Phallus: Alec Derwent Hope This was the gods’ god, The leashed divinity, Divine divining rod And Me within the me. By mindlight tower and tree Its shadow on the ground Throw, and in darkness she Whose weapon is her wound Fends off the knife, the...
Conquistador: Alec Derwent Hope I sing of the decline of Henry Clay Who loved a white girl of uncommon size. Although a small man in a little way, He had in him some seed of enterprise. Each day he caught the seven-thirty train To work,...
The School of Night: Alec Derwent Hope What did I study in your School of Night? When your mouth’s first unfathomable yes Opened your body to be my book, I read My answers there and learned the spell aright, Yet, though I searched and...
Crossing the Frontier: Alec Derwent Hope Crossing the frontier they were stopped in time, Told, quite politely, they would have to wait: Passports in order, nothing to declare And surely holding hands was not a crime Until they saw how, ranged across the gate, All...
The Return of Persephone: Alec Derwent Hope Gliding through the still air, he made no sound; Wing-shod and deft, dropped almost at her feet, And searched the ghostly regiments and found The living eyes, the tremor of breath, the beat Of blood in all that...
Easter Hymn: Alec Derwent Hope Make no mistake; there will be no forgiveness; No voice can harm you and no hand will save; Fenced by the magic of deliberate darkness You walk on the sharp edges of the wave; Trouble with soul again the putrefaction...
Morning Coffee: Alec Derwent Hope Reading the menu at the morning service: – Iced Venusberg perhaps, or buttered bum – Orders the usual sex-ersatz, and, nervous, Glances around – Will she or won’t she come? The congregation dissected into pews Gulping their strip teas in...
Meditation on a Bone: Alec Derwent Hope A piece of bone, found at Trondhjem in 1901, with the following runic inscription (about A.D. 1050) cut on it: I loved her as a maiden; I will not trouble Erlend’s detestable wife; better she should be a...
The Gateway: Alec Derwent Hope Now the heart sings with all its thousand voices To hear this city of cells, my body, sing. The tree through the stiff clay at long last forces Its thin strong roots and taps the secret spring. And the sweet...
Standardization: Alec Derwent Hope When, darkly brooding on this Modern Age, The journalist with his marketable woes Fills up once more the inevitable page Of fatuous, flatulent, Sunday-paper prose; Whenever the green aesthete starts to whoop With horror at the house not made with hands...
