Medium Cool is a weekly series related to popular culture, mostly film, TV, and books, with some music and games thrown in. We hope it’s a welcome break from the anger, hate, and idiocy we see almost daily from the other side in the political sphere.
Arguments welcomed, opinions respected, fools un-suffered. We’re here every Sunday at 7 pm.
I wouldn’t call myself a poetry person, but occasionally I come across a poem that really strikes a chord with me.
Another Scott posted this excerpt from Robert Frost recently, and I appreciated knowing the context for “the only way out is through”.
[…]But I don’t count on it as much as Len.
He looks on the bright side of everything,
Including me. He thinks I’ll be all right
With doctoring. But it’s not medicine –
Lowe is the only doctor’s dared to say so –
It’s rest I want – there, I have said it out –
From cooking meals for hungry hired men
And washing dishes after them – from doing
Things over and over that just won’t stay done.
By good rights I ought not to have so much
Put on me, but there seems no other way.
Len says one steady pull more ought to do it.
He says the best way out is always through.
And I agree to that, or in so far
As that I can see no way out but through –
Leastways for me – and then they’ll be convinced.
It’s not that Len don’t want the best for me.
Amanda Gorman blew me away with her inaugural speech for Biden. What I didn’t know until I searched for an image of her for this post is that she was diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder in kindergarten and has has speech articulation issues that make it difficult for her to pronounce certain words and sounds. I think she’s amazing.
For there is always light, if only we’re brave enough to see it. If only we’re brave enough to be it.
Whether you’re like me and find the occasional poem that strikes a chord, or whether you are a poetry fiend, or you are a poet yourself, I’m thinking that maybe in tonight’s Medium Cool we can share some of our favorite poems.
In case you are new to Medium Cool, these are not open threads.
WaterGirl
I predict this is either going to be a great Medium Cool, or a total bust. Sometimes you guys surprise me.
edit: Also, it’s fine if some of your favorite poems are your own! :-)
Baud
There once was a man from Nantucket…
NotMax
Does Phil Ochs’ rendition of The Highwayman count?
schrodingers_cat
@Baud: From North of Boston, actually. Frost was Nehru’s favorite poet.
Steve LaBonne
At the Fishhouses
Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one’s nose run and one’s eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches,
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered
among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.
Down at the water’s edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down
at intervals of four or five feet.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.”
He stood up in the water and regarded me
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas. The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be:
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.
-Elizabeth Bishop
Splitting Image
I don’t dig poetry. I’m so unhip, when people say Dylan, I think they’re talking about Dylan Thomas (whoever he was.)
Chris
My understanding and appreciation of poetry are so bad that on my French baccalaureate, I’d resigned myself that if the topic was poetry, I’d flunk it.
Sure enough, I got 16/20 score on the real thing, 14/20 on the practice thing… but on the other practice thing, the one that did have a poetry topic, 7/20.
Mr. Prosser
I discovered Steven Crane as a poet in college 56 years ago
Should the wide world roll away
Leaving black terror
Limitless night,
Nor God, nor man, nor place to stand
Would be to me essential
If thou and thy white arms were there
And the fall to doom a long way.
In the desert
I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
Who, squatting upon the ground,
Held his heart in his hands,
And ate of it.
I said, “Is it good, friend?”
“It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
“But I like it
“Because it is bitter,
“And because it is my heart.”
cope
I was a bit of a poetry nerd in high school (reading and writing) and college (just reading it for classes). Now, I don’t seek it out unless I’m visiting an old favorite. I read Wilfred Owen in HS (“dulce et decorum est pro patria mori” if my memory is correct) and first appreciated the emotional impact of poems.
I moved on to others when I studied poetry in college (e. e. cummings, T. S. Eliot, William Carlos Williams, etc). I would include Shakespeare as a poet as well. I still appreciate good poems but they are, sadly, not integral to my old man life. I really think poetry is a young person’s game as they still have life in front of them and experiences to be, well, experienced.
That said, it still creeps into my life occasionally and I am still a fan.
Steve LaBonne
A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts
The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—
There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.
To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten in the moon;
And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light,
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;
Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full
And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,
You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,
You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.
-Wallace Stevens
Scout211
Somewhat related, when I was very young I was gifted the poetry book by Jean McKee Thompson, Poems to Grow On. I don’t even remember the poems that were in that book anymore but I still remember the feeling of being first introduced to poetry. Wow. That book meant so much to me and I kept it for decades but I finally lost it somewhere in a move when I was an adult.
Googling the book just now, I think I may have found my lost book. This copy on eBay looks suspiciously like my copy, complete with that messy smudge on the cover. LOL.
I strayed from the instructions writing about a book of poetry rather than a poem, but it was quite meaningful to me in the 1950s.
Comrade Scrutinizer
Mary Oliver, Wild Geese
NotMax
Kultcha reminder: Tony awards on CBS beginning at 8 Eastern. Runs for three hours this year in case you will be recording it.
hitchhiker
David Whyte read this poem to a group I was in once a long time ago. Now he lives up the road from me, and greets me when he walks his dogs down the path next to our house. It’s called Truelove.
—–
There is a faith in loving fiercely
the one who is rightfully yours,
especially if you have
waited years and especially
if part of you never believed
you could deserve this
loved and beckoning hand
held out to you this way.
I am thinking of faith now
and the testaments of loneliness
and what we feel we are
worthy of in this world.
