Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled
Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice –
What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them; that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Think No More, Lad poem – A. E. Housman
- Absence poem – Amy Lowell poems | Poems and Poetry
- Poetics poem – A. R. Ammons poems | Poetry Monster
- Николай Огарев – Выпьем, что ли, Ваня
- On Female Inconstancy (From The Greek) by William Cowper
- Confessions of a Software Engineer by Vinaya Kumar Hanumanthappa
- The Deserted Garden
- “Here, where the vine and fig bask hand in hand,” poem – Alfred Austin
- Orlando Furioso Canto 7 by Ludovico Ariosto
- On a Sea Fight, Which the Author was in, Betwixt the English and Dutch by William Wycherley
- Street Song by Sylvia Plath
- Sonnet 37: As a decrepit father takes delight by William Shakespeare
- My Mother by Claude McKay
- Владимир Высоцкий – Песня про правого инсайда
- Robert Burns: Epigram On Mr. James Gracie:
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).
Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985), Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Cavalier of the Order of the Companions of Honour, was an English poet, novelist, and librarian.