Poets Corner - Blog Posts

The Poet's Corner Window at Westminster Abbey, designed by Graham Jones, with diamonds for Alexander Pope, Oscar Wilde, Christopher Marlowe, Elizabeth Gaskell, Robert Herrick, A.E. Housman, and Frances Burney (descending, left then right)

Studiekeuze

Daarvoor was ik uitgesneden

Het meesterwerk

Dat elke grens mijn zijn bevat

Talent vult de oppervlakte

Maar wat met de houtschilfers

Het genadeloze lemmet

De verdoemdde onbestaandheid

Uit welke grootse toekomts ben ik

Uit-

Weg-

Gesneden

Zelfs al zou realisatie mij wonderen

Materiaal blijft onveranderbaar

Bloed loopt tegendraads

En tegen zwaartekracht

Maar niet tegen de grens die het

lemmet schiep

Niet tegen het sneed

De oppervlakte

Het schild

Vastgebeiteld met mij

En al mijn "talent"

Can you hear this?

Raise your hand

Right

Left

Oh you can’t hear?

Take this for your

Right

Left

Can we test it again?

See if you lost

More

Less

This matches your hair

They'll see it

Less

More

I want the pink one

So they see it

On my right and on my left

Go back to your roots he said

Go back to the house and your bed

Go back to the char and the ash he said

Go lay in the dirt and be sad

Oh look at my roots, how they burnt I said

I cry and I stand over them

I wish they would grow so I water them

Water them with my tears, they don’t grow I said

Then take me away to a place, he said

And it could make us feel safe

A place yet it wasn’t our home I said,

But home wasn’t home, not to me I said

I yearn for a place to call home he said

For all of my roots to grow back

But if I go back to that house, he said

My roots will burn all along with them

My brothers roots are burning too I said

How do I handle those flames

I water and water and water them

The flames they hurt all that I love I said

Oh why would someone from above I said

He sat and he listened to me then said

Oh he has a plan with the ash he said

But why oh why did I have to be the ash I said

When others were allowed to be trees I said

Oh I was born with my roots burnt I said

Maybe, oh,

Maybe, that’s beautiful he said

But really it all just makes me mad I said

Mad that I can’t be a tree I said

Mad I can’t be evergreen I said

Well fine go ahead and be mad he said

But the world needs people like you who are ash

To help the trees grow, and be glad

Let's be honest.

Let's be truthful.

When you meet your own eyes in the mirror

Can you recognise or a least reconsider

The apathy

That you let cling to thee

It's carefully downing you

It feels a secure embrace

But you're afloat

You've lost the boat, to passion, to joy, to meaning

It's calling out

ahoy

Where did you go

I see your eyes meet mine in the mirror

I see what once was starting to flicker

Are you but a ghost

A lost dream turning thinner.

Anyone else physically recoil when thinking about how we are made of flesh and bone. I can even look at uncooked meat, if I've seen it raw I can't eat it cooked. And if it looks like a limb I'm not eating it at all. Then I think about how my body is uncooked meat and my bones possible tools and I shudder, I feel far too close to the tendons and the blood, I feel alive, so alive that the sound of my heart is a warning and a blessing, I feel so alive I'm afraid I'll die, I'm afraid of how gruesome it is.

I try to write something, anything, but the words are only clear when I feel them press against my heart and mind. They become muffled when hands reach for them, they loose their shape.

An incoming phone call you say

And I freeze like a deer in headlights

Have I been hit, I feel blooding rushing past my ear drums

My heart is beating quick

then quicker, a fast rapid flicker

it's trying to run away, but my body won't move

Instead my body stands shock still and I watch locked in, but so far removed

I'm dizzy spinning around and round in my amygdala, a ringing is pulsing against the outside walls of it

trying to get inside

I cannot hide

Then the ringing just stops

it's stops

Incoming call is dropped and rational thinking has lost.

