A Toast

Wishing all my readers a very Happy New Year!



A Toast! - Lang Leav

To new beginnings
             in fear and faith
             and all it tinges.

To love is a dare,
             when hope and despair
             are gates upon its hinges. 

Song of Three Smiles

 

Song of Three Smiles - WS Mervin

 

Let me call a ghost,

Love, so it be little:

In December we took

No thought for the weather.

Whom now shall I thank

For this wealth of water?

Your heart loves harbors

Where I am a stranger.

Where was it we lay

Needing no other

Twelve days and twelve nights

In each other’s eyes?

Or was it at Babel

And the days too small

We spoke our own tongue

Needing no other?

If a seed grow green

Set a stone upon it

That it learn thereby

Holy charity.

If you must smile

Always on that other,

Cut me from ear to ear

And we all smile together.

Christmas Snow

 

Heart highs reading this. (Snow-swoon!)


Snow - Gillian Clarke


The dreamed Christmas,
flakes shaken out of silences so far
and starry we can’t sleep for listening
for papery rustles out there in the night
and wake to find our ceiling glimmering,
the day a psaltery of light.

So we’re out over the snow fields
before it’s all seen off with a salt-lick
of Atlantic air, then home at dusk, snow-blind
from following chains of fox and crow and hare,
to a fire, a roasting bird, a ringing phone,
and voices wondering where we are.

A day foretold by images
of glassy pond, peasant and snowy roof
over the holy child iconed in gold.
Or women shawled against the goosedown air
pleading with soldiers at a shifting frontier
in the snows of television,

while in the secret dark a fresh snow falls
filling our tracks with stars.

On the 13th Day of Christmas...

We wouldn't really thank our true love for bombarding us with this array of shenanigans now would we!

On the Thirteenth Day of Christmas My True Love Phoned Me Up... - Dave Calder 

Well, I suppose I should be grateful, you’ve obviously gone
to a lot of trouble and expense – or maybe off your head.
Yes, I did like the birds – the small ones anyway were fun
if rather messy, but now the hens have roosted on my bed
and the rest are nested on the wardrobe. It’s hard to sleep
with all that cooing, let alone the cackling of the geese
whose eggs are everywhere, but mostly in a broken smelly heap
on the sofa. No, why should I mind? I can’t get any peace
anywhere – the lounge is full of drummers thumping tom-toms
and sprawling lords crashed out from manic leaping. The
kitchen is crammed with cows and milkmaids and smells of a million stink-bombs
and enough sour milk to last a year. The pipers? I’d forgotten them –
they were no trouble, I paid them and they went. But I can’t get rid
of these young ladies. They won’t stop dancing or turn the music down
and they’re always in the bathroom, squealing as they skid
across the flooded floor. No, I don’t need a plumber round,
it’s just the swans – where else can they swim? Poor things,
I think they’re going mad, like me. When I went to wash my
hands one ate the soap, another swallowed the gold rings.
And the pear tree died. Too dry. So thanks for nothing,
   love. Goodbye.

The Universal Hymn of Love

 
                                                      


Christmas Morning - Eugene Field

The angel host that sped last night,
Bearing the wondrous news afar,
Came in their ever-glorious flight
Unto a slumbering little star.

'Awake and sing, O star!' they cried.
'Awake and glorify the morn!
Herald the tidings far and wide--
He that shall lead His flock is born!'

The little star awoke and sung
As only stars in rapture may,
And presently where church bells hung
The joyous tidings found their way.

'Awake, O bells! 't is Christmas morn--
Awake and let thy music tell
To all mankind that now is born
What Shepherd loves His lambkins well!'

Then rang the bells as fled the night
O'er dreaming land and drowsing deep,
And coming with the morning light,
They called, my child, to you asleep.

Sweetly and tenderly they spoke,
And lingering round your little bed,
Their music pleaded till you woke,
And this is what their music said:

'Awake and sing! 'tis Christmas morn,
Whereon all earth salutes her King!
In Bethlehem is the Shepherd born.
Awake, O little lamb, and sing!'

So, dear my child, kneel at my feet,
And with those voices from above
Share thou this holy time with me,
The universal hymn of love.

Christmas Eve

 

 

Nativity - Louise Gluck

It is the evening

of the birth of God.

