Day 498: Gemstones

 

 

When asked this question by his young son, this is what Don Paterson replied, explaining the process 

of poetry  in a way a child would understand. 

 

 

Why Do You Stay Up So Late? - Don Paterson

       

For Russ

 

I’ll tell you, if you really want to know:

remember that day you lost two years ago

at the rockpool where you sat and played the jeweler

with all those stones you’d stolen from the shore?

Most of them went dark and nothing more,

but sometimes one would blink the secret color

it had locked up somewhere in its stony sleep.

This is how you knew the ones to keep.

So I collect the dull things of the day

in which I see some possibility

but which are dead and which have the surprise

I don’t know, and I’ve no pool to help me tell -

so I look at them and look at them until

one thing makes a mirror in my eyes

then I paint it with the tear to make it bright.

This is why I sit up through the night.

 

Day 497: Bluegrass

Some performance poetry today! Here's Rives with 'Bluegrass':

Day 496: Give Thanks, Give Praise

So many things to be thankful for... #Thanksgiving


A List of Praises - Anne Porter

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing,
Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches,
Mad with the joy of the Sabbath,
Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun,
Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes,
A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry
living wild on the Streets through generations of children.

Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away
With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle
As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning,
Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh
Of the wind in the pinewoods,
At night give praise with starry silences.

Give praise with the skirling of seagulls
And the rattle and flap of sails
And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell
Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor.
Give praise with the humpback whales,
Huge in the ocean they sing to one another.

Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas,
Give praise with hum of bees,
Give praise with the little peepers who live near water.
When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries
We know that the winter is over.

Give praise with mockingbirds, day’s nightingales.
Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle
And glossy tulip trees
On quiet side streets in southern towns.

Give praise with the rippling speech
Of the eider-duck and her ducklings
As they paddle their way downstream
In the red-gold morning
On Restiguche, their cold river,
Salmon river,
Wilderness river.

Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow.
Far, far from the cities,
Far even from the towns,
With piercing innocence
He sings in the spruce-tree tops,
Always four notes
And four notes only.

Give praise with water,
With storms of rain and thunder
And the small rains that sparkle as they dry,
And the faint floating ocean roar
That fills the seaside villages,
And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains

And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood,
And with the angels in that other country.

Give praise with psalms that tell the trees to sing, Give praise with Gospel choirs in storefront churches, Mad with the joy of the Sabbath, Give praise with the babble of infants, who wake with the sun, Give praise with children chanting their skip-rope rhymes, A poetry not in books, a vagrant mischievous poetry living wild on the Streets through generations of children. Give praise with the sound of the milk-train far away With its mutter of wheels and long-drawn-out sweet whistle As it speeds through the fields of sleep at three in the morning, Give praise with the immense and peaceful sigh Of the wind in the pinewoods, At night give praise with starry silences. Give praise with the skirling of seagulls And the rattle and flap of sails And gongs of buoys rocked by the sea-swell Out in the shipping-lanes beyond the harbor. Give praise with the humpback whales, Huge in the ocean they sing to one another. Give praise with the rasp and sizzle of crickets, katydids and cicadas, Give praise with hum of bees, Give praise with the little peepers who live near water. When they fill the marsh with a shimmer of bell-like cries We know that the winter is over. Give praise with mockingbirds, day's nightingales. Hour by hour they sing in the crepe myrtle And glossy tulip trees On quiet side streets in southern towns. Give praise with the rippling speech Of the eider-duck and her ducklings As they paddle their way downstream In the red-gold morning On Restiguche, their cold river, Salmon river, Wilderness river. Give praise with the whitethroat sparrow. Far, far from the cities, Far even from the towns, With piercing innocence He sings in the spruce-tree tops, Always four notes And four notes only. Give praise with water, With storms of rain and thunder And the small rains that sparkle as they dry, And the faint floating ocean roar That fills the seaside villages, And the clear brooks that travel down the mountains And with this poem, a leaf on the vast flood, And with the angels in that other country. - See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/20501#sthash.kIiYxQpI.dpuf

Day 495: Talking in Code

 

Where I think language excels is in its figurative form. Nothing sparks originality and awe and wondering quite like like metaphors and similes. 

