Crow and the Birds
Ted Hughes


When the eagle soared clear through a dawn distilling of emerald
When the curlew trawled in seadusk through a chime of wineglasses
When the swallow swooped through a woman's song in a cavern
And the swift flicked through the breath of a violet

When the owl sailed clear of tomorrow's conscience
And the sparrow preened himself of yesterday's promise
And the heron laboured clear of the Bessemer upglare
And the bluetit zipped clear of lace panties
And the woodpecker drummed clear of the rotovator and the rose-farm
And the peewit tumbled clear of the laundromat

While the bullfinch plumped in the apple bud
And the goldfinch bulbed in the sun
And the wryneck crooked in the moon
And the dipper peered from the dewball

Crow spraddled head-down in the beach-garage, guzzling a dropped ice-cream.

Examination at the Womb-door
Ted Hughes


Who owns these scrawny little feet?      Death.
Who owns this bristly scorched-looking face?      Death.
Who owns these still-working lungs?      Death.
Who owns this utility coat of muscles?      Death.
Who owns these unspeakable guts?      Death.
Who owns these questionable brains?      Death.
All this messy blood?      Death.
These minimum-efficiency eyes?      Death.
This wicked little tongue?      Death.
This occasional wakefulness?      Death.

Given, stolen, or held pending trial?
Held.

Who owns this whole rainy, stony earth?      Death.
Who owns all of space?      Death.

Who is stronger than hope?      Death.
Who is stronger than the will?      Death.
Stronger than love?      Death.
Stronger than life?      Death.

But who is stronger than death?
                                                  Me, evidently.


Pass, Crow.

Lineage
Ted Hughes


In the beginning was Scream
Who begat Blood
Who begat Eye
Who begat Fear
Who begat Wing
Who begat Bone
Who begat Granite
Who begat Violet
Who begat Guitar
Who begat Sweat
Who begat Adam
Who begat Mary
Who begat God
Who begat Nothing
Who begat Never
Never Never Never

Who begat Crow

Screaming for Blood
Grubs, crusts
Anything

Trembling featherless elbows in the nest's filth

Two Legends
Ted Hughes


I
Black was the without eye
Black the within tongue
Black was the heart
Black the liver, black the lungs
Unable to suck in light
Black the blood in its loud tunnel
Black the bowels packed in furnace
Black too the muscles
Striving to pull out into the light
Black the nerves, black the brain
With its tombed visions
Black also the soul, the huge stammer
Of the cry that, swelling, could not
Pronounce its sun.

II
Black is the wet otter's head, lifted.
Black is the rock, plunging in foam.
Black is the gall lying on the bed of the blood.

Black is the earth-globe, one inch under,
An egg of blackness
Where sun and moon alternate their weathers

To hatch a crow, a black rainbow
Bent in emptiness
                            over emptiness

But flying

If I Wanted A Boat
Mary Oliver


I would want a boat, if I wanted a
boat, that bounded hard on the waves,
that didn't know starboard from port
and wouldn't learn, than welcomed
dolphins and headed straight for the
whales, that, when rocks were close,
would slide in for a touch or two,
that wouldn't keep land in sight and
went fast, that leaped into the spray.
What kind of life is it always to plan
and do, to promise and finish, to wish
for the near and the safe? Yes, by the
heavens, if I wanted a boat I would want
a boat I couldn't steer.

Love Song
Denise Levertov


Your beauty, which I lost sight of once
for a long time, is long,
not symmetrical, and wears
the earth colors that make me see it.

A long beauty, what is that?
A song
that can be sung over and over,
long notes or long bones.

Love is a landscape the long mountains
define but don't
shut off from the
unseeable distance.

In fall, in fall,
your trees stretch
their long arms in sleeves
of earth-red and

sky-yellow, a little
lop-sided. I take 
long walks among them. The grapes
that need frost to ripen them

are amber and grow deep in the
hedge, half-concealed,
the way your beauty grows in long tendrils
half in darkness.

Words
Sylvia Plath


Axes
After whose stroke the wood rings,
And the echoes!
Echoes traveling
Off from the centre like horses.

The sap
Wells like tears, like the
Water striving
To re-establish its mirror
Over the rock

That drops and turns,
A white skull,
Eaten by weedy greens.
Years later I
Encounter them on the road—

Words dry and riderless,
The indefatigable hoof-taps.
While
From the bottom of the pool, fixed stars
Govern a life.

The Oak Tree Loves Patience
Mary Oliver


The oak tree
      loves patience,
the mountain is
      still looking,

as it has for centuries,
      for a word to say about
the gradual way it
      slides itself

back to the
      world below
to begin again,
      in another life,

to be fertile.
      When the wind blows
the grass
      whistles and whispers

in myths and riddles
      and not in our language
but one far older.
      The sea is the sea is

always the sea.
      These things
you can count on
      as you walk about the world

happy or sad,
      talky or silent, making
weapons, love, poems.
      The briefest of fires.