Years ago in the Hebrides,
I remember an old man
who walked every morning
on the grey stones
to the shore of baying seals,
who would press his hat
to his chest in the blustering
salt wind and say his prayer
to the turbulent Jesus
hidden in the water,
and I think of the story
of the storm and everyone
waking and seeing
the distant
yet familiar figure
far across the water
calling to them
and how we are all
preparing for that
abrupt waking,
and that calling,
and that moment
we have to say yes,
except it will
not come so grandly
so Biblically
but more subtly
and intimately in the face
of the one you know
you have to love
so that when
we finally step out of the boat
toward them, we find
everything holds
us, and everything confirms
our courage, and if you wanted
to drown you could,
but you don’t
because finally
after all this struggle
and all these years
you simply don’t want to
any more
you’ve simply had enough
of drowning
and you want to live and you
want to love and you will
walk across any territory
and any darkness
however fluid and however
dangerous to take the
one hand you know
belongs in yours.
WaterGirl
@Scout211: That’s so sweet, you definitely need to buy YOUR copy!
If it costs too much, I can chip in. :-
edit: Just clicked the link. Betting you can afford the $23 or best offer. :-) But somehow I am feeling very invested in you getting to have your book back since it meant so much to you.
mrmoshpotato
The Arrow and The Song by Longfeller
WaterGirl
@Scout211: Your story totally fits with the theme of tonight’s post.
You guys know by now that I just try to get the conversation started, and it goes where it goes from there.
HinTN
Mary Oliver, Wallace Stevens, Robert Frost – my early evening is made even more delightful
Steve LaBonne
New Rooms
The mind must
set itself up
wherever it goes
and it would be
most convenient
to impose its
old rooms—just
tack them up
like an interior
tent. Oh but
the new holes
aren’t where
the windows
went.
– Kay Ryan
hitchhiker
@Comrade Scrutinizer: I once led a youth retreat — high school kids.
Instead of randomly sorting them into small groups, I put up a collection of things around the retreat center. A painting. A poster. A collection of beach glass. A pile of science books. A shawl. A pair of running shoes.
And that poem.
The idea was that they’d wander around for a bit and then stand near the whatever-it-was and the groups would form naturally, with a built-in beginning place. (Why did you pick this thing?)
I was looking at that poem and at them — the frantic, sexy, frightened, gorgeous youth of them — and thinking, you know, maybe it was not the best idea to suggest that they need only let the soft animals of their bodies love what they love, given that we had a whole weekend and the adult/teen ratio was about 1/6.
It worked out, though. And I still love that poem.
Craig
My favorite contemporary poet is Sarah Kay. She lives in NYC, but I met her in LA when she was 19 and shaking after walking off stage from a performance. She’s delightful. This her poem Postcards.
I had already fallen in love with far too many postage stamps
When you appeared on my doorstep wearing nothing but a postcard promise.
No, appear is the wrong word.
Is there a word for sucker punching someone in the heart?
Is there word for when you’re sitting at the bottom of a roller coaster and you realize that the climb is coming, that you know what the climb means, that you can already feel the flip in your stomach from the fall before you’ve even moved?
Is there a word for that?
There should be.
You can only fit so many words in a postcard.
Only so many in a phone call, only so many into space before you forget that words are sometimes used for things other than filling emptiness.
It is hard to build a body out of words – I have tried.
We have both tried.
Instead of lying your head against my chest, I tell you about the boy who lives downstairs from me.
Who stays up all night long practicing his drum set.
The neighbors have complained.
They have busy days tomorrow, but he keeps on thumping through the night convinced, I think, that practice makes perfect.
Instead of holding my hand, you tell me about the sandwich you made for lunch today.
How the pickles fit so perfectly against the lettuce.
Practice does not make perfect.
Practice makes permanent.
Repeat the same mistakes over and over and you don’t get any closer to Carnagie Hall, even I know that.
Repeat the same mistakes over and over and you don’t get any closer! You never get any closer.
Is there a word for the moment you win tug of war?
When the weight gives and all that extra rope comes tumbling towards you.
How even though you’ve won you still wind up with muddy knees and scratches on your hands.
Is there a word for that?
I wish there was.
I would have said it when we were finally alone together on your couch, neither one of us with anything left to say.
Still now, I send letters into space.
Hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down and recognize you from the descriptions in my poems.
That he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you
“There is a girl who still writes you. She doesn’t know how not to.”
hitchhiker
@Craig:
I love that. Thank you.
Comrade Scrutinizer
@Craig: This resonates. Thanks.
mrnaturaljc
Emily Dickinson. A friend of mine likes to say “she was always on mushroom.” Anyway, check out the (off) rhyme of “true” and “throe.”
I like a look of Agony,
Because I know it’s true—
Men do not sham Convulsion,
Nor simulate, a Throe—
The Eyes glaze once—and that is Death—
Impossible to feign
The Beads upon the Forehead
By homely Anguish strung.
SpaceUnit
A Distance From The Sea
by Weldon Kees
“And when the seven thunders had uttered their voices, I was
about to write: and I heard a voice from heaven saying unto
me, Seal up those things which the seven thunders uttered, and
write them not.” —REVELATIONS, x, 4.
That raft we rigged up, under the water,
Was just the item: when he walked,
With his robes blowing, dark against the sky,
It was as though the unsubstantial waves held up
His slender and inviolate feet. The gulls flew over,
Dropping, crying alone; thin ragged lengths of cloud
Drifted in bars across the sun. There on the shore
The crowd’s response was instantaneous. He
Handled it well, I thought—the gait, the tilt of the head, just right.
Long streaks of light were blinding on the waves.
And then we knew our work well worth the time:
The days of sawing, fitting, all those nails,
The tiresome rehearsals, considerations of execution.
But if you want a miracle, you have to work for it,
Lay your plans carefully and keep one jump
Ahead of the crowd. To report a miracle
Is a pleasure unalloyed; but staging one requires
Tact, imagination, a special knack for the job
Not everyone possesses. A miracle, in fact, means work.
