The Brave and the Love Flute by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
The Brave and the Love Flute by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Brave was he in battle, and in the cattle chase But dumb of tongue he was ,awkward in love, Which is the most important race for men And he cried to the Gods for help above. Forlorn was he, so brave, as lesser braves As […]
Faith and Faiths by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
Faith and Faiths by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Two women, one old: one young Walk side by side, content The older, dressed as befits her faith: The other as befits her age in Ghent. With “Rock Chick” emblazoned on two crossed guitars, She may as well have been Belgian and white… The old woman, maybe her […]
Walls at Drogheda by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
Walls at Drogheda by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Walls breached Swords wielded, born from passions Of the heart Of hate Of others And of others beliefs Gave birth to murder. Rights breached Laws wielded, born from passions Of revenge To avenge Forefathers Who died when another Regime gave birth to fundamentalism. Hatred breached Flags wielded, born […]
The Death of Knowledge by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
The Death of Knowledge by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh The scholars cast the four wild winds Only Death the last thing sure And now the Knowledge dwells within And at the hearth sides of the poor And so it came to dawn the day That a visitor passing by In Gaelic tongue both pure and sure […]
The Brave and the Love Flute by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
The Brave and the Love Flute by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Brave was he in battle, and in the cattle chase But dumb of tongue he was ,awkward in love, Which is the most important race for men And he cried to the Gods for help above. Forlorn was he, so brave, as lesser braves As […]
Faith and Faiths by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
Faith and Faiths by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Two women, one old: one young Walk side by side, content The older, dressed as befits her faith: The other as befits her age in Ghent. With “Rock Chick” emblazoned on two crossed guitars, She may as well have been Belgian and white… The old woman, maybe her […]
Walls at Drogheda by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
Walls at Drogheda by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Walls breached Swords wielded, born from passions Of the heart Of hate Of others And of others beliefs Gave birth to murder. Rights breached Laws wielded, born from passions Of revenge To avenge Forefathers Who died when another Regime gave birth to fundamentalism. Hatred breached Flags wielded, born […]
The Death of Knowledge by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
The Death of Knowledge by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh The scholars cast the four wild winds Only Death the last thing sure And now the Knowledge dwells within And at the hearth sides of the poor And so it came to dawn the day That a visitor passing by In Gaelic tongue both pure and sure […]
The Brave and the Love Flute by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
The Brave and the Love Flute by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Brave was he in battle, and in the cattle chase But dumb of tongue he was ,awkward in love, Which is the most important race for men And he cried to the Gods for help above. Forlorn was he, so brave, as lesser braves As […]
Faith and Faiths by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
Faith and Faiths by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh Two women, one old: one young Walk side by side, content The older, dressed as befits her faith: The other as befits her age in Ghent. With “Rock Chick” emblazoned on two crossed guitars, She may as well have been Belgian and white… The old woman, maybe her […]
Be Not a War Poet by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh
Be Not a War Poet by Tomás Ó Cárthaigh We have not the shot or shell Who read their poems from distant days Yet today it is still the same The dance of death that war it plays Other young men, not Flanders now Afghanistan, even Belfast Wars big and small, why fight at all […]
Why the Young Men Are So Ugly by Tony Hoagland
They have little tractors in their blood and all day the tractors climb up and down inside their arms and legs, their collarbones and heads. That is why they yell and scream and slam the barbells down into their clanking slots, making the metal ring like sledgehammers on iron, like dungeon prisoners rattling their chains. […]
V by Tony Harrison
V by Tony Harrison ‘My father still reads the dictionary every day. He says your life depends on your power to master words.’ Arthur Scargill Sunday Times, 10 January 1982 Next millennium you’ll have to search quite hard to find my slab behind the family dead, butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard adding poetry […]
Turns by Tony Harrison
Turns by Tony Harrison I thought it made me look more ‘working class’ (as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!) I did a turn in it before the glass. My mother said: It suits you, your dad’s cap. (She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair: You’re every bit […]
The Change by Tony Hoagland
The season turned like the page of a glossy fashion magazine. In the park the daffodils came up and in the parking lot, the new car models were on parade. Sometimes I think that nothing really changes— The young girls show the latest crop of tummies, and the new president proves that he’s a dummy. […]
Special Problems in Vocabulary by Tony Hoagland
There is no single particular noun for the way a friendship, stretched over time, grows thin, then one day snaps with a popping sound. No verb for accidentally breaking a thing while trying to get it open —a marriage, for example. No particular phrase for losing a book in the middle of reading it, and […]
Requests for Toy Piano by Tony Hoagland
Play the one about the family of the ducks where the ducks go down to the river and one of them thinks the water will be cold but then they jump in anyway and like it and splash around. No, I must play the one about the nervous man from Palestine in row 14 with […]
Reasons to Survive November by Tony Hoagland
November like a train wreck – as if a locomotive made of cold had hurtled out of Canada and crashed into a million trees, flaming the leaves, setting the woods on fire. The sky is a thick, cold gauze – but there’s a soup special at the Waffle House downtown, and the Jack Parsons show […]
Reading Moby-Dick at 30,000 Feet by Tony Hoagland
