He has laid her down among the snows.

  They will not want her now.

  She is too happy, too remote,

  Too still the lips, so loved by those,

  Too pale the face, too smooth the brow.

  A scarlet line across her throat.

  They will not want her now.

  THE ISLAND[61]

  I know now, O’ my people, that the isle

  on which I promised that you would be free

  was ignorantly charted, or by guile,

  upon an actually empty sea.

  But sometimes, after night on starless night

  and mists through which for days no day could smile,

  a heart that love will not let sleep may sight,

  through eyes that sleep has never loved, that isle.

  Therefore, if you would glimpse that gleaming reef,

  that gloom of green upon the shadeless main,

  may you, as I, be driven mad with grief

  or they, that drove you mad, be driven sane.

  THE RACKET[62]

  If I had deigned to guzzle at the plate,

  Whose contents seemed egregiously to please

  A squalid world that I have come to hate,

  Or tried to run its race with mudded knees

  And absolutely no hope of success,

  Could I at last, perhaps with greater ease,

  Outstretch my feeble hand and try to bless

  That world that said my love was a disease?

  Would I have written nobler lines than these?

  THE FAULT

  This is the language I was born to speak,

  The words that I am doomed to say;

  I am defenseless, I am weak,

  And I am gay.

  I am the harm for which you’re not insured

  Whatever premium you pay;

  I am the ill of which you can’t be cured,

  And I am gay.

  I am the fissure through the bone,

  I am the flaw within the stone,

  I am the tiny cloud across the sky

  of evolution’s perfect day;

  I am the great mistake,

  But I am here to stay.

  THE EARLY LIGHT

  I woke and, in the early light of day,

  Beheld a word I knew I’d never own,

  The crowd arrived but still I was alone,

  And worse, I could not find the voice to say

  The angry, believing phrase that would tell

  That here was hell.

  And as I wept and shrugged to express

  My grief, the glory faded from the sky,

  The crowd departed and the night came by,

  I’ve found the voice that helps my deep distress,

  I found the words, my mouth is open, but

  My heart is shut.

  MY SECRET PASSION[63][64]

  I thought I’d tell the people

  About my secret passion,

  To clear the air,

  I like to share,

  Besides, it was in fashion.

  So, first I told my doctor,

  His words were not unkind,

  He said, “I’m sure

  We’ll find a cure,”

  And patted my behind.

  And then I told my mother,

  I thought she would be glad,

  She cried a lot

  and said, “Do not

  say anything to Dad.”

  But still I told my father,

  His lips began to foam,

  He paced the floor

  And cursed and swore

  And said, “You can’t come home.”

  And then I told my cronies,

  Their attitude was critical,

  They murmured, “Dearie,

  this is dreary.

  Please don’t get political.”

  And last, I told my boyfriend,

  It roused his deepest fears,

  Before he fled

  he turned and said,

  “I draw the line at queers.”

  DRINKING SONG

  Let everyone lift his glass above

  And give it a friendly clink,

  We’ll say we’re drinking to life and love,

  But really we’ll drink to drink.

  We’ll say we’re toasting our ladies fair,

  Their eyes of blue and their golden hair,

  When really we know they stink.

  We’ll drink to whisky and drink to gin,

  That rot your guts and impair your skin

  And color your eyeballs pink.

  We’ll say we’re drinking to life and love,

  But really we’ll drink to drink.

  And finally, as the night wears on,

  Who cares what the neighbors think?

  When shame and sherry and cheese are gone,

  We’ll say that we stink.,

  We’ll say that we drink,

  We’ll say that we drink

  To drink.

  Let everyone lift his glass above

  And give it a friendly clink,

  We’ll say we’re drinking to life and love,

  But really we’ll drink to drink.

  We’ll say we’re drinking to absent friends,

  To comrades meeting and journeys’ ends,

  Who cares if they swim or sink?

  We’ll say we’re drinking to life and love,

  But really we’ll drink to drink,

  We’ll drink to white and to milky wine,

  To every juice of the sacred vine,

  Though some of it tastes like ink.

  We’ll say we’re drinking to life and love,

  But really we’ll drink to drink.

  We’ll say that we drink

  To drink.

