The Man Who Fed the Birds.
Your meaning's bare, they said.
You'll have to cover up.
The poet, who didn't know he was naked, made no move but kept on writing
the green and the white and the blue and singing his blind man's songs.
Away from the sharp-eyed men who look for nakedness even In the decently clothed, he'd learnt no subterfuge, knowing only the company of simple men like himself who worked with their hands.
You've left it all hanging out
—your heart and that.
Said those who knew the uses of armour.
But he saw no harm for his heart was pure
and he went on playing his faltering flute to girls with cinnamon hair.
Come off it mate, you can't get away
with rosebuds and lilies these days.
But the poet who didn't know that, had already turned away
and was feeding the birds.
DERRY PARKER
SPORTSMISTRESS Look at you
Look at them.
(Lumpy limbs loathing their lithe lunging lustiness.
Allowing no longings, no loin-lulling lustfulness.)
22.
Precisely observing the bounds of propriety, lest exercise should reveal bloomer and thigh.
Sexually sensible, that's what you are.
Measuring your mind off before every lesson ten centimetres above your patella.
PETER BELL
SAY GOODBYE TO THE SUN for Lorelle
Something like a wind vanquished the heat from the afternoon cliff.
And the sea sat quietly, silently awaiting the ebb of the sun.
Twisted ripples revealed a sanity of crimson.
While the grass on the cliff froze in dissolution of theday.
They say goodbye to the sun, and watch in hope for the moon.
The waves on the shore echoed the effervescence of Your hair.
Dream.
Your thoughts are exumed from your body.
And your eyes shelter in mine
Away falls the Ibis, home to straw and hunted meat Further than our eyes can see, along the rhyming horizon The place where our minds should be ...
ANDREW JOHNSON
TWO (2) POEMS FOR CLIVE SANSOM/NATION REVIEW maybe what we should do
is write a poem for Clive Sansom
& send it to Nation Review.
23.
