Norman MacCaig Poems Flashcards
Basking Shark: Stanza 1
To stub an oar on a rock where none should be
To have it rise with a slounge out of the sea
Is a thing that happened once, too often, to me.
Basking Shark: Stanza 2
But not too often, though enough, I count as gain
That I once met, on a sea tin-tacked with rain
That roomsized monster with a matchbox brain.
Basking Shark: Stanza 3
He displaced more than water, he shoggled me
Centuries back, this decadent townee
Shook on a wrong branch of his family tree
Basking Shark: Stanza 4
Swish up the dirt and, when it settles
A spring is all the clearer. I saw me in one fling,
Emerging from the slime of everything.
Basking shark: Stanza 5
So who’s the monster? The thought made me grow pale
For twenty seconds while, sail after sail,
The tall fin slid away and then the tail
Assisi: Stanza 1
The dwarf with his hands on backwards
sat, slumped like a half-filled sack
on tiny twisted legs from which
sawdust might run,
Outside the three tiers of churches built
in honour of St Francis, brother
Of the poor, talker with birds, over whom
he had the advantage
of not being dead yet.
Assisi: Stanza 2
A priest explained
how clever it was of Giotto
to make his frescoes tell stories
that would reveal to the illiterate the goodness of God and the suffering
of His Son. I understood
the explanation and
the cleverness.
Assisi: Stanza 3
A rush of tourists, clucking contentedly,
fluttered after him as he scattered
the grain of the Word. It was they who had passed the ruined temple outside, whose eyes
wept pus, whose back was higher
than his head, whose lopsided mouth
said Grazie in a voice as sweet
as a child’s when she speaks to her mother
or a bird’s when it spoke
to St Francis.
Visiting Hour: Stanza 1
The hospital smell
combs my nostrils
as they go bobbing along
green and yellow corridors.
Visiting Hour: Stanza 2
What seems a corpse
is trundled into a lift and vanishes
heavenward.
Visiting Hour: Stanza 3
I will not feel, I will not
feel, until
I have to.
Visiting Hour: Stanza 4
Nurses walk lightly, swiftly,
here and up and down and there,
their slender waists miraculously
carrying their burden
of so much pain, so
many deaths, their eyes
still clear after
so many farewells
Visiting Hour: Stanza 5
Ward 7. She lies
in a white cave of forgetfulness.
A withered hand
trembles on it’s stalk. Eyes move
behind eyelids too heavy
to raise. Into an arm wasted
of colour a glass fang is fixed,
not guzzling but giving.
And between her and me
distance shrinks till there is none left
but the distance of pain that neither she nor I
can cross
Visiting Hour: Stanza 6
She smiles a little at this
black figure in her white cave
who clumsily rises
in the round swimming waves of a bell
and dizzily goes off, growing fainter,
not smaller, leaving behind only
books that will not be read
and fruitless fruits.
