Читать книгу October and Other Poems with Occasional Verses on the War - Bridges Robert - Страница 10

Sweet pretty fledgelings, perched on the rail arow,

Expectantly happy, where ye can watch below

Your parents a-hunting i’ the meadow grasses

All the gay morning to feed you with flies;

Ye recall me a time sixty summers ago,

When, a young chubby chap, I sat just so

With others on a school-form rank’d in a row,

Not less eager and hungry than you, I trow,

With intelligences agape and eyes aglow,

While an authoritative old wise-acre

Stood over us and from a desk fed us with flies.

Dead flies—such as litter the library south-window,

That buzzed at the panes until they fell stiff-baked on the sill,

Or are roll’d up asleep i’ the blinds at sunrise,

Or wafer’d flat in a shrunken folio.

A dry biped he was, nurtured likewise

On skins and skeletons, stale from top to toe

With all manner of rubbish and all manner of lies.