Tuesday 10 April 2012

3 poems from D H Lawrence


PEACE

Peace is written on the doorstep
In lava.

Peace, black peace congealed.
My heart will know no peace
Till the hill bursts.

Brilliant, intolerable lava,
Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass,
Walking like a royal snake down the mountain towards the sea.

Forests, cities, bridges
Gone again in the bright trail of lava.
Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots,
And now the olive leaves thousands of feet below the lava fire.

Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep.
Within, white-hot lava, never at peace
Till it burst forth blinding, withering the earth;
To set again into rock,
Grey-black rock.

Call it Peace?


from GRAPES

Once God was all negroid, as now he is fair.
But it's so long ago, the ancient Bushman has forgotten more utterly than we, who have never known.

For we are on the brink of re-memberance.
Which, I suppose is why America has gone dry.
Our pale day is sinking into twilight,
And if we sip the wine, we find dreams coming upon us
Out of the imminent night.
Nay, we find ourselves crossing the fern-scented frontiers
Of the world before the floods, where man was dark and evasive
And the tiny vine-flower rose of all roses, perfumed,
And all in naked communion communicating as now our clothed vision can never communicate.
Vistas, down dark avenues,
As we sip the wine.
The grape is swart, the avenues dusky and tendrilled, subtly prehensile,
But we, as we start awake, clutch at our vistas democratic, boulevards, tram-cars, policemen.
Give us our own back,
Let us go to the soda-fountain, to get sober.


RUINATION

The sun is bleeding its fires upon the mist
That huddles in grey heaps coiling and holding back.
Like cliffs abutting in shadow of a dead grey sea
Some street-ends thrust forward their stack.

On the misty waste lands, away from the flushing grey
Of the morning, the elms are loftily dimmed, and tall
As if moving in air towards us, tall angels
Of darkness advancing steadily over us all.

D H Lawrence (1885 - 1930)


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