In this poem by Simon Armitage, there is a series of metaphors that describe a person, unusual and arresting ones like: 'his grin was the Great Wall of China' and 'his last smile was a caesarean section.' It's like one giant Morse code for something unexpressable - pain, shock and grief.

Not The Furniture Game - Simon Armitage
 
His hair was a crow fished out of a blocked chimney
and his eyes were boiled eggs with the tops hammered in
and his blink was a cat flap
and his teeth were bluestones or Easter Island statues
and his bite was a perfect horseshoe.
His nostrils were both barrels of a shotgun, loaded.
And his mouth was an oil exploration project gone bankrupt
and his last smile was a caesarean section
and his tongue was an iguanodon
and his whistle was a laser beam
and his laugh was a bad case of kennel cough.
He coughed, and it was malt whisky.
And his headaches were Arson in Her Majesty's Dockyards
and his arguments were outboard motors strangled with fishing line
and his neck was a bandstand
and his Adam's apple was a ball cock
and his arms were milk running off from a broken bottle.
His elbows were boomerangs or pinking shears.
And his wrists were ankles
and his handshakes were puff adders in the bran tub
and his fingers were astronauts found dead in their spacesuits
and the palms of his hands were action paintings
and both thumbs were blue touchpaper.
And his shadow was an opencast mine.
And his dog was a sentry box with no-one in it
and his heart was a first world war grenade discovered by children
and his nipples were timers for incendary devices
and his shoulder blades were two butchers at the 
    meat cleaving competition
and his belly button was the Falkland Islands
and his private parts were the Bermuda triangle
and his backside was a priest hole
and his stretchmarks were the tide going out.
The whole system of his blood was Dutch elm disease.
And his legs were depth charges
and his knees were fossils waiting to be tapped open
and his ligaments were rifles wrapped in oilcloth under the 
   floorboards
and his calves were the undercarriages of Shackletons.
The balls of his feet were where meteorites had landed
and his toes were a nest of mice under the lawn mower.
And his footprints were Vietnam
and his promises were hot air balloons floating off over the 
    trees
and his one-liners were footballs through other peoples' 
   windows
and his grin was the Great Wall of China as seen from the 
   moon
and the last time they talked, it was apartheid. 
 
She was a chair, tipped over backwards
with his donkey jacket on her shoulders. 
 
They told him,
and his face was a hole
where the ice had not been thick enough to hold her. 

Day 494: Starlings

Ted Hughes is a nature poet extraordinaire, especially when it comes to describing animals and birds. Here he is on starlings, those strange birds that can be acrobats of air one minute, then stumbling screechers on land, their black feathers iridescent with rainbow colours.  

The language here mimics their unfurling sky movements perfectly - 'a Niagara/Of upward rumbling wings - that collaspes again/In an unmanageable weight/Of neurotic atoms.' before taking on a a darker quality, describing the starlings as 'a writhing of imps, 'a seething of fleas', a 'doom-panic mob'. Although I wouldn't agree with Hughes in this assessment of these birds, I love his language, how tight and taut it is, and how attentive and original.

Starlings Have Come - Ted Hughes

A horde out of Sub-Arctic Asia
Darkening nightfall, a faint sky-roar
Of pressure on the ear.

More thicken the vortex, gloomier.

A bacteria cyclone, a writhing of imps
Issuing from a hole in the horizon
Topples and blackens a whole farm.

Now a close-up seething of fleas.
                                                      And now a silence -
The doom-panic mob listens, for a second.
Then, with a soft boom, they wrap you
Into their mind-warp, assembling a nightmare sky-wheel
Of escape - a Niagara
Of upward rumbling wings - that collaspes again

In an unmanageable weight
Of neurotic atoms.
                              They're the subconscious
Of the Smart-Alec, all slick hair and Adam's apple,
Sunday chimney starling.
                                         This Elizabethan songster,
Italianate, in damask, emblematic,
Trembles his ruff, pierces the Maytime
With his perfected whistle
Of a falling bomb - or frenzies himself
Into a Gothic, dishevelled madness,
Chattering his skeleton, sucking his brains,
Gargling his blood through a tin flute -
                                                               Ah, Shepster!
Suddenly such a bare dagger of listening!