Singing &

with gold instruments

the angels bear down

upon the barn, their wings

neither white

wax nor marble. So

they have been recorded:

burnished,

literal in the composed air,

they raise their harps above

the beasts likewise gathering,

the lambs & all the startled

silken chickens ... And Joseph,

off to one side, has touched

his cheek, meaning

he is weeping ---

But how small he is, withdrawn

from the hollow of his mother's life,

the raw flesh bound

in linen as stars yield

light to delight his sense

for who there is no ornament.

 

Lines for a Christmas Card

Short, but definitely not sweet. Ho ho ho!



Lines for a Christmas Card - Hilaire Belloc

May all my enemies go to hell,
Noel, Noel, Noel, Noel.

Winter Stars

 

Winter Stars - Sara Teasdale

I went out at night alone;

 The young blood flowing beyond the sea

Seemed to have drenched my spirit’s wings—

 I bore my sorrow heavily.

But when I lifted up my head

 From shadows shaken on the snow,

I saw Orion in the east

 Burn steadily as long ago.

From windows in my father’s house,

 Dreaming my dreams on winter nights,

I watched Orion as a girl

 Above another city’s lights.

Years go, dreams go, and youth goes too,

 The world’s heart breaks beneath its wars,

All things are changed, save in the east

 The faithful beauty of the stars.

Winter Solstice

Ironic isn't it, that in this winter season, our celebration focuses on light.


'Wring Out My Clothes' - Fraincis of Assisi

Such love does
the sky now pour,
that whenever I stand in a field,

I have to wring out the light
when I get
home.

Holly

Holly - Seamus Heaney

It rained when it should have snowed.
When we went to gather holly

the ditches were swimming, we were wet
to the knees, our hands were all jags

and water ran up our sleeves.
There should have been berries

but the sprigs we brought into the house
gleamed like smashed bottle-glass.

Now here I am, in a room that is decked
with the red-berried, waxy-leafed stuff,

and I almost forgot what it's like
to be wet to the skin or longing for snow.

I reach for a book like a doubter
and want it to flare round my hand,

a black letter bush, a glittering shield-wall,
cutting as holly and ice.

Snow Fall

'There is nothing to do
But drift now, more or less
On some great lovingness...'

 

Snow Fall - May Sarton

With no wind blowing

It sifts gently down,
Enclosing my world in
A cool white down,
A tenderness of snowing.

It falls and falls like sleep
Till wakeful eyes can close
On all the waste and loss
As peace comes in and flows,
Snow-dreaming what I keep.

Silence assumes the air
And the five senses all
Are wafted on the fall
To somewhere magical
Beyond hope and despair.

There is nothing to do
But drift now, more or less
On some great lovingness,
On something that does bless,
The silent, tender snow.

Rest

Untitled - Jeffrey Yang

west of rest is sleep
east, dream
where waters meet
north, emptiness,
south, wakefulness,
and out, rising up
to the stars, peace.

Losses

 

Losses - Kay Ryan

Most losses add something—
a new socket or silence,
a gap in a personal
archipelago of islands.

We have that difference
to visit—itself
a going-on of sorts.

But there are other losses
so far beyond report
that they leave holes
in holes only

like the ends of the
long and lonely lives
of castaways
thought dead but not.

The Region November

 

 'Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying...'

The Region November - Wallace Stevens

It is hard to hear the north wind again,
And to watch the treetops, as they sway.

They sway, deeply and loudly, in an effort,
So much less than feeling, so much less than speech,

Saying and saying, the way things say
On the level of that which is not yet knowledge:

A revelation not yet intended.
It is like a critic of God, the world

And human nature, pensively seated
On the waste throne of his own wilderness.

Deeplier, deeplier, loudlier, loudlier,
The trees are swaying, swaying, swaying.

Language of Love

Permanently - Kenneth Koch

One day the Nouns were clustered in the street.
An adjective walked by, with her dark beauty.
The Nouns were struck, moved, changed.
The next day a Verb drove up, and created the Sentence.

Each Sentence says one thing - for example,

"Although it was a dark rainy day when the Adjective walked by,
I shall remember the pure and sweet expression on her face
until the day I perish from the green, effective earth."

Or, "Will you please close the window, Andrew?"

