SHENSTON IAN 88 - Old Silhillians Association

he strives and strives, images big in his brain,
but the answer is only screaming pain.
The ground beats him, sun and earth rotating in his eyes like a carousel, and
there is no room for thought, only the grasping of air, the contraction of muscles —
and what he was is gone, the tamed animal, he is only a naked want, a need that
cannot be satisfied; and the flood overtakes him with horror, that he cannot be
what he was, that he 'is' not.
Pebble
The casual toss of a pebble,
The heedless drop of a harmful word;
Ripples spread and in my mind
A sparkling pool of thoughts grows dim;
Distorted reflections; the pebble
Sinks slowly to the murky swirling
Depths of suspicion and fear.
Deceitful eddies, underlying currents of despair,
Foaming breakers of sorrow and regret;
By all of these the solid cliffs
Of loyalty and trust are broken,
Crumbling into sullen discontent:
For a friendship abused is a friendship washed away.
J. Puckering
Holocaustic Valediction.
Oh! For the lack of a teaspoon!
What a tangled web of anachronisms we weave!
The many political tessellations surround us in their firm grasp,
Spewing forth long-forgotten ideals of dialectical materialism.
Oh! Had we listened to the prudent caterpillars in the Apple of Life
We should not struggle in the ever-tightening snare of despair,
Where hope is extinguished in a last gasp of wretchedness,
While the fate of the world hinges on a small red button,
Encased in the sententious narwhal or our society.
The gnarled hand of the captalist poises above it,
Suspended in limbo,
Only awakened from deepest slumber by the quavering voice of the nations
Lamenting their folly,
Imploring it to relinquish its hold upon their anguish of countless millenia. —
for lack of a teaspoon the remedy was lost. For lack of the the remedy the race
was lost.
Andrew Dunbar, Stuart McGill.
A Sailor Returns
She stood there on the beach.
She -stared out at the sea.
The cold, dark, forbidding sea.
The harsh salt-wind blew in her face,
And she smiled.
D. Mugridge He would never forget her.
He would one day come back.
The ship had carried him far away.
The bobbing ship would never return to the shore,
But he lived on.
Kindred Spirits
Then she saw the ship on the horizon.
She saw him waving from the deck.
She was happy now.
She turned and walked back up the beach.
She finally knew that he was dead.
Victoria Hicken
My lonely soul is only half of whole
Removed from the set, the lost jigsaw piece.
The bestranged black sheep, shut out of the fold
Rejected by those seeing only fleece.
For a moment there's God, so suddenly
Beneath the ashes, the embers still glow.
Another brief span of joy cocoons me
But nothing of beauty from this can grow.
I wonder if I'm wrong to cry inside
When every animal finds its mate
And deeper hope with sorrow doth abide.
As I await the perfumed hand of fate.
So woman cross the line twixt dream and life
And kill the spectres of past gloom and strife.
Beauty and the Beast
Of many a tale I may have heard told
That flies on gossip's wings o'er land and sea,
There's one sweet song that I as favourite hold;
Of a cursed beast and his fair beauty.
Wandering gaily to forest from lea.
The young girl loses her way and is lost
Sleeping, the beast finds her under a tree
And woke she bathes in the eyes of her host.
Startled, she shrinks like a flower in a frost
Yet their love blooms in the first rays of Spring.
Now she returns on the paths she once crossed
To tell of the beast she holds as a king.
Thus they were joined as eternally one;
I promise to pay the bearer the sum. . .