—And now there are those who have come saying
That miracles were not what we were after. But what else
Is there? What other hope does life hold out
But the miraculous, the skilled and patient
Execution, the teamwork, all the pain and worry every miracle involves?
Visionaries tossing in their beds, haunted and racked
By questions of Messiahship and eschatology,
Are like the mist rising at nightfall, and come,
Perhaps to even less. Grave supernaturalists, devoted worshippers
Experience the ecstasy (such as it is), but not
Our ecstasy. It was our making. Yet sometimes
When the torrent of that time
Comes pouring back, I wonder at our courage
And our enterprise. It was as though the world
Had been one darkening, abandoned hall
Where rows of unlit candles stood; and we
Not out of love, so much, or hope, or even worship, but
Out of the fear of death, came with our lights
And watched the candles, one by one, take fire, flames
Against the long night of our fear. We thought
That we could never die. Now I am less convinced.
—The traveller on the plain makes out the mountains
At a distance; then he loses sight. His way
Winds through the valleys; then, at a sudden turning of a path,
The peaks stand nakedly before him: they are something else
Than what he saw below. I think now of the raft
(For me, somehow, the summit of the whole experience)
And all the expectations of that day, but also of the cave
We stocked with bread, the secret meetings
In the hills, the fake assassins hired for the last pursuit,
The careful staging of the cures, the bribed officials,
The angels’ garments, tailored faultlessly,
The medicines administered behind the stone,
That ultimate cloud, so perfect, and so opportune.
Who managed all that blood I never knew.
The days get longer. It was a long time ago.
And I have come to that point in the turning of the path
Where peaks are infinite—horn-shaped and scaly, choked with thorns.
But even here, I know our work was worth the cost.
What we have brought to pass, no one can take away.
Life offers up no miracles, unfortunately, and needs assistance.
Nothing will be the same as once it was,
I tell myself.—It’s dark here on the peak, and keeps on getting darker.
It seems I am experiencing a kind of ecstasy.
Was it sunlight on the waves that day? The night comes down.
And now the water seems remote, unreal, and perhaps it is.
I always thought this poem would be a great basis for a novel. Maybe I’ll get around to writing it one day.
Nancy
[somewhere i have never travelled,gladly beyond]
By E. E. Cummings
somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience, your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near
your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skilfully,mysteriously) her first rose
or if your wish be to close me, i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;
nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility:whose texture
compels me with the colour of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing
(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody,not even the rain,has such small hands
Dorothy A. Winsor
Small Kindnesses
Danusha Laméris
I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other.
We want to be handed our cup of coffee hot,
and to say thank you to the person handing it. To smile
at them and for them to smile back. For the waitress
to call us honey when she sets down the bowl of clam chowder,
and for the driver in the red pick-up truck to let us pass.
We have so little of each other, now. So far
from tribe and fire. Only these brief moments of exchange.
What if they are the true dwelling of the holy, these
fleeting temples we make together when we say, “Here,
have my seat,” “Go ahead — you first,” “I like your hat.”
SpaceUnit
@Nancy:
Nice one.
All In Green Went My Love Riding
E.E. Cummings
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.
Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.
Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before.
Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.
Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.
Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before.
Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.
Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.
Four tall stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before.
All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.
four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.
Nancy
The Red Wheelbarrow
By William Carlos Williams
so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow
glazed with rain
water
beside the white
chickens
There is something about these poems that makes me feel.
I don’t need to analyze or explain.
Poetry analysis in lit classes was hard to survive. My response was it works for me.
lowtechcyclist
Lemme try this: if I can’t get the spacing right, I’ll just delete.
Another e.e. cummings:
Jimmie’s got a goil
goil
goil,
Jimmie
’s got a goil and
she coitnly can shimmie
when you see her shake
shake
shake,
when
you see her shake a
shimmie how you wish that you was Jimmie.
Oh for such a gurl
gurl
gurl,
oh
for such a gurl to
be a fellow’s twistandtwirl
talk about your Sal–
Sal–
Sal–,
talk
about your Salo
–mes but gimmie Jimmie’s gal.
Suzanne
As an art student, I always admired this one by Auden:
Craig
@lowtechcyclist: lovely
S Cerevisiae
Good poetry can definitely move me but I usually don’t go around reading poetry very often. I was actually driven to write one after I saw my first total eclipse in 2017 and it left me completely awestruck. Prose is inadequate to describe it, I wish I was a poet or songwriter.
Nancy
@SpaceUnit:
Back at ya.
Maj TJ Kong
The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By Randall Jarrell
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.
This poem knocked me on my butt the first time and still does. Powerful images with few words is the kind of poetry that moves me the most.
Craig
Another from Sarah Kay.
B. If I Should Have a Daughter
If I should have a daughter instead of “Mom”, she’s gonna call me “Point B.” Because that way, she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I’m going to paint the solar system on the back of her hands so that she has to learn the entire universe before she can say “Oh, I know that like the back of my hand.”
She’s gonna learn that this life will hit you, hard, in the face, wait for you to get back up so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by band-aids or poetry, so the first time she realizes that Wonder-woman isn’t coming, I’ll make sure she knows she doesn’t have to wear the cape all by herself. Because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I’ve tried.
And “Baby,” I’ll tell her “don’t keep your nose up in the air like that, I know that trick, you’re just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else, find the boy who lit the fire in the first place to see if you can change him.”
But I know that she will anyway, so instead I’ll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boats nearby, ‘cause there is no heartbreak that chocolate can’t fix. Okay, there’s a few heartbreaks chocolate can’t fix. But that’s what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything if you let it.
