Eagle Poem

 

Eagle Poem - Joy Harjo

 

To pray you open your whole self

To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon

To one whole voice that is you.

And know there is more

That you can’t see, can’t hear;

Can’t know except in moments

Steadily growing, and in languages

That aren’t always sound but other

Circles of motion.

Like eagle that Sunday morning

Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky

In wind, swept our hearts clean

With sacred wings.

We see you, see ourselves and know

That we must take the utmost care

And kindness in all things.

Breathe in, knowing we are made of

All this, and breathe, knowing

We are truly blessed because we

Were born, and die soon within a

True circle of motion,

Like eagle rounding out the morning

Inside us.

We pray that it will be done

In beauty.

In beauty.

Harlem Night Song

Harlem Night Song - Langston Hughes
 
Come,
Let us roam the night together
Singing.

I love you.

Across
The Harlem roof-tops
Moon is shining.
Night sky is blue.
Stars are great drops
Of golden dew.

Down the street
A band is playing.

I love you.

Come,
Let us roam the night together
Singing.

The Weeping Girl

La Figlia Che Piange (The Weeping Girl) - T. S. Eliot

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair —
Lean on a garden urn —
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair —
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise —
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight, and the noon's repose.

Mending Wall

 

'Something there is that doesn't love a wall..' Yes, there is. Take that Donald Trump.  

 

 

Mending Wall - Robert Frost

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing:

I have come after them and made repair

Where they have left not one stone on a stone,

But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,

To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,

No one has seen them made or heard them made,

But at spring mending-time we find them there.

I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

To each the boulders that have fallen to each.

And some are loaves and some so nearly balls

We have to use a spell to make them balance:

"Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"

We wear our fingers rough with handling them.

Oh, just another kind of out-door game,

One on a side. It comes to little more:

There where it is we do not need the wall:

He is all pine and I am apple orchard.

My apple trees will never get across

And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.

He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."

Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder

If I could put a notion in his head:

"Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it

Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know

What I was walling in or walling out,

And to whom I was like to give offence.

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,

That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,

But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather

He said it for himself. I see him there

Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top

In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.

He moves in darkness as it seems to me,

Not of woods only and the shade of trees.

He will not go behind his father's saying,

And he likes having thought of it so well

He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

The Second Coming

 

This is the only poem that can fit the devastation and fearful consequences of today. 

 

The Second Coming - WB Yeats

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

November Rain

 

November Rain - Linda Pastan

How separate we are
under our black umbrellas—dark
planets in our own small orbits,

hiding from this wet assault
of weather as if water
would violate the skin,

as if these raised silk canopies
could protect us
from whatever is coming next—

December with its white
enamel surfaces; the numbing
silences of winter.

From above we must look
like a family of bats—
ribbed wings spread

against the rain,
swooping towards any
makeshift shelter.

A Rhyme for Halloween

 

Happy Halloween!

 

 

A Rhyme for Halloween -  Maurice Kilwein Guevara

 

Tonight I light the candles of my eyes in the lee

And swing down this branch full of red leaves.

Yellow moon, skull and spine of the hare,

Arrow me to town on the neck of the air.

I hear the undertaker make love in the heather;

The candy maker, poor fellow, is under the weather.

Skunk, moose, raccoon, they go to the doors in threes

With a torch in their hands or pleas: "O, please . . ."

Baruch Spinoza and the butcher are drunk:

One is the tail and one is the trunk

Of a beast who dances in circles for beer

And doesn't think twice to learn how to steer.

Our clock is blind, our clock is dumb.

Its hands are broken, its fingers numb.

No time for the martyr of our fair town

Who wasn't a witch because she could drown.

Now the dogs of the cemetery are starting to bark

At the vision of her, bobbing up through the dark.

When she opens her mouth to gasp for air,

A moth flies out and lands in her hair.

The apples are thumping, winter is coming.

The lips of the pumpkin soon will be humming.

By the caw of the crow on the first of the year,

Something will die, something appear.

