Verses

I sit here and await your pleasure
O Poetry I await while my pen runs on
The full frenzied measure
My words are sane and sober upon
The page.

Let us love this modern world, or at least
Accept what it offers with some show of grace.

Let us love this modern world, let us not protest
When the jazz-band screams above the music of the out-moded lute.

You who have the key to my locked mind
Are jealous and as nervous of collapse
As a Banker
Holding against the brimstone storm
The unsaveable balance of Today's beauty.

If I should quarry all that rock of existence,
Labouring till my mind would be worn like an old pick
Sharp and exquisite as a needle
I might find one speck of golden truth
To outweigh the lost rushes of a poet's youth.

Bring us some raw material of soul,
The breath of our spirit no more stinks
Creative, we are pure as a dream's aureole - 
The dream of a dream of a post-card sphinx.

Pain! pain!
A poem is born.
The accouchement sheets are soiled,
The membrane seal of morn
Is torn.

Do you hear the loud noise?
That was merely a shell
Bursting among schoolchildren.
Do you see the glow in the Eastern skies?

I reach out to you through the mists
With eager fingers groping
For the Tree of Good and Evil that persists
While men persist in hoping,

Knowing that at last all men must take
The fruit that tumbles to a windy chance
And be glad when winter comes to sit and make
Rag-dolls of romance.