JohnFromCincinnati.net

Poets utter great and wise things which they do not themselves understand
- Plato

Poetry is just the evidence of life. If your life is burning well, poetry is just the ash
- Leonard Cohen

Poetry is an echo, asking a shadow to dance
- Carl Sandburg

Solstice

--Louise Gluck

Each year, on the same date, the summer solstice comes.
Consummate light: we plan for it,
the day we tell ourselves
that time is very long indeed, nearly infinite.
And in our reading and writing, preference is given
to the celebratory, the ecstatic.

There is in these rituals something apart from wonder:
there is also a kind of preening,
as though human genius has participated in these arrangements
and we found the results satisfying.

What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.

But tonight we sit in the garden in our canvas chairs
so late into the evening -
why should we look either forward or backwards?
Why should we be forced to remember:
it is in our blood, this knowledge.
Shortness of the days; darkness, coldness of winter.
It is in our blood and bones; it is in our history.
It takes a genius to forget these things.

Highway Apple Trees

--Rhina P. Espaillat

Nobody seeds this harvest, it just grows,
miraculous, above old caps and cans.
These apples may be sweet. Nobody knows

If they were meant to ripen under those
slow summer clouds, cooled by their small green fans.
Nobody seeds this harvest, it just grows,

nodding assent to every wind that blows,
uselessly safe, far from our knives and pans.
These apples may be sweet. Nobody knows

what future orchards live in cores one throws
from glossy limousines or battered vans.
Nobody seeds this harvest; it just grows,

denied the gift of purpose we suppose
would give it worth, conferred by human hands.
These apples, maybe sweet (nobody knows),

soften and fall, as autumn comes and goes,
into a sleep well-earned as any man's.
Nobody seeds this harvest, it just grows.
These apples may be sweet. Nobody knows.

Thanks for the invite to this site, sven. I've missed the poetry.

Welcome, Eccles, good to have you here with us.
I read poetry every day, developed the (bad?  ???) habit since the days of "Algon" that Walkara started and tirelessly supported.
Hope you like some of my choices and would share yours.

Pray for Peace

--Ellen Bass

Pray  to whomever you kneel down to:
Jesus nailed to his wooden or  plastic cross,
his suffering face bent to kiss you,
Buddha  still under the bo tree in scorching heat,
Adonai, Allah. Raise  your arms to Mary
that she may lay her palm on our brows,
to  Shekhina, Queen of Heaven and Earth,
to Inanna in her stripped  descent.       
Then pray to the bus driver who takes you to  work.
On the bus, pray for everyone riding that bus,
for  everyone riding buses all over the world.
Drop some silver and  pray.
Waiting in line for the movies, for the ATM,
for  your latte and croissant, offer your plea.
Make your eating and  drinking a supplication.
Make your slicing of carrots a holy act, 
each translucent layer of the onion, a deeper prayer.
To  Hawk or Wolf, or the Great Whale, pray.
Bow down to terriers and  shepherds and Siamese cats.
Fields of artichokes and elegant  strawberries.
Make the brushing of your hair
a prayer,  every strand its own voice,
singing in the choir on your head.
As  you wash your face, the water slipping
through your fingers, a  prayer: Water,
softest thing on earth, gentleness
that  wears away rock.
Making love, of course, is already prayer.
Skin,  and open mouths worshipping that skin,
the fragile cases we are  poured into.
If you're hungry, pray. If you're tired.
Pray  to Gandhi and Dorothy Day.
Shakespeare. Sappho. Sojourner Truth.
When  you walk to your car, to the mailbox,
to the video store, let  each step
be a prayer that we all keep our legs,
that we  do not blow off anyone else's legs.
Or crush their skulls.
And  if you are riding on a bicycle
or a skateboard, in a wheelchair,  each revolution
of the wheels a prayer as the earth revolves:
less  harm, less harm, less harm.
And as you work, typing with a  new manicure,
a tiny palm tree painted on one pearlescent nail
or  delivering soda or drawing good blood
into rubber-capped vials,  writing on a blackboard
with yellow chalk, twirling pizzas--
With  each breath in, take in the faith of those
who have believed  when belief seemed foolish,
who persevered. With each breath out,  cherish.
Pull weeds for peace, turn over in your sleep for  peace,
feed the birds, each shiny seed
that spills onto  the earth, another second of peace.
Wash your dishes, call your  mother, drink wine.
Shovel leaves or snow or trash from your  sidewalk.
Make a path. Fold a photo of a dead child
around  your VISA card. Scoop your holy water
from the gutter. Gnaw your  crust.
Mumble along like a crazy person, stumbling
your  prayer through the streets.

The Pistachio Nut

--Robert Bly

God crouches at night over a single pistachio.
The vastness of the Wind River Range in Wyoming
Has no more grandeur than the waist of a child.

Haydn tells us that we've inherited a mansion
On one of the Georgia sea islands. Then the last
Note burns down the courthouse and all the records.

Everyone who presses down the strings with his own fingers
Is on his way to Heaven; the pain in the fingertips
Goes toward healing the crimes the hands have done.

Let's give up the notion that great music is a way
Of praising human beings. It's good to agree that one drop
Of ocean water holds all of Kierkegaard's prayers.

When I hear the sitar give out the story of its life,
I know it is telling me how to behave-while kissing
The dear one's feet, to weep over my wasted life.

Quote from: Sven2 on June 19, 2010, 01:41:24 PM
Solstice

--Louise Gluck


What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.

Thanks for posting this. It reminded me of Cass' Camera. What I mean is that at first I thought of Cass' Camera as a lens through which we see the world as it should be, but then, that would be Pollyanna's camera, I suppose, not Cass'. Perhaps Cass' camera is a lens which views the world honestly in the sense that what we see isn't filtered and distorted by chattering commentary or by twenty-five years of resentment, grudges, myths, memes, and conditioning as it was for the Yost family when we first met them. There was so much baggage between them every sentence seemed loaded, every glance and gesture charged, like tasering old wounds. I've been thinking that for me, Cass's camera has become the ability to simply see the world clearly, from "the moment of balance."

Or something like that.

I guess.

It seems hardly a day goes by when I don't think about this remarkable series.

What We Miss

--Sarah Manguso

Who says it's so easy to save a life? In the middle of an interview for
the job you might get you see the cat from the window of the seven-
teenth floor just as he's crossing the street against traffic, just as
you're answering a question about your worst character flaw and lying
that you are too careful. What if you keep seeing the cat at every
moment you are unable to save him? Failure is more like this than like
duels and marathons. Everything can be saved, and bad timing pre-
vents it. Every minute, you are answering the question and looking
out the window of the church to see your one great love blinded by
the glare, crossing the street, alone.

Quote from: Sven2 on June 22, 2010, 10:42:52 AM
Welcome, Eccles, good to have you here with us.
I read poetry every day, developed the (bad?  ???) habit since the days of "Algon" that Walkara started and tirelessly supported.
Hope you like some of my choices and would share yours.

I do. I will. Thanks.

This is what I'm listening to in the car.

WAIT NO MORE

(Bruce Cockburn, 16 July, 2001. Montreal.)


Wild things are prowling - storm winds are howling tonight
Everything's transforming into pure crystals of light
The heart is a mirror; it throws back the blaze of love
Bathed in that glow it's no secret what I'm thinking of

I want to wait no more
Wait no more
Wait no more

Sipping wine with angels in this torch-lit tavern by the sea
What does it take for what's locked up inside to be free?
Fold me into you, you know where I'm dying to be
When my ship sets sail on that ocean of deep mystery

I want to wait no more
Wait no more
Wait no more

What does it take for the heart to explode into stars?
One day we'll wake to remember how lovely we are
Lightning's a kiss that lands hot on the loins of the sky
Something uncoils at the base of my spine and I cry

I want to wait no more
Wait no more
Wait no more

* * *

One day we'll wake to remember how lovely we are.

8)

Quote from: Eccles on June 22, 2010, 10:49:48 AM

Quote from: Sven2 on June 19, 2010, 01:41:24 PM
Solstice

--Louise Gluck


What follows the light is what precedes it:
the moment of balance, of dark equivalence.

Thanks for posting this. It reminded me of Cass' Camera. What I mean is that at first I thought of Cass' Camera as a lens through which we see the world as it should be, but then, that would be Pollyanna's camera, I suppose, not Cass'. Perhaps Cass' camera is a lens which views the world honestly in the sense that what we see isn't filtered and distorted by chattering commentary or by twenty-five years of resentment, grudges, myths, memes, and conditioning as it was for the Yost family when we first met them. There was so much baggage between them every sentence seemed loaded, every glance and gesture charged, like tasering old wounds. I've been thinking that for me, Cass's camera has become the ability to simply see the world clearly, from "the moment of balance."

Or something like that.

I guess.

It seems hardly a day goes by when I don't think about this remarkable series.

Eccles, first about Cass's camera. I think that no one, besides the creator is able to see the world without any preconception unless they are 2-3 years old, (even then the life of the heart has pains and memories). And the creator in this case might be a power so many times removed from the human existence and indifferent to see the reality that way. So, who's seeing the world from the camera? Not us. Just a side thought though. 

I love Louise Gluck, she is sometime austere but that's one thinking poet. I have all her books, will post something else of hers later.

Some Bruce Cockburn songs I remember, you introduced his music on Algon thread on HBO, this one I didn't know. Thank you.

"It seems hardly a day goes by when I don't think about this remarkable series."

I "live" with those characters every day and feel the same way as you about JFC.
Thank you for saying that.

A Man In His Life

--Yehuda Amichai

A man doesn't have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn't have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.

A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.

A man doesn't have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.

And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn't learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.

He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there's time for everything.

The Woman In The Film

--Lesley Dauer

Because the film is running backwards,
a fireman carries a woman up his ladder
and places her gently in a burning building.
She curls softly between her bed sheets
just as a slight line of smoke
winds around the room. I feel I should say something
to the projectionist--I begin to think backwards
to my childhood, when I lit matches
and threw them over the fence.
A fireman shows me what might have burned
besides the toolshed. He motions his hand
towards my family, until my mother tells him to stop.
I head to the projectionist's booth.
On screen, the fire's receding
towards the back of the woman's house--
my mind rewinds further until I'm nothing
but a look Father gives to Mother over a candle
in some restaurant, and further still,
until my parents haven't met.
The projectionist doesn't hear me knocking.
The audience is laughing. I turn to find the fire's
gone out by itself, and the woman's own child
has just put a match back into its box.

My Name

Mark Strand

One night when the lawn was a golden green
and the marbled moonlit trees rose like fresh memorials
in the scented air, and the whole countryside pulsed
with the chirr and murmur of insects, I lay in the grass
feeling the great distances open above me, and wondered
what I would become -- and where I would find myself --
and though I barely existed, I felt for an instant
that the vast star-clustered sky was mine, and I heard
my name as if for the first time, heard it the way
one hears the wind or the rain, but faint and far off
as though it belonged not to me but to the silence
from which it had come and to which it would go.

Flood

--by Dionisio D. Martinez

Years of Hope

What my 1731 Stradivarius cannot play, my ears will invent.
My catalogue of inventions is worthless in the absence of desire.
I came for the music, but I stayed for you.
My tenuous landscape is nothing but layer upon layer of paper.
I sleep on the faultline and dream of being swallowed. At 5:19 in the morning one bird and then another will wake me.
What good is the dark without music?
You are as punctual as winter light.


Years of Solitude

To the one who sets a second place at the table anyway.
To the one at the back of the empty bus.
To the ones who name each piece of stained glass projected on a white wall.
To anyone convinced that a monologue is a conversation with the past.
To the one who loses with the deck he marked.
To those who are destined to inherit the meek.
To us.


Years of Reconciliation

The mime troupe is in town again. They want to reconstruct us bit by bit.
This is where the house went up in flames.
This is how we walked away, trying to salvage nothing.
That's us, building our separate houses in the aftermath.
There were ashes to be swept away, years of debris, pages and pages of unresolved music.
Here we are, looking out of our respective windows at the space between us.
Of all the illusions, forgetting is the most dangerous.


Years of Fortune

Suppose we count backwards and nothing happens.
The palm reader says I live on intuition.
Something tells me you're home for good, your unpacked bags nothing to worry about.
This morning I paid off the mortgage. By the middle of the afternoon I noticed that the house had not changed.
Indiscriminate wishes determine the length of a season and the falling of the light around here.
Escape has such a final ring to it. Let's just say we're taking our time in returning.
For better or for worse, ours is a variant of a rather common story.


Years of Judgment

One lethargic word crawls out of your reach and confronts you.
Each breath unfolds with intentions of its own.
Even the slightest preoccupation with absolute stillness is a significant increment of time.
Everything is measurable.
Salvation is a deliberate leap into the eye of a cataclysm.
Believe like a man and you will drown in a drop of faith.
Believe in nothing and the first rains will level your house.


Years of Vision

In a matter of minutes I destroyed the journal I had kept for 15 years, maybe longer.
A man in love soon learns to be unfaithful to himself.
I changed my name and taught myself not to answer when you called me by the old familiar one.
It became obvious that accidents are worth repeating.
Each day I woke a little closer to the sea with little more than my cobalt blue history to keep me afloat.
I bought a shirt to match the earth of each new country I stumbled into—terra cotta, terra firma, terra incognita.
In countries with nothing but overabundance, language has the luxury of moving backward—red hibiscus, dark leaves.


Years of Discourse

are not always preceded by years of silence. More than likely, they follow unfulfilled demands.
An arsenal of threats is dismantled.
The hands of the adversary begin to look surprisingly life-like.
For the agnostics, a man with cancer in his throat heals himself and begins to sing like a broken angel.
Those most susceptible to nostalgia are reminded of the mythical Age of Miracles.
An arsenal of memories, long abandoned, is discovered and restored.

Familiar voices reappear. In proportion to the sky, they are whispers.

The Return

John Forbes

I often dream about the ocean
                              and would like to write
a long ode to water, because I live
on a drought stricken flood plain
next to a sea where a baked delta
opens between glittering sandstone cliffs
& the dunes and beaches make holiday resorts
seem like colonies in outer space.
Where are the green islands? Where are
                                                the sticky hibiscus flowers,
the paddocks full of clover and grass,
the intricate mangrove swamps
& the mud that squelches between your toes?
                                              Instead I am covered in salt—
the same brother you forgot
whose wounds were like rumours
of the rains' failure
but who returns even so, just as the wet arrives
after weeks of dry storm lightning out to sea
                                                 & who stands in front of you
                                            dressed in his flash city clothes
but suddenly shy, like a stranger embarrassed
by wet footprints and tears
& the sudden atmosphere of drama.

The Earth

Anne Sexton


God loafs around heaven,

without a shape
but He would like to smoke His cigar
or bite His fingernails
and so forth.

God owns heaven
but He craves the earth,
the earth with its little sleepy caves,
its bird resting at the kitchen window,
even its murders lined up like broken chairs,
even its writers digging into their souls
with jackhammers,
even its hucksters selling their animals
for gold,
even its babies sniffing for their music,
the farm house, white as a bone,
sitting in the lap of its corn,
even the statue holding up its widowed life,
but most of all He envies the bodies,
He who has no body.