Plant and Phantom

 A slightly creepy rumination on the mortal condition. 

 

Plant and Phantom - Louis Mac Niece

Man: a flutter of pages,
Leaves in the Sibyl’s cave,
Shadow changing from dawn to twilight,
Murmuration of corn in the wind,
A shaking of hands with hallucinations,
Hobnobbing with ghosts, a pump of blood,
Mirage, a spider dangling
Over chaos and man a chaos.

Who cheats the pawky Fates
By what he does, not is,
By what he makes, imposing
On flux an architectonic—
Cone of marble, calyx of ice,
Spandrel and buttress, iron
Loops across the void,
Stepping stones in the random.

Man: a dance of midges,
Gold glass in the sunlight,
Prattle of water, palaver
Of starlings in a disused
Chimney, a gimcrack castle,
Seaweed tugging the rocks,
Guttering candles, the Northern
Lights and the Seventh Wave.

Whose life is a bluff, professing
To follow the laws of Nature,
In fact a revolt, a mad
Conspiracy and usurpation,
Smuggling over the frontier
Of fact a sense of value,
Metabolism of death,
Re-orchestration of world.

Man: a riot of banners,
Bulge in the wind, a prism,
Organ-pipes in the sunset,
Orgy of brains and glands,
Thunder-crackle and the bounce of hail,
Wink of wings and fog’s delusion,
A rampant martyr, a midnight
Echo, a forest fire.

Who felt with his hands in empty
Air for the Word and did not
Find it but felt the aura,
Dew on the skin, could not forget it.
Ever since has fumbled, intrigued,
Clambered behind and beyond, and learnt
Words of blessing and cursing, hoping
To find in the end the Word Itself.

Spirits of the Dead

 

Well it wouldn't be Halloween without the master of morbidity and mystery - Edgar Allan Poe.

Spirits of the Dead - Edgar Allan Poe

 

Thy soul shall find itself alone

’Mid dark thoughts of the gray tombstone—

Not one, of all the crowd, to pry

Into thine hour of secrecy.

       II

Be silent in that solitude,

   Which is not loneliness—for then

The spirits of the dead who stood

   In life before thee are again

In death around thee—and their will

Shall overshadow thee: be still.

       III

The night, tho’ clear, shall frown—

And the stars shall look not down

From their high thrones in the heaven,

With light like Hope to mortals given—

But their red orbs, without beam,

To thy weariness shall seem

As a burning and a fever

Which would cling to thee for ever.

       IV

Now are thoughts thou shalt not banish,

Now are visions ne’er to vanish;

From thy spirit shall they pass

No more—like dew-drop from the grass.

       V

The breeze—the breath of God—is still—

And the mist upon the hill,

Shadowy—shadowy—yet unbroken,

Is a symbol and a token—

How it hangs upon the trees,

A mystery of mysteries!

Real Ghosts

 

' ...but love that is never spoken
Goes like a ghost through the winding years...'

Confession: I don't believe in those supernatural entities we call ghosts.  

But I do believe in the metaphorical kind, specifically the kind Sara Teasdale so succinctly describes here.  Yes, those are the real hauntings - things that never were, but what longed to be.

(This song by the way,  compliments this poem perfectly.)

 

The Ghost Poem - Sara Teasdale

I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
But my heart was full of my new love's glory,
My eyes were laughing and unafraid.

I met one who had loved me madly
And told his love for all to hear -
But we talked of a thousand things together,
The past was buried too deep to fear.

I met the other, whose love was given
With never a kiss and scarcely a word -
Oh, it was then the terror took me
Of words unuttered that breathed and stirred.

Oh, love that lives its life with laughter
Or love that lives its life with tears
Can die - but love that is never spoken
Goes like a ghost through the winding years. . . .

I went back to the clanging city,
I went back where my old loves stayed,
My heart was full of my new love's glory, -
But my eyes were suddenly afraid.

Voodoo Doll

I love this!

