People called Sioux - a Holocaust Poem
Was Shel Silverstein just being crass
in the lyric sung by Johnny Cash -
or was he being amazingly, subversively,
unamericanly ironic?
The boy was not a boy, but a lot of men and women
their name not Sue but Sioux,
and ethnically cleansed by some of American Democracy's
many land-grabs and pogroms
carried out by racist rednecks
and Ulstermen with bombs.
(many more than 9 million aboriginal Americans were killed in every possible way by Europeans)
poem by Anthony Weir
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For they are...
...Short straws in my long beard
The urine to be drunk on rising
Holes in the moneybag
Tombstone-lichens
The hopelessness of hospitals
Depraved experiments
Screaming rust on the cages
of laboratory animals
Limbs mashed by landmines
The oppressive presence of absence
The despair of asylums
Dead fleas from the Angel
Vomit on in-trays
Frightened albinos
Decaying slaughterhouse-concrete
Maggots on bones
The drowned smells of psychiatrists
And the smegma of the teaching wolf
poem by Anthony Weir
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April 2006 (in memoriam Sarah Teasdale)
What do I care in the cold winds and languor of spring
That my face and my frame are not I?
They are just furniture, but my poems are what I feel,
I am a vacuum, they are a cry.
Why should I care? My life will soon finish
And the world that was will be holocaust, flood and drought.
My heart is a birth-wound, my mind a protest, a shout,
And only at death will their pain and their noise diminish.
Through the years I have learned
How few men and ideas are worthy of trust.
I have seen my greatest love
Murdered, trampled in the dust,
And fears I never knew before
Burrow into my heart's core.
Hope little. Ask for less.
Who dares to talk of happiness!
poem by Anthony Weir
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When you are very old...
translation of a famous sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)
from Sonnets for Hélène
When you are very old, at evening, by the fire,
spinning wool by candlelight and winding it in skeins,
you will say in wonderment as you recite my lines:
'Ronsard admired me in the days when I was fair.'
Then not one of your servants dozing gently there
hearing my name's cadence break through your low repines
but will start into wakefulness out of her dreams
and bless your name - immortalised by my desire.
I'll be underneath the ground, and a boneless shade
taking my long rest in the scented myrtle-glade,
and you'll be an old woman, nodding towards life's close,
regretting my love, and regretting your disdain.
Heed me, and live for now: this time won't come again.
Come, pluck now - today - life's so quickly-fading rose.
[...] Read more
poem by Anthony Weir
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