Black Doggerel

Warning - When I Am an Old Woman I Shall Wear Purple.
By Jenny Joseph.

( Cut for random poetry posting )

A quick favour: can anyone post the text of the poem "That Star" by Ted Hughes for me? I haven't got it in a book and apparently the complete text isn't online anywhere. Plus it's too hot to walk to the nearest library/bookshop, and no guarantee that either will have it anyway.

I did find part of it when I googled, quoted in a scholarly paper about stars:

And they surround us. And far into infinity.
These are the armies of the night.
There is no escape.
Not one of them is good, or friendly, or corruptible.
One chance remains: KEEP ON DIGGING THAT HOLE
KEEP ON DIGGING AWAY AT THAT HOLE.

But I kinda want the whole thing. Anyone have it handy?

Way back in this entry, I begged my f-list to find a certain poem. My f-list contains poets, poetry-lovers, librarians and the daughters of librarians, and yet no one has found it. It's been posted on Google Answers and gone unanswered; it was posted on a specialist poem-finding bulletin board and no one there had ever heard of it.

I am forced to draw the conclusion that someone - Daleks? John Crichton? Rogue Time Agents? Sam Vimes? - has, either maliciously, accidentally or as a necessary sacrifice for the greater good, erased it from the timeline so that the poem was, in fact, never written.

Delicious, crunchy internet cookies for anyone who comes up with a more detailed explanation of how this happened and why I am the only person who remembers its existence - it's not like my memory was ever exactly reliable, after all. Delicious Internet cookies and the sexual favour of your choice* for anyone who can actually find me the damn poem.



*Or some other favour, should you turn out to be a blood relative or otherwise sexually-incompatible life-form.

There's a poem that begins "Thirty-five feet deep in the wet language...". I can't find it online, (I've tried Googling for it) and I can't remember who wrote it.


It also contains the lines: "Oh, if those words were air...
But they are not air, and she is not mine" and "But
how can she breathe thus all cemented up? Forgive me my pleas without
end, forgive me these ninety two more words my love"

...or something very like that. I'm quoting from memory here. I believe it to be a fairly modern poem; the author's maybe someone like Brian Patten? Only probably not actually him, just someone who reminds me of him.

I've been hunting this fucking poem for two years now. I've googled till I'm blue in the face. I've posted to greatpoets, I joined a forum especially for finding poems, I've sat in a London bookshop and gone through the index of first lines of every sodding anthology they had in stock. Someone has to know this godsdamned poxy fucking poem! I may die if I can't find it. Please, I beg you, help me?