Hollow eyes watching the crowd

it's mid day, It's busy

People rush to stores like beds of fish

Fish with magpie eyes looking for shiny things to take back to their home

The figure watching, Is ignored

To look at those hollow eyes would mean to look at their own magpies ones

To confront the misery and their lack of it

So instead they talk louder as they walk past, they drown out a defeated "excuse m–

Or they become silent, their steps quick and their eyes down as they click and swipe

As the figure with hollow eyes watches you pretend to type.

I know right now, with everything that's going on in the world, it feels like the night will last forever, it's darkness stretching out for years and years ahead. But I have to say that one day, the soft pull of life will tug at you. You'll find yourself sitting quietly in the summer months enjoying the warm rays and the birdsongs, maybe you plant some flowers or berrys. You'll laugh till your sides ache and your heart lightens. You'll make art and get paint on your clothes and on your carpet. You'll read books your friend recommend and gush over your favourite characters together, maybe you'll write your own. That's what's getting me through, that one day it will be summer, the days soft and I'll have my book finished in my hands and maybe someone will read it. Maybe they won't. But it's things like this, the soft things, that make everything worth it.

There's a girl with my name, we don't look the same but we both huddle under covers when it rains. There's a girl who is almost my age, yet we have the same moon sign and we always forget the time. There's a girl reading what I write who comments every night and I can only hope that life treats you kindly, this girl will one day be in the ground and so will I, but I hope as you age you'll shed those debilitating fears that hold you back and hopefully we'll have lived a life of joy and mostly happy tears.

When I think of you I think of red, the red of our kitchen walls, the red that you always chose to colour your lips with or wear with your clothes. I think of my red blood rushing past my ears, I think of the sound it made.

I worry

I stress

I am a pylon

I am tangled in cables

I am no longer connected to the grid

Energy is lost

It's falls through a sieve

And all I'm left with is dust and static lint

I barely rinse

I Repeat

the same defeat of sinking into my bed

I am animated meat

suspended over my own stupid once avoidable mess.

Occam’s Razor:

Suggests that the simplest explanation,

Is the most plausible one.

Which means, to put it simply, I love you.

But how do I contain the multitude of all that I feel

Within so little?

How do I tell you,

I see the stars in you;

All my poems from here on until eternity

Will be about you;

“I love you” doesn’t do justice to the fact that

I swear I was a Universe unlike any other,

But I found you and we were always whole;

But somehow, with you next to me, we feel complete.

In my next life time, I swear I will find Occam; tell him

That there are some entities which need to be multiplied;

Not out of necessity,

But out of love.

by Anika

Images taken via Pinterest

so maybe there will be no coming of age.

maybe there will be no moment, signifying glory;

hell, maybe there will be no glory.

maybe we'll simply be two people who were here and then weren't.

the gods will not line up moments for us to scavenger hunt our purpose;

maybe we will not have a purpose.

or a god for that matter.

in one moment you're driving home and you're singing loud with your best friend;

in another you get mistaken for a man with your helmet on, the bulky death bike and then you get out of a ticket when the policeman sees your face and you come home in giggles.

in another moment you've decided to live through another day.

so maybe we will not be anything that aches when it is gone.

maybe we'll be mundane and chaotic indecision floating in an abyss of our own selves

and maybe you never get to meet that famous 2010 singer you liked as a teenager,

and you never get to learn the fourth language,

or go to that remote country

or kiss the love.

maybe there is no love here.

maybe we will go quietly, with naive hope that is false but you hold on to anyways

because if you do not have this hope to hold on to, there is nothing else.

to hope is to have the courage to pray, against all odds,

to pray that there is someone out there lining up things for you,

lining up lives and people for you to become.

to have hope is to be terrified of all the realities.

we'll go quietly, unnoticed;

and yes this does not match what we wanted to be,

but there are happy endings in all those poems and stories to make up for all the ones you never get to have in your reality.

A.G.

