runs on without you

Today is National Poetry Day, and I'm just squeaking in before midnight...

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I keep coming back to this as a favourite London poem, and this is both a fabulous reading, and a fabulous presentation of it : Benjamin Zephaniah reading The London Breed

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For a total change of pace, here's some John Burnside: a contemporary Scottish poet whose work has a way of winding its way into my memory and my heart.

Dark Green
(From Myth of the Twin)

There is always a place on the way
where the path curls in the dark,

into the smell of dust
and the stillness of nettles.

There is always a litter of stones
or a broken roof

a few steps into the shade;
an empty skull, a ribcage stitched with grass,

barely a trace of vapour that had lived
before you came:

a remnant of mucus and water, hatched on a bone,
like the silver-and-eggshell perfume after a birth,

or the whisper that swells and recedes in the quick of your mind
when you wake in the day, and the bright dream runs on without you.

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Or something more traditional? Maybe Christina Rossetti?

This section of Goblin Market, for example:

Morning and evening
Maids heard the goblins cry:
"Come buy our orchard fruits,
Come buy, come buy:
Apples and quinces,
Lemons and oranges,
Plump unpecked cherries-
Melons and raspberries,
Bloom-down-cheeked peaches,
Swart-headed mulberries,
Wild free-born cranberries,
Crab-apples, dewberries,
Pine-apples, blackberries,
Apricots, strawberries--
All ripe together
In summer weather--
Morns that pass by,
Fair eves that fly;
Come buy, come buy;
Our grapes fresh from the vine,
Pomegranates full and fine,
Dates and sharp bullaces,
Rare pears and greengages,
Damsons and bilberries,
Taste them and try:
Currants and gooseberries,
Bright-fire-like barberries,
Figs to fill your mouth,
Citrons from the South,
Sweet to tongue and sound to eye,
Come buy, come buy."

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* Newspaper blackout poem 'All In A Night's Work' by Austin Kleon, used under Creative Commons.