Mixed Bag Of Poems.

      April 30th. last day of National Poetry Month, so I thought I might finish it off with a bang. As usual one of my own, but a couple of others I like, and a wee film about Herbert Read, anarchist poet, writer, and art critic.

     First one by Herbert Read on the fascist bombing of Spain during the Spanish civil war.

Bombing Casualties In Spain.

Dolls' faces are rosier but these are children

their eyes not glass but gleaming gristle

dark lenses in whose quicksilver glances

the sunlight quivered. These blenched lips

were warm onceand bright with blood

but blood

held in moist bleb of flesh

not split and spatter'd in tousled hair.

In these shadowy tresses

red petals did not always

thus clot and blacken to scar.

These are dead faces.

wasps' nests are not so wanly waxen

wood embers not so greyly ashen.

They are laid out in ranks

like paper lanterns that have fallen

after a night of riot

extinct in the dry morning air.

Herbert Read.

Familiarity Breeds Contempt.

Now television has allowed the proles

to have a look at the eminent,

we sans-culottes can scan with great intent

their skins for pimples, wens and blackhead-holes,

quite pleased to find they too have scars and moles

just like the more plebian element.

Such epidermal flaws on dame and gent

bring the Mob close to those with Higher Goals.

Now we're all privileged to watch a lord

waggling his eyebrows or large moustache.

You don't get worried till They start to speak

and now that none of them has ssaid a word

worth listening to. What earns them all that cash?

Why didn't The Revolution start last week?

William Neil. 

A New Dawn.

Today we live in a peace

midst a thousand pygmy wars;

a humanity bankrupt by its past

dragged wearily through darkness and despair

yearns for a day that's cast

long, warm and fair,

a dawn that sees humankind dicard

its class, its nation and prepare

to grind outworn creeds to dust,

so mankind naked is revealed,

then moving with common cause,

share

what such a dawn may yield.

John Couzin.

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To Hell With Culture.

     Herbert Edward Read (1893–1968) was a British anarchist, poet and literary critic, among other writings including poetry, he wrote considerably on the role of art in education. Read was co-founder of the Institute of Contemporary Arts. He was one of the earliest British writers to take notice of existentialism. In the eyes of a lot of anarchists he blotted his copy book by accepting those three letters in front of his name, Sir. Of course that doesn't take anything away from what he said and wrote.

An interview with Herbert Read's son on,  "To Hell With Culture"

Visit ann arky's home at www.radicalglasgow.me.uk

War And Peace.

       Todays poem is from Selected Poetry by Herbert Read, 1892-1968, poet and art critic, proclaimed himself an anarchist but went on to accept a Knighthood. He is reported to have said that he only accepted it under pressure from his wife!

War And Peace.

The kind of war is chang'd: the crusade heart

out-shattered: flesh a stain on broken earth

and death an unresisted rain.

The horror loos'd all honour is lost.

Peace has pride and passion: but no evil

to equal the indignity of war, whose ringing anvil

wins only anguish. The weighted hammer

breaks the stretch'd tendons at the wrist

And leaves the soul a twisted nail

tearing the flesh that still would live

and give to words the brutal edge of truth.

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