Next thing - down at the bread
Screeching like a cat
Limber and saurian on your hind legs,

Tumbling the sparrows with a drop kick -

A Satanic hoodlum, a cross-eyed boss,
Black body crammed with hot rubies
And Anthrax under your nails.

Day 493: Waking at 3am

What is it about 3am?  Lots of poems written about night that mention it, songs too. I always seem to wake exactly around it. 

But as all insomniacs will know, being awake at night with an awake mind means a whole lot of gargantuan worries. Everything seems worse then, as this poem details. But look how that changes as sleep comes - so too does reassurance and comfort: 'A great snug wall goes around everything... It is a good world to be lost in...It is all right.'  Maybe we humans are wired this way, to self-comfort and find assurance in times of crisis.

Waking at 3AM - William Stafford

Even in the cave of the night when you
wake and are free and lonely,
neglected by others, discarded, loved only
by what doesn't matter - even in that
big room no one can see,
you push with your eyes till forever
comes in its twisted figure eight
and lies down in your head.

You think water in the river;
you think slower than the tide in
the grain of the wood; you become
a secret storehouse that saves the country,
so open and foolish and empty.

You look over all that the darkness
ripples across. More than has ever
been found comforts you. You open your
eyes in a vault that unlocks as fast
and as far as your thought can run.
A great snug wall goes around everything,
has always been there, will always
remain. It is a good world to be
lost in. It comforts you. It is
all right. And you sleep. 

Day 492: Against Winter

Against Winter - Charles Simic

The truth is dark under your eyelids.
What are you going to do about it?
The birds are silent; there's no one to ask.
All day long you'll squint at the gray sky.
When the wind blows you'll shiver like straw.

A meek little lamb you grew your wool
Till they came after you with huge shears.
Flies hovered over open mouth,
Then they, too, flew off like the leaves,
The bare branches reached after them in vain.

Winter coming. Like the last heroic soldier
Of a defeated army, you'll stay at your post,
Head bared to the first snow flake.
Till a neighbor comes to yell at you,
You're crazier than the weather, Charlie.

Day 491: Hymn

 

Jack Kerouac is well-known for his poetic prose, but he dabbled in poetry too. Here is one of them, in his trademark ecstatic, enthusiastic style. 


Hymn - Jack Kerouac


And when you showed me the Brooklyn Bridge
   in the morning, 
      Ah God,


And the people slipping on ice in the street,
twice,
          twice,
                    two different people
                    came over, goin to work,
                    so earnest and tryful,
                    clutching their pitiful
                    morning Daily News
                    slip on the ice & fall
                    both inside 5 minutes
                    and I cried I cried


That's when you taught me tears, Ah
   God in the morning,
      Ah Thee


And me leaning on the lampost wiping
eyes,
         eyes,
                  nobody's know I'd cried
                  or woulda cared anyway
                  but O I saw my father
                  and my grandfather's mother
                  and the long lines of chairs
                  and tear-sitters and dead,
                  Ah me, I knew God You
                  had better plans than that


So whatever plan you have for me
Splitter of majesty
Make it short
   brief
Make it snappy
   bring me home to the Eternal Mother
   today


At your service anyway,
   (and until)

Day 490: Remembering JFK

'If more politicians knew poetry, and more poets knew politics, I am convinced the world would be a better place to in which to live.' - JKF, Address Harvard 1956 

Today is the 50th anniversary of the assassination of JFK. And by chance, I came across this poem yesterday that mentions it. It illustrates simply how an extraordinary man can touch an ordinary life. 

Leo Minor (from The Whole of the Sky) - Simon Armitage

When pictures came through
of the world's first authentically green cat,
I was out of touch, watching
in black and white on a rented set.

I thought of my mother at home
the day Kennedy was shot,
in rubber gloves, crying real tears
into the washing-up.

