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
- Кондратий Рылеев – Меня пленяли наши деды
- The Wanderer
- Adam Armour’s Prayer by Robert Burns
- A Forgetful Number by Vasko Popa
- The Fathers by Siegfried Sassoon
- Images by Mary Etta Metcalf
- Robert Burns: One Night As I Did Wander:
- Владимир Маяковский – В России голод… (Главполитпросвет № 236)
- Николай Некрасов – Внимая ужасам войны
- Огюст Барбье – Прогресс
- Олег Григорьев – Стаканы
- The Coin by Sara Teasdale
- Song—Auld Rob Morris by Robert Burns
- Main to piya say naina lada aayi ray poem – Amir Khusro poems | Poems and Poetry
- Culver Dell And The Squire by William Barnes
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).