Andrew Motion fishing in Scotland
Andrew Motion is the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom. He was appointed by the Lord Chamberlain on behalf of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. He is also a Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway, University of London. The distinguished poet, biographer and novelist will be 56 years old on 26 October 2008. He became a Poet Laureate after the death of Poet Laureate Ted Hughes. Initially, the post was for a lifetime but Motion has been appointed for ten years (1999 – 2009). His job as a poet laureate include 'writing verse on royal occasions’. It was not an easy task for Motion who admitted that it was ‘very damaging’ to his work. He told the BBC, "I dried up completely about five years ago and can't write anything except to commission." While he was a Professor of Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia he was popular with the phrase POETRY IN MOTION.
The Last Call
Death called me,
I did not hear.
He spoke again:
Come near.
I went to look
for pity.
Poor death, I thought,
he loves me.
I guessed right,
he does.
And now I love him too,
just because.
Princess Margaret (1930 – 2002) courtesy divasthesite
The Younger Sister
The luxuries, of course, and privilege –
The money, houses, holidays, the lot:
All these were real, and all these drove a wedge
Between your life and ours. And yet the thought
Of how no privilege on earth can keep
A life from suffering in love and loss –
This means we turn to you and see how deep
The current runs between yourself and us.
And now death spells it out again, and more,
As it becomes your final human act:
A daughter gone before her mother goes;
A younger sister heading on before;
A woman in possession of the fact
That love and duty speak two languages.
Ice
When friends no longer remembered
the reasons we set forth,
I switched between nanny and tartar
driving us on north.
Will you imagine a human hand
welded by ice to wood?
And skin when they chip it off?
I don’t think you should.
By day the appalling loose beauty
of prowling floes:
lions’ heads, dragons, crucifix-wrecks,
and a thing like a blown rose.
By night the seething hiss
of killers cruising past –
the silence after each fountain-jet,
and our hearts aghast.
Of our journey home and the rest
there is nothing more to say.
I have lived and not yet died.
I have sailed in the Scotia Sea.
