Year 9 poetry anthology:

Parents, families and relationships.

Sonnet 116 ‘Let me not to the marriage…’

Let me not to the marriage of true mindsAdmit impediments; love is not loveWhich alters when it alteration finds,Or bends with the remover to remove. O no, it is an ever-fixèd markThat 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 proved,I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

William Shakespeare

Poem at Thirty-Nine

How I miss my father.I wish he had not beenso tiredwhen I was born.Writing deposit slips and checksI think of him.He taught me how.This is the form, he must have said:the way it is done.I learned to seebits of paperas a way to escapethe life he knewand even in high schoolhad a savingsaccount. He taught methat telling the truth

did not always meana beating;though many of my truths must have grieved himbefore the end.How I miss my father!He cooked like a persondancing in a yoga meditationand craved the voluptuoussharingof good food.Now I look and cook just like him:my brain light;tossing this and thatinto the pot;seasoning none of my lifethe same way twice; happy to feed whoever strays my way.He would have grownto admirethe woman I’ve become:cooking, writing, chopping wood, staring into the fire.

Alice Walker

Remember

Remember me when I am gone away,Gone far away into the silent land;When you can no more hold me by the hand,Nor I half turn to go yet turning stay.Remember me when no more day by dayYou tell me of our future that you planned:Only remember me; you understandIt will be late to counsel then or pray.Yet if you should forget me for a whileAnd afterwards remember, do not grieve:For if the darkness and corruption leaveA vestige of the thoughts that once I had,Better by far you should forget and smileThan that you should remember and be sad.

Christina Rossetti

Brendon Gallacher (For my brother Maxie)He was seven and I was six, my Brendon Gallacher.He was Irish and I was Scottish, my Brendon Gallacher.His father was in prison; he was a cat burglar.My father was a communist party full-time worker.He had six brothers and I had one, my Brendon Gallacher.He would hold my hand and take me by the riverWhere we’d talk all about his family being poor.He’d get his mum out of Glasgow when he got older.A wee holiday someplace nice. Some place far.I’d tell my mum about Brendon Gallacher.How his mum drank and his daddy was a cat burglar.And she’d say, ‘why not have him round for dinner?’No, no, I’d say he’s got big holes in his trousers.I like meeting him by the burn in the open air.Then one day after we’d been friends for two years,One day when it was pouring and I was indoors,My mum says to me, ‘I was talking to Mrs MoirWho lives next door to your Brendon GallacherDidn’t you say his address was 24 Novar?She says here are No Gallachers at 24 NovarThere never have been any Gallachers next door.’And he died then, my Brendon Gallacher,Flat out on my bedroom floor, his spiky hair,His impish grin, his funny flapping ear.Oh Brendon. Oh my Brendon Gallacher.

Jackie Kay

The Voice

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you wereWhen you had changed from the one who was all to

me,But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,Standing as when I drew near to the townWhere you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you

then,Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessnessTravelling across the wet mead to me here,You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,Heard no more again far or near?

      Thus I; faltering forward,      Leaves around me falling,Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,      And the woman calling.

BY THOMAS HARDY

Before You Were MineI'm ten years away from the corner you laugh onwith your pals, Maggie McGeeney and Jean Duff.The three of you bend from the waist, holdingeach other, or your knees, and shriek at the pavement.Your polka-dot dress blows round your legs. Marilyn.

I'm not here yet. The thought of me doesn't occurin the ballroom with the thousand eyes, the fizzy, movie tomorrowsthe right walk home could bring. I knew you would dancelike that. Before you were mine, your Ma stands at the closewith a hiding for the late one. You reckon it's worth it.

The decade ahead of my loud, possessive yell was the best one, eh?I remember my hands in those high-heeled red shoes, relics,and now your ghost clatters toward me over George Squaretill I see you, clear as scent, under the tree,with its lights, and whose small bites on your neck, sweetheart?

Cha cha cha! You'd teach me the steps on the way home from Mass,stamping stars from the wrong pavement. Even thenI wanted the bold girl winking in Portobello, somewherein Scotland, before I was born. That glamorous love lastswhere you sparkle and waltz and laugh before you were mine.

Carol Anne Duffy

DIGGING: Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb   The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping sound   When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:   My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds   Bends low, comes up twenty years away   Stooping in rhythm through potato drills   Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft   Against the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deepTo scatter new potatoes that we picked,Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade.   Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a dayThan any other man on Toner’s bog.Once I carried him milk in a bottleCorked sloppily with paper. He straightened upTo drink it, then fell to right awayNicking and slicing neatly, heaving sodsOver his shoulder, going down and downFor the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slapOf soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edgeThrough living roots awaken in my head.But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests.I’ll dig with it.