Who pays for us all?
When I was young I painted myself a nymph ,
with flowing draperies and crimped, Botticellean hair.
Flora, Primavera, where are your colorist dreams,
your wreathed and garlanded clothes?
Now I stand rooted by misery's captive stare,
unable to lower my eyes. The plain and the bare
speak their radical truth. On the earthern floor,
birth, sickening, and death pass in the smoke ofcook-fires.
We carry our gods piggy-back, small creatures
with reptilian feet and forked tongues:
Put me down. Pick
Inf
up.
I could wish it warmer.
David Solway
JELLYFISH
They are the bane
of ignorant swimmers:
a single brush
is an afternoon of pain.
Shaped shapelessness,
they are a food for nothing -
clutter the shore,
a queasy, languid mess-
that calmly come
