National Poetry Month #16

Three:

 The Waning Moon by P.B. Shelley

And like a dying lady, lean and pale,

Who totters forth, wrapped inn a gauzy veil,

Out of her chamber, led by the insane

And feeble wanderings of  her fading brain,

The moon arose up in the murky East,

A white and shapeless mass - 

......................................................

 

Meeting Point by Louis MacNeice

 

 Time was away and somewhere else,

 There were two glasses and two chairs

 And two people with the one pulse

 (Somebody stopped the moving stairs)

 Time was away and somewhere else.

 

 And they were neither up nor down;

 The stream's music did not stop

 Flowing through heather, limpid brown,

 Although they sat in a coffee shop

 And they were neither up nor down.

 

 The bell was silent in the air

 Holding its inverted poise -

 Between the clang and clang a flower,

 A brazen calyx of no noise:

 The bell was silent in the air.

 

 The camels crossed the miles of sand

 That stretched around the cups and plates;

 The desert was their own, they planned

 To portion out the stars and dates:

 The camels crossed the miles of sand.

 

 ......................................................

 

France by Douglas Dunn

 

A dozen sparrows scuttled on the frost.

We watched them play. We stood at the window,

And, if you saw us, then you saw a ghost 

In duplicate. I tied her nightgown’s bow.

She watched and recognised the passers-by.

Had they looked up, they’d know that she was ill – 

“Please, do not draw the curtains when I die” – 

From all the flowers on the windowsill.

 

“It’s such a shame,” she said. “Too ill, too quick.”

“I would have liked us to have gone away.”

We closed our eyes together, dreaming France,

Its meadows, rivers, woods and jouissance.

I counted summers, our love’s arithmetic.

“Some other day, my love. Some other day.”