[Sven2]

The Weary Blues
   
   
Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
     I heard a Negro play.
Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
     He did a lazy sway . . .
     He did a lazy sway . . .
To the tune o' those Weary Blues.
With his ebony hands on each ivory key
He made that poor piano moan with melody.
     O Blues!
Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
     Sweet Blues!
Coming from a black man's soul.
     O Blues!
In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
     "Ain't got nobody in all this world,
       Ain't got nobody but ma self.
       I's gwine to quit ma frownin'
       And put ma troubles on the shelf."

Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
He played a few chords then he sang some more—
     "I got the Weary Blues
       And I can't be satisfied.
       Got the Weary Blues
       And can't be satisfied—
       I ain't happy no mo'
       And I wish that I had died."
And far into the night he crooned that tune.
The stars went out and so did the moon.
The singer stopped playing and went to bed
While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
He slept like a rock or a man that's dead.

--Langston Hughes
February 1, 1902-May 22, 1967

[Water Lily]

Love, Langston Hughes, Sven.

The Negro Speaks of Rivers   
by Langston Hughes 
 


I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the
     flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.
I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln
     went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy
     bosom turn all golden in the sunset.

I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

[Water Lily]

Affirmation   
by Donald Hall 


To grow old is to lose everything.
Aging, everybody knows it.
Even when we are young,
we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads
when a grandfather dies.
Then we row for years on the midsummer
pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,
that began without harm, scatters
into debris on the shore,
and a friend from school drops
cold on a rocky strand.
If a new love carries us
past middle age, our wife will die
at her strongest and most beautiful.
New women come and go. All go.
The pretty lover who announces
that she is temporary
is temporary. The bold woman,
middle-aged against our old age,
sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand.
Another friend of decades estranges himself
in words that pollute thirty years.
Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge
and affirm that it is fitting
and delicious to lose everything.

[Water Lily]

Goddess of Maple at Evening   
by Chard deNiord 


She breathed a chill that slowed the sap
inside the phloem, stood perfectly still
inside the dark, then walked to a field
where the distance crooned in a small
blue voice how close it is, how the gravity
of sky pulls you up like steam from the arch.
She sang along until the silence soloed
in a northern wind, then headed back
to the sugar stand and drank from a maple
to thin her blood with the spirit of sap.
To quicken its pace to the speed of sound
then hear it boom inside her heart.
To quicken her mind to the speed of light
with another suck from the flooded tap.

[Water Lily]

Crossings   
by Ravi Shankar 


Between forest and field, a threshold
like stepping from a cathedral into the street—
the quality of air alters, an eclipse lifts,

boundlessness opens, earth itself retextured
into weeds where woods once were.
Even planes of motion shift from vertical

navigation to horizontal quiescence:   
there's a standing invitation to lie back
as sky's unpredictable theater proceeds.

Suspended in this ephemeral moment
after leaving a forest, before entering
a field, the nature of reality is revealed.

[Sven2]

Aerialist


Each night, this adroit young lady
Lies among sheets
Shredded fine as snowflakes
Until dream takes her body
From bed to strict tryouts
In tightrope acrobatics.

Nightly she balances
Cat-clever on perilous wire
In a gigantic hall,
Footing her delicate dances
To whipcrack and roar
Which speak her maestro's will.

Gilded, coming correct
Across that sultry air,
She steps, halts, hung
In dead center of her act
As great weights drop all about her
And commence to swing.

Lessoned thus, the girl
Parries the lunge and menace
Of every pendulum;
By deft duck and twirl
She draws applause; bright harness
Bites keen into each brave limb

Then, this tough stint done, she curtsies
And serenely plummets down
To traverse glass floor
And get safe home; but, turning with trained eyes,
Tiger-tamer and grinning clown
Squat, bowling black balls at her.

Tall trucks roll in
With a thunder like lions; all aims
And lumbering moves

To trap this outrageous nimble queen
And shatter to atoms
Her nine so slippery lives.

Sighting the stratagem
Of black weight, black bail, black truck,
With a last artful dodge she leaps
Through hoop of that hazardous dream
To sit up stark awake
As the loud alarmclock stops.

Now as penalty for her skill,
By day she must walk in dread
Steel gaunticts of traffic, terror-struck
Lest, out of spite, the whole
Elaborate scaffold of sky overhead
Fall racketing finale on her luck.

----------------------------------------------
Blackberrying


Nobody in the lane, and nothing, nothing but blackberries,
Blackberries on either side, though on the right mainly,
A blackberry alley, going down in hooks, and a sea
Somewhere at the end of it, heaving. Blackberries
Big as the ball of my thumb, and dumb as eyes
Ebon in the hedges, fat
With blue-red juices. These they squander on my fingers.
I had not asked for such a blood sisterhood; they must love me.
They accommodate themselves to my milkbottle, flattening their sides.

Overhead go the choughs in black, cacophonous flocks—
Bits of burnt paper wheeling in a blown sky.
Theirs is the only voice, protesting, protesting.
I do not think the sea will appear at all.
The high, green meadows are glowing, as if lit from within.
I come to one bush of berries so ripe it is a bush of flies,
Hanging their bluegreen bellies and their wing panes in a Chinese screen.
The honey-feast of the berries has stunned them; they believe in heaven.
One more hook, and the berries and bushes end.

