Cat

By Ted Hughes

You need your Cat.
When you slump down
All tired and flat
With too much town

With too many lifts
Too many floors
Too many neon-lit
Corridors

Too many people
Telling you what
You just must do
And what you must not

With too much headache
Video glow
Too many answers
You never will know

Then stroke the Cat
That warms your knee
You’ll find her purr
Is a battery

For into your hands
Will flow the powers
Of the beasts who ignore
These ways of ours

And you’ll be refreshed
Through the Cat on your lap
With a Leopard’s yawn
And a Tiger’s nap.

Comments :
This poem is from an anthology titled ‘The Cat and the Cuckoo’, a book of poems for children by Ted Hughes. It leapt out at me from the bookshelf because I had no idea that Ted Hughes wrote poetry for children. A nice enough poem (though I personally prefer dogs to cats), I thought it was worth putting up on this site.
- Zen

Flea's Hymn

By Kathryn Walker

To the tune of 'All Things Bright and Beautiful'

All things brown and beautiful
All things brown and small,
All things brown and difficult -
The Big Dog made them all.
- Flea

Comments :
Merry Christmas Everyone !
I found this poem quite funny - the way the 'Big Dog' for fleas stands in for the 'Lord God' for humans. and of course, 'all things bright and beautiful' is a nice song to remember on Christmas.
This poem is part of a lovely anthology titled 'Unleashead - Poems by Writers Dogs'. Expect to see more doggy poems in the days ahead.
- Zen

Fragment : “Cramped in that funneled hole”

By Wilfred Owen

Cramped in that funneled hole, they watched the dawn
Open a jagged rim around; a yawn
Of death’s jaws, which all but swallowed them
Stuck in the middle of his throat of phlegm.

(And they remembered Hell has many mouths),
They were in one of many mouths of Hell
Not seen of seers in vision; only felt
As teeth of traps; when bones and the dead are smelt
Under the mud where long ago they fell
Mixed with the sour sharp odour of the shell.

Comments : The first time I actually saw army bunkers (albeit ones that were used during a decades old war), I was shocked at how uncomfortable and claustrophobic they were – the sight made me realize some of the very real discomforts that those on the battle-field face. The first two lines of this poem and the ‘jagged rim’ of the sunrise grabbed my attention because they described the limited view from inside a bunker so well. The analogy with Death’s jaws made this a truly unforgettable poem.

In the context of the events of November 26th in Mumbai, I wonder if these two paragraphs describe the plight of those who were trapped in the Taj, Oberoi or Nariman House.
- Zenobia

About the Poet :
Wilfred Owen is one of the best-known poets of the First World War. All of Owen’s important work in poetry was written in just over a year, the last year of his life, and almost all of it is about the war. ‘My subject is War, and the pity of War’, he declared. ‘The poetry is in the pity’. ‘All a poet can do today is warn’, he went on. ‘That is why the true poets must be truthful’.
One of his famous poems titled ‘Futility’ (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/288.html) is part of the school syllabus in many secondary schools.
For more informaion on Wilfred Owen, check the following :
http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/owen_editors.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilfred_Owen

September 1, 1939

(Guest contribution from Anita B)

September 1, 1939
By W.H.Auden

I sit in one of the dives
On Fifty-second Street
Uncertain and afraid
As the clever hopes expire
Of a low dishonest decade:
Waves of anger and fear
Circulate over the bright
And darkened lands of the earth,
Obsessing our private lives;
The unmentionable odour of death
Offends the September night.

Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz ,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.

Exiled Thucydides knew
All that a speech can say
About Democracy,
And what dictators do,
The elderly rubbish they talk
To an apathetic grave;
Analysed all in his book,
The enlightenment driven away,
The habit-forming pain,
Mismanagement and grief:
We must suffer them all again.

Into this neutral air
Where blind skyscrapers use
Their full height to proclaim
The strength of Collective Man,
Each language pours its vain
Competitive excuse:
But who can live for long
In an euphoric dream;
Out of the mirror they stare,
Imperialism's face
And the international wrong.

Faces along the bar
Cling to their average day:
The lights must never go out,
The music must always play,
All the conventions conspire
To make this fort assume
The furniture of home;
Lest we should see where we are,
Lost in a haunted wood,
Children afraid of the night
Who have never been happy or good.

The windiest militant trash
Important Persons shout
Is not so crude as our wish:
What mad Nijinsky wrote
About Diaghilev
Is true of the normal heart;
For the error bred in the bone
Of each woman and each man
Craves what it cannot have,
Not universal love
But to be loved alone.

From the conservative dark
Into the ethical life
The dense commuters come,
Repeating their morning vow;
'I will be true to the wife,
I'll concentrate more on my work,'
And helpless governors wake
To resume their compulsory game:
Who can release them now,
Who can reach the dead,
Who can speak for the dumb?

