Final Portfolio

I thought, for completeness' sake, that I would post up the three revisions that I had to hand in for my poetry course here:

Walking Through Fields, I Consider Colour

The grass is green.
The grass is green with worms and mud and cowpats mixed in.
The mud is dark brown, fine-grained, very soft;
it gives under my feet, and the water mushing up shines in the after-rain light
that is pale and bright in the way that no other light is,
that remembers what greyness was,
that lifts, with a breeze, the dampness in my hair,
as I walk - no hurry - threading and skipping through lumps of grass
and cowpats, with their sour smell that layers the field,
a smell that's friendly with the petrol fumes of the paint-box cars
thrsshing through the damp and spatter of the gravelled
road curving around my field of
green grass.

I look up.
The sky is blue?

O Rose That Totters

O rose that totters leafless on my window sill
Why die?

You should be birthing beautiful monsters, tender-petaled fists of fire
wond from warm earth and clean water yet you,
my stick-bundle,
despite water, and fertiliser, and several very encouraging songs,
you crouch, keeping only bead-buds that never open.

Alas, you're too frail for much regret.
O let's be honest - if these words run
longer, you'll die
before they're done.

The Worm's Song

Rose, thou art sick! / The invisible worm / That flies in the night, / In the howling storm / Has found out they bed / Of crimson joy / And his dark secret love / Does thy life destroy.

William Blake

I'm watching from my secret place,
where the pine-tree's drip slithers under my collar.
The pine-tree sighs in the bitter night.
The birds are sleeping.

It is warm where you are -
through your window I see
on the sill amber lamps, and curtains
half-opened to the night, and you.

Tell me. If, walking in a shit-rubbish waste,
you turned an unexpected corner,
stumbled through garden-ways and saw,
unwilting, one dew-touched flower,

wouldn't you want to pluck it?

I wasn't greatly thrilled with the re-writes, I have to say. I got some very respectable marks back, though, so I must have done something right. I think he was impressed, or at least stunned, with the slash-and-burn approach used in the first and last...