Bravo Carruthers!

I'll see your The Shooting of Dan McGrew from Bill Kerr and raise you The Cremation of Sam McGee from Johnny Cash.

I liked the Sam McGee thing.:thumb:

I'm posting this poem a couple of days early (July 4th you know). Please listen to all of it and you might be surprised to hear parts for the first time.

Oh, just so you know: Independence was declared on July 2, 1776!!!!!!!!!!

A few days ago, BBC Radio 4 broadcasted a programme entitled 'O Say Can You See?'. The subject matter doesn't require any explanation of course, but I thought that it might still be of interest to US Dwellars.

The on demand service, aka iPlayer, isn't always available to listeners beyond these shores for obscure copyright reasons, but you should still be able to listen to the broadcast repeat on Saturday 5th July at 1500 UK/1000 Eastern.

Here's the blurb:

Last but not least, the link: O Say Can You See?

Many of us have deep reverence for that flag because it is the banner we fought under and our friends died under.

True story: When Tull was killed and they got his body back to Camp Hit, I ran upstairs and got his flag off the wall. We put the flag over his body (in the body bag) until the body and wounded were flown out. We sent that flag to his mother. I met her the next year. She cried and thanked us. That flag is almost a religious icon to her.

So yes, if you fight for something it is precious to you. If you sit on your ass at home and discuss the merits of war, it is probably a piece of cloth.

Except it isn't is it? Just a piece of cloth for those who've never fought. There seems a general reverence in the US for the flag which is unusual (to my mind).

Yep, we're kinda proud of that ragged old flag:



I'm almost certain that Johnny Cash wrote that poem.

Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse.

Fleur Adcock

Other things.
 

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!


Scottish Prayer.

I love this!

This is one of my favourite poems.
It was written for 'Night Mail', a 22 minute documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the General Post Office (GPO) in 1936.

NIGHT MAIL

by W H Auden

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Thro' sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver's eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman's restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro' southern uplands with northern mails.
Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro' the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?



This video is the last four minutes of the original film when the poem was recited.
Technical quality leaves something to be desired, but it was made nearly eighty years ago so some allowance has to be made.




This is the complete film. (22 mins)





The poem was adapted for a 1988 British Rail corporate video narrated by Sir Tom Courtnay.

NB There is a remastered version on YouTube which can't be linked to external websites. Try it first. LINK

On Election Day

I hear democracy weep, on election day.
The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election day.
The miscreant’s vote the same as saint’s, on election day.
The dead unleash their fury, on election day.
My brother crushed in sorrow, on election day.
The sister does her washing, on election day.
Slowly, I approach the voices dark, on election day.
The men prepare for dying, on election day.
The morning hush defends its brood, on election day.
So still, so kindly faltering, on election day.
On election day, the cats take tea with the marmoset.
On election day, the mother refuses her milk.
On election day, the frogs croak so fiercely you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth.
On election day, the iron man meets her frozen gasp.
The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.
Your eyes slide, on election day.
Still the mourners mourn, the weepers wept, the children sleep alone in bed, on election day.
No doubt a comet came to see me, fiery and irreconciled, torrid, strummed, on election day.
On election day, the trespass of the fatuous alarm and ignominious aspiration fells the golden leap to girdled crest.
The tyrant becomes prince, on election day.
Neither friend nor foe, fear nor fate, on election day.
The liar lies with the lamb, on election day.
The last shall be the first and first sent to the back of the line, on election day.
The beggar made a king, on election day.
“Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” on election day.
Let he who has not sinned, let him sin, on election day.
The ghosts wear suits, on election day.
On election day, sulfur smells like beer.
On election day, the minister quakes in fear.
On election day, the Pole and the Jew dance the foxtrot.
On election day, the shoe does not fit the foot, the bullet misfires in its pistol, the hungry waiter reels before steadying himself on facts.
The grid does not gird the fiddler, on election day.
Galoshes and tears, on election day.
The sperm cannot find the egg, on election day.
The drum beat becomes bird song, on election day.
I feel like a nightmare is ending but can’t wake up, on election day.
—Charles Bernstein

For both the Limes. It's not Arran, but even without the title I thought of you and your clan.

