Three Facets of the Poet’s Dilemma

1

Shaggy man, O shaggy little man:

You with a thatch of red hair and red-rimmed eyes

What kind of bird are you?

Trying to prove that compassion is more than pity

Or swagger more than a beard?

•

With poverty I will put up my days

And count them as the pages of my book – turned over

To the other side of the penny; to violence,

Pity expressed in the beard around my dial.

•

Read the Gospel according to yourself,

According to Love as you see it. The count was got up as Christ,

But he believed in the sweat of honest toil

And, to all accounts, smelled strongly of it.

•

In middle age a poet may cut his hair,

Shaggy grey smacks too much of benevolence:

He may wear a sixty-nine-fifty suit, if he can afford such a thing.

Good God, what would a man of his age

Look like in a crown of thorns?

•

Don’t shave your beard O shaggy, shaggy man;

Don’t give up drinking or looking like TB.

For if you were to stop looking like a poet

You’d have to get down to the sweated labour of love

And a living in letters.

2

The poets on their small white hills

Combing their long red hair:

Their wives were worrying over bills,

Their children were pale and spare –

•

Two children each, and another one

By the looks of it, on the way.

“We must write” the poet said to his son

“For we haven’t learnt to pray.”

•

“If I only could pray I could be a priest

And intone a prayer in a gown –

Since I am a poet I’d better make haste

And write my sufferings down.”

•

The wife of the poet’s a poor little thing

With eyes the colour of hay,

And parted hair like silky string

And a baby on the way.

•

She sits on the step and calls to a boy

In a grey-green shirt in the street

To be less competitive in his play

And not to muddy his feet.

•

“Lean down, lean down O Superpoet

From your literary heaven on high,

And tell my dear husband if you know it

The answer to my cry.”

•

“Where bottles of wine are flowing all over

And, come in out of the heat,

The maddening houseflies swoop and hover

And buzz to the bongo beat –”

•

“Is this the day when Dollar and Dove

Sit down on the steps in the sun

And dice in the dust of consummate love

For the soul of my little one?”

3

If you had lived in my city or with my love

You would remember the tall King of Poland

Swinging a red curtain and a sword

Before and behind him, in and out of the gallery.

Did he have a beard? I can’t remember now –

But I remember the swagger and the rain

Dragging the curtain-cloak

Down to his sandalled feet.

•

To see and to suffer is what I’m doing here

Beside this river, in this prison-house

Where no one cares to show his heart and mind

Unless he can put a price-tag on them both.

•

Spring will be buzzed by dragonflies zipped out

Of their leather case. With a yell the river splits

His ice and breaks on the stones rolling and crashing

Before he is tamed and shaved.

•

– Shutter the house and dark it is in the room.

Look out on the wide river that has never run with blood.

– On whom no barge floats queens to their curtained palaces.

Let’s take a wand down there and teach these waters

To flow upstream and fetch history down in boats.