Alphabet by Michael Rosen

 

Illustration By Enki Bilal

Alphabet

by Michael Rosen

 

You found a place
where I wasn't me
you shut your eyes
and you could see.....
an apple all alone,
bears being bad,
computers cooking cakes,
dogs drawing dad.

Boogy Woogy Buggy by Michael Rosen

 

Boogy Woogy Buggy

by Michael Rosen

I glide as I ride
in my boogy woogy buggy
take the corners wide
just see me drive
I’m an easy speedy baby
doing the baby buggy jive

I’m in and out the shops
I’m the one that never stops
I’m the one that feels
the beat of the wheels
all that air
in my hair
I streak down the street
between the feet that I meet.

No one can catch
my boogy woogy buggy
no one’s got the pace
I rule this place

I’m a baby who knows
I’m a baby who goes, baby, goes.

Do I know you? by Michael Rosen

 

Illustration by Enki Bilal

¿Te conozco?

Por Michael Rosen

Estoy perdido,
estoy perdido,
no sé dónde estoy.
Soy un calcetín en una lavadora,
una fresa en mermelada,
soy una carta en un libro,
soy la burbuja en una bebida efervescente,
soy un guijarro en la playa,
soy una pregunta en un concurso.
No sé dónde estás,
no sabes dónde estás,
no sabes cuándo estoy,
no sé cómo estabas,
no sabes a quién me refiero.

Así que encuéntrame
Encuéntrame
Pregúntame quién soy
Sácame de la lavadora
Sácame de la mermelada
Abre el libro
Deja salir toda la efervescencia
Caminemos por la playa
Y responderé a tu cuestionario
Entonces sabré dónde estás
Sabrás cuándo estoy
Sabré cómo estabas
Y sabrás a quién admiro.

‘Difficult love’ / Spanish publisher reprints groundbreaking book of Lorca’s homoerotic sonnets

'Amor difícil': una editorial española reedita un libro pionero con los sonetos homoeróticos de Lorca.

Este artículo tiene más de 9 meses de antigüedad.

Los poemas de Federico García Lorca fueron publicados anónimamente en 1983 después de haber permanecido ocultos por su familia durante 50 años.

Sam Jones en Madrid,
viernes 13 de junio de 2025

En otoño de 1983, decenas de lectores cuidadosamente seleccionados recibieron un sobre que contenía un pequeño librito rojo con sonetos que habían permanecido guardados desde que fueron escritos casi 50 años antes por el poeta español más famoso del siglo XX.

Name of Federico García Lorca's lover emerges after 70 years

 

Federico García Lorca

Name of Federico García Lorca's lover emerges after 70 years

This article is more than 13 years old

Box of mementoes reveals that young art critic Juan Ramírez de Lucas had brief affair with Spanish poet

Giles Tremlette in Madrid

10 May 2012

The identity of the lover to whom Federico García Lorca wrote passionate verse in his final year has been a mystery ever since the poet's assassination during the Spanish civil war. But now, more than 70 years later, his name has finally emerged.

Lost Federico García Lorca verse discovered 93 years after it was written

Federico García Lorca

Lost Federico García Lorca verse discovered 93 years after it was written

Eight-line poem found on the back of a manuscript sheds light on Spanish poet’s preoccupation with time

Sam Jones in Madrid

Sat 18 Apr 2026 05.00 BST

A previously unknown verse attributed to Federico García Lorca has been discovered 93 years after the celebrated Spanish poet and playwright is believed to have jotted it on the back of one of his manuscripts.

Lorca is thought to have written the eight-line poem in 1933 while working on the collection Diván del Tamarit, a homage to the Arab poets of his native Granada.

The newly discovered verse was found on the reverse of a manuscript of one of the Tamarit poems – Gacela de la raíz amarga – which the flamenco singer and Lorca enthusiast Miguel Poveda bought from a German antiquarian.

It has since been verified by the Lorca expert Pepa Merlo and will feature in a forthcoming book.

The brief verse, composed three years before Lorca was murdered in the early days of the Spanish civil war, reveals the poet’s familiar preoccupation with the passing of time: “The clock sings / I count the hours mechanically / Seven o’clock; twelve o’clock / It’s all the same / I am not here / It is the mark of flesh / That I left behind when I departed / So as to know my place / Upon my return.”

Poveda, who recently led efforts to turn Lorca’s childhood home into a cultural centre dedicated to the poet’s life and work, said he had been deeply moved by the fortuitous discovery.

The manuscript was bought by the flamenco singer Miguel Poveda. Photograph: RTVE

“My attention was grabbed when Pepa Merlo said to me, ‘That’s Federico’s handwriting. You’ve got something new by Federico there’,” he told the state broadcaster TVE on Thursday.

“For me, it’s a heartfelt gift. It’s all there in those lines, ‘It is the mark of flesh / That I left behind, when I departed / So as to know my place / Upon my return’.”

Merlo said that while the verse may have been overlooked because it was scribbled on the back of another work, it nonetheless revealed “the importance that the concept of time held for Lorca”.

The gay, progressive writer – whose works include Gypsy Ballads, Poet in New York, Blood Wedding, Yerma, and the House of Bernarda Alba – was shot by a rightwing death squad in August 1936, becoming perhaps the most prominent victim of Spain’s three-year civil war. His body has never been found and is thought to lie in a shallow grave at the bottom of a mountain slope near Granada.

