Unnamed: 0
int64 0
199
| Title
stringlengths 7
245
| Poem
stringlengths 4
88.7k
| Poet
stringlengths 2
57
| Tags
stringlengths 4
411
⌀ |
|---|---|---|---|---|
178 |
Time of the Missile
|
I remember a square of New York’s Hudson River glinting between warehouses.
Difficult to approach the water below the pier
Swirling, covered with oil the ship at the pier
A steel wall: tons in the water,
Width.
The hand for holding,
Legs for walking,
The eye sees! It floods in on us from here to Jersey tangled in the grey bright air!
Become the realm of nations.
My love, my love,
We are endangered
Totally at last. Look
Anywhere to the sight’s limit: space
Which is viviparous:
Place of the mind
And eye. Which can destroy us,
Re-arrange itself, assert
Its own stone chain reaction.
| George Oppen | Living,Death,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict |
179 |
Populist
|
I dreamed myself of their people, I am of their people,
I thought they watched me that I watched them
that they
watched the sun and the clouds for the cities
are no longer mine image images
of existence (or song
of myself?) and the roads for the light
in the rear-view mirror is not
death but the light
of other lives tho if I stumble on a rock I speak
of rock if I am to say anything anything
if I am to tell of myself splendor
of the roads secrecy
of paths for a word like a glass
sphere encloses
the word opening
and opening
myself and I am sick
for a moment
with fear let the magic
infants speak we who have brought steel
and stone again
and again
into the cities in that word blind
word must speak
and speak the magic
infants’ speech driving
northward the populist
north slowly in the sunrise the lapping
of shallow
waters tongues
of the inlets glisten
like fur in the low tides all that
childhood envied the sounds
of the ocean
over the flatlands poems piers foolhardy
structures and the lives the ingenious
lives the winds
squall from the grazing
ranches’ wandering
fences young workmen’s
loneliness on the structures has touched
and touched the heavy tools tools
in our hands in the clamorous
country birth-
light savage
light of the landscape magic
page the magic
infants speak
| George Oppen | null |
180 |
Reapers
|
Black reapers with the sound of steel on stones
Are sharpening scythes. I see them place the hones
In their hip-pockets as a thing that’s done,
And start their silent swinging, one by one.
Black horses drive a mower through the weeds,
And there, a field rat, startled, squealing bleeds.
His belly close to ground. I see the blade,
Blood-stained, continue cutting weeds and shade.
| Jean Toomer | Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity |
181 |
November Cotton Flower
|
Boll-weevil’s coming, and the winter’s cold,
Made cotton-stalks look rusty, seasons old,
And cotton, scarce as any southern snow,
Was vanishing; the branch, so pinched and slow,
Failed in its function as the autumn rake;
Drouth fighting soil had caused the soil to take
All water from the streams; dead birds were found
In wells a hundred feet below the ground—
Such was the season when the flower bloomed.
Old folks were startled, and it soon assumed
Significance. Superstition saw
Something it had never seen before:
Brown eyes that loved without a trace of fear,
Beauty so sudden for that time of year.
| Jean Toomer | Nature,Fall,Landscapes & Pastorals |
182 |
Insomnia
|
Now you hear what the house has to say.
Pipes clanking, water running in the dark,
the mortgaged walls shifting in discomfort,
and voices mounting in an endless drone
of small complaints like the sounds of a family
that year by year you’ve learned how to ignore.
But now you must listen to the things you own,
all that you’ve worked for these past years,
the murmur of property, of things in disrepair,
the moving parts about to come undone,
and twisting in the sheets remember all
the faces you could not bring yourself to love.
How many voices have escaped you until now,
the venting furnace, the floorboards underfoot,
the steady accusations of the clock
numbering the minutes no one will mark.
The terrible clarity this moment brings,
the useless insight, the unbroken dark.
| Dana Gioia | Relationships,Home Life |
183 |
The Letter
|
And in the end, all that is really left
Is a feeling—strong and unavoidable—
That somehow we deserved something better.
That somewhere along the line things
Got fouled up. And that letter from whoever’s
In charge, which certainly would have set
Everything straight between us and the world,
Never reached us. Got lost somewhere.
Possibly mislaid in some provincial station.
Or sent by mistake to an old address
Whose new tenant put it on her dresser
With the curlers and the hairspray forgetting
To give it to the landlord to forward.
And we still wait like children who have sent
Two weeks’ allowance far away
To answer an enticing advertisement
From a crumbling, yellow magazine,
Watching through years as long as a childhood summer,
Checking the postbox with impatient faith
Even on days when mail is never brought.
| Dana Gioia | null |
184 |
Jewel Box
|
Your jewel box of white balsa strips
and bleached green Czechoslovakian rushes
stands open where you keep it shelved
in the bathroom. Morning and evening
I see you comb its seawrack tangle of shell,
stone, wood, glass, metal, bone, seed
for the bracelet, earring, necklace, brooch
or ring you need. Here's brass from Nepal,
a bangle of African ivory and chased silver
for your wrist, a twist of polished
sandalwood seeds, deep scarlet,
gleaming like the fossil tears
of some long-gone exotic bird
with ruby crest, sapphire claws. Adriatic
blue, this lapis lazuli disc will brighten
the pale of your throat, and on this small
alabaster seal-ring the phantom of light
inscribes a woman tilting an amphora, clear
as day, almost as old as Alexander. To the
ebony velvet brim of your hat you'll pin
a perfect oval of abalone, a dark-whorled
underwater sheen to lead us to work
this foggy February morning. We'll leave
your nest of brightness in the bathroom
between the mirror and the laundry-basket
where my dirty shirts sprawl like
drunks amongst your skirts and blouses. Lace-
work frills and rainbow silk pastels, your panties
foam over the plastic brim, and on the shower-rail
your beige and talc-white bras dangle by one strap
like the skinned Wicklow rabbits I remember
hanging from hooks outside the victuallers'
big windows. We've been domesticated strangely,
love, according to our lights: when you
walk by me now, naked and not quite dry
from the shower, I flatten my two hands
on your wet flank, and wonder at the tall
column of flesh you are, catching the faint
morning light that polishes you pale as
alabaster. You're warm, and stay a moment
still like that, as though we were two planets
pausing in their separate orbits, pendant,
on the point of crossing. For one pulse-stroke
they take stock of their bodies
before returning to the journey. Dressed,
you select a string of chipped amber
to hang round your neck, a pair of star-shaped
earrings, a simple ring of jet-black
lustrous onyx. Going down the stairs and
out to the fogbound street, you light my way.
| Eamon Grennan | Living,Marriage & Companionship,Relationships,Home Life |
185 |
Summer Evening
|
A spear of zinc light wounds stone and water,
stripping the scarlet fuchsia bells and yellow buttercups
of any discretion, so they confess their end in this
luminous declaration that they are no more than
shortlived absolutes in living colour, bright eyes
open against the dark. A light in which everything
is exact-edged, flat, no bulk or heft to it, yet
decisively itself in outline: islands, the matte grey sea,
and miles away the fine glowing line of the horizon
that like desire will be the last to go. The mountain's
immense green and brown triangle reflects on itself
in lakewater, doubling its shape and colour there,
its stillness something drastic, an aspect of dread—as if
a lover tried to remember that loved other body
by looking in the mirror. Almost at random, shadows
fall across the small roads—which can never follow
their own bent, but always take the grain of the hill,
turning to its every tilt and inclination—and evening
starts to seep into hedges and hung washing: it is
the brown colour of a bat's wing, and silent
as a bat is. Even your own family now would have to
be streaked with it, their faces by degrees bleeding away
in the gather-dark, whole patches of them blackening
like zones of a map thrown on smouldering embers.
| Eamon Grennan | Nature,Summer |
186 |
Papyrus
|
Acorn-brown, the girl's new nipples
draw the young men's rooster eyes
where a woman is fitting a man to her mouth,
breathing fire, holding for dear life.
Green almonds in their shells:
she knifes them open one at a time and
hands him a slick teardrop, cool white
tasting cool white. Nothing
compares with such austerities, although
the skull's honeycomb of bone
will break their hearts, who need hearts
like a bird's wishbone, to bend, unbend
at every feathery beat—wishbone hearts,
or something fleet and light as an ostrich's
leg-bone, bearing him to where, panicked
with grief, he can bury his head in sand.Papyrus light: a scarf with black parrots on it
lifts in the breeze, and a real rare bird
is about to fly—his head in the clouds, his life
shrouded in daylight he keeps breaking.
| Eamon Grennan | null |
187 |
The Pond at Dusk
|
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter
overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward-radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke
floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster is disaster: the day comes at last,
and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.
| Jane Kenyon | Living,Death,Nature |
188 |
Sun and Moon
|
For Donald Clark
Drugged and drowsy but not asleep
I heard my blind roommate's daughter
helping her with her meal:
“What's that? Squash?”
“No. It's spinach.”
Back from a brain-scan, she dozed
to the sound of the Soaps: adultery,
amnesia, shady business deals,
and long, white hospital halls....
No separation between life and art.
I heard two nurses whispering:
Mr. Malcomson had died.
An hour later one of them came to say
that a private room was free.
A chill spring breeze
perturbed the plastic drape.
I lay back on the new bed,
and had a vision of souls
stacked up like pelts
under my soul, which was ill—
so heavy with grief
it kept the others from rising.
No varicolored tubes
serpentined beneath the covers;
I had the vital signs of a healthy,
early-middle-aged woman.
There was nothing to cut or dress,
remove or replace.
A week of stupor. Sun and moon
rose and set over the small enclosed
court, the trees....
The doctor’s face appeared
and disappeared
over the foot of the bed. By slow degrees
the outlandish sadness waned.
Restored to my living room
I looked at the tables, chairs, and pictures
with something like delight,
only pale, faint—as from a great height.
I let the phone ring; the mail
accrued unopened
on the table in the hall.
| Jane Kenyon | Living,Health & Illness |
189 |
Portrait of a Figure near Water
|
Rebuked, she turned and ran
uphill to the barn. Anger, the inner
arsonist, held a match to her brain.
She observed her life: against her will
it survived the unwavering flame.
The barn was empty of animals.
Only a swallow tilted
near the beams, and bats
hung from the rafters
the roof sagged between.
Her breath became steady
where, years past, the farmer cooled
the big tin amphoræ of milk.
The stone trough was still
filled with water: she watched it
and received its calm.
So it is when we retreat in anger:
we think we burn alone
and there is no balm.
Then water enters, though it makes
no sound.
| Jane Kenyon | null |
190 |
Private Beach
|
It is always the dispossessed—
someone driving a huge rusted Dodge
that’s burning oil, and must cost
twenty-five dollars to fill.
Today before seven I saw, through
the morning fog, his car leave the road,
turning into the field. It must be
his day off, I thought, or he’s out
of work and drinking, or getting stoned.
Or maybe as much as anything
he wanted to see
where the lane through the hay goes.
It goes to the bluff overlooking
the lake, where we’ve cleared
brush, swept the slippery oak
leaves from the path, and tried to destroy
the poison ivy that runs
over the scrubby, sandy knolls.
Sometimes in the evening I’ll hear
gunshots or firecrackers. Later a car
needing a new muffler backs out
to the road, headlights withdrawing
from the lowest branches of the pines.
Next day I find beer cans, crushed;
sometimes a few fish too small
to bother cleaning and left
on the moss to die; or the leaking
latex trace of outdoor love....
Once I found the canvas sling chairs
broken up and burned.
Whoever laid the fire gathered stones
to contain it, like a boy pursuing
a merit badge, who has a dream of work,
and proper reward for work.
| Jane Kenyon | Nature |
191 |
Let Evening Come
|
Let the light of late afternoon
shine through chinks in the barn, moving
up the bales as the sun moves down.
Let the cricket take up chafing
as a woman takes up her needles
and her yarn. Let evening come.
Let dew collect on the hoe abandoned
in long grass. Let the stars appear
and the moon disclose her silver horn.
Let the fox go back to its sandy den.
Let the wind die down. Let the shed
go black inside. Let evening come.
To the bottle in the ditch, to the scoop
in the oats, to air in the lung
let evening come.
Let it come, as it will, and don’t
be afraid. God does not leave us
comfortless, so let evening come.
| Jane Kenyon | Living,Time & Brevity,Religion |
192 |
Not Here
|
Searching for pillowcases trimmed
with lace that my mother-in-law
once made, I open the chest of drawers
upstairs to find that mice
have chewed the blue and white linen
dishtowels to make their nest,
and bedded themselves
among embroidered dresser scarves
and fingertip towels.
Tufts of fibers, droppings like black
caraway seeds, and the stains of birth
and afterbirth give off the strong
unforgettable attar of mouse
that permeates an old farmhouse
on humid summer days.
A couple of hickory nuts
roll around as I lift out
the linens, while a hail of black
sunflower shells
falls on the pillowcases,
yellow with age, but intact.
I’ll bleach them and hang them in the sun
to dry. There’s almost no one left
who knows how to crochet lace....
The bright-eyed squatters are not here.
They’ve scuttled out to the fields
for summer, as they scuttled in
for winter—along the wall, from chair
to skirted chair, making themselves
flat and scarce while the cat
dozed with her paws in the air,
and we read the mail
or evening paper, unaware.
| Jane Kenyon | Relationships,Home Life,Nature,Animals,Mother's Day |
193 |
Still I Rise
|
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.
Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?
Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.
You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.
Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?
Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.
| Maya Angelou | Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity,Kwanzaa |
194 |
Those Winter Sundays
|
Highlight Actions
Enable or disable annotations
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.breaking. / When In A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), the line between these two lines reads: "and smell the iron and velvet bloom of heat." While this line was deleted, the version in A Ballad of Remembrance is still a sonnet. There are other variants between both versions; mostly relating to where the line breaks. When breaking. / When In A Ballad of Remembrance (1962), the line between these two lines reads:"and smell the iron and velvet bloom of heat." While this line was deleted, the version in A Ballad of Remembrance is still a sonnet. There are other variants between both versions; mostly relating to where the line breaks. the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,who had who had In A Ballad of Remembrance: who’d driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austereaustere Grave, sober; and lacking adornment and lonely offices?
| Robert Hayden | Living,Coming of Age,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life,Philosophy,Gratitude & Apologies,Father's Day |
195 |
Not Waving but Drowning
|
Highlight Actions
Enable or disable annotations
Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.
Poor chap, he always loved larkinglarking Playing tricks, kidding, fooling around.
