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