Stars and Jasmine
by Maurice Riordan
Each of them has been a god many times:
cat, hedgehog and – our summer interloper – the tortoise.
A perfect triangle, they can neither eat
nor marry one another.
And tonight they are gods
under the jasmine under the stars.
Already the hedgehog has scoffed the cat’s supper
and she’s walked nonplussed beside him
escaping headlong into the bushes.
Wisely now, she keeps an eye on him there,
and on the tortoise
noisily criss-crossing the gravel.
For the cat, jasmine is white
but the stars have colours.
For the hedgehog, there are no stars
only a sky of jasmine,
against which he sniffs something dark,
outlined like a bird of prey.
Wisely, the tortoise ignores both jasmine and stars.
Isn’t it enough, she says, to carry the sky on your back,
a sky that is solid, mathematical and delicately coloured –
on which someone, too, has painted
our neighbours’ address: 9a Surrey Rd.
Come September, we will post her through their letterbox.
End of the poem
15 random poems
- Rain by Shel Silverstein
- Oil And Blood by William Butler Yeats
- In Honour Of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez poem – Gerard Manley Hopkins poems
- From The North by Sara Teasdale
- Cousin Nancy by T. S. Eliot
- FLORECER by Manolo Arriola
- O my faithful by Priyanka Tungana
- The Beast by Sylvia Plath
- Untitled VII by Yunus Emre
- Epistle to Hugh Parker by Robert Burns
- At Last She Comes by Robert Louis Stevenson
- If I Were a Tree by Norma Martiri
- John Kinsella’s Lament For Mrs. Mary Moore by William Butler Yeats
- Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck (Sonnet 14) by William Shakespeare
- Василий Жуковский – Адельстан
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).
