The Paper Seller

This poem is self-evident and based on observation. It is interesting to compare it to a much earlier poem, "Going for the Paper," written during my Marxist phase in the 1970s and posted here on 23 November 2013. Here is a link. The earlier poem is grittier but more syllabic than iambic. It was published in "Tribune," the socialist weekly, as I recall.

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   For years he kept a paper stall
   From dawn to noon, in heat and cold;
   The out-town station, rush hour-thronged,
   Knew him as stork-like, thin and tall.
   A decade gone, now bent and old,
He wanders lanes whey-faced, intense, untongued.

   In dirty T-shirt, flapping coat – 

   Bright sun, wet snow, it makes no odds -
   He rifles bins and, poignantly, 
   Retrieves old papers, then to tote
   Them homewards in thick soggy wads
Where window-piled they moulder yellowly.

   Unkempt of hair, with sockless shoes,

   Rifling gutters for mis-dropped cash,
   His neighbours keep a chill restraint;
   His house is dark, like a puce bruise,
   With shattered brick and crumbling sash
And wet rot bubbling under flaking paint.

   But once he bantered, doling change,

   Knowing a hundred folk by sight,
   His papers crisp in winter’s air;
   The station lights must now seem strange
   As, shunned, he shuffles day and night
Clutching pennies to pay his final fare.

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© May 2014
  

Villanelle: Rejection

This started out as a poem about a failed love, many years ago now, but transmuted into one about the devil - who exists and suffers (regardless of what the foolish recently-appointed Superior General of the Jesuits might say). However, perhaps there is something of the rejected human lover still lurking under the surface.

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Rejection is a grief the devil knows,
Undone by slighting of his self-sure love,
Heart-hate devours like canker in the rose.

Thrown from high ramparts where he’d thunder prose,

Baffled by mildness of the lyric dove,
Rejection is a grief the devil knows.

Freezing in hell-ice, each untruthful pose

Grinds jealous teeth at what’s been left above,
Heart-hate devours like canker in the rose.

Regret is helpless; that he rashly chose

Allows no backstep, like a gaoler’s shove,
Rejection is a grief the devil knows.

Ah, smile of gladness in a face which glows!

Instead, crabbed torment in a too-tight glove,
Heart-hate devours like canker in the rose.

No more to bluster in his fairground shows,

Self-sure but undone by his slighting love,
Rejection is a grief the devil knows,
Heart-hate devours like canker in the rose.

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© April 2014