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

–

Here the key of life,

There the hand to turn.

Young Boys

The river swiftly flowing

Tells us that the time

For acting and for knowing

For learning how to climb,

Time that never waits

Begs us to begin

Open up the gates,

Let the truth come in.

We pledge ourselves to borrow

The strength they had of old

Who learned through pain and sorrow

The only wealth to hold

Is that unminted gold

Which hides in each to-morrow

Prelude

Trumpets sound

For Jubilee,

Drums pound

For Jubilee,

Flutes shrill,

Bells beat their fill

For Jubilee!

Older Boys

Let us use the past

As a road to reach

That enormous beach

Rich with sail and mast

Seas for us to chart

Call the eager heart:

Let the voyage start!

Young Boys

Remembering the ruins.

III

Let us praise those men whose vision

Scorned a sneering world’s derision,

Dreamed a dream and then fulfilled it,

Dreamed a school and went to build it.

Let us praise the boys before us

Whom we echo in our chorus

Who became the men who freed us

Who became the men who lead us.

‘THE THREE DIMENSIONS’

Watch me trace

The three of space:

Up, down, and then across

The three dimensions, as they say.

But there’s another,

An elusive sort of brother –

Time!

I’m

Giving all my attention

To treating that fourth dimension

As if it were a spatial one.

I can walk up and down it or run,

Even fly. My

Time journey’s almost begun.

The past is hidden,

The future’s forbidden.

We don’t care why or how.

We’re happy enough with now.

No discomfort, no disease,

Gentlemen living at their ease,

Everything designed to please

In good Victoria’s reign.

Darwin, Marx, electric light,

The Church of England taking fright

As new ideas put old to flight

Were they right, I wonder –

Stay as you are, refuse to move,

Stick in your comfortable groove,

Sheltered from storm and thunder.

But destiny beckons me yonder

To dare the unknown, unseen.

Back to my time machine.

WORDS GETTING IN THE WAY

The man without words

Wants to be in love

Without words getting in the way.

What words could match

Her fairness of face?

What words could catch

Her grace?

The language of birds

In the blue above –

Even that’s unequipped to say

In the magic sand

What magic she brings

To all surround-

Ing things.

Why should I waste

Time and brain and breath

On what bores me to dusty death?

Let me taste

Her lips, not your words on mine –

Entwine her within my strong embrace

To a wordless man like this

A sigh can say no more

Than all of your bor-

Ing intellectual play.

How can I kiss

With words getting in the way?

I’m sick of each day

With each tiresome tome

That you drag from a special shelf.

I know a tree

Where poetry may

Proceed to hang itself

I’m sick of each night

That I spend at home

With a polysyllabic theme.

Insipid alien

Sesquipedalian writings

Make me scream

Don’t answer me when

I ask once again:

By all that’s sacred, how may

I hold her tight

With words getting in the way?

No matter how powerful or subtle or fine

I’m weary of working with words that you write

An actor enacting another man’s lines

But now that I’m seeing her, now it’s tonight

The things I must say are the things I must say.

It’s she and it’s I,

It’s her and it’s me –

No one but we

Tonight.

No poet need try

To fly in the way

Singing’s the right

Sonnets to say.

It’s she and it’s me,

And I and it’s her –

And I prefer

It so.

As soon as I see

The flame on her cheek,

Then I will know

Just how to speak

I’m sick of each day

With each tiresome tome

That you keep on a special shelf.

I know a tree

Where poetry

May proceed to hang itself.

‘SLAVERY’

Slavery slavery

Which he’s dressed up in his bravery

Up to some unsavoury escapades

I’m made

To moan in my slavery.

Slavery slavery

Which he’s returned from his knavery

Full of what he gave her and she gave him

I grimly groan in my slavery.

Slavery

Oh the anguish

No language

Cut off from my culture,

Served from my sect

The viper and the vulture

The tribal dialect

with a loincloth round my middle

And a priest upon the griddle

I would gambol to a fiddle

Made of human gut

But I’m cut

Off

‘NONE BUT THE COWARD’

None but the coward

Deserves the fair, for

Brave men die

But the coward’s always there.

What should a woman

Supremely care for –

Two live arms

Or a statue in the square?

I admit that bull or rogue ram

Will need an eventual butcher’s knife

But it’s not in my programme –

A medium sensual sort of life.

I don’t like to eat

Meat raw in my paw,

I prefer it dressed by my wife

Hardly empowered

To get in there,

I’d rather survive

And thrive

And if you’re agreeable, wive.

And, like every coward,

Stay alive.

I am, let one imagine

Lord Hamlet – one imagin-

-ation that can take in every side,

But wide to take a murder in its stride.

But not wide enough.

‘HE BOUGHT ME FROM A SARACEN’

He bought me from a Saracen

Who bought from some Turks

Who used me in the garrison

To build the public works.

Though he keeps me in food

And no longer in the nude

…

He bought me from a Grecian

Minister of works

Who’d bought me from a Venetian

Who bought me from the Turks

Who’d bought me from the Arabs

‘SEVILLA, SEVIYA – OR SEVIJA’

Sevilla, Seviya, Sevija – or Seville.

Call it what you will

It’s the same town,

Not a tame town – no shame at all

Nothing much happens in the morning:

They’re recovering from the evening.

Nothing much happens in the afternoon:

They’re waiting for the moonlight to fall

On Sevilla, Seviya, Sevija – or Seville.

Come here when you will.

Crane your necks at

All the sex at your beck and call.

‘I LOVE HATE’

I love hate.

The teeth that growl and grate

And bate me.

So hate me.

Hate is the wind

That sweeps the winter clean,

Scoured and unskinned

By the gold and green.

As for love,

And the dove-cooing lies

And the eyes that glow –

Love can get up and go.

So hate me, hate me,

Make me tough.

I hate love,

I love hate.

I’d love the world more

If it would hate me enough.

Hate is the state

That turns men tough

I’d adore

The world more

If it would only hate me enough.

Hate me.

Hate.

A TIME FOR MUSIC

You’ve got to liv wiv zest Liz luv

If you farm port of a roman fleueve

On the riverain on the sane side

Where I’ll fake you for a ride,

An Avon of a joke

Inn Eden where you’ve been rest to soak

Down the wurling Winderpool

Of a swashbuckling machine,

Bint shrunk into a minikin.

It’s a long ford that has no crossing

And its lakes a tot of frank pakenhamming

With hots of katzenjamming

Chopping up the best back notes

To fate you with flewts and notes

And a host of hobos.

I hope I’ve taught your dido heart

Numbling your private parts

In an anthem of