MY LIBRARY

Shakespeare! he's in my library
for his comedies and supernatural romances
The Tempest and A Midsummer Night's Dream
Charles Dickens! Oliver, Fagin and the Artful Dodger,
Bill Sykes the murderer

D.H. Lawrence! top shelf for Sons and Lovers
truthful portrait of working-class life
bags of love, loss, grit and dialect
Patrick Kavanagh's Green Fool and Tarry Flynn,
dreaming lyricism in the bleak Irish countryside
Flann O'Brien for the Third Policeman
a man in love with a bicycle
Oscar Wilde's Selfish Giant and Happy Prince
The Russians, Dostoesvsky and Gogol
the Overcoat, Crime and Punishment
Tolstoy's War and Peace
great squares of history

Norman Mailer and the Americans
Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath
Edgar Allan Poe, horror and suspense
throw in Carrie and Stephen King
and for witty songs that touch the heart
alcoholic little guy, Lorenz Hart

Theodore Roethke, poet gardener,
found in Far Fields, whispering Words for the Wind

For sci-fi - Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles
back to England for H.G. Wells and The Time Machine,
Arthur C Clarke, a landmark

to Scotland for the Thirty-Nine Steps
Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island
still in Edinburgh for The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
(I share the romantic lady's love of Italy)
which brings us to Death in Venice
Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse
Steppenwolf and Narziss und Goldmund
we're all sick now and need a Magic Mountain!

In Scotland again for Alisdair Gray's Lanark
dark fantasy and crepuscular skin infections
Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan and Gormenghast
a castle full of weird characters, Swelter, Flay and Steerpike

Tolkien and the hobbits
Richard Adams and the rabbits
Tove Jansson and the Moomins

my library is international
that's why I' m not racist, sexist
or provincial - thanks to these artists
of pen and pencil.