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Best Poems Written by Ijen Warner

Below are the all-time best Ijen Warner poems as chosen by PoetrySoup members

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The Millions

[This poem took its inspiration from a sonnet by Charles Hamilton Sorley, When you See Millions… The sonnet was in a collection of writing about World War One.] 

Of war I read
The poems, the pain, the countless dead
And when you see the millions…
The millions thrown together in common grave
Of what were battle lines
And now are places paved
With bones and blood and interwoven human flesh
Their lives they gave, it makes me wonder why
All men they flocked together, came to fight and die
Though I wonder even more at how we live
Our dreams, our aims, the things we choose to give
And when you see the millions…
The millions thrown together in common streets
Not soldiers now, as citizens they meet
But in each other sense the foe or spy
Protect the private castles, avert the eyes
From foreign gaze or so as not to see
The other kind of me, one old or poor or not all there
Or just a neighbour’s sad or jealous stare
Of their own accord our hearts and hands
Lay borders, demarcate the lands
And build the trenches, place the guns
The lines of city fences, few the crossing points
Fewer still the truces called, the white flag raised
For emergencies perhaps, for holidays
When we stop being islands, become the sea
Unstitch the private space and melt into the ‘we’
But otherwise, the lonely shadows flitting by
For one or two a tear we could cry
Extend an outstretched hand and warming word
Not snatched away unheard in city rush
That sometimes brings to mind the people crush
Like in the soldiers’ tales, piles of corpses in the way
Just trampled underfoot in war’s indifferent haste
That dulls the finer feelings, steals the taste
Of fellow human beings and fate we share
These streets and skies and yellowed, dirtied air
Amidst the millions lose our individual face
Become the masses, fashion our new place
As atolls, reefs, and endless rocks
No shore we leave for building docks
No room in concrete towers grown tall
The weaving all machine-done now
And we, we raise the walls.

Details | Ijen Warner Poem

People Petals

This is my translation of a Chinese Song dynasty poem and my response to the poem

Yan Jidao
To the tune of Mulan hua

Again, the east wind blows its heartless gusts
Smears flowers thick upon the ground like scarlet makeup blush
Emerald tower’s curtain no screen for sorrow’s view
Last year’s melancholy washes in anew
Am I not a fool to fret so over spring’s remains?
At every step shed my tears in vain
Instead, I’ll fill my wine cup to the brim
This full of fallen flowers I need to drink my sorrow dim

People Petals 
Fallen flowers do not linger in these days
When spring is greenhouse years and air-conditioned rooms
And workers plant the flowers for a time, then take their withered heads away
But no, it’s not in vain to fret and cry for all that falls and fades
The careless wind and strewn ground
A season mirror sending us our hearts
The flowers as if people petals that blossomed in our past
Faces gone, friends and neighbours, Christmas present aunts
Run to gather up those bits of life and stay their shades
Press them in my memory books and glue them fast
People petals still spread blush and dab the earth’s cheeks bright
The roads inside us still need tears to wash away the dust
Be summer rains and clear the skies for autumn gold
Even with the east wind shut outside and seasons small
We still know time and still grow old and feel how sorrow turns
Still the sowers, gardeners, sweepers
Still the faded fruits, the ashes and the earth

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Mid-Autumn

Plucked from before the hulks of houses going up
My childhood sea and spot of southern sky
The cornflower eyes northern poets wove into their songs
And eastern poets sang the autumn high
Climbed hills to catch the moon
Timid flower placed inside a Chinese vase
Enamel green the ocean waves
Silvered summit at the rim
Of years carried in this ebbing tide
I had many autumns and many gilded nights
Air crisp, sky long and blue, blue
Cornflower-hue of splendid time
Pressed as scavenged leaves between the pages of old books
Verse the fixing glue when flower lives are but a glimpse
A faded head and sea gone dry, the petals lost
The poets leant from their pavilions to fish the gentle orb
And roam the stars
I roam the concrete paths and pick the crumbs
A snatch of light between the clouds

