John Whitworth: Three poems

Angry Penguin

For Ern Malley, many of whose haunting lines are here incorporated

In the twentyfifth year of my age

I find myself to be a dromedary.

Loose-lipped, imperious, I stalk my cage

In the twentyfifth year of my age,

My bardbrow beetles as I swell with rage,

Robber of dead men’s dreams whose eyes are scary,

In the twentyfifth year of my age,

I hubble-bubble like a bloody Mary.

I hubble-bubble, the black swan of trespass

Where urchins pick their noses in the sun.

Mad monks incontinently chant their vespers,

I hubble-bubble, the black swan of trespass

On alien waters, fraught as chinese whispers,

As lights are doused and vanish one by one.

Black as my funeral hat, the swan of trespass

Makes urchins bloom like roses from a gun.

They bloom like roses in the bitter breeze

Like long-shanked ibises that on the Nile

Unmoving move, a calm immortal frieze

That bloom like noses in the bitter breeze,

The sole clerks of my metamorphoses

Who split the infinite beyond the bile,

Whose long semitic noses in the breeze,

Like souls from leaking roofs define a style.

John Whitworth

Storks

Storks are voiceless and communicate by clattering their beaks

Our stick-legged children muttering like storks,

Hooded, black-coated where the Devil walks,

Tread mystic patterns on unholy ground

And live in strange sussurances of sound.

Smoke from their smokes exhaling like a prayer

Into cathedrals of the empty air,

Whence is their genesis, what their intent,

These convocations of the innocent?

Listen, ah listen. Is it to our good?

Are they behaving in the ways they should?

Are they equivocating and deceiving?

Are their most secret dreams the dreams of leaving?

Stout walking boots raise little puffs of dust.

They stamp their feet to go, for go they must.

They smile like Angels but their hearts are stone.

They are here. They are there. They are gone. We are alone.

John Whitworth

Variation on a Forgotten Theme of James Fenton

I heard a bird sing sweetly.

I heard a bird sing long.

This, word for word, is what I heard

Of her sweet song:

   Wrong today.

   And wronger tomorrow,

   And wrongest the day after that.

   Broke and broker.

   You take out the the joker

   And put in the aristocrat.

   Nine Hail Marys

   Away with the fairies.

   Remember to put out the cat.

   Dead as a door

   Nail, a coffin or floor

   Nail, dead as a warfarin’d rat.

   This is the sum of it.

   Nothing will come of it.

   Tell him to shit in his hat.

It was a bird of clockwork,

With interlocking plates,

And was the private property

Of William Butler Yeats.

John Whitworth