The only thing to come now is the sea.
From between two hills a sudden wind funnels at me,
Slapping its phantom laundry in my face.
These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
To the hills' northern face, and the face is orange rock
That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
Beating and beating at an intractable metal.


--Sylvia Plath
October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963

[Water Lily]

We Have Been Friends Together


We have been friends together, 
  In sunshine and in shade; 
Since first beneath the chestnut-trees 
  In infancy we played. 
But coldness dwells within thy heart,
  A cloud is on thy brow; 
We have been friends together— 
  Shall a light word part us now? 
 
We have been gay together; 
  We have laugh'd at little jests;
For the fount of hope was gushing 
  Warm and joyous in our breasts. 
But laughter now hath fled thy lip, 
  And sullen glooms thy brow; 
We have been gay together—
  Shall a light word part us now? 
 
We have been sad together, 
  We have wept, with bitter tears, 
O'er the grass-grown graves, where slumber'd 
  The hopes of early years.
The voices which are silent there 
  Would bid thee clear thy brow; 
We have been sad together— 
  Oh! what shall part us now?

Caroline Elizabeth Sarah Norton 

[Sven2]

Winter Garden

Winter arrives. Shining dictation
the wet leaves give me,
dressed in silence and yellow.

I am a book of snow,
a spacious hand, an open meadow,
a circle that waits,
I belong to the earth and its winter.

Earth's rumor grew in the leaves,
soon the wheat flared up
punctuated by red flowers like burns,
then autumn arrived to set down
the wine's scripture:
everything passed, the goblet of summer
was a fleeting sky,
the navigating cloud burned out.

I stood on the balcony dark with mourning,
like yesterday with the ivies of my childhood,
hoping the earth would spread its wings
in my uninhabited love.

I knew the rose would fall
and the pit of the passing peach
would sleep and germinate once more,
and I got drunk on the air
until the whole sea became the night
and the red sky turned to ash.

Now the earth lives
numbing its oldest questions,
the skin of its silence stretched out.
once more I am the silent one
who came out of the distance
wrapped in cold rain and bells:
I owe to earth's pure death
the will to sprout.

--Pablo Neruda
Translation by William O'Daly

[Water Lily]

Winter Morning   
by William Jay Smith 


All night the wind swept over the house
And through our dream
Swirling the snow up through the pines,
Ruffling the white, ice-capped clapboards,
Rattling the windows,
Rustling around and below our bed
So that we rode
Over wild water
In a white ship breasting the waves.
We rode through the night
On green, marbled
Water, and, half-waking, watched
The white, eroded peaks of icebergs
Sail past our windows;
Rode out the night in that north country,
And awoke, the house buried in snow,
Perched on a
Chill promontory, a
Giant's tooth
In the mouth of the cold valley,
Its white tongue looped frozen around us,
The trunks of tall birches
Revealing the rib cage of a whale
Stranded by a still stream;
And saw, through the motionless baleen of their branches,
As if through time,
Light that shone
On a landscape of ivory,
A harbor of bone.

[Water Lily]

The Snow Man   
by Wallace Stevens 


One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughs
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time
To behold the junipers shagged with ice,
The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

[Sven2]

         Of Mere Being


        The palm at the end of the mind,
        Beyond the last thought, rises
        In the bronze distance.


        A gold-feathered bird
        Sings in the palm, without human meaning,
        Without human feeling, a foreign song.


        You know then that it is not the reason
        That makes us happy or unhappy.
        The bird sings. Its feathers shine.


        The palm stands on the edge of space.
        The wind moves slowly in the branches.
        The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.



        -- Wallace Stevens, 1954

[Sven2]

The Manger of Incidentals

We are surrounded by the absurd excess
of the universe.
By meaningless bulk,
vastness without size,
power without consequence.
The stubborn iteration
that is present without being felt.
Nothing the spirit can marry.
Merely phenomenon and its physics.
An endless, endless of going on.
No habitat where the brain can
recognize itself.
No pertinence for the heart.
Helpless duplication.
The horror of none of it being alive.
No red squirrels, no flowers,
not even weed.
Nothing that knows what season it is.
The stars uninflected by awareness.
Miming without implication.
We alone see the iris
in front of the cabin reach its perfection
and quickly perish.
The lamb is born into happiness
and is eaten for Easter.
We are blessed with powerful love
and it goes away. We can mourn.
We live the strangeness of being momentary,
and still we are exalted by being temporary.
The grand Italy of meanwhile.
It is the fact of being brief,
being small and slight
that is the source of our beauty.
We are a singularity that makes music
out of noise
because we must hurry.
We make a harvest of loneliness
and desiring in the blank wasteland
of the cosmos.


--Jack Gilbert

[Sven2]

Glad you found Stevens, Mz.Lily.  I posted one of his poems that's my favorite of all times. It reminds me by loose association of JFC style, sprawling, free-falling, or maybe free-flying out there.

[Water Lily]

 ;)Sven, thanks for the new poetry links you sent to me.

I like the last paragraph.

For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

[Sven2]

You're welcome, Mz. Lily, I'm happy to share poetry's riches. More precious than gold.