[ Home ] [ Kingsley Amis ] [ W H Auden ] [ Be Angry at the Sun ] [ Elizabeth Bishop ] [ Byron ] [ CP Cavafy ] [ Raymond Carver ] [ Wendy Cope ] [ Fable of the Mermaid and the Drunks ] [ U A Fanthorpe ] [ Robert Frost ] [ Graham Greene ] [ Marilyn Hacker ] [ David Holbrook ] [ The Jackdaw of Rheims ] [ Rudyard Kipling ] [ Philip Larkin ] [ Poems 2002/3 ] [ Gerard Manley Hopkins ] [ Daniel North ] [ Stevie Smith ] [ Susan Sorensen ] [ Adrienne Rich ] [ Michael Tod ] [ W B Yeats ] [ Noel Whittall ]

You have reached iGreens.org.uk.  In December 2006 we moved to iGreens.org with faster servers and discussion boards.  Click here to follow us.  

Shot dictators are quite small.

The bullets take more than life.

A dictator’s wife holds a lot of blood.

I saw it on TV, leaking from her neck.

Could have been a scarf;

silk, Hermès perhaps.

I watched a man in another land

take a live fish from water. Then

a sharp knife. He sectioned its body,

slicing through gleaming skin,

severing the muscle and nerve

and backbone that had driven it

through its strange dimension.

Maybe fish don’t suffer;

they bleed less freely than dictators

or their wives.

by Noel Whitall

Noel Whittall lives in Yorkshire.  Click here to contact him.   

"The dictator and his wife" is available in Curriculum 4 Leeds Poets, published by White Line Press, 1998.  Available from 1A Headingley Mount. Leeds. LS6 3EL

[ Home ] [ Up ]

You have reached iGreens.org.uk.  In December 2006 we moved to iGreens.org with faster servers and discussion boards.  Click here to follow us.  

Send mail to enquiries@igreens.org.uk  with questions or comments about this web site.
Last modified: September 26, 2006