  PRECIOUS STONE[65]

  Spring comes when spring comes never any more,

  Over the barren ploughland of my years,

  But I, who always feared the spring before,

  Have found at last an ending to all fears,

  When God, with knotted winds across the sky,

  Scourges the white or weeping clouds of rain

  Or, from the bed from which it loved to lie,

  Drags by its emerald hair the sleeping grain,

  Convulses in the agony of birth,

  Trees that were old and only longed to die

  Or with a rash of flowers infects the earth,

  These things are like a rainbow in the sky,

  If God ordained all this, he did ordain

  That I who wanted love, should be alone,

  I am some kindred miracle of pain,

  I asked for bread, he gave me precious stone.

  THE MUSIC OF DELIUS

  Under the transverse gloom of ruined sound,

  A flute note rose and traveled on alone

  Toward a sea, moon-grey and with no tide,

  Girding the land this land shall someday be.

  With naked feet upon the moon-grey ground,

  Over recumbent columns of blurred stone,

  Over my statue, lying on its side,

  I followed soundlessly.

  And, standing always on the moon-grey shore,

  I knew the reason why I lived and died

  And wept, and then not minded what I knew,

  And then forgot and only watched the sea.

  And no sail chipped its rim forever more

  And no wind ever blew.

  NEVER AND NEVER[66]

  Never imagine that happiness is out there;

  It is always in here,

  Never try to be unlike other people;

  Only strive to be more and more like yourself,

  Never tell your mother anything;

  Whatever you say will one day be used against you,

  Never work; in fact, before you do anything

  Always ask yourself one question:

  Can I possibly get out of this?

  NO REGRETS

  I never say no,

  I can’t say no,

  I never say no to anything

  Because I am told that, as I lie dying

  On an iron bedstead in a rented room,

  I shall not regret anything I did,

  I shall regret what I didn’t do, so I do

  Anything so as to regret very little,

  Like Madame Piaf,

  I shall have no regrets.

  DEATH MADE MAD

  That’s very difficult

  And I don’t know how to do this,

  But death stands tall

  Like the blades of wintry grass,

  And sways with the snowflakes

  While I graze the surface

  With my fair feet.

  When will it all end?

  WILD BIRDS

  Why the wild birds fly

  I don’t know, except that of course

  We’re all wild birds of a sort,

  Don’t you all think? Only some of us

  Never get a chance to take flight.

  EPITAPH[67]

  O’ hurt and hurtling clod of earth,

  We have come back to you,

  For now we know what freedom’s worth,

  We crawled, we stood,

  We found we had the knack,

  We walked, we ran, we flew,

  We did these things because we could,

  They were not good,

  Forgive us, take us back.

  ALL THIS AND BEVIN TOO[68]

  There’s a place at the edge of the town

  Where a Kangaroo walks with a frown

  In the loneliest street

  On the weariest feet

  And, whenever he can, he looks down,

  Though they say the street simply shone

  With his smiles in the days that are gone.

  He played hop-scotch, had fun

  With the kids and would run

  With one foot off the curb and one on.

  But all that was before he had heeded

  The wireless announcements that pleaded

  Or read in the press

  The distressed S.O.S.

  Saying, ‘KANGAROOS URGENTLY NEEDED.’

  For, as soon as the meaning was plain

  (And it was when he’d read it again),

  Having hopped from his chair,

  He had slid down the stair

  And had boarded a Bakerloo train.

  It was clear to him what he must do

  He must offer himself to the Zoo.

  But the moment he tried

  The committee replied,

  ‘We’ve already got plenty of you.

  ‘If you like, you may leave us your name

  So that we can go into your claim

  And then, doubtless, you’ll hear

  In the course of a year

  An evasive reply to the same.

  ‘And perhaps, in the interim, you

  Would take home these forms to read through,

  Paying special attention,

  Perhaps I should mention,

  To paragraph four-seven-two.’

  So our hero returned to his room.

  (O Bloomsbury, where is they bloom?)

  And he lit in an attic

  To make it dramatic

  A candle to lighten the gloom

  And he sat there and tried not to snivel

  While wading through pages of drivel

  Compiled in verbose

  And ambiguous prose

  By the servants that some had called civil,

  For most of their questions were rude.

  They asked what he weighed in the nude

  And, as well as his size

  And the shade of his eyes,

  If he’d ever been formerly ‘zooed.’