Orkney/ This Life
It is big sky and its changes,
the sea all round and the waters within.
It is the way sea and sky
work off each other constantly,
like people meeting in Alfred Street,
each face coming away with a hint
of the other's face pressed in it.
It is the way a week long gale
ends and folks emerge to hear
a single bird cry way high up.

It is the way you lean to me
and the way I lean to you, as if
we are each other's prevailing;
how we connect along our shores,
the way we are tidal islands
joined for hours then inaccessible,
I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
The way I am an inland loch to you
when a clatter of white whoops and rises...

It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the ferry's engines thrum
this life this life this life.

Andrew Greg

Thank you, Sundae. That's glorious!


Sent by thought transference

If you had seen me pecking it out, letter by letter on this tiny phone...
I swear, I must value you above rubies.

Love you, too, sis!


Sent by thought transference

Danse Macabre

I love dispatch I strike at once
The wit, the wise, the fool, the dunce;
The steel-clad soldier, stout and bold,
The miser with his treasur'd gold;

The studious sage, and matron grave,
The haughty noble, and the slave,
I strip, with unrelenting paw,
The ermine from the man of law:
Disrobe the prelate of his his lawn;
And dim with clouds the op'ning dawn...

I love Danse Macabre. A truly astonishing work. One of those almost timeless pieces of art. Nearly 500 years old and still speaks to us.

Nice thread

Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening


Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound’s the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.


The woods are lovely, dark and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.

Robert Frost

I like that one.

Telefon!!

Tired - Fenton Johnson

That's sad.

Yes, On the scale of greys, that's black.

Could have been written by any modern tax-payer.

Yes, it's time again for my annual posting of one of my favorite poems!

April

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.
The sun is hot on my neck as I observe
The spikes of the crocus.
The smell of the earth is good.
It is apparent that there is no death.
But what does that signify?
Not only under ground are the brains of men
Eaten by maggots,
Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.
It is not enough that yearly, down this hill,
April
Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Very nice.

Life in itself
Is nothing,
An empty cup

Yes...the job and joy, for each and every one, is to fill that cup.

Is It Fair by JB Barrington

I live in a prosperous city
Rich in history and heritage and beauty that beguiles
But take a look past the wall and the shops that enthral
For somewhat contrasting lifestyles
If my eyes can see injustice
Surely your eyes can see it too
We’ve all got the wisdom and courage to oppose it
As a collective it’s not difficult to do
I want fair and square just and honest
I want them free from discrimination
I wanna snap and unwrap the reels of red tape
In the corridors of administration
Where the regulators regulate
In favour of the greedy
Where a wave of cuts make and create
More vulnerable and needy
For them it’s a buyer’s market
For I am of the plenty
I’m one big pound sign as they buy my time
Their purse gets fat mine stays empty
It’s the same old theme in the same grand scheme
In the same old day to day
It’s the same fat chance and the same old dance
To the same old tune they play
Now that my children have gone
My boxes and suitcase they wait in the hall
But it’s all about numbers cos memories don’t matter
As the last of the photos come down from the wall
Is it fair that I now have to leave
Just because I’ve grown old and alone
Is it fair that I’m forced to leave behind
My house that once was my family home
I have no family heirlooms
No crystal cut glass or antiques
When death does bereave all I’ll bequeath
Is some debt and more tears to soak cheeks
I wish i could just have that something
To pass down to my next of kin
Instead of sleeping pills and unpaid bills
In an empty biscuit tin
Centuries ago the people of York
Marched to London to have their say
They said they wouldn’t accept poverty
Or inequality
So why should we accept it today?

Teacher assigned a 16 line poem.

:lol2:

Teach shoulda been more specific, I guess.

Distances

Swifts turn in the heights of the air;
higher still turn the invisible stars.
When day withdraws to the ends of the earth
their fires shine on a dark expanse of sand.

We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,
from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand.

Phillippe Jaccottet
(translated from the French by Derek Mahon)

The Oven Bird

by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

I have a hard time understanding that poem. And at first I wondered WTF? But then I saw your post in the other thread.