I want her to see the world through the underside of a glass bottom boat, to look through a magnifying glass at the galaxies that exist on the pin point of a human mind. Because that’s how my mom taught me. That there’ll be days like this, “There’ll be days like this my momma said” when you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises. When you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you wanna save are the ones standing on your cape. When your boots will fill with rain and you’ll be up to your knees in disappointment and those are the very days you have all the more reason to say “thank you,” ‘cause there is nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline no matter how many times it’s sent away.
You will put the “wind” in win some lose some, you will put the “star” in starting over and over, and no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life.
And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting I am pretty damn naive but I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily but don’t be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it.
“Baby,” I’ll tell her “remember your mama is a worrier but your papa is a warrior and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more.”
Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things and always apologize when you’ve done something wrong but don’t you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining.
Your voice is small but don’t ever stop singing and when they finally hand you heartbreak, slip hatred and war under your doorstep and hand you hand-outs on street corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother.
SpaceUnit
Inversnaid
Gerard Manley Hopkins
This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, fell-frowning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew,
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
Steve in the ATL
It’s been a while since we had a thread about ubi sunt poetry, so I recommend Ballade, later renamed Ballade des dames du temps jadis (“ballad of ladies from days gone by”). For my money, it was the best poem of 1461! The refrain is particularly well known (anyone read Catch-22?): “Mais où sont les neiges d’antan?” (but where are the snows of yesteryear?).
brantl
I am the eagle, I live in high country
In rocky cathedrals that reach to the sky
I am the hawk and there’s blood on my feathers
But time is still turning, they soon will be dry
And all of those who see me, all who believe in me
Share in the freedom I feel when I fly
Come dance with the west wind and touch on the mountain tops
Sail o’er the canyons and up to the stars
And reach for the heavens and hope for the future
And all that we can be and not what we are
John Denver, The Eagle and the Hawk
Craig
@SpaceUnit: excellent, thanks
zhena gogolia
Fyodor Tyutchev, Silentium
Speak not, lie hidden, and conceal
the way you dream, the things you feel.
Deep in your spirit let them rise
akin to stars in crystal skies
that set before the night is blurred:
delight in them and speak no word.
How can a heart expression find?
How should another know your mind?
Will he discern what quickens you?
A thought once uttered is untrue.
Dimmed is the fountainhead when stirred:
drink at the source and speak no word.
Live in your inner self alone
within your soul a world has grown,
the magic of veiled thoughts that might
be blinded by the outer light,
drowned in the noise of day, unheard…
take in their song and speak no word.
Translated by V.Nabokov
Dorothy A. Winsor
@Suzanne: I love that poem. It captures the wonder of that painting
WaterGirl
@Maj TJ Kong: Welcome!
Pauline
I’ve never been that much into poetry, but one poem that has stuck with me all these years since I first read it in high school is Gwendolyn Brooks’ We Real Cool. That there’s so much packed into those spare lines just got to me.
We Real CooL
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
The Pool Players.
Seven at the Golden Shovel.
We real cool. We
Left school. We
Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We
Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We
Jazz June. We
Die soon.
WaterGirl
@Steve in the ATL:
Love that.
TheflipPsyd
On my phone and can’t copy the poem. Brian Bilston wrote a poem called America is a Gun. Really hit me the first time I saw it
As an English minor, I read a lot of poetry in college. Always enjoyed it but have to admit don’t read much anymore.
Gary K
I had a wonderful experience back at the beginning of March, performing in a production of Romeo and Juliet at the local campus of Ohio State (not the mother ship in Columbus but a much smaller place). The cast was mostly college kids of course, with some older folks mixed in in the more mature roles, and then yours truly as Friar Lawrence, older than the four youngest cast members put together. Yes, Shakespeare is a great poet, and you come to appreciate that even more as you struggle to learn your lines: whenever you forget a word, replace it with your own approximation, and then go back and see what he actually wrote, his word is always sharper, more precise, and more charged with emotion. The oldsters in the cast came to our characterizations pretty fast, and then never improved, whereas the youngsters just kept getting better every day, even up into the dress rehearsals. Although the director was a generation younger than me, as the rehearsals went on I began to think of her as our mother hen; she usually ended the evening by telling us all to eat a vegetable and get some rest. The cast really bonded, and there were sobs after our last of four performances. The following day was a real letdown, and that together with the emotional wallop of the play put me into a sad space. I read Frost’s “Birches” that day, and these lines leapt out:
That day we all regrouped at the theatre to strike the set and sweep the stage, and then chatted over some pizza. I think she was sharing that same letdown but our reminiscing about the show eventually led to some laughs.
SpaceUnit
The Wife-Woman
Anne Spencer
Maker-of-sevens in the scheme of things
From earth to star;
Thy cycle holds whatever is fate, and
Over the border the bar.
Though rank and fierce the mariner
Sailing the seven seas,
He prays, as he holds his glass to his eyes,
Coaxing the Pleiades.
I cannot love them; and I feel your glad
Chiding from the grave,
That my all was only worth at all, what
Joy to you it gave.
These seven links the Law compelled
For the human chain—
I cannot love them; and you, oh,
Seven-fold months in Flanders slain!
A jungle there, a cave here, bred six
And a million years,
Sure and strong, mate for mate, such
Love as culture fears;
I gave you clear the oil and wine;
You saved me your hob and hearth—
See how even life may be ere the
Sickle comes and leaves a swath.
But I can wait the seven of moons,
Or years I spare,
Hoarding the heart’s plenty, nor spend
A drop, nor share—
So long but outlives a smile and
A silken gown;
Then gaily I reach up from my shroud,
And you, glory-clad, reach down.
Anne Spencer was the daughter of a former slave. Her own son was a Tuskegee Airman. She was a librarian and a teacher and civil rights activist as well as a poet.
