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Wednesday, March 23, 2016

CHAINED

By Jean Bush


A city lies smoking and ruined
As far as the eye can see.
The people are saddened and shaken
As they walk  through the newest debris.

A wretched cry goes out for justice,
The Masters respond with glee.
Your soft chains will always be bloodless
And reach farther across the sea.

The people grasp quickly their shackles
In fond hopes of staying safe.
And ignore their last gasping freedom
As brave history is erased.

The Phoenix is stricken and fallen
As the world looks forward in dread,
I hear no hope that's a callin',
Is Europe most truly now dead?

Saturday, February 13, 2016

READER

 
By Jean Bush
 
 


I feel your words upon me
As they race across the page,
A running sense of wonder
Even late upon this age.
 
The whispered flips of paper
As the pages turn and burn
 

 
Setting me afire,
It seems I never learn.
 
The secrets whispered to me
As I pause and try to hear,
 

Are echo cries of memory
That are laden wet with tears.
 
 
The hardened cover closes
Shutting down the riot sight.
I nod and ponder deeply
Slipping off into the night.
 

 

 



Wednesday, December 23, 2015

The Fall of Icarus


"Fall of Icarus" by Pieter Bruegel


W. H. Auden


About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how it takes place
while someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
for the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who especially did not want it to happen, 
skating on a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course.

Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Bruegel's Icarus, for instance:
how everything turns away
quite leisurely from the disaster;
the ploughman may have heard the splash,
the forsaken cry;

But for him it was not an important failure; the sun
shown as it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

Sunday, July 26, 2015

London Tom-Cat

By Michael Hamburger




Look at the gentle savage, monstrous gentleman
With jungles in his heart, yet metropolitan
As we shall never be; who- while his human hosts,
Afraid of their own past and it's primaeval ghosts,
Pile up great walls for comfort - walks coquettishly
Through their elaborate cares, sure of himself and free
To be like them, domesticated, or aloof!



A dandy in the room, a demon on the roof,
He's delicately tough, endearingly reserved,
Adaptable, fastidious, rope-and-fibre-nerved.



Now an accomplished Yogi good at sitting still
He ponders ancient mysteries on the window-sill,
Now stretches, bares his claws and saunters off to find
the thrills of love and hunting, cunningly combined.
Acrobat, diplomat, and simple tabby cat,
He conjures tangled forests in a furnished flat.

Tuesday, July 21, 2015

The Call

By Jean Bush

Oh, who do you call,
My beautiful one?



Rising in iridescent splendor
In the dark side of light against the creeping dawn.

A mourning cry to follow ere the heat of day,
Dries up the velvet feathered throats of longing.



A reddened eye of patience waits and watches;
Awash in tall grass, brown eyes blink
Then more as fear leaps to flight in graceful bounds.



But a muscular coat of dusty fur and the ruby spray of death
Insures another day of life and an all too ready hunger.




SEASCAPE

By Jean Bush





Oh, how you loved it, puppy,
When first you saw the beach.
“Sit, stay, don’t dig the sand.”
I had so much to teach.

You barked and jumped and chased the crabs
And snapped at flying foam.
And fell asleep within my arms
As I gently walked you home.



We took long walks together,
As you splashed and jumped on me.
And the years and tides rolled into one
At our place beside the sea.

The dimming years would clutch my fears
As you unwound from life.
And I put you away and there you stay,
So far away from me.

The tide pulls back so slowly
As I weep on bended knee;
But I can feel you run forever
At our place beside the sea.




Sunday, March 15, 2015

A Very Dark Night




By Libby Stott

When ever the wood and sea are dark,
Whenever the stars are high,
All night long in the deep, dark park
A bat goes swooping by.

Late at night when the lights are out
Why does he sweep about?
Whenever the sky is black and sad
And people are no longer awake,


By on the shadows, dark and bad,
By on the swoop goes it;
By at the swoop it goes.

And then by it comes back at the swoop again.