Our love was wine drunk

At 3 am on the kitchen floor,

We made space for each other.

We were giggles illuminated

By the fairy lights in my room.

We were lights turned off

And windows pushed wide open;

We were a clear night sky,

We were so beautiful, so pure;

Two stars besides one another,

We were bright and free.

I wrote a poem

And you thought it was for you.

I wrote an eulogy

And you thought it was

For my funeral.

To be with someone

Who thinks of nothing

But the ending

When you both are still here

Is to say there already exist

Thousands of ends in their mind.

I just wish he has also imagined

One mellow future where

We're both here and we're both okay,

No one buries us and no one burns us.

We kissed and fought wars

With our tongues,

You seemed to taste an awful lot

Like the lull after a bomb;

The quiet after the storm

When there is nothing more left

To break apart, nothing more left

To get undone.

We tore limbs and rearranged parts

Of our own selves-

Like the Jenga tiles

We never seemed

To arrange right.

We crumbled there on your bed,

And never could hold each other again,

Could never hold our own selves again.

Inevitable

We were a prolonged sunset,

Something beautiful

That we knew 

Would end in darkness anyways.

We were a mouthful of words

The tongue couldn't help but mess up.

We were a tiny cat

Who climbed the big tree

And forgot it had yet to learn 

How to come back down.

We went skydiving,

Up, up, up 

And the earth pulled us back down;

We free fell into our own demise

And made a mess,

We left chaos behind.

I am a walking grave

Of all the people

I did not let myself become.

This sadness is the only eulogy

They will ever hear.

There are skeletons which live in closets

That have been kept shut

For far too long

And the skeletons need their coffins

And the coffins their graves

And one too many graves

Makes a cemetry

I am the cemetery:

The door that locked its own kind out;

The graves, the coffins and the skeletons.

But I am alive, goddamn it!

Buried within myself

People I did not

Let myself become.

People were not meant

To carry so much of

What wasn't alive,

Coffins do no justice to the living.

Lives aren't meant

To be spent within boxes,

How the hell did

We get tricked into believing

They will do death any justice?

You are alive,

And everything

You could've been too,

Just not here.

But somewhere,

In another universe,

You exist

But are everything

You have always wanted to be,

And perhaps,

Someday in this life too.

After Indian Mystic Poet Kabir Das

Kabir walked after death,

Walked his own body to a grave.

Flowers bloomed and plucked themselves

Out of their homes,

Placed themselves in the middle

Of life and a walk to the grave

To let a man leave in peace.

Kashi born,

He walked with the conviction

He had in his knowledge,

Challenged the Orthodoxes,

Challenged the convention;

Kashi born guaranteed a place in heavens

He gave it all up,

Got himself cremated and burried at the same time,

Got himself fights throughout life

And even afterwards,

Got himself a piece of satisfaction,

Got himself legends and disciples

And angry purohits,

Got a piece of logic and equality of castes

When there were no such words

And Brahmins were gods.

Man dead already,

Looked at his funerals,

Looked at the burial

And felt his head turn towards Meccah,

Could hear the verses ring in his ears

As the soil washed over the lack of his body:

"We created you from it,

And return you into it,

And from it we will raise you a second time";

Looked at the cremation

And felt his soul return to the gods

As they proceeded with the Antim Sanskaar, chanted:

"When thou hast made him ready,

All possessing Fire,

Then do thou give him over to the Fathers,

When he attains unto the life that waits him,

He shall become subject to the will of gods".

I was not the broken thing anymore.

I cried and fought and fell

And scratched and clawed

My way back from hell.

I made an armour out of this body,

Grew my heart into a soldier,

Marched to once friendly lines

To cut off all ties

And fought you off

With all my might.

You weren't here anymore

And I grew myself a garden,

Planted my heart in its bosom;

Took the armour out to let it rust,

Felt the sunlight burn my thick skin,

And I almost could feel the years turn,

And could almost feel myself turn to dust.