The eyes, opening and shutting like keyholes
and never forgetting, recording by thousands,
the skull with its brains like eels--
the tablet of the world--
the bones and their joints
that build and break for any trick,
the genitals,
the ballast of the eternal,
and the heart, of course,
that swallows the tides
and spits them out cleansed.

He does not envy the soul so much.
He is all soul
but He would like to house it in a body
and come down
and give it a bath
now and then.

Filthy Savior

  --Laure-Anne Bosselaar

Look at this storm, the idiot,
pouring its heart out here, of all places,
an industrial suburb on a Sunday,
soaking nothing but cinder-block
and parking lots,

wasting its breath on smokeless
smoke-stacks, not even a trash can
to send rumbling through the streets.
And that lightning bolt, forking itself
to death, to hit

nothing — what a waste.
What if I hadn't been here, lost too,
four in the morning, driving around
in a jean-shirt over my night-gown,
reciting Baudelaire aloud —

like an idiot ¬— unable to sleep,
scared to death by my longing for it,
death, so early in the morning, driving
until the longing runs on empty?
The windshield wipers can't

keep up with this deluge,
and I almost run over it, a flapping
white thing in the middle of the street.
I step out, it's a gull, one leg
caught in a red plastic net

snared around its neck.
I throw my shirt over the shrieking thing,
take it back to the car, search my bag
for something, anything, find a nail file,
start sawing at the net.

The gull is huge, filthy, it shits
on my shirt, pecks at me — idiot, I'm trying
to save you. I slip a sleeve over its head,
hold it down with one hand, saw, cut,
pull with the other,

free the leg, the neck,
wrap the gull again, hold it against me,
fighting for its life, its crazed heart
beats against mine. I put my package
on the hood, open the shirt, and

there it goes, letting the wind
push it, suck it into a cloud; then it's
gone — like some vague, inhuman
longing — as the rain lifts, and the suburbs
emerge in dirty white light.

Stay Close to Any Sound

--Hafiz

Stay close to any sounds
that make you glad
you are alive.

Everything
in this world is
helplessly reeling.

An invisible wake
was created
when God said
to His beautiful dead lover,
"Be!".

Hafiz, who will understand you
if you do not explain that last line?

Well then,
I will sing it this way:

When God said to illusion,
"Be!"

Gift

--Czeslaw Milosz

A day so happy.
Fog lifted early. I worked in the garden.
Hummingbirds were stopping over the honeysuckle flowers.
There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.
I knew no one worth my envying him.
Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.
To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.
In my body I felt no pain.
When straightening up, I saw blue sea and sails.

The Lamb

--Linda Gregg

It was a picture I had after the war.
A bombed English church. I was too young
to know the word English or war,
but I knew the picture.
The ruined city still seemed noble.
The cathedral with its roof blown off
was not less godly. The church was the same
plus rain and sky. Birds flew in and out
of the holes God's fist made in the walls.
All our desire for love or children
is treated like rags by the enemy.
I knew so much and sang anyway.
Like a bird who will sing until
it is brought down. When they take
away the trees, the child picks up a stick
and says, this is a tree, this the house
and the family. As we might. Through a door
of what had been a house, into the field
of rubble, walks a single lamb, tilting
its head, curious, unafraid, hungry.

Salinas Is On His Way

Luis Omar Salinas

Go, friends, quickly to your tasks and wives.
This night I have to discover the clouds--
talk to the galaxies.
My parents are old
and the road is a serpent full of ambitions.
And what remains of me after sleep
is sunlight entering
like a nun into church.
After dreams get through with me
I shall devour books, sing arias,
walk on snow,
have arguments with darkness,
and crawl into the corner of the sea
listening to the tingle of bells.
What remains of me after sleep
may be a corpse.
So send out word:

Salinas is on his way--
quoting verses from the Bible,
making a mad dash through the night,
making sure everything is secure.

A Talk With Friedrich Nietzsche

--Adam Zagajewski

Most highly respected Professor Nietzsche,
sometimes I seem to see you
on a sanatorium terrace at dawn
with fog descending and song bursting
the throats of the birds.

Not tall, head like a bullet,
you compose a new book
and a strange energy hovers around you.
Your thoughts parade
like enormous armies.

You know now that Anne Frank died,
and her classmates and friends, boys, girls,
and friends of her friends, and cousins
and friends of her cousins.

What are words, I want to ask you, what
is clarity and why do words keep burning
a century later, though the earth
weighs so much?

Clearly nothing links enlightenment
and the dark pain of cruelty.
At least two kingdoms exist,
if not more.

But if there's no God and no force
welds elements in repulsion,
then what are words really, and from whence
does their inner light come?

And from where does joy come, and where
does nothingness go? Where is forgiveness?
Why do the incidental dreams vanish at dawn and the
great ones keep growing?

--Translated by Renata Gorczynski

Raven and the Birth of Tango

--Janni Edwards

i.

Raven hates myth, unless he gets a piece of the action.
He's perfected the shrug, carries a knife,
kicks ass when he needs to. When Raven shaves night,
he leaves shadow. A trick he learned by dancing.

ii.

Bored, Raven headed south, Buenos Aires.
Wandered the markets, the mixed-blood arrabales
the brothels. Cocked his head, sniffed.
Smelled meat on the edge of spoiling,
the bandoneonists drinking red wine, making love to their instruments.
He watched the card games, the emigrants and compadritos
drifting in from the country, their drinking, feuds, knives.
Raven thought about wounds and longings.
He listened to the ocean weight of darkness
sifting centuries of largo and eros,
listened to dogs barking in the night.

iii.

Raven blew a smoke ring around the moon,
watched dancers riffing Africa
off the music of the arrabales,
and when he was ready
                         Raven caught the tip
of the dance in his beak, tugged
                           and slowl
Raven pulled out Tango

He twined the dark blue current of sex around
the man's arm winding like a snake
around his partner's waist—and just like that
Raven caught the dancers
about to break
in two

2. The Marriage Tango


The old couple is dancing. Solemn,
worn confederates of the tango. Their bodies are thick with age,
their feet callused yet quick.
This is an old story, like water, like flying.
Still, each time they dance it, something new.
The young lovers set out in a raft
at the edge of the ocean, reckless,
rehearsing their new names like children
writing in the night air with burning sticks

Husband            Wife

They don't yet know neither the ocean nor the sky
cares about love or secrets or fidelity.

How they are bold with each other.
How like a kite she agrees to be led.
How he learns not to be afraid of her.
How the magnet of desire pulls in and at them.
How dangerous they become for each other.
How close they sail to the edge of the flat world,
how they long for the flying plunge.
How they learn to read each other's weather.
How they bear children, work and weep and laugh.
How they count the casualties.
How they make love:
How they sleep each night for decades spooned around each other,
wake to tell their dreams.
How they carry on.
How they haunt each other.

How strange to find themselves old and still dancing
quick and slow under the crooked smile of the moon.
How they sail closer and closer to death.
How, somehow, their raft becomes an ark,

Raven their dark dove.

One Reason I Like Opera

--by Marge Piercy

In movies, you can tell the heroine
because she is blonder and thinner
than her sidekick. The villainess
is darkest. If a woman is fat,
she is a joke and will probably die.

In movies, the blondest are the best
and in bleaching lies not only purity
but victory. If two people are both
extra pretty, they will end up
in the final clinch.

Only the flawless in face and body
win. That is why I treat
movies as less interesting
than comic books. The camera
is stupid. It sucks surfaces.

Let's go to the opera instead.
The heroine is fifty and weighs
as much as a '65 Chevy with fins.
She could crack your jaw in her fist.
She can hit high C lying down.

The tenor the women scream for
wolfs down an eight course meal daily.
He resembles a bull on hind legs.
His thighs are the size of beer kegs.
His chest is a redwood with hair.

Their voices twine, golden serpents.
Their voices rise like the best
fireworks and hang and hang
then drift slowly down descending
in brilliant and still fiery sparks.

The hippopotamus baritone (the villain)
has a voice that could give you
an orgasm right in your seat.
His voice smokes with passion.
He is hot as lava. He erupts nightly.

The contralto is, however, svelte.
She is supposed to be the soprano's
mother, but is ten years younger,
beautiful and Black. Nobody cares.
She sings you into her womb where you rock.

What you see is work like digging a ditch,
hard physical labor. What you hear
is magic as tricky as knife throwing.
What you see is strength like any
great athlete's. What you hear

is still rendered precisely as the best
Swiss watchmaker. The body is
resonance. The body is the cello case.
The body just is. The voice loud
as hunger remagnetizes your bones.

Obama edits Emma Lazarus poem on Statue of Liberty

"In his immigration speech today, President Obama cited the most prominent symbol of America's immigrant tradition: The Statue of Liberty.

He also quoted famous lines from the Emma Lazarus poem inscribed at the base of the statue -- at least some of them.

Read on, and see if you can spot the difference (and we credit our friends at Politico for noticing this).

Here's Obama, according to the White House website:

   And here's the Lazarus poem:

   
Yes, the president left out the section about "the wretched refuse of your teeming shore."

Politically correct? Or did he just overlook the line?"

from:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/07/obama-edits-emma-lazaus-poem-on-state-of-liberty-/1 (http://content.usatoday.com/communities/theoval/post/2010/07/obama-edits-emma-lazaus-poem-on-state-of-liberty-/1)

A Blade of Grass

--Brian Patten

You ask for a poem.
I offer you a blade of grass.
You say it is not good enough.
You ask for a poem.

I say this blade of grass will do.
It has dressed itself in frost,
It is more immediate
Than any image of my making.

You say it is not a poem,
It is a blade of grass and grass
Is not quite good enough.
I offer you a blade of grass.

You are indignant.
You say it is too easy to offer grass.
It is absurd.
Anyone can offer a blade of grass.

You ask for a poem.
And so I write you a tragedy about
How a blade of grass
Becomes more and more difficult to offer,

And about how as you grow older
A blade of grass
Becomes more difficult to accept.

Barbie Joins 12 Steps Program

Barbie is bottoming out,
she's sitting on the pity pot.  She hasn't the know-how to express

any of her emotions.  Before she even gets

to her first meeting, she takes the first step, admits

her life has become unmanageable.
She's been kidnapped by boys

and tortured with pins.  She's been left

for months at a time between scratchy couch cushions

with cracker crumbs, pens, and loose change.

She can't help herself from being a fashion doll.

she is the ultimate victim.

She humbly sits on a folding chair

in a damp church basement.  The cigarette smoke

clouds the faces around her, the smell of bad coffee

permeates the air.  The group booms the serenity prayer:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can, and wisdom
to know the difference. Poor Barbie is lost

in a philosophical quandary.  Her God must be Mattel.

How can she turn her life and will over to a toy company?

must she accept her primary form of locomotion

being the fists of young careless humans?

Ans what can she change?  The only reason Barbie

is at the meeting at all is because she wound up in the tote bag

of a busy mother.  She toppled out when the woman,

putting on lipstick at the bathroom mirror, spilled the contents

of her bag onto the floor.  The mother didn't see Barbie skid under a stall door

where a confused drunk, at the meeting for warmth,

was peeing.  Never thought Barbie had problems,

she said, picking up the doll.  She thought it would be funny

to prop Barbie in the last row.  No one else noticed the doll

as she fidgeted in her seat.  The hungry drunk

went on to spoon a cupful of sugar into her coffee.

Barbie sat through the meeting, wondering:

What is wisdom?  What is letting go?
She wished she could clap like the others

when there was a good story recovery.  She accepted

her higher power, Mattel, would finally let her move.

miracles don't happen overnight, said a speaker.

Take the action and leave the rest to God,said another.

Barbie's prayer that she would be at the next meeting was answered.

A member of the clean-up committee squished her between the seat

and the back of the folding chair and stacked her, with the others, against the wall.


                                                                                          --Denise Duhamel

Any Prince To Any Princess


August is coming

and the goose, I'm afraid,

is getting fat.

There have been

no golden eggs for some months now.

Straw has fallen well below market price

despite my frantic spinning

and the sedge is,

as you rightly point out,

withered.


I can't imagine how the pea

got under your mattress. I apologize

humbly. The chambermaid has, of course,

been sacked. As has the frog footman.

I understand that, during my recent fact-finding tour of the

Golden River,

despite your nightly unavailing efforts,

he remained obstinately

froggish.


I hope that the Three Wishes granted by the General

Assembly

will go some way towards redressing

this unfortunate recent sequence of events.

The fall in output from the shoe-factory, for example:

no one could have foreseen the work-to-rule

by the National Union of Elves. Not to mention the fact

that the court has been fast asleep

for the last six and a half years.


The matter of the poisoned apple has been taken up

by the Board of Trade: I think I can assure you

the incident will not be

repeated.


I can quite understand, in the circumstances,

your reluctance to let down

your golden tresses. However

I feel I must point out

that the weather isn't getting any better

and I already have a nasty chill

from waiting at the base

of the White Tower. You must see

the absurdity of the

situation.

Some of the courtiers are beginning to talk,

not to mention the humble villagers.

It's been three weeks now, and not even

a word.


Princess,

a cold, black wind

howls through our empty palace.

Dead leaves litter the bedchamber;

the mirror on the wall hasn't said a thing

since you left. I can only ask,

bearing all this in mind,

that you think again,



let down your hair,



reconsider

                                                                       --Adrian Henri

Weary Rings      

     There are desires to return, to love, to not disappear,
and there are desires to die, fought by two
opposing waters that have never isthmused.

     There are desires for a great kiss that would shroud Life,
one that ends in the Africa of a fiery agony,
a suicide!

     There are desires to. . . have no desires, Lord;
I point my deicidal finger at you:
there are desires to not have had a heart.

     Spring returns, returns and will depart. And God,
bent in time, repeats himself, and passes, passes
with the spinal column of the Universe on his back.

     When my temples beat their lugubrious drum,
when the dream engraved on a dagger aches me,
there are desires to be left standing in this verse!

--César Vallejo

translated by Clayton Eshleman

Crow's Fall


When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.


He got his strength flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.
He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.


At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.
But the sun brightened-
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.
He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.


"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."

--Ted Hughes

So Be It, Amen

There are people who don't want Kierkegaard to be
A humpback, and they're looking for a wife for Cézanne.
It's hard for them to say, "So be it. Amen."

When a dead dog turned up on the road, the disciples
Held their noses. Jesus walked over and said:
"What beautiful teeth!" It's a way to say "Amen."

If a young boy leaps over seven hurdles in a row,
And an instant later is an old man reaching for his cane,
To the swiftness of it all we have to say "Amen."

We always want to intervene when we hear
That the badger is marrying the wrong person,
But the best thing to say at a wedding is "Amen."

The grapes of our ruin were planted centuries
Before Caedmon ever praised the Milky Way.
"Praise God," "Damn God" are all synonyms for "Amen."

Women in Crete loved the young men, but when
"The Son of the Deep Waters" dies in the bath,
And they show the rose-colored water, Mary says "Amen."

--Robert Bly

Villanelle

Time will say nothing but I told you so,
Time only knows the price we have to pay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,
If we should stumble when musicians play,
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

There are no fortunes to be told, although,
Because I love you more than I can say,
If I could tell you I would let you know.

