A commenter who loves poetry and is feeling a little down requests a special open thread today on poems of “celebration and/or loss”, with, if possible, a special emphasis on Pablo Neruda.
You seem like a bunch of literary, poetic cats to me so have at it.
maye
Do not stand at my grave and weep,
I am not there, I do not sleep.
I am a thousand winds that blow.
I am the diamond glint on snow.
I am the sunlight on ripened grain.
I am the gentle autumn rain.
When you wake in the morning hush,
I am the swift, uplifting rush
Of quiet birds in circling flight.
I am the soft starlight at night.
Do not stand at my grave and weep.
I am not there, I do not sleep.
Do not stand at my grave and cry.
I am not there, I did not die!
Mary Frye (1932)
LittlePig
Seeing how Ozymandias and The Cremation Of Sam McGee is pretty much my repertoire, I got nothin’.
geg6
Huh?
Me no likey poetry.
rlrr
Sadly, most of the poetry I’m familiar with contains words that rhyme with Nantucket…
EconWatcher
A special emphasis on Pablo Neruda? Really? Perhaps one of his many odes to Joseph Stalin will hit the spot.
I realize that odious people can sometimes produce great art, but I don’t think you can separate the art and the politics with Neruda. He sure didn’t.
taylormattd
It’s too bad Blossom turned out to be a scientifically illiterate anti-vaxx fanatic.
Mnemosyne
I discovered this through an exhibit at the Huntington Library and it’s become one of my favorites:
The History of One Tough Motherfucker by Charles Bukowski
Just to prove it fits in for B-J, here’s the first few lines:
(Don’t worry about the cat getting run over in those first few lines — the cat is the One Tough Motherfucker of the title.)
BGinCHI
Philip Larkin was a miserable son of a bitch, but a damn fine poet. Of the many great poems I could drop here, let’s try this one:
High Windows
When I see a couple of kids
And guess he’s fucking her and she’s
Taking pills or wearing a diaphragm,
I know this is paradise
Everyone old has dreamed of all their lives—
Bonds and gestures pushed to one side
Like an outdated combine harvester,
And everyone young going down the long slide
To happiness, endlessly. I wonder if
Anyone looked at me, forty years back,
And thought, That’ll be the life;
No God any more, or sweating in the dark
About hell and that, or having to hide
What you think of the priest. He
And his lot will all go down the long slide
Like free bloody birds. And immediately
Rather than words comes the thought of high windows:
The sun-comprehending glass,
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.
Rock
I know Robert Frost is too mainstream to be cool, but for loss how about
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leafs a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
DecidedFenceSitter
Sorry, don’t know Neruda; however:
628. Ode on Melancholy
NO, no! go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kist
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globèd peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
Jacquie
I’ll plug Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art, which is a favorite that I return to when I need comforting. Below in full:
The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.
Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.
I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.
I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.
—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.
Higgs Boson's Mate
It was a face which darkness could kill
in an instant
a face as easily hurt
by laughter or light
‘We think differently at night’
she told me once
lying back languidly
And she would quote Cocteau
‘I feel there is an angel in me’ she’d say
‘whom I am constantly shocking’
Then she would smile and look away
light a cigarette for me
sigh and rise
and stretch
her sweet anatomy
let fall a stocking
-Lawrence Ferlinghetti
Cris (without an H)
@taylormattd: What? She has a PhD in Neuroscience. In real life.
flukebucket
Limbaugh lambasting Chris Christie as we speak! Republicans in disarray.
Roses are red
Violets are blue
I am glad to be alive
How about you?
Soonergrunt
There once was a man from Nantucket…
Rafael
I’ve forgotten most of the Neruda I had read except his Poem 15. But I would counter with a recommendation for another latin american poet, the uruguayan Mario Benedetti. Just look up translations of Todavia, Hagamos un trato and Corazon Coraza for good examples.
Soonergrunt
To an Athlete Dying Young
By A. E. Housman 1859–1936
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.
Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.
Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.
Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.
Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.
So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.
And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.
Raven
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner by Randall Jarrell published in 1945.
From my mother’s sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.
scav
Might fit BJ more than defined theme
We’re extremely fortunate
A poem by Wislawa Szymborska
We’re extremely fortunate
not to know precisely
the kind of world we live in.
One would have
to live a long, long time,
unquestionably longer
than the world itself.
Get to know other worlds,
if only for comparison.
Rise above the flesh,
which only really knows
how to obstruct
and make trouble.
For the sake of research,
the big picture
and definitive conclusions,
one would have to transcend time,
in which everything scurries and whirls.
From that perspective,
one might as well bid farewell
to incidents and details.
The counting of weekdays
would inevitably seem to be
a senseless activity;
dropping letters in the mailbox
a whim of foolish youth;
the sign “No Walking on the Grass”
a symptom of lunacy.
LanceThruster
Passer Mortuus Est
DEATH devours all lovely things:
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness,–presently
Every bed is narrow.
Unremembered as old rain
Dries the sheer libation;
And the little petulant hand
Is an annotation.
After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?
Edna St. Vincent Millay
gregor
Souls accuse me of infidelity.
Wandering over the ocean I gather greater storms.
The breaths wind up the watch.
Knowing this will never end,
I make one more cross.
Coldnesses sublimate from the gray,
and for a sky
I stand
unfolded.
BGinCHI
@Rock: Frost is a great poet.
He’s been unfortunately harmed by poor teaching and forced appreciation. Anyone who reads “After Apple-Picking” and doesn’t see the brilliance is a little dead inside.
Count Ulster
I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whalebone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime-tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.
And the plashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden-paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.
I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles
on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon —
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.
Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday se’nnight.”
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” I told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.
In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.
In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden-paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?
— Amy Lowell
cleek
Bob wants the wind to blow constantly
because as a kite
he’d be happy
on a string in the sky
pulling against the ground forever
He’d be the only one happy
“why does the wind blow so much?
only good for kites and sailboats
and damned if i got a sailboat.”
Beef jerky is
leather
soaked in salty beef soup
for a hundred years
is what Bob wishes
he could have for dinner
every night for a week
…and Pepsi
What if one day the sun didn’t set
but stayed out all night
like a lost cat
that found it’s way home
late the next day
but scared everyone silly
the whole night long
We’d remember that night
for a long time
That’s what Bob wants
for the day when he dies
that the sun will stay out
all night long
So everyone will say “remember
when Bob died?
The sun didn’t set
but stayed out all night
like a lost cat…
”
When the sun went down
the cat stayed
out all night, Bob found out
waiting on the steps till daylight
But later after a bit
the cat came back
and meowed at Bob
scolding him
for not letting her have her freedom
she felt trapped
lately
and needed some time to herself
Now Bob sulks on tiptoes
to give the cat space
while the cat looks at him
and shakes her head
men
Bob’s brother says “Bob,
when i was a kid
i had this girl
and how
and she dumped me
and i thought about killing myself
i thought she was something special, then
but i never quite did
And now that i’m older i’m glad
i never quite did it
cause since then
i’ve got to dump plenty of chicks
and i never talk to them again
So i don’t know but
but, i kinda hope
that they felt like killing themselves
cause that’s what it’s all about
you know?
that’s how it always ends up
But you gotta be the one dumping
cause feeling like you want to kill yourself
over losing someone
that’s the worst
worse than anything
cause dead seems like the only place where she isn’t
but it’s too scary to go there.
So Bob,
don’t worry about the cat
there are other cats. God.”
LanceThruster
Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Dylan Thomas (as spake by Rodney Dangerfield in “Back to School”)
dedc79
The Highwayman
last two verses below:
And still of a winter’s night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding—
Riding—riding—
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
Over the cobbles he clatters and clangs in the dark inn-yard;
He taps with his whip on the shutters, but all is locked and barred;
He whistles a tune to the window, and who should be waiting there
But the landlord’s black-eyed daughter,
Bess, the landlord’s daughter,
Plaiting a dark red love-knot into her long black hair.
FlipYrWhig
SONNET LXXI.
Written at Weymouth in winter.
THE chill waves whiten in the sharp North-east;
Cold, cold the night-blast comes, with sullen sound,
And black and gloomy, like my cheerless breast:
Frowns the dark pier and lonely sea-view round.
Yet a few months–and on the peopled strand
Pleasure shall all her varied forms display;
Nymphs lightly tread the bright reflecting sand,
And proud sails whiten all the summer bay:
Then, from these winds that whistle keen and bleak,
Music’s delightful melodies shall float
O’er the blue waters; but ’tis mine to seek
Rather, some unfrequented shade, remote
From sights and sounds of gaiety–I mourn
All that gave me delight–Ah! never to return.
Ronnie P
O, Loss! O, Divine Celebration!
O, great Being in thine eyes resolved!
Resolute in thy appearance
and just in thy virtue
of last days betold.
Our losses must in our
souls confine thee our just celebration!
-S. Chamberlyne, 1804
Howard Beale IV
Enoch Arden
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Soonergrunt
@Cris (without an H): She’s also a member of an organization called the “Holistic Moms Network” which apparently has a vocal anti-vax group among their ranks. Whether or not she’s part of that group isn’t something I could find on my short break from staring at network activity logs.
The Fat Kate Middleton
You people are hitting all my favorites (Larkin, Jarrell, et al.). I’m starting with this one, from Keillor’s Writer’s Almanac last week:
In Heaven It Is Always Autumn
by Elizabeth Spires
“In Heaven It Is Always Autumn”
John Donne
In heaven it is always autumn. The leaves are always near
to falling there but never fall, and pairs of souls out walking
heaven’s paths no longer feel the weight of years upon them.
Safe in heaven’s calm, they take each other’s arm,
the light shining through them, all joy and terror gone.
But we are far from heaven here, in a garden ragged and unkept
as Eden would be with the walls knocked down,
the paths littered
with the unswept leaves of many years, bright keepsakes
for children of the Fall. The light is gold, the sun pulling
the long shadow soul out of each thing, disclosing an outcome.
The last roses of the year nod their frail heads,
like listeners listening to all that’s said, to ask,
What brought us here? What seed? What rain? What light?
What forced us upward through dark earth? What made us bloom?
What wind shall take us soon, sweeping the garden bare?
Their voiceless voices hang there, as ours might,
if we were roses, too. Their beds are blanketed with leaves,
tended by an absent gardener whose life is elsewhere.
It is the last of many last days. Is it enough?
To rest in this moment? To turn our faces to the sun?
To watch the lineaments of a world passing?
To feel the metal of a black iron chair, cool and eternal,
press against our skin? To apprehend a chill as clouds
pass overhead, turning us to shivering shade and shadow?
And then to be restored, small miracle, the sun
shining brightly
as before? We go on, you leading the way, a figure
leaning on a cane that leaves its mark on the earth.
My friend, you have led me farther than I have ever been.
To a garden in autumn. To a heaven of impermanence
where the final falling off is slow, a slow and radiant happening.
The light is gold. And while we’re here, I think it must
be heaven.
LanceThruster
“Nos morituri te salutamus”
Roman Gladiator Salute (apocryphal)
Kane
God no longer answers prayer,
and Satan won’t buy souls anymore;
It’s not that He doesn’t care,
but God no longer answers prayer;
I’ve got to do my share
to open my own damn door;
For God no longer answers prayer,
and Satan won’t buy souls anymore.
kane~
FlipYrWhig
@Count Ulster: That one is FANTASTIC. I used to teach it near the end of a semester on English poetry up to the First World War era.
mainmati
THE QUEEN
I have named you queen.
There are taller ones than you, taller.
There are purer ones than you, purer.
There are lovelier than you, lovelier.
But you are the queen.
When you go through the streets
no one recognizes you.
No one sees your crystal crown, no one looks
at the carpet of red gold
that you tread as you pass,
the nonexistent carpet.
And when you appear all the rivers sound
in my body, bells
shake the sky, and a hymn fills the world.
Only you and I,
only you and I, my love,
listen to it.
