I AM NOT MOSES

Sir Edward Coley Burne-Jones … Singing Angels (‘Honesty’) Tapestry 1898 (detail)

Do I just pretend to be open
am I a charlatan at heart
how sincere 
how honest 
when push 
comes to shove 
when the chips are down 
what remains
that is true to my intent

Have I forsaken my promise 
my desire to be me
openly faithful 
truly chaste 
a compassionate soul
struggling for honesty
and resolved to lead
into the Promised Land

My poems are 
imagination’s creatures
but still
slave to whim 
to make-believe 
and the pre-determined end
does this condemn me to 
reach a bargain
to fudge the truth

If so then
has that truth 
become another lie 
or does it just allow me
a latitude
a breadth of narrative 
which covers up 
the shallowness of my intent

I compromise surely
make accommodations to reality
inhibited by
thoughts of entitlement 
feelings of worth
desire to please 
to purchase credibility
a mercenary versifier
forever regretting
that this facade 
must be negotiated
with my better judgement
not wanting to hurt 
protecting decorum and 
further weakening honesty 
effectively
dissolving the truth

And yet 
rather this 
than face the rejection 
that surely would follow 
as always 
the truth that 
no – I am no wunderkind
not tomorrow’s success
nor Destiny’s child
just waiting
to be found

Moses Discovered In The Bulrush  

Stephen Spender

(Poem No.39 of my favourite short poems)

Sir John Everett Millais … ‘Bubbles’ 1886 – Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight

My Parents Kept me from Children Who Were Rough

My parents kept me from children who were rough
and who threw words like stones and who wore torn clothes.
Their thighs showed through rags. They ran in the street
And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron
And their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms.
I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys
Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

They were lithe, they sprang out behind hedges
Like dogs to bark at our world. They threw mud
And I looked another way, pretending to smile,
I longed to forgive them, yet they never smiled.

. . . by Stephen Spender

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Spender’s disability of having a club foot and a stammer intensely affected his childhood memories, particular those of rejection by his peers.  As a grown man and a distinguished poet and author, he expressed those feelings of early rejection, of being an outsider in this moving poem which, in some ways, is akin to Philip Larkin’s remembered distaste felt for the way his parents had brought him up (See: ‘This Be The Verse’   ).  Spender regretted his parents keeping him in a ‘bubble’, protecting him as they saw it, while all the time he had wanted just to be ‘one of them’.

Some of my readers will recall that I used Spender’s phrase “threw words like stones” in my recent poem:  ‘The Black House’  (q.v.).

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No Way To Treat A Lady

 

LOVE  DISCARDED

The way to treat a lady when you’re tired
Is not to dump her in a bin and run.
Why not admit that she you once admired
Has lost your love and now your chapter’s done.

To tip her in a bin head first was cruel,
Forgetting all the love she gave to you.
For once she was your all transcendent jewel;
A wretched end was not the thing to do.

She was owed far better from her erstwhile lover,
A fitting end would be a parting prayer,
To let goodbyes be said, the party’s over,
And move on to the next furtive affair.

We hope your new amour will treat you better
Than you deserve, you two-faced cheating brute.
Perhaps she’ll send that candid scarlet letter,
The one which spills the beans on your repute.

Just remember this my callous Casanova.
That when you end your defunct escapades.
When all that great ferment at last is over,
Then, what you sow you’ll truly reap in spades.

I took these two photographs in 2009 at a garden centre in Surrey, England … WHB

 

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