All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.

Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

Comments : I came across this poem in Nilanajana S Roy’s column in today’s business standard (http://www.business-standard.com/india/news/reading-intimeterror/09/35/342295/)

While the poem was written for times which were worse than this (Media channels can go on about the ‘war’ on Mumbai but I would prefer to call it an ‘attack’), it still has some relevant and moving paragraphs, especially the penultimate stanza. What I have seen again and again in Mumbai, always reminds me that ‘we must love one another or die’.

Hopefully the day will never come when the time to read and appreciate and feel the poem in its entirety arises.
- Anita B.

This Be The Verse

Guest contribution from anonymous contributor

This Be The Verse
By Philip Larkin

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another's throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don't have any kids yourself.


Comments : An old Philip Larkin poem that is precise and disturbing: This Be The Verse . In the days that we find ourselves in, a reminder that we inherit many of the woes that we live with - and also that we need to continuously remind ourselves to do as little further harm as possible.

Maybe the sun will shine brighter tomorrow...

- Anon

Poems by Yehuda Amichai

Hello Everyone,

Am giving below three links to poems from the wondering minstrels website - all by Yehuda Amichai, relevant for the times and the recent events in Mumbai.

'Let the memorial hill remember' (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1548.html)
'Seven Laments for the War Dead' (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1108.html)
'The Diameter of the Bomb' (http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1448.html)

Regards,
Zen.

Special Glasses

By Billy Collins

I had to send away for them
because they are not available in any store.

They look the same as any sunglasses
with a light tint and silvery frames,
but instead of filtering out the harmful
rays of the sun,

they filter out the harmful sight of you --
you on the approach,
you waiting at my bus stop,
you, face in the evening window.

Every morning I put them on
and step out the side door
whistling a melody of thanks to my nose
and my ears for holding them in place, just so,

singing a song of gratitude
to the lens grinder at his heavy bench
and to the very lenses themselves
because they allow it all to come in, all but you.

How they know the difference
between the green hedges, the stone walls,
and you is beyond me,

yet the schoolbuses flashing in the rain
do come in, as well as the postman waving
and the mother and daughter dogs next door,

and then there is the tea kettle
about to play its chord—
everything sailing right in but you, girl.

Yes, just as the night air passes through the screen,
but not the mosquito,
and as water swirls down the drain,
but not the eggshell,
so the flowering trellis and the moon
pass through my special glasses, but not you.

Let us keep it this way, I say to myself,
as I lay my special glasses on the night table,
pull the chain on the lamp,
and say a prayer—unlike the song—
that I will not see you in my dreams.

Comments : Billy Collins is one poet I discovered only last year (thanks A) when a friend lent me ‘The Trouble With Poetry’. I found that I loved the touch of whimsy in some of the poems, the twist in the tale in others, and the sense of time slowly unspooling in others – all of these delivered in no-nonsense, matter-of-fact, light-n-airy verse.
Incidentally, I read a review that said that ‘The Trouble With Poetry’ is a collection of the most inferior of his poems. But I thoroughly enjoyed it and it left me hungry for more Billy Collins.
Have chosen one of the more somber and sad poems here – I really liked this poem for the way it describes the process of getting over someone.
- Zen

About the poet : Billy Collins is the author of eight collections of poetry, including Nine Horses; Sailing Alone Around the Room; Picnic. Lightning; The Art of Drowning; and Questions About Angels. He is also the editor of Poetry 180: A Turning Back to Poetry and 180 More: Extraordinary Poems for Every Day. A Distinguished Professor of English at Lehman College of the City University of New York, he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States for 2001-2003 and is currently serving as the Poet Laureate of New York State.
More about the poet on http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/278 and http://www.cstone.net/~poems/troubcol.htm

Weather Child

Sometimes the air in which roses
grow and trees thrive turns boisterous,
then rough. It tousles their foliage, then knocks
them down so that a child watching all this
out of a window thinks without knowing
what it’s thinking : that’s how it must be,
living with a parent with an uncertain temper.
By,
Suniti Namjoshi

Comments :I liked this poem because of the analogy with trees – found it an unusual link to child abuse. Incidentally, it is part of a book titled ‘Sycorax’, which is one worth buying. It has both prose and poetry, a lot of which is a tongue-in-cheek and cynical look at reality. Zen

Click on http://ambainny.blogspot.com/2008/02/suniti-namjoshi.html to read Suniti’s comments about this poem, part of an interesting interview given by her.