(Yes, and this is by the film master of the macabre - Tim Burton. Illustration too. From 'The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy & Other Stories')

Voodoo Girl - Tim Burton

 

Her skin is white cloth,
and she's all sewn apart
and she has many colored pins
sticking out of her heart.

She has a beautiful set
of hypno-disk eyes,
the ones that she uses
to hypnotize guys.

She has many different zombies
who are deeply in her trance.
She even has a zombie
who was originally from France.

But she knows she has a curse on her,
a curse she cannot win.
For if someone gets
too close to her,

the pins stick farther in. 

Ouija

 

Sylvia Plath has creepy perfected here in her descriptions of the ouija board.

Ouija - Sylvia Plath

It is a chilly god, a god of shades,
Rises to the glass from his black fathoms.
At the window, those unborn, those undone
Assemble with the frail paleness of moths,
An envious phosphorescence in their wings.
Vermilions, bronzes, colors of the sun
In the coal fire will not wholly console them.
Imagine their deep hunger, deep as the dark
For the blood-heat that would ruddle or reclaim.
The glass mouth sucks blood-heat from my forefinger.
The old god dribbles, in return, his words.

The old god, too, writes aureate poetry
In tarnished modes, maundering among the wastes,
Fair chronicler of every foul declension.
Age, and ages of prose, have uncoiled
His talking whirlwind, abated his excessive temper
When words, like locusts, drummed the darkening air
And left the cobs to rattle, bitten clean.
Skies once wearing a blue, divine hauteur
Ravel above us, mistily descend,
Thickening with motes, to a marriage with the mire.

He hymns the rotten queen with saffron hair
Who has saltier aphrodisiacs
Than virgins' tears. That bawdy queen of death,
Her wormy couriers are at his bones.
Still he hymns juice of her, hot nectarine.
I see him, horny-skinned and tough, construe
What flinty pebbles the ploughblade upturns
As ponderable tokens of her love.
He, godly, doddering, spells
No succinct Gabriel from the letters here
But floridly, his amorous nostalgias.

Ghost Music

 

 'The ghosts of long-dead melodies...'

 

Ghost Music - Robert Graves
 
Gloomy and bare the organ-loft,
Bent-backed and blind the organist.
From rafters looming shadowy,
From the pipes' tuneful company,
Drifted together drowsily,
Innumerable, formless, dim,
The ghosts of long-dead melodies,
Of anthems, stately, thunderous,
Of Kyries shrill and tremulous:
In melancholy drowsy-sweet
They huddled there in harmony.
Like bats at noontide rafter-hung.

Autumn Sky

'Come, lovers of dark corners,

The sky says,

And sit in one of my dark corners.'

Today begins my annual Halloween week themed postings.

First up, it's the delectably random and  surreal Charles Simic.
An Autumn sky can contain many things: the golden glow of a Hunter's Moon, a flight of birds,
or maybe even if your eye is quick enough, a witch on a broomstick!

Autumn Sky - Charles Simic 

In my great grandmother's time,

All one needed was a broom

To get to see places

And give the geese a chase in the sky.

               •

The stars know everything,

So we try to read their minds.

As distant as they are,

We choose to whisper in their presence.

               •

Oh Cynthia,

Take a clock that has lost its hands

For a ride.

Get me a room at Hotel Eternity

Where Time likes to stop now and then.

               •

Come, lovers of dark corners,

The sky says,

And sit in one of my dark corners.

There are tasty little zeroes

In the peanut dish tonight.

Watch Repair

 

 

 

When keen observation becomes transformation, that's poetry!

 

Watch Repair - Charles Simic

 

A small wheel

Incandescent,

Shivering like

A pinned butterfly.

Hands thrown up

In all directions:

The crossroads

One arrives at

In a nightmare.

Higher than that

Number 12 presides

Like a beekeeper

Over the swarming honeycomb

Of the open watch.

Other wheels

That could fit

Inside a raindrop.

Tools

That must be splinters

Of arctic starlight.

Tiny golden mills

Grinding invisible

Coffee beans.

