Gwen Harwood Poems

She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt
Someone she loved once passed by – too late
...

Daybreak: the household slept.
I rose, blessed by the sun.
A horny fiend, I crept
out with my father's gun.
...

So the light falls, and so it fell
on branched leaved with flocking birds.
Loght stole a citys weight to swell
the coloured lofe of stone. Your words
...

Shadows grazing eastward melt
from their vast sun-driven flocks
into consubstantial dusk.
A snow wind flosses the bleak rocks,
...

In the space between love and sleep
when heart mourns in its prison
eyes against shoulder keep
their blood-black curtains tight.
...

The tenth day, and they give
my mirror back. Who knows
how to drink pain, and live?
I look, and the glass shows
...

A child one summer's evening soaked
a glass jar in the reeling sun
hoping to keep, when day was done
and all the sun's disciples cloaked
...

So hungry-sensitive that he
craves day and night the pap of praise,
he'll ease his gripes or fingerpaint
in heartsblood on a public page.
...

The snails brush silver. Critic crow
points his unpleasant beak, and lances.
Resumes his treetop, darts below
his acid-bright, corrosive glances.
...

Show me the order of the world,
the hard-edge light of this-is-so
prior to all experience
and common to both world and thought,
...