Damian Balassone, ‘The Lunar Dance’

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You dance with her from dawn to dusk,
but when the freezing night is done
she pecks your cheek and flies away
towards the great nocturnal sun.

*

And what became of you, young man?
Did you become a rolling stone?
Were you condemned to roam the earth
and never find your way back home?

‘I trekked the earth to find the one
who danced with me so long ago.
And now my bones are frail and weak.
And now my hair is white as snow.’

Your rambling days are almost done.
The final hour is drawing near.
And now, my child, the time has come
to see the one you held so dear.

*****

‘The Lunar Dance’ was first published in InDaily Poet’s Corner. (Submission details in link.)

Damian Balassone is the author of three volumes of poetry and reflections, in Strange Game in a Strange Land (two editions), Here, Bear and Everywhere (illustrated by Jess Racklyeft), and Chime (two editions), while his collection of short poems and epigrams, Love is a Weird Cat, is forthcoming. His poems have also appeared in more than 100 other Australian and international publications, notably in The New York Times, The Australian, The Canberra Times and The Spectator. In noting Damian’s work, Australia’s uncrowned poet laureate, Les Murray, described Damian as a ‘a virtuoso’. More about Damian and his work can be found here.

Photo: This image is from Unsplash and was published prior to 5 June 2017 under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.

Thomas Love Peacock, ‘The War-song of Dinas Vawr’

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The mountain sheep are sweeter,
But the valley sheep are fatter;
We therefore deemed it meeter
To carry off the latter.
We made an expedition;
We met a host, and quelled it;
We forced a strong position,
And killed the men who held it.

On Dyfed’s richest valley,
Where herds of kine were browsing,
We made a mighty sally,
To furnish our carousing.
Fierce warriors rushed to meet us;
We met them, and o’erthrew them:
They struggled hard to beat us;
But we conquered them, and slew them.

As we drove our prize at leisure,
The king marched forth to catch us:
His rage surpassed all measure,
But his people could not match us.
He fled to his hall-pillars;
And, ere our force we led off,
Some sacked his house and cellars,
While others cut his head off.

We there, in strife bewild’ring,
Spilt blood enough to swim in:
We orphaned many children,
And widowed many women.
The eagles and the ravens
We glutted with our foemen;
The heroes and the cravens,
The spearmen and the bowmen.

We brought away from battle,
And much their land bemoaned them,
Two thousand head of cattle,
And the head of him who owned them:
Ednyfed, king of Dyfed,
His head was borne before us;
His wine and beasts supplied our feasts,
And his overthrow, our chorus.

*****

The first lines are so catchy… the poem is so barbaric… I recognise this is where we all were 2,000 years ago, and where many Russians and Israelis are still today…

Thomas Love Peacock (1785 – 1866) was an English novelist, poet, and official of the East India Company. He was a close friend of Percy Bysshe Shelley, and they influenced each other’s work. Peacock wrote satirical novels, each with the same basic setting: characters at a table discussing and criticising the philosophical opinions of the day. Let’s assume his war-song doesn’t represent his actual view of the world. In fact, we can get a better sense from his “A Day at the India Office”:

From ten to eleven, have breakfast for seven;
From eleven to noon, think you’ve come too soon;
From twelve to one, think what’s to be done;
From one to two, find nothing to do;
From two to three, think it will be
A very great bore to stay till four.

Illustration: ‘War-song’ by RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light (aka Quill). Quill decided to substitute a token gold crown for the king’s head, and I let that stand.

Semi-formal verse: RHL, ‘Conversation with the Beast’

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“And what are you?” asked the all-seeing sightless beast
bearing me on its back through vast seascapes,
going somewhere, nowhere, ceaseless as droning plane or priest.
“Are you one of the great lizards? Or the little apes?
The winged skylords? The many-tentacled?
An ape-displacing metal monster?”
“Of those,” I said, “ ‘Ape’ has to be my answer.”

“I talk with all of you,” it said, “you’re all identical.
You are all struggling up, and lying back and down,
and all are living with some lilac crown
on heads and clothed with your purple gown
while all your world degrades to brown.
This you all do, will always do, have always done,
always, while seas seem to run,
and while I seem to carry you with seeming motion.”

“What is this sea?” I asked. “Time, that we’re moving through?”
“Why not?” it said. “There is no Time, nor Ocean.
All is more dream than stream;
I am not as I seem
and nor are you.”