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,
There must be reasons why the leaves decay;
Time will say nothing but I told you so.

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,
The vision seriously intends to stay;
If I could tell you I would let you know.

Suppose the lions all get up and go,
And all the brooks and soldiers run away?
Will time say nothing but I told you so?
If I could tell you I would let you know.

-- W H Auden

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.

You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.

Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

-- Mary Oliver

Deep Sorriness Atonement Song

(for missed appointment, BBC North, Manchester) 

The man who sold Manhattan for a halfway decent bangle,
He had talks with Adolf Hitler and could see it from his angle,
And he could have signed the Quarrymen but didn't think they'd make it
So he bought a cake on Pudding Lane and thought "Oh well I'll bake it"

    But his chances they were slim
    And his brothers they were Grimm,
    And he's sorry, very sorry,
    But I'm sorrier than him.

And the drunken plastic surgeon who said "I know, let's enlarge 'em!"
And the bloke who told the Light Brigade "Oh what the hell, let's charge'em",
The magician with an early evening gig on the Titanic
And the Mayor who told the people of Atlantis not to panic,

    And the Dong about his nose
    And the Pobble re his toes,
    They're all sorry very sorry
    But I'm sorrier than those.

And don't forget the Bible, with the Sodomites and Judas,
And Onan who discovered something nothing was as rude as,
And anyone who reckoned it was City's year for Wembley.
And the kid who called Napoleon a shortarse in assembly,

    And the man who always smiles
    Cause he knows I have his files,
    They're all sorry, really sorry,
    But I'm sorrier by miles.

And Robert Falcon Scott who lost the race to the Norwegian,
And anyone who's ever split a pint with a Glaswegian,
Or told a Finn a joke or spent an hour with a Swiss-German,
Or got a mermaid in the sack and found it was a merman,

    Or him who smelt a rat,
    And got curious as a cat,
    They're all sorry, deeply sorry,
    But I'm sorrier than that.

All the people who were rubbish when we needed them to do it,
Whose wires crossed, whose spirit failed, who ballsed it up or blew it,
All notches of nul points and all who have a problem Houston,
At least they weren't in Kensington when they should have been at Euston.

    For I didn't build the Wall
    And I didn't cause the Fall
    But I'm sorry, Lord, I'm sorry,
    I'm the sorriest of all.



-- Glyn Maxwell

Be Music, Night
- Kenneth Patchen

     Be music, night,
That her sleep may go
Where angels have their pale tall choirs

Be a hand, sea,
That her dreams may watch
Thy guidesman touching the green flesh of the world

Be a voice, sky,
That her beauties may be counted
And the stars will tilt their quiet faces
Into the mirror of her loveliness

Be a road, earth,
That her walking may take thee
Where the towns of heaven lift their breathing spires

O be a world and a throne, God,
That her living may find its weather
And the souls of ancient bells in a child's book
Shall lead her into Thy wondrous house

Thanks, Skor, not much Patchen is on the Net, I didn't know this particular poem. It is lovely.
I wish you and Ray would post more poetry here, introducing different voices, intermingling styles. I just recently found a site devoted exclusively to bitniks.

The Dry Salvages: Canto III

I sometimes wonder if that is what Krishna meant -
Among other things - or one way of putting the same thing:
That the future is a faded song, a Royal Rose or a lavender spray
Of wistful regret for those who are not yet here to regret,
Pressed between yellow leaves of a book that has never been opened.
And the way up is the way down, the way forward is the way back.
You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,
That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.
When the train starts, and the passengers are settled
To fruit, periodicals and business letters
(And those who saw them off have left the platform)
Their faces relax from grief into relief
To the sleepy rhythm of a hundred hours.
Fare forward, travellers! not escaping from the past
Into different lives, or into any future;
You are not the same people who left the station
Or who will arrive at any terminus,
While the narrowing rails slide together behind you;
And on the deck of the drumming liner
Watching the furrow that widens behind you,
You shall not think 'the past is finished'
Or 'the future is before us'.
At nightfall, in the rigging and the aerial,
Is a voice descanting (though not to the ear,
The murmuring shell of time, and not in any language)
'Fare forward, you who think that you are voyaging:
You are not those who saw the harbour
Receding, or those who will disembark.
Here between the hither and the farther shore
While time is withdrawn, consider the future
And the past with an equal mind.
At the moment which is not of action or inaction
You can receive this: "on whatever sphere of being
The mind of a man may be intent
At the time of death" - that is the one action
(And the time of death is every moment)
Which shall fructify in the lives of others:
And do not think of the fruit of action.
Fare forward.
O Voyagers, O Seamen,
You who come to port, and you whose bodies
Will suffer the trial and judgement of the sea,
Or whatever event, this is your real destination.'
So Krishna, as when he admonished Arjuna
On the field of battle.
Not fare well,
But fare forward, voyagers.


--T.S.Eliot

The Dry Salvages - presumably les trois sauvages - is a small group of
rocks, with a beacon, off the N.E. coast of Cape Ann, Massachusetts.

T.S. Eliot is just amazing.  I found that reading this poem evokes sentiment similar to Cayafy's "Ithaka".  Just beautiful.
Here's a simpler poem, but lovely.

Contrast
- Robinson Jeffers

The world has many seas, Mediterranean, Atlantic, but
here is the shore of the one ocean.
And here the heavy future hangs like a cloud; the
enormous scene; the enormous games preparing
Weigh on the water and strain the rock; the stage is
here, the play is conceived; the players are
not found.

I saw on the Sierras, up the Kaweah valley above the
Moro rock, the mountain redwoods
Like red towers on the slopes of snow; about their
bases grew a bushery of Christmas green,
Firs and pines to be monuments for pilgrimage
In Europe; I remembered the Swiss forests, the dark
robes of Pilatus, no trunk like these there;
But these are underwood; they are only a shrubbery
about the boles of the trees.

Our people are clever and masterful;
They have powers in the mass, they accomplish marvels.
It is possible Time will make them before it
annuls them, but at present
There is not one memorable person, there is not one
mind to stand with the trees, one life with
the mountains.

Let America Be America Again
by Langston Hughes

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed--
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek--
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean--
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today--O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home--
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay--
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again--
The land that never has been yet--
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME--
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose--
The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath--
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain--
All, all the stretch of these great green states--
And make America again!

"There's nothing to mourn about death any more than there is to mourn about the growing of a flower. What is terrible is not death but the lives people live or don't live up until their death. They don't honor their own lives, they piss on their lives. They shit them away. Dumb fuckers. They concentrate too much on fucking, movies, money, family, fucking. Their minds are full of cotton. They swallow God without thinking, they swallow country without thinking. Soon they forget how to think, they let others think for them. Their brains are stuffed with cotton. They look ugly, they talk ugly, they walk ugly. Play them the great music of the centuries and they can't hear it. Most people's deaths are a sham. There's nothing left to die."
—The Captain Is Out to Lunch and the Sailors Have Taken Over the Ship, 1998

Not directed at anyone here...attended the funeral of an a-hole earlier this week.

love is a place... (58) by E. E. Cummings

love is a place
& through this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skilfully curled)
all worlds

O Where Are You Going?

"O where are you going?" said reader to rider,
"That valley is fatal when furnaces burn,
Yonder's the midden whose odours will madden,
That gap is the grave where the tall return."

"O do you imagine," said fearer to farer,
"That dusk will delay on your path to the pass,
Your diligent looking discover the lacking
Your footsteps feel from granite to grass?"

"O what was that bird," said horror to hearer,
"Did you see that shape in the twisted trees?
Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly,
The spot on your skin is a shocking disease."

"Out of this house," said rider to reader,
"Yours never will," said farer to fearer,
"They're looking for you," said hearer to horror,
As he left them there, as he left them there.


-- W H Auden

The More Loving One

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime,
Though this might take me a little time.

-- W H Auden

Angel Wings

In the morning I opened the cupboard
and found inside it a pair of wings,
a pair of angel's wings.
I was not naive enough to believe them real.
I wondered who had left them there.

I took them out the cupboard,
brought them over to the light by the window
and examined them.
You sat in the bed in the light by the window grinning.

'They are mine,' you said;
You said that when we met
you'd left them there.

I thought you were crazy.
Your joke embarrassed me.
Nowadays even the mention of the word angel
embarrasses me.

I looked to see how you'd stuck the wings together.
Looking for glue, I plucked out the feathers.
One by one I plucked them till the bed was littered,

'They are real,' you insisted,
your smile vanishing.
And on the pillow your face grew paler.
Your hands reached to stop me but
for some time now I have been embarrassed by the word angel.

For some time now in polite or conservative company
I have checked myself from believing
anything so untouched and yet so touchable
had a chance of existing.

I plucked then
till your face grew even paler;
intent on proving them false
I plucked
and your body grew thinner.
I plucked till you all but vanished.

Soon beside me in the light,
beside the bed in which you were lying
was a mass of torn feathers;
glueless, unstitched, brilliant,
reminiscent of some vague disaster.

In the evening I go out alone now.
You say you can no longer join me.
You say
Ignorance has ruined us,
disbelief has slaughtered.

You stay at home
listening on the radio
to sad and peculiar music,
who fed on belief,
who fed on the light I'd stolen.

Next morning when I opened the cupboard
out stepped a creature,
blank, dull, and too briefly sensual
it brushed out the feathers gloating.
I must review my disbelief in angels.

-- Brian Patten

XVI

But wherefore do not you a mightier way
Make war upon this bloody tyrant, Time?
And fortify your self in your decay
With means more blessed than my barren rhyme?
Now stand you on the top of happy hours,
And many maiden gardens, yet unset,
With virtuous wish would bear you living flowers,
Much liker than your painted counterfeit:
So should the lines of life that life repair,
Which this, Time's pencil, or my pupil pen,
Neither in inward worth nor outward fair,
Can make you live your self in eyes of men.
To give away yourself, keeps yourself still,
And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill.

William Shakespeare

Zippy, thank you, Shakespeare is not my everyday reading, but the special treat, for some special time. When you posted the poem I was reading Hamlet though, that was a strange coincidence. Always happy to read - and listen - your posts!

Spent Fri and Sat working at West Pt. The Bear Mountain Bridge is probably my favorite bridge to look at, in the world, and always makes me think of Kerouac...

"If you drop a rose in the Hudson River at its mysterious source in the Adirondacks, think of all the places it journeys by as it goes out to sea forever- think of that wonderful Hudson Valley. I started hitching up the thing. Five scattered rides took me to the desired Bear Mountain Bridge, where Route 6 arched in from New England."

Beautiful bridge, Zippy.

That one is the longest in Canada, as you are driving in the car on it - you are flying above the water.
Confederate Bridge, ladies and gentlemen.
(http://www.photosfan.com/images/bridge-321.JPG)

Lost Content

You couples lying
where moon-scythes and day-scythes reaped you,
browning fruit falls and sleeps
in tangled nests, the wild grass,
falls from your apple tree that still grows here:
cry for your dead hero, his weak sword, his flight,
that you were slaughtered and your bed poured whiteness,
the issue of murdered marriage dawns.
The streets crack, a house falls open to the air,
sun and rain lie on the bed.
And the river still runs in a child's hands
under the factory's black hulk,
four stacks that used to bloom with smoke
over shining leaves, beneath thunderheads.
Then the storm
shatters and beats and after
in woods
a scented smoke of light,
a dripping quiet, and the small gold snake
sparkles at the pond's edge.
But who is he? What were
the goods he made, what became of his loved wife,
his children, and where
has he gone, fearsome, powerless? The silver
path of air from the river's bend to its rippling away
beneath the low concrete bridge
is still pure. No one comes, and the child
who watched by it has vanished.
Or sometimes he appears for a day, a night,
in the walls and windows reflected on the water,
in goldfinches' flight, cricket song, the heron's great
rise from the bank. Last a carp leaps,
voices and a lantern slide down the secret stream
in black and gold peace,
past the child's husk, the family never born.

--by A. F. Moritz

As One Listens to the Rain

Listen to me as one listens to the rain,
not attentive, not distracted,
light footsteps, thin drizzle,
water that is air, air that is time,
the day is still leaving,
the night has yet to arrive,
figurations of mist
at the turn of the corner,
figurations of time
at the bend in this pause,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
without listening, hear what I say
with eyes open inward, asleep
with all five senses awake,
it's raining, light footsteps, a murmur of syllables,
air and water, words with no weight:
what we are and are,
the days and years, this moment,
weightless time and heavy sorrow,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
wet asphalt is shining,
steam rises and walks away,
night unfolds and looks at me,
you are you and your body of steam,
you and your face of night,
you and your hair, unhurried lightning,
you cross the street and enter my forehead,
footsteps of water across my eyes,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the asphalt's shining, you cross the street,
it is the mist, wandering in the night,
it is the night, asleep in your bed,
it is the surge of waves in your breath,
your fingers of water dampen my forehead,
your fingers of flame burn my eyes,
your fingers of air open eyelids of time,
a spring of visions and resurrections,
listen to me as one listens to the rain,
the years go by, the moments return,
do you hear the footsteps in the next room?
not here, not there: you hear them
in another time that is now,
listen to the footsteps of time,
inventor of places with no weight, nowhere,
listen to the rain running over the terrace,
the night is now more night in the grove,
lightning has nestled among the leaves,
a restless garden adrift-go in,
your shadow covers this page

--Octavio Paz

Desiderata

Go placidly amid the noise and haste, and remember what peace there may be
in silence.

As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly; and listen to others, even the dull
and ignorant; they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons, they are vexations to the spirit. If you
compare yourself with others, you may become vain and bitter; for always
there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself. Enjoy your
achievements as well as your plans.

Keep interested in your career, however humble; it is a real possession in
the changing fortunes of time. Exercise caution in your business affairs;
for the world is full of trickery. But let this not blind you to what virtue
there is; many persons strive for high ideals; and everywhere life is full
of heroism.

Be yourself. Especially, do not feign affection. Neither be cynical about
love; for in the face of all aridity and disenchantment it is as perennial
as the grass.

Take kindly the counsel of the years, gracefully surrendering the things of
youth. Nurture strength of spirit to shield you in sudden misfortune. But do
not distress yourself with imaginings. Many fears are born of fatigue and
loneliness. Beyond a wholesome discipline, be gentle with yourself.

You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you
have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the
universe is unfolding as it should.

Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and
whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep
peace with your soul.

With all its sham, drudgery and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful
world.

Be cheerful.

Strive to be happy.

-- Max Ehrmannn

(Despite finding the poem very straightforward and thus didactic to a fault, I like it, so here it is)

"All Last Night . . ."
ALL last night I had quiet
In a fragrant dream and warm:
She became my Sabbath,
And round my neck, her arm.

I knew the warmth in my dreaming;
The fragrance, I suppose,
Was her hair about me,
Or else she wore a rose.

Her hair I think; for likest
Woodruffe 'twas, when Spring
Loitering down the wet woodways
Treads it sauntering.

No light, nor any speaking;
Fragrant only and warm.
Enough to know my lodging,
The white Sabbath of her arm.