Pablo Neruda, from The Captain’s Verses, my favorite of his books of poetry
Punchy
From where I sit
Obama will win
This is despite
The votes of my kin
Dad, he’s a racist
Mom just a follower
Gunna call em Tuesday nite
Just to hear him holler
taylormattd
@Cris (without an H): And Peter Deusberg not only has a Ph.D, his work in the early 1970s on oncogenes was groundbreaking.
That didn’t stop him, however, from decades of false claims that HIV does not cause AIDS. He went around claiming it was actually anti-retrovirals and possibly recreational drugs that cause AIDS. He also claimed that AIDS in Africa was a “myth”, and his denialism, provided as an adviser to the South African government likely caused thousands and thousands of deaths.
So an appeal to a degree isn’t helpful.
The bottom line is that Blossom is an anti-vaxxer and a moron.
Benno
I heard the old, old men say,
‘Everything alters,
And one by one we drop away.’
They had hands like claws, and their knees
Were twisted like the old thorn-trees
By the waters.
‘All that’s beautiful drifts away
Like the waters.’
– W.B. Yeats, The Old Men Admiring Themselves in the Water
LanceThruster
To A Mouse –
Robert Burns
– original –
Wee, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,
O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murdering pattle.
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An’ fellow mortal!
I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
‘S a sma’ request;
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t.
Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s win’s ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!
Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,
An’ weary winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.
That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turned out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld.
But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!
Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
Standard English translation
Small, crafty, cowering, timorous little beast,
O, what a panic is in your little breast!
You need not start away so hasty
With argumentative chatter!
I would be loath to run and chase you,
With murdering plough-staff.
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes you startle
At me, your poor, earth born companion
And fellow mortal!
I doubt not, sometimes, but you may steal;
What then? Poor little beast, you must live!
An odd ear in twenty-four sheaves
Is a small request;
I will get a blessing with what is left,
And never miss it.
Your small house, too, in ruin!
Its feeble walls the winds are scattering!
And nothing now, to build a new one,
Of coarse grass green!
And bleak December’s winds coming,
Both bitter and keen!
You saw the fields laid bare and wasted,
And weary winter coming fast,
And cozy here, beneath the blast,
You thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel plough passed
Out through your cell.
That small bit heap of leaves and stubble,
Has cost you many a weary nibble!
Now you are turned out, for all your trouble,
Without house or holding,
To endure the winter’s sleety dribble,
And hoar-frost cold.
But little Mouse, you are not alone,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes of mice and men
Go often awry,
And leave us nothing but grief and pain,
For promised joy!
Still you are blest, compared with me!
The present only touches you:
But oh! I backward cast my eye,
On prospects dreary!
And forward, though I cannot see,
I guess and fear!
matryoshka
One of Margaret Atwood’s that always grabbed me by the throat (LOSS!)
DEATH OF A YOUNG SON BY DROWNING
He, who navigated with success
the dangerous river of his own birth
once more set forth
on a voyage of discovery
into the land I floated on
but could not touch to claim.
His feet slid on the bank,
the currents took him;
he swirled with ice and trees in the swollen water
and plunged into distant regions,
his head a bathysphere;
through his eyes’ thin glass bubbles
he looked out, reckless adventurer
on a landscape stranger than Uranus
we have all been to and some remember.
There was an accident; the air locked,
he was hung in the river like a heart.
They retrieved the swamped body,
cairn of my plans and future charts,
with poles and hooks
from among the nudging logs.
It was spring, the sun kept shining, the new grass
leapt to solidity;
my hands glistened with details.
After the long trip I was tired of waves.
My foot hit rock. The dreamed sails
collapsed, ragged.
I planted him in this country
like a flag.
ranchandsyrup
I’m partial to Es Que Somos Muy Pobres by Rulfo.
LanceThruster
I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I’ve watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those … moments will be lost in time, like tears…in rain.
Time to die. ~ Roy Batty “Blade Runner”
Todd
“Who’s that knocking at my door? Who’s that knocking at my door?
Who’s that knocking at my door?” said the fair Young Maiden.
“Open the door, you pox-ridden whore!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“What if I should lock the door? What if I should lock the door?
What if I should lock the door?” said the fair Young Maiden.
“I’ll use my cock to pick the lock!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“What if my parents should come home? What if my parents come home?
What if my parents should come home?” said the fair Young Maiden.
“I’ll kill your pa and then fuck your ma!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“Are you young and handsome, sir? Are you young and handsome, Sir?”
Are you young and handsome, sir?” said the fair Young Maiden.
“I’m old and rough and dirty and tough!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“What is your intention, sir? What is your intention, sir?
What is your intention, sir?” said the fair Young Maiden.
“Oh, off with your shirt, so you doesn’t get hurt!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“Will you take me to the dance? Will you take me to the dance?
Will you take me to the dance?” said the fair Young Maiden.
“To Hell with the dance! Now off with your pants!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
“Will you vow to marry me? Will you vow to marry me?
Will you vow to marry me?” said the fair Young Maiden.
“No, we won’t wed. Getcher ass in the bed!” said Barnacle Bill the Sailor….
Valdivia
late to the thread as always, but have so many good ones. Have to read through it…
gracias DougJ
matryoshka
Punchy wins, hands down.
SFPoet
Coincidentally, I was at a tribute to the poetry of Pablo Neruda last night at an Art Gallery in North Beach (San Francisco). It was a beautiful night of people reading one of their own poems and one of Neruda’s poems. This is the Neruda poem I performed (It’s also in the end credits of “Il Postino” (The Postman), a great movie if y’all haven’t seen it).
Poetry
And it was at that age … Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don’t know, I don’t know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don’t know how or when,
no they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from the others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infinitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
felt myself a pure part
of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
Pablo Neruda
slag
Fuzzy paw to face
Grumbling breath slowly softens
Poetic cat snores
Raven
Death & Fame by Allen Ginsberg
When I die
I don’t care what happens to my body
throw ashes in the air, scatter ’em in East River
bury an urn in Elizabeth New Jersey, B’nai Israel Cemetery
But l want a big funeral
St. Patrick’s Cathedral, St. Mark’s Church, the largest synagogue in
Manhattan
Xboxershorts
A little over a month and 115 years ago, near Hazelton PA, 19 unarmed immigrant coal miners were gunned down as they marched to the Lattimer mine to demand fair pay and better work conditions.
I wrote this to commemorate their sacrifice.
We was only askin for a little
just a little bit o respect
workin and dyin in the mine
was our job and we know’d that
but at the end of each day
if we made it that far
and found our way back home
every penny I done made
was taken by the company store.
Now we’s doin more but makin less
and we’s dyin right and left
and the widders and chil’un is left alone
to starve in the wilderness
Doncha got no heart?
Doncha even care?
if that’s yer way
ya got nothin to say
then we’re marchin to Lattimer
The work in the mine is hard allright,
and we got no gripe against that
but ya can’t keep cuuttin pay on us
thinkin we wouldn’t get mad
maybe ya think we’s uppity
that we don’t know our place
but we’s comin up to Lattimer
We wanna talk with ya face to face
‘Cause we doin more but makin less
and we’s dyin right and left
and the widders and chil’un is left alone
to starve in the wilderness
Doncha got no heart?
Doncha even care?
if that’s yer way
ya got nothin to say
then we’re marchin to Lattimer
So we got some boys who think like us
from down the Hazelton way
for the Lattimer mine we set our sights
400 sang in unity
And the Pardee folks will know our gripe
this is the land of the free
Flying the flag along the way
We have a right to the American dream
‘Cause we doin more but makin less
and we’s dyin right and left
and the widders and chil’un is left alone
to starve in the wilderness
Doncha got no heart?
Doncha even care?
if that’s yer way
ya got nothin to say
then we’re marchin to Lattimer
And Sherriff Martin met our folk
not far from Lattimer
he had him 90 deputies
Said boys, you can’t got there
So we pled our case on that dusty road
told him we stand firm
We’s headin up to Lattimer
so’s they could hear our terms
‘Cause we doin more but makin less
and we’s dyin right and left
and the widders and chil’un is left alone
to starve in the wilderness
Doncha got no heart?
Doncha even care?
if that’s yer way
ya got nothin to say
then we’re marchin to Lattimer
And the Sherriff hung his head right then
I swear, I heard him sigh
Said “Boys, I can’t let that happen”
he grabbed our flag and said “Open fire”
And the blood ran thick as coal tar
19 men lay dead
50 more was wounded
by Sherriff’s men that day
doin more but makin less
and we’s dyin right and left
and the widders and chil’un is left alone
to starve in the wilderness
Doncha got no heart?
Doncha even care?
if that’s yer way
ya got nothin to say
then we’s marchin to Lattimer
catclub
There is one art,
no more, no less.
To all things do
with artlessness.
…my clock has lost both hands and
chime, and only tells eternity.
LanceThruster
The meaning of life is that it ends. ~ Kafka
minachica
One of my faves, esp this time of year (and I don’t care if Frost isn’t cool enough):
My November Guest
MY Sorrow, when she’s here with me,
Thinks these dark days of autumn rain
Are beautiful as days can be;
She loves the bare, the withered tree;
She walks the sodden pasture lane.
Her pleasure will not let me stay.
She talks and I am fain to list:
She’s glad the birds are gone away,
She’s glad her simple worsted gray
Is silver now with clinging mist.
The desolate, deserted trees,
The faded earth, the heavy sky,
The beauties she so truly sees,
She thinks I have no eye for these,
And vexes me for reason why.
Not yesterday I learned to know
The love of bare November days
Before the coming of the snow,
But it were vain to tell her so,
And they are better for her praise.
Raven
This is not a poem, it’s a song by Mark Knopler written about one of the 9/11 hijack victims who phoned home from the plane before he died. Sue me:
My famous last words
Are laying around in tatters
Sounding absurd whatever I try
But I love you and that’s all that really matters
If this is good bye
If this is good bye
Your bright shining sun
Would light up the way before me
You were the one made me feel I could fly
And I love you whatever is waiting for me
If this is good bye If this is good bye
Who knows how long we’ve got
Or what were made out of
Who knows if there’s a plan or not
There is our love,
I know there is our love
My famous last words could never tell the story Spinning unheard in the dark of the sky
But I love you and this is our glory
If this is good bye
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
ah one of my favorites of all time. His poetry has a disturbing power to me.
@Jacquie:
I’d forgotten that one, beautiful.
catclub
@slag:
Sandpaper kisses on cheek and on chin.
That is the way for the day to begin.
Sandpaper kisses, a cuddle, a purr.
I have an alarm clock that’s covered with fur.
Pluky
Constantine Cavafy
“The God Abandons Antony”
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
Σαν έξαφνα, ώρα μεσάνυχτ’, ακουσθεί
αόρατος θίασος να περνά
με μουσικές εξαίσιες, με φωνές—
την τύχη σου που ενδίδει πια, τα έργα σου
που απέτυχαν, τα σχέδια της ζωής σου
που βγήκαν όλα πλάνες, μη ανωφέλετα θρηνήσεις.
Σαν έτοιμος από καιρό, σα θαρραλέος,
αποχαιρέτα την, την Aλεξάνδρεια που φεύγει.
Προ πάντων να μη γελασθείς, μην πεις πως ήταν
ένα όνειρο, πως απατήθηκεν η ακοή σου·
μάταιες ελπίδες τέτοιες μην καταδεχθείς.
Σαν έτοιμος από καιρό, σα θαρραλέος,
σαν που ταιριάζει σε που αξιώθηκες μια τέτοια πόλι,
πλησίασε σταθερά προς το παράθυρο,
κι άκουσε με συγκίνησιν, αλλ’ όχι
με των δειλών τα παρακάλια και παράπονα,
ως τελευταία απόλαυσι τους ήχους,
τα εξαίσια όργανα του μυστικού θιάσου,
κι αποχαιρέτα την, την Aλεξάνδρεια που χάνεις.
The Moar You Know
Hate seeing people down, so here’s one I just cooked up:
There once was a Senator from Nantucket
Who drove a pickup, an American rustbucket
His name was Scott Brown
In the polls he was down
On November 6, please tell him to suck it.
