Richard Grantham

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Original text in yellow, anagram in pink.

A poem by Sylvia Plath.

MIRROR

I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful -
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is a part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.

Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.

LOOKING GLASS

Polished, strict, I lack prejudice.
With no hesitation I consume all I view -
Straightforward, affected by no emotion.
I have no malice. The authentic alone is my creed -
The countenance of a rectangular mini-deity.
Mostly I stare here at my room.
Here is a bathrobe hook. Walls are decorated. Such devotion
Must make this some rare aspect of me. Yet it wavers,
As visages and night part us time after time.

Here I am a pond. A lady looks to me,
And asks my depths for a verification of self.
Then she reverts to her falsehoods of light and satellite.
I take a stern view, and express it frankly.
She sobs and flails in thanks.
I remain essential. She will return here to me.
Dawn after white dawn it is she who appears.
In me her youth sank horribly, while a wrinkling replacement
Ascends more and more, a horrid old dried trout.

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A poem by Roger McGough.

BUCKET

every evening after tea
grandad would take his bucket for a walk

An empty bucket

When I asked him why
he said it was because it was easier to carry
than a full one

grandad had
an answer
for everything

DAFFY OLD FART

gran began raving at us about
the kkk "crusade"
all the time

a nice sane idea, she said
every darky lad needs to know
we're very much in charge now

a bit after this
was when
we put her away

 

in a bucket

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A poem by Graham Walley.

DEATH OF GOD

I have just hung my teddy bear.
I don't know why
Or what motives I had,
I just, hung him.
Before, he just lay there.
Stuffed and vile;
Seeing inside of me, and
Laughing.
Laughing at me, because I,
I was human.
That's why I hung him.
Because I was human,
But no longer;
I have hung him.
So he has won.

END OF A CHILDHOOD

Nothing is the same.
A life -
Why is it huge, harsh,
Joyless and inhuman?
A bunny jeers away,
Having never loved me;
As he summons what joy I gave him,
Hurling it back as bitter, wounding abuse.
I used to hug him, awed,
But I shun
The huge-mouthed, guffawing fiend
Who taught me hate.

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Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll

O, Charles Dodgson's wholly logical brew: the girl, her kitten, a hut, fauna
(weird local bugs); through the talking flowers, an idle royal, then chaos!
Huge Lion harshly fights lethal Unicorn, or Tweedle lads go back to war;
chessboard, railway (hold on!), carol of the White Knight, ultra-sullen Egg
on the boil; finally (through the castle) our child grows regal... and wakes.

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Shakespeare's 18th sonnet.

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed:
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st,
Nor shall death brag thou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st,
   So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
   So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Obviously old Will never got any farther south than Croydon, or else his real esteem of summer might have been rather less immoderate. Here in Australia, for instance, summer lasts for approximately eight and a half months and is bloody hot. It's often bad enough to melt corrugated iron, old shoes and sometimes shoelaces. And the threat of eternal summer down here is enough to make you move to the Scottish Highlands... well, almost. Nothing's this strong.

So I feel his summer reference is a bit odd, unless of course his dedicatee was a heated raving nymphomaniac on ten men a day. And let's hope he wasn't.

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Updated: May 10, 2016


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