Published Poems

He sits in a corner of my memory
With his short pipe, holding it by the bowl.

Candida, Born September 22, 1942

Candida is one to-day - 
What is there that one can say?

On an apple-ripe September morning
Through the mist-chill fields I went
With a pitch-fork on my shoulder
Less for use than for devilment.

Bright shone the sunlight on Peggy and Doreen,
Wild swung the ash sticks. Be careful asthoreen!

It's cold enough to snow to-day.
Ah, year, there's no delaying.
"It's only seven weeks till Christmas,"
The children playing
At Mount Street Bridge were saying.

To end in verse without much cause;
Shop-windows show old Santa Claus
Down from the Arctic's midnight sun's 
Ghost glimmer on planes and tanks and guns.

Gulliver he went to Lilliput,
Swift he was not silly but
His man came back by the hilly rut,
Riding on a pony.

White bread, you give us hope; you break
The grey monotony of the story.
It is not how you look or taste,
But the imagination that blossoms in the waste
When we look on the loaf that is not []eary.

One side of the potato-pits was white with frost - 
How wonderful that was! how wonderful!

My father played the melodeon
Outside at our gate,
There were stars in the morning east
And they danced to his music.