Pluky
@Raven: But songs are poems, lyric poems!
LanceThruster
“My candle burns at both ends It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends –
It gives a lovely light.”
~ Edna St. Vincent Millay.
Raven
@Pluky: I’ll wait for BGinCHI: to chime in!
MomSense
Dirge Without Music
I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains,—but the best is lost.
The answers quick and keen, the honest look, the laughter, the
love,—
They are gone. They are gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not
approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the
world.
Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Valdivia
So many good ones here, my favorite Neruda, which may be trite since everyone in Latin America cries to it when thinking of lost love, but it has the ability to conjure the pain of an unsteady, hungering missing heart so well…
Poem # 20
Twenty Love Poems: And a Song of Despair
Tonight I Can Write
MomSense
@Lance Thruster
First poem I learned as a child. Millay was my gr. grandmother’s cousin.
sparrow
Puerto Rican Obituary. One of my SO’s favorites.
https://www.msu.edu/~sullivan/PietriPoemObit.html
long, so excerpt:
The Fat Kate Middleton
Peonies
This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open–
pools of lace,
white and pink–
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away
to their dark, underground cities–
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again–
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?
– Mary Oliver
BGinCHI
@Valdivia: Would rather have posted Church Going or Wedding Wind, but the former is too long.
handsmile
I’m afraid I can be of no help on Neruda, but on the theme of celebration/loss, I’d be hard pressed to find a more apposite poem:
The Emperor of Ice Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream
Take from the dresser of deal
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice cream.
Wallace Stevens
ETA: Always a treat to encounter selections of Larkin, Szymborksa, and Bishop. Surely there must be something germane by Milosz as well.
LanceThruster
@MomSense:
Way cool!
BGinCHI
@Raven: Some, like the Prine lyric you posted several days ago, yeah. But just songs generally? Not really, per se, but this will get get pedantic really quickly.
If you find yourself guarding poetry’s borders you are going to ruin it faster than anything. There’s a lesson there I think….
I was going to post a Hall & Oates song to spice things up around here but there are just so many good ones!
BGinCHI
@handsmile: Stevens is my man.
LanceThruster
@Pluky:
Hell yeah!
—
People Who Died
by Jim Carroll
Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD’d on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Herbie pushed Tony from the Boys’ Club roof
Tony thought that his rage was just some goof
But Herbie sure gave Tony some bitchen proof
“Hey,” Herbie said, “Tony, can you fly?”
But Tony couldn’t fly, Tony died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Brian got busted on a narco rap
He beat the rap by rattin’ on some bikers
He said, “Hey, I know it’s dangerous, but it sure beats Riker’s”
But the next day he got offed by the very same bikers
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Teddy sniffing glue, he was 12 years old
Fell from the roof on East Two-nine
Cathy was 11 when she pulled the plug
On 26 reds and a bottle of wine
Bobby got leukemia, 14 years old
He looked like 65 when he died
He was a friend of mine
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
G-berg and Georgie let their gimmicks go rotten
So they died of hepatitis in upper Manhattan
Sly in Vietnam took a bullet in the head
Bobby OD’d on Drano on the night that he was wed
They were two more friends of mine
Two more friends that died
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Mary took a dry dive from a hotel room
Bobby hung himself from a cell in the tombs
Judy jumped in front of a subway train
Eddie got slit in the jugular vein
And Eddie, I miss you more than all the others
And I salute you brother
Those are people who died, died
They were all my friends, and they died
Kane
The Weight
I died right the first time
Truth in word and scars
Knocked on a night sky
An echo shook the stars
Prayed with incense burning
Pockets full of charms
Made love to an angel
then she died in my arms
In silent moments yearning
between golden whispers
and transient glances
I think of what might have been
I died right the first time
Wings and dreams disjointed
Infernal stones of blame are thrown
for drowning in a pool of strife
Extended index fingers pointed
to the charge of a wasted life.
kane~
The Fat Kate Middleton
@handsmile: I used to love teaching this one – it entirely delighted and puzzled my students.
dewzke
There Will Come Soft Rains
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;
And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;
Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;
And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.
Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;
And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.
Sara Teasdale
LanceThruster
In Flanders Fields by John McCrae
In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.
We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.
Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
a long-ago lost lover gave me as one of his first gifts a copy of High Windows, so it still resonates for me. The ones you mention are among my favorites as well.
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
that was just incredible beautiful. The last stanzas almost made me gasp.
@handsmile:
ah Stevens, always, always a must. Milosz Annalena comes to mind. Beautiful if not exactly totally on topic.
BGinCHI
@LanceThruster: Carroll was also a good poet. And I’ll never forget reading The Basketball Diaries when I was a teenager. Great book.
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
wait: yours too? :)
The Fat Kate Middleton
@minachica:
Frost is ALWAYS cool enough – he’s a poet I’ve come to appreciate more and more as I get older (and older).
slag
@catclub: Yes. All cats are poetic.
LanceThruster
@The Moar You Know:
Fvckin’ A Eddy!
HRA
http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-song-of-despair/
by Pablo Neruda
MP
@Valdivia: Wonderful poem, and even more amazing in Spanish. There are just some lines in there (e.g. “A lo lejos alguien canta. A lo lejos.” or “Y el verso cae al alma como al pasto el rocío.” ) that you just can’t translate. I read this the first time as a junior in college, and remember being amazed at how lyrical Spanish could be.
LanceThruster
@BGinCHI:
He came to our campus to talk about his poetry. I thought it was funny when he was surprised that I had a copy of “Catholic Boy” for him to sign.
Very good lecturer.
aimai
The Book of Revelations
It is the winter light that knows us
by the laddering of bark,
by the nubs of buds set
defended and ready.
Arrived in the mountains at the frontier,
There was silence in heaven for abou tthe space
of half an hour,
that is the silence we know
contemplating our lives:
the child who set out with a magic stone,
the friend who left sayign we would be together,
the burning house that set us free.
In the winter light we are stripped away
and I am commanded to write these things.
–Celia Gilbert
danimal
Running for Pres was Mitt
Six years in, won’t quit,
But the Kenyan was smart,
and Mitt fell apart,
No friends, Nov 7, tough sh!t.
BGinCHI
@The Fat Kate Middleton: His essays/lectures on poetry are gold too. Really surprisingly cutting edge given his rep. That dude was no fool.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Valdivia: So many of her poems do the same thing to me. And for me, too, High Windows is a much cherished collection. I met Larkin when I was an undergrad at Oxford, but was too young and too awed to really engage with him, or even to make any kind of judgement about what sort of person he was.
Poopyman
When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.
-W.B. Yeats
BGinCHI
@aimai: I don’t know her but that’s really nice.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@BGinCHI: Indeed. Again, I used a few of his essays in the classes I taught.
Chyron HR
I listened hard but could not see
Life tempo change out- and inside me
The preacher trained in all to lose his name
The teacher travels, asking to be shown the same
In the end we’ll agree, we’ll accept, we’ll immortalize
That the truth of man maturing in his eyes
All complete in the sight of seeds of life with you
The Fat Kate Middleton
@aimai: Love this. I’ll be looking up more work by Ms. Gilbert.
vheidi
First Early Mornings Together
Robert Pinsky
Waking up over the candy store together
We hear the birds waking up below the sill
And slowly recognize ourselves, the weather,
The time, and the birds that rustle there until
Down to the street as fog and silence lift
The pigeons from the wrinkled awning flutter
To reconnoiter, mutter, stare and shift
Pecking by ones or twos the rainbowed gutter.
Valdivia
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
That poem is now one of my new favorites. I didn’t know it and it completely moved me.
Meeting authors and poets is always disconcerting. I met Mark Strand and was blown away by how much he was like some of his poems. And sometimes hearing them read their own poetry is jarring: Neruda had the most awful reedy voice!
@MP:
yes, the translation is good but nothing like the original.
Es tan corto el amor y tan largo el olvido…
aimai
I want to also recommend a fantastic record, if you can find it: the poems of Lorca sung by Spain’s great folksinger Paco Ibanez. I don’t speak spanish or understand it much but the poems are just hearbreakingly beautiful when sung this way. Google it. It was out on a CD a few years ago but doesn’t seem to be currently in print.
aimai
LanceThruster
Last Kiss by Wayne Cochran
Oh where, oh where, can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me
She’s gone to heaven, so I’ve got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world
We were out on a date in my daddy’s car
We hadn’t driven very far
There in the road, straight ahead
A car was stalled, the engine was dead
I couldn’t stop, so I swerved to the right
I’ll never forget the sound that night
The screamin’ tires, the bustin’ glass
The painful scream that I heard last
Oh where, oh where, can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me
She’s gone to heaven, so I’ve got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world
[ From: http://www.elyrics.net/read/p/pearl-jam-lyrics/last-kiss-lyrics.html%5D
When I woke up the rain was pourin’ down
There were people standing all around
Something warm goin’ through my eyes
But somehow I found my baby that night
I lifted her head, she looked at me and said
“Hold me darling, just a little while”
I held her close, I kissed her our last kiss
I found the love that I knew I had missed
Well now she’s gone
Even though I hold her tight
I lost my love, my life, that night
Oh where, oh where, can my baby be?
The Lord took her away from me
She’s gone to heaven, so I’ve got to be good
So I can see my baby when I leave this world
BGinCHI
@The Fat Kate Middleton: I’d like to believe such a great poet could not have been a bad man, but all indications are to the contrary. If you read Motion’s bio or any of the other stuff it’s hard to take. I like curmudgeons, and am one, but I’m nice to people I don’t know and liberal-minded, but Larkin? Caught in that scared white Tory xenophobic mindset.
kindness
What’s up with Crooks&Liars today? I can’t get in. Who would hack them?
barbara
So many wonderful poems quoted so far. Here’s an excerpt from a Neruda poem called “Keeping Quiet” that seems so pertinent to this post-storm/pre-election moment:
If we weren’t unanimous
about keeping our lives so much in motion,
if we could do nothing for once,
perhaps a great silence would
interrupt this sadness,
this never understanding ourselves
and threatening ourselves with death,
perhaps the earth is teaching us
when everything seems to be dead
and then everything is alive.
Si no pudimous ser unanimes
moviendo tanto nuestras vidas,
tal vez no hacer nada una vez,
tal vez un gran silencio pueda
interrumpir esta tristeza,
este no entendernos jamas
y amenazarnos con la muerte,
tal vez la tierra nos ensene
cuando todo parcece muerto
y luego todo estaba vivo.
(Translated by Stephen Mitchell)
Apologies for lack of accent marks in the Spanish
Michael G
Lisa: Hmm. Pablo Neruda said, “Laughter is the language of the soul.”
Bart: I am familiar with the works of Pablo Neruda.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@BGinCHI: Oh dear. But then, I love Eliot, too, and we know what kind of person he was. As long as I’m name-dropping, I also met Andrew Motion when I was reading at Oxford. I remember that I liked him very much.
I'mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet
Another by Edna St. Vincent Milay – http://www.scrapbook.com/poems/doc/8479/253.html
Childhood Is the Kingdom Where Nobody Dies
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1937)
Childhood is not from birth to a certain age and at a certain age
The child is grown, and puts away childish things.
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies.
Nobody that matters, that is. Distant relatives of course
Die, whom one never has seen or has seen for an hour,
And they gave one candy in a pink-and-green stripéd bag, or a
jack-knife,
And went away, and cannot really be said to have lived at all.
And cats die. They lie on the floor and lash their tails,
And their reticent fur is suddenly all in motion
With fleas that one never knew were there,
Polished and brown, knowing all there is to know,
Trekking off into the living world.
You fetch a shoe-box, but it’s much too small, because she won’t
curl up now:
So you find a bigger box, and bury her in the yard, and weep.
But you do not wake up a month from then, two months
A year from then, two years, in the middle of the night
And weep, with your knuckles in your mouth, and say Oh, God!
Oh, God!
Childhood is the kingdom where nobody dies that matters,
—mothers and fathers don’t die.
And if you have said, “For heaven’s sake, must you always be
kissing a person?”