Lascelles Abercrombie

A Prayer

TEND me my birds, and bring again
The brotherhood of woodland life,
So shall I wear the seasons round
A friend to need, a foe to strife;

Keep me my heritage of lawn,
And grant me, Father, till I die
The fine sincerity of light
And luxury of open sky.

So, learning always, may I find
My heaven around me everywhere,
And go in hope from this to Thee,
The pupil of Thy country air.

Norman Rowland Gale

Eros Turannos

SHE fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reason to refuse him.
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost
As if it were alone the cost--
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits, and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him.
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed by what she knows of days,
Till even Prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion.
And Home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be.
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen--
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm, for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given.
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea,
Where down the blind are driven.

Edwin Arlington Robinson

Just to thank you Sven, I've tried to live by the Desiderata forever, it was good to open the page and find those well remembered and comforting words there waiting for me. Thanks.
(I did post a tiny poem last night but cannot find it today)

Dover Beach- Matthew Arnold

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago
Heard it on the A gaean, and it brought
Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow
Of human misery; we
Find also in the sound a thought,
Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith
Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore
Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.
But now I only hear
Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,
Retreating, to the breath
Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear
And naked shingles of the world.


Ah, love, let us be true
To one another! for the world, which seems
To lie before us like a land of dreams,
So various, so beautiful, so new,
Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,
Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

Skor, there is a somewhat sarcastic, a'la Bukowski poem by Anthony Hecht, "The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life", doesn't fit here thematically, it's crass. Oh, poetry is freedom, I will post it. As far from "spiritual enlightenment" as it is, the poem is good.  

The Dover Bitch: A Criticism of Life

for Andrews Wanning

So there stood Matthew Arnold and this girl
With the cliffs of England crumbling away behind them,   
And he said to her, "Try to be true to me,   
And I'll do the same for you, for things are bad   
All over, etc., etc."
Well now, I knew this girl. It's true she had read   
Sophocles in a fairly good translation   
And caught that bitter allusion to the sea,   
But all the time he was talking she had in mind   
The notion of what his whiskers would feel like   
On the back of her neck. She told me later on   
That after a while she got to looking out
At the lights across the channel, and really felt sad,   
Thinking of all the wine and enormous beds   
And blandishments in French and the perfumes.
And then she got really angry. To have been brought   
All the way down from London, and then be addressed   
As a sort of mournful cosmic last resort   
Is really tough on a girl, and she was pretty.   
Anyway, she watched him pace the room   
And finger his watch-chain and seem to sweat a bit,   
And then she said one or two unprintable things.
But you mustn't judge her by that. What I mean to say is,   
She's really all right. I still see her once in a while   
And she always treats me right. We have a drink   
And I give her a good time, and perhaps it's a year   
Before I see her again, but there she is,   
Running to fat, but dependable as they come.   
And sometimes I bring her a bottle of Nuit d'Amour.

--Anthony Hecht

Cissy, you're welcome.
Where did you post your poem? Can you post it again, please, I hope you didn't delete it on your computer!

No One Lives In The House Anymore
CESAR VALLEJO

No one lives in the house anymore - you tell me - all have gone. The living room, the bedroom, the patio, are deserted. No one remains any longer, since everyone has departed.

And I say to you: When someone leaves, someone remains. The point through which the man passed is no longer empty.The only place that is empty, with human solitude, is that through which no man has passed. New houses are deader than the old ones, for their walls are of stone or steel but not of men. A house comes into the world, not when people finish building it, but when they begin to inhabit it. A house lives only off men, like a tomb. That's why there is an irresistible resemblance between a house and a tomb. Except that the house is nourished by the life of man, while the tomb is nourished by the death of man. That is why the first is standing, while the second is laid out.

Everyone has departed from the house, in reality, but all have remained in truth. And it is not their memory that remains, but they themselves. Nor is it that they remain in the house, but that they continue about the house. Functions and acts leave the house by train or by plane or on horseback, walking or crawling. What continues in the house is the organ, the agent in gerund and in circle. The steps have left, the kisses, the pardons, the crimes. What continues in the house are the foot, the lips, the eye, the heart. Negations and affirmations, good and evil, have dispersed. What continues in the house is the subject of the act.

--Translated by Clayton Eshleman

The Gospel of the Gospel

And the prophet said: "Let not your heart
dwell in sadness, but be glad in the day."
The word used for heart has two translations:
One is as a door through which a blue sky
over white-washed stone steps can be glimpsed
and the other has to do with a kind of clearing
in a forest of hemlock and white pine.
Sadness references the turning-inward look
of a shy child in a roomful of strangers.
Glad has a connotation of the same weight
and earthiness of certain flower bulbs
that can lie dormant or be transported
great distances in their dry drowse
and then brought to blossom when replanted.
The phrase "in the day" is a guess, but a good guess,
given that time passed then as now.

--Michael Chitwood

An Amateur Photographer

He has a photo of himself
next to a girlfriend, friend and neighbor;
at leisure and in tireless labor;
holding a flute, a ball, a saber;
himself - raising glass of wine;
himself - receiving a diploma;
himself - in front of roofs and walls,
at gates of Sodom and Gomorrah;
himself - next to a dappled steed,
a monument, a tomb, a castle;
next to a grotto or a fountain;
dwarfed by a highrise or a mountain;
after a night out and before;
himself, himself, himself...
Whatever for?
He writes, poor man, not quite a sage,
his unsophisticated story.
Without awareness, still less glory
he keeps a record of the age.
And all this time he's in the midst
of stars and storms, of rains and snows,
of smiles and joys, of gasps and woes -
a single gasp, and he is dust.
Preserved on film (himself now laid
to rest) is he who labored, quietly,
to conquer life immortal via
lenses and negatives and slides.
But he had cosmos for his crib,
and was himself a tiny cosmos
of God's design, complete and flawless..
but much too simple, that's the rub.
And now he's one in a downpour
of raindrops... Who taught him to long for
the immortality of splendor
while knocking at its humble door?


--David Samoilov

Translated by Tanya Wolfson

Past Parallax

Last night, I made love to a star. Pristine,
the sky. Blustery. I climbed
a staircase of wind from my window
to soft-step across
the ozone's crumbling balcony.
She was draped in eon's
old light, picking the bones
of cosmonauts from her braids.
I knelt, hugged her
midsection, pressed my cheek
over her belly's cool plane.
Though barren, she was motherly
in that moment before she unwrapped
the luminance from her shoulders,
and we fumbled for each other
in the cherry darkness.
Through sleep, I reached for the pen, paused:
another poem, another phantom longing.
What will critics think of these
once I'm gone. That I was hijacked
by the carnal, blood thin with youth?
No, it's that I fall in love with people
so far from the ground beneath me
I feel the span as measurable
only in light and years.

--Kyle Dargan

Message to Blanca

                                                        for Blanca Subercaseaux

I don't know  if I can come,
let's see if I can reach you, sister.

I'll arrive, if I do, on a mild wind,
so as not to freeze your plains,
or at the edge of your dream,
with love, and without a word.

Stand up tall, in case I find it
hard to meet halfway,
and bring me little earth
to remember my inn by.

Don't worry if I don't have a shape
or if I look different.
And don't cry if I don't answer,
for my sin was words.
But give me yours, your word,
that was like a dove alighting.

--Gabriela Mistral

A note to readers: the title is as the author intended.

What the Living Do


Johnny, the kitchen sink has been clogged for days, some utensil probably fell down there.
And the Drano won't work but smells dangerous, and the crusty dishes have piled up

waiting for the plumber I still haven't called. This is the everyday we spoke of.
It's winter again: the sky's a deep, headstrong blue, and the sunlight pours through

the open living-room windows because the heat's on too high in here and I can't turn it off.
For weeks now, driving, or dropping a bag of groceries in the street, the bag breaking,

I've been thinking: This is what the living do. And yesterday, hurrying along those
wobbly bricks in the Cambridge sidewalk, spilling my coffee down my wrist and sleeve,

I thought it again, and again later, when buying a hairbrush: This is it.
Parking. Slamming the car door shut in the cold. What you called that yearning.

What you finally gave up. We want the spring to come and the winter to pass. We want
whoever to call or not call, a letter, a kiss—we want more and more and then more of it.

But there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass,
say, the window of the corner video store, and I'm gripped by a cherishing so deep

for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I'm speechless:
I am living. I remember you.

--Marie Howe

These two poems are in reply to the conversation we had with Eccles few weeks ago, about one form of immortality, the joy of feeling alive. As Faust said, "Verweile doch!du bist so schön!" - If to the moment I shall ever say: "Ah, linger on, thou art so fair!"

There are many interpretations of the idea of course.

The Afterlife: Letter to Sam Hamill


You may think it strange, Sam, that I'm writing
a letter in these circumstances. I thought
it strange too—the first time. But there's
a misconception I was laboring under, and you
are too, viz. that the imagination in your
vicinity is free and powerful. After all,
you say, you've been creating yourself all
along imaginatively. You imagine yourself
playing golf or hiking in the Olympics or
writing a poem and then it becomes true.
But you still have to do it, you have to exert
yourself, will, courage, whatever you've got, you're
mired in the unimaginative. Here I imagine a letter
and it's written. Takes about two-fifths of a
second, your time. Hell, this is heaven, man.
I can deluge Congress with letters telling
every one of those mendacious sons of bitches
exactly what he or she is, in maybe about
half an hour. In spite of your Buddhist
proclivities, when you imagine bliss
you still must struggle to get there. By the way
the Buddha has his place across town on
Elysian Drive. We call him Bud. He's lost weight
and got new dentures, and he looks a hell of a
lot better than he used to. He always carries
a jumping jack with him everywhere just
for contemplation, but he doesn't make it
jump. He only looks at it. Meanwhile Sidney
and Dizzy, Uncle Ben and Papa Yancey, are
over by Sylvester's Grot making the sweetest,
cheerfulest blues you ever heard. The air,
so called, is full of it. Poems are fluttering
everywhere like seed from a cottonwood tree.
Sam, the remarkable truth is I can do any
fucking thing I want. Speaking of which
there's this dazzling young Naomi who
wiped out on I-80 just west of Truckee
last winter, and I think this is the moment
for me to go and pay her my respects.
Don't go way. I'll be right back.

--Hayden Carruth

I've just heard from my godparents who live in Cairo. I'm thankful they're alright.

Most Westerners, like me, first heard of the poet, Simin Behbahani, after she wrote 'A Poem For Neda,' following the killing of the youthful protestor in Iran. Although Behbahani wrote the following poem about her native Iran, where she has been regarded as a national treasure, I think it apposite to print it here as we await the outcome of events in Egypt.

MY COUNTRY, I WILL BUILD YOU AGAIN.

My country, I will build you again,
if need be with bricks made of my life.
I will build columns to support your roof,
if need be, with my bones.
Once more I'll breath the perfume
of flowers loved by your youth.
Once more I will wash the blood stains
on your body with my flowing tears.
Once more, the darkness will leave this house,
and I will paint my poems blue
with the color of our sky.
And in his generosity the "resurrector of old bones"
will grant me the splendor of your mountains.
Old I may be, but I can still learn,
given another chance.
I will begin a second youth alongside my progeny.
I will recount the hadith of "Love of Homeland"
with such passion as to bring life to every word.
The fire still burns in my breast
of the love for my people.
My poems may be drenched in blood
But you shall make me strong.
I will build you again with my life,
however meager my means.

~ Simin Behbahani

God willing, or as my godmother would say, "Insha'Allah."

Fantasy

I sailed in my dreams to the Land of Night
Where you were the dusk-eyed queen,
And there in the pallor of moon-veiled light
The loveliest things were seen ...

A slim-necked peacock sauntered there
In a garden of lavender hues,
And you were strange with your purple hair
As you sat in your amethyst chair
With you feet in your hyacinth shoes.
Oh, the moon gave a bluish light
Through the trees in the land of dreams and night.
I stood behind a bush of yellow-green
And whistled a song to the dark-haired queen ...


Gwendolyn Bennett (1902-1981)

A Walk to Sope Creek

Sometimes when I've made the mistake of anger, which sometimes
breeds the mistake of cruelty, I walk

down the rocky slope above the ruined mill on Sope Creek
where sweet gum and hickory weave sunlight

into gauzy screens. And sometimes when I've made the mistake
of cruelty, which always breeds grief,

I remember how, years ago, my uncle led me, a boy,
into a thicket of pines and taught me to pray

beside a white stone, the way a man had taught him, a boy,
to pray behind a clapboard church.

Sometimes when I'm as mean as a stone, I weave
between trees above that crumbling mill

and stumble through those threaded screens of light,
the way anger must fall

through many stages of remorse.
Any rock, he allowed, can be an altar.

--David Bottoms

Relax

Bad things are going to happen.
Your tomatoes will grow a fungus
and your cat will get run over.
Someone will leave the bag with the ice cream
melting in the car and throw
your blue cashmere sweater in the drier.
Your husband will sleep
with a girl your daughter's age, her breasts spilling
out of her blouse. Or your wife
will remember she's a lesbian
and leave you for the woman next door. The other cat—
the one you never really liked—will contract a disease
that requires you to pry open its feverish mouth
every four hours, for a month.
Your parents will die.
No matter how many vitamins you take,
how much Pilates, you'll lose your keys,
your hair and your memory. If your daughter
doesn't plug her heart
into every live socket she passes,
you'll come home to find your son has emptied
your refrigerator, dragged it to the curb,
and called the used appliance store for a pick up—drug money.
There's a Buddhist story of a woman chased by a tiger.
When she comes to a cliff, she sees a sturdy vine
and climbs halfway down. But there's also a tiger below.
And two mice—one white, one black—scurry out
and begin to gnaw at the vine. At this point
she notices a wild strawberry growing from a crevice.
She looks up, down, at the mice.
Then she eats the strawberry.
So here's the view, the breeze, the pulse
in your throat. Your wallet will be stolen, you'll get fat,
slip on the bathroom tiles of a foreign hotel
and crack your hip. You'll be lonely.
Oh taste how sweet and tart
the red juice is, how the tiny seeds
crunch between your teeth.

--Ellen Bass

The Second Trying

If I could only get hold of the whole of you,   
How could I ever get hold of the whole of you,   
Even more than the most beloved idols,   
More than mountains quarried whole,   
          More than mines   
          Of burning coal,   
Let's say mines of extinguished coal   
And the breath of day like a fiery furnace.   

If one could get hold of you for all the years,   
How could one get hold of you from all the years,   
How could one lengthen a single arm,   
Like a single branch of an African river,   
As one sees in a dream the Bay of Storms,   
As one sees in a dream a ship that went down,   
The way one imagines a cushion of clouds,   
Lily-clouds as the body's cushion,   
But though you will it, they will not convey you,   
Do not believe that they will convey you.   

If one could get hold of all-of-the-whole-of-you,   
If one could get hold of you like metal,   
Say like pillars of copper,   
Say like a pillar of purple copper   
(That pillar I remembered last summer)—
And the bottom of the ocean I have never seen,   
And the bottom of the ocean that I can see   
With its thousand heavy thickets of air,   
A thousand and one laden breaths.   

If one could only get hold of the-whole-of-you-now,   
How could you ever be for me what I myself am? 