And now he’s dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.
Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.
| Stevie Smith | Living,Death,Disappointment & Failure,Social Commentaries |
196 |
The Truth about Small Towns
|
1. THE TRUTH ABOUT SMALL TOWNS
It never stops raining. The water tower’s tarnished
as cutlery left damp in the widower’s hutch.
If you walk slow (but don’t stop), you’re not from nearby.
All you can eat for a buck at the diner is
cream gravy on sourdough, blood sausage, and coffee.
Never lie. The preacher before this one dropped bombs
in the war and walked with a limp at parade time.
Until it burned, the old depot was a disco.
A café. A card shoppe. A parts place for combines.
Randy + Rhonda shows up each spring on the bridge.
If you walk fast you did it. Nothing’s more lonesome
than money. (Who says shoppe?) It never rains.
2. GRAVEYARD
Heat in the short field and dust scuffed up, glare
off the guard-tower glass where the three pickets
lean on their guns. The score is one to one.
Everybody’s nervous but the inmates,
who joke around—they jostle, they hassle
the team of boys in trouble and their dads.
It’s all in sport. The warden is the ump.
The flat bleachers are dotted with guards; no
one can recall the last time they got one
over the wall. The cons play hard, then lose.
And the warden springs for drinks all around—
something he calls graveyard, which is five kinds
of soda pop poured over ice into
each one’s cup, until the cup overflows.
3. COUNCIL MEETING
The latest uproar: to allow Wendy’s
to build another fast-food burger shack
on two acres of wetlands near Raccoon Creek,
or to permit the conservationist
well-to-do citizenry to keep their green
space and thus assure long, unsullied views
from their redwood decks, picture windows,
and backyards chemically rich as golf greens.
The paper’s rife with spats, accusations,
pieties both ways. Wendy’s promises
flowers, jobs. The citizens want this, too,
but want it five miles away where people
don’t care about egrets, willows, good views.
Oh, it’s going to be a long night: call
out for pizza, somebody brew some tea.
Then we’ll all stand up for what we believe.
4. CHARMING
The remnant industry of a dying town’s itself.
Faux charm, flaked paint, innuendo in a nasal twang.
Now the hardware store’s got how-to kits to make
mushrooms out of plywood for the yard,
and the corner grocery’s specialty this week
is mango chutney, good with rabbit, duck, or spread
for breakfast on a whole-wheat bagel fresh
each morning at the small patisserie across
the way from the red hotel. Which reminds me.
Legend has it that the five chipped divots
in the hotel wall—local lime and mortar—
are what remains of the town’s last bad man.
His fiery death’s renowned, but don’t look now
Someone with a camera’s drawing down on you.
| David Baker | Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,Class,Crime & Punishment,Money & Economics |
197 |
Romanticism
|
It is to Emerson I have turned now,
damp February, for he has written
of the moral harmony of nature.
The key to every man is his thought.
But Emerson, half angel, suffers his
dear Ellen’s dying only half-consoled
that her lungs shall no more be torn nor her
head scalded by her blood, nor her whole life
suffer from the warfare between the force
& delicacy of her soul & the
weakness of her frame . . . March the 29th,
1832, of an evening strange
with dreaming, he scribbles, I visited
Ellen’s tomb & opened the coffin.
—Emerson looking in, clutching his key.
Months of hard freeze have ruptured the wild
fields of Ohio, and burdock is standing
as if stunned by persistent cold wind
or leaning over, as from rough breath.
I have brought my little one, bundled and
gloved, to the lonely place to let her run,
hoary whiskers, wild fescue, cracks widened
along the ground hard from a winter drought.
I have come out for the first time in weeks
still full of fever, insomnia-fogged,
to track her flags of breath where she’s dying
to vanish on the hillsides of bramble
and burr. The seasonal birds—scruff cardinal,
one or two sparrows, something with yellow—
scatter in small explosions of ice.
Emerson, gentle mourner, would be pleased
by the physical crunch of the ground, damp
from the melt, shaped by the shape of his boot,
that half of him who loved the Dunscore heath
too rocky to cultivate, covered thick
with heather, gnarled hawthorn, the yellow furze
not far from Carlyle’s homestead where they strolled,
—that half of him for whom nature was thought.
Kate has found things to deepen her horror
for evenings to come, a deer carcass tunneled
by slugs, drilled, and abandoned, a bundle
of bone shards, hoof and hide, hidden by thick
bramble, or the bramble itself enough
to collapse her dreams, braided like rope, blood-
colored, blood-barbed, tangled as Medusa.
What does she see when she looks at such things?
I do not know what is so wrong with me
that my body has erupted, system
by system, sick unto itself. I do
not know what I have done, nor what she thinks
when she turns toward her ill father. How did
Emerson behold of his Ellen, un-
embalmed face fallen in, of her white hands?
Dreams & beasts are two keys by which we are
to find out the secrets of our own natures.
Half angel, Emerson wrestles all night
with his journal, the awful natural
fact of Ellen’s death, which must have been
deeper sacrifice than a sacrament.
Where has she gone now, whose laughter comes down
like light snow on the beautiful hills?
Perhaps it is the world that is the matter . . .
—His other half worried by the wording.
| David Baker | Living,Death,Marriage & Companionship,Sorrow & Grieving,Nature,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Reading & Books,Mythology & Folklore,Horror |
198 |
Musical Moment
|
Always the caravan of sound made us halt
to admire the swinging and the swift go-by
of beasts with enormous hooves and heads
beating the earth or reared against the sky.
Do not reread, I mean glance ahead to see
what has become of the colossal forms:
everything happened at the instant of passing:
the hoof-beat, the whinny, the bells on the harness,
the creak of the wheels, the monkey’s fandango
in double time over the elephant’s back.
When the marching was over and we were free to go on
there was never before us a dungfall or a track
on the road-sands of any kind:
only the motion of footprints being made
crossing and recrossing in the trampled mind.
| Virginia Hamilton Adair | null |
0 |
There Is No Age
|
There is no age, this darkness and decay
Is by a radiant spirit cast aside,
Young with the ageless youth that yesterday
Bent to the yoke of flesh immortal pride.
What though in time of thunder and black cloud
The Spirit of the Innermost recedes
Into the depths of Being, stormy browed,
Obscured by a long life of dreams and deeds—
There is no age—the swiftly passing hour
That measures out our days of pilgrimage
And breaks the heart of every summer flower,
Shall find again the child’s soul in the sage.
There is no age, for youth is the divine;
And the white radiance of the timeless soul
Burns like a silver lamp in that dark shrine
That is the tired pilgrim’s ultimate goal.
| Eva Gore-Booth | Time & Brevity |
1 |
The Weaver
|
I was the child that passed long hours away
Chopping red beetroot in the hay-piled barn;
Now must I spend the wind-blown April day
Minding great looms and tying knots in yarn.
Once long ago I tramped through rain and slush
In brown waves breaking up the stubborn soil,
I wove and wove the twilight’s purple hush
To fold about the furrowed heart of toil.
Strange fires and frosts burnt out the seasons’ dross,
I watched slow Powers the woven cloth reveal,
While God stood counting out His gain and loss,
And Day and Night pushed on the heavy wheel.
Held close against the breast of living Powers
A little pulse, yet near the heart of strife,
I followed the slow plough for hours and hours
Minding through sun and shower the loom of life.
The big winds, harsh and clear and strong and salt,
Blew through my soul and all the world rang true,
In all things born I knew no stain or fault,
My heart was soft to every flower that grew.
The cabbages in my small garden patch
Were rooted in the earth’s heart; wings unseen
Throbbed in the silence under the dark thatch,
And brave birds sang long ere the boughs were green.
| Eva Gore-Booth | null |
2 |
The Little Waves of Breffny
|
The grand road from the mountain goes shining to the sea,
And there is traffic in it and many a horse and cart,
But the little roads of Cloonagh are dearer far to me,
And the little roads of Cloonagh go rambling through my heart.
A great storm from the ocean goes shouting o’er the hill,
And there is glory in it and terror on the wind,
But the haunted air of twilight is very strange and still,
And the little winds of twilight are dearer to my mind.
The great waves of the Atlantic sweep storming on their way,
Shining green and silver with the hidden herring shoal,
But the Little Waves of Breffny have drenched my heart in spray,
And the Little Waves of Breffny go stumbling through my soul.
| Eva Gore-Booth | Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,St. Patrick's Day |
3 |
The Incarnate
|
Deep in the soul there throbs the secret pain
Of one homesick for dear familiar things,
When Spring winds rock the waves of sunlit rain
And on the grass there falls the shadow of wings.
How should one bend one’s dreams to the dark clay
Where carven beauty mixed with madness dwells?
And men who fear to die fear not to slay,
And Life has built herself ten thousand hells.
No wave that breaks in music on the shore
Can purify the tiger’s bloodstained den,
The worms that crawl about the dark world’s core
Cry out aloud against the deeds of men.
Alas, the peace of these still hours and deep
Is but a dream that wanders from afar,
And the great Dreamer, turning in His sleep,
Smothers in darkness all our little star.
Yet in the gentle spirit of the wise
Light flashes out through many a simple thing,
The tired ploughman, with impassive eyes,
Knows in his heart that he was once a king.
He sees in dreams the crown long lost and dear,
That glittered on a fallen spirit’s brow,
A shattered gleam from some far shining sphere
Has dazed the eyes of him who drives the plough.
The long brown furrows of the broken soil
Lead in straight lines unto the sunset's gates;
On high green hills, beyond the reach of toil,
The vision of the twilight broods and waits.
The silence folded in about the heart
Whispers strange longings to the broken soul,
That lingers in a lonely place apart,
Stretching vain hands to clasp the secret whole.
| Eva Gore-Booth | Christianity |
4 |
Re-Incarnation
|
The darkness draws me, kindly angels weep
Forlorn beyond receding rings of light,
The torrents of the earth’s desires sweep
My soul through twilight downward into night.
Once more the light grows dim, the vision fades,
Myself seems to myself a distant goal,
I grope among the bodies’ drowsy shades,
Once more the Old Illusion rocks my soul.
Once more the Manifold in shadowy streams
Of falling waters murmurs in my ears,
The One Voice drowns amid the roar of dreams
That crowd the narrow pathway of the years.
I go to seek the starshine on the,waves,
To count the dewdrops on the grassy hill,
I go to gather flowers that grow on graves,
The world’s wall closes round my prisoned will.
Yea, for the sake of the wild western wind
The sphered spirit scorns her flame-built throne,
Because of primroses, time out of mind,
The Lonely turns away from the Alone.
Who once has loved the cornfield’s rustling sheaves,
Who once has heard the gentle Irish rain
Murmur low music in the growing leaves,
Though he were god, comes back to earth again.
Oh Earth! green wind-swept Eirinn, I would break
The tower of my soul’s initiate pride
For a gray field and a star-haunted lake,
And those wet winds that roam the country side.
I who have seen am glad to close my eyes,
I who have soared am weary of my wings,
I seek no more the secret of the wise,
Safe among shadowy, unreal human things.
Blind to the gleam of those wild violet rays
That burn beyond the rainbow's circle dim,
Bound by dark nights and driven by pale days,
The sightless slave of Time’s imperious whim;
Deaf to the flowing tide of dreams divine
That surge outside the closed gates of birth,
The rhythms of eternity, too fine
To touch with music the dull ears of earth—
I go to seek with humble care and toil
The dreams I left undreamed, the deeds undone,
To sow the seed and break the stubborn soil,
Knowing no brightness whiter than the sun.
Content in winter if the fire burns clear
And cottage walls keep out the creeping damp,
Hugging the Old Illusion warm and dear,
The Silence and the Wise Book and the Lamp.
| Eva Gore-Booth | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,Christianity |
5 |
The Vagrant’s Romance
|
(A Reincarnation Phantasy)
This was the story never told
By one who cared not for the world’s gold.
One of the idle and wise,
A beggar with unfathomable eyes.
One who had nothing but dreams to give
To men who are eager to labour and live.
For the world in its wisdom deep and dim
Had taken all pleasure and treasure from him.
This was the story his soul could tell,
Immortal and unfathomable.
There was no record in his brain,
He did not know he should live again.
But there was one who read the whole,
Buried deep in a dead man’s soul.
“In the days of Atlantis, under the wave,
I was a slave, the child of a slave.
When the towers of Atlantis fell,
I died and was born again in hell.
From that sorrowful prison I did escape
And hid myself in a hero’s shape.
But few years had I of love or joy,
A Trojan I fell at the Siege of Troy.
I came again in a little while,
An Israelite slave on the banks of the Nile.
Then did I comfort my grief-laden heart.
With the magic lore and Egyptian art.
Fain was I to become Osiris then,
But soon I came back to the world of men.
By the Ganges I was an outcast born,
A wanderer and a child of scorn.
By the Waters of Babylon I wept,
My harp amongst the willows slept.
In the land of Greece I opened my eyes,
To reap the fields of Plotinus the Wise.
When the great light shattered the world’s closed bars,
I was a shepherd who gazed at the stars.
For lives that were lonely, obscure, apart,
I thank the Hidden One, in my heart,
That always and always under the sun
I went forth to battle and never won.
A slayer of men, I was doomed to abide,
For ever and aye, on the losing side.
Whenever. I dream of the wonderful goal,
I thank the hidden God in my soul
That though I have always been meanly born,
A tiller of earth and a reaper of corn,
Whenever through ages past and gone
The light divine for a moment shone,
Whenever piercing laborious night
A ray fell straight from the Light of Light,
Whenever amid fierce, lightning and storm
The divine moved in a human form,
Whenever the earth in her cyclic course
Shook at the touch of an unknown force,
Whenever the cloud of dull years grew thin
And a great star called to the light within,
I have braved storm and labour and sun
To stand at the side that Holy One.
No matter how humble my birth has been,
There are few who have seen what I have seen.
Mine the shepherd’s star and the reaper’s reward,
And the dream of him who fell by the sword.
One thing I have learned the long years through,
To know the false words from the true.
The slave who toiled on the banks of the Nile
With wisdom gladdened his long exile.
From Buddha at eve by the Ganges’ side
An outcast learnt the worth of the world’s pride.
To the tired reaper, when day was done,
Did Plotinus unveil the hidden sun.
Amongst the stars, on a Syrian night,
A ragged shepherd found the Light of Light.
From dream to dream, o’er valley and hill,
I followed the Lord Christ's wandering will.