Or, “I do wish to gracious you’d stop tapping on the window with
your thimble!”
Tomorrow, or even the day after tomorrow if you’re busy having
fun,
Is plenty of time to say, “I’m sorry, mother.”
To be grown up is to sit at the table with people who have died,
who neither listen nor speak;
Who do not drink their tea, though they always said
Tea was such a comfort.
Run down into the cellar and bring up the last jar of raspberries;
they are not tempted.
Flatter them, ask them what was it they said exactly
That time, to the bishop, or to the overseer, or to Mrs. Mason;
They are not taken in.
Shout at them, get red in the face, rise,
Drag them up out of their chairs by their stiff shoulders and shake
them and yell at them;
They are not startled, they are not even embarrassed; they slide
back into their chairs.
Your tea is cold now.
You drink it standing up,
And leave the house.
(Sorry if the formatting is bonkered.)
Cheers,
Scott.
Scratch
From one of America’s finer poets, but maybe not as well-known as he ought to be.
Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg
You might come here Sunday on a whim.
Say your life broke down. The last good kiss
you had was years ago. You walk these streets
laid out by the insane, past hotels
that didn’t last, bars that did, the tortured try
of local drivers to accelerate their lives.
Only churches are kept up. The jail
turned 70 this year. The only prisoner
is always in, not knowing what he’s done.
The principal supporting business now
is rage. Hatred of the various grays
the mountain sends, hatred of the mill,
The Silver Bill repeal, the best liked girls
who leave each year for Butte. One good
restaurant and bars can’t wipe the boredom out.
The 1907 boom, eight going silver mines,
a dance floor built on springs—
all memory resolves itself in gaze,
in panoramic green you know the cattle eat
or two stacks high above the town,
two dead kilns, the huge mill in collapse
for fifty years that won’t fall finally down.
Isn’t this your life? That ancient kiss
still burning out your eyes? Isn’t this defeat
so accurate, the church bell simply seems
a pure announcement: ring and no one comes?
Don’t empty houses ring? Are magnesium
and scorn sufficient to support a town,
not just Philipsburg, but towns
of towering blondes, good jazz and booze
the world will never let you have
until the town you came from dies inside?
Say no to yourself. The old man, twenty
when the jail was built, still laughs
although his lips collapse. Someday soon,
he says, I’ll go to sleep and not wake up.
You tell him no. You’re talking to yourself.
The car that brought you here still runs.
The money you buy lunch with,
no matter where it’s mined, is silver
and the girl who serves your food
is slender and her red hair lights the wall.
— Richard Hugo
cosima
True story: worked with a young boy who was sad because his girlfriend had moved away to finish college and he felt she was slipping away from him, he was asking me for advice. I told him to read Pablo Neruda poetry to her over the phone and to include snippets in his letters to her. She was shocked to hear him reading her Pablo Neruda, moved back to town to finish her degree, they got married and lived happily ever after (last I heard). I used to write little snippets in my love notes to my husband. He wrote some fabulous poetry about love. Sigh.
Here’s a beautiful clip, Madonna reading Pablo Neruda on the Il Postino soundtrack: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mP0CkbbNfVU
That said, on loss, W.H. Auden has some masterful poetry, beyond the fabulous Funeral Blues.
If I Could Tell You
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 the lions all 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.
Kilgore Trout
Why I disagree with your views for a Marxist Society
A picnic in the summer’s grass
your smile is cute,the wine is sweet
I love your
idealized version of the world where people actually care about strangers.
miserybob
I’m not very well versed (hah) in poetry, but I do love the Russians… Here’s one by Yevgeny Yevtushenko. [The one that first sprung to mind is “Tomorrow’s Wind” (you’ll have to google, it’s a bit too long to paste) – I’m getting old enough to feel it blowing at my back and I welcome it.]
Anyway, here’s a shorter poem.
I Hung a Poem on a Branch by Yevgeny Yevtushenko
I hung a poem
on a branch.
Thrashing,
it resists the wind.
“Take it down,
don’t joke,”
you urge.
People pass.
Stare in surprise.
Here’s a tree
waving
a poem.
Don’t argue now.
We have to go on.
“You don’t know it by heart!”…
That’s true,
but I’ll write a fresh poem for you tomorrow.”
It is not worth being upset by such trifles!
A poem’s not too heavy for a branch.
I’ll write as many as you ask for,
as many poems
as there are trees!
How shall we get on in the future together?
Perhaps, we shall soon forget this?
No,
if we have trouble on the way,
we’ll remember
that somewhere
bathed in light
a tree
is waving
a poem,
and smiling we’ll say
” ‘We have to go on.’ “…
The Fat Kate Middleton
@cosima: I thought I’d read all of Auden, but am sure I’ve not seen this before. It is wonderful. As is the Edna St. Vincent Millay before it.
erlking
Late to the thread as always–
Please Don’t Bury Me
Woke up this morning
Put on my slippers
Walked in the kitchen and died
And oh what a feeling!
When my soul
Went thru the ceiling
And on up into heaven I did ride
When I got there they did say
John, it happened this way
You slipped upon the floor
And hit your head
And all the angels say
Just before you passed away
These were the very last words
That you said:
Chorus:
Please don’t bury me
Down in that cold cold ground
No, I’d druther have ’em cut me up
And pass me all around
Throw my brain in a hurricane
And the blind can have my eyes
And the deaf can take both of my ears
If they don’t mind the size
Give my stomach to Milwaukee
If they run out of beer
Put my socks in a cedar box
Just get “em” out of here
Venus de Milo can have my arms
Look out! I’ve got your nose
Sell my heart to the junkman
And give my love to Rose
Repeat Chorus
Give my feet to the footloose
Careless, fancy free
Give my knees to the needy
Don’t pull that stuff on me
Hand me down my walking cane
It’s a sin to tell a lie
Send my mouth way down south
And kiss my ass goodbye
—John Prine
dadanarchist
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
“Failing and Flying” by Jack Gilbert
Valdivia
@cosima:
love that story. My grandfather courted my grandmother by declaiming Neruda to her every night.
Cris (without an H)
I wasn’t aware of the anti-vaxx thing, and I see (thanks to your prompting) that it’s absolutely correct.
I guess I was more reacting to “scientifically illiterate,” which I don’t think is a correct description either of Bialik or Deusberg, in spite of their wrongness on certain matters scientific.
Rhoda
Theodore Roethke is my favorite poet.
For Loss:
Elegy for Jane
(My student, thrown by a horse)
I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils;
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile;
And how, once startled into talk, the light syllables leaped for her,
And she balanced in the delight of her thought,
A wren, happy, tail into the wind,
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches.
The shade sang with her;
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing,
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose.
Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth,
Even a father could not find her:
Scraping her cheek against straw,
Stirring the clearest water.
My sparrow, you are not here,
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow.
The sides of wet stones cannot console me,
Nor the moss, wound with the last light.
If only I could nudge you from this sleep,
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon.
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love:
I, with no rights in this matter,
Neither father nor lover.
For Celebration:
I Knew a Woman
I knew a woman, lovely in her bones,
When small birds sighed, she would sigh back at them;
Ah, when she moved, she moved more ways than one:
The shapes a bright container can contain!
Of her choice virtues only gods should speak,
Or English poets who grew up on Greek
(I’d have them sing in chorus, cheek to cheek.)
How well her wishes went! She stroked my chin,
She taught me Turn, and Counter-turn, and stand;
She taught me Touch, that undulant white skin:
I nibbled meekly from her proffered hand;
She was the sickle; I, poor I, the rake,
Coming behind her for her pretty sake
(But what prodigious mowing did we make.)
Love likes a gander, and adores a goose:
Her full lips pursed, the errant note to seize;
She played it quick, she played it light and loose;
My eyes, they dazzled at her flowing knees;
Her several parts could keep a pure repose,
Or one hip quiver with a mobile nose
(She moved in circles, and those circles moved.)
Let seed be grass, and grass turn into hay:
I’m martyr to a motion not my own;
What’s freedom for? To know eternity.
I swear she cast a shadow white as stone.
But who would count eternity in days?
These old bones live to learn her wanton ways:
(I measure time by how a body sways.)
Judge Crater
Kipling:
Take up the White Man’s burden–
The savage wars of peace–
Fill full the mouth of Famine
And bid the sickness cease;
And when your goal is nearest
The end for others sought,
Watch sloth and heathen Folly
Bring all your hopes to nought.
aimai
@I’mNotSureWhoIWantToBeYet:
Wow! Thank you for posting that. Great poem. My oldest daughter, when she was three, basically expressed the child’s version of this when she said to us, confidently and inquirigly “But…the real people don’t die.” I still feel a plangent sense of grief when I think of that piercing moment.
aimai
Aardvark Cheeselog
97 responses and no love for the Bard?
Sonnet LXIV
When I have seen by Time’s fell hand defaced
The rich proud cost of outworn buried age;
When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed,
And brass eternal slave to mortal rage;
When I have seen the hungry ocean gain
Advantage on the kingdom of the shore,
And the firm soil win of the watery main,
Increasing store with loss, and loss with store;
When I have seen such interchange of state,
Or state itself confounded to decay;
Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate
That Time will come and take my love away.
This thought is as a death which cannot choose
But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
Just Some Fuckhead
…
…
Words that have been written
In a manner designed
To convey import
Or elicit feeling
Greater than the sum of those words
lol chikinburd
More Dylan T.:
And Death Shall Have No Dominion
And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan’t crack;
And death shall have no dominion.
And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.
The Stolen Dormouse
listen: there’s a hell
of a good universe next door; let’s go
–e.e. cummings
Bill E Pilgrim
At some point we’ll start
all being born
with the same face.
Darkness
will acquire the texture
of fur and will be
all the grief we need.
Stars will be replaced
by spiders creating
lightning storms as they
spin, laughter will be
recognized and accepted
as the universal language.
All objects will become
either a saxophone or a drum.
You will breathe again.
In utter calm that yet
includes a storm,
blue as deep as the moment
weather destroys its keys.
The word “we” will become singular.
-Cole Swensen, 1986
Emma
@Rock: One of my favorites! Here’s another:
The worm drives helically through the wood
And does not know the dust left in the bore
Once made the table integral and good;
And suddenly the crystal hits the floor.
Electrons find their paths in subtle ways,
A massless eddy in a trail of smoke;
The names of lovers, light of other days —
Perhaps you will not miss them. That’s the joke.
The universe winds down. That’s how it’s made.
But memory is everything to lose;
Although some of the colors have to fade,
Do not believe you’ll get the chance to choose.
Regret, by definition, comes too late;
Say what you mean. Bear witness. Iterate.
John M. Ford.
And he dashed it off in a comment in one of Making Light threads.
Valdivia
@Aardvark Cheeselog:
indeed! My favorite,
Sonnet 129
Aardvark Cheeselog
Also, too, # LXV
Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o’ersways their power,
How with this rage shall beauty hold a plea,
Whose action is no stronger than a flower?
O! how shall summer’s honey breath hold out,
Against the wrackful siege of battering days,
When rocks impregnable are not so stout,
Nor gates of steel so strong but Time decays?
O fearful meditation! where, alack,
Shall Time’s best jewel from Time’s chest lie hid?
Or what strong hand can hold his swift foot back?
Or who his spoil of beauty can forbid?
O! none, unless this miracle have might,
That in black ink my love may still shine bright.
Southern Beale
OH well I was going to suggest some poems until I saw they had to be by Pablo Neruda.
/sarcasm
Seriously, that’s way too highbrow for me. The only poem I know starts with, “Whose woods these are I think I know …”
But anonymous commenter feeling down and needing poetry: whomever you are, I hope you feel better soon.
aimai
I think I got this poem from someone at Balloon Juice a few years ago–maybe it was BG in Chi?
Introduction to Poetry
–Billy Collins
I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide
or press an ear against its hive.
I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,
or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.
I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.
But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.
They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.
from The Apple that Astonished Paris, 1996
University of Arkansas Press, Fayetteville, Ark.
Permissions information.