--Dahlia Ravikovitch

A Night at the Opera

"The tenor's too fat," the beautiful young
woman complains, "and the soprano
dowdy and old." But what if Othello's
not black, if Rigoletto's hump lists,
if airy Gilda and her entourage
of flesh outweigh the cello section?

In fairy tales, the prince has a good heart,
and so as an outward and visible
sign of an inward, invisible grace,
his face is not creased, nor are his limbs gnarled.
Our tenor holds in his liver-spotted
hands the soprano's broad, burgeoning face.

Their combined age is ninety-seven; there's
spittle in both pinches of her mouth;
a vein in his temple twitches like a worm.
Their faces are a foot apart. His eyes
widen with fear as he climbs to the high
B-flat he'll have to hit and hold for five

dire seconds. And then they'll stay in their stalled
hug for as long as we applaud. Franco
Corelli once bit Birgit Nilsson's ear
in just such a command embrace because
he felt she'd upstaged him. Their costumes weigh
fifteen pounds apiece; they're poached in sweat

and smell like fermenting pigs; their voices rise
and twine not from beauty, nor from the lack
of it, but from the hope for accuracy
and passion, both. They have to hit the note
and the emotion, both, with the one poor
arrow of the voice. Beauty's for amateurs.

--William Matthews

Amherst Massachusetts

Boulder Colorado drinks a margarita outside on the patio. He walks to
Pearl Street and finds a spot on the pavement to watch a street performer.
People in dreadlocks, playing guitars, ask him if he can spare a smile as
he passes them by. Baskets with notes that say, "For music school," sit
in front of young girls who are playing the violin.

Boulder Colorado checks his watch as he realizes that Tucson Arizona
probably won't show up. he waits outside the pizza joint before going
to a phone booth. Tucson Arizona answers the phone out of breath. She
talks closely into the telephone and Boulder Colorado imagines her
pale skin and the way her shirt thins to her body, and says, it would have
been nice if you had called.

She slips the phone off her fingers and wraps her body in a towel before
getting dressed to meet New York City. New York City is always up late,
they shop on Fourth Ave, and even when the stores are closed the streets
are open. It's Downtown Saturday Night and New York City is dancing.

He pulls Tucson Arizona to his chest, his arms are on her lower back, his
hands feeling the slender of her hips. Amherst Massachusetts is reading the
newspaper when she looks out and notices Tucson Arizona's slim body
dancing between the trees. She thinks about New York City's cinnamon
breath and raw cologne.

Amherst Massachusetts wraps her brown thick hair up in a wool hat, her
neck in a scarf. She lets the roads take her home, following the leaves as
they fall to the silence of the street. She places her hands on her hips and
feels the roundness the year has brought them.

Amherst Massachusetts thinks about New York City and the charm he has
with women, she thinks about Tucson Arizona and the way she lets men
play on her body like sunlight. She knows they are dancing the
night away and won't be home anytime soon.

--Jaimee Kuperman

Restoration Ode

What tends toward orbit and return,
comets and melodies, robins and trash trucks
restore us. What would be an arrow, a dove
to pierce our hearts restore us. Restore us

minutes clustered like nursing baby bats
and minutes that are shards of glass. Mountains
that are vapor, mice living in cathedrals,
and the heft and lightness of snow restore us.

One hope inside dread, "Oh what the hell"
inside "I can't" like a pearl inside a cake
of soap, love in lust in loss, and the tub
filled with dirt in the backyard restore us.

Sunflowers, let me wait, let me please
see the bridge again from my smacked-up
desk on Euclid, jog by the Black Angel
without begging, dream without thrashing.

Let us be quick and accurate with the knife
and everything that dashes restore us,
salmon, shadows buzzing in the wind,
wren trapped in the atrium, and all

that stills at last, my friend's cat,
a pile of leaves after much practice,
and ash beneath the grate, last ember
winked shut restore us. And the one who comes

out from the back wiping his hands on a rag,
saying, "Who knows, there might be a chance."
And one more undestroyed, knocked-down nest
stitched with cellophane and dental floss,

one more gift to gently shake
and one more guess and one more chance.

--Dean Young

Forever

Even in Dante's inspired version,
Heaven and Hell don't seem appropriate
For human habitation, being too static,
Too imbued with notions of the eternal.
Yes, for the sake of justice, the violent
Who get away with murder on earth
Should be made to feel a heat more fiery
Than the coals of rage that burned within them;
The betrayers of friends and patrons deserve a chill
Colder than the ice in their arctic hearts.
But shouldn't their sentences have a limit?
Won't their victims, the pillaged and trampled
And rolled to the wall, safe at last
In the balmy realm of the blessed,
Grow uneasy, eventually, with the thought
Of their oppressors in endless torment?
Won't they decide a determinate stay
Is long enough? It's not for us to object
If Abel throws down a rope at last to Cain,
If Jesus takes Judas by the hand.
So hell, if imagination wins out,
Ought to be slowly emptying,
And then heaven as well, as the saints
Return to earth to help the sinners
Learn what damage they can undo
If they give themselves to the effort,
And what damage they'll have to leave as is.

--Carl Dennis

God Says Yes To Me

I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic
and she said yes
I asked her if it was okay to be short
and she said it sure is
I asked her if I could wear nail polish
or not wear nail polish
and she said honey
she calls me that sometimes
she said you can do just exactly
what you want to
Thanks God I said
And is it even okay if I don't paragraph
my letters
Sweetcakes God said
who knows where she picked that up
what I'm telling you is
Yes Yes Yes

--Kaylin Haught

The Pomegranate

The only legend I have ever loved is
the story of a daughter lost in hell.
And found and rescued there.
Love and blackmail are the gist of it.
Ceres and Persephone the names.
And the best thing about the legend is
I can enter it anywhere. And have.
As a child in exile in
a city of fogs and strange consonants,
I read it first and at first I was
an exiled child in the crackling dusk of
the underworld, the stars blighted. Later
I walked out in a summer twilight
searching for my daughter at bed-time.
When she came running I was ready
to make any bargain to keep her.
I carried her back past whitebeams
and wasps and honey-scented buddleias.
But I was Ceres then and I knew
winter was in store for every leaf
on every tree on that road.
Was inescapable for each one we passed.
And for me.
It is winter
and the stars are hidden.
I climb the stairs and stand where I can see
my child asleep beside her teen magazines,
her can of Coke, her plate of uncut fruit.
The pomegranate! How did I forget it?
She could have come home and been safe
and ended the story and all
our heart-broken searching but she reached
out a hand and plucked a pomegranate.
She put out her hand and pulled down
the French sound for apple and
the noise of stone and the proof
that even in the place of death,
at the heart of legend, in the midst
of rocks full of unshed tears
ready to be diamonds by the time
the story was told, a child can be
hungry. I could warn her. There is still a chance.
The rain is cold. The road is flint-coloured.
The suburb has cars and cable television.
The veiled stars are above ground.
It is another world. But what else
can a mother give her daughter but such
beautiful rifts in time?
If I defer the grief I will diminish the gift.
The legend will be hers as well as mine.
She will enter it. As I have.
She will wake up. She will hold
the papery flushed skin in her hand.
And to her lips. I will say nothing


--Eavan Boland

I Didn't Apologize to the Well

I didn't apologize to the well when I passed the well,
I borrowed from the ancient pine tree a cloud
and squeezed it like an orange, then waited for a gazelle
white and legendary. And I ordered my heart to be patient:
Be neutral as if you were not of me! Right here
the kind shepherds stood on air and evolved
their flutes, then persuaded the mountain quail toward
the snare. And right here I saddled a horse for flying toward
my planets, then flew. And right here the priestess
told me: Beware of the asphalt road and the cars
and walk upon your exhalation. Right here
I slackened my shadow and waited, I picked the tiniest
rock and stayed up late. I broke the myth and I broke.
And I circled the well until I flew from myself
to what isn't of it. A deep voice shouted at me:
This grave isn't your grave. So I apologized.
I read verses from the wise holy book, and said
to the unknown one in the well: Salaam upon you the day
you were killed in the land of peace, and the day you rise
from the darkness of the well alive!

--Mahmoud Darwish
translated by Fady Joudah

Thank you for continuing to post these poems, Sven.

Thanks for noticing and reading, Skor.

Wow! a far cry from M is for the many things she taught me!   :)

Oh yes, they draw blood. And you wish you could give more.
Metaphorically, Flower, just metaphorically.  8)

and sometimes not...   :P ever get beaten with the wrong end of a hi heel and not in that good way either! LOL!  :D

Can't say that I have and if there exists a good way to get beaten, that too somehow got past me!    :(

you ain't missing much i assure you... how i'm still alive with most all of my faculties still intact is somewhat of a small miracle i guess..  8)

This Was Once a Love Poem


This was once a love poem,
before its haunches thickened, its breath grew short,
before it found itself sitting,
perplexed and a little embarrassed,
on the fender of a parked car,
while many people passed by without turning their heads.

It remembers itself dressing as if for a great engagement.
It remembers choosing these shoes,
this scarf or tie.

Once, it drank beer for breakfast,
drifted its feet
in a river side by side with the feet of another.

Once it pretended shyness, then grew truly shy,
dropping its head so the hair would fall forward,
so the eyes would not be seen.

IT spoke with passion of history, of art.
It was lovely then, this poem.
Under its chin, no fold of skin softened.
Behind the knees, no pad of yellow fat.
What it knew in the morning it still believed at nightfall.
An unconjured confidence lifted its eyebrows, its cheeks.

The longing has not diminished.
Still it understands. It is time to consider a cat,
the cultivation of African violets or flowering cactus.

Yes, it decides:
Many miniature cacti, in blue and red painted pots.
When it finds itself disquieted
by the pure and unfamiliar silence of its new life,
it will touch them—one, then another—
with a single finger outstretched like a tiny flame.

--Jane Hirshfield

Elegy in Joy


We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.

The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.

Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.

This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.

--Muriel Rukeyser

A child said, What is the grass?

A child said, What is the grass? fetching it to me with full
hands;
How could I answer the child?. . . .I do not know what it
is any more than he.

I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful
green stuff woven.

Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropped,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we
may see and remark, and say Whose?

Or I guess the grass is itself a child. . . .the produced babe
of the vegetation.

Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow
zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the
same, I receive them the same.

And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them;
It may be you are from old people and from women, and
from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps,
And here you are the mother's laps.

This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old
mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues!
And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths
for nothing.

I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men
and women,
And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring
taken soon out of their laps.

What do you think has become of the young and old men?
What do you think has become of the women and
children?

They are alive and well somewhere;
The smallest sprouts show there is really no death,
And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait
at the end to arrest it,
And ceased the moment life appeared.

All goes onward and outward. . . .and nothing collapses,
And to die is different from what any one supposed, and
luckier.


--Walt Whitman

Live Blindly and Upon the Hour

Live blindly and upon the hour. The Lord,
Who was the Future, died full long ago.
Knowledge which is the Past is folly. Go,
Poor, child, and be not to thyself abhorred.
Around thine earth sun-winged winds do blow
And planets roll; a meteor draws his sword;
The rainbow breaks his seven-coloured chord
And the long strips of river-silver flow:
Awake! Give thyself to the lovely hours.
Drinking their lips, catch thou the dream in flight
About their fragile hairs' aerial gold.
Thou art divine, thou livest,—as of old
Apollo springing naked to the light,
And all his island shivered into flowers.

--Trumbull Stickney
1874-1904

History is a Room

                                          The study of History is the study of Empire.
                                                                               —Niall Ferguson

I cannot enter.

To enter that room, I would need to be a man who makes History, not a girl to whom History happened.

Mother to two daughters, I guard their lives with hope, a pinch of salt I throw over my shoulder.

To enter that room, I would need to wield a gun.

Here, I brandish weapons that serve an art my mother and grandmother knew: how to make of plantain and eggs a meal.

To enter that room, I would need to live in the past, to understand how power is amassed, eclipsing the sun.

Beneath my children's beds, I scatter grains of rice to keep duppy at bay.

To enter that room, I would need to live in the present: This election. This war.

Beneath my children's pillows, I place worry dolls to ensure their peaceful sleep.

To enter that room, I would need to bridge the distance between my door and what lies beyond.

Standing in my foyer at dusk, I ask the sea to fill the crevices of this house with its breath.

History is recounted by the dead, returned from their graves to walk in shriveled skins.

In our yard, I watch my daughters run with arms papering the wind.

History is recounted by children in nursery rhymes, beauty masking its own violence.

In my kitchen, I peel an orange, try to forget my thumb must wrest the pulp from its rind.

History is recounted in The Book of Explanations: AK-47 begat UZI, which begat M-16 ... and all the days of their lives were long.

Pausing at the sink, I think of how a pepper might be cut, blade handled so the knife becomes the fruit slit open, its seeds laid bare.

History is recounted in The Book of Beginnings: the storey of a people born of forgetting.

In our yard, I name the world for my children—praying mantis, robin's egg, maple leaf—words for lives they bring me in their palms.

To enter that room, I would need to look into the mirror of language, see in collateral damage the faces of the dead.

In our yard, I sow seeds, planting myself in this soil.

To enter that room, I would need to uncover the pattern of a life woven onto some master loom.

Here, I set the table, sweep the floor, make deals with the god of small things.

To enter that room, I would need to be armed with the right question: is History the start of evening or dawn returning the swallow to the sky?

Here, I light candles at nightfall, believe the match waits to be struck.

--Shara McCallum

Be Kind

Not merely because Henry James said
there were but four rules of life—
be kind be kind be kind be kind—but
because it's good for the soul, and,
what's more, for others, it may be
that kindness is our best audition
for a worthier world, and, despite
the vagueness  and uncertainty of
its recompense, a bird may yet  wander
into a bush before our very houses,
gratitude may not manifest itself in deeds
entirely equal to our own, still there's
weather arriving from every direction,
the feasts of famine and feasts of plenty
may yet prove to be one,  so why not
allow the little sacrificial squinches and
squigulas to prevail? Why not inundate
the particular world with minute particulars?
Dust's certainly all our fate, so why not
make it the happiest possible dust,
a detritus of blessedness? Surely
the hedgehog, furling and unfurling
into its spiked little ball, knows something
that, with gentle touch and unthreatening
tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked
witches of our childhood have died and,
from where they are buried, a great kindness
has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course,
in the end so much comes down to privilege
and its various penumbras, but too much
of our unruly animus has already been
wasted on reprisals, too much of the
unblessed air is filled with smoke from
undignified fires. Oh friends, take
whatever kindness you can find
and be profligate in its expenditure:
It will not drain your limited resources,
I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable
and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws
to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,
and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.

--Michael Blumenthal

Guitar

Beneath the full moon
they went hunting guitars.
And brought back this one,
pale, delicate, shapely,
eyes of inexhaustible mulata

waist of wood with an opening.
She is young, barely flies.
But already she sings when she hears
songs and couplets
flutter their wings in other cages.
Sombersongs and lonelycouplets.
There is inscription on her cage:
                                             "Beware: she dreams."