*****

I’m very happy to have this in the latest edition of Cerasus – “now published and currently available to buy at a special discounted price:

In the UK: CERASUS Poetry Magazine # 6: Amazon.co.uk: Wilks, John: 9798160784458: Books

In the USA: CERASUS Poetry Magazine # 6: Wilks, John: 9798160784458: Amazon.com: Books

(For other countries, click on a link then change the .co.uk or .com in the address bar as appropriate.)”

Thanks, John Wilks.

Sonnet: Richard Fleming, ‘Boy’

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He closes his eyes while, around his head,
like playground shouts, a flock of angry birds
explodes. He feels an overwhelming dread,
remembering his irate father’s words
and what the words preceded: those first blows
that pummelled his thin shoulders and his ears,
left him confused and with a bloody nose,
his much-loved, navy T-shirt stained with tears.
He blinks, refocuses. The birds have gone.
And, looking at his wristwatch, he can see
hours have slipped by like buses missed. A pawn
on life’s great chessboard, he stands helplessly.
Time flows around him. In it he will grow
to strength while it diminishes his foe.

*****

Richard Fleming writes: “I’ve written a great deal of verse over the years, much of which I’d happily disown, but amidst that unruly scrub-grass a few flowers have blossomed. The bouquet presented here comprises a mixture of formal and informal verse, including a number of older poems that have appeared elsewhere: there are also several more recently written ones that have not previously been published.

          “The Russian poet, Yevgeny Yevtushenko, is quoted as saying: ‘a poet’s autobiography is his poetry’ and that may be true to a degree but let’s not forget that poetry is a creative art, a flight of fantasy, therefore poems that, at first glance, may appear to be autobiographical will almost certainly have been embellished by the writer’s imagination.

          “The selection leans strongly towards rhyming verse: my preference, despite the fact it seems to have fallen from favour in the world of modern poetry. What odds? I’ve never been one to run with the pack.”

‘Boy’ was published in The High Window.

Richard Fleming is an Irish-born poet and humorist based in Guernsey, a Channel Island between Britain and France. Widely regarded as one of the island’s foremost literary voices, his versatile work blends lyricism, sharp wit, emotional depth, and a strong sense of place. Drawing from his Northern Irish roots and adopted home, his poetry and prose explore love, loss, nostalgia, identity, and modern life. Collections include Strange Journey (2012), held in the National Poetry Library, and Stone Witness (Blue Ormer) featuring the BBC-commissioned title poem. His work can be found on

Facebook https://www.facebook.com richard.fleming.92102564/

or Bard at Bay www.redhandwriter.blogspot.com

*****

Photo: Boy Walking Contraluz by Wilfredor, Creative Commons Zero, Public Domain Dedication

Odd poem: T.S. Eliot, ‘Interlude: in a Bar’

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Across the room the shifting smoke
Settles around the forms that pass
Pass through or clog the brain;
Across the floors that soak
The dregs from broken glass

The walls fling back the scattered streams
Of life that seems
Visionary, and yet hard;
Immediate, and far;
But hard…
Broken and scarred
Like dirty broken finger nails
Tapping the bar.

*****

It’s very Eliot, isn’t it! A poem written in pencil in his early Notebook; dated provisionally to the years immediately before the publication of Prufrock in 1917, the Notebook is wryly headed ‘Complete Poems of T.S. Eliot’. The near 100 pages of the Notebook, with the twice as many pages of Christopher Ricks’ notes on the poems, comprise the bulk of the material in ‘T.S. Eliot – Inventions of the March Hare – Poems 1909-1917’.

Ricks’ nine comments on this poem include pointing out the similarity of the line
‘Like dirty broken finger nails’
to the passage towards the end of The Waste Land:
‘On Margate Sands.
I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
The broken fingernails of dirty hands.’

fwiw

Photo: “Lucky Strike.” by H.Robertson is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Armand d’Artois,’Oxen’, tr. John Gallas

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Under a porridge heaven (scourged with black,
and prickly-pale as sackcloth) drear and dun,
the road lays down its cobbles, mirrored slick
with recent rain and half a sickened sun.

A passer-by or two. Not noticing
the shambling creatures going to their deaths.
A troop of oxen, slipping on the slime,
heading for the abbatoir. Their breaths

resigned and patient; runny eyes that see
the emerald grass, the clear, bright streams, the fields,
the apple-blossomed ease of Normandy.