At this height, Kansas is just a concept, a checkerboard design of wheat and corn no larger than the foldout section of my neighbor’s travel magazine. At this stage of the journey I would estimate the distance between myself and my own feelings is roughly the same as the mileage from Seattle to New York, […]
Quiet by Tony Hoagland
Prolonged exposure to death Has made my friend quieter. Now his nose is less like a hatchet And more like a snuffler. Flames don’t erupt from his mouth anymore And life doesn’t crack his thermometer. Instead of overthrowing the government He reads fly-fishing catalogues And takes photographs of water. An aphorist would say The horns […]
Note to Reality by Tony Hoagland
Without even knowing it, I have believed in you for a long time. When I looked at my blood under a microscope I could see truth multiplying over and over. —Not police sirens, nor history books, not stage-three lymphoma persuaded me but your honeycombs and beetles; the dry blond fascicles of grass thrust up above […]
National Trust by Tony Harrison
National Trust by Tony Harrison Bottomless pits. There’s on in Castleton, and stout upholders of our law and order one day thought its depth worth wagering on and borrowed a convict hush-hush from his warder and winched him down; and back, flayed, grey, mad, dumb. Not even a good flogging made him holler! O gentlemen, […]
Memory As a Hearing Aid by Tony Hoagland
Somewhere, someone is asking a question, and I stand squinting at the classroom with one hand cupped behind my ear, trying to figure out where that voice is coming from. I might be already an old man, attempting to recall the night his hearing got misplaced, front-row-center at a battle of the bands, where a […]
Marked with D. by Tony Harrison
Marked with D. by Tony Harrison When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven not unlike those he fuelled all his life, I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven and radiant with the sight of his dead wife, light streaming from his mouth to shape her name, ‘not Florence and not […]
Lucky by Tony Hoagland
If you are lucky in this life, you will get to help your enemy the way I got to help my mother when she was weakened past the point of saying no. Into the big enamel tub half-filled with water which I had made just right, I lowered the childish skeleton she had become. Her […]
Long Distance II by Tony Harrison
Long Distance II by Tony Harrison Though my mother was already two years dead Dad kept her slippers warming by the gas, put hot water bottles her side of the bed and still went to renew her transport pass. You couldn’t just drop in. You had to phone. He’d put you off an hour to […]
Long Distance I by Tony Harrison
Long Distance I by Tony Harrison Your bed’s got two wrong sides. You life’s all grouse. I let your phone-call take its dismal course: Ah can’t stand it no more, this empty house! Carrots choke us wi’out your mam’s white sauce! Them sweets you brought me, you can have ’em back. Ah’m diabetic now. Got […]
Jet by Tony Hoagland
Sometimes I wish I were still out on the back porch, drinking jet fuel with the boys, getting louder and louder as the empty cans drop out of our paws like booster rockets falling back to Earth and we soar up into the summer stars. Summer. The big sky river rushes overhead, bearing asteroids and […]
Tony Harrison – Tony Harrison
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In Praise of Their Divorce by Tony Hoagland
And when I heard about the divorce of my friends, I couldn’t help but be proud of them, that man and that woman setting off in different directions, like pilgrims in a proverb —him to buy his very own toaster oven, her seeking a prescription for sleeping pills. Let us keep in mind the hidden […]
I Have News For You by Tony Hoagland
There are people who do not see a broken playground swing as a symbol of ruined childhood and there are people who don’t interpret the behavior of a fly in a motel room as a mocking representation of their thought process. There are people who don’t walk past an empty swimming pool and think about […]
Heredity by Tony Harrison
Heredity by Tony Harrison How you became a poet’s a mystery! Wherever did you get your talent from? I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry- one was a stammerer, the other dumb. ————— The End And that’s the End of the Poem © Poetry Monster, 2021. Poems by topic and subject. Poetry Monster — […]
Grammar by Tony Hoagland
Maxine, back from a weekend with her boyfriend, smiles like a big cat and says that she’s a conjugated verb. She’s been doing the direct object with a second person pronoun named Phil, and when she walks into the room, everybody turns: some kind of light is coming from her head. Even the geraniums look […]
Don’t Tell Anyone by Tony Hoagland
We had been married for six or seven years when my wife, standing in the kitchen one afternoon, told me that she screams underwater when she swims— that, in fact, she has been screaming for years into the blue chlorinated water of the community pool where she does laps every other day. Buttering her toast, […]
Disappointment by Tony Hoagland
I was feeling pretty religious standing on the bridge in my winter coat looking down at the gray water: the sharp little waves dusted with snow, fish in their tin armor. That’s what I like about disappointment: the way it slows you down, when the querulous insistent chatter of desire goes dead calm and the […]
Coming and Going by Tony Hoagland
My marriage ended in an airport long ago. I was not wise enough to cry while looking for my car, walking through the underground garage; jets were roaring overhead, and if I had been wise I would have looked up at those heavy-bellied cylinders and seen the wheelchairs and the frightened dogs inside; the kidneys […]
Book Ends by Tony Harrison
Book Ends by Tony Harrison I Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead we chew it slowly that last apple pie. Shocked into sleeplessness you’re scared of bed. We never could talk much, and now don’t try. You’re like book ends, the pair of you, she’d say, Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare… […]
Big Grab by Tony Hoagland
The corn chip engineer gets a bright idea, and talks to the corn chip executive and six months later at the factory they begin subtracting a few chips from every bag, but they still call it on the outside wrapper, The Big Grab, so the concept of Big is quietly modified to mean More or […]
Bible Study by Tony Hoagland
Who would have imagined that I would have to go a million miles away from the place where I was born to find people who would love me? And that I would go that distance and that I would find those people? In the dream JoAnne was showing me how much arm to amputate if […]
Beauty by Tony Hoagland
When the medication she was taking caused tiny vessels in her face to break, leaving faint but permanent blue stitches in her cheeks, my sister said she knew she would never be beautiful again. After all those years of watching her reflection in the mirror, sucking in her stomach and standing straight, she said it […]