Kings there are who would barter a throne
For the long day’s toil and the light unknown,
The deed of the strong and the word of the wise,
And the night under cold and starry skies—
The white light of dawn on the hillside shed
On Him who had nowhere to lay His head.
Behold there are kings who would change with me,
For the love of the ancient mystery.
Shepherd and reaper and slave I have been,
There are few who have seen what I have seen.
I have been a gipsy since those days,
And lived again in the wild wood ways.
Wise with the lore of those hidden things,
Learnt from Lord Christ in His wanderings,
Beggar and reaper and shepherd and slave,
I am one who rests not in any grave;
I will follow each stormy light divine,
And the secret of all things shall be mine.
These things have I seen, would you bid me mourn
That I was never an Emperor born?”
| Eva Gore-Booth | Travels & Journeys,Religion,Christianity,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends |
6 |
Secret Waters
|
Lo, in my soul there lies a hidden lake,
High in the mountains, fed by rain and snow,
The sudden thundering avalanche divine,
And the bright waters’ everlasting flow,
Far from the highways’ dusty glare and heat.
Dearer it is and holier, for Christ’s sake,
Than his own windy lake in Palestine,
For there the little boats put out to sea
Without him, and no fisher hears his call,
Yea, on the desolate shores of Galilee
No man again shall see his shadow fall.
Yet here the very voice of the one Light
Haunts with sharp ecstasy each little wind
That stirs still waters on a moonlit night,
And sings through high trees growing in the mind,
And makes a gentle rustling in the wheat. . . .
Yea, in the white dawn on this happy shore,
With the lake water washing at his feet,
He stands alive and radiant evermore,
Whose presence makes the very East wind kind,
And turns to heaven the soul’s green-lit retreat.
| Eva Gore-Booth | Faith & Doubt |
7 |
The New Colossus
|
Not like the brazen giant of Greek fame,
With conquering limbs astride from land to land;
Here at our sea-washed, sunset gates shall stand
A mighty woman with a torch, whose flame
Is the imprisoned lightning, and her name
Mother of Exiles. From her beacon-hand
Glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command
The air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
| Emma Lazarus | Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Heroes & Patriotism |
8 |
Vasectomy
|
After the steaming bodies swept
through the hungry streets of swollen cities;
after the vast pink spawning of family
poisoned the rivers and ravaged the prairies;
after the gamble of latex and
diaphragms and pills;
I invoked the white robes, gleaming blades
ready for blood, and, feeling the scourge
of Increase and Multiply, made
affirmation: Yes, deliver us from
complicity.
And after the precision of scalpels,
I woke to a landscape of sunshine where
the catbird mates for life and
maps trace out no alibis—stepped
into a morning of naked truth,
where acts mean what they really are:
the purity of loving
for the sake of love.
| Philip Appleman | Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships |
9 |
Xenophobia
|
1
“must represent the governess
for, of course, the creature itself
could not inspire such terror.”
staring at me fixedly, no
trace of recognition.
“when the window opened of its own accord.
In the big walnut tree
were six or seven wolves ...
strained attention. They were white.”
(The fear of cloudy skies.)
like strangers! After five years
Misgiving. Misdoubt.2
(The fear that one is dreaming.)
The moon was shining, suddenly
everything around me appeared
(The fear of)
unfamiliar.
Wild vista
inside or near the home.
(Dread of bearing a monster.)
If I failed to overlook the torn cushions,
three teapots side by side,
strewn towels, socks, papers—
both foreign and stale. 3
when I saw the frame was rotten,
crumbling away from the glass,
in spots, in other places still attached
with huge globs of putty.
The doctor forced me to repeat the word.
Chimera. Cold feet.
scared and unreal looking at buildings.
The thin Victorians with scaly paint,
their flimsy backporches linked
by skeletal stairways.4
After five years
(The fear that you are not at home.)
I was sitting in the alcove where I never sit
when I noticed a single eye,
crudely drawn in pencil,
in a corner near the floor.
The paint was blistering—
beneath it I saw white.5
Sparrows settle on the sagging wires.
(Fear of sights not turned to words.)
Horrific. Grisly.
“Rumplestiltskin!”
Not my expression.
Not my net of veins
beneath thin skin.
(A morbid dread of throbbing.)
Of its own accord
| Rae Armantrout | Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics |
10 |
Language of Love
|
There were distinctive
dips and shivers
in the various foliage,
syncopated,
almost cadenced in the way
that once made him invent
“understanding.”
*
Now the boss could say
“parameters”
and mean something
like “I’ll pinch.”
By repeating the gesture exactly
the woman awakened
an excited suspicion
in the infant.
When he awakened
she was just returning from
one of her little trips.
It’s common to confuse
the distance
with flirtation:
that expectant solemnity
which seems to invite a kiss.
*
He stroked her carapace
with his claw.
They had developed a code
in which each word appeared to refer
to some abdicated function.
Thus, in a department store,
Petite Impressions might neighbor
Town Square.
But he exaggerated it
by mincing
words like “micturition,”
setting scenes
in which the dainty lover
would pretend to leave.
*
Was it sadness or fear?
He still wasn’t back.
The act of identification,
she recognized,
was always a pleasure,
but this lasting difference
between sense and recognition
made her unhappy
or afraid.
Once she was rewarded
by the beams
of headlights flitting
in play.
| Rae Armantrout | Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships |
11 |
Veil
|
The doll told me
to exist.
It said, “Hypnotize yourself.”
It said time would be
transfixed.
*
Now the optimist
sees an oak
shiver
and a girl whiz by
on a bicycle
with a sense of pleasurable
suspense.
She budgets herself
with leafy
prestidigitation.
I too
am a segmentalist.
*
But I’ve dropped
more than an armful
of groceries or books
downstairs
into a train station.
An acquaintance says
she colors her hair
so people will help her
when this happens.
To refute her argument,
I must wake up
and remember my hair’s
already dyed.
*
As a mentalist,
I must suffer
lapses
then repeat myself
in a blind trial.
I must write
punchlines only I
can hear
and only after
I’ve passed on
| Rae Armantrout | Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics |
12 |
Sounds of the Resurrected Dead Man’s Footsteps #17
|
1. At the Walking Dunes, Eastern Long Island
That a bent piece of straw made a circle in the sand.
That it represents the true direction of the wind.
Beach grass, tousled phragmite.
Bone-white dishes, scoops and bowls, glaring without seeing.
An accordion of creases on the downhill, sand drapery.
The cranberry bushes biting down to survive.
And the wind’s needlework athwart the eyeless Atlantic.
And the earless roaring in the shape of a sphere.
A baritone wind, tuned to the breath of the clouds.
Pushing sand that made a hilly prison of time.
For wind and water both move inland.
Abrading scrub — the stunted, the dwarfed, the bantam.
A fine sandpaper, an eraser as wide as the horizon.
Itself made of galaxies, billions against the grain.
Sand: the mortal infinitude of a single rock.
2. Walking in the Drowning Forest
Pitch pine, thirty-five-foot oaks to their necks in sand.
That the ocean signals the lighthouse.
Gull feathers call to the fox that left them behind.
Impressions of deer feet, dog feet and gull claws.
The piping plover in seclusion.
Somewhere the blind owl to be healed at sunset.
Here is artistry beyond self-flattery.
A rootworks wiser than the ball of yarn we call the brain.
A mindless, eyeless, earless skin-sense.
To which the crab comes sideways.
With which the sunken ship shares its secrets.
From which no harness can protect one, nor anchor fix one.
He knows, who has paddled an hour with one oar.
He knows, who has worn the whitecaps.
Who has slipped from the ferry or leaped from the bridge.
To be spoken of, though no one knows.
| Marvin Bell | Living,Death,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams |
13 |
The Israeli Navy
|
The Israeli Navy,
sailing to the end of the world,
stocked with grain
and books black with God’s verse,
turned back,
rather than sail on the Sabbath.
Six days, was the consensus,
was enough for anyone.
So the world, it was concluded,
was three days wide
in each direction,
allowing three days back.
And Saturdays were given over
to keeping close,
while Sundays the Navy,
all decked out in white
and many-colored skullcaps,
would sail furiously,
trying to go off the deep end.
Yo-ho-ho, would say the sailors,
for six days.
While on the shore their women moaned.
For years, their boats were slow,
and all show.
And they turned into families
on the only land they knew.
| Marvin Bell | Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Religion,Judaism,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict |
14 |
Song of Social Despair
|
Ethics without faith, excuse me,
is the butter and not the bread.
You can’t nourish them all, the dead
pile up at the hospital doors.
And even they are not so numerous
as the mothers come in maternity.
The Provider knows his faults—
love of architecture and repair—
but will not fall into them for long:
he can’t afford the adolescent luxury,
the fellowship of the future
looks greedily toward his family.
The black keys fit black cylinders
in the locks in holes in the night.
He had a skeleton key once,
a rubber arm and complete confidence.
Now, as head of the family, he is
inevitably on the wrong side looking out.
| Marvin Bell | Living,Death,Religion,Faith & Doubt,God & the Divine |
15 |
An Introduction to My Anthology
|
Such a book must contain—
it always does!—a disclaimer.
I make no such. For here
I have collected all the best—
the lily from the field among them,
forget-me-nots and mint weed,
a rose for whoever expected it,
and a buttercup for the children
to make their noses yellow.
Here is clover for the lucky
to roll in, and milkweed to clatter,
a daisy for one judgment,
and a violet for when he loves you
or if he loves you not and why not.
Those who sniff and say no,
These are the wrong ones (and
there always are such people!)—
let them go elsewhere, and quickly!
For you and I, who have made it this far,
are made happy by occasions
requiring orchids, or queenly arrangements
and even a bird-of-paradise,
but happier still by the flowers of
circumstance, cattails of our youth,
field grass and bulrush. I have included
the devil’s paintbrush
but only as a peacock among barn fowl.
| Marvin Bell | Nature,Trees & Flowers,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Reading & Books |
16 |
We Had Seen a Pig
|
1
One man held the huge pig down
and the other stuck an ice pick
into the jugular, which is when
we started to pay attention.
The blood rose ten feet with force
while the sow swam on its back
as if to cut its own neck.
Its fatty back smacked the slippery
cement while the assassins shuffled
to keep their balance, and the bloody
fountain rose and fell back and rose
less and less high, until
the red plume reentered the pig
at the neck, and the belly collapsed
and the pig face went dull.2
I knew the pig
was the butcher’s, whose game
lived mainly behind our garage.
Sometimes turkeys, always
roosters and sheep. Once the windmill
turned two days without stopping.
The butcher would walk in his apron
straight for the victim. The others
would scratch and babble
and get in the way.
Then the butcher would lead the animal
to the back door of his shop,
stopping to kill it on a stump.
It was always evening, after closing.
The sea breeze would be rising,
cloaking the hour in brine.3
The pig we saw slaughtered
was more than twice anything
shut up in the patch
we trespassed to make havoc.
Since the butcher was Italian,
not Jewish, that would be his pig.
Like the barber who carried
a cigar box of bets
to the stationery store, like
the Greek who made sweets
and hid Greek illegals,
immigrant “submarines,”
the butcher had a business, his
business, by which he took
from our hands the cleaver and serrated
knife for the guts,
and gave us back in butcher paper
and outer layers of brown wrapping
our lives for their cries.4
Hung up to drain, the great pig,
hacked into portions,
looked like a puzzle
we could put together in the freezer
to make a picture of
a pig of course, a map, clothes or other things
when we looked.
| Marvin Bell | Relationships,Pets |
17 |
A Motor
|
The heavy, wet, guttural
small-plane engine
fights for air, and goes down in humid darkness
about where the airport should be.
I take a lot for granted,
not pleased to be living under the phlegm-
soaked, gaseous, foggy and irradiated
heavens whose angels wear collars in propjets
and live elsewhere in Clean Zones,
but figuring the air is full of sorrows.
I don’t blame
the quick use of the entire earth
on the boozy
pilot
come down to get a dose of cobalt
for his cancer. He’s got
a little life left, if
he doesn’t have to take all day to reach it.
With the black patches
inside him, and
the scars and the streaks and the sick stomach,
his life is more and more like
that of the lowliest child chimney sweep
in the mind of the great insensible,
William Blake. William Blake,
the repeated one, Blake, half mad,
half remembered,
who knew his anatomy, down to
the little-observed muscle in the shoulder
that lifts the wing.
The little London chimney sweeper
reaches up and reaches down.
In his back,
every vertebra is separated from the long
hours of stretching.
With one deep, tired breath,
the lungs go black.
By the Holiday Company crane,
adding a level to the hospital,
on the highest land in the county,
heavy sits the pure-white Air Care
helicopter, with
its bulging eye.
It has kept many going, a good buy,
something.
Now someone I know says Blake
in anger,
angry for his brother in the factory
and his sister on the ward,
but tonight I have no more anger
than the muscle
that lifts my knee when I walk.
Another pleads with the ocean
that the words for
suffering and trouble
take place in a sound that will be all sounds
and in the tidal roll
of all our lives and every event,
but I am silent by water,
and am less to such power
than a failed lung.
And I think it is only a clever trick to know
that one thing may be contained
in another. Hence,
Blake in the sweep, one in the ground
in one in the air,
myself in the clinic for runaway cells,
now and later.
| Marvin Bell | Activities,Jobs & Working,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life |
18 |
A Man May Change
|
As simply as a self-effacing bar of soap
escaping by indiscernible degrees in the wash water
is how a man may change
and still hour by hour continue in his job.
There in the mirror he appears to be on fire
but here at the office he is dust.
So long as there remains a little moisture in the stains,
he stands easily on the pavement
and moves fluidly through the corridors. If only one
cloud can be seen, it is enough to know of others,
and life stands on the brink. It rains
or it doesn’t, or it rains and it rains again.
But let it go on raining for forty days and nights
or let the sun bake the ground for as long,
and it isn’t life, just life, anymore, it’s living.
In the meantime, in the regular weather of ordinary days,
it sometimes happens that a man has changed
so slowly that he slips away
before anyone notices
and lives and dies before anyone can find out.
| Marvin Bell | null |
19 |
The Uniform
|
Of the sleeves, I remember their weight, like wet wool,
on my arms, and the empty ends which hung past my hands.
Of the body of the shirt, I remember the large buttons
and larger buttonholes, which made a rack of wheels
down my chest and could not be quickly unbuttoned.
Of the collar, I remember its thickness without starch,
by which it lay against my clavicle without moving.