Maj TJ Kong
@TheflipPsyd:
Here is a link. Worthy mention.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Poetry/comments/uxogoc/poem_america_is_a_gun_brian_bilston/
narya
Spring Watching Pavilion by Ho Xuan Huong
A gentle spring evening arrives
airily, unclouded by worldly dust.
Three times the bell tolls echoes like a wave.
We see heaven upside-down in sad puddles.
Love’s vast sea cannot be emptied.
And springs of grace flow easily everywhere.
Where is nirvana?
Nirvana is here, nine times out of ten.
WaterGirl
@TheflipPsyd:
Here you go!
America Is A Gun
England is a cup of tea.
France, a wheel of ripened brie.
Greece, a short, squat olive tree.
America is a gun.
Brazil is football on the sand.
Argentina, Maradona’s hand.
Germany, an oompah band.
America is a gun.
Holland is a wooden shoe.
Hungary, a goulash stew.
Australia, a kangaroo.
America is a gun.
Japan is a thermal spring.
Scotland is a highland fling.
Oh, better to be anything
than America as a gun.”
― Brian Bilston
eclare
I love Robert Frost. I had Nothing Gold Can Stay read at my parents’ funeral.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/148652/nothing-gold-can-stay-5c095cc5ab679
WaterGirl
@Maj TJ Kong: We are all helpers here on Balloon Juice.
WaterGirl
@eclare: I had never read that. Much shorter than I expected. Very touching.
Nothing Gold Can Stay
narya
There’s another one, by Jessica L Walsh: “when my daughter tells me I was never punk.” On my phone so you’ll have to ask the internet.
I’m not really a poetry person, though I’ve had two poets in my life (both gone now; fuck cancer).
TheflipPsyd
@Maj TJ Kong: Thanks so much for giving a link.
ETA: and to Watergirl as well.
eclare
@Dorothy A. Winsor:
What a sweet and hopeful sentiment.
eclare
One of the saddest and shortest poems
For sale: baby shoes, never worn.
Ernest Hemingway.
Just look at that parking lot
I’d like to hear U.S.Senator Tommy Tuberville explain to all the soldiers, sailors, samurai, Greek mercenaries, Aztec jaguar,Nepalese Gurkhas and the other warrior poets, why he considers them to be “Woke”. General George Patton could lead the group. Good luck ,Senator.
eclare
@WaterGirl:
Thanks!
Craig
@WaterGirl: damn, that’s good.
Craig
@eclare: damn. Thanks for that.
Heidi Mom
Conscientious Objector
Edna St. Vincent Millay
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death.
I hear him leading his horse out of the stall; I hear the clatter on the barn-floor.
He is in haste; he has business in Cuba, business in the Balkans, many calls to make this morning.
But I will not hold the bridle while he cinches the girth.
And he may may mount by himself: I will not give him a leg up.
Though he flick my shoulders with his whip, I will not tell him which way the fox ran.
With his hoof on my breast, I will not tell him where the black boy hides in the swamp.
I shall die, but that is all that I shall do for Death; I am not on his payroll.
I will not tell him the whereabouts of my friends nor of my enemies either.
Though he promise me much, I will not map him the route to any man’s door.
Am I a spy in the land of the living, that I should deliver men to Death?
Brother, the password and the plans of our city are safe with me; never through me
Shall you be overcome.
Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride
@Nancy: When I was in high school I set that poem to music, even though I had doubts about its rhetoric. Unfortunately, it was later spoiled for me by discovering that Woody Allen gave it to a character in “Hannah and Her Sisters” to use for the purpose of seduction, and that Allen himself had used it for that purpose with Mia Farrow. The worst thing is that when Barbara Hershey (the seducee) read the poem out loud in the movie, she mangled the last stanza by transposing “opens” and “closes,” thus blowing the key rhyme with “roses.” I have no idea why Allen left that reading in the movie, since her character wasn’t supposed to be an idiot.
Since we’re talking a lot about Frost here, I thought I’d mention one of his more obscure poems, “The Pauper Witch of Grafton.” (Yes, the same town where much later the bears ate the libertarians.) The witch delivers a dramatic monologue about how she used to be young and beautiful and rambunctious, but now is old and poor and alone. She asks herself whether she would have done it all again the same way if she could have foreseen how things would come out, and ends with the greatest line of blank verse ever written: “I might’ve, but it doesn’t seem as if.” (I can picture Frost chortling as he came up with that one.)
Craig
@Heidi Mom: that’s great. I’m getting a lot out of this thread, I’d have never seen that, or others of these poems here
Darkrose
The poem that’s been in my head since Thursday is Meet Me Here, movement 30 of Considering Matthew Shepard, by Craig Hella Johnson. Sister Rail Gun of Warm Humanitarianism posted the link in the Pride thread, but I’ll link it again here: https://www.youtube.com/live/obPsAenDqUU
Of all the pieces, this one lingers for me, especially the line “And we’ll dance with all the children / Who’ve been lost along the way.” So many lost, not just Matthew, but all of the queer and trans folks lost to violence and suicide and AIDS and hatred. They are not forgotten.
Meet me here
Won’t you meet me here
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
There’s a balm in the silence
Like an understanding air
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
We’ve been walking through the darkness
On this long, hard climb
Carried ancestral sorrow
For too long a time
Will you lay down your burden
Lay it down, come with me
It will never be forgotten
Held in love, so tenderly
Meet me here
Won’t you meet me here
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
There’s a joy in the singing
Like an understanding air
Where the fence ends and the horizon begins.
Meet me here
Won’t you meet me here
Where the old fence ends and the horizon begins
There’s a joy in the singing
Like an understanding air
Where the fence ends and the horizon begins.
