GutClean

I quote the English poet George Barker's 'True Confession' in one of my Indie comments and copy further here a couple of very striking passages from it.

The first passage is a beautiful love poem. By way of contrast the introduction to the poem itself offers some splendidly scatological observations on the act of human procreation you'll just have to sniff out for yourself you dirty barker (as George himself would have observed and does at the start of section III in the poem)

I sent a letter to my love
  In an envelope of stone,
And in between the letters ran
  A crying torrent that began
To grow till it was bigger than
  Nyanza or the heart of man.
I sent a letter to my love
  In an envelope of stone. 

I sent a present to my love
  In a black bordered box,
A clock that beats a time of tears
  As the stricken midnight nears
And my love weeps as she hears
  The armageddon of the years.
I sent my love the present
  In a black bordered box. 

I sent a liar to my love
  With his hands full of roses
But she shook her yellow and curled
  Curled and yellow hair and cried
The rose is dead of all the world
  Since my only love has lied.
I sent a liar to my love
  With roses in his hands. 

I sent a daughter to my love
  In a painted cradle.
She took her up at her left breast
  And rocked her to a mothered rest
Singing a song that what is best
  Loves and loves and forgets the rest.
I sent a daughter to my love
  In a painted cradle. 

I sent a letter to my love
  On a sheet of stone.
She looked down and as she read
  She shook her yellow hair and said
Now he sleeps alone instead
  Of many a lie in many a bed.
I sent a letter to my love
  On a sheet of stone. 

and the second an exquisite meditation on human suffering (there is a long preamble to what I wish to quote of which I supply just the concluding two verses to begin with)

I confess, my God, this lonely
  Derelict of a night, when I
And not the conscious I only
  Feel all the responsibility -
(But the simple and final fact
  That we are better than we act,
For this fortunate windfall
  We are not responsible at all) - 

I confess, my God, that in
  The hotbed of the monkey sin
I saw you through a guilt of hair
  Standing lonely as a mourner
Silent in the bedroom corner
  Knowing you need not be there:
I saw the genetic man had torn
  A face away from your despair. 

I confess, my God, my Good,
  I have not wholly understood
The nature of our holiness:
  The striking snake errs even less
Not questioning; the physicist
  Not asking why all things exist
Serves better than those who advance a
  Question to which life's the answer. 

But, O my God, the human purpose
  If at all I can perceive
A purpose in the life I live,
  Is to hide in the glass horse
Of our doubt until the pity
  Of heaven opens up a city
Of absolute belief to us,
  Because our silence is hideous 

And our doubt more miserable
  Than certainty of the worst would be.
Like infinity pitiable
  Ghosts who do not even know
They waver between reality
  And unreality, we go
About our lives and cannot see
  Even why we suffer so. 

I know only that the heart
  Doubting every real thing else
Does not doubt the voice that tells
  Us that we suffer. The hard part
At the dead centre of the soul
  Is an age of frozen grief
No vernal equinox of relief
  Can mitigate, and no love console. 

Then, O my God, by the hand
  This star-wandering grief takes
The world that does not understand
  Its own miseries and mistakes
And leads it home. Not yet, but later
  To lean an expiated head
On the shoulder of a creator
  Who knows where all troubles lead. 

George incidentally doesn't get much of a write-up in his wiki - anyone able and willing to expand the entry appreciated by me.