Or, for example, "Thank you, the pink pot of flowers on
the window sill has changed color recently to a light
yellow, due to the heat from the boiler factory which
exists nearby."

In the springtime the Sentences and the Nouns lay silently on the grass.
A lonely Conjunction here and there would call, "And! But!"
But the Adjective did not emerge.

As the adjective is lost in the sentence,
So I am lost in your eyes, ears, nose, and throat -
You have enchanted me with a single kiss
Which can never be undone
Until the destruction of language.

Night Life

 

The Night, The Porch - Mark Strand

To stare at nothing is to learn by heart

What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself

To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by.

Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish.

What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort

Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux

Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting

For something whose appearance would be its vanishing—

The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf,

Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there

Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.

 

Full Moon Self

  
'There's no material as variable as moonlight...'

There's a lovely full moon out tonight. Make or do with it what you will.

 

Full Moon - Alice Oswald 

Good God!

What did I dream last night?

I dreamt I was the moon.

I woke and found myself still asleep.

It was like this: my face misted up from inside

And I came and went at will through a little peephole.

I had no voice, no mouth, nothing to express my trouble,

except my shadows leaning downhill, not quite parallel.

Something needs to be said to describe my moonlight.

Almost frost but softer, almost ash but wholer.

Made almost of water, which has strictly speaking

No feature, but a kind of counter-light, call it insight.

Like in woods, when they jostle their hooded shapes,

Their heads congealed together, having murdered each other,

There are moon-beings, sound-beings, such as deer and half-deer

Passing through there, whose eyes can pierce through things.

I was like that: visible invisible visible invisible.

There's no material as variable as moonlight.

I was climbing, clinging to the underneath of my bones, thinking:

Good God! Who have I been last night?

Riddle

Richard Wilbur - Riddle

Where far in forest I am laid,
In a place ringed around by stones,
Look for no melancholy shade,
And have no thoughts of buried bones;
For I am bodiless and bright,
And fill this glade with sudden glow;
The leaves are washed in under-light;
Shade lies upon the boughs like snow.

Samhain

Samhain - Annie Finch

 

(The Celtic Halloween)

 

In the season leaves should love,

since it gives them leave to move

through the wind, towards the ground

they were watching while they hung,

legend says there is a seam

stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil

earth from the sky in one last pale

wave, as autumn dies to bring

winter back, and then the spring,

we who die ourselves can peel

back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.

Tonight at last I feel it shake.

I feel the nights stretching away

thousands long behind the days

till they reach the darkness where

all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch

move with me, and when I brush

my own mind across another,

I am with my mother's mother.

Sure as footsteps in my waiting

self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,

intimate, a waiting bounty.

"Carry me." She leaves this trail

through a shudder of the veil,

and leaves, like amber where she stays,

a gift for her perpetual gaze.

Halloween Mask

The scariest thing of all? Not demons, but human nature.

 
Empire of Dreams  - Charles Simic 

On the first page of my dreambook

It’s always evening

In an occupied country.   

Hour before the curfew.   

A small provincial city.   

The houses all dark.

The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner   

Where I shouldn’t be.   

Alone and coatless

I have gone out to look

For a black dog who answers to my whistle.   

I have a kind of Halloween mask

Which I am afraid to put on.

The Haunted Chamber

  

'Each heart has its haunted chamber...'

Perhaps the most haunting thing of all - the ghosts we keep in our own hearts.


The Haunted Chamber - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each heart has its haunted chamber,
  Where the silent moonlight falls!
On the floor are mysterious footsteps,
  There are whispers along the walls!

And mine at times is haunted
  By phantoms of the Past
As motionless as shadows
  By the silent moonlight cast.

A form sits by the window,
  That is not seen by day,
For as soon as the dawn approaches
  It vanishes away.

It sits there in the moonlight
  Itself as pale and still,
And points with its airy finger
  Across the window-sill.

Without before the window,
  There stands a gloomy pine,
Whose boughs wave upward and downward
  As wave these thoughts of mine.

And underneath its branches
  Is the grave of a little child,
Who died upon life's threshold,
  And never wept nor smiled.

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  That haunt my troubled brain?
That vanish when day approaches,
  And at night return again?

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  But the statues without breath,
That stand on the bridge overarching
  The silent river of death?