Then we’ll come to the mountain
We’ll go bounding to see
That great circle of dancing
And we’ll dance endlessly
And we’ll dance with all the children
Who’ve been lost along the way
We will welcome each other
Coming home, this glorious day
We are home in the mountain
And we’ll gently understand
That we’ve been friends forever
That we’ve never been alone
We’ll sing on through any darkness
And our Song will be our sight
We can learn to offer praise again
Coming home to the light…
Old School
Haiku
First, calm down,
Next, stay that way
for the rest of your life.
– Ron Padgett
dnfree
@Splitting Image: I see what you did there….
Jack Canuck
@Nancy: You beat me to it – this is one of my favourite poems and was going to post it myself. I don’t like all of ee cummings’ work, but this one is just beautiful.
Gloria DryGarden
@eclare: oh, at their funeral. That’s beautiful.
I wish I’d thought of a poem, for my father’s. We never had a service for my mom. Let me think about this…A few of her old friends are still alive around here. We could do something.
she was gone, long before she was gone, because she had progressive aphasia, a kind of dementia.
dnfree
The Finding of Reasons by W. S. Merwin
Every memory is abandoned
As waves leave their shapes
The houses stand in tears as the sun rises
Even Pain
That is a god to the senses
Can be forgotten
Until he returns in the flashing garments
And the senses themselves
Are to be taken away like clothing
After a sickness
Proud of their secrets as the dead
Our uses forsake us
That have been betrayed
They follow tracks that lead before and after
And over water
The prints cross us
When they have gone we find reasons
As though to relinquish a journey
Were to arrive
As though we had not been made
Of distances that would not again be ours
As though our feet would come to us once more
Of themselves freely
To us
Their forgotten masters
To listen to the announcements you would think
The triumph
Were ours
As the string of the great kite Sapiens
Cuts our palms
Along predestined places
Leaving us
Leaving
While we find reasons
Gloria DryGarden
BELOVED, gaze in thine own heart,
The holy tree is growing there;
From joy the holy branches start,
And all the trembling flowers they bear.
The changing colours of its fruit
Have dowered the stars with merry light;
The surety of its hidden root
Has planted quiet in the night;
The shaking of its leafy head
Has given the waves their melody,
And made my lips and music wed,
Murmuring a wizard song for thee.
There the Loves a circle go,
The flaming circle of our days,
Gyring, spiring to and fro
In those great ignorant leafy ways;
Remembering all that shaken hair
And how the wingèd sandals dart,
Thine eyes grow full of tender care:
Beloved, gaze in thine own heart.
Gaze no more in the bitter glass
The demons, with their subtle guile,
Lift up before us when they pass,
Or only gaze a little while;
For there a fatal image grows
That the stormy night receives,
Roots half hidden under snows,
Broken boughs and blackened leaves.
For all things turn to barrenness
In the dim glass the demons hold,
The glass of outer weariness,
Made when God slept in times of old.
There, through the broken branches, go
The ravens of unresting thought;
Flying, crying, to and fro,
Cruel claw and hungry throat,
Or else they stand and sniff the wind,
And shake their ragged wings; alas!
Thy tender eyes grow all unkind:
Gaze no more in the bitter glass.
_______
Loreena McKennit made it into a beautiful song, which conveys it so well.
more poems by yeats Here
dnfree
This is a great poem about the experience of live theater at its best.
Thin Air, by Linda Gregerson
As I recall, the play
was mediocre, late
low energy from one
who ought to have honored
the work of his better days
in better form. We were bored,
we were waiting to be
released.
When, in one of those
moves that throws
the poor actors like meat
on the fire, he must have written
Starts to cry,
and she did and did not stop and when
the character beside her asked,
with faint
disgust, Just what
do you think you’re
crying for, the question
was fair if cruel because
it lacked all preparation it
was cheating, we hadn’t been made
to care. On stony ground.
And that’s
when it happened, and somehow
that was why as well,
the utterly improbable three-
or-four-times-in-a-lifetime thing we
come here for, the god-
from-a-machine for whom
we hope to be the congregants.
Because,
she said, still crying, I’m
unhappy, and the moment
was majestic, we were crying
too, or I was, in the presence
of the one true conjuration,
which is something-out-of-
nothing, which is
mother
grief and loneliness-on-earth
assuaged, confessedly
premised on pure
technique, the from-us-but-not-of-us
which is why we call it make
believe.
Jack Canuck
Two of my favourite poems, by Rainer Maria Rilke (translated from the German by Stephen Mitchell – it really makes a difference which English version you read!)
Evening (Abend)
The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;
and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion of what becomes
a star each night, and rises;
and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.
To Say Before Going To Sleep
I would like to sing someone to sleep,
have someone to sit by and be with.
I would like to cradle you and softly sing,
be your companion while you sleep or wake.
I would like to be the only person
in the house who knew: the night outside was cold.
And would like to listen to you
and outside to the world and to the woods.
The clocks are striking, calling to each other,
and one can see right to the edge of time.
Outside the house a strange man is afoot
and a strange dog barks, wakened from his sleep.
Beyond that there is silence.
My eyes rest upon your face wide-open;
and they hold you gently, letting you go
when something in the dark begins to move.
Yutsano
When I was in college, I had an RA who was from Australia. He introduced me to so much of their culture, but of course he had to introduce me to the National Poet of Australia, A B “Banjo” Paterson. He became my favourite poet, and he was quite the character in life as well. He actually affected language, as this poem created a phrase used commonly in English now.
But you can’t mention Banjo without including the the unofficial national anthem of Australia.
Gloria DryGarden
Alice Walker, “How Poems are Made / A Discredited View”
![]()
Letting go
In order to hold on
I gradually understand
How poems are made.
There is a place the fear must go.
There is a place the choice must go.
There is a place the loss must go.
The leftover love.