Of my trousers, the same—heavy, bulky, slow to give
for a leg, a crowded feeling, a molasses to walk in.
Of my boots, I remember the brittle soles, of a material
that had not been made love to by any natural substance,
and the laces: ropes to make prisoners of my feet.
Of the helmet, I remember the webbed, inner liner,
a brittle plastic underwear on which wobbled
the crushing steel pot then strapped at the chin.
Of the mortar, I remember the mortar plate,
heavy enough to kill by weight, which I carried by rope.
Of the machine gun, I remember the way it fit
behind my head and across my shoulder blades
as I carried it, or, to be precise, as it rode me.
Of tactics, I remember the likelihood of shooting
the wrong man, the weight of the rifle bolt, the difficulty
of loading while prone, the shock of noise.
For earplugs, some used cigarette filters or toilet paper.
I don’t hear well now, for a man of my age,
and the doctor says my ears were damaged and asks
if I was in the Army, and of course I was but then
a wounded eardrum wasn’t much in the scheme.
| Marvin Bell | Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict |
20 |
[“Speciously individual ...”]
|
Speciously individual
like a solid piece of spit
floating in a cuspidor
I dream of free bravery
but am a social being.
I should do something
to get out of here
but float around in the culture
wondering what it will grow.
| Alan Dugan | Social Commentaries |
21 |
The Spell of the Yukon
|
I wanted the gold, and I sought it;
I scrabbled and mucked like a slave.
Was it famine or scurvy—I fought it;
I hurled my youth into a grave.
I wanted the gold, and I got it—
Came out with a fortune last fall,—
Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it,
And somehow the gold isn’t all.
No! There’s the land. (Have you seen it?)
It’s the cussedest land that I know,
From the big, dizzy mountains that screen it
To the deep, deathlike valleys below.
Some say God was tired when He made it;
Some say it’s a fine land to shun;
Maybe; but there’s some as would trade it
For no land on earth—and I’m one.
You come to get rich (damned good reason);
You feel like an exile at first;
You hate it like hell for a season,
And then you are worse than the worst.
It grips you like some kinds of sinning;
It twists you from foe to a friend;
It seems it’s been since the beginning;
It seems it will be to the end.
I’ve stood in some mighty-mouthed hollow
That’s plumb-full of hush to the brim;
I’ve watched the big, husky sun wallow
In crimson and gold, and grow dim,
Till the moon set the pearly peaks gleaming,
And the stars tumbled out, neck and crop;
And I’ve thought that I surely was dreaming,
With the peace o’ the world piled on top.
The summer—no sweeter was ever;
The sunshiny woods all athrill;
The grayling aleap in the river,
The bighorn asleep on the hill.
The strong life that never knows harness;
The wilds where the caribou call;
The freshness, the freedom, the farness—
O God! how I’m stuck on it all.
The winter! the brightness that blinds you,
The white land locked tight as a drum,
The cold fear that follows and finds you,
The silence that bludgeons you dumb.
The snows that are older than history,
The woods where the weird shadows slant;
The stillness, the moonlight, the mystery,
I’ve bade ’em good-by—but I can’t.
There’s a land where the mountains are nameless,
And the rivers all run God knows where;
There are lives that are erring and aimless,
And deaths that just hang by a hair;
There are hardships that nobody reckons;
There are valleys unpeopled and still;
There’s a land—oh, it beckons and beckons,
And I want to go back—and I will.
They’re making my money diminish;
I’m sick of the taste of champagne.
Thank God! when I’m skinned to a finish
I’ll pike to the Yukon again.
I’ll fight—and you bet it’s no sham-fight;
It’s hell!—but I’ve been there before;
And it’s better than this by a damsite—
So me for the Yukon once more.
There’s gold, and it’s haunting and haunting;
It’s luring me on as of old;
Yet it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting
So much as just finding the gold.
It’s the great, big, broad land ’way up yonder,
It’s the forests where silence has lease;
It’s the beauty that thrills me with wonder,
It’s the stillness that fills me with peace.
| Robert W. Service | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics |
22 |
My Madonna
|
I haled me a woman from the street,
Shameless, but, oh, so fair!
I bade her sit in the model’s seat
And I painted her sitting there.
I hid all trace of her heart unclean;
I painted a babe at her breast;
I painted her as she might have been
If the Worst had been the Best.
She laughed at my picture and went away.
Then came, with a knowing nod,
A connoisseur, and I heard him say;
“’Tis Mary, the Mother of God.”
So I painted a halo round her hair,
And I sold her and took my fee,
And she hangs in the church of Saint Hillaire,
Where you and all may see.
| Robert W. Service | Religion,Christianity,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture |
23 |
The Reckoning
|
It’s fine to have a blow-out in a fancy restaurant,
With terrapin and canvas-back and all the wine you want;
To enjoy the flowers and music, watch the pretty women pass,
Smoke a choice cigar, and sip the wealthy water in your glass.
It’s bully in a high-toned joint to eat and drink your fill,
But it’s quite another matter when you
Pay the bill.
It’s great to go out every night on fun or pleasure bent;
To wear your glad rags always and to never save a cent;
To drift along regardless, have a good time every trip;
To hit the high spots sometimes, and to let your chances slip;
To know you’re acting foolish, yet to go on fooling still,
Till Nature calls a show-down, and you
Pay the bill.
Time has got a little bill — get wise while yet you may,
For the debit side’s increasing in a most alarming way;
The things you had no right to do, the things you should have done,
They’re all put down; it’s up to you to pay for every one.
So eat, drink and be merry, have a good time if you will,
But God help you when the time comes, and you
Foot the bill.
| Robert W. Service | Living,Time & Brevity |
24 |
The Prospector
|
I strolled up old Bonanza, where I staked in ninety-eight,
A-purpose to revisit the old claim.
I kept thinking mighty sadly of the funny ways of Fate,
And the lads who once were with me in the game.
Poor boys, they’re down-and-outers, and there’s scarcely one to-day
Can show a dozen colors in his poke;
And me, I’m still prospecting, old and battered, gaunt and gray,
And I’m looking for a grub-stake, and I’m broke.
I strolled up old Bonanza. The same old moon looked down;
The same old landmarks seemed to yearn to me;
But the cabins all were silent, and the flat, once like a town,
Was mighty still and lonesome-like to see.
There were piles and piles of tailings where we toiled with pick and pan,
And turning round a bend I heard a roar,
And there a giant gold-ship of the very newest plan
Was tearing chunks of pay-dirt from the shore.
It wallowed in its water-bed; it burrowed, heaved and swung;
It gnawed its way ahead with grunts and sighs;
Its bill of fare was rock and sand; the tailings were its dung;
It glared around with fierce electric eyes.
Full fifty buckets crammed its maw; it bellowed out for more;
It looked like some great monster in the gloom.
With two to feed its sateless greed, it worked for seven score,
And I sighed: “Ah, old-time miner, here’s your doom!”
The idle windlass turns to rust; the sagging sluice-box falls;
The holes you digged are water to the brim;
Your little sod-roofed cabins with the snugly moss-chinked walls
Are deathly now and mouldering and dim.
The battle-field is silent where of old you fought it out;
The claims you fiercely won are lost and sold.
But there’s a little army that they’ll never put to rout —
The men who simply live to seek the gold.
The men who can’t remember when they learned to swing a pack,
Or in what lawless land the quest began;
The solitary seeker with his grub-stake on his back,
The restless buccaneer of pick and pan.
On the mesas of the Southland, on the tundras of the North,
You will find us, changed in face but still the same;
And it isn’t need, it isn’t greed that sends us faring forth —
It’s the fever, it’s the glory of the game.
For once you’ve panned the speckled sand and seen the bonny dust,
Its peerless brightness blinds you like a spell;
It’s little else you care about; you go because you must,
And you feel that you could follow it to hell.
You’d follow it in hunger, and you’d follow it in cold;
You’d follow it in solitude and pain;
And when you’re stiff and battened down let someone whisper “Gold,”
You’re lief to rise and follow it again.
Yet look you, if I find the stuff it’s just like so much dirt;
I fling it to the four winds like a child.
It’s wine and painted women and the things that do me hurt,
Till I crawl back, beggared, broken, to the Wild.
Till I crawl back, sapped and sodden, to my grub-stake and my tent —
There’s a city, there’s an army (hear them shout).
There’s the gold in millions, millions, but I haven’t got a cent;
And oh, it’s me, it’s me that found it out.
It was my dream that made it good, my dream that made me go
To lands of dread and death disprized of man;
But oh, I’ve known a glory that their hearts will never know,
When I picked the first big nugget from my pan.
It’s still my dream, my dauntless dream, that drives me forth once more
To seek and starve and suffer in the Vast;
That heaps my heart with eager hope, that glimmers on before —
My dream that will uplift me to the last.
Perhaps I am stark crazy, but there’s none of you too sane;
It’s just a little matter of degree.
My hobby is to hunt out gold; it’s fortressed in my brain;
It’s life and love and wife and home to me.
And I’ll strike it, yes, I’ll strike it; I’ve a hunch I cannot fail;
I’ve a vision, I’ve a prompting, I’ve a call;
I hear the hoarse stampeding of an army on my trail,
To the last, the greatest gold camp of them all.
Beyond the shark-tooth ranges sawing savage at the sky
There’s a lowering land no white man ever struck;
There’s gold, there’s gold in millions, and I’ll find it if I die.
And I’m going there once more to try my luck.
Maybe I’ll fail — what matter? It’s a mandate, it’s a vow;
And when in lands of dreariness and dread
You seek the last lone frontier, far beyond your frontiers now,
You will find the old prospector, silent, dead.You will find a tattered tent-pole with a ragged robe below it;
You will find a rusted gold-pan on the sod;
You will find the claim I’m seeking, with my bones as stakes to show it;
But I’ve sought the last Recorder, and He’s — God. | Robert W. Service | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics |
25 |
Just Think!
|
Just think! some night the stars will gleam
Upon a cold, grey stone,
And trace a name with silver beam,
And lo! ’twill be your own.
That night is speeding on to greet
Your epitaphic rhyme.
Your life is but a little beat
Within the heart of Time.
A little gain, a little pain,
A laugh, lest you may moan;
A little blame, a little fame,
A star-gleam on a stone.
| Robert W. Service | Living,Death,Time & Brevity |
26 |
The Twins
|
There were two brothers, John and James,
And when the town went up in flames,
To save the house of James dashed John,
Then turned, and lo! his own was gone.
And when the great World War began,
To volunteer John promptly ran;
And while he learned live bombs to lob,
James stayed at home and—sneaked his job.
John came home with a missing limb;
That didn’t seem to worry him;
But oh, it set his brain awhirl
To find that James had—sneaked his girl!
Time passed. John tried his grief to drown;
To-day James owns one-half the town;
His army contracts riches yield;
And John? Well, search the Potter’s Field.
| Robert W. Service | Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict |
27 |
It Is Later Than You Think
|
Lone amid the café’s cheer,
Sad of heart am I to-night;
Dolefully I drink my beer,
But no single line I write.
There’s the wretched rent to pay,
Yet I glower at pen and ink:
Oh, inspire me, Muse, I pray,It is later than you think!
Hello! there’s a pregnant phrase.
Bravo! let me write it down;
Hold it with a hopeful gaze,
Gauge it with a fretful frown;
Tune it to my lyric lyre ...
Ah! upon starvation’s brink,
How the words are dark and dire:
It is later than you think.
Weigh them well .... Behold yon band,
Students drinking by the door,
Madly merry, bock in hand,
Saucers stacked to mark their score.
Get you gone, you jolly scamps;
Let your parting glasses clink;
Seek your long neglected lamps:
It is later than you think.
Look again: yon dainty blonde,
All allure and golden grace,
Oh so willing to respond
Should you turn a smiling face.
Play your part, poor pretty doll;
Feast and frolic, pose and prink;
There’s the Morgue to end it all,
And it’s later than you think.
Yon’s a playwright — mark his face,
Puffed and purple, tense and tired;
Pasha-like he holds his place,
Hated, envied and admired.
How you gobble life, my friend;
Wine, and woman soft and pink!
Well, each tether has its end:
Sir, it’s later than you think.
See yon living scarecrow pass
With a wild and wolfish stare
At each empty absinthe glass,
As if he saw Heaven there.
Poor damned wretch, to end your pain
There is still the Greater Drink.
Yonder waits the sanguine Seine ...
It is later than you think.
Lastly, you who read; aye, you
Who this very line may scan:
Think of all you planned to do ...
Have you done the best you can?
See! the tavern lights are low;
Black’s the night, and how you shrink!
God! and is it time to go?
Ah! the clock is always slow;
It is later than you think;
Sadly later than you think;
Far, far later than you think.
| Robert W. Service | Living,Time & Brevity |
28 |
Maternity
|
There once was a Square, such a square little Square,
And he loved a trim Triangle;
But she was a flirt and around her skirt
Vainly she made him dangle.
Oh he wanted to wed and he had no dread
Of domestic woes and wrangles;
For he thought that his fate was to procreate
Cute little Squares and Triangles.
Now it happened one day on that geometric way
There swaggered a big bold Cube,
With a haughty stare and he made that Square
Have the air of a perfect boob;
To his solid spell the Triangle fell,
And she thrilled with love’s sweet sickness,
For she took delight in his breadth and height—
But how she adored his thickness!
So that poor little Square just died of despair,
For his love he could not strangle;
While the bold Cube led to the bridal bed
That cute and acute Triangle.
The Square’s sad lot she has long forgot,
And his passionate pretensions ...
For she dotes on her kids—Oh such cute Pyramids
In a world of three dimensions.
| Robert W. Service | Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire |
29 |
I Believe
|
It’s my belief that every man
Should do his share of work,
And in our economic plan
No citizen should shirk.
That in return each one should get
His meed of fold and food,
And feel that all his toil and sweat
Is for the common good.
It’s my belief that every chap
Should have an equal start,
And there should be no handicap
To hinder his depart;
That there be fairness in the fight,
And justice in the race,
And every lad should have the right
To win his proper place.
It’s my belief that people should
Be neither rich nor poor;
That none should suffer servitude,
And all should be secure.
That wealth is loot, and rank is rot,
And foul is class and clan;
That to succeed a man may not
Exploit his brother man.
It’s my belief that heritage
And usury are wrong;
That each should win a worthy wage
And sing an honest song ....
Not one like this — for though I rue
The wrong of life, I flout it.
