Read Poems That Make Grown Men Cry Online
Authors: Anthony and Ben Holden
Poems That Make Grown Men Cry (13 page)
For nature, heartless, witless nature,
Will neither care nor know.
DNA neither cares nor knows. DNA just is. And we dance to its music.
Last Poems: XL
Tell me not here, it needs not saying,
What tune the enchantress plays
In aftermaths of soft September
Or under blanching mays,
For she and I were long acquainted
And I knew all her ways.
On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveller’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.
On acres of the seeded grasses
The changing burnish heaves;
Or marshalled under moons of harvest
Stand still all
night the sheaves;
Or beeches strip in storms for winter
And stain the wind with leaves.
Possess, as I possessed a season,
The countries I resign,
Where over elmy plains the highway
Would mount the hills and shine,
And full of shade the pillared forest
Would murmur and be mine.
For nature, heartless,
witless nature,
Will neither care nor know
What stranger’s feet may find the meadow
And trespass there and go,
Nor ask amid the dews of morning
If they are mine or no.
(1922)
The poet, novelist, and biographer Sir Andrew Motion (b. 1952) was Britain’s Poet Laureate from 1999 to 2009. As well as several
volumes of poetry, he
has published biographies of John Keats and Philip Larkin. He is also president of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
The many publications of the ethologist and evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins (b. 1941) include
The Selfish Gene
(1976),
The Extended Phenotype
(1982),
The Blind Watchmaker
(1986),
River Out of Eden
(1995),
The God Delusion
(2006) and a memoir,
An Appetite for Wonder
(2013). Professor for Public Understanding of Science
at Oxford University from 1995 to 2008, he is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford. In 2013 he led
Prospect
magazine’s list of the world’s Top 100 living thinkers.
GABRIELA MISTRAL
(1889–1957)
JEREMY IRONS
I first came across this poem thirty years ago in New York, where I included it in a lunchtime reading I did at St Bartholomew’s on Park Avenue. It is, I think, the poem
that of all those I read I find the hardest to get through; it stirs very deep emotions within me, not at any particular line,
but in the relentless and naked passion that imbues the poem
throughout. The love that generates such emotion is unequivocal, takes no prisoners, and is perhaps the love I am, or yearn to be, part of.
God Wills It
I
Earth will turn against you
If your soul betrays my soul.
A shudder of anguish
will run through the waters.
The world
has been brighter
since you made me yours,
when we stood silent
by a flowering thorn,
and love’s fragrance
pierced us like the thorn.
But earth will send forth vipers
against you if you betray my soul;
I will break my barren knees
no child sits upon.
Christ will die in my heart,
and the door of my house
will break the beggar’s knocking hand
and turn the suffering woman away.
II
Every kiss your mouth gives
reaches my ears,
for the deep places of the earth
echo me your words.
The dust of the pathways
holds the scent of your footsoles,
and through the mountains
I track you like a deer.
The clouds
above my house
show me the woman you love.
Sneak like a thief to kiss her
in the darkness under earth,
but when you tilt her chin up,
you’ll see my tearstained face.
III
God will keep the sun from you
if you don’t walk beside me.
God won’t let you drink
if I don’t tremble on the water.
He won’t let
you sleep, except
in the deep nest of my hair.
IV
If you let go from me you crush my soul
even in the moss of the road;
hunger and thirst gnaw at you
on every hill and plain,
and wherever you go, sunset
will bleed my wounds.
And I slip from your tongue
though you call another woman,
and I stick like
the taste
of brine in your throat,
and whether you hate or praise or plead,
to me you cry, to me alone.
V
If you go and die far from me,
you’ll hold out your hollowed hand
for ten years underground,
to catch my tears,
feeling the trembling
of the suffering flesh,
until my bones crumble
into
dust on your face.
(1922)
TRANSLATION BY URSULA K. LE GUIN
Jeremy Irons (b. 1948) has played many classical and contemporary roles onstage, starred in TV series from
Brideshead Revisited
(1981) to
The Borgias
(2011) and
films from
The French Lieutenant’s Woman
(1981) to
Margin Call
(2011). He won an Academy Award for his portrayal of Claus
von Bülow in
Reversal of Fortune
(1990).
KENNETH H. ASHLEY
(1887–?)
FELIX DENNIS
Some time ago, I bought part of the library of the late novelist J. B. Priestley. In the pages of one of his books,
Up Hill and Down Dale
by an obscure poet, Kenneth H.
Ashley, published in 1924, I found a slip of paper where Priestley had marked a particular short poem called ‘Out of Work’. As soon
as I read it, I was transported back almost fifty
years to a dingy bedsit in an obscure street (now demolished) in Harrow on the Hill.
It was from here, after quitting Harrow School of Art, that I tramped the local streets looking for work to keep me in Gitanes cigarettes, potato and leek soup, and alcohol. The R&B band I
was playing in had work most weeks, but after the fuel bills for
the van and the hire-purchase payments on the gear, there was precious little left over to split among the band members and
manager.
I eventually found work mowing verges for the council and digging the odd grave (a more skilled occupation than you might think!), but I have never forgotten those far-off days of poverty and
hopelessness. I know exactly what Ashley meant when he ended on
that shocking six-word line: ‘And I wished I were dead.’ The only counter to it I can offer those in the same position
comes from the pen of a man
who never knew want in his life, Winston Churchill: ‘If you’re going through hell, keep going.’
Easy advice to give but hard to swallow.
Out of Work
Alone at the shut of the day was I,
With a star or two in a frost
cleared sky,
And the byre smell in the air.
I’d tramped the length and breadth of the fen,
But never a farmer wanted men;
Naught doing anywhere.
A great calm moon rose back of the mill,
And I told myself it was God’s will
Who went hungry and who went fed.
I tried to whistle; I tried to be brave,
But the new ploughed fields smelt dank as the grave;
And I wished I were dead.
(1924)
In 1971, as co-editor of
Oz
magazine, Felix Dennis (b. 1947) was imprisoned by the British government at the end of the longest conspiracy trial in English history,
during which he recorded a single with John Lennon to raise money for a legal defence
fund. Following his subsequent acquittal by the High Court of Appeal, Dennis went on in 1973 to found his own
magazine-publishing company, which now sees him a multimillionaire publisher and philanthropist. He turned to poetry only in his mid-fifties, but has since become a popular performance poet, with
several best-selling volumes to his name.
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