When the coffee’s boiling

Cautiously,

So it doesn’t burn us,

We raise it

To the lips

Of the nearest

Ear.

Love in Autumn

 

What can I say? I'm in a lyrical swooning mood....
 


Love in Autumn - Sara Teasdale

I sought among the drifting leaves,
The golden leaves that once were green,
To see if Love were hiding there
And peeping out between.

For thro' the silver showers of May
And thro' the summer's heavy heat,
In vain I sought his golden head
And light, fast-flying feet.

Perhaps when all the world is bare
And cruel winter holds the land,
The Love that finds no place to hide
Will run and catch my hand.

I shall not care to have him then,
I shall be bitter and a-cold --
It grows too late for frolicking
When all the world is old.

Then little hiding Love, come forth,
Come forth before the autumn goes,
And let us seek thro' ruined paths
The garden's last red rose.

Autumn love

 

'Autumn Hug' ~ Leonid Afremov

 Well this is just gorgeous.



Autumn - Garrison Keillor

Here on an autumn night in the sweet orchard smell,
Sitting in a pile of leaves under the starry sky,
Oh what stories we could tell
With this starlight to tell them by.

October night, and you, and paradise,
So lovely and so full of grace,
Above your head, the universe has hung its lights,
And I reach out my hand to touch your face.

I believe in impulse, in all that is green,
Believe in the foolish vision that comes true,
Believe that all that is essential is unseen,
And for this lifetime I believe in you.

All of the lovers and the love they made:
Nothing that was between them was a mistake.
All that we did for love's sake,
Is not wasted and will never fade.

All who have loved shall be forever young
And walk in grandeur on a cool fall night
Along the avenue,
They live in every song that is ever sung,
In every painting of pure light,
In every pas de deux.

Oh love that shines in every star
And love reflected in the silver moon.
It is not here, but it's not far.
Not yet, but it will be here soon.

The Mower

 

 

Always serious Larkin, but my, does this poem pack a punch. Its brevity and starkness considerably powerful.

 

 

The Mower - Philip Larkin 

 

The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found   

A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,   

Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.   

Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world   

Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.

The first day after a death, the new absence   

Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind   

While there is still time.

After Apple Picking

This is one of Frost's most famous poems and it's easy to see why. Frost is a master of the metaphor and if you substitute the apples here in 'After Apple Picking' for harvests reaped in life, then you will discover many philosophical depths to this seemingly simple poem.


After Apple-Picking - Robert Frost

My long two-pointed ladder's sticking through a tree

Toward heaven still,

And there's a barrel that I didn't fill

Beside it, and there may be two or three

Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.

But I am done with apple-picking now.

Essence of winter sleep is on the night,

The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.

I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight

I got from looking through a pane of glass

I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough

And held against the world of hoary grass.

It melted, and I let it fall and break.

But I was well

Upon my way to sleep before it fell,

And I could tell

What form my dreaming was about to take.

Magnified apples appear and disappear,

Stem end and blossom end,

And every fleck of russet showing clear.

My instep arch not only keeps the ache,

It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round.

I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.

And I keep hearing from the cellar bin

The rumbling sound

Of load on load of apples coming in.

For I have had too much

Of apple-picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.

There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,

Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.

For all

That struck the earth,

No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,

Went surely to the cider-apple heap

As of no worth.

One can see what will trouble

This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.

Were he not gone,

The woodchuck could say whether it's like his

Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,

Or just some human sleep.

Late September Song

Late September Song - Linda Pastan

With the sound of
a freight train
rushing
through the trees,
the first strong
wind

of autumn
makes each
leaf
sing the song
of its own
execution.

The Gift

 

The Gift -  Mary Oliver

Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.

So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful.That the gift has been given.

The Seven Sorrows

 Autumn, a season of goodbyes and sorrows.

The Seven Sorrows - Ted Hughes

 

The first sorrow of autumn
Is the slow goodbye
Of the garden who stands so long in the evening-
A brown poppy head,
The stalk of a lily,
And still cannot go.