Details | Ijen Warner Poem

Sad Lions

Sad lions set in Moscow stone
Watch motion streams
With lips so pulled and long
They follow people flows 
Sad faces, smiles, tears and laughs
Fragments glum or grey
Sad lions sucking on spaghetti strands
Flags and symbols changed and rulers come and gone
Sad lions droop in mournful pose
Other creatures pompous proud
Puffed fat as bloated toads
Blank-eyed, hurry past 
With thoughts of car parks underground
Or penthouses 
And towers higher than in Shanghai
Higher than in Dubai
Their lions would be gold 
The haughty sort to guard the doors
For mannered faces be the mirror glass
It wouldn’t be a Moscow thing to play
At being lions, stretch one’s lips in sorrowed pout
But then again, the merchants and the nobles
Perhaps stayed young at moments in their day

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Response To Night At the River

This is my translation of a Chinese poem and my own modern-day reply

Night at the River
Tang Shigu

Lonely autumn on the river
Fishermen’s lights dot the night
Lift my head to see the moon tip faint gleam upon the trees
Shore birds startled by the shimmering waves
Soon tuck their heads again in sleep
Cold dew clings damp and keeps the fireflies from flight

My response to Tang Shigu’s Night at the River 

The fireflies live in books
The fishermen gone, pleasure boats trace shining lines through city lights
arranged in rows, blocks and sheets
with scant place for moonbeams, even full
Our birds know only darkness trimmed
Ignore electric glow and neon flash
Only autumn stays the same, damp and grey
With fading colours, naked trees
This constancy of the heart’s lonely sigh

Details | Ijen Warner Poem

The Sky Grows Old

If the sky truly felt for us it would grow old too
Such words I read, and thought
It does grow old, each day
The hours tick its youth away
Late autumn fades its light
Dressed drab in old lady greys and browns
Bent low, pressed and tired
Winter-wrinkled, puckered up in old man’s frown
Makes you wonder where he went, the fretful boy with rushing eyes
The summer girl with arms flung wide to hug the world
Look up and see the cocky ones pick fights
The chance crowds cluster around
Like riot police and demonstrators
The kind who mask their faces, hurl stones
We all know youth has its storms
And didn’t the sky have them too?
Whip us with the wind, pelt and lash
Be a hooligan, a punk, a vandal
Spray can of snow or rain, and cheeky grin between the clouds
Dawn’s soft and pinkish kiss
Peach flush on city walls
Young mother’s quiet gaze 
She throws across her child’s sleepy face
And steady night of map lines, moon
To guide, to cast a blanket broad
Silver streams of lighthouse light
Like teachers, fathers, calmer now with duties and years
Sky grown sedate, less flashy in its spread
Just like us it seems
Of the same moods and seasons
And we like its dawns and dusks

Details | Ijen Warner Poem

Bottled World

Bottled peppers, pickles, plums, old ladies stand
In small flock at the market gate
Their bottled things arrayed, their pastes and jams
Fruit that hung all summer fat then autumn picked
Mushed and melted, now fills random jars
And on collectors’ shelves in coloured glassy rows
The world shrunk down to bulbs of fancy drink
A gulp or two of bitter, sweet or dry
Forms and labels richer in their tales told
The container not the content draws the eye
People stream in escalator lines
Concrete-bottled, metro sausage strings
Cattle crowd of elbows, faces blank
Not the peacock-pretty multi-coloured things
Not in winter grey and twilight coats wrapped thick
Bottled pickle once a pepper crisp and bright
As golden sun, and the liquor once was grape
Before they locked it in the glass and corked it tight
And the human flow, it runs from light to light
A smile tossed, a boy waits with a rose
Beneath the city-packaged layers, sudden sense
of closeness, them my sea and I their drop

Details | Ijen Warner Poem

Steelwork Summer

Steelwork Summer 

Blast furnace sky swings down
Pours a molten mix the way they lay roads
Press it in, choke you up on din and dust
Slink along the walls, close
Hugging that stingy strip of shade
Once summer was a skipping girl
Only now and then might fire in scarlet blush
Now it’s the sweaty worker’s weary grin
He flashes through rutted blackened days
Of rolling sweltering lines across the city life
Oh yes, we work it, summer, fuel the forge
Temper the steel