Kenneth Allott poems

Kenneth Allott(29 August 1912 - 1973 / Glamorganshire/ South Wales)

The Statue

- by Kenneth Allott 45

I take you looking at the statue
the smile is yours and the stone is you
the stone is simple and the smile is playful
the smile is stolen and the stone is fallen
I ask you to stand and smile like that until
thinking you stone, time has forgotten you.
They say but really I forget

however picturesque
however figurative
whether so often and so quizzical
whoever it was crying in another voice ...
Let us sit like tailors. At least 1 am sure of this:
man or woman or beast I recall no face.

The night is kind so please to bend your arm
hide your head in the hollow of your arm
nobody will take you unawares, nobody
and nobody will take you unprepared
for time it is now to step out of time
and sleep will come as easy as kiss my hand
and you will find sleep kind.

Sleep has few terrors if we sleep like you
it is a cooling shower that falls on you
the water running through mirrors noiselessly
dreaming in doing things you dreamt to do.

But now all brawn Colossus straightens up
and stammers in the language of birds
and the sea goes mincing back into the sunset
strange to have lived so long upon this planet
daylight and moonlight, all the fun in the world.

Ragnarok

- by Kenneth Allott 42

Our Trojan world is polarised to mourn;
To dream and find a black spot on the sun,
And wake to love and find our lover gone.

The destination of any weapon is grief.
In homesteads now where joy must seem naive
Under a splitting sky our women conceive.

The towns of houses, massed security
Out-generalled by a later century,
Are hearse-plumes on an old economy.

The ache of crushed walls when the raid is over.
This is a house, we said, we have built forever:
A two-backed fool, thinking of one day's weather.

Only one monster has to love his error.
Only his wrangling heart cannot recover,
But glories in illusion when half cadaver;

Or likes being ill, or nurses grievances,
Or calls a mountain or a forest 'his',
Or quarrels in five hundred languages.

And man, erect, unvenerable,
A bloodshot eye so simply vulnerable
That half his history is marginal,

Incises stone in the Bastille of hate:
'Give us this day before it is too late
Something to love indeed, enough to eat.'