Silver-drooling snouts. Sometimes a snort
or sniff. But nothing more. Remembering
the sea. A passing smell. A passing thought.

*****

John Gallas writes: “I love ‘Oxen’, a little gem you find sometimes when translating from periodical/magazine contributions that mostly sank without trace over time. I’d be delighted. It’s from ‘La Parnasse contemporain’ (only ever 3 editions – 1866, 71 and 76).”

Armand d’Artois (1788 – 1867) was a French playwright and librettist. Here is the original:

LES BŒUFS

Sous un ciel bas, d’un blanc triste, teinté de noir,
Qui prend l’aspect blafard et morne d’un cilice,
La rue étend au loin son pavé rond et lisse
Que l’averse a rendu luisant comme un miroir.

Quelques passants s’en vont, flanant sur le trottoir,
Sans voir ces condamnés qui marchent au supplice :
Des troupeaux de bœufs, dont le pied trébuche et glisse
Sur le chemin qui mène au sanglant abattoir.

Et dans les yeux rêveurs de ces bêtes superbes
Sont encor peints les clairs ruisseaux, les hautes herbes
Et les pommiers en fleur du gras pays normand.

La bave en fils d’argent tombe de leurs narines,
Et parfois l’un d’entre eux renifle longuement,
Comme au ressouvenir d’âcres senteurs marines.

John Gallas, Aotearoa/NZ poet, published mostly by Carcanet. Saxonship Poet (see www.saxonship.org), Fellow of the English Association, St Magnus Festival Orkney Poet, librettist, translator and biker. 2025 Midlands Writing Prize winner. Presently living in Markfield, Leicestershire. Website is www.johngallaspoetry.co.uk which has a featured Poem of the Month, complete book list, links and news.

“Herd of Cattle on Red Dirt Road, Vietnam” by AdamCohn is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Nobel Prize Disappointment goes to Anne Carson

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So the Nobel Prize (good) for Literature (good) goes to a Canadian (good) “for her bold and inventive oeuvre that, in playful dialogue with the classical tradition, has created new forms for contemporary literature.” That’s all very well… Then the Nobel Committee should create a new category for awarding the Literature Prize to Anne Carson, because if her work isn’t a novel, short story or memoir, it certainly isn’t poetry either. Bold, inventive, playful, new forms – perhaps. But in any way comparable to Kipling, Yeats, Eliot or Walcott? Nope. She has created new (perhaps) forms for contemporary literature, but what I’ve read of hers isn’t poetry. Reuters says she blends verse with (whatever), but I haven’t found any verse of hers, nothing that is immediately word-for-word memorable. There may be some. If there is, it’s not prominent. As The Hindu editorialised, “The Academy has chosen a writer who belongs in no category in particular.”

Oh well. Maybe she got the prize for Icelandic-Canadian dual citizenship? Or translations of Sappho?

So it goes. There’s always next year.

“Is that all there is.” by Onlysilence is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Mervyn Peake, ‘Lean Sideways on the Wind’

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Lean sideways on the wind, and if it bears
Your weight, you are a daughter of the Dawn —
If not, pick up your carcass, dry your tears,
Brush down your dress — for that sweet elfin horn

You thought you heard was from no fairyland —
Rather it flooded through the kitchen floor,
From where your Uncle Eustace and his band
Of flautists turn my cellar, more and more

Into a place of hollow and decay:
That is my theory, darling, anyway.

*****

Another one of Mervyn Peake‘s poems from ‘A Book of Nonsense’, collected by his widow Maeve Gilmore. He was casually proficient with iambic pentameter — there are several passages in Titus Groan, the first of his Gormenghast books, where several lines of iambics are unobtrusively buried in the text, to be noticed only by slow readers like myself. Asking Quill, my ChatGPT, about this, I get:

Yes—there is published criticism addressing exactly this. The most directly relevant piece I found is R. W. (Robert) Maslen’s “Mervyn Peake, the Poet of Gormenghast,” in Miracle Enough: Papers on the Works of Mervyn Peake, edited by G. Peter Winnington (2013), pp. 127–138. Browse by Glasgow Author

You can read it free here: Mervyn Peake: The Poet of Gormenghast.

Maslen identifies three examples particularly relevant to your observation:

The final chapter: successive pentameters give the closing predictions an oracular quality, anticipating the sequel’s violence and upheaval.

The fight in the Hall of Spiders: the narration moves into iambic pentameter as the action takes on an epic character. Sepulchrave’s fragmented speech catches the same rhythm, associating his madness with Shakespearean tragedy.

