Poems- Not your own.

[Carruthers]

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.

[xoxoxoBruce]

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

[xoxoxoBruce]

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!”

[xoxoxoBruce]

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

#1

And the winner is—the envelope, please—Hal G.P. Colebatch, the Western Australian from outer space, whose bibliography includes such science-fiction tours de force as Man-Kzin Wars X. (“How the Wunderlanders,” Man-Kzin Wars X’s blurb-writer hyperventilates, “first learned of the Kzin attacks on Earth by slower-than-light communications, barely in time to prepare to fight back—how valiant human defenders turned to guerilla warfare in the Wunderland jungles and caves after the feline warrior race had destroyed . . . ” The suspense is killing you, right?)

There could be no denying Colebatch the cordon bleu once the judges discovered his “Reactionary Observations at the Pistol Club” (Quadrant, June 2008), and in particular the sheer astuteness of its first couplet, as opposed to its first quatrain. Quickly, the judges realized that whatever connotations of self-respect, discretion, or skill his title’s adjective reactionary might imply, Colebatch’s actual poem shows his aesthetic kinship with the decorum levels of interchangeable Kardashians. Who needs the deep understanding of the human heart that is obtainable from Jane Austen or Scott Fitzgerald, who needs the billets-doux of John Donne or Andrew Marvell, when we have Colebatch’s laser-like insight into emotional relations between the sexes?


Watching women pull the trigger,

It’s funny how their nipples get bigger.