The love that spills out
Of the too full cup
And runs and hides
Its too full self
In shame.
I gradually comprehend
How poems are made.
To the upbeat flight of memories.
The flagged beats of the running
Heart.
I understand how poems are made.
They are the tears
That season the smile.
The stiff-neck laughter
That crowds the throat.
The leftover love.
I know how poems are made.
There is a place the loss must go.
There is a place the gain must go.
The leftover love.
#alice walker
Craig
@Gloria DryGarden: WOW, that’s great. I forget how much I like poetry. Songs and hip-hop rhymes are something I wish I could do. Real poets too. People like Yeats are amazing. I’ll put an all time classic here.
The Second Coming
Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Gloria DryGarden
Another favorite by alice walker, but on YouTube
about Van Gogh, and what he wanted us to have, “to see”
If There Was Any Justice
“and seeing, save”
Gloria DryGarden
Two trees sung live by L McKennit:
Craig, if you haven’t yet, you want to hear mckennitt sing it. Which is where I first had my attention caught by this poem.
dnfree
@Dorothy A. Winsor: The older I get, the more I treasure those interactions. I like to compliment the bagger at the grocery store. That’s a great poem.
NotMax
Trivia time.
Ian Wolfe, whom you may recognize from playing Mr. Atoz in Star Trek and the acerbic butler in WKRP in Cincinnati among a myriad of other film and TV roles, also was a poet.
SpaceUnit
Thomas Hardy is typically recognized more as a novelist than a poet. In his time his verse was sometimes criticized for the simplicity of its structure and syntax, but I think he merely preferred the poignant to the profound and wasn’t interested in artifice-for-the-sake-of-artifice. I actually find that refreshing. To hell with the critics.
Let Me Enjoy
Let me enjoy the earth no less
Because the all-enacting Might
That fashioned forth its loveliness
Had other aims than my delight.
II
About my path there flits a Fair,
Who throws me not a word or sign;
I’ll charm me with her ignoring air,
And laud the lips not meant for mine.
III
From manuscripts of moving song
Inspired by scenes and dreams unknown
I’ll pour out raptures that belong
To others, as they were my own.
IV
And some day hence, towards Paradise
And all its blest — if such should be —
I will lift glad, afar-off eyes
Though it contain no place for me.
bluefoot
@hitchhiker: wow, I haven’t thought about David Whyte in years. Which is funny because I have two of his books.
different poems and poets speak/have spoken to me at different times in my life. I seem to be quoting “The Second Coming” a lot lately. I can’t think of one to share at the moment but the ones others have shared so far are beautiful.
Gloria DryGarden
In my 20s my friend Dane turned me on to a poet laureate, Joy Harjo.
a lot of her poems are online. I can’t find the one I wanted to share here, about eagles circling, rounding out the morning
I have a few of her poems printed out or copied from library books, and attached to my walls, where I can read them.
Craig
@Gloria DryGarden: thanks. I’ll check it out.
bluefoot
@Jack Canuck: Translations are hard because the rhythm changes. I once had a book of Pablo Neruda poetry that had the original Spanish one the left and an English translation on the facing page. A Chilean friend said it was the best translation she had seen, but she made me learn how to read the Spanish out loud so that I could get a sense of how it sounded.
Craig
@Dorothy A. Winsor: wow, that’s lovely. So simple, so true. Thanks for that.
Gloria DryGarden
A few by me. I’m certainly not in the same league as some of these famed poets and laureates, but I have fun writing them.
My new poetry prompt-
Write how I’d like it be.
Imagine nourishment,
right actions,
Imagine goodness sprouts and grows,
The highest good of many,
of all,
Harming none.
Let the possible take root
In a bed of sweet fierce goodness
And inner strength
So May it be.
________
________
In silken silence
She’s reaching for connection
Heartbeat under stars
Heart breathing in stars
Heart a breath of stars
Stars and heart one breath
__________
__________
How to Violate a Country
Instead of hitting
He penetrated In the night
Across the safety rules
That forbid it.
Entering, taking,
Forcing silence
Teaching fear
It came via stealth and tricks,
And suddenness
We didn’t know what hit us.
_________
_________
Disturbance poem
Slide under the warm covers,
Grasp a knee
Slip a hand further up,
to take The Precious ordinary
You Tell us what you’ll do if
We speak
Or resist
If we tell.
Soon one by one,
we re-consider silence
Consider forgetting
Wonder how long we can pretend,
Thanking the ones who did speak.
_______
________
and for a sweet rinse, this one
For dancers at the Drum Circle
Dance fiercely
Your hair wild, streaming in the wind
Pull up energy into your hands
Form a ball of healing
Weave in strands of Intention
And when the ball is ready,
Full,
Fling it out toward your target like an explosive.
Your healing dance
Spreads earth transformation
through your full heart
💜
Gloria DryGarden
@bluefoot: oh I’ve seen that book. Neruda is amazing
puedo escribir los versos más tristes esta noche….
its a read aloud poem. If you have even a smidgen of spanish, it’s mostly accessible. Profound.
Craig
@Gloria DryGarden: link goes to the wrong place, but I found this 2019 performance in Poland. Knocks the legs out from under me like Fake Plastic Trees from Radiohead does. Thanks.
SpaceUnit
The Man-Moth
Elizabeth Bishop
Here, above,
cracks in the buildings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to record in thermometers.
But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.
Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer’s cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.
Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.
Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.
If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It’s all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee’s sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you’re not paying attention
he’ll swallow it. However, if you watch, he’ll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.
Gloria DryGarden
This gem from a Canadian poet I found on blue sky
Grecian Windflower
By Jean-Paul Thuot
I stop at the edge
of the lake
as I have always done
in this moment.
