Remembering Fireworks
Elizabeth Jennings


Always as if for the first time we watch
The fireworks as if no one had ever
Done this before, made shapes, signs,
Cut diamonds on air, sent up stars
Nameless, imperious. And in the falling
Of fire, the spent rocket, there is a kind
Of nostalgia as normally only attaches
To things long known and lost. Such an absence,
Such emptiness of sky the fireworks leave
After their festival. We, fumbling
For words of love, remember the rockets,
The spinning wheels, the sudden diamonds,
And say with delight 'Yes, like that, like that.'
Oh and the air is full of falling
Stars surrendered. We search for a sign.

Stargazers abd Others
Elizabeth Jennings


      One, staring out stars,
Lost himself in looking and almost
Forgot glass, eye, air, space;
Simply, he thought, the world is improved
By my staring, how the still glass leaps
When the sky thuds in like tides.

      Another, making love, once
Stared so far over his pleasure
That woman, world, the spiral
Of taut bodies, the clinging hands, broke apart
And he saw, as the stargazer sees,
Landscapes made to be looked at,
Fruit to fall, not be plucked.

      In you also something
Of such vision occurs.
How else would I have learnt
The tapered stars, the pause
Of the nervous spiral? Names I need
Stronger than love, desire,
Passion, pleasure. Oh discover
Some star and christen it, but let me be
The space that your eye moves over.

The Diamond Cutter
Elizabeth Jennings


Not what the light will do but how he shapes it
And what particular colours it will bear,

And something of the climber's concentration
Seeing the white peak, setting the right foot there.

Not how the sun was plausible at morning
Nor how it was distributed at noon,

And not how much the single stone could show
But rather how much brilliance it would shun;

Simply a paring down, a cleaving to
One object, as the star-gazer who sees

One single comet polished by its fall
Rather than countless, untouched galaxies.

Lazarus
Elizabeth Jennings


      It was the amazing white, it was the way he simply
Refused to answer our questions, it was the cold pale glance
Of death upon him, the smell of death that truly 
Declared his rising to us. It was no chance
Happening, as a man may fill a silence
Between two heart-beats, seem to be dead and then
Astonish us with the closeness of his presence;
This man was dead, I say it again and again.
All of our sweating bodies moved towards him
And our minds moved too, hungry for finished faith.
He would not enter our world at once with words
That we might be tempted to twist or argue with:
Cold like a white root pressed in the bowels of earth
He looked, but also vulnerable — like birth.

To A Friend with A Religious Vocation
Elizabeth Jennings

                                    For C.


Thinking of your vocation, I am filled
With thoughts of my own lack of one. I see
Within myself no wish to breed or build
Or take the three vows ringed by poverty.
      And yet I have a sense,
Vague and inchoate, with no symmetry,
Or purpose. Is it merely a pretence,

A kind of scaffolding which I erect
half out of fear, half out of laziness?
The fitful poems come but can't protect
The empty areas of loneliness.
      You know what you must do,
So that mere breathing is a way to bless.
Dark nights, perhaps, but no grey days for you.

Your vows enfold you. I must make my own;
Not this, now that, each one empirical.
My poems move from feelings not yet known,
And when the poem is written I can feel
      A flash, a moment's peace.
The curtain will be drawn across your grille.
My silences are always enemies.

Yet with the same convictions that you have
(It is but your vocation that I lack),
I must, like you, believe in perfect love.
It is the dark, the dark, that draws me back
      Into a chaos where
Vocations, visions, fail, the will grows slack
And I an stunned by silence everywhere.

Children and Death
Elizabeth Jennings


Not to be spoken of, they will not let
     Us enter rooms where anyone has died,
And they put candles by our beds, a light
     That keeps us watchful and more terrified

Than any dear familiar darkness where
     Our shadows slip away. We dream of death
Sweet and apparent in the freedom there
     And ape a dying by a withheld breath.

Nor do they know our games have room enough
     For death and sickness. We have stretched them out
Further than childhood or parents' love
     And further even than the breath of doubt.

The Room
Elizabeth Jennings


This room I know so well becomes
A way to keep proportion near.
In other houses, other rooms
Only anomalies appear.

I chose these books, the pictures too,
Thinking that I would often look
Upon a canvas like a view
Or find a world within a book.

They lie or hang, each laden now
With my own past, yet there's no sign
For anyone who does not know
Me, that these attributes are mine.

Strange paradox — that I collect
Objects to liberate myself.
This room so heavy now, so decked
Has put my past upon a shelf.

And this is freedom — not to need
To choose those things again. I thus
Preside upon the present, cede
The ornaments to usefulness.

And yet I know that while I clear
The ground and win back liberty,
Tomorrow's debris settles here
To make my art, to alter me.

Two Deaths
Elizabeth Bishop


It was only a film, 
Perhaps I shall say later
Forgetting the story, left only
With bright images — the blazing dawn
Over the European ravaged pain,
And a white unsaddled horse, the only calm
Living creature. Will only such pictures remain?

Or shall I see
The shot boy running, running
Clutching the white sheet on the washing-line,
Looking at his own blood like a child
Who never saw blood before and feels defiled,
A boy dying without dignity
Yet brave still, trying to stop himself from falling
And screaming — his white girl waiting just out of calling?

I am ashamed
Not to have seen anyone dead,
Anyone I know I mean;
Odd that yesterday also
I saw a broken cat stretched on a path,
Not quite finished. Its gentle head
Showed one eye staring, mutely beseeching
Death, it seemed. All day
I have thought of death, of violence and death,
Of the blazing Polish light, of the cat's eye:
I am ashamed I have never seen anyone die.

About These Things
Elizabeth Jennings


About these things I shall always be dumb.
Some wear their silences as more than dress,
As more than skin-deep. I bear mine like some

Scar that is hidden out of shamefulness.
I speak from depths I do not understand
Yet cannot find the words for this distress.

So much of power is put into my hand
When words come easily. I sense the way
People are charmed and pause; I seem to mend

Some hurt. Some healing seems to make them stay.
And yet within the power that I use
My wordless fears remain. Perhaps I say

In lucid verse the terrors that confuse
In conversation. Maybe I am dumb
Because if fears were spoken I would lose

The lovely languages I do not choose
More than the darknesses from which they come.