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Best Poems From
ANTHONY WEIR
(13th September 1941)
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1.
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Television
It's not that images are powerful
but that consciousness -
already cursed by narrative - is weak:
everybody watches, mimics.
No-one sees.
We are all distorted
unreadable reflections of each other.
In this globalisation
hypocrisy like prurience
is a vast equaliser
making us all moral latrines
horribly disguised as clinics.
Anthony Weir
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2.
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Anti-poem
Obviously, song came before speech
and moans came before song.
Whales sing refrains and antiphons,
compose sonatas.
Darwin thought that certain fish designed their own eyes;
researchers report that the planet's remaining fish not only
like but can also recognise
the less-commercial human music.
[Perhaps a line here ending with 'status'...]
[Perhaps a line here ending with 'God'...]
I both fear and pity people who think they are better than cod
Anthony Weir
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3.
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'When you are very old...'
translation of a famous sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)
from Sonnets for Hιlθne
When you are very old, at evening, by the fire,
spinning wool by candlelight and winding it in skeins,
you will say in wonderment as you recite my lines:
'Ronsard admired me in the days when I was fair.'
Then not one of your servants dozing gently there
hearing my name's cadence break through your low repines
but will start into wakefulness out of her dreams
and bless your name - immortalised by my desire.
I'll be underneath the ground, and a boneless shade
taking my long rest in the scented myrtle-glade,
and you'll be an old woman, nodding towards life's close,
regretting my love, and regretting your disdain.
Heed me, and live for now: this time won't come again.
Come, pluck now - today - life's so quickly-fading rose.
(translation by Anthony Weir)
Anthony Weir
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4.
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People called Sioux - a Holocaust Poem
Was Shel Silverstein just being crass
in the lyric sung by Johnny Cash -
or was he being amazingly, subversively,
unamericanly ironic?
The boy was not a boy, but a lot of men and women
their name not Sue but Sioux,
and ethnically cleansed by some of American Democracy's
many land-grabs and pogroms
carried out by racist rednecks
and Ulstermen with bombs.
(many more than 9 million aboriginal Americans were killed in every possible way by Europeans)
Anthony Weir
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