Christopher Shepheard Poems

You wear your years like jewels
That time cannot waste or weather —
A face that lips might laze upon
And angels’ glances gaze upon
...

An enterprise for zealots to pursue
Who felt within their skills a worship quickening
To build a spire of stone and thereby light
The heavens up, for all men to acquire.
...

I felt your hand upon my arm
And was awakened by your urgency;
There heard you murmuring in expectant voice
Things that only should be yours and mine —
...

Though marked and measured, mountainous the path
That patience preaches — ligature and lath
To hold up heaviness in harness — moulds who moon-
Rake, trudge, with sun-scorched shoulders, dune upon dune.
...

I did not fear my birth
Into this fluttering breath
Where decimal places of measured time
Resolve their way to death.
...

You were like looking in from the rain
On a Christmas Eve, when the hearth is ablaze,
When the warmth oozes out through the window pane
And the sodden byways glisten and glaze
...

What is it for a man to die? This world
Of water leaves no other moil or mark
Of his departure than a ripple ring.
A lemming, dropping into Arctic dark
...

You taught me all the things I had not guessed,
Nor looked for, saying that they were sweet
And life was not given for less.
...

A frank affection seldom stirs
The gossips to inject their spurs;
Their appetites will quickly pall
Since all their news in know to all.
...

You sat, the victrix of my escapade,
The spoils upon your lap; a programmed scrolled
From fiddling, an empty box. I had,
I thought, enough of fight to have emerged
...