Appendix - Uncollected and Unattributed Poems

Summary

‘G. B. S.’

Childless old fellow, you fell from the apple tree And your million children drew their breath in pain.

You are the only one left, for ever spared to them While the gas flickered out and the street was lit with atoms.

Ninety-four years not being too long a reminder That there is a human mind in the human body.

And not the easy angel of failure with willow-green tears But bitter success appeared in the long old age.

To make all you thought of come true, said the bitter angel, And still he will not give in, say his million children.

P. M. F.

‘Como El Vilano’, by Vincente Aleixandre

Lovely is the Kingdom of love

But bitter also is the Kingdom.

It is because the lover's heart

Is bitter in the lonely hours apart

Watching the inaccessible cloud of air

He sees her eyes are there

The lover is born for happiness

For propagation everlasting

Which from his innermost heart unfolds

To lose itself for ever and ever

In the pure heart of love delivered

But the solicitous round of life

The nagging hours day by day

And that same airy cloud, and dreams

And the short flight of the young whom love inspires

All whisper against the duration of the impossible fires.

‘The Queue’

It was a story for childen's children

A winter's tale of the death of a King –

When the heard-of died, the unheard stood in their thousands

In the sootblack frostwhite night before spring.

Lights on the bridge, the dazzled dark

River ran between fire and fire

With sensible shoes and ruined faces

They crawled towards their heart's desire.

They were blind in the icy breath,

To the nightlong thought of majesty

Goldringed goldrobed envied apart

But as thou art so he shall be

And in the dust be equal made

With the poor crooked scythe and spade

But the day and the night, and the day and the night

War borne, war torn, care shared, dead in the prime,

Their own dust shaken, their dear heart breaking,

They cared for this, in winter time.