Red | Ted Hughes

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

REQUEST: I'm looking for a specific poem. It was based on the Lady of Shalott, and it was written from her POV. This is the only line I remember:
"While he sits there pontificating on God and grace and mercy and faces."
I've googled, and I have a feeling it's well known, but I just can't seem to find it.
Thanks in advance!

EDIT: Found! Thanks to exceptindreams.

Even though I'm not a fan of some of the Birthday Letters poems, this is one of the best in BL IMO.
 

Red

Red was your colour.

If not red, then white. But red

Was what you wrapped around you.

Blood-red. Was it blood?

Was it red-ochre, for warming the dead?

Haematite to make immortal

The precious heirloom bones, the family bones.

 

When you had your way finally

Our room was red. A judgement chamber.

Shut casket for gems. The carpet of blood

Patterned with darkenings, congealments.

The curtains – ruby corduroy blood,

Sheer blood-falls from ceiling to floor.

The cushions the same. The same

Raw carmine along the window-seat.

A throbbing cell. Aztec altar – temple.

 

Only the bookshelves escaped into whiteness.

 

And outside the window

Poppies thin and wrinkle-frail

As the skin on blood,

Salvias, that your father named you after,

Like blood lobbing from a gash,

And roses, the heart’s last gouts,

Catastrophic, arterial, doomed.

 

Your velvet long full skirt, a swathe of blood,

A lavish burgundy.

Your lips a dipped, deep crimson.

You revelled in red.

I felt it raw – like the crisp gauze edges

Of a stiffening wound. I could touch

The open vein in it, the crusted gleam.

 

( Everything you painted you painted white, )

 

 

Gifts | Oodgeroo Noonuccal

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

‘I will bring you love’, said the young lover,
‘A glad light to dance in your dark eye.
Pendants I will bring of the white bone,
And gay parrot feathers to deck your hair.’

But she only shook her head.

‘I will put a child in your arms,’ he said,
‘Will be a great headman, great rain-maker.
I will make remembered songs about you 
That all the tribes in all the wandering camps
Will sing forever.’

But she was not impressed.

‘I will bring you the still moonlight on the lagoon,
And steal for you the singing of all the birds;
I will bring the stars of heaven to you,
And put the bright rainbow into your hand.’

‘No’, she said, ‘bring me tree-grubs.’

Seamus Heaney, 'Personal Helicon'

[duathir.livejournal.com]

Personal Helicon

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

by Seamus Heaney

The End | Wilfred Owen + Request

[wind-hover.livejournal.com]

The End by Wilfred Owen

After the blast of lightning from the East,
The flourish of loud clouds, the Chariot Throne;
After the drums of Time have rolled and ceased,
And by the bronze west long retreat is blown.

Shall life renew these bodies? Of a truth
All death will He annul, all tears assuage? -
Fill the void veins of Life again with youth,
And wash, with an immortal water, Age?

When I do ask white Age he saith not so:
'My head hangs weighted with snow.'
And when I hearken to the Earth, she saith:
'My fiery heart shrinks, aching. It is death.
Mine ancient scars shall not be glorified,
Nor my titanic tears, the sea, be dried.'

-

Request: I found this poem on a poetry app. Does anyone know who wrote this/the source? Google search doesn't seem to work as the app seemed to suggest it was translated from Arabic / an Islamic religious poem (but I'm not sure about that either).

Each Moment Is like Sunlight on the Heart

( Cut for short poem )