Today's poem:

The Death of Hercules, by Edwin Morgan.

Hyena

Edwin Morgan

I am waiting for you. I have been travelling all morning through the bush and not eaten. I am lying at the edge of the bush on a dusty path that leads from the burnt-out kraal. I am panting, it is midday, I found no water-hole. I am very fierce without food and although my eyes are screwed to slits against the sun you must believe I am prepared to spring.

What do you think of me? I have a rough coat like Africa. I am crafty with dark spots like the bush-tufted plains of Africa. I sprawl as a shaggy bundle of gathered energy like Africa sprawling in its waters. I trot, I lope, I slaver, I am a ranger. I hunch my shoulders. I eat the dead.

Do you like my song? When the moon pours hard and cold on the veldt I sing, and I am the slave of darkness. Over the stone walls and the mud walls and the ruined places and the owls, the moonlight falls. I sniff a broken drum. I bristle. My pelt is silver. I howl my song to the moon – up it goes. Would you meet me there in the waste places?

It is said I am a good match for a dead lion. I put my muzzle at his golden flanks, and tear. He is my golden supper, but my tastes are easy. I have a crowd of fangs, and I use them. Oh and my tongue – do you like me when it comes lolling out over my jaw very long, and I am laughing? I am not laughing. But I am not snarling either, only panting in the sun, showing you what I grip carrion with.

I am waiting for the foot to slide, for the heart to seize, for the leaping sinews to go slack, for the fight to the death to be fought to the death, for a glazing eye and the rumour of blood. I am crouching in my dry shadows till you are ready for me. My place is to pick you clean and leave your bones to the wind.

Love

Edwin Morgan

Love rules. Love laughs. Love marches. Love is the wolf that guards the gate. Love is the food of music, art, poetry. It fills us and fuels us and fires us to create. Love is terror. Love is sweat. Love is bashed pillow, crumpled sheet, unenviable fate. Love is the honour that kills and saves and nothing will ever let that high ambiguity abate. Love is the crushed ice that tingles and shivers and clinks fidgin-fain for the sugar-drenched absinth to fall on it and alter its state. With love you send a probe So far from the globe No one can name the shoals the voids the belts the zones the drags the flares it signals all to leave all and to navigate.

The Glass

Edwin Morgan’s lovely poem of loss and remembrance, and bright optimism

To love you in shadow as in the light is light itself. In subterranean night you sow the fields with fireflies of delight.

Lanarkshire holds you, under its grim grass. But I hold what you were, like a bright glass I carry brimming through the darkening pass.

Strawberries

Edwin Morgan

There were never strawberries like the ones we had that sultry afternoon sitting on the step of the open french window facing each other your knees held in mine the blue plates in our laps the strawberries glistening in the hot sunlight we dipped them in sugar looking at each other not hurrying the feast for one to come the empty plates laid on the stone together with the two forks crossed and I bent towards you sweet in that air in my arms abandoned like a child from your eager mouth the taste of strawberries in my memory lean back again let me love you

let the sun beat on our forgetfulness one hour of all the heat intense and summer lightning on the Kilpatrick hills

let the storm wash the plates