The International Terminal -- Les Murray

Guest poem sent in by Steve Forsythe

(Poem #1958) The International Terminal Some comb oil, some blow air, some shave trenchlines in their hair but the common joint thump, the heart's spondee kicks off in its rose-lit inner sea like an echo, at first, of the one above it on the dodgy ladder of love -- and my mate who's driving says I never found one yet worth staying with forever. In this our poems do not align. Surely most are if you are, answers mine, and I am living proof of it, I gloom, missing you from the cornering outset -- And hearts beat mostly as if they weren't there, Rocking horse to rocking chair, most audible dubbed on the tracks of movies or as we approach where our special groove is or our special fear. The autumn-vast parking-lot-bitumen overcast now switches on pumpkin-flower lights all over dark green garden sites and a wall of car-bodies, stacked by blokes, obscures suburban signs and smokes. Like coughs, cries, all such unlearned effects the heartbeat has no dialects but what this or anything may mean depends on what poem we're living in. Now a jet engine, huge child of a gun, shudders with haze and begins to run. Over Mount Fuji and the North Pole I'm bound for Europe in a reading role and a poem long ago that was coming for me had Fuji-san as its axle-tree. Cities shower and rattle over the gates as I enter that limbo between states but I think of the heart swarmed around by poems like an egg besieged by chromosomes and how out of that our world is bred through the back of a mirror, with clouds in its head --and airborne, with a bang, this five-hundred-seat theatre folds up its ponderous feet. -- Les Murray

Here is another poem on a different aspect of flight - it is almost the
opposite of Walcott's poem [Poem #1957]: anticipation vs. completion, the
anxiety of departure vs. the expansive consciouness of Walcott's being in
flight, almost formal vs. free-flowing verse. It captures well all the
emotions evoked by the beginning of a long journey. The depiction of the
actual takeoff ("Now a jet engine...") brilliantly evokes the final physical
and mental rush.

Steve Forsythe

[Links]

Biography:
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Les_Murray

Official site:
  http://www.lesmurray.org/

Myfanwy at Oxford -- John Betjeman

Guest poem sent in by Steve Forsythe

(Poem #1908) Myfanwy at Oxford Pink may, double may, dead laburnum Shedding an Anglo-Jackson shade, Shall we ever, my staunch Myfanwy, Bicycle down to North Parade? Kant on the handle-bars, Marx in the saddlebag, Light my touch on your shoulder-blade. Sancta Hilda, Myfanwyatia Evansensis --- I hold your heart, Willowy banks of a willowy Cherwell a Willowy figure with lips apart, Strong and willowy, strong to pillow me, Gold Myfanwy, kisses and art. Tubular bells of tall St. Barnabas, Single clatter above St. Paul, Chasuble, acolyte, incense-offering, Spectacled faces held in thrall. There in the nimbus and Comper tracery Gold Myfanwy blesses us all. Gleam of gas upon Oxford station, Gleam of gas on her straight gold hair, Hair flung back with an ostentation, Waiting alone for a girl friend there. Second in Mods and a Third in Theology Come to breathe again Oxford air. Her Myfanwy as in Cadena days, Her Myfanwy, a schoolgirl voice, Tentative brush of a cheek in a cocoa crush, Coffee and Ulysses, Tennyson, Joyce, Alpha-minded and other dimensional, Freud or Calvary? Take your choice. Her Myfanwy? My Myfanwy. Bicycle bells in a Boar's Hill Pine, Stedman Triple from All Saints' steeple, Tom and his hundred and one at nine, Bells of Butterfield, caught in Keble, Sally and backstroke answer "Mine!" -- John Betjeman

Here's a poem by Sir John Betjeman that's about both young love and the
experience of a middle class Brit in an upper class college environment.
Light-years away from my own college experience, but it still paints a
vivid picture of that time and place. His "Myfanwy" is Myfanwy Evans, later
Piper.

Steve

[Martin adds]

There are very few poets whose individual style shines so clearly through
their works as does Betjeman's. Here, after just one line it is nigh
unmistakable. (The flip side is that a lot of his poems end up sounding very
similar, but that is just a surface thing and doesn't detract from either
their merit or their appeal.)

martin