Memory Poems - Poems For Memory

When June comes dancing o'er the death of May, With scarlet roses tinting her green breast, And mating thrushes ushering in her day, And Earth on tiptoe for her golden guest, I always see the evening when we met-- The first of June baptized in tender rain-- And walked home through the wide streets, gleaming wet, Arms locked, our warm flesh pulsing with love's pain. I always see the cheerful little room, And in the corner, fresh and white, the bed, Sweet scented with a delicate perfume, Wherein for one night only we were wed; Where in the starlit stillness we lay mute, And heard the whispering showers all night long, And your brown burning body was a lute Whereon my passion played his fevered song. When June comes dancing o'er the death of May, With scarlet roses staining her fair feet, My soul takes leave of me to sing all day A love so fugitive and so complete.

A pen--to register; a key-- That winds through secret wards Are well assigned to Memory By allegoric Bards. As aptly, also, might be given A Pencil to her hand; That, softening objects, sometimes even Outstrips the heart's demand; That smooths foregone distress, the lines Of lingering care subdues, Long-vanished happiness refines, And clothes in brighter hues; Yet, like a tool of Fancy, works Those Spectres to dilate That startle Conscience, as she lurks Within her lonely seat. Oh! that our lives, which flee so fast, In purity were such, That not an image of the past Should fear that pencil's touch! Retirement then might hourly look Upon a soothing scene, Age steal to his allotted nook Contented and serene; With heart as calm as lakes that sleep, In frosty moonlight glistening; Or mountain rivers, where they creep Along a channel smooth and deep, To their own far-off murmurs listening.

Every old man I see Reminds me of my father When he had fallen in love with death One time when sheaves were gathered. That man I saw in Gardner Street Stumbled on the kerb was one, He stared at me half-eyed, I might have been his son. And I remember the musician Faltering over his fiddle In Bayswater, London, He too set me the riddle. Every old man I see In October-coloured weather Seems to say to me: "I was once your father."

After the funeral, mule praises, brays, Windshake of sailshaped ears, muffle-toed tap Tap happily of one peg in the thick Grave's foot, blinds down the lids, the teeth in black, The spittled eyes, the salt ponds in the sleeves, Morning smack of the spade that wakes up sleep, Shakes a desolate boy who slits his throat In the dark of the coffin and sheds dry leaves, That breaks one bone to light with a judgment clout' After the feast of tear-stuffed time and thistles In a room with a stuffed fox and a stale fern, I stand, for this memorial's sake, alone In the snivelling hours with dead, humped Ann Whose hodded, fountain heart once fell in puddles Round the parched worlds of Wales and drowned each sun (Though this for her is a monstrous image blindly Magnified out of praise; her death was a still drop; She would not have me sinking in the holy Flood of her heart's fame; she would lie dumb and deep And need no druid of her broken body). But I, Ann's bard on a raised hearth, call all The seas to service that her wood-tongud virtue Babble like a bellbuoy over the hymning heads, Bow down the walls of the ferned and foxy woods That her love sing and swing through a brown chapel, Blees her bent spirit with four, crossing birds. Her flesh was meek as milk, but this skyward statue With the wild breast and blessed and giant skull Is carved from her in a room with a wet window In a fiercely mourning house in a crooked year. I know her scrubbed and sour humble hands Lie with religion in their cramp, her threadbare Whisper in a damp word, her wits drilled hollow, Her fist of a face died clenched on a round pain; And sculptured Ann is seventy years of stone. These cloud-sopped, marble hands, this monumental Argument of the hewn voice, gesture and psalm Storm me forever over her grave until The stuffed lung of the fox twitch and cry Love And the strutting fern lay seeds on the black sill.