Evening contentment: a meal, a temple
and as the thick heat of the day lifts off,
the city comes alive.
What is architecture without shadow?
At the wrong but necessary time,
midday in high summer, when
the overhead sun has stolen into siesta
all meaning, even beauty,
from the very temples themselves,
we had been clambering around the Acropolis,
which seemed to promise so much from afar,
an ideal world; now up close, we couldn’t find it,
trying perhaps too hard; that tiny temple by the entrance
offered more; the korae in the museum
smiled an understanding of all this;
knew all about us. This is what awe means.
Now, in the cooling air of evening, the tourists,
showered, in their fresh cottons,
meet and converge with their Athenian hosts
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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What The ****? !
All was quiet in the Garden of Eden
and not a fig-leaf stirred...
but after the Fall of Man
(usually forwards and enthusiastically, we note)
literature
required some word for what happens
when evening falls, the curfew tolls the knell of parting day,
lovers begin to nuzzle, friends
remember a prior engagement, journalists
try to bribe the night porter, and
some novelists, blushing, draw the curtain, while others
brighten and begin to enjoy their work; and filmmakers
need to decide between a darkling screen,
a symbolic firework display, or
box-office returns.
Egyptian hieroglyphics afford little clue (there's
a chance missed) : but jump-cutting now to Anglo-Saxon usage,
Chaucer, Father of the English Language so we're told,
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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The life or death question
You could guess from the crowd
converging on the Memorial Hall
and on a Saturday night, that
the speaker must be world-famed in his field,
making his first visit to the college.
A French scientist of renown –
cognitive theory or some such –
turned Buddhist monk these thirty, forty years,
he carried the blessing and the curse,
the burden of responsibility not only of his vocation
but his fame. The hall was packed.
Serene – ‘together’ has to be the word –
he spoke for an hour; enthusiastic applause;
then question time.
There’s always that tense silence before
the first question…how will
the hall respond tonight? Will it hold the level
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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A Cartesian life co-odinated
The year is 1607; the place, the lodgings
of the Jesuit College Royal Henri-le-Grand
at La Fleche; it’s evening;
around a flickering candle
three boys of eleven years,
bright young faces against black robes,
bright eyes, lit in each pupil by the candle flame;
too young yet to be tired
by their day of such demanding study,
they laugh over a game
designed to improve their knowledge
of the Latin terms that they must learn:
the one whose father is a High Court judge
of course knows most; yet is most bored;
such is a father’s ambition for his son…
the game, easily constructed without expense:
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Don't you wish your soul was larger? (Advt.)
You were born with a little pink soul.
That didn’t seem to matter for your first ten years or so.
Then you started to compare it with what
other boys had swinging for them…
and of course, how girls were different,
but managed in their own private way…
then you discovered girls, bigtime. Well, for you, smalltime...
They didn’t mind the modest size of your soul, at first;
then they started giggling together, and
favoured some other guy like crazy
since it got around that he had a huge swinging soul
and knew just how to use it.
Now you’ve got a partner, and she doesn’t say anything
because she knows you’re very sensitive about this
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0126 A Longstanding Question
It’s rather a delicate personal matter…
I could of course say I’m just asking for a friend…
but I guess You’d see through that, from what I hear…
I wouldn’t trouble You, but
it’s not a question that concerned Adam
since he had no comparative physiology
any more than he had comparative theology…
so it didn’t matter a figleaf to him…
and Moses had the bigger picture in mind, and in his position
had to keep up with the Tablets
to use a medical term which
we might refer to later…
as for Jesus, well it didn’t affect him personally, of course,
even as Son of Man,
unless of course the Da Vinci Code is true
but I’d rather not pursue such maudlin thoughts
with You…
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Good v. Evil - watch the rematch in the comfort of your own home!
But hold on a minute –
who set this league up?
Is it a fair game? Are the teams
equally matched? Have they
both got wealthy sponsors?
Can they both afford those
international mercenaries?
Is it - excuse the metaphor -
a level playing field? …
Some say it’s the oldest
religion in the world, with
the largest number of current
devotees.. even those of us
who say we’re agnostic, atheist, or
never got the voting paper,
secretly keep its shrine, deep
in our hearts…
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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0281 A mid-Atlantic voice
It's said in Indian circles that the years of retirement
are the time when men choose the occupation
of their next life. So I'm sitting here on a fine Sunday
in a quiet London suburb, the very day when the geraniums
have decided that they and the sun are into
a long-term relationship, sitting wondering whether
I'd like to be an American poet next time around.
It seems on the surface very tempting:
for economic survival, teaching creative writing
in a medium-profile college where I guess
they get on well with their students
and discuss in a class of about twenty-one
Pamela Anderson's implants and their removal
in an urbane, witty, jokes-and-depth way;
they live with a happy family in a happy house
and rejoice - as poets, unacknowledged legislators of mankind -
in the safety, the relaxed glory, of being typical Americans yet
with full liberal license nay duty to criticise or reject or even fulminate against the American Way of Life.
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Sin
Language is a blessing and a curse –
sometimes uniting, sometimes dividing,
sometimes an arrow, sometimes blown blossoms,
misplaced seeds..
How can we of the Western world
imagine what it’s like to speak a tongue,
as Persians, Hebrews, Aramaics, Arabs
are so blessed that they possess –
where words remember that they come from One
whose word is law, whose word is love;
so words are true at every level of understanding:
say ‘name’ or ‘kingdom’; ‘bread’; or ‘dust’:
a golden ladder from the heaven to earth,
from earth to heaven; we as dust beneath
the chariot wheel, as it drives over
this old potter’s yard; cracking discarded potsherds
back to dust, to mud, to clay, to future pots –
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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Dear Will Shakespeare
Dear Will,
How are things out there?
just thought you'd like to know,
that you're eleventh on the Top Poets list
as of today (though I should mention
that the hittership is 75% from
the New World that you just foresaw
before you 'closed your book'; not
that that's relevant - they speak an
English, isn't that great, which is nearer
to your own sound than the strangled
glottal stops of Cheapside Thames-side these sorry days) ...
So to the list: and so you'll understand
that no offence is meant, etcetera...
top dog today is Sheldon Silverstein -
the sort of oddball who lives down the street
just where the sidewalk ends,
whom your children hang around with all the time -
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poem by Michael Shepherd
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