Read Essential Poems from the Staying Alive Trilogy for Free Online Page B

the luck begins, it’s like a wedding,
    which is like love, which is like everything.
    ALICE OSWALD

An Arundel Tomb
    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    His hand withdrawn, holding her hand.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

Love after Love
    The time will come
    when, with elation,
    you will greet yourself arriving
    at your own door, in your own mirror
    and each will smile at the other’s welcome,
    and say, sit here. Eat.
    You will love again the stranger who was your self.
    Give wine. Give bread, Give back your heart
    to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
    all your life, whom you ignored
    for another, who knows you by heart.
    Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
    the photographs, the desperate notes,
    peel your own image from the mirror.
    Sit. Feast on your life.
    DEREK WALCOTT

Missing God
    His grace is no longer called for
    before meals: farmed fish multiply
    without His intercession.
    Bread production rises through
    disease-resistant grains devised
    scientifically to mitigate His faults.
    Yet, though we rebelled against Him
    like adolescents, uplifted to see
    an oppressive father banished –
    a bearded hermit – to the desert,
    we confess to missing Him at times.
    Miss Him during the civil wedding
    when, at the blossomy altar
    of the registrar’s desk, we wait in vain
    to be fed a line containing words
    like ‘everlasting’ and ‘divine’.
    Miss Him when the TV scientist
    explains the cosmos through equations,
    leaving our planet to revolve on its axis
    aimlessly, a wheel skidding in snow.
    Miss Him when the radio catches a snatch
    of plainchant from some echoey priory;
    when the gospel choir raises its collective voice
    to ask Shall We Gather at the River?
    or the forces of the oratorio converge
    on I Know That My Redeemer Liveth
    and our contracted hearts lose a beat.
    Miss Him when a choked voice at
    the crematorium recites the poem
    about fearing no more the heat of the sun.
    Miss Him when we stand in judgement
    on a lank Crucifixion in an art museum,
    its stripe-like ribs testifying to rank.
    Miss Him when the gamma-rays
    recorded on the satellite graph
    seem arranged into a celestial score,
    the music of the spheres,
    the Ave Verum Corpus of the observatory lab.
    Miss Him when we stumble on the breast lump
    for the first time and an involuntary prayer
    escapes our lips; when a shadow crosses
    our bodies on an x-ray screen; when we receive
    a transfusion of foaming blood
    sacrificed anonymously to save life.
    Miss Him when we exclaim His name
    spontaneously in awe or anger
    as a woman in the birth ward
    calls to her long-dead