I still can't follow the poem, but now I understand why you posted it.

Well, ya see, Frost got a little confused when he stopped by the woods on that snowy evening when he took the road less traveled. I think I know, and that has made all the difference. ;)

Upon further reflection, I think it's about the passage of the seasons and abruptly switches to a bird coming to realize, to its great embarrassment, that it can't carry a tune.

See, it was singing and then got all self conscious, so it stopped. And now it wonders what to do now that it realizes its singing sucks.

And, being a bird and all...what the heck else it is supposed to do? So he applied for a job as 'poet muse.'

Uncle.

Aunt.

Oh, thought this was word ass. Sorry. It was brilliant though, wasn't it?

I hope it didn't seem like I was being critical of you, Gravdigr. I was taking a shot at Frost, but mostly it was from my own feelings of inadequacy at not being able to do this poetry stuff well. You know, tearing somebody else down so I can feel better about myself. Even if it is a dead guy who doesn't know I'm doing it. And I didn't even really feel that bad in the first place, so it was completely unnecessary.

I don't get that poem, but I think that says more about me than it does about Frost. Or you.

Thanks for teaching me a little about the oven bird.

Poetry is obfuscated communication. :(

Um yeah...it was just joking around. it didn't occur to me for a second that grav might take it as an insult...because that seems far to go and grav has a great sense of jokery. Saying uncle just seemed a 'haha mudderpluckers, ya got me.'

And anyway, I like Frost. so, that was fun. Sigh. I'm starting to hate that oven bird. Damn you ovenbird, damn you to hell.

That's pretty much all it was. No offenses.

This one, I understand.

My Grandparents’ Generation
by Faith Shearin


They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,

their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.

They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,

their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics

and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in

lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs

with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me

and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,

a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.

I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken

fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them

in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,

collecting two hundred dollars.

I liked that.^^ 'Sall true, too.

*************************************************

Attachment 51427

from Get Fuzzy

This morning I heard the screaming of Swifts as I was walking down the High Street.
Turning around I caught a brief glimpse of about eight of the birds just before they flew out of sight around an old building.
They are the first I've seen this year and are always last to arrive from their wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, Swallows and House Martins arriving before them.
Sadly they are the first to leave and suddenly, one day in late August, they are gone.

Swifts - Ted Hughes

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialize at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come --
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters --

A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched

Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades

Sparkle out into blue --
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

Every year a first-fling, nearly flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up — then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling

On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

Nested in a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo --

The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.

Quiet Fun”
My son Augustus, in the street, one day,
Was feeling quite exceptionally merry.
A stranger asked him: “Can you tell me, pray,
The quickest way to Brompton Cemetery?”
“The quickest way? You bet I can!” said Gus,
And pushed the fellow underneath a bus.

— Harry Graham

WHEREAS, on an occasion immediately preceding the Nativity Festival, throughout a certain
dwelling unit, quiet descended, in which would be heard no disturbance, not even the sound
emitted by a diminutive rodent related to, and in form resembling, a rat; and

WHEREAS, the offspring of the occupants had affixed their tubular, closely knit coverings for
the nether limbs to the flue of the fireplace in the expectation that a personage known as
St. Nicholas would arrive; and

WHEREAS, said offspring had become somnolent and were entertaining nocturnal hallucinations
re: saccharine-flavored fruit; and

WHEREAS, the adult male of the family, et ux, attired in proper headgear, had also become
quiescent in anticipation of nocturnal inertia; and

WHEREAS, a distraction on the snowy acreage outside aroused the owner to investigate; and

WHEREAS, he perceived in a most unbelieving manner a vehicle propelled by eight domesticated
quadrupeds of a species found in arctic regions; and

WHEREAS, a most odd rotund gentleman was entreating the aforesaid animals by their
appellations, as follows: “Your immediate cooperation is requested, Dasher, Dancer,
Prancer, and Vixen, and collective action by you will be appreciated, Comet, Cupid, Donder,
and Blitzen”; and

WHEREAS, subsequent to the above, there occured a swift descent to the hearth by
the aforementioned gentleman, where he proceeded to deposit gratuities in the
aforementioned tubular coverings,

NOW, THEREFORE, be ye advised: That upon completion of these acts, and upon his
return to his original point of departure, he proclaimed a felicitation of the type prevalent
and suitable to these occasions, i.e., “Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”

This article about the worst poems published in the last 100 years, has the top six plus an honorable mention.