Day 489: At a Window

 

Love is all we need.  

At a Window - Carl Sandburg

Give me hunger,

O you gods that sit and give

The world its orders.

Give me hunger, pain and want,

Shut me out with shame and failure

From your doors of gold and fame,

Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,

A voice to speak to me in the day end,

A hand to touch me in the dark room

Breaking the long loneliness.

In the dusk of day-shapes

Blurring the sunset,

One little wandering, western star

Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.

Let me go to the window,

Watch there the day-shapes of dusk

And wait and know the coming 
Of a little love.

Day 488: No, It's November

Winter has well and truly arrived this week. Darkness and cold. November, most maligned of months, as this poem demonstrates, just a string of negatives. Sometimes it feels this way alright doesn't it? 


November - Thomas Hood

No sun - no moon!
No morn - no noon -
No dawn - no dusk - no proper time of day.
No warmth, no cheerfulness, no healthful ease,
No comfortable feel in any member -
No shade, no shine, no butterflies, no bees,
No fruits, no flowers, no leaves, no birds! -
November!

Day 487: November Night

Eventually, memories too, like leaves, fall away.  Winter is the season of letting go.


November Night - Adelaide Crapsey

Listen...

With faint dry sound,

Like steps of passing ghosts,

The leaves, frost-crisp'd, break from the trees

And fall.

Day 486: Some Trees

Trees again.



Some Trees - John Ashberry

These are amazing: each
Joining a neighbor, as though speech
Were a still performance.
Arranging by chance

To meet as far this morning
From the world as agreeing
With it, you and I
Are suddenly what the trees try

To tell us we are:
That their merely being there
Means something; that soon
We may touch, love, explain.

And glad not to have invented
Such comeliness, we are surrounded:
A silence already filled with noises,
A canvas on which emerges

A chorus of smiles, a winter morning.
Placed in a puzzling light, and moving,
Our days put on such reticence
These accents seem their own defense.

Day 485: To Sleep

I read recently that Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter) is a fan of poetry, playing one of the Beats poets in a new upcoming movie. But, he's a traditionalist at heart, noting Keats as his favourite poet. When asked why, he replied simply: 'His language is just so gorgeous.'  That's it, of course. No better way to put it. His language is a balm I always say. Just reading it soothes over the troubled mind.    Here he is on sleep. Too many beautiful phrases to quote, but a very true one, as all insomniacs will know is 'Then save me, or the passed day will shine/Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,–'.  Ah yes.      

To Sleep- Keats

 

O soft embalmer of the still midnight,
    Shutting, with careful fingers and benign,
Our gloom-pleas’d eyes, embower’d from the light,
    Enshaded in forgetfulness divine:
O soothest Sleep! if so it please thee, close
    In midst of this thine hymn my willing eyes,
Or wait the “Amen,” ere thy poppy throws
    Around my bed its lulling charities.
Then save me, or the passed day will shine
Upon my pillow, breeding many woes,–
    Save me from curious Conscience, that still lords
Its strength for darkness, burrowing like a mole;
    Turn the key deftly in the oiled wards,
And seal the hushed Casket of my Soul.

Day 484: Space

 

After seeing the film 'Gravity' a few nights ago (the one about two astronauts alone in space) I haven't been able to stop thinking about it. Space, that is. The big blank vastness of it. How unknown it is, and how much we want to know about it. How perilous it is and how beautiful. How it is nothing and how it is everything. And how it is a metaphor and a musing, as the film is, for so many aspects of life, especially existential ones.

It's hard to find any poems about space, but luckily, I have this one by the brilliant Alice Oswald to turn to. A sonnet about Nasa's Spacecraft Voyager, all the more relevant now, after it became the first man-made object to enter interstellar space in September of this year. But is the poem only about that? What is the space, full of 'Deep Silence' she is referring to?

