2017 POEMS FOR AGES OVER 14 – UNDER 19 SELECT ONE FROM THE LIST BELOW AND A POEM OF YOUR OWN CHOICE
Sonnet 116 by William Shakespeare
The Unreturning by Wilfred Owen
Pop Sonnet XCVI The Who, ‘Pinball Wizard’
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be
taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
Suddenly night crushed out the day and hurled
Her remnants over cloud-peaks, thunder-walled.
Then fell a stillness such as harks appalled
When far-gone dead return upon the world.
From London-town to Brighton’s Shores I’ve
trekk’d
to test my dext’rous skills in each arcade,
and naught I’ve seen could make me e’er expect
to see the prowess Tommy hath display’d.
Like Grecian marbles, he unmoving stands
before the table. Saying not a word,
for naught but intuition guides his hands:
He never hath the cab’net seen or heard.
No sight hath he, nor any means to hear how do his flipper fingers aim so true?
I’ll crown this wizard king and disappear;
My name forgotten, I’ll be known as “who?”
-To watch him play shall surely thee enthral,
For lo! The kid doth play a mean pinball!
There watched I for the Dead; but no ghost woke.
Each one whom Life exiled I named and called.
But they were all too far, or dumbed, or thralled,
And never one fared back to me or spoke.
Then peered the indefinite unshapen dawn
With vacant gloaming, sad as half-lit minds,
The weak-limned hour when sick men's sighs are
drained.
And while I wondered on their being withdrawn,
Gagged by the smothering Wing which none
unbinds,
I dreaded even a heaven with doors so chained.