He Wishes For The Cloths Of Heaven - William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.


[sharon]

The Landlady – Margaret Atwood

This is the lair of the landlady

She is

a raw voice

loose in the rooms beneath me.

the continuous henyard

squabble going on below

thought in this house like

the bicker of blood through the head.

She is everywhere, intrusive as the smells

that bulge in under my doorsill;

she presides over my

meagre eating, generates

the light for eyestrain.

From her I rent my time:

she slams

my days like doors.

Nothing is mine.

and when I dream images

of daring escapes through the snow

I find myself walking

always over a vast face

which is the land-

lady's, and wake up shouting.

She is a bulk, a knot

swollen in a space. Though I have tried

to find some way around

her, my senses

are cluttered by perception

and can't see through her.

She stands there, a raucous fact

blocking my way:

immutable, a slab

of what is real.

solid as bacon.



[sharon]