Titus’s christening: the ritual text contains blank verse printed as prose—very much the unobtrusive insertion you describe.

*****

“Windy skirt” by Paula Satijn is licensed under CC BY-ND 2.0.

Unforgettable nonsense: Mervyn Peake, ‘I Cannot Give the Reasons’

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I cannot give the reasons,
I only sing the tunes:
the sadness of the seasons
the madness of the moons.

I cannot be didactic
or lucid, but I can
be quite obscure and practic-
ally marzipan

In gorgery and gushness
and all that’s squishified.
My voice has all the lushness
of what I can’t abide

And yet it has a beauty
most proud and terrible
denied to those whose duty
is to be cerebral.

Among the antlered mountains
I make my viscous way
and watch the sepia fountains
throw up their lime-green spray.

*****

Mervyn Peake (1911-1968) is now best known for his Gormenghast novels, but he was first known as a British artist, and his works are in the National Portrait Gallery, the Imperial War Museum and The National Archives. His poetry is very varied, and much of it is nonsense on the surface but with interesting depth. Peake was born in China, joining the list of foreign-born British-educated novelists that includes Kipling, Tolkien and Ishiguro.

As is useful for artists, he seems to have had extremely strong visualisation and a photographic memory. Fifty years ago in British Columbia I met a woman (whose name I don’t recall) who had known Peake as a youth. Apparently he particularly liked Kipling’s novel ‘Stalky & Co’ and knew it by heart. He handed her the copy he carried and told her to choose a page: she gave him the page number, and he then recited it from the top down.

“Titus Alone by Mervyn Peake” by Eckhart Public Library is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

Sonnet: Amit Majmudar, ‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’

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it doesn’t mean two shlubs like you and me
would be in Eden with them. God knows I
am partial to a slice of apple pie
and grew up filching off a neighbor’s tree
the peaches he intended for his nieces.
How many generations would the ruse
have lasted? Theologians float their theses,
but sin’s a firecracker with a fuse

that heaven’s ghostly glow can light as well
as any spark that fountained out of hell.
Can’t speak for you, though I suspect I do,
I’d grow so bored, I’d climb the wall with you:
A derring-duo, deathlessness-defying,
we’d sneak out into all that lively dying.

*****

Amit Majmudar writes: “If Eve and Adam Never Fell” continues a long tradition for me. For a reason unknown to me, I have written obsessively for decades about the fall from the garden of Eden, in fact by sheer volume of work it comes in third behind the Ramayana story and the 1947 Partition of India among my recurrent themes. “Subtle Anatomy,” for example, is one of my first ever published poems, way back in 1999:

Subtle Anatomy
by Amit Majmudar

An arm is the spine of an angel wing,
cracked at the elbow. Webbed for gliding once,
we could leap off of cliff or bridge or tower
and saw no problem with a leap of faith.
What happened to it? Ask the suicide.
After the battle in heaven, the good angels,
precursors to the Turks who shamed their captives,
carved and carted off those wings—atrocious—
a mound of wings more chilling than a mound
of skulls: in this case, the contributors
could watch the ground tumor swell. So you see
we have some angel in us, even if
it’s the bedeviled kind, stripped of its wings
like a drunk pilot, out of service.

Before Eve met the serpent, she was fleshier
than even Rubens’s palette could stomach
and spineless, literally. The serpent
dove in her through the nest-hole anus
until the scorpion-stinger coccyx
slurped in too, and she sheathed him whole.
He straightened her, the breath in a balloon,
into this human posture of rebellion,
this upright and bipedal challenge.
Settled, the serpent sent nerves everywhere,
claiming each inch of her with senses.
Not with an apple but an apple’s taste
the serpent ruined her, fossilizing
to the vertebral column. So you see
we have some devil in us too
and dead center at that
commanding everything.

previously published in The Journal of the AMA

*****

Amit Majmudar’s recent books include Twin A: A Memoir (Slant Books, 2023), The Great Game: Essays on Poetics (Acre Books, 2024), the hybrid work Three Metamorphoses (Orison Books, 2025), and Things My Grandmother Said: Poems (Knopf, 2026). His forthcoming book is a novel, Cervantes in Chains (Slant Books, 2027).

‘If Eve and Adam Never Fell’ was first published in The Sonneteer

Illustration: RHL and GPT-6 Astra Light