indescribable

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alternation finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error, and upon me prov’d,
I never writ, not no man ever lov’d.

— William Shakespeare 

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d:
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st,
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

— William Shakespeare 

If I were to sleep, it would be on an iron bed,
bolted to the floor in a bomb-proof concrete room
with twelve locks on the door.
I wouldn’t ask for a mattress
or decorate. I wouldn’t ask for beautiful.
I’d let the philosophers in,
but not into my bed.
They’d arrive cradling their brass instruments.
I might let them play
but only very softly and only if
they didn’t fight or sing.

If I were to sleep, there wouldn’t be any windows.
There would be a skylight,
but in the middle of the floor.
I’d press my face against the glass
and stare down at other floors upon floors upon floors…
I’d do a sleep dance right on top of the skylight.
It would be a new game.
It would involve amazing feats of sleep contortion.
It would involve letters.

If I were to sleep, I would be spread-eagled across the bed,
and even with the iron struts and screws cutting into my back,
I would protect the metal frame.
I would protect the springs.

— Kate Hall (in The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology) 

Stop, said the angel. Stop doing what you were doing
     and listen.
Yes, you  can taste  the stew and add the salt
(Have you tried it with a touch of cinnamon?)
But listen to me while you’re doing it.
I am not the one who found you
The work in the Telephone Exchange.
That was a different angel.
I am the angel who says Remember,
Do you remember, the taste of the wood-sorrel leaves
In the ditches on your way to school? Go on, 
Remember, how you found them
Piercing a lattice of green blades,
And their bitter juice. The grassy roads
That swung in and out of the shade
Passing a well or a graveyard,
The gaps and stiles on the chapel path —
Their windings, their changes of path
Always escaping the casual watch you kept —
You must go back and look at them again,
And look again the next day, for they change,
There is new growth, or the dew is packed like a blanket.
Later come rose hips and the bloom of sloes,
And you must be there to see them. Your children will find
The sweet drop in the fuschia flower, swallow it down;
They will run from the summer shower, but your work is
     to stay,
To hold the post of the starved pikeman, grasping upright
The borrowed long ladder. After the rain
Dries off your shrinking shirt, the blue flower
Will shine up from the aftergrass where it nestled.
You will have to guess the size of the steam rising,
How it frees itself, sliding up off the field
At the time when the beeches are dropping their mast,
When the sloes are ripe in the hedge, you might still
Find the taste there, among the last of the grain.

— Eilean Ni Chuilleanain (in The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology) 

I cannot see my mother’s face;
no longer know my father’s name.
It’s the forgetting of the world
keeps me sane.

A stranger’s laugh, a neighbour’s death;
my wife’s despair, my daughter’s grief.
It’s the forgetting of the world
gives me breath.

The hungry, old, surrounding sea,
heavens at a field’s worn edge in me.
It’s the forgetting of the world
sets us free.

— John Glenday (in The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology) 

This is my formula for the fall of things:
we come to a river we always knew we’d have to cross.
It ferries the twilight down through fieldworks

of corn and half-blown sunflowers.
The only sounds, one lost cicada calling to itself
and the piping of a bird that will never have a name.

Now tell me there is a pause
where we know there should be an end;
then tell me you too imagined it this way

with our shadows never quite touching the river
and the river never quite reaching the sea. 

— John Glenday (in The 2010 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology)

Red was your colour.
If not red, then white. But red
Was what you wrapped around you.
Blood-red. Was it blood?
Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?
Haematite to make immortal
The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

 When you had your way finally
Our room was red. A judgement chamber.
Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood
Patterned with darkenings, congealments.
The curtains — ruby corduroy blood,
Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor
The cushions the same. The same
Raw carmine along the window-seat.
A throbbing cell. Aztec altar — temple.

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness. 

And outside the window
Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail
As the skin of blood,
Salvias, that your father named you after,
Like blood lobbing from the gash,
And roses, the heart’s last gouts,
Catastrophic, arterial, doomed. 

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,
A lavish burgundy.
Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.

You revelled in red.
I felt it raw — like crisp gauze edges
Of a stiffening wound. I could touch
The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

 Everything you painted you painted white
Then splashed it with roses, defeated it,
Leaned over it, dripping roses,
Weeping roses, and more roses,
Then sometimes, among them, a little blue bird.

Blue was better for you. Blue was wings.
Kingfisher blue silks from San Francisco
Folded your pregnancy
In crucible caresses.
Blue was your kindly spirit — not a ghoul
But electrified, a guardian, thoughtful. 

In the pit of red
You hid from the bone-clinic whiteness.

But the jewel you lost was blue.  

— Ted Hughes

My luve is like a red, red rose,
     That’s newly sprung in June:
My luve is like the melodie,
     That’s sweetly play’d in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonie lass,
     So deep in luve am I,
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
     Till a’ the seas gang dry.

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
     And the rocks melt w’ the sun!
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
     While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare-thee-weel, my only luve,
     And fare-thee-weel a while!
And I will come again, my luve,
     Tho’ it were ten-thousand mile.

— Robert Burns 

My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun;
Coral is far more red than her lips’ red;
If snow be white, why then her breasts are dun;
If hairs be wires, black wires grow on her head.
I have seen roses damasked, red and white,
But no such roses see I in her cheeks,
And in some perfumes is there more delight
Than in the breath that from my mistress reeks.
I love to hear her speak, yet well I know
That music hath a far more pleasing sound.
I grant I never saw a goddess go;
My mistress when she walks treads on the ground.
     And yet, by heaven, I think my love as rare
     As any she belied with false compare.

— William Shakespeare