Seeing as this poem is the one that closes her collection 'Woods', preceded by a few blank pages, I can't help but think of it as an ode to writing, to poetry. To feeling out and filling up that 'Deep Silence' that is the mystery of life, the 'steep flights of blackness' with 'massless light' of poetry that is illuminating, but not as tangible as other things. What do you think? Or maybe it's about journeys, all kinds, even our last one, death. Whatever it is, I love how the whole poems hangs there, punctuation-less in the blank space of the page. And everything hovering towards its last word: flight, not tethered by a full stop but suspended there, freely.

I don't know, but like space, the not knowing is intriguing! Once again, another instance of the beauty of poetry - it can be whatever you believe it to be. A bit like space, too.

Sonnet - Alice Oswald

Spacecraft Voyager 1 has boldly gone
into Deep Silence carrying a gold-plated disc inscribed with
    whale-song
it has bleeped back a last infra-red fragment of language
and floated way way up over the jagged edge
of this almost endless bright and blowy enclosure of weather
to sink through a new texture as tenuous as the soft upward
    pressure of an elevator
and go on and on falling up steep flights of blackness with
    increasing swiftness
beyond the Crystalline Cloud of the Dead beyond Plato beyond
    Copernicus
O meticulous swivel cameras still registering events
among those homeless spaces gathering in that silence
that hasn't yet had time to speak        in that increasing sphere
of tiny runaway stars notched in the year
now you can look closely at massless light
that is said to travel freely but is probably in full flight

Day 483: Easy Vs True

We often wish for things to be easier in this life, but if they were, we wouldn't be who we are, as simple as that - 'for on such a pretense, you wouldn't be you.'

If - ee cummings

If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn’t a lie,
Life would be delight,—
But things couldn’t go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn’t be I.

If earth was heaven and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I’d be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn’t be you.

If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,—
Yet they’d all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn’t be we.

Day 482: The Poet Vs The Analyst

 

Critics and writers, never the twain on the same thought plane. Writing is hard, it's the doing, the forging, the creating from nothing  - critiquing is easy, it's the looking, the blaming, the picking-out of mistakes like bones, the uncreating. And it can wreck a sensitive writer's soul. 

Look how Anne Sexton illustrates it here, in the last stanza, doubting her own 'win', her own belief and worth, real in her hands, just because a critic casts a shadow on it.

Said The Poet To The Analyst - Anne Sexton

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
I confess I am only broken by the sources of things;
as if words were counted like dead bees in the attic,
unbuckled from their yellow eyes and their dry wings.
I must always forget how one word is able to pick
out another, to manner another, until I have got
something I might have said...
but did not.

Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing. I work with my best, for instances,
when I can write my praise for a nickel machine,
that one night in Nevada: telling how the magic jackpot
came clacking three bells out, over the lucky screen.
But if you should say this is something it is not,
then I grow weak, remembering how my hands felt funny
and ridiculous and crowded with all
the believing money.

Day 481: Hurry

 

Short, and sharp, this poem is a reminder not to waste time or our dreams.
 

Bouquet - Langston Hughes

Gather quickly
Out of darkness
All the songs you know
And throw them at the sun
Before they melt
Like snow 

Day 480: Among Trees

  

Trees suddenly acquire a new importance at this time of the year. It's hard not to notice them with their gorgeous autumn colours and their leaves everywhere. They step out of the background into the foreground of the vista of our daily lives. Not just a seasonal marker, they seem to be saying something too. 

When I Am Among the Trees - Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
   but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

Day 479: Winter Migration

Triangles- Pablo Neruda

Three triangles of birds crossed
Over the enormous ocean which extended
In winter like a green beast.
Everything just lay there, the silence,
The unfolding gray, the heavy light
Of space, some land now and then.
Over everything there was passing
A flight
And another flight
Of dark birds, winter bodies
Trembling triangles
Whose wings,
Frantically flapping, hardly
Can carry the gray cold, the desolate days
From one place to another
Along the coast of Chile.

I am here while from one sky to another
The trembling of the migratory birds
Leaves me sunk inside myself, inside my own matter
Like an everlasting well
Dug by an immovable spiral.
Now they have disappeared
Black feathers of the sea
Iron birds
From steep slopes and rock piles
Now at noon
I am in front of emptiness. It’s a winter
Space stretched out
And the sea has put
Over its blue face
A bitter mask.

