It's National Poetry Day

I like that, Madchen. I think I would have this on my door today, as I'm feeling a bit cynical:

The High Achievers

Educated in the Humanities,
they headed for the City, their beliefs
implicit in the eyes and arteries
of each, and their sincerity displayed
in notes, in smiles, in sheaves
of decimal etcetera. Made,
they counted themselves free. Those were the hours
of self-belief, and the slow accolade
of pieces clattering into a well.
And then the shrug of powers,
and the millions glutted where they fell
toadstooling into culture. Who knows when
they made their killings during that hot spell:
flies or policemen? An infinity
of animals began
to thrive especially, as when the dull sea,
sick with its fish, was turning them to men.

Glyn Maxwell

One mention of the Forward Prize on Radio 4, one article in G2. Well, that's the glare of publicity out of the way for another year.

You stop at the tourist office in Aubeterre,
a columbarium of files and dockets.
She explains, while you flip through the little leaflets
about the chapel and the puppet-theatre,
that everything is boarded up till spring,
including - before you can ask - the only hotel.
A moped purrs through the unbroken drizzle.
You catch yourself checking her hands for rings.

She prepares a light supper; you chat,
her fussy diction placing words in air
like ice in water. She leads you to her room
but gets the shivers while you strip her bare;
lifting her head, you watch her pupils bloom
into the whole blue iris, then the white.

- DP

SOME WINTER SPARROWS

I hear you already, a choir of small wheels,
Through frayed trees I see your
Shaken flight like a shiver
Of thin light on a river.
...

More snow: under a green fir-bush bowed low
With flakes broad as cats' paws
You hunch, puffed: if you do not
Move maybe it will go away.
...
Whether the gray cat is at the corner,
The hawk hunting over
The graves, or the light too late
To trust, you will not come down.

--W.S. Merwin