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Peace by D H Lawrence
Peace is written on the doorstep
In lava.
Peace, black peace congealed.
My heart will know no peace
Till the hill bursts.
Brilliant, intolerable lava
Brilliant as a powerful burning-glass
Walking like a royal snake down the mountain towards the sea.
Forests, cities, bridges
Gone again in the bright trail of lava.
Naxos thousands of feet below the olive-roots,
And now the olive leaves of thousands of feet below the lava fire.
Peace congealed in black lava on the doorstep.
Within, white-hot lava, never at peace
Till it busrt forth blinding, withering the earth;
To set again into rock
Grey-black rock.
Call it peace?
'The Room Above the Square' by Stephen Spender.
The light in the window seemed perpetual
When you stayed in the high room for me;
It glowed above the trees through the leaves
Like my certainty.
The light is fallen and you are hidden
In sunright peninsulas of the sword:
Torn like leaves through Europe is the peace
That through us flowed.
Now I climb alone to the high room
Above the darkened square
Where among stones and roots, the other
Unshattered lovers are.Crew Room - John Pudney
Beyond this disregard,
The casual answer, and the hard
Brief pranks,
Is kindness which is metal
Patterned as stalk and petal,
As the wide flower frank.
Yet Fear and Death, abstract
And terrible as dreams, enact
The scene
Against which these stand gainly,
Living nobly or vainly,
Parting with casual mien.
Beyond some sum of words,
Some bashful imagery of birds
Are spun
Together out of laughter
More than the senses after
Ever will make of disregard or fun.
No Summer now - John Pudney
O frost fell early
Upon the flowering bough.
There is no summer now.
It is a story
As old as any they tell
How, still as death, frost fell.
How life was lovely
As life was never before
And will be never more.
Though season surely
Follows the season now spent
And fills man with content.
O frost falls early,
Old as time is the sorrow
Killed or cured tomorrow.
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