The Poetry Society

Philip Gross

 "What got me into writing? T.S.Eliot's The Waste Land - found by accident in the school library one lunchtime when I was in there hiding from the rain (and maybe people). Did I 'understand' it? No way... but I was intrigued, entranced, annoyed, strangely captivated by it..."

Poem by a teenaged Philip Gross

A Cliff Scene: Tregardock.

The tiger sea claws down the ages

 from the cliff; no pad and pawful

playing, but white claws unleashed

on the land, peeling down and grinding out

the soil's bone.

                                    Are the sea's muscular

spasms which roll in the waves

partnered by the air's surge, boiling

with gulIs in a thousand screaming wings

tumbling upward at the world's edge?

            Elemental conflict scorns and scatters

life's intrusion, leaves its illusions

to the living - eliminates colour

in a fused and furied world

of grey, black and the white

flowering of their frenzy.

Each clutching fall back from the cliff's face

throws its anger on the wind's waves,

charms its prey and me, the erstwhile

charmer, into eyebound awe.

Watching this, I am no more living

than the gulls in the wind's mad hands,

or a mouse alive in the final

catfilled yawn of the shadow's tooth.

What does it matter if I live

or die; if mankind builds or draws

a fiery curtain on his world?

Blind waves will beat their brains out

still on thoughtless rocks.