Bluebeard

 

A short and sharp take on the Bluebeard story by Sylvia Plath. 

Bluebeard - Sylvia Plath

I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study;
because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key;
in his eye’s darkroom I can see
my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study.

Incantation

It's almost Halloween... when the 'witchery' of autumn is in plain sight. 

from Incantation - George Parsons Lathrop

When the leaves, by thousands thinned,
A thousand times have whirled in the wind,
And the moon, with hollow cheek,
Staring from her hollow height,
Consolation seems to seek
From the dim, reechoing night;
And the fog-streaks dead and white
Lie like ghosts of lost delight
O’er highest earth and lowest sky;
Then, Autumn, work thy witchery!

After the Storm

May Perpetual Light Shine - Patricia Spears Jones

We have encountered storms 

Perfect in their drench and wreck

 

Each of us bears an ornament of grief

A ring, a notebook, a ticket torn, scar

It is how humans know their kind—

 

What is known as love, what can become  

the heart’s food stored away for some future

Famine

 

Love remains a jewel in the hand, guarded

Shared fragments of earth & air   drift & despair.

 

We ponder what patterns matter other than moons and tides:

musical beats—rumba or waltz or cha cha cha

cosmic waves like batons furiously twirling

colors proclaiming sparkle of darkness

as those we love begin to delight

in the stars embracing

 

Storm Warnings

We are currently in the middle of a hurricane in Ireland. (Ireland!)

Stormy weather always makes me think of this poem.

Storm Warnings - Adrienne Rich

The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

Night

It Is Difficult to Speak of the Night  - Jack Gilbert

It is difficult to speak of the night.
It is the other time. Not
an absence of day.
But where there are no flowers
to turn away into.
There is only this dark
and the familiar place of my body.
And the voices calling out
of me for love.
This is not the night of the young:
their simple midnight of fear.
Nor the later place to employ.
This dark is a major nation.
I turn to it at forty
and find the night in flood.
Find the dark deployed in process.
Clotted in parts, in parts
flowing with lights.
The voices still keen of the divorce
we are born into.
But they are farther off,
and do not interest me.
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in mid passage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.

Grief

For the week that's in it. 


Grief - Raymond Carver

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning.

October, Daphne's Month

'Autumn Goddess' by Moon Dreamer

Posted this one before, but it's so beautiful it merits a reposting. 

October - Linda Pastan

How suddenly

the woods

have turned

again. I feel

like Daphne, standing

with my arms

outstretched

to the season,

overtaken

by color, crowned

with the hammered gold

of leaves.

Letter in October

A Letter in October - Ted Kooser

Dawn comes later and later now, 

and I, who only a month ago 

could sit with coffee every morning 

watching the light walk down the hill 

to the edge of the pond and place 

a doe there, shyly drinking, 

then see the light step out upon 

the water, sowing reflections 

to either side—a garden 

of trees that grew as if by magic— 

now see no more than my face, 

mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, 

startled by time. While I slept, 

night in its thick winter jacket 

bridled the doe with a twist 

of wet leaves and led her away, 

then brought its black horse with harness 

that creaked like a cricket, and turned 

the water garden under. I woke, 

and at the waiting window found 

the curtains open to my open face; 

beyond me, darkness. And I, 

who only wished to keep looking out, 

must now keep looking in. 

Into October

'the colors of returning...'


Into October - WS Mervin

These must be the colors of returning
the leaves darkened now but staying on
into the bronzed morning among the seed heads
and the dry stems and the umbers of October
the secret season that appears on its own
a recognition without a sound
long after the day when I stood in its light
out on the parched barrens beside a spring
all but hidden in a tangle of eglantine
and picked the bright berries made of that summer

Blackberry Eating

Blackberry Eating - Galway Kinnell

I love to go out in late September
among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries
to eat blackberries for breakfast,
the stalks very prickly, a penalty
they earn for knowing the black art
of blackberry-making; and as I stand among them
lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries
fall almost unbidden to my tongue,
as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words
like strengths or squinched,
many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,
which I squeeze, squinch open, and splurge well
in the silent, startled, icy, black language
of blackberry-eating in late September.