 The second sorrow
Is the empty feet
Of a pheasant who hangs from a hook with his brothers.
The woodland of gold
Is folded in feathers
With its head in a bag.

And the third sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the sun who has gathered the birds and who gathers
The minutes of evening,
The golden and holy
Ground of the picture.

The fourth sorrow
Is the pond gone black
Ruined and sunken the city of water-
The beetle’s palace,
The catacombs
Of the dragonfly.

And the fifth sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the woodland that quietly breaks up its camp.
One day it’s gone.
It has only left litter-
Firewood, tentpoles.

And the sixth sorrow
Is the fox’s sorrow
The joy of the huntsman, the joy of the hounds,
The hooves that pound
Till earth closes her ear
To the fox’s prayer.

And the seventh sorrow
Is the slow goodbye
Of the face with its wrinkles that looks through the window
As the year packs up
Like a tatty fairground
That came for the children.

Autumn Equinox

Mabon - Annie Finch

For Mabon (fall equinox), Sept. 21

Our voices press

from us

and twine

around the year's

fermenting wine

Yellow fall roars

Over the ground.

Loud, in the leafy sun that pours

Liquid through doors,

Yellow, the leaves twist down

as the winding

of the vine

pulls our curling

voices—

Glowing in wind and change,

The orange leaf tells

How one more season will alter and range,

Working the strange

Colors of clamor and bells

In the winding

of the vine

our voices press out

from us

to twine

When autumn gathers, the tree

That the leaves sang

Reddens dark slowly, then, suddenly free,

Turns like a key,

Opening air where they hang

and the winding

of the vine

makes our voices

turn and wind

with the year’s

fermented wine

One of the hanging leaves,

Deeply maroon,

Tightens its final hold, receives,

Finally weaves

Through, and is covered soon

in the winding

of the vine—

Holding past summer's hold,

Open and strong,

One of the leaves in the crown is gold,

Set in the cold

Where the old seasons belong.

Here is my crown

Of winding vine,

Of leaves that dropped,

That fingers twined,

another crown

to yield and shine

with a year’s

fermented wine.

A Memory Lies in Me

Aren't some memories 'splendid sorrows', providing both pain and ecstasy? Memories we can never let go of; that lie deep in us, have become part of us. Anna Akhmatova explains it exquisitely here.
 

Like A White Stone - Anna Akhmatova

Like a white stone deep in a draw-well lying,
As hard and clear, a memory lies in me.
I cannot strive nor have I heart for striving:
It is such pain and yet such ecstasy.

It seems to me that someone looking closely
Into my eyes would see it, patent, pale.
And, seeing, would grow sadder and more thoughtful
Than one who listens to a bitter tale.

The ancient gods changed men to things, but left them
A consciousness that smoldered endlessly,
That splendid sorrows might endure forever.
And you are changed into a memory.

Trust

 

Trust - Thomas R. Smith

It’s like so many other things in life  
to which you must say no or yes.                                   
So you take your car to the new mechanic.  
Sometimes the best thing to do is trust.  

The package left with the disreputable-looking  
clerk, the check gulped by the night deposit,  
the envelope passed by dozens of strangers—  
all show up at their intended destinations.  

The theft that could have happened doesn’t.  
Wind finally gets where it was going  
through the snowy trees, and the river, even              
when frozen, arrives at the right place.                       

And sometimes you sense how faithfully your life  
is delivered, even though you can’t read the address.

September 11th (and Since)

 

"How are we not part of each other?"

I love the message of this poem, its empathy and truth. Powerful.
 


September 11th - Sharon Olds

On each September eleventh, I think about
the family - the young mother,
the young father, and their small child -
whom my relative killed, with his car, one sunny
day. And when he killed them, as if
stepping on the balsa figures of the creche,
I remembered that we had killed Jesus,
too. And I thought of everyone
killed in our name - without our having been asked.
Today we kneel, we bow down
to the families of September - and to all those
since that September, to whom what we feared
would happen has happened. We kneel to families
everywhere. How are we not part
of each other? It looks as if, someday,
we will all go up in smoke, together,
back to nothing. But look! Out of air,
of water, fire, and earth, we came, and then there
blossomed, from us, love itself,
love in a thousand languages,
each one to die for.