Alas! I’m not prepared to do
A goddam thing about it.
| Robert W. Service | Arts & Sciences,Humor & Satire,Social Commentaries |
30 |
Uneasy Rider
|
Falling in love with a mustache
is like saying
you can fall in love with
the way a man polishes his shoes
which,
of course,
is one of the things that turns on
my tuned-up engine
those trim buckled boots
(I feel like an advertisement
for men’s fashions
when I think of your ankles)
Yeats was hung up with a girl’s beautiful face
and I find myself
a bad moralist,
a failing aesthetician,
a sad poet,
wanting to touch your arms and feel the muscles
that make a man’s body have so much substance,
that makes a woman
lean and yearn in that direction
that makes her melt/ she is a rainy day
in your presence
the pool of wax under a burning candle
the foam from a waterfall
You are more beautiful than any Harley-Davidson
She is the rain,
waits in it for you,
finds blood spotting her legs
from the long ride.
| Diane Wakoski | Love,Infatuation & Crushes,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Relationships,Men & Women |
31 |
Inside Out
|
I walk the purple carpet into your eye
carrying the silver butter server
but a truck rumbles by,
leaving its black tire prints on my foot
and old images the sound of banging screen doors on hot
afternoons and a fly buzzing over the Kool-Aid spilled on
the sink
flicker, as reflections on the metal surface.
Come in, you said,
inside your paintings, inside the blood factory, inside the
old songs that line your hands, inside
eyes that change like a snowflake every second,
inside spinach leaves holding that one piece of gravel,
inside the whiskers of a cat,
inside your old hat, and most of all inside your mouth where you
grind the pigments with your teeth, painting
with a broken bottle on the floor, and painting
with an ostrich feather on the moon that rolls out of my mouth.
You cannot let me walk inside you too long inside
the veins where my small feet touch
bottom.
You must reach inside and pull me
like a silver bullet
from your arm.
| Diane Wakoski | Relationships,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture |
32 |
The Photos
|
My sister in her well-tailored silk blouse hands me
the photo of my father
in naval uniform and white hat.
I say, “Oh, this is the one which Mama used to have on her dresser.”
My sister controls her face and furtively looks at my mother,
a sad rag bag of a woman, lumpy and sagging everywhere,
like a mattress at the Salvation Army, though with no holes or tears,
and says, “No.”
I look again,
and see that my father is wearing a wedding ring,
which he never did
when he lived with my mother. And that there is a legend on it,
“To my dearest wife,
Love
Chief”
And I realize the photo must have belonged to his second wife,
whom he left our mother to marry.
My mother says, with her face as still as the whole unpopulated part of the
state of North Dakota,
“May I see it too?”
She looks at it.
I look at my tailored sister
and my own blue-jeaned self. Have we wanted to hurt our mother,
sharing these pictures on this, one of the few days I ever visit or
spend with family? For her face is curiously haunted,
not now with her usual viperish bitterness,
but with something so deep it could not be spoken.
I turn away and say I must go on, as I have a dinner engagement with friends.
But I drive all the way to Pasadena from Whittier,
thinking of my mother’s face; how I could never love her; how my father
could not love her either. Yet knowing I have inherited
the rag-bag body,
stony face with bulldog jaws.
I drive, thinking of that face.
Jeffers’ California Medea who inspired me to poetry.
I killed my children,
but there as I am changing lanes on the freeway, necessarily glancing in the
rearview mirror, I see the face,
not even a ghost, but always with me, like a photo in a beloved’s wallet.
How I hate my destiny.
| Diane Wakoski | Living,Growing Old,Midlife,The Body,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature |
33 |
my dream about being white
|
hey music and
me
only white,
hair a flutter of
fall leaves
circling my perfect
line of a nose,
no lips,
no behind, hey
white me
and i’m wearing
white history
but there’s no future
in those clothes
so i take them off and
wake up
dancing.
| Lucille Clifton | Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity |
34 |
my dream about the second coming
|
mary is an old woman without shoes.
she doesn’t believe it.
not when her belly starts to bubble
and leave the print of a finger where
no man touches.
not when the snow in her hair melts away.
not when the stranger she used to wait for
appears dressed in lights at her
kitchen table.
she is an old woman and
doesn’t believe it.
when Something drops onto her toes one night
she calls it a fox
but she feeds it.
| Lucille Clifton | Religion,Christianity,Faith & Doubt |
35 |
the message of crazy horse
|
i would sit in the center of the world,
the Black Hills hooped around me and
dream of my dancing horse. my wife
was Black Shawl who gave me the daughter
i called They Are Afraid Of Her.
i was afraid of nothing
except Black Buffalo Woman.
my love for her i wore
instead of feathers. i did not dance
i dreamed. i am dreaming now
across the worlds. my medicine is strong.
my medicine is strong in the Black basket
of these fingers. i come again through this
Black Buffalo woman. hear me;
the hoop of the world is breaking.
fire burns in the four directions.
the dreamers are running away from the hills.
i have seen it. i am crazy horse.
| Lucille Clifton | null |
36 |
mulberry fields
|
they thought the field was wasting
and so they gathered the marker rocks and stones and
piled them into a barn they say that the rocks were shaped
some of them scratched with triangles and other forms they
must have been trying to invent some new language they say
the rocks went to build that wall there guarding the manor and
some few were used for the state house
crops refused to grow
i say the stones marked an old tongue and it was called eternity
and pointed toward the river i say that after that collection
no pillow in the big house dreamed i say that somewhere under
here moulders one called alice whose great grandson is old now
too and refuses to talk about slavery i say that at the
masters table only one plate is set for supper i say no seed
can flourish on this ground once planted then forsaken wild
berries warm a field of bones
bloom how you must i say
| Lucille Clifton | Living,Time & Brevity,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity |
37 |
In the House of the Latin Professor
|
All things fall away: store fronts on the west,
ANGEL’S DELICATESSEN, windows boarded
and laced in day-glow, BLUE KNIGHT AUTO REPAIR
to the north with its verandah of rusted mufflers
and hubcaps of extinct Studebakers.
The diminishing neighborhood sprawls
under dusty folds of sycamore and fading elm,
the high birdhouse out back starling-haunted.
Inside the cottage a bay window translates
the language of sunlight, flaring like baroque
trumpets on the red carpet, shadow-dappled
as the house turns slowly beneath the drift
of tree branch and sun. We have come
to shroud the couch in plastic, spread sheets
over the fat reading chair and the piano’s
mahogany gloom, the impossible etude’s
blur of black notes. Among a turmoil
of ungraded papers lies the Loeb Classics Aeneid
open to the last lesson. Later in the bedroom
we imagine a flourish of light, her husband
loosening the sash of her white silk robe,
his beard brushing the back of her neck.Amores, the art of love, of words lifting
like vapors on a cold day, the dense vowels
of Ovid and Virgil almost vanished, almost
risen to music. We lock the heavy door
and walk away from the silence, the lone
hexameters of Dido pulsing in an empty house.
| B. H. Fairchild | Living,Marriage & Companionship,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life |
38 |
The Men
|
As a kid sitting in a yellow vinyl
booth in the back of Earl’s Tavern,
you watch the late-afternoon drunks
coming and going, sunlight breaking
through the smoky dark as the door
opens and closes, and it’s the future
flashing ahead like the taillights
of a semi as you drop over a rise
in the road on your way to Amarillo,bright lights and blonde-haired women,
as Billy used to say, slumped over
his beer like a snail, make a real man
out of you | B. H. Fairchild | Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure,Activities,Travels & Journeys,Philosophy |
39 |
Mrs. Hill
|
I am so young that I am still in love
with Battle Creek, Michigan: decoder rings,
submarines powered by baking soda,
whistles that only dogs can hear. Actually,
not even them. Nobody can hear them.
Mrs. Hill from next door is hammering
on our front door shouting, and my father
in his black and gold gangster robe lets her in
trembling and bunched up like a rabbit in snow
pleading, oh I’m so sorry, so sorry,
so sorry, | B. H. Fairchild | Living,Coming of Age,Philosophy |
40 |
The Rebel
|
There is a wall of which the stones Are lies and bribes and dead men's bones. And wrongfully this evil wall Denies what all men made for all, And shamelessly this wall surrounds Our homesteads and our native grounds. But I will gather and I will ride, And I will summon a countryside, And many a man shall hear my halloa Who never had thought the horn to follow; And many a man shall ride with me Who never had thought on earth to see High Justice in her armoury. When we find them where they stand, A mile of men on either hand, I mean to charge from right away And force the flanks of their array, And press them inward from the plains, And drive them clamouring down the lanes, And gallop and harry and have them down, And carry the gates and hold the town. Then shall I rest me from my ride With my great anger satisfied. Only, before I eat and drink, When I have killed them all, I think That I will batter their carven names, And slit the pictures in their frames, And burn for scent their cedar door, And melt the gold their women wore, And hack their horses at the knees, And hew to death their timber trees, And plough their gardens deep and through— And all these things I mean to do For fear perhaps my little son Should break his hands, as I have done.
| Hilaire Belloc | Social Commentaries,War & Conflict |
41 |
Lines to a Don
|
Remote and ineffectual Don
That dared attack my Chesterton,
With that poor weapon, half-impelled,
Unlearnt, unsteady, hardly held,
Unworthy for a tilt with men—
Your quavering and corroded pen;
Don poor at Bed and worse at Table,
Don pinched, Don starved, Don miserable;
Don stuttering, Don with roving eyes,
Don nervous, Don of crudities;
Don clerical, Don ordinary,
Don self-absorbed and solitary;
Don here-and-there, Don epileptic;
Don puffed and empty, Don dyspeptic;
Don middle-class, Don sycophantic,
Don dull, Don brutish, Don pedantic;
Don hypocritical, Don bad,
Don furtive, Don three-quarters mad;
Don (since a man must make an end),
Don that shall never be my friend.
* * *
Don different from those regal Dons!
With hearts of gold and lungs of bronze,
Who shout and bang and roar and bawl
The Absolute across the hall,
Or sail in amply billowing gown
Enormous through the Sacred Town,
Bearing from College to their homes
Deep cargoes of gigantic tomes;
Dons admirable! Dons of Might!
Uprising on my inward sight
Compact of ancient tales, and port
And sleep—and learning of a sort.
Dons English, worthy of the land;
Dons rooted; Dons that understand.
Good Dons perpetual that remain
A landmark, walling in the plain—
The horizon of my memories—
Like large and comfortable trees.
* * *
Don very much apart from these,
Thou scapegoat Don, thou Don devoted,
Don to thine own damnation quoted,
Perplexed to find thy trivial name
Reared in my verse to lasting shame.
Don dreadful, rasping Don and wearing,
Repulsive Don—Don past all bearing.
Don of the cold and doubtful breath,
Don despicable, Don of death;
Don nasty, skimpy, silent, level;
Don evil; Don that serves the devil.
Don ugly—that makes fifty lines.
There is a Canon which confines
A Rhymed Octosyllabic Curse
If written in Iambic Verse
To fifty lines. I never cut;
I far prefer to end it—but
Believe me I shall soon return.
My fires are banked, but still they burn
To write some more about the Don
That dared attack my Chesterton.
| Hilaire Belloc | Humor & Satire |
42 |
from A Moral Alphabet
|
D: The Dreadful Dinotherium he
Will have to do his best for D.
The early world observed with awe
His back, indented like a saw.
His look was gay, his voice was strong;
His tail was neither short nor long;
His trunk, or elongated nose,
Was not so large as some suppose;
His teeth, as all the world allows,
Were graminivorous, like a cow's.
He therefore should have wished to pass
Long peaceful nights upon the Grass,
But being mad the brute preferred
To roost in branches, like a bird.1
A creature heavier than a whale,
You see at once, could hardly fail
To suffer badly when he slid
And tumbled (as he always did).
His fossil, therefore, comes to light
All broken up: and serve him right.
MORALIf you were born to walk the ground,Remain there; do not fool around.
E stands for Egg.
MORALThe Moral of this verse Is applicable to the Young. Be terse.
K for the Klondyke, a Country of Gold,
Where the winters are often excessively cold;
Where the lawn every morning is covered with rime,
And skating continues for years at a time.
Do you think that a Climate can conquer the grit
Of the Sons of the West? Not a bit! Not a bit!
When the weather looks nippy, the bold Pioneers
Put on two pairs of Stockings and cover their ears,
And roam through the drear Hyperborean dales
With a vast apparatus of Buckets and Pails;
Or wander through wild Hyperborean glades
With Hoes, Hammers, Pickaxes, Mattocks and Spades.
There are some who give rise to exuberant mirth
By turning up nothing but bushels of earth,
While those who have little cause excellent fun
By attempting to pilfer from those who have none.
At times the reward they will get for their pains
Is to strike very tempting auriferous veins;
Or, a shaft being sunk for some miles in the ground,
Not infrequently nuggets of value are found.
They bring us the gold when their labours are ended,
And we—after thanking them prettily—spend it.
MORALJust you work for Humanity, never you mind
If Humanity seems to have left you behind. | Hilaire Belloc | Humor & Satire |
43 |
Sarah Byng, Who Could Not Read and Was Tossed into a Thorny Hedge by a Bull
|
Some years ago you heard me sing My doubts on Alexander Byng. His sister Sarah now inspires My jaded Muse, my failing fires. Of Sarah Byng the tale is told How when the child was twelve years old She could not read or write a line. Her sister Jane, though barely nine, Could spout the Catechism through And parts of Matthew Arnold too, While little Bill who came between Was quite unnaturally keen On 'Athalie', by Jean Racine. But not so Sarah! Not so Sal! She was a most uncultured girl Who didn't care a pinch of snuff For any literary stuff And gave the classics all a miss. Observe the consequence of this! As she was walking home one day, Upon the fields across her way A gate, securely padlocked, stood, And by its side a piece of wood On which was painted plain and full, BEWARE THE VERY FURIOUS BULL Alas! The young illiterate Went blindly forward to her fate, And ignorantly climbed the gate! Now happily the Bull that day Was rather in the mood for play Than goring people through and through As Bulls so very often do; He tossed her lightly with his horns Into a prickly hedge of thorns, And stood by laughing while she strode And pushed and struggled to the road. The lesson was not lost upon The child, who since has always gone A long way round to keep away From signs, whatever they may say, And leaves a padlocked gate alone. Moreover she has wisely grown Confirmed in her instinctive guess That literature breeds distress.
| Hilaire Belloc | Coming of Age,Humor & Satire |
44 |
Westray: 1991
|
Then the day passed into the evening,
a sovereign, darkening blue. And
the twenty-six lost miners,
if living at all, knew nothing of the hour:
not the languid canter
of light, or the wind
curled through the hedgerows. Not pain.
