Congress// Original Poem

This poem was part of my A-level English cousework. It had to be a reaction to the poet Ted Hughes and from a poem in his 'Birthday Letters' I will link below the original poem by Hughes.

Congress

Oh Prison Guard, hunting your prey
Talons elongated
Grasping the soft, subtle throat. The day
Pulling to night.

You toyed with being safe. Malnourished
I kept you well. Drops of water pattering against your waxen
Wings outstretched. You flourished.
Airborne.

Incarcerator. Words seducing you from the page
Ink blots streamed down.
Dancing between your eyes- Rattling against your cage
Wire snapping silently

You pushed too far, thrashing higher. I could not pull
You down.
Floating with a head so full
Ideas plummeting you below the cold, welcoming clay.

Convulsed as the ivy coiling around your cadaver
Congress strutting- chirping endlessly
A palaver.
Pecking at what was left of your carcass…

Taciturn Terato screaming in your mind
Echoing in a deafening silence
Scratching at what is left behind
Wrong is right, right wrong

Below is the Hughes poem..

The Blackbird

You were the jailer of your murderer --
Which imprisoned you.
And since I was your nurse and your protector
Your sentence was mine too.

You played at feeling safe. As I fed you
You ate and drank and swallowed
Sliding me sleepy looks, like a suckling babe,
From under your eyelids.

You fed your prisoner's rage, in the dungeon,
Through the keyhole --
Then, in a single, stung bound, came back up
The coiled, unlit stairwell.

Giant poppy faces flamed and charred
At the window. 'Look!'
You pointed and a blackbird was lugging
A worm from its bottleneck.

The lawn lay like the pristine waiting page
Of a prison report.
Who would write what upon it
I never gave a thought.

A dumb creature, looping at the furnace door
On its demon's prong,
Was a pen already writing
Wrong is right, right wrong.

Ted Hughes

XoXo E