Funeral Blues

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message ‘He is Dead’.
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now; put out every one,
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun,
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood;
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

     — W H Auden

“Funeral Blues” poem by W H Auden, read by me (Click title link for text source; click here for image source). A sombre and cold-afflicted reading, but one which I hope will be enjoyed.

Sonnet III — Sonnets to Orpheus

A god can do it. But, tell me, how can a man
follow his narrow road through the strings?
A man is split. And where two roads intersect
inside him, no one has built the Singer’s Temple.

Writing poetry as we learn from you is not desiring
not wanting anything that can ever be achieved.
To write poetry is to be alive. For a god that’s easy.
When, however, are we really alive? And when does he

turn the earth and the stars so they face us?
Yes, you are young and you love and the voice
forces your mouth open – that is lovely, but learn

to forget that breaking into song. It doesn’t last.
Real singing is a different movement of air.
Air moving around nothing. A breathing in a god. A wind.

     — Rainer Maria Rilke (translated by Robert Bly)

“Sonnet III” from Sonnets to Orpheus by Rainer Maria Rilke, read by me. (Click here for image source).

A Partridge — A Pear Tree

The first day: Truelove sends
a shushed blue morning hour, the mute
absurdity of tarmac, a sobering of worn toes—
the upbeat’s echo dredges us home.

Second, he sends books, and underlinings—
Sartre’s mutter—something is beginning.
The words stem: flesh-nub,
furling bruise of a clear, new shoot.

We cultivate with iron tea and hours:
milk swigs, sweet drams, the open breath
of television at the schedule’s finish,
lush with nebula and static,

Johnny’s tender, breakfast croon.
The fruits set, wax, fluid and flesh,
specked skin—a fatty, nibbled velvet.
At four A.M. he cawls,

true as a child’s crayoned circle of bird—
twig-foot, shut-eye. He’s
no hart, nor dove, but gamey,
winter market plume.

His is a glistering, brass whirr
of wings, a glide—a chestnut tail.
I put by the feathers;
ease the meat from the bone.

     — Kate Potts

“A Partridge — A Pear Tree” poem by Kate Potts, read by me (Click title link for text source; click here for image source). I don’t know why I’m making recordings when I have a cold.

Totem

All Souls’ over, the roast seeds eaten, I set  
on a backporch post our sculpted pumpkin  
under the weather, warm still for November.  
Night and day it gapes in at us
through the kitchen window, going soft
in the head. Sleepwalker-slow, a black rash of ants  
harrows this hollow globe, munching  
the pale peach flesh, sucking its seasoned  
last juices dry. In a week, when the ants and  
humming flies are done, only a hard remorseless light  
drills and tenants it through and through. Within,  
it turns mould-black in patches, stays  
days like this while the weather takes it  
in its shifty arms: wide eye-spaces shine,  
the disapproving mouth holds firm. Another week,  
a sad leap forward: sunk to one side
so an eye-socket’s almost blocked, it becomes
a monster of its former self. Human, it would have  
rotted beyond unhappiness and horror  
to some unspeakable subject state—its nose  
no more than a vertical hole, the thin  
bridge of amber between nose and mouth  
in ruins. The other socket opens
wider than ever: disbelief.
                                        It’s all downhill
from here: knuckles of sun, peremptory
steady fingers of frost, strain all day and night—
cracking the rind, kneading the knotted fibres  
free. The crown, with its top-knot mockery  
of stalk, caves in; the skull buckles; the whole  
sad head drips tallowy tears: the end
is in sight. In a day or two it topples on itself  
like ruined thatch, pus-white drool spidering  
from the corner of the mouth, worming its way
down the body-post. All dignity to the winds,  
it bows its bogeyman face of dread
to the inevitable.
                           And now, November almost out,  
it is in the bright unseasonable sunshine
a simmer of pulp, a slow bake, amber shell speckled  
chalk-grey with lichen. Light strikes and strikes  
its burst surfaces: it sags, stays at the end of  
its brief tether—a helmet of dark circles, death caul.  
Here is the last umbilical gasp, everybody’s  
nightmare parent, the pitiless system
rubbing our noses in it. But pity poor lantern-head  
with his lights out, glob by greasy glob
going back where he came from: as each seed-shaped  
drop falls free, it catches and clutches
for one split second the light. When the pumpkin  
lapses to our common ground at last—where  
a swaddle of snow will fold it in no time
from sight—I try to take in the empty space it’s left  
on top of the wooden post: it is that empty space.

— Eamon Grennan, “Totem” from Out of Sight: New & Selected Poems.

“Totem” poem by Eamon Grennan, read by me. (Click title link for text source; click here for image source). Again, another reading for Hallowe’en. My voice sounds even worse than usual; I think I’m coming down with a bout of something nasty. Apologies.