Autumn Poem

Autumn Poems - Nikki Giovanni

the heat
you left with me
last night
still smolders
the wind catches
your scent
and refreshes
my senses

i am a leaf
falling from your tree
upon which I
was impaled

How To Be Old

How To Be Old - May Swenson 

It is easy to be young, (Everybody is,
at first.) It is not easy
to be old. It takes time.
Youth is given; age is achieved.
One must work a magic to mix with time
in order to become old.

Youth is given. One must put it away
like a doll in a closet,
take it out and play with it only 
on holidays. One must have many dresses
and dress the doll impeccably
(but not to show the doll, to keep it hidden.)

It is necessary to adore the doll,
to remember it in the dark on the ordinary
days, and every day congratulate
one's aging face in the mirror.

In time one will be very old.
In time, one's life will be accomplished.
And in time, in time, the doll–
like new, though ancient–will be found.

The Midnight Club

The Midnight Club - Mark Strand

The gifted have told us for years that they want to be loved
For what they are, that they, in whatever fullness is theirs,
Are perishable in twilight, just like us. So they work all night
In rooms that are cold and webbed with the moon’s light;
Sometimes, during the day, they lean on their cars,
And stare into the blistering valley, glassy and golden,
But mainly they sit, hunched in the dark, feet on the floor,
Hands on the table, shirts with a bloodstain over the heart.

Autumn Equinox

I love the idea of 'stillness' in this poem. Isn't the equinox  a time of stillness before the change in seasons? A moment of pause, surrender, reflection. 


Autumn Refrain - Wallace Stevens

The skreak and skritter of evening gone
And grackles gone and sorrows of the sun,
The sorrows of the sun, too, gone . . . the moon and moon,
The yellow moon of words about the nightingale
In measureless measures, not a bird for me
But the name of a bird and the name of a nameless air
I have never--shall never hear. And yet beneath
The stillness that comes to me out of this, beneath
The stillness of everything gone, and being still
Being and sitting still, something resides,
Some skreaking and skrittering residuum,
And grates these evasions of the nightingale
Though I have never--shall never hear that bird.
And the stillness is in the key, all of it is,
The stillness is all in the key of that desolate sound.

The Beautiful Changes

The season of beautiful changes: autumn.


The Beautiful Changes - Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies 

On water; it glides 

So from the walker, it turns 

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes. 

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   

As a mantis, arranged 

On a green leaf, grows 

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows. 

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   

In such kind ways,   

Wishing ever to sunder 

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Autumn Note

My default autumn feeling.

Autumn Note - Langston Hughes

The little flowers of yesterday
Have all forgotten May.
The last gold leaf
Has turned to brown.
The last bright day is grey.
The cold of winter comes apace
And you have gone away.

Autumn Love Song

cruelly, love - ee cummings

cruelly, love

walk the autumn long;
the last flower in whose hair,
they lips are cold with songs

for which is
first to wither, to pass?
shallowness of sunlight
falls, and cruelly,
across the grass
Comes the
moon

love, walk the
autumn
love, for the last
flower in the hair withers;
thy hair is acold with
dreams,
love thou art frail

-walk the longness of autumn
smile dustily to the people,
for winter
who crookedly care.

Frog Autumn

Frog Autumn - Sylvia Plath 

Summer grows old, cold-blooded mother. 
The insects are scant, skinny. 
In these palustral homes we only 
Croak and wither. 

Mornings dissipate in somnolence. 
The sun brightens tardily 
Among the pithless reeds. Flies fail us. 
The fen sickens. 

Frost drops even the spider. Clearly 
The genius of plenitude 
Houses himself elsewhere. Our folk thin 
Lamentably. 

The Light of September

I may have posted this poem before, but it's so beautiful, I'll post again. 

To The Light of September - WS Mervin

When you are already here 

you appear to be only 

a name that tells of you 

whether you are present or not 

and for now it seems as though 

you are still summer 

still the high familiar 

endless summer 

yet with a glint 

of bronze in the chill mornings 

and the late yellow petals 

of the mullein fluttering 

on the stalks that lean 

over their broken 

shadows across the cracked ground 

but they all know 

that you have come 

the seed heads of the sage 

the whispering birds 

with nowhere to hide you 

to keep you for later 

you 

who fly with them 

you who are neither 

before nor after 

you who arrive 

with blue plums 

that have fallen through the night 

perfect in the dew