Copyright 1988 by Billy Collins.
jharp
Count me as a poetry moron.
Either my brain doesn’t work that way or I am too stupid to get.
Brachiator
from Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror
We have seen the city; it is the gibbous
Mirrored eye of an insect. All things happen
On its balcony and are resumed within,
But the action is the cold, syrupy flow
Of a pageant. One feels too confined,
Sifting the April sunlight for clues,
In the mere stillness of the ease of its
Parameter. The hand holds no chalk
And each part of the whole falls off
And cannot know it knew, except
Here and there, in cold pockets
Of remembrance, whispers out of time.
John Ashbery
reality-based
here’s more classic Edna St. Vincent Millay
Well, I have lost you; and I lost you fairly;
In my own way, and with my full consent.
Say what you will, kings in a tumbrel rarely
Went to their deaths more proud than this one went.
Some nights of apprehension and hot weeping
I will confess; but that’s permitted me;
Day dried my eyes; I was not one for keeping
Rubbed in a cage a wing that would be free.
If I had loved you less or played you slyly
I might have held you for a summer more,
But at the cost of words I value highly,
And no such summer as the one before.
Should I outlive this anguish—and men do—
I shall have only good to say of you.
and ok, everybody’s read it, and heard the last line too many times – but I still love Tennyson’s Ulysses (if we’re talking about loss, and time, and trying again? )
the last lines –
Come, my friends,
‘Tis not too late to seek a newer world.
Push off, and sitting well in order smite
The sounding furrows; for my purpose holds
To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until I die.
It may be that the gulfs will wash us down:
It may be we shall touch the Happy Isles,
And see the great Achilles, whom we knew.
Though much is taken, much abides; and though
We are not now that strength which in the old days
Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are,
One equal-temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
LABiker
Autumn Daybreak
Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,
I know—for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor—
How may boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.
Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;
When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.
Edna St. Vincent Millay
the antibob
Meditation at Lagunitas
By Robert Hass
All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.
Ann Rynd
Chimes From a Fractured Belfry
There is over.
On the balustraded porch, in the rank haze,
rows flare
and bleed together.
Genes leak into the pool.
The Bishop turns his back.
The stream washes down from him.
Red spots,
yellow in yolky embryonic
communion
green stains around the edges,
verdigris jam, drying into
black acromegalic masks.
Eons bore
through neon
climes
emerging drunk
in whirling paradi.
Galaxies flail,
planets oblate, moons get dinged,
Orbits fold,
A nova reels.
The sky, a former golden thing,
is turning blue,
Heaven’s broke.
Frank Regan
Poopyman
For our innumerate wingnut friends:
ZIMMER’S HEAD THUDDING AGAINST THE BLACKBOARD
Paul Zimmer
At the blackboard I had missed
Five number problems in a row,
And was about to foul a sixth,
When the old, exasperated nun
Began to pound my head against
My six mistakes. When I cried,
She threw me back into my seat,
Where I hid my head and swore
That very day I’d be a poet,
And curse her yellow teeth with this.
duck-billed placelot
Did no one else post this one, really? Maybe I missed it.
Excerpt from “A Dog Has Died”, my favorite Neruda poem by far.
nancydarling
Valdivia, when I read DougJ’s post, you were my first thought. I hope it’s not you because I don’t want you to be the one feeling a little down.
Anyway here’s the opening lines to my favorite Roethke poem, “Journey to the Interior”.
It’s too long to post the whole thing, but here are the final lines.
If you are the one, be well, my friend.
cosima
@ Valdivia — It would have worked with me! Not sure how long I’d have been able to hold out under a Neruda onslaught. I hope that the boy (who would now be a man) is still reading his sweet wife Neruda. And I hope that your grandparents had many wonderful years together after that promising beginning. Just the thought of having a fella read Neruda to me makes me swoon, and I’ve been happily married now for about 15 yrs…
@FK Middleton — From my trusty “Everyman’s Library Pocket Poet” Auden edition.
handsmile
Such a glorious thread to lift the gloom from Sandy and to still, however briefly, the gut-churning of the uh, you know….
Many thanks Ms. Middleton for the revelatory Oliver poem! Such a superb and surely enduring writer. And to others here for the unexpected/unknown gifts from Pinsky, Hugo, Gilbert, and Roethke.
Valdivia: I knew you’d offer up a lovely selection from Milosz! [I must say I had wondered if you were the anonymous inspiration for this thread. And btw, are you still Shanghai-ed?]
As for Philip Larkin: his acerbic wit, strong opinions, and proud misanthropy would seem to make him an ideal member of the BJ community avant la lettre.
Roger Moore
O Captain! my Captain! our fearful trip is done,
The ship has weathered every rack, the prize we sought is won,
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring;
But O heart! heart! heart!
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up–for you the flag is flung–for you the bugle trills,
For you bouquets and ribboned wreaths–for you the shores a-crowding,
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head!
It is some dream that on the deck
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still,
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will.
The ship is anchored safe and sound, its voyage closed and done,
From fearful trip the victor ship comes in with object won;
Exult O shores, and ring O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
Walt Whitman
Valdivia
@nancydarling:
blushing.
ah you know me too well!
and many many thanks for the good wishes… affairs of the heart are always so complex no?
that stanza: on one side of silence there is no smile
just totally slayed me.
Sad_Dem
Sorry to come late to this wonderful party. Here is a quick translation of “Walking Around” by Neruda.
Walking Around
It happens that I am tired of being a man.
It happens that I go to the tailor’s and to movies
faded and impervious, like a felt swan
swimming on an ancient sooty lake.
The smell of the hairdresser’s makes my cry out loud
I only want some relief from stones and wool,
I only want to not see establishments or gardens,
no merchandise, no eyeglasses, no elevators.
It happens that I am tired of my feet and nails
and my hair and my shadow
It happens that I am tired of being a man.
Nevertheless it would be delicious
to startle a notary with a cut lily
or kill a nun with a blow to the ear.
It would be beautiful
to walk around with a green knife
shouting until I die from the cold.
I don’t want to keep being a root in the dark
trembling, stretching, chattering with dreams
downward, in the wet guts of the earth
absorbent and thoughtful, eating every day.
I don’t want that disgrace for myself.
I don’t want to be a root and a tomb
living underground, warehoused with the dead,
a stiff dying of pity.
This is why Monday shines like gasoline
when it sees me coming with my jail face
and howls its passing like a wounded wheel
leaving footprints of warm blood toward the night.
And it pushes my to certain corners, certain humid houses,
to hospitals where the bones fly out the windows
to shoe shops smelling of vinegar
to cracked and frightful streets.
There are sulfur-colored birds with horrible intestines
hanging from the doors of houses I hate
there are dentures forgotten in a cafeteria
there are mirrors
that should have cried in shame and fear
there are raincoats everywhere, and venom, and navels.
I go walking around calmly, with my eyes and shoes
with rage and forgetfulness
I go, by offices and shops with orthopedics
patios where clothes hang from a wire
underwear, towels, sweaters that cry
slow dirty tears.
aimai
I love Mary Oliver. And I highly recommend Rumi who I have just fallen in love with–maybe I wasn’t old enough before but I began reading the “Red Book” translation by Coleman Barks/banks? while sitting waiting for a memorial to a 96 year old scientist. Somehow Rumi hit me in an entirely new way. Whoever is suffering today? Give it a try.
aimai
Mnemosyne
@Roger Moore:
I vaguely recall that that poem is about Lincoln assassination — am I remembering correctly?
Sad_Dem
@BGinCHI: Yep, Larkin was a racist sexist Tory. Hard to accept, isn’t it?
Lex
Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.
Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.
He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.
The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.
“Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” W.H. Auden
Valdivia
@handsmile:
mea culpa indeed for instigating this–see you BJ people know me too well!
not in Shanghai anymore but trying to figure out if I am feeling Shanghaied or not…
And I knew you would provide a Stevens to delight us. :)
steve
Things I Want Decided
Which shouldn’t exist
in this world,
the one who forgets
or the one
who is forgotten?
Which is better,
to love
one who has died
or not to see
each other when you are alive?
Which is better,
the distant lover
you long for
or the one you see daily
without desire?
Which is the least unreliable
among fickle things—
the swift rapids,
a flowing river,
or this human world?
— Izumi Shikibu
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, you are.
jibeaux
None of this yet?
A Valediction Forbidding Mourning
by John Donne
AS virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say,
“Now his breath goes,” and some say, “No.”
So let us melt, and make no noise, 5
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move ;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.
Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears ;
Men reckon what it did, and meant ; 10
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.
Dull sublunary lovers’ love
—Whose soul is sense—cannot admit
Of absence, ’cause it doth remove 15
The thing which elemented it.
But we by a love so much refined,
That ourselves know not what it is,
Inter-assurèd of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips and hands to miss. 20
Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to aery thinness beat.
If they be two, they are two so 25
As stiff twin compasses are two ;
Thy soul, the fix’d foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if th’ other do.
And though it in the centre sit,
Yet, when the other far doth roam, 30
It leans, and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.
Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run ;
Thy firmness makes my circle just, 35
And makes me end where I begun.
Ann Rynd
After great pain, a formal feeling comes – (372)
BY EMILY DICKINSON
After great pain, a formal feeling comes –
The Nerves sit ceremonious, like Tombs –
The stiff Heart questions ‘was it He, that bore,’
And ‘Yesterday, or Centuries before’?
The Feet, mechanical, go round –
A Wooden way
Of Ground, or Air, or Ought –
Regardless grown,
A Quartz contentment, like a stone –
This is the Hour of Lead –
Remembered, if outlived,
As Freezing persons, recollect the Snow –
First – Chill – then Stupor – then the letting go –
Rathskeller
Federico García Lorca: Llanto por la muerte de Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (Lament for the death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías).
English version:
http://boppin.com/lorca/lament.html
Spanish version with MP3
http://www.classicistranieri.com/federico-garcia-lorca-llanto-por-la-muerte-de-ignacio-sanchez-mejias-lettura-di-valerio-di-stefano-audiobook-mp3.html
A fragment:
———————-
I will not see it!
Tell the moon to come,
for I do not want to see the blood
of Ignacio on the sand.
I will not see it!
The moon wide open.
Horse of still clouds,
and the grey bull ring of dreams
with willows in the barreras.
I will not see it!
Let my memory kindle!
Warm the jasmines
of such minute whiteness!
I will not see it!
The cow of the ancient world
passed her sad tongue
over a snout of blood
spilled on the sand,
and the bulls of Guisando,
partly death and partly stone,
bellowed like two centuries
sated with threading the earth.
No.
I will not see it!
catclub
@Mnemosyne: yes.
Also “When [something somethings] Last in the Dooryard Bloomed”
AnneW
Leigh Hunt. 1784–1859
Jenny kiss’d Me
Jenny kiss’d me when we met,
Jumping from the chair she sat in;
Time, you thief, who love to get
Sweets into your list, put that in!
Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
Say that health and wealth have miss’d me,
Say I’m growing old, but add,
Jenny kiss’d me.
Lee Rudolph
Here are some poems of mine on loss. The ones with “prayer” in their titles are in a stanza that Paul Goodman used for a lot of “little prayers”, and that I have adopted (and somewhat adapted) under that name. “Heart’s Desire” is a ghazal; I first heard of that form, and heard some ghazals, from Adrienne Rich (a very recent loss) in 1967 or 1968, I forget which.
===
SNOW PRAYER
I had taken the word of the calendar
and slept, thinking winter was over.
Morning came: the sky was gray,
it had nothing to say;
the garden was hidden beneath a new drift,
still dead. I have lost something I loved,
but what, and when,
I have forgotten.
If I could remember, I could make an end:
let me remember. By afternoon
the snow was gone, in wind,
in untrustworthy sun.
===
BLUE PRAYER
Shine your light on me in the blue dark,
O midnight specialist; O most chaotic
coyote chorister, sing me in blue sleep
through suites of dreams moist as the new moon’s lip
kissing blue heaven where the sun has set
hard as a stone, where its blue bruise is left.