Day 478: Vocation of a Poet

Belief in his/her imaginings, it's a poet's prerogative!


Vocation - Billy Collins

As I watched the night sky
from the wooden dock
I had painted gray earlier that day

I saw an airplane fly,
its red port-light blinking all the while,
right through the Big Dipper

nearly clipping one of the stars
of that constellation,
which was tilted upside-down at the time

and seemed to be pouring whatever it held
into space one big dipperful at a time.

And that was when I discovered
poised right above me
a hitherto unknown constellation

composed of six stars
two for the snout and the four behind
for the pig’s trotters

though it would have taken some time
to make anyone see that.

But since there was no one there
lying next to me
my constellation of the Pig
remained a secret

and a bright reminder,
after many jumbled days and nights,
of my true vocation–

keeping an eye on things
whether they existed or not,
recumbent under the random stars.

Day 477: A Wind Has Blown...

 

I notice I haven't posted any EE Cummings poems here in a while, one of my favourite poets. And I suppose it's because I always read him in spring/summer. He is the poet most taken and associated with Spring, naming it as one of his main muses (he even gives it a capital letter, which I love!) So many leaping and bounding poems he has written about it that embody its zest perfectly. Even his writing style is exuberant like spring, full of the joys and enthusiasms of its new beginnings.

He doesn't deal with autumn/winter quite as well you see. Here's one poem that marks a meditation on the season and notice how solemn and sober it is, not at all like his spring ramblings. And how much slower the tone is - he even makes use of full stops, something he very rarely does so intent are his rush-on run-on lines with fulfilling their ecstatic purpose! It is a weary speaker though who says dejectedly here: 'I think i have known Autumn too long.'

There's a sadness pervading this poem which slows everything down - exactly how a spring person and poet feels like now, exactly what autumn and winter does.

A Wind Has Blown The Rain Away And Blown - ee cummings

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand.  I think i too have known
autumn too long

                  (and what have you to say,
wind wind wind—did you love somebody
and have you the petal of somewhere in your heart
pinched from dumb summer?
                            O crazy daddy
of death dance cruelly for us and start

the last leaf whirling in the final brain
of air!)Let us as we have seen see
doom’s integration………a wind has blown the rain

away and the leaves and the sky and the
trees stand:
             the trees stand.  The trees,
suddenly wait against the moon’s face.

Day 476: New Moon

 

There's a lovely new moon in the sky right now. Even though November days may be dreary, the dusks are beautiful, otherwordly almost, a palette of many different blues and a sliver of the new moon lighting them 'a wisp of beauty all alone'. Most definitely, as Sara Teasdale declares here 'a gift.' Worth your while stepping out in them and looking up.

The New Moon - Sara Teasdale

Day, you have bruised and beaten me,
As rain beats down the bright, proud sea,
Beaten my body, bruised my soul,
Left me nothing lovely or whole -

Yet I have wrested a gift from you,
Day that dies in dusky blue:
For suddenly over the factories
I saw a moon in the cloudy seas -

A wisp of beauty all alone
In a world as hard and gray as stone -
Oh who could be bitter and want to die
When a maiden moon wakes up in the sky? 

Day 475: Fury of Sunsets

 

The end of the day brings out frustration in Anne Sexton, and also existential wondering. In brilliant language, as always.


The Fury of Sunsets - Anne Sexton 

Something
cold is in the air,
an aura of ice
and phlegm.
All day I've built
a lifetime and now
the sun sinks to
undo it.
The horizon bleeds
and sucks its thumb.
The little red thumb
goes out of sight.
And I wonder about
this lifetime with myself,
this dream I'm living.
I could eat the sky
like an apple
but I'd rather
ask the first star:
why am I here?
why do I live in this house?
who's responsible?
eh?

Day 474: November Rain

I can think of no better description for rain than in this poem. Brilliant!


Rain - Des Dillon

A million sardines
flapping insane on
the wet-velvet tarmac.

