The Shield of Achilles (Part 2)

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

A Thousand Splendid Suns (READ IT!)

Kahled Hosseini's potrayal of Afgahni women under the Taliban, is a hauntingly, soul searing search for love, freedom and self realisation under the cruellest of regimes, a man and a woman.

' Mariam is never very far. She is here, in these walls they've repainted, in the trees they've planted, in the blankets that keep the children warm, in these pillows and books and pencils. She is in the children's laughter. She is in the verses Aziza recites and in the prayers she mutters when she bows westwards. But, mostly, Mariam is in Laila's own heart, where she shines with the bursting radiance of a thousand suns.'

excerpt from A thousand Splendid Suns (c) Khaled Hosseini 2007

Snow on Snow (listen to the podcast -------->>>>

Snow is sometimes a she, a soft one.
Her kiss on your cheek, her finger on your sleeve
In early December, on a warm evening,
And you turn to meet her, saying, 'It's snowing'
But it is not. And nobody's there
Empty and calm is the air.

Sometimes the snow is a he, a sly one
Weakly he signs the dry stone with a damp spot.
Waifish he floats and touches the pond and is not.
Treacherous-beggarly he falters, and taps at the window.
A little longer he clings to the grass-blade tip
Getting his grip.

Then how she leans, how furry foxwrap she nestles
The sky with her warm, and the earth with her softness.
How her lit crowding fairlytales sink through the space-silence
To build her palace, till it twinkles in starlight
Too frail for a foot
Or a crumb of soot.

Then how his muffled armies move in all night
And we wake and every road is blockaded
Every hill taken and every farm occupied
And the white glare of his tents is on the ceiling..
And all that dull blue day and on into the gloaming
We have to watch more coming

Then everything in the rubbish-heaped world
Is a bridesmaid at her miracle.
Dunghills and crumbly dark old barns are bowed in the chapel
of her sparkle,
The gruesome boggy cellars of the wood
Are a wedding of lace
Now taking place

© Copyright Ted Hughes

The Roe Deer by Ted Hughes

In the dawn's early light, in the the biggest snow of the year
Two blue-dark deer stood in the road, alerted.

They had happened into my dimension
The moment I was arriving just there.

They planted their 2 or 3 years of secret deerhood
Clear on my snowscreen vision of the abnormal

And hesitated in the all-way disintigration
And stared at me. And so for some lasting seconds

I could think the deer were waiting for me
To remember the password and sign

That the curtain had blown aside for a moment
And there where the trees were no longer trees, nor the road a road

The deer had come for me.

Then they ducked thru the hedge, and upright they rode their legs

Away downhill over snow-lonely field

Towards tree-dark--finally
Seeming to eddy and glide and fly away up

Into the boil of big flakes.
The snow took them and soon their nearby hoofprints as well.

Revising its dawn inspiration
Back to the ordinary.

© Ted Hughes Feb 1973

Wycombe walk

I walk the Wycombe hills
At close of day
As night draws its curtain of darkness
Cross vales of green
Crouching cottages
Leaking light and life
Silent stables standing
And I pass by

Spectral sheep stop and stare
Startled animals scurry there
Untidily like a fleeting thought
Just cant catch it

Black cows heads bowed
dark thoughts unmowed
and tree and bush and here
close in
walk faster, faster, faster
Light, life and longing
to be there

© mjcooke 2009

Do not Stand at My Grave and Weep

Do not stand at my grave and weep
I am not there. I do not sleep
I am a thousand winds that blow
I am the diamond glints on snow
I am the sunlight on ripened grain
I am the gentle autumn rain

When you awaken in the morning's hush
I am the swift uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circled flight
I am the soft stars that shine at night
Do not stand at my grave and cry
I am not there. I did not die.

Anon

The Trees by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf
Like something almost being said
The recent buds relax and spread
Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again
And we grow old? No, they die too
Their yearly trick of looking new
Is written down in rings of grain

Yet still the unresting castles thresh
In full grown thickness every May
Last year is dead, they seem to say
Begin afresh, afresh, afresh

(c) Philip Larkin 1967