--Nicolas Guillen

If Time Is An Engine

There are sunflowers on the path where I go
and lacewings rising from the fields
With each step I take, I know more surely
that this is the way

If time is an engine, then it was created in a dream
If love is an engine, then the dreamer weeps
If memory is an engine, then it will carry the dream away

But there are sunflowers on the path where I go
and the dog is at my heel. There is a gate
and a meadow beyond. There is a stream

The sky is blue by day, blue in the evening
But I know the way of the hidden stars
and I'm still alive, I still know secrets
There is nothing I have left undone.

So my keys are on the table. You can sell my
clothes. Rust, rust is affecting the machinery
But I am not needed. The machines can be repaired

For if time is a cathedral, then I have lived in the cathedral
If love is a cathedral, then I have lived in splendor
If memory is a cathedral, then I remember everything

but now pass by. And there are sunflowers
on the path where I go. The dog is at my heel
There is a gate and a meadow beyond
There is a stream

--Eleanor Lerman

One More Hymn to the Sun

You know that like an ideal mother
she will never leave you,
though after a week of rain
you begin to worry

but you accept her brief absences,
her occasional closed doors
as the prerogative
of an eccentric lover . . .

You like the fact that her moods are an orderly version of yours,
arranged, like the needs of animals,
by seasons: her spring quirks,
her sexual summers,
her steadfast warmth in the fall;
you remember her face on Christmas Day,
blurred, and suffused with the weak smile
of a woman who has just given birth

The way she loves you, your whole body,
and still leaves enough space between you
to keep you from turning to cinders
before your time! . . .

She never gave up on you
though it took you billions of years
to learn the alphabet
and the shadow you cast on the ground
changed its shape again and again

- Lisel Mueller

You Can't Have It All

But you can have the fig tree and its fat leaves like clown hands
gloved with green. You can have the touch of a single eleven-year-old finger
on your cheek, waking you at one a.m. to say the hamster is back.
You can have the purr of the cat and the soulful look
of the black dog, the look that says, If I could I would bite
every sorrow until it fled, and when it is August,
you can have it August and abundantly so. You can have love,
though often it will be mysterious, like the white foam
that bubbles up at the top of the bean pot over the red kidneys
until you realize foam's twin is blood.
You can have the skin at the center between a man's legs,
so solid, so doll-like. You can have the life of the mind,
glowing occasionally in priestly vestments, never admitting pettiness,
never stooping to bribe the sullen guard who'll tell you
all roads narrow at the border.
You can speak a foreign language, sometimes,
and it can mean something. You can visit the marker on the grave
where your father wept openly. You can't bring back the dead,
but you can have the words forgive and forget hold hands
as if they meant to spend a lifetime together. And you can be grateful
for makeup, the way it kisses your face, half spice, half amnesia, grateful
for Mozart, his many notes racing one another towards joy, for towels
sucking up the drops on your clean skin, and for deeper thirsts,
for passion fruit, for saliva. You can have the dream,
the dream of Egypt, the horses of Egypt and you riding in the hot sand.
You can have your grandfather sitting on the side of your bed,
at least for a while, you can have clouds and letters, the leaping
of distances, and Indian food with yellow sauce like sunrise.
You can't count on grace to pick you out of a crowd
but here is your friend to teach you how to high jump,
how to throw yourself over the bar, backwards,
until you learn about love, about sweet surrender,
and here are periwinkles, buses that kneel, farms in the mind
as real as Africa. And when adulthood fails you,
you can still summon the memory of the black swan on the pond
of your childhood, the rye bread with peanut butter and bananas
your grandmother gave you while the rest of the family slept.
There is the voice you can still summon at will, like your mother's,
it will always whisper, you can't have it all,
but there is this.

--Barbara Ras

excerpt from The Dreams of Chang

"For, were all these Buddhas of yours more foolish than
you and I? And yet, just you listen to what they say
about this love of the universe and all things corporeal,
beginning with sunlight, with a wave, with the air, and
winding up with woman, with an infant, with the scent
of white acacia! Or else, -- do you know what sort of a
thing this Tao is, that has been thought up by nobody
else but you Chinamen? I know it but poorly myself,
brother, but then, everybody knows it poorly; but, as
far as it is possible to understand it, just what is it, after
all? The Abyss, our First Mother; She gives birth to all
things that exist in this universe, and She devours them
as well, and, devouring them, gives birth to them anew;
or, to put it in other words, It is the Path of all that ex-
ists, which nothing that exists may resist. But we resist
It every minute; every minute we want to turn to our
desire not only the soul of a beloved woman, let us say,
but even the entire universe as well! It is an eerie thing
to be living in this world, Chang," said the captain; "it's
a most pleasant thing, but still an eerie one, and espe-
cially for such as I! For I am too avid of happiness, and
all too often do I lose the way: dark and evil is this
Path, -- or is it entirely, entirely otherwise?"
And, after a silence, he added further:
"For after all, what is the main thing? When you
love somebody, there is no power on earth that can make
you believe that the one you love can possibly not love
you. And that is just where the devil comes in, Chang.
But how magnificent life is; my God, how magnificent!"

--Ivan Bunin
translated by Bernard Guilbert Guerney

24th September 1945

The best sea: has yet to be crossed.
The best child: has yet to grow up.
The best days: have yet to be lived;
and the best word I wanted to say to you
is the word I have not yet said.

--Nazim Hikmet

blessing the boats
(at St. Mary's)

may the tide
that is entering even now
the lip of our understanding
carry you out
beyond the face of fear
may you kiss
the wind then turn from it
certain that it will
love your back may you
open your eyes to water
water waving forever
and may you in your innocence
sail through this to that

--Lucille Clifton

Chuang Tzu and the First Noble Truth

As Chuang Tzu would say
when some good Confucian talked
about righteousness
and virtue, "Not quite there yet,
eh?" knowing that words can say

only so much, that
behind the words are more words,
and more behind those.
What the old man understood
is that each word names, and by

naming, it divides:
this from that and on and on.
But the Tao is one.
What is good is good for whom?
Do dogs have Buddha nature?

Say yes or say no,
and Buddha nature is gone.
The practice refines
itself. All the words I've loved
so many years? Going, gone.

Buddha nature, Tao,
the practice of poetry-
going, going, gone.
Present mind and future mind
lie beyond what is contained.

What mind do we bring
to the poem or to bed?
Stuck in samsara,
dreaming of truth and virtue,
just who is that butterfly,

just who is that man
who says again with a grin
and shake of the head,
"Struggle and judgment and pain-
still not quite there yet, eh?"

--Sam Hamill

Psychoanalysis: An Elegy    


What are you thinking about?

I am thinking of an early summer.
I am thinking of wet hills in the rain
Pouring water.  Shedding it
Down empty acres of oak and manzanita
Down to the old green brush tangled in the sun,
Greasewood, sage, and spring mustard.
Or the hot wind coming down from Santa Ana
Driving the hills crazy,
A fast wind with a bit of dust in it
Bruising everything and making the seed sweet.
Or down in the city where the peach trees
Are awkward as young horses,
And there are kites caught on the wires
Up above the street lamps,
And the storm drains are all choked with dead branches.

What are you thinking?

I think that I would like to write a poem that is slow as a summer
As slow getting started
As 4th of July somewhere around the middle of the second stanza
After a lot of unusual rain
California seems long in the summer.
I would like to write a poem as long as California
And as slow as a summer.
Do you get me, Doctor?  It would have to be as slow
As the very tip of summer.
As slow as the summer seems
On a hot day drinking beer outside Riverside
Or standing in the middle of a white-hot road
Between Bakersfield and Hell
Waiting for Santa Claus.

What are you thinking now?

I'm thinking that she is very much like California.
When she is still her dress is like a roadmap.  Highways
Traveling up and down her skin
Long empty highways
With the moon chasing jackrabbits across them
On hot summer nights.
I am thinking that her body could be California
And I a rich Eastern tourist
Lost somewhere between Hell and Texas
Looking at a map of a long, wet, dancing California
That I have never seen.
Send me some penny picture-postcards, lady,
Send them.
One of each breast photographed looking
Like curious national monuments,
One of your body sweeping like a three-lane highway
Twenty-seven miles from a night's lodging
In the world's oldest hotel.

What are you thinking?

I am thinking of how many times this poem
Will be repeated.  How many summers
Will torture California
Until the damned maps burn
Until the mad cartographer
Falls to the ground and possesses
The sweet thick earth from which he has been hiding.

What are you thinking now?

I am thinking that a poem could go on forever.

--Jack Spicer

At the Equinox

The tide ebbs and reveals orange and purple sea stars.
I have no theory of radiance,

but after rain evaporates
off pine needles, the needles glisten.

In the courtyard, we spot the rising shell of a moon,
and, at the equinox, bathe in its gleam.

Using all the tides of starlight,
we find
vicissitude is our charm.

On the mud flats off Homer,
I catch the tremor when waves start to slide back in;

and, from Roanoke, you carry
the leafing jade smoke of willows.

Looping out into the world, we thread
and return. The lapping waves

cover an expanse of mussels clustered on rocks;
and, giving shape to what is unspoken,

forsythia buds and blooms in our arms.

--Arthur Sze

Fallen
by Ryan J. Healy
like a black cloud it hovers over
exiling the weakness to darkness

a deep pit of emptiness to fall into
opens up slowly inside

memories left in shadows of hollowed emotions

a love hangs in the balance

the wind passes over what was once a dream brought to life
a nightmare now with no escape

for every breath and every blink of the watery eyes
comes the faded sight of happiness fleeing with the light

beyond the clouds of darkness there is hope
time may bring a new beginning to the end

left behind is a voice
a voice left calling for answers never given
a fading voice

the darkness overcomes

it was so overwhelming

the petals have fallen

I like this one, Mz Lily. Wish you'd share more poems with us!

Sometimes I Am Startled Out of Myself

like this morning, when the wild geese came squawking,
flapping their rusty hinges, and something about their trek
across the sky made me think about my life, the places
of brokenness, the places of sorrow, the places where grief
has strung me out to dry. And then the geese come calling,
the leader falling back when tired, another taking her place.
Hope is borne on wings. Look at the trees. They turn to gold
for a brief while, then lose it all each November.
Through the cold months, they stand, take the worst
weather has to offer. And still, they put out shy green leaves
come April, come May. The geese glide over the cornfields,
land on the pond with its sedges and reeds.
You do not have to be wise. Even a goose knows how to find
shelter, where the corn still lies in the stubble and dried stalks.
All we do is pass through here, the best way we can.
They stitch up the sky, and it is whole again.

--Barbara Crooker

The Lost Hotels of Paris

The Lord gives everything and charges
by taking it back. What a bargain.
Like being young for a while. We are
allowed to visit the hearts of women,
go into their bodies so we feel
no longer alone. We are permitted
romantic love with its bounty and half-life
of two years. It is right to mourn
for the small hotels of Paris that used to be
when we used to be. My mansard looking
down on Notre Dame every morning is gone,
and me listening to the bell at night.
Venice is no more. The best Greek islands
have drowned in acceleration. But it's the having
not the keeping that is the treasure.
Ginsberg came into my house one afternoon
and said he was giving up poetry
because it told lies, that language distorts.
I agreed, but asked what we have
that gets its right even that much.
We look up at the stars and they are
not there. We see the memory
of when they were, once upon a time.
And that too is more than enough.

--Jack Gilbert

Perishable, It Said

Perishable, it said on the plastic container,
and below, in different ink,
the date to be used by, the last teaspoon consumed.

I found myself looking:
now at the back of each hand,
now inside the knees,
now turning over each foot to look at the sole.

Then at the leaves of the young tomato plants,
then at the arguing jays.

Under the wooden table and lifted stones, looking.
Coffee cups, olives, cheeses,
hunger, sorrow, fears—
these too would certainly vanish, without knowing when.

How suddenly then
the strange happiness took me,
like a man with strong hands and strong mouth,
inside that hour with its perishing perfumes and clashings.

--Jane Hirshfield

As at the Far Edge of Circling

As at the far edge of circling the country,
facing suddenly the other ocean,
the boundless edge of what I had wanted
to know, I stepped
into my answers' shadow ocean,

the tightening curl of the corners
of outdated old paperbacks, breakers,
a crumble surf of tiny dry triangles around
my ankles sinking in my stand

taken that the horizon written
by the spin of my compass is that this is
is not enough a point to turn around on,

is like a skin that falls short of edge
as a rug, that covers a no longer
natural spot, no longer existent
to live on from, the map of my person
come to the end of, but not done.

That country crossed was what I could imagine,
and that little spit of answer is the shadow—
not the ocean which casts it— that I step next
into to be cleansed of question.

But not of seeking ...it as
if simplified for the seeking,
come to its end at this body.

--Ed Roberson

Of What is Real

I like to lie with you wordless
on black cloud rooft beach
in late june 5 o'clock tempest
on clump weed bed with sand
fitting your contours like tailor made

and I like to wash my summer brown face
in north cold hudson rapids
with octagon soap
knees niched in steamy rocks
where last night's frog stared
at our buddhist sleep

but most of all I like to see
the morning happen . . .

I like to go down vertical mountains
where lanny goshkitch
meditated
crashing poplars
sap sticky arms flailing
as thermosed green tea
anoints sneakers
and blood soakt brow I taste and love
myself a split second

and I like to feel my own full scrotum
as I horizon the whole crisp linen earth
in my beatitude waiting miguel-like
in maskt fantasy for christ-like
you—
whoever you are

but most of all I like to see
the morning happen . . .

I like to look at books howl
haikus of the seasons
of the mind
that I might know the knowing
and the simplest to think of all of us
taking turns at catching each other
in the rye

and I like to taste cold absinthe
on hot hung sunday mornings
discussing orgies symposiums
and sounds with hoary headed poets
in upstairs jazz club
in Japan

but most of all I like to see
the morning happen when k and ike still sleep
and only the denver night riders hum contrasts
to orient jazzy feather beasts
in the dewy garden of real earth
where I can sink my naked feet
cool

--Richard Tagett

Perhaps the World Ends Here


The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what, we must eat to live.

The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the table. So it has been since creation, and it will go on.

We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.

It is here that children are given instructions on what it means to be human. We make men at it, we make women.

At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts of lovers.

Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms around our children. They laugh with us at our poor falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back together once again at the table.

This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella in the sun.

Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate the terrible victory.

We have given birth on this table, and have prepared our parents for burial here.

At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow. We pray of suffering and remorse. We give thanks.

Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table, while we are laughing and crying, eating of the last sweet bite.

--By Joy Harjo

maggie and milly and molly and may
went down to the beach (to play one day)

and maggie discovered a shell that sang
so sweetly she couldn't remember her troubles,and

milly befriended a stranded star
whose rays five languid fingers were;

and molly was chased by a horrible thing
which raced sideways while blowing bubbles: and

may came home with a smooth round stone
as small as a world and as large as alone.

For whatever we lose(like a you or a me)
it's always ourselves we find in the sea

ee cummings

The strong shore is my beloved
And I am his sweetheart.
We are at last united by love, and
Then the moon draws me from him.
I go to him in haste and depart
Reluctantly, with many
Little farewells.

I steal swiftly from behind the
Blue horizon to cast the silver of
My foam upon the gold of his sand, and
We blend in melted brilliance.