Summer to Autumn

 

As Summer into Autumn slips - Emily Dickinson

As Summer into Autumn slips
And yet we sooner say
"The Summer" than "the Autumn," lest
We turn the sun away,

And almost count it an Affront
The presence to concede
Of one however lovely, not
The one that we have loved -

So we evade the charge of Years
On one attempting shy
The Circumvention of the Shaft
Of Life's Declivity.

Nostalgia

 

Nostalgia - Charles Wright
 
Always it comes when we least expect it, like a wave,
Or like the shadow of several waves,
                                                             one after the next,
Becoming singular as the face

Of someone who rose and fell apart at the edge of our lives.

Breaks up and re-forms, breaks up, re-forms.
And all the attendant retinue of loss foams out
Brilliant and sea-white, then sinks away.

Memory’s dog-teeth,
                                   lovely detritus smoothed out and laid up.

And always the feeling comes that it was better ten,
Whatever it was—
                                people and places, the sweet taste of things—
And this one, wave borne and wave-washed, was part of all that.

We take the conceit in hand, and rub it for good luck.

Or rub it against the evil eye.
And yet, when that wave appears, or that wave’s shadow, we like it,
Or say we do,
                        and hope the next time

We’ll be surprised again, and returned again, depite the fact
The time will come, they say, when the weight of nostalgia,
                                                                             that ten-foot spread
Of sand in the heart, outweighs
Whatever living existence we drop on the scales.

May it never arrive, Lord, may it never arrive.
 

Lives

 

Remembering Seamus Heaney, three years gone today.


Lives (for Seamus Heaney) - Derek Mahon

First time out
I was a torc of gold
And wept tears of the sun.

That was fun
But they buried me
In the earth two thousand years

Till a labourer
Turned me up with a pick
In eighteen fifty-four

And sold me
For tea and sugar
In Newmarket-on-Fergus.

Once I was an oar
But stuck in the shore
To mark the place of a grave

When the lost ship
Sailed away. I thought
Of Ithaca, but soon decayed.

The time that I liked
Best was when
I was a bump of clay

In a Navaho rug,
Put there to mitigate
The too god-like

Perfection of that
Merely human artifact.
I served my maker well

He lived long
To be struck down in
Tucson by an electric shock

The night the lights
Went out in Europe
Never to shine again.

So many lives,
So many things to remember!
I was a stone in Tibet,

A tongue of bark
At the heart of Africa
Growing darker and darker …

It all seems
A little unreal now,
Now that I am

An anthropologist
With my own
Credit card, dictaphone,

Army-surplus boots
And a whole boatload
Of photographic equipment.

I know too much
To be anything any more;
And if in the distant

Future someone
Thinks he has once been me
As I am today,

Let him revise
His insolent ontology
Or teach himself to pray.

August Musing

I think we've reached that point now alright when we have to bade farewell to summer! This poem, in all its beauty, softens the blow a little. 

*(I found this poem on the beautiful Beyond the Fields We Know blog.)

August - Barbara Crooker

Summer sings its long song, and all the notes are green.
But there’s a click, somewhere in the middle
of the month, as we reach the turning point, the apex,
a Ferris wheel, cars tipping and tilting over the top,
and we see September up ahead, school and schedules
returning. And there’s the first night you step outside
and hear the katydids arguing, six more weeks
to frost, and you know you can make it through to fall.
Dark now at eight, nights finally cooling off for sleep,
no more twisting in damp sheets, hearing mosquitoes’
thirsty whines. Lakes of chicory and Queen Anne’s lace
mirror the sky’s high cirrus. Evenings grow chilly,
time for old sweaters and sweatpants, lying in the hammock
squinting to read in the quick-coming dusk.
A few fireflies punctuate the night’s black text,
and the moonlight is so thick, you could swim in it
until you reach the other side.