About the poet :
Suniti Namjoshi (born 1941) is an Indian writer and poet, many of whose works explore issues of gender and sexual orientation. She has written several collections of fables, poetry and fantasy fiction. She has also written some children's fiction (Aditi and the one eyed monkey, Aditi and the Thames Dragon etc). She was born in Mumbai. She has worked as an officer in the IAS and held several academic posts in India and Canada. She now lives in the UK.
Read further details at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suniti_Namjoshi and http://india.poetryinternationalweb.org/piw_cms/cms/cms_module/index.php?obj_id=9964

archy goes abroad

london england
since i have been
residing in westminster
abbey i have learned
a secret that i desire
to pass on to the psychic
sharps it is this
until the body of a human
being perishes utterly
the spirit is not
released from its vicinity
so long as there is any
form left in the physical
part of it the ghost cannot go
to heaven or to hell
the ancient greeks
understood this and they
burned the body very often
so that the spirit could
get immediate release
the ancient Egyptians
also knew it
but they reacted differently
to the knowledge
the embalmed the body
so that the form would
persist for thousands
of years and the ghost would have
to stick around for a time
here in westminster abbey
there are hundreds of
ghosts that have not yet
been released
some of them are able to wander
a few miles away
and some of them cannot
go further than a few hundred
yards from the graves
where their bodies lie
for the most part
they make the best of it
they go out on little
excursions around london
and at night they sit on
their tombs and
tell their experiences
to each other
it is perhaps the most
exclusive club in London
henry the eighth came in
about three o clock this morning
after rambling about
picadilly for a couple of hours
and I wish I had the
space to report in detail
the ensuing conversation
between him and charles dickens
now and then
a ghost can so influence
a living person that you
might say he had grabbed off
that living persons body and was
using it as his own
edward the black prince
was telling the gang
the other evening
that he had been leading the life
of a city clerk for three weeks
one of those birds
with a top hat and a sack coat
who come floating though
the mist and drizzle
with manuscript cases
under their arms looking unreal
even when they are not animated
by ghosts edward the black prince
who is known democratically
as neddie black here
says this clerk was a mild and
humble wight when he took
him over but he worked
him up to the place where
he assaulted a policeman
saturday night then left him flatone of the most pathetic
sights however
is to see the ghost of queen
victoria going out every
evening with the ghost
of a scepter in her hand
to find mr lytton strachey
and bean him it seems she beans
him and beans him and he
never knows it
and every night on the stroke
of midnight elizabeth tudor
is married to sir walter raleigh by that
eminent clergyman
dr lawrence sterne
the gang pulls a good many
pageants which are written
by ben johnson but i think
the jinks will not be properly
planned and staged until
j m barrie gets here
this is the jolliest bunch
i have met in london
they have learned
since they passed over
that appearances and suety
puddings are not all they were
cracked up to be anon from your little friend
archy

Comments : I loved this poem for it's whimsical rambling story. The idea of the ghosts of Henry the Eighth and Charles Dickens sitting having a conversation, the 'most exclusive club in London' these just cracked me up. - Zen

Don Marquis first introduced archy the cockroach and mehitabel, a cat in her ninth life, in his newspaper column, ‘The Sun Dial’ in 1916. In a previous life archy was a free verse poet, while mehitabel’s soul once belonged to Cleopatra. She is toujours gai, but archy is more philosophical. It is he who records their songs and observations on the boss’ typewriter late at night. But he is not strong enough to make capital letters so it all comes out lower case.

the main question is
whether the stuff is
literature or not.

it is.
(p.s. I copied the above bit from the back cover of 'archy and mehitabel')

excerpts from 'certain maxims of archy'

(From 'archy and mehitabel'
by don marquis)

if you get gloomy just
take an hour off and sit
and think how
much better this world
is than hell
of course it won t cheer
you up much if
you expect to go there


prohibition makes you
want to cry
into your beer and
denies you the beer
to cry into



that stern and
rockbound coast felt
like an amateur
when it saw how grim
the puritans that
landed on it were

Comments : I liked these excerpts, especially the first and the last. The last reminded me of some serious kill-joys I know, and the first was just too tongue-in-cheek to leave out of this post.
- Zen

Welcome

Hello Everyone,
Most of you who read this are amongst those who are missing the wondering minstrels as much as I have been. After repeated mails to the minstrels’ owners with guest poems, have decided that I have to get my regular fix of new poems elsewhere. Hence this blog. Will post a poem here every week (or more often) to begin with. Am hoping in a few weeks others will start sending in guest poems (please mail entropymuse.ed@gmail.com) and then I can sit back and enjoy myself reading guest entries and posting them on this blog.
Rules remain the same as for the minstrels – anything is acceptable, as long as it includes a commentary from you (even one line with your opinion of the poem will do).
Hope this experiment throws up some interesting poems.
Zen.