New and Selected Poems (11 page)

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Authors: Ted Hughes

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BOOK: New and Selected Poems
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Full Moon and Little Frieda
 
 

A cool small evening shrunk to a dog bark and the clank of a bucket –

 

And you listening.

A spider’s web, tense for the dew’s touch.

A pail lifted, still and brimming – mirror

To tempt a first star to a tremor.

 

Cows are going home in the lane there, looping the hedges with their warm wreaths of breath –

A dark river of blood, many boulders,

Balancing unspilled milk.

 

‘Moon!’ you cry suddenly, ‘Moon! Moon!’

 

The moon has stepped back like an artist gazing amazed at a work

 

That points at him amazed.

 
Wodwo
 
 

What am I? Nosing here, turning leaves over

Following a faint stain on the air to the river’s edge

I enter water. What am I to split

The glassy grain of water looking upward I see the bed

Of the river above me upside down very clear

What am I doing here in mid-air? Why do I find

this frog so interesting as I inspect its most secret

interior and make it my own? Do these weeds

know me and name me to each other have they

seen me before, do I fit in their world? I seem

separate from the ground and not rooted but dropped

out of nothing casually I’ve no threads

fastening me to anything I can go anywhere

I seem to have been given the freedom

of this place what am I then? And picking

bits of bark off this rotten stump gives me

no pleasure and it’s no use so why do I do it

me and doing that have coincided very queerly

But what shall I be called am I the first

have I an owner what shape am I what

shape am I am I huge if I go

to the end on this way past these trees and past these trees

till I get tired that’s touching one wall of me

for the moment if I sit still how everything

stops to watch me I suppose I am the exact centre

but there’s all this what is it roots

roots roots roots and here’s the water

again very queer but I’ll go on looking

 
from
CROW
 
 
Two Legends 
 
 
I
 

Black was the without eye

Black the within tongue

Black was the heart

Black the liver, black the lungs

Unable to suck in light

Black the blood in its loud tunnel

Black the bowels packed in furnace

Black too the muscles

Striving to pull out into the light

Black the nerves, black the brain

With its tombed visions

Black also the soul, the huge stammer

Of the cry that, swelling, could not

Pronounce its sun.

 
II
 

Black is the wet otter’s head, lifted.

Black is the rock, plunging in foam.

Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.

 

Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,

An egg of blackness

Where sun and moon alternate their weathers

 

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow

Bent in emptiness

                              over emptiness

 

But flying

 
Lineage
 
 

In the beginning was Scream

Who begat Blood

Who begat Eye

Who begat Fear

Who begat Wing

Who begat Bone

Who begat Granite

Who begat Violet

Who begat Guitar

Who begat Sweat

Who begat Adam

Who begat Mary

Who begat God

Who begat Nothing

Who begat Never

Never Never Never

 

Who begat Crow

 

Screaming for Blood

Grubs, crusts

Anything

 

Trembling featherless elbows in the nest’s filth

 
Examination at the Womb-Door
 
 

Who owns these scrawny little feet?
Death.

Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face?
Death.

Who owns these still-working lungs?
Death.

Who owns this utility coat of muscles?
Death.

Who owns these unspeakable guts?
Death.

Who owns these questionable brains?
Death.

All this messy blood?
Death.
 

 

These minimum-efficiency eyes?
Death.

This wicked little tongue?
Death.

This occasional wakefulness?
Death.
 

 

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?

Held.
 

 

Who owns the whole rainy, stony earth?
Death.

Who owns all of space?
Death.
 

 

Who is stronger than hope?
Death.

Who is stronger than the will?
Death.

Stronger than love?
Death.

Stronger than life?
Death.
 

 

But who is stronger than death?

                                            
Me,
evidently.

 

Pass, Crow.

 
A Childish Prank
 
 

Man’s and woman’s bodies lay without souls,

Dully gaping, foolishly staring, inert

On the flowers of Eden.

God pondered.

 

The problem was so great, it dragged him asleep.

 

Crow laughed.

He bit the Worm, God’s only son,

Into two writhing halves.

 

He stuffed into man the tail half

With the wounded end hanging out.

 

He stuffed the head half headfirst into woman

And it crept in deeper and up

To peer out through her eyes

 

Calling its tail-half to join up quickly, quickly

Because O it was painful.

 

Man awoke being dragged across the grass.

Woman awoke to see him coming.

Neither knew what had happened.

 

God went on sleeping.

 

Crow went on laughing.

 
Crow’s First Lesson
 
 

God tried to teach Crow how to talk.

‘Love,’ said God. ‘Say, Love.’

Crow gaped, and the white shark crashed into the sea

And went rolling downwards, discovering its own depth.

 

‘No, no,’ said God. ‘Say Love. Now try it. LOVE.’