Interest in Lorca has only grown as the centenary of his death draws near. Last summer, a facsimile edition of the poet’s homoerotic, anguished – and posthumously published – Sonnets of Dark Love was issued to bring the poems to a new readership.

Although long known to Lorca scholars, the sonnets had been hidden away by the poet’s family, who believed their tortured and sensual lines would taint his legacy and stir up old hatreds.

The newly discovered poem will be published in a book written by Poveda and Merlo titled Las cosas del otro lado. lo inédito en Federico García Lorca(Things from the Other Side: the Unpublished in Federico García Lorca).

THE GUARDIAN

Michael Rosen / Don't mention the children

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7DiGkQS2h8

Don't mention the children 

by Michael Rosen

Don't mention the children.

Don't name the dead children.

The people must not know the names

of the dead children.

The names of the children must be hidden.

The children must be nameless.

The children must leave this world

having no names.

No one must know the names of

the dead children.

No one must say the names of the

dead children.

No one must even think that the children

have names.

People must understand that it would be dangerous

to know the names of the children.

The people must be protected from

knowing the names of the children.

The names of the children could spread

like wildfire.

The people would not be safe if they knew

the names of the children.

Don’t name the dead children.

Don’t remember the dead children.

Don’t think of the dead children.

Don’t say: ‘dead children’.

My island of strangers by Michael Rosen

 

Illustration by Danielle Rhoda

My island of strangers 

by Michael Rosen

by This article is more than 10 months oldby Michael Rosen Rosen

I lay in bed
hardly able to breathe
but there were people to sedate me,
pump air into me
calm me down when I thrashed around
hold my hand and reassure me
play me songs my family sent in
turn me over to help my lungs
shave me, wash me, feed me
check my medication
perform the tracheostomy
people on this “island of strangers”
from China, Jamaica, Brazil, Ireland
India, USA, Nigeria and Greece.

I sat on the edge of my bed
and four people came with
a frame and supported me
or took me to a gym
where they taught me how
to walk between parallel bars
or kick a balloon
sat me in a wheelchair
taught me how to use the exercise bike
how to walk with a stick
how to walk without a stick
people on this “island of strangers”
from China, Jamaica, Brazil, Ireland
India, USA, Nigeria and Greece.

If ever you’re in need as I was
may you have an island of strangers
like I had.

THE GUARDIAN

Pablo Neruda / Ode To A Naked Beauty

Ode To A Naked Beauty

By Pablo Neruda

With chaste heart, and pure
eyes
I celebrate you, my beauty,
restraining my blood
so that the line
surges and follows
your contour,
and you bed yourself in my verse,
as in woodland, or wave-spume:
earth's perfume,
sea's music.

Nakedly beautiful,
whether it is your feet, arching
at a primal touch
of sound or breeze,
or your ears,
tiny spiral shells
from the splendour of America's oceans.
Your breasts also,
of equal fullness, overflowing
with the living light
and, yes,
winged
your eyelids of silken corn
that disclose
or enclose
the deep twin landscapes of your eyes.

The line of your back
separating you
falls away into paler regions
then surges
to the smooth hemispheres
of an apple,
and goes splitting
your loveliness
into two pillars
of burnt gold, pure alabaster,
to be lost in the twin clusters of your feet,
from which, once more, lifts and takes fire
the double tree of your symmetry:
flower of fire, open circle of candles,
swollen fruit raised
over the meeting of earth and ocean.

Your body - from what substances
agate, quartz, ears of wheat,
did it flow, was it gathered,
rising like bread
in the warmth,
and signalling hills
silvered,
valleys of a single petal, sweetnesses
of velvet depth,
until the pure, fine, form of woman
thickened
and rested there?

It is not so much light that falls
over the world
extended by your body
its suffocating snow,
as brightness, pouring itself out of you,
as if you were
burning inside.

Under your skin the moon is alive

 

Getty Images

(Credit: Getty Images)

'There's no other poem like it': Why this Robert Burns classic is a masterpiece

Nicholas Barber
23 January 2026

Tam O'Shanter is a rip-roaring tale of witches and alcohol, but it has hidden depths. On Burns Night this Sunday – and 235 years after the poem was published in 1791 – Scots everywhere may well be treated to a masterwork with a unique, universal appeal.

Pablo Neruda / Your hands

Your hands

by Pablo Neruda

Pablo Neruda / Tus manos

When your hands leap
towards mine, love,
what do they bring me in flight?
Why did they stop
at my lips, so suddenly,
why do I know them,
as if once before,
I have touched them,
as if, before being,
they travelled
my forehead, my waist?

Their smoothness came
winging through time,
over the sea and the smoke,
over the Spring,
and when you laid
your hands on my chest
I knew those wings
of the gold doves,
I knew that clay,
and that colour of grain.

The years of my life
have been roadways of searching,
a climbing of stairs,
a crossing of reefs.
Trains hurled me onwards
waters recalled me,
on the surface of grapes
it seemed that I touched you.
Wood, of a sudden,
made contact with you,
the almond-tree summoned
your hidden smoothness,
until both your hands
closed on my chest,
like a pair of wings
ending their flight.