Insomnia by Elizabeth Bishop

The moon in the bereau mirror
looks out a million miles
(and perhaps with a pride, at herself,
but she never, never smiles)
far and away beyond sleep, or
perhaps she's a daytime sleeper.

By the Universe deserted,
she'd tell it to go to hell,
and she'd find a body of water,
or a mirror, on which to dwell.
So wrap up care in a cobweb
and drop it down the well

into that world inverted
where left is always right,
where the shadows are really the body,
where we stay awake all night,
where the heavens are shallow as the sea
is now deep, and you love me.

Bereft.

No longer do we skip and play
as sunlight brightly fills the bay.
Our world has spun, it's getting cool,
the sea now has to stick to rules
and follow orders to file out
filling an ocean roundabouts
the way and go, not feeling bold
as we shiver against the cold.

What Happens to Women by Ros Barber

It's what happens to women, no matter who you are.
Divine inside? They'll only see the face.
It's coming, despite your warmth, your grit, your heart -
the sudden shift from beuaty to disgrace.
A light snapped off and your gone. You're in the dark.
No one can see you now, you're unglued,
for while you slept, the world took you softly apart.
Now man after man walks through the ghost of you.

On a morning like any other, she wakes to find
her lover moved out and her admirers gone
from her steps, as if with one breath, one mind,
they abandoned their roses there like skeletons.
A half-penned love note stutters towards the sea,
embarrassed, undoing its 'love', and 'dear, and 'we'.

The Love of Unknown Women by Alan Jenkins

Young women with damp hollows, downy arms,
Bare burnished legs — you see them striding
Towards their plant-filled offices, riding
Bicycles to flatshares after work; lunchtimes, you stare
As secretaries, backpackers tanned from birth
Peel off their things and stretch on sun-warmed earth.
A few of them stare back... As if they’d share
Their world of holidays and weekend farms
With you! They step more lightly every year,
A glimpse of neck-hair, a scent that lingers, girls
Who, swinging bags with shops’ names, disappear,
Trailing glances, into crowds; each one unfurls
Her special beauty like a fragile frond
Before your famished eyes. I am what lies beyond,
They seem to say, beyond the mortgage, car and wife —
I am what you deserve, I am the buried life
You will never live. Are they pushed laughing onto beds
By hands that unhook bras and yank down briefs?
Do they wake with tongues thick-furred, heads
Hot and unremembering as carpet-swirls?
Crave water running over them in purls,
As cool as their long fingers? Schubert, jazz,
It’s all the same to them. As are your little griefs.
It isn’t fair. If you’ve not changed, what has?
Is it a kind of shifting, imperceptible, like sands
On some barren, windswept stretch of shore?
In simmering parks, on summer streets
Where they wait but not for you, you furtively explore
The curves of eyebrow, cheek and lip —
Of other things too; you search left hands
For seals of love, or ownership.
Moving off, they can smell your old defeats.

Next, Please by Philip Larkin

Always too eager for the future, we
Pick up bad habits of expectancy.
Something is always approaching; every day
Till then we say,

Watching from a bluff the tiny, clear
Sparkling armada of promises draw near.
How slow they are! And how much time they waste,
Refusing to make haste!

Yet still they leave us holding wretched stalks
Of disappointment, for, though nothing balks
Each big approach, leaning with brasswork prinked,
Each rope distinct,

Flagged, and the figurehead with golden tits
Arching our way, it never anchors; it's
No sooner present than it turns to past.
Right to the last

We think each one will heave to and unload
All good into our lives, all we are owed
For waiting so devoutly and so long.
But we are wrong:

Only one ship is seeking us, a black-
Sailed unfamiliar, towing at her back
A huge and birdless silence. In her wake
No waters breed or break.

E Bay Habit.

Fully aware

like a kestrel

hung out in air

over morsels

 

of food

ready to pounce

won't do me no good

this 3.4 fl oz

 

bottle du bleu

too expensive

it's true

but I'm worth it.

 

Commute.

Racing on down
the swirling river of eastway;
crimson lights
a barrier to nothing.
To stop is to die.

So I speed on, through
traffic rapids, round rocks
of trucks; careful to avoid
the soft machinations
of pedestrians.

On in to work
where I get stabbed
dead
in the heart
by a smiling child.

We the Women by Grace Nichols

We the women who toil
unadorn
heads tie with cheap
cotton

We the women who cut
clear fetch dig sing

We the women making
something from this
ache-and-pain-a-me
back-o-hardness

Yet we the women
whose praises go unsung
whose voices go unheard
whose deaths they sweep
aside
as easy as dead leaves

Tea by Carol Ann Duffy

I like pouring your tea, lifting
the heavy pot, and tipping it up,
so the fragrant liquid steams in your china cup.

Or when you're away, or at work,
I like to think of your cupped hands as you sip,
as you sip, of the faint half-smile of your lips.

I like the questions - sugar? milk? -
and the answers I don't know by heart, yet,
for I see your soul in your eyes and I forget.

Jasmine, Gunpowder, Assam, Earl Grey, Ceylon,
I love tea's names. Which tea would you like? I say,
but it's any tea, for you, please, any time of day,

as the woman harvests the slopes,
for the sweetest leaves, on Mount Wu-Yi,
and I am your lover, smitten, straining your tea.

Baize by Polly Clark

I should have tried harder
to love Steve Davis.
If not for his neat bow tie
then for his rare motor skills.

Good hand-eye co-ordination
smooths the path of a relationship.
At least one of you must have it
like hope, and the ability

to love and keep one's word.
There was much I failed to understand
that Steve tried to explain:
that life's a process of elimination,

and the black truth must be toyed with
until it's the only way out.
One must maximise one's options
within the frame the game creates,

avoiding conflict until its result
can be decisive in your favour -
and the one true art is procrastination
so complex it appears something is happening

until finally, the smack of the cue
drives uncertainty off the face of the earth.
I've learned at last I don't need anything
that requires a hand to touch me.

I dream of the long green baize
where Steve and I might have lain,
my unmanageable dreams
finally, gratefully, pocketed.