Michael Longley Poems

A fastidious brewer of tea, a tea
Connoisseur as well as a poet,
I modestly request on my sixtieth
Birthday a gift of snow water.
...

We were combatants from the start. Our dad
Bought us boxing gloves when we were ten —
Champions like Euryalus, say, or Epeius
...

Inauspicious between headstones
On Angel Hill, wintry love
Tokens for Murdo, Alistair,
...

Lighting up, lest all our hearts should break,
His fiftieth cigarette of the day,
Happy with so many notes at his beck
...

These are the small hours when
Moths by their fatal appetite
Which thatbrings them tapping to get in,
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Amateur witches and professional virgins,
Sirens and shepherdesses - all new areas
Of experience (I have been out of touch) -
...

Achilles hunts down Hector like a sparrowhawk
Screeching after a horror-struck collared-dove
That flails just in front of her executioner, so
...

Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
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The spear-point pierces his tender neck.
His armour clatters as he hits the ground.
Blood soaks his hair, bonny as the Graces',
...

My father, let no similes eclipse
Where crosses like some forest simplified
Sink roots into my mind, the slow sands
...