The City Planners by Margaret Atwood

Cruising these residential Sunday

streets in dry August sunlight:

what offends us is

the sanities:

the houses in pedantic rows, the planted

sanitary trees, assert

levelness of surface like a rebuke

to the dent in our car door.

No shouting here, or

shatter of glass: nothing more abrupt

than the rational whine of a power mower

cutting a straight swath in the discouraged grass.

But though the driveways neatly

sidestep hysteria

by being even, the roofs all display

the same slant of avoidance to the hot sky,

certain things:

the smell of spilt oil a faint

sickness lingering in the garages,

a splash of paint on brick surprising as a bruise,

a plastic hose poised in a vicious

coil; even the too-fixed stare of the wide-windows

give momentary access to

the landscape behind or under

the future cracks in the plaster

when the houses, capsize, will slide

obliquely into clay seas, gradual as glaciers

that right now nobody notices.

That is where the City Planners

with the insane faces of political conspirators

territories, concealed from each other,

each in his own private blizzard;

guessing directions, they sketch

transitory lines rigid as wooden borders

on a wall in the white vanishing air

tracing the panic of suburb

order in a bland madness of snows.

A Different History by Sujata Bhatt

 

Great Pan is not dead;

he simply emigrated

           to India.

Here the gods roam freely,

disguised as snakes or monkeys;

every tree is sacred

and it is a sin

to be rude to a book.

It is a sin to shove a book aside

                      with your foot,

a sin to slam books down

            hard on the table

a sin to toss one carelessly

           across a room.

You must learn how to turn the pages gently

without disturbing Sarasvati,

without offending the tree

from whose wood the paper was made.

           Which language

            has not been the oppressor’s tongue?

           Which language

truly meant to murder someone?

And how does it happen

that after the torture,

after the soul has been cropped

with a long scythe swooping out

of the conqueror’s face-

the unborn grandchildren

grow to love that strange language.

 

The Woodspurge by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

 

The wind flapped loose, the wind was still,

Shaken out dead from trees and hill:

I had walked on at the wind’s will,-

I sat now, for the wind was still.

Between my knees my forehead was, –

My lips drawn in, said not Alas!

My hair was overin the grass,

My naked ears heard the day pass.

My eye, wide open, had the run

Of some ten weeds to fix upon;

 Among those few, out of the sun,

The woodsurge flowered, three cups in one.

From perfect grief there need not be

Wisdom or even memory:

One thing then learnt remains to me,-

The woodspurge has a cup of three.

Summer Farm by Norman MacCaig

Straws like tame lightnings lie about the grass

And hang zigzag on hedges. Green as glass

The water in the horse-trough shines.

Nine ducks go wobbling by in two straight lines.

A hen stares at nothing with one eye,

then picks it up. Out of an empty sky

A swallow falls and, flickering through

The barn, dives up again into the dizzy blue.

I lie, not thinking, into the cool, soft grass,

Afraid of where a thought might take me -as

This grasshopper with plated face

Unfolds his legs and finds himself in space.

Self under self, a pile of selves I stand

Threaded on time, and with metaphysic hand

Lift the farm like a lid and see

Farm within farm, and in the centre, me.

The Planners by Boey Kim Cheng

They plan. They build. All spaces are gridded,

filled with permutations of  possbilities.

The buildings are in alignment with the roads

which meet at desired points

linked by bridges all hang

in the grace of mathematics.

They build and will not stop.

Even the sea draws back

and the skies surrender.

They erase the flaws,

the blemishes of the past,

knock off useless blocks with dental dexterity.

All gaps are plugged with  gleaming gold.

The country wears perfect rows of shining teeth.

Anaesthesia,amnesia, hypnosis.

They have the means.

They have it all so it will not hurt,

so history is new again. The piling will not stop.

The drilling goes right through the fossils of last century.

But my heart would not bleed

poetry. Not a single drop

to stain the blueprint

of our past’s tomorrow.

Pied Beauty by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things-

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pierced-fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare and strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

Horses by Edwin Muir

Those lumbering horses in the steady plough,

On the bare field-I wonder why, just now,

They seem terrible, so wild and strange,

Like magic power on the stony grange.

Perhaps some childish hour has come again,

When I watched fearful, through the blackening rain,

Their hooves like pistons in an ancient mill

Move up and down, yet seem as standing still.

Their conquering hooves which trod the stubble down

Were ritual that turned the field to brown,

And their great hulks were seraphim of gold,

Or mute ecstatic monsters on the mould.

And oh the rapture, when, one furrow done,

They marched broad-breasted to the sinking sun!

The light flowed off their bossy sides in flakes;

The furrows rolled behind like struggling snakes.

But when at dusk with streaming nostrils home

They came, they seemed gigantic in the gloam

And warm and glowing with mysterious fire

That lit their smouldering bodies in the mire.

Their eyes as brilliant and as wide as the night

Gleamed with a cruel apocalyptic light.

Their manes the leaping ire of the wind

Lifted with rage invisible and blind.

Ah, now it fades! It fades! And I must pine

Again for that dread country crystalline,

Where the black field and the still-standing  tree

Were bright and fearful presences to me.

The Cockroach by Kevin Halligan

I watched a giant cockroach start to pace,

Skirting a ball of dust that road the floor.

At first he seemed quite satisfied to trace

A path between the wainscot and the door,

But soon he turned to jog in crooked rings,

Circling the rusty table leg and back,

And flipping right over to scratch his wings-

As if the victim of a mild attack

Of restlessness that worsened over time.

After a while, he climbed an open shelf

And stopped. He looked uncertain where to go.

Was this due payment for some vicious crime

A former life had led to? I don’t know

Except I thought I recognised myself.

Sonnet: Composed Upon Westminister Bridge by William Wordsworth

Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would be the soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth like a garment wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatre, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne ‘ er saw I, never felt, a clam so deep!

Dear God! the very houses seemed asleep;

And the might heart is lying still!

Pike by Ted Hughes

Pike, three inches long, perfect

Pike in all parts, green tigering the gold.

Killers from the egg: the malevolent aged grin.

They dance on the surface among the flies.

 

Or move, stunned by their own grandeur

Over a bed of emerald, silhouette

Of submarine delicacy and horror.

A hundred feet long in their world.

 

In ponds, under the heat-struck lil-pads-

Gloom of their stillness:

Logged on last year’s black leaves, watching upwards.

Or hung in an amber cavern of weeds

 

The jaws’ hooked clamp and fangs

Not to be changed at this date;

A life subdued to its instrument;

The gills kneading quietly, and the pectorals.

 

 Three we kept behind the glass,

Jungled in weed: three inches, four,

And four and a half: fed fry to them-

Suddenly there were two: Finally one.

 

 With a sag belly and the grin it was born with.

And indeed they spar nobody.

Two, six pounds each, over two feet long,

High and dry and dead in the willow-herb-

 

One jammed past its gills down the other’s gullet:

The outside eye stared: as a vice locks-

The same iron in this eye

Though its film shrank in death.

 

A pond I fished, fifty years across,

Whose lilies and muscular tench

Had outlasted every visible stone

Of the monastery that planted them-

 

Stilled legendary depth:

It was deep as England. It held

Pike too immense to stir, so immense and old

That past nightfall I dared not cast

 

But silently cast and fished

With hair frozen on my head

For what might move, for what eye might move.

The still splashes on the dark pond.

 

Owls hushing the floating woods

Frail on my ear against the dream

Darkness beneath night’s darkness had freed,

That rose slowly towards me, watching.