Gwen Harwood Poems

She sits in the park. Her clothes are out of date.
Two children whine and bicker, tug her skirt.
A third draws aimless patterns in the dirt
Someone she loved once passed by – too late
...

Daybreak: the household slept.
I rose, blessed by the sun.
A horny fiend, I crept
out with my father's gun.
...

So the light falls, and so it fell
on branched leaved with flocking birds.
Loght stole a citys weight to swell
the coloured lofe of stone. Your words
...

In the space between love and sleep
when heart mourns in its prison
eyes against shoulder keep
their blood-black curtains tight.
...

Shadows grazing eastward melt
from their vast sun-driven flocks
into consubstantial dusk.
A snow wind flosses the bleak rocks,
...

The tenth day, and they give
my mirror back. Who knows
how to drink pain, and live?
I look, and the glass shows
...

A child one summer's evening soaked
a glass jar in the reeling sun
hoping to keep, when day was done
and all the sun's disciples cloaked
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The snails brush silver. Critic crow
points his unpleasant beak, and lances.
Resumes his treetop, darts below
his acid-bright, corrosive glances.
...

So hungry-sensitive that he
craves day and night the pap of praise,
he'll ease his gripes or fingerpaint
in heartsblood on a public page.
...

Show me the order of the world,
the hard-edge light of this-is-so
prior to all experience
and common to both world and thought,
...