Girls won’t trouble you

He’s the fella for Llewela

French without tears.

Or, All’s Llwell that Ends Llwell.

‘THE SEA, GREEN AND DEEP’

The sea, green and deep,

Seems like a beast asleep.

The beach and seaweed gleam,

And the sea breathes, heaves, sleepily,

In its deep green dream.

‘WINTER WINS’

Winter wins

Freeze the trees.

Winter winds

Chill the knees.

Bitter, shrill,

They whistle, shriek,

Nip and whip

Chin and cheek.

Shiver, shiver, bird on tree,

Shiver, shiver, fish in sea.

Stream and river, frozen be.

Soon will spring

Bring the sun,

Linnets sing,

Winter done.

‘OUT OF THE STATION PUFFS THE TRAIN’

Out of the station puffs the train

Under the bridge, then up the hill,

Down the hill, across the plain,

Beside a river, till once again

It comes to a station and stands still.

SONNET FROM ‘THE END OF THINGS: THREE DIALOGUES FOR OLD MEN’

Crippled, the antarctic fire with chiselled skill

And fraught with allomorphs deforms the climb

To netherness and, opportune, clangs time

Out of the waldorf-coloured chlorophyll.

Undoubt, unbuild the wharf-encrusted thrill

That doubts redouts of most discordant slime

Where, weathered to a clink of the sublime,

The sheaths of allergy must work their will.

Enough – or else too much, which means too little.

Unbreach, consider neither jot nor tittle,

The swarthy Nordics out of Dusseldorf.

You find it mollient? I found it brittle,

And hence exploded with a beery skittle

Each brooding titan and resplendent dwarf.

‘IMAGINATION IS YOUR TRUE APOLLO’

Imagination is your true Apollo.

In our translunar skills the moon’s small beer.

Fact’s fancy’s cripple. Acts are dim to follow

Words (small cheese, I meant – small green cheese).

We’re too long beyond the moon. The moon’s too near.

Bored with the merely visible, SF

Spends trillions on each fresh galactic race

Yet shells out not one cent to make us deaf

To the shrill signals from that silver face,

Attuning us to tunes from deeper space.

Still, it was all romance, drawn up from wells;

Or myth – an uncertain lantern in the air,

Or Prester John’s balloon, the Christian hell’s

Chill annexe, or the huntress in her chair.

Now Armstrong (Neil) and Aldrin (Ed) are there,

And Collins in his clucking mothercraft.

Old Glory on the consecrated crust

Is all th’ old glory that, alas, is left.

Glory in, in your progressive lust,

These heroes who sift silver for its dust.

Where the black gods deliciously prevail,

You find cool tribes. Our hot entropic plan

Submits to seeing human order fail,

Erects inhuman order where it can

And smiles and sighs at lunonautic man.

‘OUR NORMAN BETTERS’

Our Norman betters

Taught English letters

To bathe in the fresh

Warm springs of the south.

So turn your backs on

Anglo-Saxon,

The þ in the flesh

And the æ in the mouth.

NOSTALGIA IN HEAD PLUNGING

----------different topic

a rose is a rose is a rose       yes, but try:

a street is a street is a street

a bridge is a bridge is a bridge

rosa no buscaba rosa buscaba otra cosa

gli archi fanno più belli i ponti

is everything art,

is everything structuralism?

‘DREAMING WHEN DAWN’S LEFT HAND…’

Dreaming when dawn’s left hand…

Break break break…

Grrr there go my heart’s abhorrence

Out of the cradle endlessly rocking

Simon Danz has come home again

Earth hath not anything…

A thing of beauty…

O wild west wind…

Loveliest of trees…

Before the Romans came to Rye…

AN ELEGY FOR X

X is unnecessary, like his brother

That ‘whoreson zed’ (King Lear) or like the other

That stands between thoses two – the Grecian i,

As Latins call it. You may ponder why

We need an X in taxi when you queue

(There’s Norman tyranny. C double U

Will do, and did do for the Saxons when

A queen had not dethroned a native cwen),

Lugging your luggage from a train or bus,

For tacsis at a Cymric terminus.

In Russia, if you have the time to wait,

A takcu is delivered by the state.

St Cyril gave the barbarous Russians X

For a good Grecian purpose. Even sex,

A western import, has a K and C.

The Welsh, though far from sexless, like to be

X-less. And yet that letter was a brand

Of Celticness when Claudius stormed the land,

Raping and pillaging, firing farmer’s ricks,

Subduing what he thought were knavish tricks –

Asterix, Obelix, Vercingetorix.

X stands for sh in Malta; Taxxbiex.

Venetians, scornful of the Roman leash,

Mock X in rex and lex bidding it dance

In place of voiced and unvoiced sibilants.

Only in Xmas do we pay our dues

To the harsh velar Greeks and Russians use,

For Christ is Xristos, and who spoke or wrote

The sacred name paid homage in his throat.

Now phoneticians sensibly denote

That fishbone-clearing phoneme with the letter

Which marks the sounds that K and S do better.

Was XXXXXX the ghastly agonizing rasp

St Andrew uttered in his final gasp

Spreadeagled on his special, chi-shaped cross?

It’s a sad letter. We won’t mourn its loss,

Let it be buried, vapourised or drowned

At least when it essays a double sound.

X is a cypher, X the unknown,

The sign of the analphabete, alone,

Along with brewing strengths, the pseudonyms

Of spies and co-respondents. Sing no hymns

Save frog-croaks. Only note where it is not

With this sole epitaph: ‘X marks the spot’.

WORDS FOR MUSIC

FROM MUSIC FOR MOSES THE LAWGIVER

PRINCESS’S LULLABY/QUEEN’S LULLABY

Out of the desert the wind blows strong, but cool from out of the sea.

The desert burns and the day is long, but night sends my loved one back to me.

CHANT

Lord of the river and of that quickening mud

Whence all manner of lowly things are brought to