#1

You and Me and P.B. Shelley

What is life? Life is stepping down a step or sitting in a chair,
And it isn't there.
Life is not having been told that the man has just waxed the floor,
It is pulling doors marked PUSH and pushing doors marked PULL and not noticing notices which say PLEASE USE OTHER DOOR.
It is when you diagnose a sore throat as an unprepared geography lesson and send your child weeping to school only to be returned an hour later covered with spots that are indubitably genuine,
It is a concert with a trombone soloist filling in for Yehudi Menuhin.
Were it not for frustration and humiliation
I suppose the human race would get ideas above its station.
Somebody once described Shelley as a beautiful and ineffective angel beating his luminous wings against the void in vain,
Which is certainly describing with might and main,
But probably means that we are all brothers under our pelts,
And Shelley went around pulling doors marked PUSH and pushing doors marked PULL just like everybody else.

Ogden Nash

"Richard Cory"

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim.

And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always human when he talked;
But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

And he was rich – yes, richer than a king –
And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he was everything
To make us wish that we were in his place.

So on we worked, and waited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.

A poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson, published in 1897

That is brilliant. I think I may have heard it somewhere a long time ago - but I don't think I ever really took note of it.

I first heard of Richard Cory from Paul McCartney


They say that Richard Cory owns one half of this whole town,
With political connections to spread his wealth around.
Born into society, a banker's only child,
He had everything a man could want: power, grace, and style.

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

The papers print his picture almost everywhere he goes:
Richard Cory at the opera, Richard Cory at a show.
And the rumor of his parties and the orgies on his yacht!
Oh, he surely must be happy with everything he's got.

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

He freely gave to charity, he had the common touch,
And they were grateful for his patronage and thanked him very much,
So my mind was filled with wonder when the evening headlines read:
"Richard Cory went home last night and put a bullet through his head."

But I work in his factory
And I curse the life I'm living
And I curse my poverty
And I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be,
Oh, I wish that I could be
Richard Cory.

If you listen to the song, he really emphasizes the bullet through the head part. It was fairly powerful.

But I like the Robinson poem better.

Simon and Garfunkel it was --

I like this guy.:thumb:

Davey Flower Becomes a Pterodactyl

“Raaaaak! Awrrrk! Kraaa! Urrgg!” I heard from down the hall,
A piercing, plaintive, prehistoric sort of call.

“What’s going on?” I called out, and soon my wife replied.
“Your son’s become a pterodactyl. Seriously. No lie.”

It’s true indeed—our little boy, our blue-eyed Davey Flower
Had become an awkward, flapping, pointy dinosaur.

His sister promptly cheered and laughed, the bratty little wench.
“Yay, my baby brother’s gone!” then whined about the stench.

And as he tried to flap his wings, she quickly wondered too,
“Maybe could he do tricks like the parrot at the zoo?”

His mother started out concerned, but quickly justified it
As punishment for messy rooms and making her so tired.

What do you feed a pterodactyl? He’s got goldfish from the tank!
No, don’t eat the hamster too! And put down baby Frank!

Chicken fingers, popcorn, fries. Figures, some things never change,
That’s all he’d eat before too! Even then we thought it strange.

Davey gained more energy at whatever rate we lost it.
It wore off around midnight, when we were just exhausted.

By then he’d mastered flapping, and hovering in place,
And started eyeing windows, contemplating outer space.

Now he’s grown, and when I ask if he recalls those days,
He says, while diapering his kid, “It was just a phase.”

But I wonder if he dreams at night and maybe sort of cries.
I still do when I recall my blue-eyed son once knew the way to fly.

Jack Gilbert’s poem, “The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart”:

"How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
Get it wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not a language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds."

November
 

This will ring a bell with UK Dwellars.

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds -
November!

Thomas Hood (1799-1845)

I like this. Thanks!