RE-READING ROSEMARY TONKS ~

 

R O S E M A R Y    T O N K S

Addiction to an Old Mattress

No, this is not my life, thank God ...

... worn out like this, and crippled by brain-fag;

Obsessed first by one person, and then

(Almost at once) most horribly besotted by another;

These Februaries, full of draughts and cracks,

They belong to the people in the streets, the others

Out there – haberdashers, writers of menus.

Salt breezes! Bolsters from Istanbul!

Barometers, full of contempt, controlling moody isobars.

Sumptuous tittle-tattle from a summer crowd

That’s fed on lemonades and matinées. And seas

That float themselves about from place to place, and then

Spend hours – just moving some clear sleets across glass stones.

Yalta: deck-chairs in Asia’s gold cake; thrones. 

Meanwhile ... I live on ... powerful, disobedient,

Inside their draughty haberdasher’s climate,

With these people ... who are going to obsess me,

Potatoes, dentists, people I hardly know, it’s unforgivable

For this is not my life 

But theirs, that I am living.

And I wolf, bolt, gulp it down, day after day.

__________________________

Rosemary Tonks

Bedouin of the London Evening:

Collected Poems & Selected Prose

(Bloodaxe Books, 2014)  

© Estate of Rosemary Tonks 2014, 2016.

TO MY COTTAGE ~

To My Cottage


Thou lowly cot where first my breath I drew,

Past joys endear thee, childhood's past delight

Where each you summer's pictured on my view,

And, dearer still, the happy winter-night

When the storm pelted down with all his might

And roared and bellowed in the chimney-top

And pattered vehement 'against the window-light

And on the threshold fell the quick eaves-drop.

How blest I've listened on my corner stool,

Heard the storm rage, and hugged my happy spot,

While the fond parent wound her whirring spool

And spared a sigh for the poor wanderer's lot.

In thee, sweet hut, this happiness was proved,

And these endear and make thee doubly loved.


__________________

John Clare  (1793~1864)
poems selected by Paul Farley
Faber 2007