  And the sky became black that was blue

  Before all of his reading was through

  And he still couldn’t see

  What the meaning would be

  Of that paragraph four-seven-two.

  It said, ‘Kindly state how and when

  In the future, the past or since then

  Either you or your mother

  Or father or brother

  Has ever? And will they again?

  So he called in the cat, who was good

  At what cannot be quite understood,

  And by dawn, weary-eyed,

  They had somehow replied

  To the question as well as they could.

  About paragraph four-seven-two,

  With the craftiest possible mew,

  Said the cat, looking wise

  And half closing his eyes,

  ‘I should say, “Yes and No.” People do.’

  But day after day after day

  Drifted by, either sunny or grey,

  And, when finally came

  A reply to his claim,

  It was not what he’d hoped they would say.

  Though they didn’t say, ‘No,’ I confess,

  Yet they certainly didn’t say, ‘Yes.’

  They said, ‘Not in as much,

  Heretofore, such and such,

  Notwithstanding’ and ‘nevertheless.’

  And the Kangaroo thought that at least,

  Since his chances were greatly increased

  Of achieving his ends

  By the help of his friends,

  He must offer to make them a feast.

  Now he hadn’t the butter for toast

  And not rations enough for a roast

  But each guest brought some beer

  And his egg for the year

  And they drank to the health of their host.

  They had bread, which they cut very thick,

  And a cake that was hard as a brick.

  It was mostly wood-pulp

  But they all gave a gulp

  And thirteen of them only were sick.

  They had coffee but drank it, perforce,

  With no milk and no sugar of course.

  But the deadliest flop

  Was a tiny lamb chop

  Which they all of them knew to be horse.

  But all that didn’t get him much forwarder,

  He stuck for an hour in a corridor,

  Then in a room

  That was cold as a tomb

  And, because of the people, was horrider.

  They asked him his birth-place and who

  Were his parents and what did they do;

  And they asked him what wage

  And how tiny a cage

  They could get him to take in the zoo.

  And they told him his chances were small,

  If indeed they existed at all,

  And they yawned and enquired,

  Looking angry and tired,

  If he’d been to the local town hall.

  After that he saw girls of fifteen

  Who were gushingly willing but green

  And others of fifty

  Whose answers were shifty,

  But no one an age in between.

  And they said, without shame or remorse,

  That they’d given his cage to a horse,

  But that still, if he chose,

  And could alter his nose,

  He could put his name down for a course.

  So they gave him a pen that was squiggly

  And, feeling half sad and half giggly,

  He managed to sign

  On the dottiest line,

  Though his signature went a bit wiggly.

  They would train him, they said, in the art

  That’s performed by a horse with a cart,

  And would teach him to neigh

  In the very best way.

  In September the classes would start.

  And so, once having signed, willy-nilly,

  He went, feeling wretchedly silly,

  To school with a foal

  Being trained as a mole

  And a finch be trained as a filly.

  And, after a term and a half,

  With a jaguar and a giraffe,

  He went in for a test

  To see which was the best,

  And they all of them tried not to laugh.

  And the Kangaroo, out of the three,

  Was successful alone in that he

  Didn’t swallow his bit,

  And they had to admit

  He was due for an equine degree.

  But the final results of this test,

  Which were posted to them on request,

  Had got nothing to do

  With a cage in the Zoo

  As the cat, in his wisdom, had guessed,

  For, suppressing a querulous mew,

  He said, ‘All our failure is due

  To our answer, I fear,

  Being rather too clear

  About paragraph four-seven-two,

  Because year after year after year

  Will go by, either cloudy or clear,

  Without ever a word

  Being spoken or heard

  That concerns your intended career.’

  What the Kangaroo wondered was, ‘Why?’

  But he feared that to speak was to cry,

  So he lolloped away.

  There was nothing to say

  But to bid all the neighbors good-bye.

  On the monkey who’d lent him a hat

  He bestowed a benevolent pat

  On the top of his head,

  With no word being said.

  Then he went for a walk with the cat.

  And to him, who was nearest his heart,

  He announced he was willing to part

  With his radio set,

  With the bitter regret

  That he’d listened to it at the start.

  After which he turned homeward in tears

  Where he settled his rental arrears.

  Then he packed both his bags