Peter Hook

Raking leaves on a warm and gusting winter's day

I should have known it all along
No way to round up fallen leaves
On a day like this with wind so strong
It'd rip the rake right out of your hands.

The leaves know, too, that they were wrong
When they let go of branches they'd
Been clinging to all summer long.
They cut their ties a month too soon!

Is it the wind – or pure despair
That makes them wild and want to dance
And whirl around me in the air
Then spiral up in bowing towers

As if to grasp the branches where
They spent their last most happy hours?

The good ship "Merriweather"

The good ship "Merriweather" came to grief
While sailing in the South Australian Sea.
She ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef
And broke to bits and pieces of debris.

All done in save a single green glass bottle
That an old sailor emptied at a gulp.
"Why wase a drap?" he muttered to a knothole
Before they both were battered to a pulp.

The bottle bobbed eleven thousand leagues
On currents imperturbable and silent
Outwitting all the winds' and waves' intrigues
To dash it up against some rocky island,

Until my daughter caught it by the neck
And held it to the sun: "No letter. Heck!"

A spring unsprung

No tarter tongue has ever wrung
The peace and quiet from my mind.
So highly strung she was among
The most unhappy of her kind.
At times she clung to me and hung.
(Was there no other she could find?)
When her mood swung the words she flung
Oh, how they stung the undersigned!
                                                             - Peter


Music and voice by Andrew "Murugan" Looker

Autobiography in Ten Lines

Heaving left, then heeling right, now port, now starboard,
I managed somehow to haul my hull through Harvard,
Sought a steady compass from the anti-mystics
Of Maharashtra and settled on linguistics.
In Marathi, Hindi-Urdu, and Kashmiri
Found so little in support of formal theory,
That I satisfy my urge for solving puzzles
Now by reading - even sometimes writing - ghazals.
I got a doctorate from UPenn,
Retired now till God knows when.

Sixtieth Reunion

Classmates, has it been that long since
with mind and bodies half decayed
we slipped into our ninth decade?
The thought's enough to make one wince!

No more can we ignore the hints,
the shadows cast, the looming shade
of Time's all-mastering quivering blade,
while eating after-dinner mints.

Time's the one no-one can convince,
that Lamartine could not persuade,
from his dread course who can't be swayed.
Each moment bears his fingerprints

while over coffee and a blintz
we paint the past in golden tints.