Wednesday, December 9, 2009

"Just follow on?" by Ravin Caldera


Where are you?

Now, you mean?

I don't know!


I looked at the winding roads

on a dividing pike

as far as I could see

No end at sight

Then, took the least interested


I felt, it felt, rather,

I am something - I am nothing

I am everything - for a moment!


Just follow on - as far as it takes

Where does it go?

No one knows, I suppose . . .


Just follow on - to the end . . .

as far as I could see,

as far as I could go

as far as it goes

But, is there an end?

No, I suppose not!



whining, whining, whining . . .

Why whines all along?

Just follow on -just follow on . . .

No end at sight!

are we lost?

I don't know!

Just follow on . . .


This is my very first poem in English. I hope the readers will enjoy and made a comment about it. Thanks!

Tuesday, December 8, 2009

An Arundel Tomb by Philip Larkin


Side by side, their faces blurred,

The earl and countess lie in stone,
Their proper habits vaguely shown
As jointed armour, stiffened pleat,
And that faint hint of the absurd—
The little dogs under their feet.

Such plainness of the pre-baroque
Hardly involves the eye, until
It meets his left-hand gauntlet, still
Clasped empty in the other; and
One sees, with a sharp tender shock,
His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.

They would not think to lie so long.
Such faithfulness in effigy
Was just a detail friends would see:
A sculptor’s sweet commissioned grace
Thrown off in helping to prolong
The Latin names around the base.

They would not guess how early in
Their supine stationary voyage
The air would change to soundless damage,
Turn the old tenantry away;
How soon succeeding eyes begin
To look, not read. Rigidly they

Persisted, linked, through lengths and breadths
Of time. Snow fell, undated. Light
Each summer thronged the glass. A bright
Litter of birdcalls strewed the same
Bone-riddled ground. And up the paths
The endless altered people came,

Washing at their identity.
Now, helpless in the hollow of
An unarmorial age, a trough
Of smoke in slow suspended skeins
Above their scrap of history,
Only an attitude remains:

Time has transfigured them into
Untruth. The stone fidelity
They hardly meant has come to be
Their final blazon, and to prove
Our almost-instinct almost true:
What will survive of us is love.

Philip Larkin, “An Arundel Tomb” from Collected Poems.