Not rage. If living at all then
just this: a worm of black water
at the lower back. At the lungs
two tablets of air.
What is it like there? the broadcaster asked,
his voice and the slow reply
cast down through the time zones of America.
A stillness. All of the families
asleep in the fire station.
And the mineworks pale on the landscape.
What else?
Nothing. Blue lights of police cars.
What else?
Nothing.
Nothing?
...The thrum of the crickets.
A thousand files on a thousand scrapers.
A thousand taut membranes called mirrors
amplifying the breed-song. A landscape of cupped wings
amplifying the breed-song. A thousand bodies
summoned to a thousand bodies—and the song itself a body,
so in tune with the dusk's warmth
it slows when a cloud passes over.
Today. Tomorrow. In that May Nova Scotia darkness
when the earth flared and collapsed.
Before that May. After that darkness.
On the larch bud. On the fire station.
On shale and the grind-steps of magma.
On the gold straining in its seam bed.
On the coal straining. On the twenty-six headlamps
swaying through the drift tunnels. On the bud.
On the leaves, on the meadow grass,
on the wickerwork of shrubs:
dark cape of desire.
| Linda Bierds | null |
45 |
Ultima Thule
|
A little candlewax on the thumbnail, liquid
at first, slipping, then stalled to an ice-hood.
Another layer, another, and the child lies back,
his thumb a hummock, his small knuckle
buckled with cracks.
No snow yet, but
the last white meadows of switchwort and saxifrage
mimic it. Already the bears brush back
through the dwarf willows—Hubbart Point, Cape Henrietta Maria,
the bay's deep arc flattening, lessening
as land extends through the fast-ice and the seam
of open leads stretches, withdraws.
They have come for the pack floes, for the slow
rafting. And repeat on their white faces, the boy thinks,
the low strokes of the borealis: violet mouths,
madder blue at the eyelids. Perhaps he will walk
to the shoreline—no shore, of course, just miles
of land-fast ice stretched over water, stretched out
to water, the line where each begins
a filament, a vapor. By then the bears will be
sailors, or, far to the north, stalled in their waxy sleep.
He yawns, looks down at his slipper, his floormat
of braided fleece. By then the lights
will be thicker, greens and magentas flashing, rolling in
at times like fog. To go where nothing lives.
He turns, settles. To extend a little breath
out over that ice—the white, cumbersome bodies
migrating in reverse with the others, dragging
between them a lifeline, plump and intricate,
like a net, like purse seiners dragging a cork net,
its great arc spiraling, tighter, tighter,
now green in those lights, now blue, now
pink as the boy's ear,
where all night a line of cold
traces the rim, the lobe,
circles down, chills, and recedes.
| Linda Bierds | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Seas, Rivers, & Streams |
46 |
The Neon Artist in December
|
Snow everywhere, like the salt
electrons jump from, as gas snaps
and the tube hisses with light.
I am holding just now the hooked underbeak
of the great flamingo:
cool glass, a little dusting of phosphor.
Just off through the tree-line, the New Year
waits with its bells,
as in the ballroom of the Grand Hotel, stretched
thirty feet up to the promenade deck,
the back-kneed, S-necked mate
waits with its own ringing, its
soft, rattle-whistle of argon.
What a pair they will make: ice-pink tubeworks
north and south on the ballroom floor.
And below: foxscarves, carnations, the pull
and push of the long trombones.
Flamingos! And now
the moon pressing back through the tree-line.
Close your eyes. Let us
say we are children together, ten, perhaps twelve.
I see neon: a steadfast landscape of
DEPOT, HEIDELBERG, VACANCY.
And you? Women in cardigans? A certain
leaf tree? Perhaps the gleam
of your dress shoe as you welcome the New Year.
The ballroom is thick with smoke and laughter.
Two birds, of course, north and south. Then
the catch in your breath as an uncle explains
the impact of vapor and salt, how
a light that has never been
curls up through the century—swank,
incredibly still.Our times, he laughs, and in
from the thin roadways all the WELCOMES,
the PALMISTS and EXITS, all the boneworks
blown to their plush, just bearable tones
curl up to a wing and S-neck.
High above you, cupped
left, right on the ballroom floor, that
ice-pink, still parenthesis.
Then foxscarves. The flick of the black shoes.
| Linda Bierds | null |
47 |
Questions About Angels
|
Of all the questions you might want to ask
about angels, the only one you ever hear
is how many can dance on the head of a pin.
No curiosity about how they pass the eternal time
besides circling the Throne chanting in Latin
or delivering a crust of bread to a hermit on earth
or guiding a boy and girl across a rickety wooden bridge.
Do they fly through God's body and come out singing?
Do they swing like children from the hinges
of the spirit world saying their names backwards and forwards?
Do they sit alone in little gardens changing colors?
What about their sleeping habits, the fabric of their robes,
their diet of unfiltered divine light?
What goes on inside their luminous heads? Is there a wall
these tall presences can look over and see hell?
If an angel fell off a cloud, would he leave a hole
in a river and would the hole float along endlessly
filled with the silent letters of every angelic word?
If an angel delivered the mail, would he arrive
in a blinding rush of wings or would he just assume
the appearance of the regular mailman and
whistle up the driveway reading the postcards?
No, the medieval theologians control the court.
The only question you ever hear is about
the little dance floor on the head of a pin
where halos are meant to converge and drift invisibly.
It is designed to make us think in millions,
billions, to make us run out of numbers and collapse
into infinity, but perhaps the answer is simply one:
one female angel dancing alone in her stocking feet,
a small jazz combo working in the background.
She sways like a branch in the wind, her beautiful
eyes closed, and the tall thin bassist leans over
to glance at his watch because she has been dancing
forever, and now it is very late, even for musicians.
| Billy Collins | Ghosts & the Supernatural |
48 |
The Wires of the Night
|
I thought about his death for so many hours,
tangled there in the wires of the night,
that it came to have a body and dimensions,
more than a voice shaking over the telephone
or the black obituary boldface of name and dates.
His death now had an entrance and an exit,
doors and stairs,
windows and shutters which are the motionless wings
of windows. His death had a head and clothes,
the white shirt and baggy trousers of death.
His death had pages, a dark leather cover, an index,
and the print was too minuscule for anyone to read.
His death had hinges and bolts that were oiled
and locked,
had a loud motor, four tires, an antenna that listened
to the wind, and a mirror in which you could see the past.
His death had sockets and keys, it had walls and beams.
It had a handle which you could not hold and a floor
you could not lie down on in the middle of the night.
In the freakish pink and gray of dawn I took
his death to bed with me and his death was my bed
and in every corner of the room it hid from the light,
and then it was the light of day and the next day
and all the days to follow, and it moved into the future
like the sharp tip of a pen moving across an empty page.
| Billy Collins | Death |
49 |
Nostalgia
|
Remember the 1340s? We were doing a dance called the Catapult.
You always wore brown, the color craze of the decade,
and I was draped in one of those capes that were popular,
the ones with unicorns and pomegranates in needlework.
Everyone would pause for beer and onions in the afternoon,
and at night we would play a game called “Find the Cow.”
Everything was hand-lettered then, not like today.
Where has the summer of 1572 gone? Brocade and sonnet
marathons were the rage. We used to dress up in the flags
of rival baronies and conquer one another in cold rooms of stone.
Out on the dance floor we were all doing the Struggle
while your sister practiced the Daphne all alone in her room.
We borrowed the jargon of farriers for our slang.
These days language seems transparent, a badly broken code.
The 1790s will never come again. Childhood was big.
People would take walks to the very tops of hills
and write down what they saw in their journals without speaking.
Our collars were high and our hats were extremely soft.
We would surprise each other with alphabets made of twigs.
It was a wonderful time to be alive, or even dead.
I am very fond of the period between 1815 and 1821.
Europe trembled while we sat still for our portraits.
And I would love to return to 1901 if only for a moment,
time enough to wind up a music box and do a few dance steps,
or shoot me back to 1922 or 1941, or at least let me
recapture the serenity of last month when we picked
berries and glided through afternoons in a canoe.
Even this morning would be an improvement over the present.
I was in the garden then, surrounded by the hum of bees
and the Latin names of flowers, watching the early light
flash off the slanted windows of the greenhouse
and silver the limbs on the rows of dark hemlocks.
As usual, I was thinking about the moments of the past,
letting my memory rush over them like water
rushing over the stones on the bottom of a stream.
I was even thinking a little about the future, that place
where people are doing a dance we cannot imagine,
a dance whose name we can only guess.
| Billy Collins | Time & Brevity,Humor & Satire |
50 |
Workshop
|
I might as well begin by saying how much I like the title.
It gets me right away because I’m in a workshop now
so immediately the poem has my attention,
like the Ancient Mariner grabbing me by the sleeve.
And I like the first couple of stanzas,
the way they establish this mode of self-pointing
that runs through the whole poem
and tells us that words are food thrown down
on the ground for other words to eat.
I can almost taste the tail of the snake
in its own mouth,
if you know what I mean.
But what I’m not sure about is the voice,
which sounds in places very casual, very blue jeans,
but other times seems standoffish,
professorial in the worst sense of the word
like the poem is blowing pipe smoke in my face.
But maybe that’s just what it wants to do.
What I did find engaging were the middle stanzas,
especially the fourth one.
I like the image of clouds flying like lozenges
which gives me a very clear picture.
And I really like how this drawbridge operator
just appears out of the blue
with his feet up on the iron railing
and his fishing pole jigging—I like jigging—
a hook in the slow industrial canal below.
I love slow industrial canal below. All those l’s.
Maybe it’s just me,
but the next stanza is where I start to have a problem.
I mean how can the evening bump into the stars?
And what’s an obbligato of snow?
Also, I roam the decaffeinated streets.
At that point I’m lost. I need help.
The other thing that throws me off,
and maybe this is just me,
is the way the scene keeps shifting around.
First, we’re in this big aerodrome
and the speaker is inspecting a row of dirigibles,
which makes me think this could be a dream.
Then he takes us into his garden,
the part with the dahlias and the coiling hose,
though that’s nice, the coiling hose,
but then I’m not sure where we’re supposed to be.
The rain and the mint green light,
that makes it feel outdoors, but what about this wallpaper?
Or is it a kind of indoor cemetery?
There’s something about death going on here.
In fact, I start to wonder if what we have here
is really two poems, or three, or four,
or possibly none.
But then there’s that last stanza, my favorite.
This is where the poem wins me back,
especially the lines spoken in the voice of the mouse.
I mean we’ve all seen these images in cartoons before,
but I still love the details he uses
when he’s describing where he lives.
The perfect little arch of an entrance in the baseboard,
the bed made out of a curled-back sardine can,
the spool of thread for a table.
I start thinking about how hard the mouse had to work
night after night collecting all these things
while the people in the house were fast asleep,
and that gives me a very strong feeling,
a very powerful sense of something.
But I don’t know if anyone else was feeling that.
Maybe that was just me.
Maybe that’s just the way I read it.
| Billy Collins | School & Learning,Humor & Satire,Poetry & Poets |
51 |
Print
|
In the dining room there is a brown fish
hanging on the wall who swims along
in his frame while we are eating dinner.
He swims in candlelight for all to see,
as if he has been swimming forever, even
in the darkness of the ink before someone thought
to draw him and the thin reeds waving in his stream
and the clear pebbles strewn upon the sand.
No wonder he continues his swimming
deep into the night, long after we have
blown out the candles and gone upstairs to bed.
No wonder I find him in the pale morning
light, still swimming, still looking out at me
with his one, small, spellbound eye.
| Billy Collins | null |
52 |
Man in Space
|
All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a table of people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,
and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,
why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.
| Billy Collins | Relationships,Men & Women |
53 |
Introduction to Poetry
|
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
| Billy Collins | School & Learning,Poetry & Poets |
54 |
To My Old City
|
You’re still there in the spectral impress,
the plied afterimage grid of trucks
and buses, diesel fume and bloodspoor streaked
on wet streets, and cars biting evening papers
from the black newsstand. Above, the trestle’s
gravel bed hums expectantly, or with relief,
and the gritty pinpoints of snow, at rest
on silver rails, flare into the coming dark,
while everywhere your hungry light still tries
to reconstruct itself, charm the space
in and around the looseknit ironworks,
winter’s checkered yellowings glaring past
the dark. From here, two years away, I see
in your middle distance a trestle stretched
between two brownstones, the whole scene
droning deep: the train tears through the gap,
ratcheting the space with green aquatic squares
that flick past like old sluggish film,
each frame a piece of failing, played-back fact,
and the unseen wheels click, mumble, click
in flukes of young clean snow fountaining up
around those strangers abiding in the glass.
| W. S. Di Piero | Cities & Urban Life |
55 |
Starlings
|
Snarls, bread trucks, yeast
breathing inside huddled bags,
and sleepers completing lives
behind their gray windows.
A whistle on the phonewires,
feathers, twitches, whistling
down to the hot loaves.
Reeds everywhere, pulse,
flesh, flutes, and wakened sighs.
An answer. Radio news
and breathers behind our windows,
birds’ new voices changing,changed, to the unforgiving
hunger screech of immigrants.
| W. S. Di Piero | Nature,Animals,Cities & Urban Life |
56 |
Saint Francis of Assisi
|
The View
The plain’s hatching now
after rainless months.
A dust devil rips
through a peach orchard
down there, a seam snuffed
by falling dust-fruit.
Behind the vine rows’
shriveled abundance
a low fire runs
ragged by the ditch,
flaying the pale sod.
The voided skins wave.
September, thirsting,
sings our Hosannah,
shrieks red poverties
to old heaven’s eye.
* * *1944
You want February? Snow and sleet came down hard,
heaven’s post-Christmas gift to freeze our eyelids shut.
Walking the icy ground, our shoes all shot with holes,
we did the Alexander’s Army Ragtime Dance,
stomping snow off bones safely packed in newspapers.
From down below, we must have looked crazy happy,
dancing like Hollywood Indians, though who had
anything to eat? We dreamed lard. So the wolves came,
not straight into town, not into the piazza,
but near the outcrop behind the church. God’s design,
the best, the way they study the tired world
makes them next to human, or more. They’re waiting
while they move. I’d worship that expectancy.
