Стихи и эссе

Pick a quarrel, go to war,
Leave the hero in the bar;
Hunt the lion, climb the peak:
No one guesses you are weak.

The friends of the born nurse

Are always getting worse.

I'm beginning to lose patience

With my personal relations:
They are not deep,
And they are not cheap.

I'm for freedom because I mistrust the Censor in office,

But if I held the job, my! how severe I should be!

When he is well

She gives him hell;
But she's a brick
When he is sick.

Those who will not reason

Perish in the act;
Those who will not act
Perish for that reason.

Let us honor if we can

The vertical man,
Though we value none
But the horizontal one.

Private faces

In public places
Are wiser and nicer
Than public faces
In private places.

The conversation of birds

Say very little,
But mean a great deal.

Among the mammals

Only Man has ears
That can display no emotion.

In moments of joy

All of us wish we possessed
A tail we could wag.

The shame in ageing

is not that Desire should fail
(Who mourns for something
he no longer needs?): it is
That someone else must be told.

The tyrant's device:

Whatever is Posiible
Is Necessary.

Passing Beauty

still delights him,
but he no longer
has to turn round.

Does God ever judge us

by appearances?
I suspect that He does.

Today two poems begged to be written: I had to refuse them.

Sorry, no longer, my dear! Sorry, my precious, not yet!

Only look in the mirror to detect a removable blamish,

As of the permanent ones already you know quite enough.

God never makes knots,

But is expert, if asked to,
At untying them.

A poet's hope: to be,

Like some valley cheese,
Local, but prized elsewhere.

WORDS

A sentence uttered makes a world appear
Where all things happen as it says they do;
We doubt the speaker, not the tongue we hear:
Words have no word for words that are not true.

Syntactically, though, it must be clear;

One cannot change the subject half-way through,
Nor alter tenses to appease the ear:
Arcadian tales are hard-luck stories too.

But should we want to gossip all the time,

Were fact not fiction for us at its best,
Or find a charm in syllables that rhyme,

Were not our fate by verbal chance expressed,

As rustics in a ring-dance pantomime
The Knight at some lone cross-roads of his quest?

Uncle Henry