—I remember the dead in my dreams: then morning
comes (gray turning blue) and I forget how to sing.
===
HEART’S DESIRE
What you do not have you cannot lose;
what you possess, you will lose over and over.
The ruin of a landmark is a landmark,
its new name blooms from the mode of its destruction.
Mother, you have been taken from me, and oh! the taste of my loss
is sweeter than any milk you ever spared.
The name of the stone is Heart’s Desire
but it is a stone. And it is a stone.
BGinCHI
@catclub: lilacs last
Whitman.
MomSense
@AnneW
Oh my but that poem brought me back to an air mail love letter (oh that thin, crinkly, blue paper) from a boy who told me that poem reminded him of me. Unrequited love. Youth.
Sigh.
Morbo
Death poem of Ujimasa Hojo
Autumn wind of eve,
blow away the clouds that mass
over the moon’s pure light
and the mists that cloud our mind,
do thou sweep away as well.
Now we disappear,
well, what must we think of it?
From the sky we came.
Now we may go back again.
That’s at least one point of view.
MomSense
@AnneW
Oh my but that poem brought me back to an air mail love letter (oh that thin, crinkly, blue paper) from a boy who told me that poem reminded him of me. Unrequited love. Youth.
Sigh.
MomSense
@AnneW
Oh my but that poem brought me back to an air mail love letter (oh that thin, crinkly, blue paper) from a boy who told me that poem reminded him of me. Unrequited love. Youth.
Sigh.
merrinc
Touch of Love
I would straighten your tie,
smooth your collar,
pick a bit of lint from your sleeve
before you left for your day’s affairs
and I turned attention to mine.
Today I brushed off a leaf that had fallen
on your name.
~ Doris Louise Alsup
MomSense
I haven’t seen any Rabindranath Tagore yet. If you haven’t read it, Gitanjali is a gem of a collection.
Peace my heart…
Peace, my heart, let the time for the parting be sweet.
Let it not be a death but completeness.
Let love melt into memory and pain into songs.
Let the flight through the sky end in the folding of the wings over the nest.
Let the last touch of your hands be gentle like the flower of the night.
Stand still, O Beautiful End, for a moment, and say your last words in silence.
I bow to you and hold up my lamp to light you on your way.
~Rabindranath Tagore
earl in ca
this should cheer you up…
Wife’s Lament
by Marjorie Strauss
Oh Sticky Ballsack, you wantonly grip my thigh
No matter how quickly you try to retract,
I feel each bit of your Sticky Ballsack slowly peel back
Clutching and grasping my every pore,
Flesh is violated, repulsed
Naked slumber has lost it’s allure,
Snuggles have been cast aside
Sticky Ballsack, you have pilfered
Our post-intercourse embrace.
rollSound
Many years ago I wrote a Frost parody for a magazine contest…
Whose car this is I think you know
Its keys were in my pocket, though.
You did not see me drive from here
To watch the double-feature show.
The ticket-taker thought it queer.
My ID picture was not clear.
And, so, I did not get to see
“The Vixens from the Planet Zyr”.
I was as mad as I could be
And, driving fast, I did not see
The curve behind that compost heap,
And hit the mighty chestnut tree.
The ditch was muddy, dark and deep.
The tow truck charge was really steep.
I’m sorry that I’m such a creep.
But, Friday can I use the Jeep?
Metrosexual Manichean Monster DougJ
@rollSound:
I like it.
contract3d
from The Garden of Proserpine
BY ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE
From too much love of living,
From hope and fear set free,
We thank with brief thanksgiving
Whatever gods may be
That no life lives for ever;
That dead men rise up never;
That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere
Safe to sea.
Tehanu
I have two:
Here lies a most beautiful lady
Light of heart and step was she
I think she was the most beautiful lady
That ever was in the West Country.
But beauty vanishes — beauty passes,
However rare — rare — it be;
And when I crumble, who will remember
This lady of the West Country?
Walter de la Mare
******************
,,,
All I have is a voice
To undo the folded lie,
The romantic lie in the brain
Of the sensual man-in-the-street
And the lie of Authority
Whose buildings grope the sky:
There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.
Defenseless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.
W.H. Auden, “September 1, 1939”
*****************
(I was going to go with “And Death Shall Have No Dominion” and John M. Ford’s “Against Entropy” but like-minded souls beat me to them. It’s nice to be a member of this community.)
Leeds man
More Bukowski;
a challenge to the dark
shot in the eye
shot in the brain
shot in the ass
shot like a flower in the dance
amazing how death wins hands down
amazing how much credence is given to idiot forms of life
amazing how laughter has been drowned out
amazing how viciousness is such a constant
I must soon declare my own war on their war
I must hold to my last piece of ground
I must protect the small space I have made that has allowed me life
my life not their death
my death not their death…
Joel
@taylormattd: Nobel prize winner Kary Mullis jumped on board that train, as well. Fucknuts is also an AGW denier as well.
contract3d
(ditto – last verse)
Then star nor sun shall waken,
Nor any change of light:
Nor sound of waters shaken,
Nor any sound or sight:
Nor wintry leaves nor vernal,
Nor days nor things diurnal;
Only the sleep eternal
In an eternal night.
Rhoda
@jharp: I doubt you’re a moron. Poems are stories. You either enjoy them or not; but there’s no great mystery. A great example is William Carlos Williams This is just to say…
I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast
Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold
People adore that poem. From high school to grad school…it’s a classic for a reason. Me, I can’t get passed the fact he ate the plums. I think fuck, the last of the plums are gone. I become irrationally irritated because I’m the one that saves the slice of cake and finds some asshole snaked it.
I find no beauty in that poem. It’s a lyrical fuck you IMO.
Anyway, I moved away from the point I was trying to make which was I don’t believe in poetry morons. I hope you find something you like because a good poem is like a great story or an excellent song…it’s a great and pure connection.
Uncle Cosmo
I would imagine that losing’s one’s father qualifies as loss, so: In the interest of sparing innocent electrons, I hope yinz won’t mind me linking to this old diary of mine on GOS rather than republishing the whole shebang here. Beisbol fans especially encouraged to click over.
gogol's wife
You BJers are making me, an old broken-down literature teacher, cry today. What a great thread.
Osip Mandelstam, translated by John High and Matvei Yankelevich:
Yet to die. Unalone still.
For now your pauper-friend is with you.
Together you delight in the grandeur of the plains,
And the dark, the cold, the storms of snow.
Live quiet and consoled
In gaudy poverty, in powerful destitution.
Blessed are those days and nights.
The work of this sweet voice is without sin.
Misery is he whom, like a shadow,
A dog’s barking frightens, the wind cuts down.
Poor is he who, half-alive himself
Begs his shade for pittance.
Ash Can
Can’t forget the Bard’s Sonnet 18, e3specially since it’s so seasonal:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou growest:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
PS: Chin up, Valdivia! :)
cleek
This Is Just To Say
I have eaten
the eco-tourist
that was in
the river
and whom
you were probably
relying upon
to pay your guide fees.
Forgive me
he was delicious
so crunchy
and screamy.
ObWi
Kerry Reid
“Love after Love,” Derek Walcott
The time will come
When, with elation,
You will greet yourself arriving
At your own door, in your own mirror,
And each will smile at the other’s welcome,
And say, sit here, Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
To itself, to the stranger who has loved you
All your life, whom you ignored
For another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
The photographs, the desperate notes,
Peel your image from the mirror,
Sit. Feast on your life.
Kerry Reid
@Kerry Reid: The italics didn’t come out right. Sorry about that.
Retief
Here’s one of loss from Kipling:
Gethsemane
The Garden called Gethsemane
In Picardy it was,
And there the people came to see
The English soldiers pass.
We used to pass — we used to pass
Or halt, as it might be,
And ship our masks in case of gas
Beyond Gethsemane.
The Garden called Gethsemane,
It held a pretty lass,
But all the time she talked to me
I prayed my cup might pass.
The officer sat on the chair,
The men lay on the grass,
And all the time we halted there
I prayed my cup might pass.
It didn’t pass — it didn’t pass —
It didn’t pass from me.
I drank it when we met the gas
Beyond Gethsemane!
ee cummings
I CARRY YOUR HEART WITH ME
i carry your heart with me (i carry it in
my heart) i am never without it (anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear no fate (for you are my fate, my sweet) i want
no world (for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you
here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life; which grows
higher than the soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart
i carry your heart (i carry it in my heart)
fedupwithhypocrisy
Grief
I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;
That only men incredulous of despair,
Half-taught in anguish, through the midnight air
Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access
Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness
In souls as countries, lieth silent-bare
Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare
Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express
Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death–
Most like a monumental statue set
In everlasting watch and moveless woe
Till itself crumble to the dust beneath.
Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet:
If it could weep, it could arise and go.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning
LanceThruster
Joe Heller
True story, Word of Honor:
Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer
now dead,
and I were at a party given by a billionaire
on Shelter Island.
I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel
to know that our host only yesterday
may have made more money
than your novel ‘Catch-22’
has earned in its entire history?”
And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.”
And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?”
And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.”
Not bad! Rest in peace!”
–Kurt Vonnegut
The New Yorker, May 16th, 2005
From the author of The No Asshole Rule.
contract3d
I am a nominal Lutheran (more of a Taoist, actually, lovely thing about Lutherans is that they are “comfortable with the mysteries” (one of which is apparently, well, -me-.)
Still, they have some of the most wonderfully subversive hymns in their “Big Red Book” – here’s the last verse of my favorite:
Not in the dark of some building confining
Not in some heaven, light years away
This is the place where the new light is shining
Here is the kingdom and now is the day!
If you can sing that, or even hear it sung, and not march out the door with a spring in your step you’re made of stone.
A particularly dense and obdurate stone at that.
Retief
And here is one of celebration, at least it is for me. I can’t think of it without hearing Gene Wilder’s voice and seeing the crazy light in his eye, which makes me happy.
The Rowing Song – Roald Dahl
Round the world and home again
That’s the sailor’s way
Faster faster, faster faster
There’s no earthly way of knowing
Which direction we are going
There’s no knowing where we’re rowing
Or which way the river’s flowing
Is it raining, is it snowing
Is a hurricane a–blowing
Not a speck of light is showing
So the danger must be growing
Are the fires of Hell a–glowing
Is the grisly reaper mowing
Yes, the danger must be growing
For the rowers keep on rowing
And they’re certainly not showing
Any signs that they are slowing.
Gus
@Rock: I recite that poem to myself dozens of times every spring. Those first buds are gold. That fleeting early spring moment where the weather’s perfect before it gets ungodly hot makes it all worth [email protected]handsmile: I LOVE that poem. Stevens is one of my favorites. I was going to post it. Not 100% sure if fits, but Ode to a Nightingale never falis to choke me up.
ReflectedSky
Marina
By T.S. Eliot
Quis hic locus, quae regio, quae mundi plaga?
What seas what shores what grey rocks and what islands
What water lapping the bow
And scent of pine and the woodthrush singing through the fog
What images return
O my daughter.
Those who sharpen the tooth of the dog, meaning
Death
Those who glitter with the glory of the hummingbird, meaning
Death
Those who sit in the sty of contentment, meaning
Death
Those who suffer the ecstasy of the animals, meaning
Death
Are become insubstantial, reduced by a wind,
A breath of pine, and the woodsong fog
By this grace dissolved in place
What is this face, less clear and clearer
The pulse in the arm, less strong and stronger—
Given or lent? more distant than stars and nearer than the eye
Whispers and small laughter between leaves and hurrying feet
Under sleep, where all the waters meet.
Bowsprit cracked with ice and paint cracked with heat.
I made this, I have forgotten
And remember.
The rigging weak and the canvas rotten
Between one June and another September.
Made this unknowing, half conscious, unknown, my own.
The garboard strake leaks, the seams need caulking.
This form, this face, this life
Living to live in a world of time beyond me; let me
Resign my life for this life, my speech for that unspoken,
The awakened, lips parted, the hope, the new ships.
What seas what shores what granite islands towards my timbers
And woodthrush calling through the fog
My daughter.