If I could talk to one, just a few minutes,
he’d teach me hunger’s secrets. So one awful night
I wrapped my legs and feet, stuffed more papers inside
my pants and shirt, then danced my way behind the church.
Faint gray writing on the snow. Skin and bones, sneezes,
frost feathers, drifting away. Two of them walked back,
canny bigshot archbishop warrior types. They said:
The moon’s blue, we know you want secrets, help, advice,
news from this side. Our truth is: Forget likenesses,
live inside your carbon soul, the moon’s black and blue,
in the soul’s time the world’s one winter together.
* * *Renunciation
The snowy poplar seeds are everywhere,
balling against curbs and car wheels,
sifting through gates, doorways, kitchen windows,
snagged by white blossoms shaken loose
from the nodding horse-chestnut leaves. We stand
in their shadows—our springtime’s dark.
The debris scrapes our cheeks, clings an instant
to our lashes, chokes the soft breath
before tumbling off the near precipice.
We want divine uncertainty.
O give us the Judas tree’s blood shadows,
make us sick with rank pear blossoms,
blind us with earth’s random pieces engorged
with broom’s milky fallen-sun flesh.
| W. S. Di Piero | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Weather,Religion,Christianity |
57 |
Ice Plant in Bloom
|
From where I stood at the field’s immaculate edge,
walking past the open patch of land that’s money bounded,
in California’s flat sunlight, by suburban shadows of houses
occupied by professors, lawyers, radically affluent do-gooders,
simple casual types, plus a few plumbers, children of lettuce-pickers
and microchip princes, grandchildren of goatherds and orchard keepers
who pruned and picked apricot trees that covered what wasn’t yet
block after block. Vaporized by money, by the lords and ladies of money,
in one month, on one block, three bungalows bulldozed, and the tanky smells
of goatherds and, before them, dirt farmers who never got enough water,
held momentary in the air like an album snapshot’s aura,
souls of roller-rink sweethearts and sausage-makers fleeing
heaps of crusty lath, lead pipe, tiny window casements,
then new foundations poured for cozy twelve-room houses.
So what was she doing in that field among weeds and ice plant?
The yellow and pink blooms spiking around her feet like glory?
Cranking her elbow as surveyors do, to a bored watcher in the distance,
she fanned the air, clouds running low and fast behind her.
A voice seeped through the moodless sunlight
as she seemed to talk to the flowers and high weeds.
She noticed me, pointed in my direction. Accusation, election,
I could not tell, nor if it was at me myself
or the green undeveloped space she occupied,
welded into her grid by traffic noise. Okay!
A word for me? A go-ahead? Okay! Smeared by the wind
and maybe not her own voice after all. I held my place.
She would be one of the clenched ministers adrift
in bus terminals and K-Marts, carrying guns
in other parts of America, except she dressed like a casual lady of money,
running shoes, snowbird sunglasses, wristwatch like a black birthday cake.
The voice, thin and pipey, came from the boy or girl,
blond like her, who edged into view as I tracked the shot. The child,
staring down while he cried his song, slowly tread the labyrinth
of ice plant’s juicy starburst flesh of leaves.Okay! He follows the nested space between flowers that bristle at his feet,
his or hers, while the desiccated California sky so far from heaven and hell
beams down on us beings of flower, water, and flesh before we turn to money.
The sky kept sliding through the tips of weeds. The sky left us behind.
| W. S. Di Piero | Social Commentaries,Class,Money & Economics |
58 |
Saturday Afternoon
|
"NOW YAHWEH ORDERED THAT A GREAT FISH SHOULD SWALLOW HIM."
Into my backyard’s six fat squares of concrete rigged with clothesline,
Charlie the Cop swung gunnysacks convulsed with Jersey chickens.
From the open view of other yards, unfolded down the block,
neighbor women watched ours boil tub water; the barechested men,
laying out knives and cleavers, fumbled the animals into daylight,
in the middle of my world, my certain place, not stump roots
on the cold Atlantic floor of mountains I’d imagined,
one week every summer, from the hot Wildwood boardwalk.
But just then Charlie lifted me above his head, saying
“O Billy Boy you've never in your life seen this! Want it?”
The ground gone, steep drag of thinned air, chicken squawk
tingling in my ears with dim human voices. Charlie threw me in the sea.
The underplace, swallowing my heart, opened like a horn of plenty,
blood channels lit blue and red like pinball arteries, flesh-motes,
mucus, sinew, pulsing viscera bits dripping from clothesline.
Missile tracks horned across the ceiling. In the ribcage,
stooped beggars crowded, kicking spongy gouts of something;
deeper in the tunnel, toward the tail, in files winding out of sight,
shaved heads, men and women in pajamas. Spear carriers paced the walls.
Into my vaulted space came words not really words: shades, images
with a worldly shape of meaning, but beyond me, aloof and hysterical.
The silence wrapped me like a prickly woolen sleeve knit
by my women’s voices, shouting, out there, unrecoverable, dense,
while their horny hands plucked and the sweaty men teased,
stuffing tacky down inside their headscarves. Inside,
blood cells combed my walls, unfinished patterns seeped through
as picturegrams that glided across the whale’s belly. A still life
with ginger jar and pomegranates. A flayed, ripening Christ.
An Ohio puddler stirring pigiron mash, whose back is the same one
in Giotto’s Gethsemane that stays the hand slicing off a soldier’s ear.
Mercury, my heart, the sickening beautiful shiftingness of things.
Kettles steamed, tin basins quivered with guts, my dear hell’s bloodglyphs
in things, in me. I’d not be whole in and of the world again.
Quills cracked when Charlie put me down. In my backyard, in my head,
women sang under a pier to the unformed sea, an unvoiced song
I’d heard inside the monster, breezing now through clotheslines.
Men scrubbed their hands at the spigot, the women sighing.
Flies left charcoal scrawls on the air and grazed old stains;
they lighted on my arms, not waiting, but constant, my familiars,
until their manic newsiness went away. Then, in that twilight,
slow, shadowless lightning bugs appeared, going on and off.
| W. S. Di Piero | Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Social Commentaries |
59 |
Victory
|
There is no Rescue Mission where it isn’t freezing
from the need that created it. The lost children
distill to pure chemical. Where Good is called No-Tone
it’s the one who cries out who doesn’t get a coat.
The children fuse colors because they don’t want to
separate. Daughters shot off of hydrants who cut
each other in the neck and gut, don’t care
which one of them will end up later in surgery.
And drugged sons pretending to be costumes,
well, they’re not welcome to comprehension either.
Why does a wild child confuse a moon
with a hole in his skin?
One was born soaked in gin.
His first sip was from a bottle of denial.
What can “leave me alone” mean after that?
The system is settled, dimensions fixed.
Another one’s hand feels like a starfish.
Makes me hysterical like the word perestroika.
But they all dig the way the pepper is rosy in the vodka.
It’s verbocity that creates jokers.
Brick and grit are the candy and frosting
where volunteers and teachers write cards that go:
“Donate books that say NOT and NO and poets
who say Urn instead of Oh.”
How do the children convert their troubles
into hip-hop? Dunno—but it’s wonderful.
| Fanny Howe | Living,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life |
60 |
The Pilgrim
|
"Such a palmer ne'er was seene, Lesse Love himselfe had palmer beene." Never too late.
Pilgrim feet, pray whither bound? Pilgrim eyes, pray whither bent? Sandal-shod and travel-gowned, Lo, I seek the way they went Late who passed toward Holy Land. Pilgrim, it was long ago; None remains who saw that band; Grass and forest overgrow Every path their footing wore. Men are wise; they seek no more Roads that lead to Holy Land. Proud his look, as who should say: I shall find where lies the way. Pilgrim, thou art fair of face, Staff and scrip are not for thee; Gentle pilgrim, of thy grace, Leave thy quest, and bide with me. Love shall serve thee, joy shall bless; Thou wert made for tenderness: God's green world is fair and sweet; Not o'er sea and Eastern strand, But where friend and lover meet Lies the way to Holy Land. Low his voice, his lashes wet: One day if God will—not yet. Pilgrim, pardon me and heed. Men of old who took that way Went for fame of goodly deed, Or, if sooth the stories say, Sandalled priest, or knight in selle, Flying each in pain and hate, Harassed by stout fiends of hell, Sought his crime to expiate. Prithee, Pilgrim, go not hence; Clear thy brow, and white thy hand, What shouldst thou with penitence? Wherefore seek to Holy Land? Stern the whisper on his lip: Sin and shame are in my scrip. Pilgrim, pass, since it must be; Take thy staff, and have thy will; Prayer and love shall follow thee; I will watch thee o'er the hill. What thy fortune God doth know; By what paths thy feet must go. Far and dim the distance lies, Yet my spirit prophesies: Not in vigil lone and late, Bowed upon the tropic sand, But within the city gate, In the struggle of the street, Suddenly thine eyes shall meet His whose look is Holy Land. Smiled the pilgrim, sad and sage: Long must be my pilgrimage.
| Sophie Jewett | Travels & Journeys,Religion |
61 |
If Spirits Walk
|
“I have heard (but not believed) the spirits of the dead
May walk again.”
Winter’s Tale
If spirits walk, Love, when the night climbs slow
The slant footpath where we were wont to go,
Be sure that I shall take the self-same way
To the hill-crest, and shoreward, down the gray,
Sheer, gravelled slope, where vetches straggling grow.
Look for me not when gusts of winter blow,
When at thy pane beat hands of sleet and snow;
I would not come thy dear eyes to affray,
If spirits walk.
But when, in June, the pines are whispering low,
And when their breath plays with thy bright hair so
As some one's fingers once were used to play—
That hour when birds leave song, and children pray,
Keep the old tryst, sweetheart, and thou shalt know
If spirits walk.
| Sophie Jewett | Love,Heartache & Loss,Relationships,Ghosts & the Supernatural |
62 |
Song
|
“O Love, thou art winged and swift,
Yet stay with me evermore!”
And I guarded my house with bolt and bar
Lest Love fly forth at the door.
Without, in the world, ’t was cold,
While Love and I together
Laughed and sang by my red hearth-fire,
Nor knew it was winter weather.
Sweet Love would lull me to sleep,
In his tireless arm caressed;
His shadowing wings and burning eyes
Like night and stars wrought rest.
And ever the beat of Love’s heart
As a chime rang at my ear;
And ever Love’s bending, beautiful face
Covered me close from fear.
Was it long ere I waked alone?
A snow-drift whitened the floor;
I saw spent ashes upon my hearth
And Death in my open door.
| Sophie Jewett | Living,Death,Love,Heartache & Loss,Romantic Love,Relationships,Nature,Winter |
63 |
To a Child
|
The leaves talked in the twilight, dear;
Hearken the tale they told:
How in some far-off place and year,
Before the world grew old,
I was a dreaming forest tree,
You were a wild, sweet bird
Who sheltered at the heart of me
Because the north wind stirred;
How, when the chiding gale was still,
When peace fell soft on fear,
You stayed one golden hour to fill
My dream with singing, dear.
To-night the self-same songs are sung
The first green forest heard;
My heart and the gray world grow young—
To shelter you, my bird.
| Sophie Jewett | Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Birth,Birthdays,Mother's Day |
64 |
Midwinter
|
All night I dreamed of roses,
Wild tangle by the sea,
And shadowy garden closes.
Dream-led I met with thee.
Around thee swayed the roses,
Beyond thee sang the sea;
The shadowy garden closes
Were Paradise to me.
O Love, ’mid the dream-roses
Abide to heal, to save!
The world that day discloses
Narrows to one white grave.
| Sophie Jewett | Living,Death,Nature,Winter |
65 |
In Harvest
|
Mown meadows skirt the standing wheat;
I linger, for the hay is sweet,
New-cut and curing in the sun.
Like furrows, straight, the windrows run,
Fallen, gallant ranks that tossed and bent
When, yesterday, the west wind went
A-rioting through grass and grain.
To-day no least breath stirs the plain;
Only the hot air, quivering, yields
Illusive motion to the fields
Where not the slenderest tassel swings.
Across the wheat flash sky-blue wings;
A goldfinch dangles from a tall,
Full-flowered yellow mullein; all
The world seems turning blue and gold.
Unstartled, since, even from of old,
Beauty has brought keen sense of her,
I feel the withering grasses stir;
Along the edges of the wheat,
I hear the rustle of her feet:
And yet I know the whole sea lies,
And half the earth, between our eyes.
| Sophie Jewett | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Summer |
66 |
The Watergaw
|
Ae weet forenicht i’ the yow-trummle
I saw yon antrin thing,
A watergaw wi’ its chitterin’ licht
Ayont the on-ding;
An’ I thocht o’ the last wild look ye gied
Afore ye deed!
There was nae reek i’ the laverock’s hoose
That nicht—an’ nane i’ mine;
But I hae thocht o’ that foolish licht
Ever sin’ syne;
An’ I think that mebbe at last I ken
What your look meant then.
| Hugh MacDiarmid | Living,Death,Relationships,Nature,Weather |
67 |
The Sauchs in the Reuch Heuch Hauch
|
(For George Reston Malloch)
There’s teuch sauchs growin’ i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch.
Like the sauls o’ the damned are they,
And ilk ane yoked in a whirligig
Is birlin’ the lee-lang day.
O we come doon frae oor stormiest moods,
And Licht like a bird i’ the haun’,
But the teuch sauchs there i’ the Reuch Heuch Hauch
As the deil’s ain hert are thrawn.
The winds ’ud pu’ them up by the roots,
Tho’ it broke the warl’ asunder,
But they rin richt doon thro’ the boddom o’ Hell,
And nane kens hoo fer under!
There’s no’ a licht that the Heavens let loose
Can calm them a hanlawhile,
Nor frae their ancient amplefeyst
Sall God’s ain sel’ them wile.
| Hugh MacDiarmid | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Trees & Flowers,Religion,God & the Divine |
68 |
from Water Music
|
(To William and Flora Johnstone)
Wheesht, wheesht, Joyce, and let me hear
Nae Anna Livvy’s lilt,
But Wauchope, Esk, and Ewes again,
Each wi’ its ain rhythms till’t. | Hugh MacDiarmid | Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals |
69 |
Stony Limits
|
(In Memoriam: Charles Doughty, 1843-1926)
Under no hanging heaven-rooted tree,
Though full of mammuks’ nests,
Bone of old Britain we bury thee
But heeding your unspoken hests
Naught not coeval with the Earth
And indispensable till its end
With what whom you despised may deem the dearth
Of your last resting-place dare blend.