Day 473: The Dance

 

CK Williams makes a lot of important points here. Like how 'misbelieving' ourselves can lead us to misbelieving the world, which can so often be harsh, but more often 'lovely.'  There are instances in life which show us 'what we are', like this moment in poem, when the bystanders of a restaurant are transfixed by a couple dancing.

What are these moments for you? (And note - they are so often the moments of poetry, which the poet in  all of us hankers after).

The Dance - CK Williams

A middle-aged woman, quite plain, to be polite about it, and
   somewhat stout, to be more courteous still,
but when she and the rather good-looking, much younger man
   she’s with get up to dance,
her forearm descends with such delicate lightness, such restrained
   but confident ardor athwart his shoulder,
drawing him to her with such a firm, compelling warmth, and
   moving him with effortless grace
into the union she’s instantly established with the not at all
   rhythmically solid music in this second rate cafe,

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some
   sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,
nothing that we’d ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be
   admired or be repentant for,
but something to which we’ve never adequately given credence,
which might have consoling implications about how we misbe-
   lieve ourselves, and so the world,
that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which
   sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

Day 472: Trees Cannot Name the Seasons

We don't need to know the ins and outs of everything going on around us. Let's not dwell in the bleakness and barreness. Only  know that it is all a part of nature's cycle. And that sometimes what we call 'winter' is what the trees call 'hibernation' - rest, recuperation, revival.

Trees Cannot Name the Seasons - Roger McGough

Trees cannot name the seasons
Nor flowers tell the time.
But when the sun shines
And they are charged with light,
They take a day-long breath.
What we call 'night'
Is their soft exhalation.

And when joints creak yet again
And the dead skin of leaves falls,
Trees don’t complain
Nor mourn the passing of the hours.
What we call 'winter'
Is simply hibernation.

And as continuation
Comes to them as no surprise,
They feel no need
To divide and itemize.
Nature has never needed reasons
For flowers to tell the time
Or trees put a name to seasons.

Day 471: Human Seasons

It's been often expressed, this idea that we all have our own seasons, not only in stages of life, but in shades of mind too. Here Keats puts it simply. 

Which season are you in at the moment?  

The Human Seasons- Keats

Four Seasons fill the measure of the year;

     There are four seasons in the mind of man:

He has his lusty Spring, when fancy clear

     Takes in all beauty with an easy span:

He has his Summer, when luxuriously

     Spring’s honied cud of youthful thought he loves

To ruminate, and by such dreaming high

     Is nearest unto heaven: quiet coves

His soul has in its Autumn, when his wings

     He furleth close; contented so to look

On mists in idleness—to let fair things

     Pass by unheeded as a threshold brook.

He has his Winter too of pale misfeature,

Or else he would forego his mortal nature.

Day 470: Starlings in November

November has arrived with its characteristic cold and dark. But at least there's one good thing about this most maligned of months  - starling murmuration time. 

Look to the skies at dusk for this stunning spectacle of nature - there's nothing quite like it when these birds swirl in the sky en masse, like a synchronised art, or  'one stippled star that opens.'  

As always, Mary Oliver harnesses the magic and meaning of such a sight into a beautiful reflection that ends with a powerful personal (and universal) epiphany: 'I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing...'.

Starlings in Winter - Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,
even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

Day 469: Real Monsters

Well Hallowe'en may be over but that doesn't mean the ghouls are gone. The real ghouls I mean.

This poem may on the surface seem to be about Hallowe'en, but look closely. The horror and doom it describes is none other than an unhappy marriage.

All Hallow's Eve - Dorothea Tanning 

Be perfect, make it otherwise.

Yesterday is torn in shreds.

Lightning’s thousand sulfur eyes

Rip apart the breathing beds.

Hear bones crack and pulverize.

Doom creeps in on rubber treads.

Countless overwrought housewives,

Minds unraveling like threads,

Try lipstick shades to tranquilize

Fears of age and general dreads.

Sit tight, be perfect, swat the spies,

Don’t take faucets for fountainheads.

Drink tasty antidotes. Otherwise

You and the werewolf: newlyweds.