Anthony Weir

I dreamed.
I woke in tenderness.
I dreamed of tenderness
as a ripe plum squirting
...

In the Beginning
God burst like a Balloon
Showering the World
With dirty shreds
...

At the Conference of
Poetry Police
An observer who claimed
That a tree was worth
...

The animal garden
Is now a murder-hole.
Language was always the Labyrinth.
Civilisation is striving, spurning
...

Man in a shower.
His only reality
the removal of reality.
...

December snow falling
tells me to stop thinking.
...

Just another little organ
of the Great Conspiracy:
poetry as pathetic part
of the entertainment industry
...

Nature's red in tooth and claw
But we are black of heart.
There's more 'soul' in a jackal's paw
than all our works of art.
...

The greatest achievement is to become
unmentionable to the unspeakable.
'Now' is glimpses of the always
framed by never.
...

My invisible, other true friend, Brother Zoti Lamort,
unknowable, ever-present, everywhere
like a vast four-dimensional carpet,
asks me silently why I have to be human,
...

We're told that writing was invented here:
lists of weapons, foodstuffs, kings, kinsmen,
laws and penalties.
Here lived the first Man-God, Gilgamesh.
...

Obviously, song came before speech
and moans came before song.
Whales sing refrains and antiphons,
compose sonatas.
...

Farming is more swords
than earth-savaging, earth-exhausting ploughshares:
exile from Eden,
starvation and infection,
...

Miserable wars
if love is not the reason
Miserable wars
...

In the absurd
eventuality of re-incarnation
I should be desirous
of returning as a bower-bird
...

In just one respect they tend to deviate.
In other ways they earnestly collaborate,
conform depressingly.
The same is true of dissidents and poets.
...

translation of a famous sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard (1524-1585)
from Sonnets for Hélène

When you are very old, at evening, by the fire,
...

On warm, still nights
I hear rocks groan in their sleep.
I am mumbling sadness
unable to love or to weep,
...

...

Through language we lose
our innocence,
our animal integrity.
Through knowledge
...