Slowly the women file to where he stands
Upright in rimless glasses, silver hair,
Dark suit, white collar. Stewards tirelessly
Persuade them onwards to his voice and hands,
Within whose warm spring rain of loving care
Each dwells some twenty seconds. Now, dear child,
What’s wrong, the deep American voice demands,
And, scarcely pausing, goes into a prayer
Directing God about this eye, that knee.
Their heads are clasped abruptly; then, exiled
Like losing thoughts, they go in silence; some
Sheepishly stray, not back into their lives
Just yet; but some stay stiff, twitching and loud
With deep hoarse tears, as if a kind of dumb
And idiot child within them still survives
To re-awake at kindness, thinking a voice
At last calls them alone, that hands have come
To lift and lighten; and such joy arrives
Their thick tongues blort, their eyes squeeze grief, a crowd
Of huge unheard answers jam and rejoice –
What’s wrong! Moustached in flowered frocks they shake:
By now, all’s wrong. In everyone there sleeps
A sense of life lived according to love.
To some it means the difference they could make
By loving others, but across most it sweeps
As all they might have done had they been loved.
That nothing cures. An immense slackening ache,
As when, thawing, the rigid landscape weeps,
Spreads slowly through them; that, and the voice above
Saying Dear child, and all time has disproved.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Knoxville Tennessee by Nikki Giovanni
- Teignmouth: “Some Doggerel,” Sent In A Letter To B. R. Haydon poem – John Keats poems
- Cavern in Paradise by Rita Odessa Villaruel
- Selfish World, Selfish People by Shahbaz Khan
- Ione, Dead the Long Year poem – Ezra Pound poems
- in_between_the_strophes.html
- Lines to a Gentleman who sent a Newspaper by Robert Burns
- Юнна Мориц – Вечерний свет
- Владимир Бенедиктов – Улетевшим мечтам
- Composed By The Sea-Side, Near Calais, August 1802 by William Wordsworth
- Chanting the Square Deific. by Walt Whitman
- The Falling Of The Leaves by William Butler Yeats
- Elegy, Imitated From One Of Akenside’s Blank-Verse Inscriptions by Samuel Taylor Coleridge
- Dockery And Son by Philip Larkin
- Depths
Some external links:
Duckduckgo.com – the alternative in the US
Quant.com – a search engine from France, and also an alternative, at least for Europe
Yandex – the Russian search engine (it’s probably the best search engine for image searches).

Philip Arthur Larkin (1922-1985), Commander of the Order of the British Empire, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Cavalier of the Order of the Companions of Honour, was an English poet, novelist, and librarian.