five ways to kill a man - edwin brock

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man:
you can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you say, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention blackboots, bomb craters,
more mud, and a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, and a psychopath and
land that no one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he is living somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

Brock, Edwin. "Five Ways to Kill a Man" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: Penguin Books, 1999. 290-1.

what the animals teach us - chard de niord

that love is dependent on memory,
that life is eternal and therefore criminal,
that thought is an invisible veil that covers our eyes,
that death is only another animal,
that beauty is formed by desperation,
that sex is solely a human problem,
that pets are wild in heaven,
that sounds and smells escape us,
that there are bones in the earth without any marker,
that language refers to too many things,
that music hints at what we heard before we sang,
that the circle is loaded,
that nothing we know by forgetting is sacred,
that humor charges the smallest things,
that the gods are animals without their masks,
that stones tell secrets to the wildest creatures,
that nature is an idea and not a place,
that our bodies have diminished in size and strength,
that our faces are terrible,
that our eyes are double when gazed upon,
that snakes do talk, as well as asses,
that we compose our only audience,
that we are geniuses when we wish to kill,
that we are naked despite our clothes,
that our minds are bodies in another world.

de Niord, Chard. "What the Animnals Teach Us" The Pushcart Book of Poetry. Murray, Joan, ed. New York: Pushcart Press, 2006. 464-5.

meeting point - louis macneice

Time was away and somewhere else,
There were two glasses and two chairs
And two people with the one pulse
(Somebody stopped the moving stairs):
Time was away and somewhere else.

And they were neither up nor down;
The stream's music did not stop
Flowing through heather, limpid brown,
Although they sat in a coffee shop
And they were neither up nor down.

The bell was silent in the air
Holding its inverted poise --
Between a clang and clang a flower,
A brazen calyx of no noise:
The bell was silent in the air.

The camels crossed the miles of sand
That stretched around the cups and plates;
The desert was their own, they planned
To portion out the stars and dates:
The camels crossed the miles of sand.

Time was away and somewhere else.
The waiter did not come, the clock
Forgot them and the radio waltz
Came out like water from a rock:
Time was away and somewhere else

Her fingers flicked away the ash
That bloomed again in tropic trees:
Not caring if the markets crash
When they had forests such as these,
Her fingers flicked away the ash.

God or whatever means the Good
Be praised that time can stop like this,
That what the heart has understood
Can verify in the body's peace
God or whatever means the Good.

MacNeice, Louis. "Meeting Point" Scanning the Century: The Penguin Book of the Twentieth Century in Poetry. Peter Forbes, Ed. London: Penguin Books, 1999. 290-1.

we go forward - anne compton

We go forward by grace days. A phalanx of survivors.
On either side, the Inscrutable lays a hand on some friend.
Wrestles him to the ground, stops her dead. This is not an elegy.
Though we sign the air with ceremony, hands and heart in slow motion,
our feet don't stop: we're already crossing the border into tomorrow.
More of everything is what we want. We're greedy. Glad to be left
standing. When we glance behind in grief, we're afoot in a changed world
and isn't it every day? Altered, larger somehow, and we're allowed.
That's what's amazing. And what's on our minds every morning?
Prevent us, O Lord, not from sin -- we stir the dust of it with every footfall --
but from nonchalance: a look unanswered, a kiss unrequited. Someone else
in our arms. And though words can't compass this tender of days,
let the one word be yes even if every step away concurs, Be it so.
Consider the foot, beloved, the hold it has on here.

Compton, Anne. "We Go Forward" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 152-3.

mystery of the verb - anne hebert

In a quiet country we received the passion of the world, naked sword laid on our two hands

Our heart had never known the light when that first was confided to us, and its glimmer deepened the shadow of our features

It was before all weakness, charity was alone
Preceding fear and shame.

It invented the universe in primal justice and we shared this vocation in the great vitality of our love.

Light and death within us received right of asylum, looked at each other with blind eyes, touched each other with careful hands.

Arrows of odour reached us, uniting us to the earth like wounds at a wedding marked by its excesses

O seasons, rivers, alders and ferns, leaves, flowers, wet wood, blue grasses, all our riches bleed their fragrance, animal musk beside us

Colours and sounds visited us in numbers and by small stunning groups, while the dream doubled our spell as the storm hems in the blue of an innocent eye

Joy set to crying out, a new mother smelling of game-birds among the reeds. Spring delivered was so fair that it took our hearts with one hand

The three strokes of the world's creation sounded in our ears and grew like the beating of our blood

In a single dizziness the instant was. Its flash passed over our face and we received a mission of fire and burning.

Silence, nothing moves or speaks, the world is founded, and lifts our hearts, seizes the world in a single stormy gesture, has us clinging to its dawn like the skin to fruit

All the quick earth, the forest on our right, the deep city to our left, right in the world's centre, we advance to the world's tip

Foreheads with curls where silence turns to stale musky shocks of hair, every grimace, aged faces, children's cheeks, loves, wrinkles, joys, mournings, creatures, creatures, tongues of fire at the earth's solstice

O my darkest brothers, all feasts engraved in secret; human breasts, musician gourds where captive voices rage

Let him who has received the function of the world take you in charge like an extra, shadowed heart, too full of shadows, never relent until the dead and living are justified in one single song among the dawns and grasses

Hebert, Anne. "Mystery of the Verb" Modern Canadian Poets. Jones, Evan and Todd Swift, eds. Manchester: Carcanet Press Limited, 2010. 58-9.