A Lizard Sonnet

Oscar Hansen

If you travel to escape the small lizard on your back

you will eventually arrive outside your parents' house.

Only they have long since gone,

someone else lives there. Perhaps a child sleeps in your bed

dreaming your dreams?

You walk down a street where you used to play

but no one knows you, and the sense of loss overwhelms you.

Swallow hard, don't cry, because your memory is untrue.

You left to get away from a small-minded town, poverty, and screams

in the night; but it was worth going back to remind you what

an awful place you left.

I have a small lizard in the kitchen. I have tried

to kill it because it is grey and without redeeming colours that

could make it into a pet but it is too quick, and hides in corners

I can`t reach, so it can live for now.

Fontana di Trevi

Alfred Austin reconciles himself to loss and loneliness

Why do I sit within the spell Of eyes like thine, who oft have known What 'tis in Beauty's gaze to dwell, And then—to feel alone: Back be remitted to my cell, Too lately near a throne?

What though the moon on Trevi's fount, Whilst we together drink, doth shine, Can it the rural miles remount, Or I subtract from mine? Whilst Time hath scarce begun to count The pleasant paths of thine.

How vain to thus divide its wave! It will not help to blend our own. Thy voice is gay, but mine is grave, As thine too will have grown In days when nought is left thee save A half-remembered tone.

The light that gilds my world no more, But only now just breaks on thine; Thy shadows stretch all bright before, Behind in darkness mine. Leave me my unillumined shore, And in thy lustre shine!

Forth to thy Future, gifted child! Oh, be it fair as thou! As thy sweet tones and temper mild, And cloudless as thy brow; And thou wilt then be reconciled That I am silent now!

Today’s Poll Topper - the erstwhile cathedral at Coventry, reduced to a shell by the Luftwaffe. Its 50′s replacement is one of the glories of modern English ecclesiastical architecture

Reconciliation

Walt Whitman 

WORD over all, beautiful as the sky! Beautiful that war, and all its deeds of carnage, must in time be utterly lost; That the hands of the sisters Death and Night, incessantly softly wash again, and ever again, this soil’d world: ... For my enemy is dead — a man divine as myself is dead; I look where he lies, white-faced and still, in the coffin — I draw near;           I bend down, and touch lightly with my lips the white face in the coffin.

Sometimes it Happens

Brian Patten

And sometimes it happens that you are friends and then You are not friends, And friendship has passed. And whole days are lost and among them A fountain empties itself.

And sometimes it happens that you are loved and then You are not loved, And love is past. And whole days are lost and among them A fountain empties itself into the grass.

And sometimes you want to speak to her and then You do not want to speak, Then the opportunity has passed. Your dreams flare up, they suddenly vanish.

And also it happens that there is nowhere to go and then There is somewhere to go, Then you have bypassed. And the years flare up and are gone, Quicker than a minute.

So you have nothing. You wonder if these things matter and then As soon you begin to wonder if these things matter They cease to matter, And caring is past. And a fountain empties itself into the grass.