They don’t want to be your hedge,Your barrier, your living wall, the no-goGo-between between your propertyAnd the prying of dogs and strangers. They don’tWant to settle any of your old squabblesInside or out of bounds. Their new growthIn eight-foot shoots goes thrusting straightUp in the air each April or goes offHalf-cocked sideways to recconoiterWilder dimensions:Continue reading “For a row of laurel shrubs”
Author Archives: Robin
Cantata on the Day of Lenin’s Death
(21 Jan 1924) by Bertolt Brecht The road to hell is paved with good intentions and for the past two years I have saved this cantata so that I could post it on the centenary of Lenin’s death. That was yesterday – I missed it. Never mind, better late than never.1.The day Lenin passed awayAContinue reading “Cantata on the Day of Lenin’s Death”
Dream Barker
by Jean Valentine We met for supper in your flat-bottomed boat.I got there first: in a white dress: I rememberWondering if you’d come. Then you shot over the bank,A Virgilian Nigger Jim, and poled us offTo a little sea-food barker’s cave you knew.What’ll you have? you said. Eaves hung down,Bamboozled claws hung up from theContinue reading “Dream Barker”
January
by John Updike The days are shortThe sun a sparkHung thin betweenThe dark and darkFat snowy footstepsTrack the floorMilk bottles burstOutside the door.The river isA frozen placeHeld still beneathThe trees of lace.The sky is lowThe wind is gray.The radiatorPurrs all day.
It takes a tough wake-up call to tell you that you’re in the wrong job
The time has come, the walrus said, to talk of many things; of shoes and ships; and sealing wax; of cabbages and kings. If I am the walrus (not the one the Beatles sang about) then Marion was not the carpenter, but the gardener, and a time did come when we had to talk ofContinue reading “It takes a tough wake-up call to tell you that you’re in the wrong job”
Houses of Dreams
by Sarah Teasdale You took my empty dreamsAnd filled them every oneWith tenderness and nobleness,April and the sun.The old empty dreamsWhere my thoughts would throngAre all too full of happinessTo even hold a song.Oh, the empty dreams were dimAnd the empty dreams were wide,They were sweet and shadowy housesWhere my thoughts could hide.But you tookContinue reading “Houses of Dreams”
All the World’s a Stage
by William Shakespeare All the world’s a stage,And all the men and women merely players;They have their exits and their entrances,And one man in his life plays many parts,His acts being seven stages. At first, the infant,Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchelAnd shining morning face, creeping like aContinue reading “All the World’s a Stage”
A Birthday
by Christina Rossetti My heart is like a singing birdWhose nest is in a water’d shoot;My heart is like an apple-treeWhose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;My heart is like a rainbow shellThat paddles in a halcyon sea;My heart is gladder than all theseBecause my love has come to me.Raise me a dais of silkContinue reading “A Birthday”
What a carry on as I start having second thoughts on my new career
It’s been a while since I recounted any of the chronological episodes of my life and I left you fairly early in my new role as manager of an Odeon cinema in London – Camden Town to be precise. It’s strange the period from me going to work for Harry Corbett and my move intoContinue reading “What a carry on as I start having second thoughts on my new career”
Street in Agrigentum
by Salvatore Quasimodo There is still the wind that I rememberfiring the manes of horses, racingslanting, across the plains,the wind that stains and scours the sandstone,and the heart of gloomy columns, telamons,Overthrown in the grass. Spirit of the ancients, greywith the rancour, return on the wind,breathe in that feather-light mossthat covers those giants, hurled downContinue reading “Street in Agrigentum”
Robin's Nest 