Explanations of Love

 

Explanations of Love - Carl Sandburg

There is a place where love begins and a place
where love ends.

There is a touch of two hands that foils all dictionaries.

There is a look of eyes fierce as a big Bethlehem open hearth
furnace or a little green-fire acetylene torch.

There are single careless bywords portentous as a
big bend in the Mississippi River.

Hands, eyes, bywords–out of these love makes
battlegrounds and workshops.

There is a pair of shoes love wears and the coming
is a mystery.

There is a warning love sends and the cost of it
is never written till long afterward.

There are explanations of love in all languages
and not one found wiser than this:

There is a place where love begins and a place
where love ends—and love asks nothing.

Love's Strategems

 

How love trumps all, even our flimsy attempts to avoid it.


Love's Strategems - Donald Justice

But these maneuverings to avoid
The touching of hands,
These shifts to keep the eyes employed
On objects more or less neutral
(As honor, for time being, commands)
Will hardly prevent their downfall.
Stronger medicines are needed.
Already they find
None of their strategems have succeeded,
Nor would have, no,
Not had their eyes been stricken blind,
Hands cut off at the elbow.

Summer Rain Poem

 

'it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower...'

I posted this poem previously here, but since it bears a new title now (as it appears in the latest collection 'Falling Awake' from Alice Oswald), I'll post it again.

And, because right now, I really need to read something that captures some beauty about this dismal summer rain we've been having...! :(

A Short Story of Falling - Alice Oswald

It is the story of the falling rain
to turn into a leaf and fall again

it is the secret of a summer shower
to steal the light and hide it in a flower

and every flower a tiny tributary
that from the ground flows green and momentary

is one of water’s wishes and this tale
hangs in a seed-head smaller than my thumbnail

if only I a passerby could pass
as clear as water through a plume of grass

to find the sunlight hidden at the tip
turning to seed a kind of lifting rain drip

then I might know like water how to balance
the weight of hope against the light of patience

water which is so raw so earthy-strong
and lurks in cast-iron tanks and leaks along

drawn under gravity towards my tongue
to cool and fill the pipe-work of this song

which is the story of the falling rain
that rises to the light and falls again

August

August -  Lizette Woodworth Reese

No wind, no bird. The river flames like brass.
On either side, smitten as with a spell
Of silence, brood the fields. In the deep grass,
Edging the dusty roads, lie as they fell
Handfuls of shriveled leaves from tree and bush.
But ’long the orchard fence and at the gate,
Thrusting their saffron torches through the hush,
Wild lilies blaze, and bees hum soon and late.
Rust-colored the tall straggling briar, not one
Rose left. The spider sets its loom up there
Close to the roots, and spins out in the sun
A silken web from twig to twig. The air
Is full of hot rank scents. Upon the hill
Drifts the noon’s single cloud, white, glaring, still.

The Saddest Lines

Well this is beautiful. Swooningly romantic and heartbreaking.  Pablo Neruda, in perfect form.



Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines) - Pablo Neruda 
 

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

Never (Ever)

 

A clever and cool little poem. 


Ever - Meghan O'Rourke

Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never nothing,
because nothing’s not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine—gutting—never to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever”
and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.

If I Could Tell You

August, always seems a month about Time. When summer time begins to run out and time as a rapidly dwindling resource, makes itself known.


If I Could Tell You - WH Auden

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Sorrow of True Love

I love how this poem equates true love with the sun; I always do that too.

The Sorrow of True Love - Edward Thomas 

The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow

And true love parting blackens a bright morrow:

Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair

Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear

Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.

But greater sorrow from less love has been

That can mistake lack of despair for hope

And knows not tempest and the perfect scope

Of summer, but a frozen drizzle perpetual

Of drops that from remorse and pity fall

And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,

Removed eternally from the sun’s law.