Where nature is content with little so are you
So be it the little to which all else is due.
Nor in vain mimicry of the powers
That lifted up the mountains shall we raise
A stone less of nature’s shaping than of ours
To mark the unfrequented place.
You were not filial to all else
Save to the Dust, the mother of all men,
And where you lie no other sign needs tells
(Unless a gaunt shape resembles you again
In some momentary effect of light on rock)
But your family likeness to all her stock.
Flowers may be strewn upon the grave
Of easy come easy go.
Fitly only some earthquake or tidal wave
O’er you its red rose or its white may throw
But naught else smaller than darkness and light
—Both here, though of no man’s bringing!—
And as any past time had been in your sight
Were you now from your bed upspringing,
Now or a billion years hence, you would see
Scant difference, eyed like eternity.
How should we have anything to give you
In death who had nothing in life,
Attempting in our sand-riddles to sieve you
Who were with nothing, but the sheer elements rife?
Anchor of truth, facile as granite you lie,
A plug suspended in England’s false dreams.
Your worth will be seen by and by,
Like God’s purpose in what men deem their schemes,
Nothing ephemeral can seek what lies in this ground
Since nothing can be sought but the found.
The poem that would praise you must be
Like the glass of some rock, sleek brown, crowded
With dark incipient crystal growths, we see;
Or a glimpse of Petavius may have endowed it
With the tubular and dumb-bell-shaped inclusions surrounded
By the broad reaction rims it needs.
I have seen it in dreams and know how it abounded
—Ah! would I could find in me like seeds!—
As the north-easterly garden in the lunation grows,
A spectacle not one man in ten millions knows.
I belong to a different country than yours
And none of my travels have been in the same lands
Save where Arzachel or Langrenus allures
Such spirits as ours, and the Straight Wall stands,
But crossing shear planes extruded in long lines of ridges,
Torsion cylinders, crater rings, and circular seas
And ultra-basic xenoliths that make men look midges
Belong to my quarter as well, and with ease
I too can work in bright green and all the curious interference
Colours that under crossed nicols have a mottled appearance.
Let my first offering be these few pyroxenes twinned
On the orthopinacoid and hour-glass scheme,
Fine striae, microline cross-hatchings, and this wind
Blowing plumes of vapour forever it would seem
From cone after cone diminishing sterile and grey
In the distance; dun sands in ever-changing squalls;
Crush breccias and overthrusts; and such little array
Of Geology’s favourite fal-de-lals
And demolitions and entrenchments of weather
As any turn of my eyes brings together.
I know how on turning to noble hills
And stark deserts happily still preserved
For men whom no gregariousness fills
With the loneliness for which they are nerved
—The lonely at-one-ment with all worth while—
I can feel as if the landscape and I
Became each other and see my smile
In the corners of the vastest contours lie
And share the gladness and peace you knew,
—The supreme human serenity that was you!
I have seen Silence lift his head
And Song, like his double, lift yours,
And know, while nearly all that seems living is dead,
You were always consubstantial with all that endures.
Would it were on Earth! Not since Ezekiel has that faw sun ringed
A worthier head; red as Adam you stood
In the desert, the horizon with vultures black-winged,
And sang and died in this still greater solitude
Where I sit by your skull whose emptiness is worth
The sum of almost all the full heads now on Earth
—By your roomy skull where most men might well spend
Longer than you did in Arabia, friend!
| Hugh MacDiarmid | Living,Death,Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals |
70 |
from On a Raised Beach
|
(To James H. Whyte)
All is lithogenesis—or lochia,
Carpolite fruit of the forbidden tree,
Stones blacker than any in the Caaba,
Cream-coloured caen-stone, chatoyant pieces,
Celadon and corbeau, bistre and beige,
Glaucous, hoar, enfouldered, cyathiform,
Making mere faculae of the sun and moon,
I study you glout and gloss, but have
No cadrans to adjust you with, and turn again
From optik to haptik and like a blind man run
My fingers over you, arris by arris, burr by burr,
Slickensides, truité, rugas, foveoles,
Bringing my aesthesis in vain to bear,
An angle-titch to all your corrugations and coigns,
Hatched foraminous cavo-rilievo of the world,
Deictic, fiducial stones. Chiliad by chiliad
What bricole piled you here, stupendous cairn?
What artist poses the Earth écorché thus,
Pillar of creation engouled in me?
What eburnation augments you with men’s bones,
Every energumen an Endymion yet?
All the other stones are in this haecceity it seems,
But where is the Christophanic rock that moved?
What Cabirian song from this catasta comes?
Deep conviction or preference can seldom
Find direct terms in which to express itself.
Today on this shingle shelf
I understand this pensive reluctance so well,
This not discommendable obstinacy,
These contrivances of an inexpressive critical feeling,
These stones with their resolve that Creation shall not be
Injured by iconoclasts and quacks. Nothing has stirred
Since I lay down this morning an eternity ago
But one bird. The widest open door is the least liable to intrusion,
Ubiquitous as the sunlight, unfrequented as the sun.
The inward gates of a bird are always open.
It does not know how to shut them.
That is the secret of its song,
But whether any man’s are ajar is doubtful.
I look at these stones and know little about them,
But I know their gates are open too,
Always open, far longer open, than any bird’s can be,
That every one of them has had its gates wide open far longer
Than all birds put together, let alone humanity,
Though through them no man can see,
No man nor anything more recently born than themselves
And that is everything else on the Earth.
I too lying here have dismissed all else.
Bread from stones is my sole and desperate dearth,
From stones, which are to the Earth as to the sunlight
Is the naked sun which is for no man’s sight.
I would scorn to cry to any easier audience
Or, having cried, to lack patience to await the response.
I am no more indifferent or ill-disposed to life than death is;
I would fain accept it all completely as the soil does;
Already I feel all that can perish perishing in me
As so much has perished and all will yet perish in these stones.
I must begin with these stones as the world began.
Shall I come to a bird quicker than the world’s course ran?
To a bird, and to myself, a man?
And what if I do, and further?
I shall only have gone a little way to go back again
And be like a fleeting deceit of development,
Iconoclasts, quacks. So these stones have dismissed
All but all of evolution, unmoved by it,
(Is there anything to come they will not likewise dismiss?)
As the essential life of mankind in the mass
Is the same as their earliest ancestors yet.
| Hugh MacDiarmid | Time & Brevity,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Sciences,Social Commentaries,History & Politics |
71 |
The Little White Rose
|
(To John Gawsworth)
The rose of all the world is not for me.
I want for my part
Only the little white rose of Scotland
That smells sharp and sweet—and breaks the heart.
| Hugh MacDiarmid | Love,Realistic & Complicated,Nature,Trees & Flowers,Social Commentaries,History & Politics |
72 |
In Houston
|
I’d dislocated my life, so I went to the zoo.
It was December but it wasn’t December. Pansies
just planted were blooming in well-groomed beds.
Lovers embraced under the sky’s Sunday blue.
Children rode around and around on pastel trains.
I read the labels stuck on every cage the way
people at museums do, art being less interesting
than information. Each fenced-in plot had a map,
laminated with a stain to tell where in the world
the animals had been taken from. Rhinos waited
for rain in the rhino-colored dirt, too grief-struck
to move their wrinkles, their horns too weak
to ever be hacked off by poachers for aphrodisiacs.
Five white ducks agitated the chalky waters
of a duck pond with invisible orange feet
while a little girl in pink ruffles
tossed pork rinds at their disconsolate backs.
This wasn’t my life! I’d meant to look
with the wise tough eye of exile, I wanted
not to anthropomorphize, not to equate, for instance,
the lemur’s displacement with my displacement.
The arched aviary flashed with extravagance,
plumage so exuberant, so implausible, it seemed
cartoonish, and the birdsongs unintelligible,
babble, all their various languages unravelling—
no bird can get its song sung right, separated from
models of its own species.
For weeks I hadn’t written a sentence,
for two days I hadn’t spoken to an animate thing.
I couldn’t relate to a giraffe—
I couldn’t look one in the face.
I’d have said, if anyone had asked,
I’d been mugged by the Gulf climate.
In a great barren space, I watched a pair
of elephants swaying together, a rhythm
too familiar to be mistaken, too exclusive.
My eyes sweated to see the bull, his masterful trunk
swinging, enter their barn of concrete blocks,
to watch his obedient wife follow. I missed
the bitter tinny Boston smell of first snow,
the huddling in a cold bus tunnel.
At the House of Nocturnal Mammals,
I stepped into a furtive world of bats,
averted my eyes at the gloomy dioramas,
passed glassed-in booths of lurking rodents—
had I known I’d find what I came for at last?How did we get here, dear sloth, my soul, my sister?
Clinging to a tree-limb with your three-toed feet,
your eyes closed tight, you calm my idleness,
my immigrant isolation. But a tiny tamarin monkey
who shares your ersatz rainforest runs at you,
teasing, until you move one slow, dripping,
hairy arm, then the other, the other, the other,
pulling your tear-soaked body, its too-few
vertebrae, its inferior allotment of muscles
along the dead branch, going almost nowhere
slowly as is humanly possible, nudged
by the bright orange primate taunting, nipping,
itching at you all the time, like ambition.
| Gail Mazur | Relationships,Pets,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life |
73 |
Poem for Christian, My Student
|
He reminds me of someone I used to know,
but who? Before class,
he comes to my office to shmooze,
a thousand thousand pointless interesting
speculations. Irrepressible boy,
his assignments are rarely completed,
or actually started. This week, instead
of research in the stacks, he’s performing
with a reggae band that didn’t exist last week.
Kids danced to his music
and stripped, he tells me gleefully,
high spirit of the street festival.
He’s the singer, of course—
why ask if he studied an instrument?
On the brink of graduating with
an engineering degree (not, it turned out,
his forte), he switched to English,
his second language. It’s hard to swallow
the bravura of his academic escapes
or tell if the dark eyes laugh with his face.
Once, he brought me a tiny persimmon
he’d picked on campus; once, a poem
about an elderly friend in New Delhi
who left him volumes of Tagore
and memories of avuncular conversation.
My encouragement makes him skittish—
it doesn’t suit his jubilant histrionics
of despair. And I remember myself
shrinking from enthusiasm or praise,
the prospect of effort-drudgery.
Success—a threat. A future, we figure,
of revision—yet what can the future be
but revision and repair? Now, on the brink
again, graduation’s postponed, the brilliant
thesis on Walker Percy unwritten.
“I’ll drive to New Orleans and soak
it up and write my paper in a weekend,”
he announces in the Honors office.
And, “I want to be a bum in daytime
and a reggae star at night!”
What could I give him from my life
or art that matters, how share
the desperate slumber of my early years,
the flashes of inspiration and passion
in a life on hold? If I didn’t fool
myself or anyone, no one could touch
me, or tell me much . . . This gloomy
Houston Monday, he appears at my door,
so sunny I wouldn’t dare to wake him
now, or say it matters if he wakes at all.
“Write a poem about me!” he commands,
and so I do.
| Gail Mazur | Living,Coming of Age,Disappointment & Failure,Midlife,School & Learning,Poetry & Poets |
74 |
Maternal
|
On the telephone, friends mistake us now
when we first say hello—not after.
And that oddly optimistic lilt
we share nourishes my hopes:
we do sound happy. . . .
Last night, in my dream’s crib,
a one-day infant girl.
I wasn’t totally unprepared—
there was the crib, and cotton kimonos,
not just a padded dresser drawer.
And then, I knew I could drive
to the store for the tiny, funny
clothes my daughter wears.
I was in a familiar room
and leaned over the rail, crooningHello, and the smiling baby—
she’d be too young for speech,
I know, or smiles—
gurgled back at me, Hullo.
—If I could begin again,
I’d hold her longer, closer!
Maybe that way, when night opens
into morning, and all my windows
gape at the heartbreaking street,
my dreams wouldn’t pierce so,
I wouldn’t hold my breath
at the parts of my life still in hiding,
my childhood’s white house
where I lunged toward the flowers of love
as if I were courting death. . . .
Over the crib, a mobile was spinning,
bright birds going nowhere,
primary colors, primary
as mothering once seemed. . . .
Later, I wonder why I dreamt
that dream, yearning for what I’ve had,
and have
why it was my mother’s room,
the blonde moderne bedroom set
hidden under years of junk—a spare room’s
the nicest way to put it,
though now all
her crowded rooms are spare—
| Gail Mazur | Living,Growing Old,Infancy,Parenthood,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Home Life |
75 |
Maybe It’s Only the Monotony
|
of these long scorching days
but today my daughter
is truly exasperating—Stop it! I shout—or I’ll—
and I twist her little pinked arm
slowly,
calibrating my ferocity—You can’t hurt me you can’t hurt me!
She’s so defiant, glowering,
glaring at me—
but frightened,
her eyes bright with tears—See, I’m not even crying!
I see. But it’s the angel
of extermination
I see, shining
in his black trappings,
and turning ecstatically
toward him, a little Jewish girl
tempts him
to play his game of massacre.
—after Vittorio Sereni
| Gail Mazur | Living,Parenthood,Relationships,Home Life |
76 |
Made Shine
|
This face had no use for light, took none of it,
Grew cavernous against stars, bore into noon
A dark of midnight by its own resources.
Yet where it lay in sleep, where the pillows held it
With the blind plaster over it and the four walls
Keeping the night carefully, it was undone.
Sixty-watt light, squared to a window frame,
Across a well of air, across wind and window
Leaped and made shine the dark face in its sleep.
| Josephine Miles | null |
77 |
So Graven
|
Simplicity so graven hurts the sense.
The monumental and the simple break
And the great tablets shatter down in deed.
Every year the quick particular jig
Of unresolved event moves in the mind,
And there's the trick simplicity has to win.
| Josephine Miles | null |
78 |
The Sympathizers
|
To this man, to his boned shoulders
Came the descent of pain.
All kinds,
Cruel, blind, dear, horrid, hallowed,
Rained, again, again.
To this small white blind boned face,
Wherever it was,
Descended
The blows of pain, it took as it were blinded,
As it were made for this.
We were there. We uneasy
Did not know if it were.
Knew neither
The reason nor the man nor whether
To share, or to beware.
| Josephine Miles | Living,Health & Illness,Social Commentaries |
Subsets and Splits