Music poems
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Out of The Annexe
© Ivan Donn Carswell
It grew out of the Annexe and our Corps in a world at peace
while our army trained, magnificent in its heroic pretence,
for an implausible war. They were halcyon days
in the shelter, days that combine in easy recollections
The Forlorn
© James Russell Lowell
The night is dark, the stinging sleet,
Swept by the bitter gusts of air,
Drives whistling down the lonely street,
And glazes on the pavement bare.
Lake Otamangakau
© Ivan Donn Carswell
II Awake, aware in tented night,
a flax bush shuffled glissé tread
of frond on frond and seed-pod prattle
marching on the fractious wind
surrounds the tent, and lake, and night.
The Fugitive
© Mary Darby Robinson
Oft have I seen yon Solitary Man
Pacing the upland meadow. On his brow
Why England Is Conservative
© Alfred Austin
Because of our dear Mother, the fair Past,
On whom twin Hope and Memory safely lean,
Krishna And His Three Handmaidens
© Paul Hamilton Hayne
AND where he sat beneath the mystic stars,
Nigh the twin founts of Immortality,
That feed fair channels of the Stream of Trance,--
To Krishna once his three handmaidens came,
The Nativity
© William Cowper
Upon my meanness, poverty, and guilt,
The trophy of thy glory shall be built;
My selfdisdain shall be the unshaken base,
And my deformity its fairest grace;
For destitute of good, and rich in ill,
Must be my state and my description still.
Maran-Milan (Death-Wedding)
© Rabindranath Tagore
Why do you speak so softly, Death, Death,
Creep upon me, watch me so stealthily?
Dreams of better days
© Ivan Donn Carswell
At break of day we rested, the contest of our wills
declined to wrest the peace away and where
the foreign powers held sway a quiet was in abundance;
a ghostly calm entranced the crowd shrouded
The Voice Of Beauty Drowned
© Robert Graves
'Cry from the thicket my heart's bird!'
The other birds woke all around;
Consciousness Of Our Return
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Night's grating of steel on stone and splash
of water crashing from the buckets
brings back that moment in a flash;
the night burnt bright in limb's caress
and flesh yielding flesh in passions
blessed by sealed lips.
Absorbed in familiar rhythms
© Ivan Donn Carswell
Absorbed in familiar rhythms,
carillon of senses steeped
in good vibrations, surrounded
by musical beat
Warble Of Lilac-Time
© Walt Whitman
My mind henceforth, and all its meditations-my recitatives,
My land, my age, my race, for once to serve in songs,
(Sprouts, tokens ever of death indeed the same as life,)
To grace the bush I love-to sing with the birds,
A warble for joy of Lilac-time.
The Dog of Art
© Denise Levertov
That dog with daisies for eyes
who flashes forth
flame of his very self at every bark
is the Dog of Art.
Contraband
© Denise Levertov
The tree of knowledge was the tree of reason.
That's why the taste of it
drove us from Eden. That fruit
was meant to be dried and milled to a fine powder
The Nightingale
© Mark Akenside
To-night retired, the queen of heaven
With young Endymion stays;
And now to Hesper it is given
Awhile to rule the vacant sky,
Till she shall to her lamp supply
A stream of brighter rays.
A Tree Telling of Orpheus
© Denise Levertov
Fire he sang, that trees fear, and I, a tree, rejoiced in its flames.
New buds broke forth from me though it was full summer.
As though his lyre (now I knew its name) were both frost and fire, its chords flamed up to the crown of me.
The Mutes
© Denise Levertov
Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway
The Smiths
© Edwin Greenslade Murphy
There were Smiths from every region where the Smiths are known to grow,
There were cornstalk Smiths, Victorian Smiths, and Smiths who eat the crow;
There were Maori Smiths, Tasmanian Smiths, and parched-up Smiths from Cairns;
Bachelor Smiths and widower Smiths and Smiths with wives and bairns.