I quench his thirst and submerge his
Heart; he softens my voice and subdues
My temper.
At dawn I recite the rules of love upon
His ears, and he embraces me longingly.
At eventide I sing to him the song of
Hope, and then print smooth kisses upon
His face; I am swift and fearful, but he
Is quiet, patient, and thoughtful. His
Broad bosom soothes my restlessness.

As the tide comes we caress each other,
When it withdraws, I drop to his feet in
Prayer.

Many times have I danced around mermaids
As they rose from the depths and rested
Upon my crest to watch the stars;
Many times have I heard lovers complain
of the smallness, and I helped them to sigh.

Many times have I stolen gems from the
Depths and presented them to my beloved
Shore. He takes in silence, but still
I give for he welcomes me ever.

In the heaviness of night, when all
Creatures seek the ghost of Slumber, I
Sit up, singing at one time and sighing
At another. I am awake always.

Alas! Sleeplessness has weakened me!
But I am a lover, and the truth of love
Is strong.
I may weary, but I shall never die.
Kahlil Gibran

Love E.E. Cummings Maggy, Milly, Molly, and May... Nice wavewatcher..... Sven2 I know this poem is long, but............. :-\



Come, dear children, let us away;
Down and away below!
Now my brothers call from the bay,
Now the great winds shoreward blow,
Now the salt tides seaward flow;
Now the wild white horses play,
Champ and chafe and toss in the spray.
Children dear, let us away!
This way, this way!

Call her once before you go—
Call once yet!
In a voice that she will know:
'Margaret! Margaret!'
Children's voices should be dear
(Call once more) to a mother's ear;
Children's voices, wild with pain—
Surely she will come again!
Call her once and come away;
This way, this way!
'Mother dear, we cannot stay!
The wild white horses foam and fret.'
Margaret! Margaret!

Come, dear children, come away down;
Call no more!
One last look at the white-walled town,
And the little grey church on the windy shore;
Then come down!
She will not come though you call all day;
Come away, come away!

Children dear, was it yesterday
We heard the sweet bells over the bay?
In the caverns where we lay,
Through the surf and through the swell,
The far-off sound of a silver bell?
Sand-strewn caverns, cool and deep,
Where the winds are all asleep;
Where the spent lights quiver and gleam,
Where the salt weed sways in the stream,
Where the sea-beasts, ranged all round,
Feed in the ooze of their pasture-ground;
Where the sea-snakes coil and twine,
Dry their mail and bask in the brine;
Where great whales come sailing by,
Sail and sail, with unshut eye,
Round the world for ever and aye?
When did music come this way?
Children dear, was it yesterday?

Children dear, was it yesterday
(Call yet once) that she went away?
Once she sate with you and me,
On a red gold throne in the heart of the sea,
And the youngest sate on her knee.
She combed its bright hair, and she tended it well,
When down swung the sound of a far-off bell.
She sighed, she looked up through the clear green sea;
She said: 'I must go, for my kinsfolk pray
In the little grey church on the shore today.
'Twill be Easter-time in the world—ah me!
And I lose my poor soul, Merman! here with thee.'
I said: 'Go up, dear heart, through the waves;
Say thy prayer, and come back to the kind sea-caves!'
She smiled, she went up through the surf in the bay.
Children dear, was it yesterday?

Children dear, were we long alone?
'The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan;
Long prayers,' I said, 'in the world they say;
Come,' I said; and we rose through the surf in the bay.
We went up the beach, by the sandy down
Where the sea-stocks bloom, to the white-walled town;
Through the narrow paved streets, where all was still,
To the little grey church on the windy hill.
From the church came a murmur of folk at their prayers,
But we stood without in the cold blowing airs.
We climbed on the graves, on the stones worn with rains,
And we gazed up the aisle through the small leaded panes.
She sate by the pillar; we saw her clear:
'Margaret, hist! come quick, we are here!
Dear heart,' I said, 'we are long alone;
The sea grows stormy, the little ones moan.'
But, ah, she gave me never a look,
For her eyes we sealed to the holy book!
Loud prays the priest; shut stands the door.
Come away, children, call no more!
Come away, come down, call no more!

Down, down, down!
Down to the depths of the sea!
She sits at her wheel in the humming town,
Singing most joyfully.
Hark, what she sings: 'O joy, O joy,
For the humming street, and the child with its toy!
For the priest, and the bell, and the holy well;
For the wheel where I spun,
And the blessed light of the sun!'
And so she sings her fill,
Singing most joyfully,
Till the shuttle drops from her hand,
And the whizzing wheel stands still.
She steals to the window, and looks at the sand,
And over the sand at the sea;
And her eyes are set in a stare;
And anon there breaks a sigh,
And anon there drops a tear,
From a sorrow-clouded eye,
And a heart sorrow-laden,
A long, long sigh;
For the cold strange eyes of a little Mermaiden,
And the gleam of her golden hair.

Come away, away children;
Come children, come down!
The hoarse wind blows coldly;
Lights shine in the town.
She will start from her slumber
When gusts shake the door;
She will hear the winds howling,
Will hear the waves roar.
We shall see, while above us
The waves roar and whirl,
A ceiling of amber,
A pavement of pearl,
Singing: 'Here came a mortal,
But faithless was she!
And alone dwell for ever
The kings of the sea.'

But, children, at midnight,
When soft the winds blow,
When clear fall the moonlight,
When spring-tides are low;
When sweet airs come seaward
From heaths starred with broom,
And high rocks throw mildly
On the blanched sands a gloom;
Up the still, glistening beaches,
Up the creeks we will hie,
Over banks of bright seaweed
The ebb-tide leaves dry.
We will gaze, from the sand-hills,
At the white sleeping town;
At the church on the hillside—
And then come back down.
Singing: 'There dwells a loved one,
But cruel is she!
She left lonely for ever
The kings of the sea.'

Matthew Arnold

Here's a poem, off course for the season and, not like much poetry that is posted here. But, I love afican american poetry and I like this one...

Slim Greer in Hell     
by Sterling A. Brown 


I

Slim Greer went to heaven;
  St. Peter said, "Slim,
You been a right good boy."
  An' he winked at him.

     "You been travelin' rascal
       In yo'day.
     You kin roam once mo';
       Den you come to stay.

"Put dese wings on yo' shoulders,
  An' save yo' feet."
Slim grin, and he speak up,
  "Thankye, Pete."

     Den Peter say, "Go
       To Hell an' see,
     All dat is doing, and
       Report to me.

"Be sure to remember
  How everything go."
Slim say, "I be seein' yuh
  On de late watch, bo."

     Slim got to cavortin'
       Swell as you choose,
     Like Lindy in de Spirit
       Of St. Louis Blues.

He flew an' he flew,
  Till at last he hit
A hangar wid de sign readin'
  DIS IS IT.

     Den he parked his wings,
       An' strolled aroun',
     Gittin' used to his feet
       On de solid ground.

II

Big bloodhound came aroarin'
  Like Niagry Falls,
Sicked on by white devils
  In overhalls.

Now Slim warn't scared
  Cross my heart, it's a fac',
An de dog went on a bayin'
  Some po' devil's track.

     Den Slim saw a mansion
     An' walked right in;
     De Devil looked up
     Wid a sickly grin.

"Suttingly didn't look
  Fo' you, Mr. Greer,
How it happens you comes
  To visit here?"

     Slim say---"Oh, jes' thought
       I'd drop by a spell."
     "Feel at home, seh, an' here's
     De keys to hell."

Den he took Slim around
  An' showed him people
Rasin' hell as high as
  De first Church Steeple.

     Lots of folks fightin'
       At de roulette wheel,
     Like old Rampart Street,
       Or leastwise Beale.

Showed him bawdy houses
  An' cabarets,
Slim thought of New Orleans
  An' Memphis days.

     Each devil was busy
       Wid a devlish broad,
     An' Slim cried, "Lawdy,
       Lawd, Lawd, Lawd."

Took him in a room
  Where Slim see
De preacher wid a brownskin
  On each knee.

     Showed him giant stills,
       Going everywhere,
     Wid a passel of devils
       Stretched dead drunk there.

Den he took him to de furnace
  Dat some devils was firing,
Hot as Hell, an' Slim start
  A mean presspirin'.

     White devils with pitchforks
       Threw black devils on,
     Slim thought he'd better
       Be gittin' along.

An' he says---"Dis makes
  Me think of home---
Vicksburg, Little Rock, Jackson,
  Waco and Rome."

     Den de devil gave Slim
       De big Ha-Ha;
     An' turned into a cracker,
       Wid a sheriff's star.

Slim ran fo' his wings,
  Lit out from de groun'
Hauled it back to St. Peter,
  Safety boun'.
III

     St. Peter said, "Well,
       You got back quick.
     How's de devil?  An' what's
       His latest trick?"

An' Slim Say, "Peter,
  I really cain't tell,
The place was Dixie
  That I took for hell."

     Then Peter say, "you must
       Be crazy, I vow,
     Where'n hell dja think Hell was,
       Anyhow?

"Git on back to de yearth,
  Cause I got de fear,
You'se a leetle too dumb,
  Fo' to stay up here. . ."

Lovely poems, and at last - some variety, (I know, I was putting everyone to sleep with my "impressionistic" taste! :o )
THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU, Mz.Lily and Wavewatcher.

Ahem, wavewatcher, what shorter version of your screen name is preferable to you?
Oh, no, I recall one such personality, and his "Brownie, doing a heck of a job", I rescind the question, wavewatcher, you are who you call yourself!!!!!

 :D I like wavewatcher,  I chose my name, from my gggmother, her Indian name was waterlily weddle...?really? I've spent sometime on Ancestry.com.... but her white name was Rebbecca...  >:(///........Oh, and not to drop names..but, E.E Cummings was my 10Th cousin on my mother's > fathers > mother > side. of course 6 times removed......ha ha, and must add I descend down and am related to Pocahontas, through Rebbecca, and oh....there's more, but I won't stop the poetry thread over my very interesting family!! ;)

Great poetry Mz Waterlilly! and Sven, your poetry never makes me sleepy! I told you I would come back, dear Sven, so I decided to re-emerge with some ocean poetry. I always felt that the ocean (off of Imperial Beach) deserved a Best-Supporting Actor Emmy for it's role in our beloved show.(especially in that haunting, final scene)

Sometime During Eternity ...

By Lawrence Ferlinghetti b. 1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Sometime during eternity
                                                       some guys show up   
and one of them
                      who shows up real late
                                                       is a kind of carpenter   
      from some square-type place
                                              like Galilee
          and he starts wailing
                                          and claiming he is hip
            to who made heaven
                                       and earth
                                                      and that the cat
                   who really laid it on us
                                                 is his Dad


          And moreover
             he adds
                         It's all writ down
                                              on some scroll-type parchments   
          which some henchmen
                  leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres   
                a long time ago
                                       and which you won't even find   
         for a coupla thousand years or so
                                                 or at least for
      nineteen hundred and fortyseven
                                                      of them
                            to be exact
                                             and even then
         nobody really believes them
                                                   or me
                                                            for that matter
          You're hot
                         they tell him
          And they cool him


          They stretch him on the Tree to cool


                         And everybody after that
                                                               is always making models   
                                          of this Tree
                                                          with Him hung up   
          and always crooning His name
                                     and calling Him to come down   
                                 and sit in
                                                 on their combo
                           as if he is the king cat
                                                            who's got to blow   
                      or they can't quite make it


                      Only he don't come down
                                                         from His Tree
          Him just hang there
                                       on His Tree
          looking real Petered out
                                          and real cool
                                                             and also
                   according to a roundup
                                                    of late world news   
             from the usual unreliable sources
                                                               real dead
8)

Letting Go
By Fay Zwicky


Tell the truth of experience
they say they also
say you must let
go learn to let go
let your children
go

and they go
and you stay
letting them go
because you are obedient and
respect everyone's freedom
to go and you stay

and you want to tell the truth
because you are yours truly
its obedient servant
but you can't because
you're feeling what you're not
supposed to feel you have
let them go and go and

you can't say what you feel
because they might read
this poem and feel guilty

and some post-modern hack
will back them up
and make you feel guilty
and stop feeling which is
post-modern and what
you're meant to feel

so you don't write a poem
you line up words in prose
inside a journal trapped
like a scorpion in a locked
drawer to be opened by
your children let go
after lived life and all the time
a great wave bursting
howls and rears and

you have to let go
or you're gone you're
gone gasping you
let go
till the next wave
towers crumbles
shreds you to lace—

When you wake
your spine is twisted
like a sea-bird
inspecting the sky,
stripped by lightning.

I love it!
Everything - the stuttering, as if in a breathless and lost chase, the tie of "go" and "gone" - us, them, time, towers crumbling - I love this poem, thank you, Mz.Lily, now - more, please.

thanks Sven, that means alot.

The ocean said to me once by Charles Bukowski

The ocean said to me once,
"Look!
Yonder on the shore
Is a woman, weeping.
I have watched her.
Go you and tell her this --
Her lover I have laid
In cool green hall.
There is wealth of golden sand
And pillars, coral-red;
Two white fish stand guard at his bier.

"Tell her this
And more --
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With a surplus of toys."

The Spirit Medium by William Butler Yeats

Poetry, music, I have loved, and yet
Because of those new dead
That come into my soul and escape
Confusion of the bed,
Or those begotten or unbegotten
Perning in a band,
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.

Or those begotten or unbegotten,
For I would not recall
Some that being unbegotten
Are not individual,
But copy some one action,
Moulding it of dust or sand,
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.

An old ghost's thoughts are lightning,
To follow is to die;
Poetry and music I have banished,
But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Makes no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.


 
 

Oh, Mz. Lily, look who is the author - what a cruel end was awaiting her, no big wonder the poem is so tragic.

Never Mind


that guests no longer come unannounced
or that the photo album contains pictures
of much younger people than we remember being

never mind that swallows etch Sanskrit
on the wrinkled sky

it's November
and the present is emptying its wine
into our glasses

never mind that we're not touching now

because our shadows are holding hands
in the dark behind our backs

--Denver Butson

Human Beauty


If you write a poem about love...
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death...

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

--Albert Goldbarth

P.S. For Wavewatcher, keeping with the ocean theme.

 ;)

Quote from: Sven2 on January 09, 2012, 05:26:19 PM
Oh, Mz. Lily, look who is the author - what a cruel end was awaiting her, no big wonder the poem is so tragic.

;) .Ha ha ha! tragic is an under statement... Maybe some of my long, long interesting family lineage...Ancestory.com...love it...
Hi Sven... I'm staying on track......

Sand Flesh and Sky

Our ropes are the roots
of our life. We fish
low in the earth,
the river beneath runs through our veins,
blue and cold in a riverbed.

When the sun comes up,
the moon moves slowly to the left.


I tie the logs and limbs together,
holding them in place.


The ocean beats them
smooth like rock.
Here my sense of time is flat.


I find in a strip of damp sand
footprints and marks of hands,
and torn pieces of flesh.


Night is a beast.
The tide moves, gushing
back and forth.


Sunlight touches our faces,
turning us, turning us, turning us
in our morning sleep.