LanceThruster
Poetic license…
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Nately died a wealthy man, Yossarian. He had over sixty shares in the syndicate.
Yossarian: What difference does that make? He’s dead.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his family will get it.
Yossarian: He didn’t have time to have a family.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then his parents will get it.
Yossarian: They don’t need it, they’re rich.
1st Lt. Milo Minderbinder: Then they’ll understand.
Merganser
I don’t usually comment here, but opened the comments to post the poem in 130. Here’s another one by Hass, “Letter to a Poet”:
A mockingbird leans
from the walnut, bellies,
riffling white, accomplishes
his perch upon the eaves.
I witnessed this act of grace
in blind California
in the January sun
where families bicycle on Saturday
and the mother with high cheekbones
and coffee-colored iridescent
hair curses her child
in the language of Pushkin–
John, I am dull from
thinking of your pain,
this mimic world
which make us stupid
with the totem griefs
we hope will give us
power to look at trees,
at stones, one brute to another
like poems on a page.
What can I say, my friend?
There are tricks of animal grace,
poems in the mind
we survive on. It isn’t much.
You are 4,000 miles away &
this world did not invite us.
Duhkaman
also by garcia-lorca
Cancion de jinete
Córdoba.
Lejana y sola.
Jaca negra, luna grande,
y aceitunas en mi alforja.
Aunque sepa los caminos
yo nunca llegaré a Córdoba.
Por el llano, por el viento,
jaca negra, luna roja.
La muerte me está mirando
desde las torres de Córdoba.
¡Ay qué camino tan largo!
¡Ay mi jaca valerosa!
¡Ay, que la muerte me espera,
antes de llegar a Córdoba.
Córdoba.
Lejana y sola
the song of the rider who knows the road, but will never make his destination
Uncle Cosmo
Back in 1973, during some times darkened with losses on a number of fronts, a book in my lap fell open to this poem & introduced me to the poet who would become my Perfect Master & Hero Of The Zeitgeist:
THE SHIPS ARE MADE READY IN SILENCE
Moored to the same ring:
The hour, the darkness and I,
Our compasses hooded like falcons.
Now the memory of you comes aching in
With a wash of broken bits which never left port
In which once we planned voyages,
They come knocking like hearts asking:
What departures on this tide?
Breath of land, warm breath,
You tighten the cold around the navel,
Though all shores but the first have been foreign,
And the first was not home until left behind.
Our choice is ours but we have not made it,
Containing as it does, our destination
Circled with loss as with coral, and
A destination only until attained.
I have left you my hope to remember me by,
Though now there is little resemblance.
At this moment I could believe in no change,
The mast perpetually
Vacillating between the same constellations,
The night never withdrawing its dark virtue
From the harbor shaped as a heart,
The sea pulsing as a heart,
The sky vaulted as a heart,
Where I know the light will shatter like a cry
Above a discovery:
“Emptiness.
Emptiness! Look!”
Look. This is the morning.
— W. S. Merwin
from The Moving Target (1963)
Look. This is the morning. In that calm acceptance of what was I took huge solace.
Many years later I met Merwin after a reading & as he was signing my copies of his books, I said, Your poetry got me through a really bad time in 1973. He smiled & replied, Why thank you so much for telling me that. A truly gentle man whom we should treasure while he is still with us (WSM turned 85 this year).
R-Jud
@aimai:
Coleman Barks. I keep that book by my bedside and take it on long journeys. I’ll only just be coming of age (in Hobbit years, anyway) tomorrow, but it has carried me through many otherwise empty nights. I used to read it aloud to the Bean when she was a sleepless infant. I should probably start again.
A favorite:
Unmarked Boxes
Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round
in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk
now drinks wine and honey mixed.
God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,
from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flower bed.
As roses, up from ground.
Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,
now a cliff covered with vines,
now a horse being saddled.
It hides within these,
till one day it cracks them open
Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep
and changes shape. You might say, “Last night
I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,
a field of grapevines.” Then the phantasm goes away.
You’re back in the room.
I don’t want to make any one fearful.
Hear what’s behind what I say.
Tatatumtum tatum tatadum.
There’s the light gold of wheat in the sun
and the gold of bread made from that wheat.
I have neither. I’m only talking about them,
as a town in the desert looks up
at stars on a clear night.
BGinCHI
@gogol’s wife: We need more poetry threads.
Or, we need more threads with poetry.
There are so many poems I want to post but don’t want to crap all over the thread.
/lit teacher getting ever older and a Pushcart Prize nominated poet
zoej
No poetry but rather joy. My little jenday conure (parrot), Pokey is recovering after a night in intensive care. Things looked very bleak yesterday, but today she may have turned a corner. Another night still in intensive care is planned with more tests tomorrow, when she maybe stronger.
BGinCHI
@Uncle Cosmo: Merwin is great. First four books of his are just excellent stuff.
I assume you’ve read his contemporaries, amongst which my favorite is James Wright. He’s a bit older but I love his work.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@gogol’s wife: Ah. So, so beautiful. Thank you
R-Jud
@cleek: That made me cough with laughter for a solid minute. Cheers.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@gogol’s wife: Ah. So, so beautiful. Thank [email protected]BGinCHI: Please, can you share one of your poems?
BGinCHI
@The Fat Kate Middleton: I’ll link to it:
http://www.bpj.org/index/V54N4.html
It’s called “Cauthard.” Scroll down…it opens as a pdf.
Sorry for the labor.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@R-Jud: @gogol’s wife: Ah. So, so beautiful. Thank [email protected]BGinCHI: Please, can you share one of your poems?
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
Yes I came home to check what new ones were posted and am crying again.
ETA: Seconding Fat Kate Middletown to ask for one of yours (or more!).
gogol's wife
I mean Middleton!
The Fat Kate Middleton
@BGinCHI: Thanks so much for this link. Just one of many passages I loved:
‘there as though the bible were an almanac of desire Cauthard spies the last in line
that last that shall be first as he prepares
to coil his pale naked body to swing and swan out into the unresisting air to hang oh so briefly motionless he throws his head back spreads
his arms cruciform and the rearguard
madonna locks his eyes as he wails a faint
eloi eloi that never reaches the substance
of the plea for icy riverwater swallows him away.”
Sorry about the multiple postings. I have Parkinson’s Disease now, and trouble controlling my digits. I think maybe you love T.S.Eliot, too.
gogol's wife
@BGinCHI:
I’m going to have to print that out tomorrow and read it on paper. It looks delicious.
BGinCHI
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
@gogol’s wife:
Thanks for reading.
That’s humbling.
The Fat Kate Middleton
From my journal:
April, 2012: M– died today. When C– called, we were at the farm. I knew as soon as he spoke that something terrible had happened. While he was telling me there had been an accident, he put me on hold to take D’s call; she told him Baby had died.
Later: I probably wrote this too soon …
Killdeer
Last night, killdeer appeared at the end of our long driveway.
The little ones cried,
Alarmed at our presence.
Later, we found them in our garden,
Under their mother’s wings.
This morning,
We watched the littlest one die.
My husband buried it near the lamp
At the edge of the garden.
Tonight, the mother and father
Return to the place where their baby was left,
Crying
Over and over,
I remember the night
You walked down the stairs
Into the dark.
There, in the garden,
You howled, thinking
We would not hear you.
Now you return to the place where
Your dear one, your little one, was left,
Crying
Over and over.
– For H.
BGinCHI
@The Fat Kate Middleton: Beautiful and so sad.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@BGinCHI: Thanks. I posted this thinking the thread was ended, and I was probably safe having no one read. But again, thank you. We’ve been pretty sad here lately.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@The Fat Kate Middleton: She was two years old.
dance around in your bones
Razors pain you,
Rivers are damp,
Acids stain you,
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful,
Nooses give,
Gas smells awful,
You might as well live.
Dorothy Parker
(Perhaps not what you were thinking about, haven’t yet read the thread. Sorry if offensive).
(Also, lost my husband a year ago Election Day, so no accusations of insensitivity, please. I have to keep my sense of humor, somehow).
The Fat Kate Middleton
@dance around in your bones:
No offense given. I’ve read your comments since then, and have such admiration for how you’re dealing with your loss. It’s so important to recognize and use our sense of humor.
BGinCHI
@dance around in your bones: Humor, hell yes.
I wouldn’t have survived without it. Having a 10-month-old brings it back in a lot of amazing ways.
Plus, only smart people are funny.
jackg44
We are the clumsy passersby,
we push past each other with elbows,
with feet, with trousers, with suitcases,
we get off the train, the jet plane, the ship, we step down
in our wrinkled suits and sinister hats.
We are all guilty, we are all sinners,
we come from dead-end hotels or industrial peace,
this might be our last clean shirt,
we have misplaced our tie,
yet even so, on the edge of panic, pompous,
sons of bitches who move in the highest circles
or quiet types who don’t owe anything to anybody,
we are one and the same, the same in time’s eyes,
or in solitude’s: we are the poor devils
who earn a living and a death working
bureautragically or in the usual ways,
sitting down or packed together in subway stations,
boats, mines, research centers, jails,
universities, breweries,
(under our clothes the same thirsty skin),
(the hair, the same hair, only in different colors).
— Pablo Neruda
The Fat Kate Middleton
True. And I used to be funny … I will be again, I think.
dance around in your bones
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
My sense of humor basically keeps me alive. It’s something I shared with my late husband. Man, he could make me laugh, and I loved him for it and I miss him so much for that particular quality.
@BGinCHI: Heh. true enough. I am now living with THREE (count ’em, THREE!) grandkids, aged 6, 3 and 2 – ALL boys – and they keep me laughing everyday. (Ok, sometimes gnashing my teeth and uttering cusswords under my breath, but….) basically pretty cool.
Oh, the 2 yr old produced his first f-bomb the other day. Yay.
Valdivia
@Ash Can:
thank you!
Ian
Yeats is always good on loss:
When have I last looked on
The round green eyes and the long wavering bodies
Of the dark leopards of the moon?
All the wild witches, those most noble ladies,
For all their broom-sticks and their tears,
Their angry tears, are gone.
The holy centaurs of the hills are vanished;
I have nothing but the embittered sun;
Banished heroic mother moon and vanished,
And now that I have come to fifty years
I must endure the timid sun.
–“Lines Written in Dejection”
Speech after long silence; it is right,
All other lovers being estranged or dead,
Unfriendly lamplight hid under its shade,
The curtains drawn upon unfriendly night,
That we descant and yet again descant
Upon the supreme theme of Art and Song:
Bodily decrepitude is wisdom; young
We loved each other and were ignorant.
–“After Long Silence”
And one that’s perhaps both loss and celebration:
I met the Bishop on the road
And much said he and I.
‘Those breasts are flat and fallen now,
Those veins must soon be dry;
Live in a heavenly mansion,
Not in some foul sty.’
‘Fair and foul are near of kin,
And fair needs foul,’ I cried.
‘My friends are gone, but that’s a truth
Nor grave nor bed denied,
Learned in bodily lowliness
And in the heart’s pride.
‘A woman can be proud and stiff
When on love intent;
But Love has pitched his mansion in
The place of excrement;
For nothing can be sole or whole
That has not been rent.’
–“Crazy Jane Talks with the Bishop”
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
That was just amazing. What else can one say?
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
heart breaking and I am glad you posted it.
What an amazing thread. It gladdens a sad heart.
The Fat Kate Middleton
Whenever I would introduce the poetry unit to my high school students, there was always one or more who would say, “Ewww! I hate poetry!” And I would always say, “That means you hate life … and I know you don’t.” Always, by the end of that unit, they would tell me how much they loved what we had read – not all, of course – but, still loved SOME poetry. That unit was one of my few victories in teaching. And, even after retiring, I am still receiving emails and gifts of poetry.
gogol's wife
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
It is really astounding how many students THINK they hate poetry until they actually, you know, read some.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@gogol’s wife: Isn’t it? I’m just so grateful that I was able to give them such a gift. I’ve been wondering how I might do it on a volunteer basis.
