Welcome to the first poetry selection on my Steemit account. Today's featured authors are Edward Estlin Cummings, Zaffar Kunial and Robert Frost. I hope you'll enjoy it.
Photo sources:
- Lech Walesa by Jann Lipka
- Untitled by karencarson007 (Pinterest)
- Braid: Hourglass Sand Castle by Greg Noe (First Hour)
old age sticks by E.E. Cummings
old age sticks
up Keep
off
signs)&
youth yanks them down(old
age
cries No
Tres)&(pas)
youth laughs
(sing
old age
scolds Forbid
den
Stop
Must
n't Don't
&)youth goes
right on
gr
owing old.
Six by Zaffar Kunial
Forget that old joke about timing, which I won’t rudely
repeat. I learnt that timing had a world to do with weight
transference between the feet, planting my front pole
down, and as the ball is middled, the burden on the back
foot amasses through the axis of tensed, stick-thin arms
to the sweetspot in the rootless willow. A kind of sacrifice
from one side to the other. The ball now hit, and staying
hit – airborne towards what the locked-in Aberdonian
grandmother I’d never meet might have called, on a sepia
day, the lift. Over the fence, from that first garden
to another address, all that wound-up string beneath
the skin. Gone. Mum’s gone, says Roseta, the girl at 60,
next to our 58, one morning while fetching the washing
from a line spiralling a shared stake. Gone where?
asks mine. Where’s your mother? … She’s dead? Dear God,
o love, mum says above the crossed wires. At her tears
I’m still cottoning on. Roseta, Zeta, who posted
my first Valentine, signed with a question mark I’d not
get. Whose mum was the only one who could get me
to sleep. To the country of that eternal beginningness.
She’d come round in the small hours mum would say,
hearing your cries, dad working nights, and she’d go
like this, jigging you in her arms, and you’d be off, gone.
She’d come from Barbados, her husband from Jamaica,
a one-time boxer; different islands, different tempers,
she’d tell mum. Fighting leaked in and past walls.
Silences too. Belted up. Once, innocent, naked,
I placed my penis through that fence, peed – till he waved
a pitchfork; fathers fist-fought. Once, Zeta’s dad shook
a crowbar. Mine raised mum’s school hockey stick.
Dad’s middle finger smashed. Feeling gone. Forever.
He made me press a needle to test the dead, knuckled
centre. The nerves, gone. Like my tongue under fizz bombs.
Gone. How that word’s weight returns me to a fenced world
at the point when mute, blue heavens – reflecting from high
on nextdoor’s greenhouse – amass the suddenest voice,
sharp as the pitch of a polestar. And the held sky falls in.
I Could Give All To Time by Robert Frost
To Time it never seems that he is brave
To set himself against the peaks of snow
To lay them level with the running wave,
Nor is he overjoyed when they lie low,
But only grave, contemplative and grave.
What now is inland shall be ocean isle,
Then eddies playing round a sunken reef
Like the curl at the corner of a smile;
And I could share Time’s lack of joy or grief
At such a planetary change of style.
I could give all to Time except – except
What I myself have held. But why declare
The things forbidden that while the Customs slept
I have crossed to Safety with? For I am There,
And what I would not part with I have kept.