Thomas Henry Stephens

Thomas Henry Stephens Poems

Thomas Henry Stephens Biography

Born at an early age I was born at midnight, at the height of a storm, in times of uncertainty, when many were in despair. My mother conceived as the air force fought the desperate dog fights in southern England, she then passed through pregnancy while the bombs dropped on all of Britain's major cities. What did she think in times such as these? I never knew. I arrived, a scrawny bit of raw flesh, who, I'm told, looked like a skinned rabbit, unlikely to survive, but born into love and hope. The bombs continued to fall while I cried and slept and fed, unaware, in the comforting arms of my family of all the joy and sadness to follow. While I weaned, men and women died in their million across the whole of the world. The conflagration continuing for years and years until I became ready for my first school experience. The town in which I lived was untouched, to some extent, because the bombs and mayhem happened many miles away or in other countries. The only real effect was that men left, some never to return, and women worked in the breweries and factories, for the sake of survival. My Father, whom I hardly remember, died when I was about 4 years old. On his death certificate he was classified as a wagon-repairer, though I was not aware of this for many years. He dreamed not to be a wagon-repairer but to become an electrical engineer. When I was young my mother gave me his text books and certificates showing he had qualified for this profession with distinction. The war intervened, and although he did not die 'at the front' he eventually lost his life because he became trapped between the buffers of railway carriages. The thrombosis moved to his brain, he became paralysed and his heart was stopped. There is a simple cure today using rat poison. My belief that he was an engineer, influence and tempered all of my hopes and despair and later fed my rebellion against the system. My Father's heritage is, therefore, somewhat amorphous, as you will see, I tried to emulate a fiction that in truth did not exist. Later I study art and the philosophy of life, painted sculpted, wrote, built a house and moved to the Cornish Coast.)

The Best Poem Of Thomas Henry Stephens

Silent Landscape

I paced silently in the useless landscape,
Where a white solo horse,
matured and immured in an Arabian souk,
is frantic and tantalisingly rampant.

The glistening chandeliers hung from the clouds,
Impartially,
And the sparkling immobile glass droplets,
rest heavy in the fog.

While the driving wind blew from the east in the night,
The dark satanic mills mashed bird and beasts alike.
Spinning insanely faster,
the incandescent glowing light bulbs,
burst with violent verdant black tulips.

With a hearty shout and a heavy heart the unlawful daughter,
hobbled delicately,
tidily plastering the Eskimo's chilblain with mustard.
The leather of her red shoes grew bulbous bunions in sympathy,
While the radio played Waltzing Matilda.

We follow the drums and the drums say die.
The flag's in rags, the dogs are dead,
Freezing in the burning snow,
Carving and sobbing swathes through drifts,
Leaving a plague of bile and spit.

I carved and constructed a blameless doll,
Who was gallant and honest to a fault but without a brain.
And the gentleman concurred that the topsy-turvy world,
Leaves our thin souls unnerved,
And our mouldy agnostic waterproof jackets green with envy.

The father said elephants with custard,
And we all fell in brotherly adoration into the greasy pudding.
The festering jelly was most abusive and pounced,
On the bloated paper Mache'Tintoretto painting,
pasting all parts into a corner,
with no escape.

How can we, without love and hope,
Pay the boatman for a journey to the unknown,
Without let or hindrance?
Tell us so we shall know.
Without prevarication.

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