Phoenician in a time of Romans
Canticle From The Book Of Bob (Lucia Perillo)
We hired the men to carry the coffin,
we hired a woman to sing in our stead.
We hired a limo, we hired a driver,
we hired each lily to stand with its head
held up and held open while Scripture was read.
We hired a dustpan, we hired a broom
to sweep up the pollen that fell in the room
where we’d hired some air
to draw out the stale chord
from the organ we hired.
And we hired some tears because our own eyes were tired.
The pulpit we hired, we hired the priest
to say a few words about the deceased,
and money changed hands
and the process was brief.
We said, “Body of Christ.”
Then we hired our grief.
We hired some young men to carry his coffin,
we hired a woman to sing for his soul –
we hired the limo, we hired the driver,
then we hired the ground and we hired the hole.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@Phoenician in a time of Romans: Devastating. I’ll be checking out more of Perillo.
BGinCHI
@Valdivia: Thanks. Hoisting a glass your way later.
Chorey Les Beaune.
Valdivia
@BGinCHI:
while I was in China about 3 orders of wine came. I plan to drink a lot of those bottles on election day :)
Steeplejack
For the traveler on her return–from Basho’s The Narrow Road to the Deep North:
The Fat Kate Middleton
@ee cummings: Simply can’t respond to all the wonderful poems here …but must to this. Love eec so much.
aimai
@Lee Rudolph:
Lee Rudolph, your ghazal was beautiful. My mother, the Celia Gilbert whose poem I posted upthread, was a good friend of Adrienne’s. Your work is a wonderful memorial for her. I copied myself your poem on mothers and loss so I could keep it.
aimai
gogol's wife
Another Mandelstam, translated by me:
As feminine silver shines,
That has struggled with oxide and adulteration,
So does quiet work make silver
The iron plough and the voice of the verse-maker.
Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason
@dance around in your bones: Thanks, that Dorothy Parker rhyme is one of my faves.
aimai
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
Dear Kate,
I wanted to offer you this. It is a poem by my mother in her book “An Ark of Sorts” about the year following the death of my sister at age six. My parents, my brother and I, all moved to live in Paris for a year. Its an incredible book.
Night
The children sleep.
Behind me on the mantelpiece,
reflected from the darkness of the window,
a Chinese traveler with a broad-brimmed hat
slouches on his terra-cotta donkey;
my face is his worried moon.
Stroking the worn green leather of the desk,
I try to write letters.
I had good friends, I think,
but what are they to me? When death happened,
I embarked on a sleepless journey like an Egyptian,
eyes painted open on the coffin
that holds me, such a sarcophagus
as the children and I saw in the Louvre,
with bold red and black bands
and prayers of magic that scaled its sides.
Mail from home arrives infrequently.
How difficult it is to communicate
with someone of another world.
—Celia Gilbert “An Ark of Sorts”
jake the snake
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees is my destroyer. D. Thomas
Rank Stranger
I wandered again to my home the mountains
Where in youths’ early drawn I was happy and free
I looked for my friends, but I never could find them.
I found they were all rank strangers to me
Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank strangers to me
They’ve all moved away said the voice of a stranger
To a beautiful home by the bright crystal sea
Some beautiful day, I’ll meet them in heaven
Where no one will be a stranger to me.
Everybody I met seemed to be a rank stranger
No mother or dad, not a friend could I see
They knew not my name and I knew not their faces
I found they were all rank stranger to me. Traditional/Public Domain.
nancydarling
@EconWatcher:
I have been stewing about this comment ever since I read it hours ago and have decided not to let it pass.
Neruda was born in the early 20th century and came of age in a world at war, followed by a world-wide great depression and another world war against fascism.
Many good and thoughtful people were communists in that time—or flirted with communism. I never knew any of them personally but I’ve known quite a few of their children and grandchildren. They were not monsters. They were seeking a way to a better world, however wrong or misguided they might have been. (I’m not talking about the Stalins of the time.)
Maybe their solutions were wrong but they sure as hell defined the problem correctly.
Pablo Neruda had a distinguished career as a diplomat and senator in addition to his Nobel winning poetry. I also think he was on the right side of history in his support of Salvadore Allende.
Uncle Cosmo
@BGinCHI: Actually the first four books leave me kinda cold, in the same way that I read Auden & say Yeah, OK, so what’s the big deal?
It’s the second four that blow me away (The Moving Target, The Lice, The Carrier of Ladders, Writings to an Unfinished Accompaniment).
That same time I met Merwin I also said to him (actually had a few minutes to chat!) that I’d spent the last 10 years trying to write like him in order to figure out how he was doing whatever it was he was doing that was blowing me away. He said sharply, Oh, don’t imitate! but then paused & said, If you must imitate, imitate diction–the images must be your own. And I said, Well of course, & he smiled & said, Of course.
I must admit that I never knew all that much about poetry & that most of it I seem to have forgotten. Among other things I read very few of Merwin’s contemporaries & only a few who were adults in wartime. And only a few of them impress me, & they incompletely–Richard Wilbur for seemingly effortless rhyme, Randall Jarrell for his deeply-imagined war poetry & what is perhaps the darkest poem I know (“90 North”), some Roethke. I don’t know Wright at all. So many authors, so little time left…
(PS Is is too obnoxious to ask you as a Crashcart Prize numbiknee to have a look at my poem over at GOS & tell me what you think? Won’t bug you again…;))
Peregrinus
@Valdivia:
From one huge Neruda lover to another, feel better!
Sadly all of my own choices have been taken, but I can offer you something perhaps a little different – a recording I made some time ago of Federico García Lorca’s “Romance Sonámbulo.”
http://archive.org/details/RomanceSonmbulo
The text is here:
http://www.poesi.as/index203.htm
(BTW, if anyone ever wants a poem recorded, in English or especially in Spanish, hit me up. I need the practice as I just started being involved with my school’s speech and debate team.)
Kate McArdle
@cleek: This extraordinary.. i love reading it out loud. Did you write this???
The Fat Kate Middleton
@aimai: Your mother is Celia Gilbert? How can I read all her poems? So beautiful, so moving.
The Fat Kate Middleton
@the antibob: This is magnificent … so, so beautiful. Thank you.
dance around in your bones
@Brother Shotgun of Sweet Reason: Y yo tambien :)
It just always makes me smile.
Valdivia
@Steeplejack:
thank you from the bottom of my heart for that. May we all find doll houses :)
@Peregrinus:
nothing more beautiful than reading poetry out loud, as it was meant to be. y gracias!
BGinCHI
@Uncle Cosmo: Man, seriously, that is a beautiful, heart-wrenching poem.
My old man died at 42, so as hard as it is to lose a father, you can take some comfort that he had a long life.
dance around in your bones
I was going to say I have no fucking idea why my comment is in moderation, but then realized that a Spanish word I used contains the word am.bien.
This is estupido!
The Fat Kate Middleton
@aimai: I did not know this was your mother’s writing. Thank you so much. I’m, well, crying again. I’ve saved this thread where I can find it again, as much for your mother’s poems as anything. I told my husband where he can find this thread, when it’s needed.
LanceThruster
I learned a lot and enjoyed myself immensely, so as another mentioned, I’ll mark this thread for later, particularly since I have not yet had the time to read some of the longer (and clearly much beloved) submissions, whether original creations or otherwise (some of the short ones are like brilliant haikus).
I’ll add what I thought of on the drive home since he’s a poet himself, his quotes are lyrical themselves, and it fits the theme of loss/celebration simultaneously. T. Geisal was a student of life and human nature who saw the poetry in us all.
“Don’t cry because it’s over. Smile because it happened.” ~Dr. Suess
Peregrinus
@Valdivia:
¡De nada! I’ve got a few original ones there (just hit the “creator” field) that I didn’t even know were still around until about a month ago.
aimai
@The Fat Kate Middleton:
Dear Kate,
If you want to “talk” to me directly write to me at aimaiami at comcast dot net. You can find my mother’s latest book (“Something to Exchange”) at Amazon and she has two other books “Bonfire” and “Queen of Darkness” as well as “An Ark of Sorts.” Although I am very snail mail disabled I would be happy to send you a copy of An Ark of Sorts, which won the Jane Kenyon Chapbook Award (I think that was what it was called) if you send me your real world address. Just write to me c/o my aimai address. My heart is breaking for you with this grief you are undergoing. It sounds like my mother’s work will speak to you.
mandarama
I’m a poetry professor, and I love this thread for all of my many beloved favorites that are cited above and all of the new material I can go explore. Thanks to you all.
I’m so glad to see Millay feature prominently, because the academy was hard on her in the mid-century (esp. here at my own university, home to the New Critics). Here’s my favorite of hers (I don’t think it has been quoted yet…?):
Sonnet XLIII
What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.
mandarama
Adrienne Rich is also one of my most loved writers…not just for her poetry, but also her brilliant essay “When We Dead Awaken.” This poem is one of my students’ favorites out of her poems…though it might interest you guys that today’s college kids do NOT know the metaphor of the title. When I ask them, “What does ‘living in sin’ mean?” they have no idea. (It’s no longer an idiom for them, so they are prone to get confused and think the speaker is in an unhappy marriage.)
Living in Sin
(1951)
She had thought the studio would keep itself;
no dust upon the furniture of love.
Half heresy, to wish the taps less vocal,
the panes relieved of grime. A plate of pears,
a piano with a Persian shawl, a cat
stalking the picturesque amusing mouse
had risen at his urging.
Not that at five each separate stair would writhe
under the milkman’s tramp; that morning light
so coldly would delineate the scraps
of last night’s cheese and three sepulchral bottles;
that on the kitchen shelf among the saucers
a pair of beetle-eyes would fix her own—
envoy from some village in the moldings . . .
Meanwhile, he, with a yawn,
sounded a dozen notes upon the keyboard,
declared it out of tune, shrugged at the mirror,
rubbed at his beard, went out for cigarettes;
while she, jeered by the minor demons,
pulled back the sheets and made the bed and found
a towel to dust the table-top,
and let the coffee-pot boil over on the stove.
By evening she was back in love again,
though not so wholly but throughout the night
she woke sometimes to feel the daylight coming
like a relentless milkman up the stairs.
mandarama
For coming to terms with loss, I think Yeats is brilliant in this poem he wrote just a short time before his death:
The Circus Animals’ Desertion
I
I sought a theme and sought for it in vain,
I sought it daily for six weeks or so.
Maybe at last, being but a broken man,
I must be satisfied with my heart, although
Winter and summer till old age began
My circus animals were all on show,
Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot,
Lion and woman and the Lord knows what.
II
What can I but enumerate old themes,
First that sea-rider Oisin led by the nose
Through three enchanted islands, allegorical dreams,
Vain gaiety, vain battle, vain repose,
Themes of the embittered heart, or so it seems,
That might adorn old songs or courtly shows;
But what cared I that set him on to ride,
I, starved for the bosom of his faery bride.
And then a counter-truth filled out its play,
‘The Countess Cathleen’ was the name I gave it;
She, pity-crazed, had given her soul away,
But masterful Heaven had intervened to save it.
I thought my dear must her own soul destroy
So did fanaticism and hate enslave it,
And this brought forth a dream and soon enough
This dream itself had all my thought and love.
And when the Fool and Blind Man stole the bread
Cuchulain fought the ungovernable sea;
Heart-mysteries there, and yet when all is said
It was the dream itself enchanted me:
Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.
III
Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder’s gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.
cosima
@Valdivia —
Lots of wonderful poetry to be found in a book that I love (and keep in my bedroom to remind me to life love often) called “Risking Everything — 110 Poems of Love and Revelation.” It’s edited by Roger Housden.
From the end of In Blackwater Woods by Mary Oliver:
you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it
against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.
Ziege
@EconWatcher: Oh, come on. Neruda’s poetry was beautiful and accomplished, he’s one of the great American writers. If the poem doesn’t contain politics and yet you “can’t separate the art and the politics” then you’re the Stalinist. That’s exactly how Stalinism treated art.
Valdivia
@cosima:
thanks! I will check it out. Love those lines from the poem.