Friday Poetry Corner

[Chico]

Thanks Chico.

Now I can't stop humming that blasted tune... pass the Led Zeppelin CD quick...

Try this

[WageSlave]

Who knows. I was going to suggest that you stand up and mong nnnnnnnnnnnnnnNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnnng gggggggggg at the top of your voice, but in honesty it'd probably not be out-of-the-ordinary enough for me to notice.

EO, is there a weirdo who regularly hangs around the 'garden' of your client?

[EqualOpportunities]

EO, is there a weirdo who regularly hangs around the 'garden' of your client?

Sadly not - not at this office anyway. I thought I was close to finding someone relatively sane in the office, for a minute then.

[WageSlave]

Sadly not - not at this office anyway. I thought I was close to finding someone relatively sane in the office, for a minute then.

Shame. But I've found the boiler room is a wonderful place to go for a scream. Really helps to relieve the frustration...at least for a few seconds.

[EqualOpportunities]

Shame. But I've found the boiler room is a wonderful place to go for a scream. Really helps to relieve the frustration...at least for a few seconds.

Shame indeed. Ah well, not here to make friends are we...

[AlfredJPruffock]

My goodness boys and girls still reading the Friday Poetry Corner are we ?
Soon it will be way by our beditmes, but on a night like this ...


On a Night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:

After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shamelesss a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
Bur already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It's cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People's Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn't have happened did.

Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

WH Auden

[WageSlave]

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

-W.B. Yeats