Crow gaped, and a bluefly, a tsetse, a mosquito

Zoomed out and down

To their sundry flesh-pots.

 

‘A final try,’ said God. ‘Now, LOVE.’

Crow convulsed, gaped, retched and

Man’s bodiless prodigious head

Bulbed out onto the earth, with swivelling eyes,

Jabbering protest –

 

And Crow retched again, before God could stop him.

And woman’s vulva dropped over man’s neck and tightened.

The two struggled together on the grass.

God struggled to part them, cursed, wept –

 

Crow flew guiltily off.

 
That Moment
 
 

When the pistol muzzle oozing blue vapour

Was lifted away

Like a cigarette lifted from an ashtray

 

And the only face left in the world

Lay broken

Between hands that relaxed, being too late

 

And the trees closed forever

And the streets closed forever

 

And the body lay on the gravel

Of the abandoned world

Among abandoned utilities

Exposed to infinity forever

 

Crow had to start searching for something to eat.

 
Crow Tyrannosaurus
 
 

Creation quaked voices –

It was a cortege

Of mourning and lament

Crow could hear and he looked around fearfully.

 

The swift’s body fled past

Pulsating

With insects

And their anguish, all it had eaten.

 

The cat’s body writhed

Gagging

A tunnel

Of incoming death-struggles, sorrow on sorrow.

 

And the dog was a bulging filterbag

Of all the deaths it had gulped for the flesh and the bones.

It could not digest their screeching finales.

Its shapeless cry was a blort of all those voices.

 

Even man he was a walking

Abattoir

Of innocents –

His brain incinerating their outcry.

 

Crow thought ‘Alas

Alas ought I

To stop eating

And try to become the light?’

 

But his eye saw a grub. And his head, trapsprung, stabbed.

And he listened

And he heard

Weeping

 

Grubs grubs He stabbed he stabbed

Weeping

Weeping

 

Weeping he walked and stabbed

 

Thus came the eye’s

                                  roundness

                                                the ear’s

                                                            deafness.

 
The Black Beast
 
 

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow, like an owl, swivelled his head.

Where is the Black Beast?

 

Crow hid in its bed, to ambush it.

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow sat in its chair, telling loud lies against the Black Beast.

Where is it?

Crow shouted after midnight, pounding the wall with a last.

Where is the Black Beast?

Crow split his enemy’s skull to the pineal gland.

Where is the Black Beast? 

 

Crow crucified a frog under a microscope, he peered into the brain of a dogfish.

Where is the Black Beast?

 

Crow roasted the earth to a clinker, he charged into space –

Where is the Black Beast?

 

The silences of space decamped, space flitted in every direction –

Where is the Black Beast?

 

Crow flailed immensely through the vacuum, he screeched after the disappearing stars –

Where is it? Where is the Black Beast?

 
Crow’s Account of the Battle
 
 

There was this terrific battle.

The noise was as much

As the limits of possible noise could take.

There were screams higher groans deeper

Than any ear could hold.

Many eardrums burst and some walls

Collapsed to escape the noise.

Everything struggled on its way

Through this tearing deafness

As through a torrent in a dark cave.

 

The cartridges were banging off, as planned,

The fingers were keeping things going

According to excitement and orders.

The unhurt eyes were full of deadliness.

The bullets pursued their courses

Through clods of stone, earth and skin,

Through intestines, pocket-books, brains, hair, teeth

According to Universal laws.

And mouths cried ‘Mamma’

From sudden traps of calculus,

Theorems wrenched men in two,

Shock-severed eyes watched blood

Squandering as from a drain-pipe

Into the blanks between stars.

Faces slammed down into clay

As for the making of a life-mask

Knew that even on the sun’s surface

They could not be learning more or more to the point.

Reality was giving its lesson,

Its mishmash of scripture and physics,

With here, brains in hands, for example,

And there, legs in a treetop.

 

There was no escape except into death.

And still it went on – it outlasted

Many prayers, many a proved watch,

Many bodies in excellent trim,

Till the explosives ran out

And sheer weariness supervened

And what was left looked round at what was left.

 

Then everybody wept,

Or sat, too exhausted to weep,

Or lay, too hurt to weep.

 

And when the smoke cleared it became clear

This had happened too often before

And was going to happen too often in future

And happened too easily

Bones were too like lath and twigs

Blood was too like water

Cries were too like silence

The most terrible grimaces too like footprints in mud

And shooting somebody through the midriff

Was too like striking a match

Too like potting a snooker ball

Too like tearing up a bill

Blasting the whole world to bits

Was too like slamming a door

Too like dropping in a chair

Exhausted with rage

Too like being blown to bits yourself

Which happened too easily

With too like no consequences.

 

So the survivors stayed.

And the earth and the sky stayed.

Everything took the blame. 

 

Not a leaf flinched, nobody smiled.

 

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