Parting/Party Ship

 

Party Ship - Kay Ryan

You are a

land I can’t

stand leaving

and can’t not.

My party ship

is pulling out.

We all have

hats. I try to

toot some notes

you’ll understand

but this was not

our instrument

or plan.

Fireflies

 'What do the fireflies say?'

Fireflies - Frank Ormsby

The lights come on and stay on under the trees.
Visibly a whole neighbourhood inhabits the dusk,
so punctual and in place it seems to deny
dark its dominion. Nothing will go astray,
the porchlamps promise. Sudden, as though a match
failed to ignite at the foot of the garden, the first squibs
trouble the eye. Impossible not to share
that sportive, abortive, clumsy, where-are-we-now
dalliance with night, such soothing restlessness.
What should we make of fireflies, their quick flare
of promise and disappointment, their throwaway style?
Our heads turn this way and that. We are loath to miss
such jauntiness in nature. Those fugitive selves,
winged and at random! Our flickery might-have-beens
come up from the woods to haunt us! Our yet-to-be
as tentative frolic! What do the fireflies say?
That loneliness made light of becomes at last
convivial singleness? That any antic spark
cruising the void might titillate creation?
And whether they spend themselves, or go to ground,
or drift with their lights out, they have left the gloom,
for as long as our eyes take to absorb such absence,
less than it seemed, as childless and deprived
as Chaos and Old Night. But ruffled too,
as though it unearthed some memory of light
from its long blackout, a hospitable core
fit home for fireflies, brushed by fireflies' wings.

High Flight

This poem was famously written by a pilot referring to the wonders of flight. But I also think it describes death; what it must be like when the soul finally flies free.




High Flight - John Gillespie Magee Jr

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth,
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, - and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of  - Wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air...
Up, up the long, delirious, burning blue
I've topped the wind-swept heights with easy grace
Where never lark or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

Summer Nights

 

Summer Nights - Louise Gluck

Orderly, and out of long habit, my heart continues to beat.
I hear it, nights when I wake, over the mild sound of the air conditioner.
As I used to hear it over the beloved’s heart, or
variety of hearts, owing to there having been several.
And as it beats, it continues to drum up ridiculous emotion.

So many passionate letters never sent!
So many urgent journeys conceived of on summer nights,
surprise visits to men who were nearly complete strangers.
The tickets never bought, the letters never stamped.
And pride spared. And the life, in a sense, never completely lived.
And the art always in some danger of growing repetitious.

Why not? Why not? Why should my poems not imitate my life?
Whose lesson is not the apotheosis but the pattern, whose meaning
is not in the gesture but in the inertia, the reverie.

Desire, loneliness, wind in the flowering almond—
surely these are the great, the inexhaustible subjects
to which my predecessors apprenticed themselves.
I hear them echo in my own heart, disguised as convention.

Balm of the summer night, balm of the ordinary,
imperial joy and sorrow of human existence,
the dreamed as well as the lived—
what could be dearer than this, given the closeness of death?

Evening of the Mind

 

 

 

Evening of the Mind - Donald Justice

 

Now comes the evening of the mind.

Here are the fireflies twitching in the blood;

Here is the shadow moving down the page

Where you sit reading by the garden wall.

Now the dwarf peach trees, nailed to their trellises,

Shudder and droop. Your know their voices now,

Faintly the martyred peaches crying out

Your name, the name nobody knows but you.

It is the aura and the coming on.

It is the thing descending, circling, here.

And now it puts a claw out and you take it.

Thankfully in your lap you take it, so.

You said you would not go away again,

You did not want to go away—and yet,

It is as if you stood out on the dock

Watching a little boat drift out

Beyond the sawgrass shallows, the dead fish ...

And you were in it, skimming past old snags,

Beyond, beyond, under a brazen sky

As soundless as a gong before it’s struck—

Suspended how?—and now they strike it, now

The ether dream of five-years-old repeats, repeats,

And you must wake again to your own blood

And empty spaces in the throat.