         1976

Written by Clarence Major

Beautiful stuff here Sven and Miss Lily! I love checking in each day..like a poem-of-the-day update. And Mr. OceanFlower, thanks for the Ferlinghetti..great stuff!

The Sea Hold by Carl Sandburg
THE SEA is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land ... five white dice rolled from a tube.

Not so long ago ... the sea was large...
And to-day the sea has lost nothing ... it keeps all.

I am a loon about the sea.
I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I forget so many sea songs and sea cries.

I am a loon about the sea.
So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper shack trembling in a sand storm.

The sea knows more about them than they know themselves.
They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.

The sea is large.
The sea must know more than any of us.

It's great to exchange thoughts on the BB, the rare treat now. I was going to open a new thread - as an answer to the perpetual electoral season and give it "Let's Get Mad About Politics" title, but thought better of it. Why aggravate people and take them away from life as it simply flows - with every sunrise and snowfall, newborn birds and deer, with oldsters watching it pass, sadly.

Anyways - do not turn silent, my friends, and I know some that read, but do not speak here. There would be time for silence, that's for sure. Poetry, music, sweet wine and friendly banter is our shelter.

Blessed

The man whose ancestral home has just burned to the ground
in San Bruno, California, taking with it all his possessions
and family memorabilia, says he is blessed to have found
such good friends and neighbors to take him in, blessed
that his wife and children have survived with him, he says
he is blessed the way a man who has just given up
his spare kidney feels blessed to have helped a stranger,
the way those thirty-three Chilean miners, just up from
their sixty-nine days within the earth's blackened underbelly
say they are blessed to see daylight once again, just as
most of us, even without saying so, are blessed, as I am,
this very moment, to receive a postcard from U.S. Army
Captain Scott M. Pastor, informing me that my son has arrived
safely at Fort Leonard Wood—Whoever would have thought
I'd be grateful, even, for that? Yet who isn't among the blessed,
who can still sleep easily amid the splotched splendors
of the quotidian world—like those 4,500 poor "sufferers"
aboard the Carnival Cruise Line, sentenced to five days
of flown-in Spam and crabmeat and the scent of freshly
rotting vegetables? So much true suffering on this earth,
so many without the balm of other bodies and the
beneficence of breathable air, who have lost the dice-roll
of sperm and egg, or come up with the two of clubs
and three of diamonds on the blackjack table of this life,
down to their final two chips and free drink before
the time comes to face the cashier again. Easily the fall air
of West Virginia enters my lungs, easily the day descends
into the solace of sleep and pillows, the lex loci dilecti
of misdeeds and small miracles. Grace may not be merited,
friends, but nonetheless deserves to be praised, as I praise
it now, on this beautiful, unjust, splendiferous earth—
its blessed and bountiful beneficence bouldering down.

--Michael Blumenthal

Refugio's Hair    


In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera--The Land of the Lime--
And her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bareback, and sit there
As he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrín
And he placed the child in her arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse's rear leg.
The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full toward the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the álamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.

--Alberto Ríos

I like this poem by Ríos for an interesting take on the story of Absalom, for a woman's saving grace.

I like that , too Sven...Absalom..?

This Dream 

Edna St. Vincent Millay

Love, if I weep it will not matter, And if you laugh I shall not care;
Foolish am I to think about it, But it is good to feel you there.
Love, in my sleep I dreamed of waking,
White and awful the moonlight reached Over the floor, and somewhere, somewhere,
There was a shutter loose, it screeched! Swung in the wind, and no wind blowing!
I was afraid, and turned to you, Put out my hand to you for comfort, And you were gone!
Cold, cold as dew, Under my hand the moonlight lay!
Love, if you laugh I shall not care, But if I weep it will not matter, Ah, it is good to feel you there!

Mz.Lily, you pull classical strings! Thanks for the poem.

Grecian Temples

Because I'm getting pretty gray at the temples,
which negatively impacts my earning potential
and does not necessarily attract vibrant young women
with their perfumed bosoms to dally with me
on the green hillside,
I go out and buy some Grecian Hair Formula.

And after the whole process, which involves
rubber gloves, a tiny chemistry set,
and perfect timing, I look great.
I look very fresh and virile, full of earning potential.
But when I take my fifteen-year-old beagle
out for his evening walk, the contrast is unfortunate.
Next to me he doesn't look all that great,
with his graying snout, his sort of faded,
worn-out-dog look. It makes me feel old,
walking around with a dog like that.

It's not something a potential employer,
much less a vibrant young woman with a perfumed bosom
would necessarily go for. So I go out
and get some more Grecian Hair Formula—
Light Brown, my beagle's original color.
And after all the rigmarole he looks terrific.
I mean, he's not going to win any friskiness contests,
not at fifteen. But there's a definite visual improvement.
The two of us walk virilely around the block.

The next day a striking young woman at the bookstore
happens to ask me about my parents,
who are, in fact, long dead, due to the effects of age.
They were very old, which causes death.
But having dead old parents does not go
with my virile, intensely fresh new look.

So I say to the woman, my parents are fine.
They love their active lifestyle in San Diego.
You know, windsurfing, jai alai, a still-vibrant sex life.
And while this does not necessarily cause her
to come dally with me on the green hillside, I can tell
it doesn't hurt my chances.

I can see her imagining dinner
with my sparkly, young-seeming mom and dad
at some beachside restaurant
where we would announce our engagement.

Your son has great earning potential,
she'd say to dad, who would take
a gander at her perfumed bosom
and give me a wink, like he used to do
back when he was alive, and vibrant.

--George Bilgere

I think Wavewatcher may like this poem. Not exactly Bukowski, although with engaging humor.

The Old Age of Nostalgia

Those hours given over to basking in the glow of an imagined
future, of being carried away in streams of promise by a love or
a passion so strong that one felt altered forever and convinced
that even the smallest particle of the surrounding world was
charged with purpose of impossible grandeur; ah, yes, and
one would look up into the trees and be thrilled by the wind-
loosened river of pale, gold foliage cascading down and by the
high, melodious singing of countless birds; those moments, so
many and so long ago, still come back, but briefly, like fireflies
in the perfumed heat of summer night.

--Mark Strand

Unable to find

                          the right way to get out of bed,
we watch the shades cut down
into thin slices, waver a while,
shoulder to shoulder, then join, lazy.

                          Let's leave this room now: it's given us
all it can, let's go—it's Sunday—have
breakfast out, find a table for two: two eggs,
two toast, two coffees—black. No, nothing

                          plain: latté. We'll read the paper,
the story of a man who rescued the only thing
he wanted from the rubble of his collapsed shack:
his cat—and be moved by it, and like that;

                           or play hangman on our paper napkins,
find easy words—no double-meanings: day,
night, rivers... then send the game to its fate,
crumpled on our empty plates.

                           Let's step inside a church, sit through a wedding,
a christening, a mass for the dead, but leave
before the last amen. We'll take the long way home,
make plans for summer—winter even.


--Laure-Anne Bosselaar

 I find this poem a tribute to the courage each of us has to face our lives with commitment for a journey none understands completely.
 
Crossing the Bar
 

 Sunset and evening star,
And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For though from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face
When I have crost the bar.


Alfred Lord Tennyson

A contemporary reply to your post, Mz.Lily.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone.

When I Uncovered Your Body

When I uncovered your body
I thought shadows fell deceptively,
urging memories of perfect rhyme.
I thought I could bestow beauty
like a benediction and that your half-dark flesh
would answer to the prayer.
I thought I understood your face
because I had seen it painted twice
or a hundred times, or kissed it
when it was carved in stone.

With only a breath, a vague turning,
you uncovered shadows
more deftly than I had flesh,
and the real and violent proportions of your body
made obsolete old treaties of excellence,
measures and poems,
and clamoured with a single challenge of personal beauty,
which cannot be interpreted or praised:
it must be met.

--Leonard Cohen

LET'S NOT DWELL ON THE AFTER LIFE ...LOL ;) SVEN............THE LAST POST WAS GREAT CON--TEMPO.....oops on the caps...

Poets seem to always  give there take on what it will be like to crossover.......?

Mz.Lily, where are you, hope you're reading a lot of poetry!!!!!

In Love with You

O what a physical effect it has on me
To dive forever into the light blue sea
Of your acquaintance! Ah, but dearest friends,
Like forms, are finished, as life has ends! Still,
It is beautiful, when October
Is over, and February is over,
To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet
Ways! As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then
Reply (to no one), "Let's go five or six blocks."
Isn't the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian?
Aren't my eyes bigger than love?
Isn't this history, and aren't we a couple of ruins?
Is Carthage Pompeii? is the pillow the bed? is the sun
What glues our heads together? O midnight! O midnight!
Is love what we are,
Or has happiness come to me in a private car
That's so very small I'm amazed to see it there?

--Kenneth Koch

When the Green Lies Over the Earth

When the green lies over the earth, my dear,
A mantle of witching grace,
When the smile and the tear of the young child year
Dimple across its face,
And then flee, when the wind all day is sweet
With the breath of growing things,
When the wooing bird lights on restless feet
And chirrups and trills and sings
To his lady-love
In the green above,
Then oh! my dear, when the youth's in the year,
Yours is the face that I long to have near,
Yours is the face, my dear.

But the green is hiding your curls, my dear,
Your curls so shining and sweet;
And the gold-hearted daisies this many a year
Have bloomed and bloomed at your feet,
And the little birds just above your head
With their voices hushed, my dear,
For you have sung and have prayed and have pled
This many, many a year.
And the blossoms fall,
On the garden wall,
And drift like snow on the green below.
But the sharp thorn grows
On the budding rose,
And my heart no more leaps at the sunset glow,
For oh! my dear, when the youth's in the year,
Yours is the face that I long to have near,
Yours is the face, my dear.


Written by Angelina W. Grimke

A Cold Rain the Day Before Spring

From heaven it falls on the gray pitted ice
that has been here since December.
In the gutter rivulets erode piles
of dirt and road salt into small countries
and the morning is so dark, in school

teachers turn on fluorescent lights
and everyone comes in smelling of damp wool.
From heaven it falls, just the opposite
of prayer, which I send up
at the traffic light: please

let me begin over again, one
more time over again, wipe the slate
clean, the same way after school
janitors, keys jangling from
belt loops, will use a wet rag and wipe

the school day off, so there is only
the residue, faint white on the smooth
surface. It's the same way
the infield looks before the game
begins, or the ice on a rink

between periods. All new again
for the moment and glistening.
Imagine each day you get to start
again and again. Again. How many
days does the janitor enter the room

of your soul, wipe it clean
go out into the hallway
and push his broom
down the long corridor, full
of doors to so many rooms.

--Stuart Kestenbaum

---

Now I am alone.
Oh, what a rogue and peasant slave am I!
Is it not monstrous that this player here,
But in a fiction, in a dream of passion,
Could force his soul so to his own conceit
That from her working all his visage wanned,
Tears in his eyes, distraction in his aspect,
A broken voice, and his whole function suiting
With forms to his conceit? And all for nothing—
For Hecuba!
What's Hecuba to him or he to Hecuba
That he should weep for her? What would he do
Had he the motive and the cue for passion
That I have? He would drown the stage with tears
And cleave the general ear with horrid speech,
Make mad the guilty and appall the free,
Confound the ignorant, and amaze indeed
The very faculties of eyes and ears.Yet I,
A dull and muddy-mettled rascal, peak
Like John-a-dreams, unpregnant of my cause,
And can say nothing—no, not for a king,
Upon whose property and most dear life
A damned defeat was made. Am I a coward?
Who calls me "villain"? Breaks my pate across?
Plucks off my beard and blows it in my face?
Tweaks me by the nose? Gives me the lie i' th' throat
As deep as to the lungs? Who does me this?
Ha!

Hamlet, Act 2, Scene 2

To Happiness

If you're not approaching, I hope at least
You're off to comfort someone who needs you more,
Not lost wandering aimlessly
Or drawn to the shelter of well-lit rooms
Where people assume you've arrived already.

If you're coming this way, send me the details—
The name of the ship, the port it leaves from—
So I can be down on the dock to help you
Unload your valises, your trunks and boxes
And stow them in the big van I'll have rented.

I'd like this to be no weekend stay
Where a single change of clothes is sufficient.
Bring clothes for all seasons, enough to fill a closet;
And instead of a single book for the bedside table
Bring boxes of all your favorites.

I'll be eager to clear half my shelves to make room,
Eager to read any titles you recommend.
If we've many in common, feel free to suggest
They prove my disposition isn't to blame
For your long absence, just some problems of attitude,

A few bad habits you'll help me set to one side.
We can start at dinner, which you're welcome
To cook for us while I sweep and straighten
And set the table. Then light the candles
You've brought from afar for the occasion.

Light them and fill the room I supposed I knew
With a glow that shows me I was mistaken.
Then help me decide if I'm still the person I was
Or someone else, someone who always believed in you
And imagined no good reasons for your delay.

--Carl Dennis

The good, the bad and the inconvenient

Gardening is often a measured cruelty:
what is to live and what is to be torn
up by its roots and flung on the compost
to rot and give its essence to new soil.

It is not only the weeds I seize.
go down the row of new spinach—
their little bright Vs crowding—
and snatch every other, flinging

their little bodies just as healthy,
just as sound as their neighbors
but judged, by me, superfluous.
We all commit crimes too small

for us to measure, the ant soldiers
we stomp, whose only aim was to
protect, to feed their vast family.
It is I who decide which beetles

are "good" and which are "bad"
as if each is not whole in its kind.
We eat to live and so do they,
the locusts, the grasshoppers,

the flea beetles and aphids and slugs.
By bad I mean inconvenient. Nothing
we do is simple, without consequence
and each act is shadowed with death.

--Marge Piercy

14


Don't let that horse
                                    eat that violin
    cried Chagall's mother
                                             But he
                        kept right on
                                                 painting

And became famous

And kept on painting
                                       The Horse With Violin In Mouth

And when he finally finished it
he jumped up upon the horse
                                                     and rode away
                  waving the violin

And then with a low bow gave it
to the first naked nude he ran across

And there were no strings
                                                 attached

--Lawrence Ferlinghetti

A Brief for the Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.


--Jack Gilbert

from
My God, It's Full of Stars

3.

Perhaps the great error is believing we're alone,

That the others have come and gone—a momentary blip—

When all along, space might be choc-full of traffic,

Bursting at the seams with energy we neither feel

Nor see, flush against us, living, dying, deciding,

Setting solid feet down on planets everywhere,

Bowing to the great stars that command, pitching stones

At whatever are their moons. They live wondering

If they are the only ones, knowing only the wish to know,

And the great black distance they—we—flicker in.


Maybe the dead know, their eyes widening at last,

Seeing the high beams of a million galaxies flick on

At twilight. Hearing the engines flare, the horns

Not letting up, the frenzy of being. I want to be

One notch below bedlam, like a radio without a dial.

Wide open, so everything floods in at once.

And sealed tight, so nothing escapes. Not even time,

Which should curl in on itself and loop around like smoke.

So that I might be sitting now beside my father

As he raises a lit match to the bowl of his pipe

For the first time in the winter of 1959.

--Tracy K.Smith

(for the Higgs boson)