The heron, there
in mid-flight
between two
breaths, while
Mist dances
ecstatic across
the water’s smooth skin.
Just this. Just this.
Where does the singing
come from all around,
speaker and spoken
prayer and prayer
saying, make this body perfect
it is the soil from which I rise
springlike, again as I always have
Copyright © Jean-Paul Thuot
Gloria DryGarden
@SpaceUnit: I feel sure I remember you commenting last year that you really didn’t like poetry… cool that you shared one.
SpaceUnit
Ha, I immediately admitted that the comment was intended as tongue-in-cheek. I read poetry but it’s sort of like panning for gold. Mostly gravel.
I’ve posted about a half dozen that I like on this thread.
dnfree
We heard this one on our trip to Greece, discussing “The Odyssey”. Cavafy is an iconic Greek poet.
Ithaka
BY C. P. CAVAFY
As you set out for Ithaka
hope your road is a long one,
full of adventure, full of discovery.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon—don’t be afraid of them:
you’ll never find things like that on your way
as long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
as long as a rare excitement
stirs your spirit and your body.
Laistrygonians, Cyclops,
wild Poseidon—you won’t encounter them
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.
Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter harbors you’re seeing for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to learn and go on learning from their scholars.
Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for.
But don’t hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years,
so you’re old by the time you reach the island,
wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaka to make you rich.
Ithaka gave you the marvelous journey.
Without her you wouldn’t have set out.
She has nothing left to give you now.
And if you find her poor, Ithaka won’t have fooled you.
Wise as you will have become, so full of experience,
you’ll have understood by then what these Ithakas mean.
SpaceUnit
Gary Come Home
by Spongebob Squarepants
Gary, now I know I was wrong
I messed up, and now you’re gone
Gary, I’m sorry I neglected you
Oh, I never expected you
to run away and leave me
Feeling this empty
Your meow right now would
sound like music to me
Please come home,
’cause I miss you, Gary
(Gary come home…)
Gary come home
(Gary come home…)
Gary, can’t you see I was blind
I’ll do anything to change your mind
More than a pet, you’re my best friend
Too cool to forget, come back
‘Cause we are family
And forgive me for making you wanna roam
And now my heart is beating
like the saddest metronome
Somewhere I hope you’re
reading my latest three-word
poem: Gary come home
(Gary come home…)
Gary come home
(Gary come home…)
Gary come home
(Gary come home…)
Gary come home
(Gary come home)
Ahh…
Gary, come home
Gary, come home
Gary, won’t you come home
Melancholy Jaques
I insisted on teaching poetry even though the current regime does not favor or value it. I especially love Emily Dickinson.
If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it’s poetry. These are the only ways I know it. Is there any other way? – From Dickinson’s Letters.
One of my favorite poems from Dickinson – there are so many:
Exultation is the going
Of an inland soul to sea,—
Past the houses, past the headlands,
Into deep eternity!
Bred as we, among the mountains,
Can the sailor understand
The divine intoxication
Of the first league out from land?
Gloria DryGarden
@Melancholy Jaques: thats beautiful. Esp as I’m landlocked.. oh, the ocean (mother of us all)
SpaceUnit
@Melancholy Jaques:
I love her too. I think my favorite is I Dwell In Possibility.
One could found a whole school of philosophy on that very simple poem.
Gloria DryGarden
I still remember some of the Archy and mehitabel poems we read in junior high, by Don Marquis. You all remember them?
Here’s a selection Poems by Don marquis Archy and mehitabel
Can’t find the one I wanted, it had a line from aliens observing us in our cars, seeing us an alien life form too, and asking, about us, those innards and soft parts they saw inside, “were those their brains, or the guts.”
I still think about that line..
SpaceUnit
@dnfree:
I’ve been waiting for some joker to copy and paste the entire Iliad onto this thread.
hitchhiker
Any Gary Snyder fans? I was in high school in 1969 when my English teacher — who appeared to be a straight-edge old lady- somehow brought him into our class to read to us. For the whole month before he came, she had Riprap written out in her neat cursive on one half of the chalkboard. I can still recite it.
——
Lay down these words
Before your mind like rocks.
placed solid, by hands
In choice of place, set
Before the body of the mind
in space and time:
Solidity of bark, leaf, or wall
riprap of things:
Cobble of milky way,
straying planets,
These poems, people,
lost ponies with
Dragging saddles—
and rocky sure-foot trails.
The worlds like an endless
four-dimensional
Game of Go.
ants and pebbles
In the thin loam, each rock a word
a creek-washed stone
Granite: ingrained
with torment of fire and weight
Crystal and sediment linked hot
all change, in thoughts,
As well as things.
hotshoe
@SpaceUnit:
Hoo boy, that’s one to knock ya on your ass. Or lift ya up. I don’t know which. Moving, that’s for sure.
Steve in the ATL
@SpaceUnit: how about the Eddie Murphy classic Kill My Landlord?
jame
Flying Crooked
The butterfly, the cabbage white,
(His honest idiocy of flight)
Will never now, it is too late,
Master the art of flying straight,
Yet has — who knows so well as I? —
A just sense of how not to fly:
He lurches here and here by guess
And God and hope and hopelessness.
Even the aerobatic swift
Has not his flying-crooked gift.
Robert Graves
jame
Also A E Housman’s Terence this is stupid stuff
Liminal Owl
@NotMax: Why wouldn’t it? I adore that poem. (I prefer the cover of Phil Ochs’ version done by Scottish singer Ray Fisher, but it doesn’t seem to be on YouTube.)
@WaterGirl: thanks for introducing me to the Frost poem, which I now love. And my own belated contribution to the thread is his Two Tramps in Mud Time, which got me started reading Frost when I was in grade school.
Gloria DryGarden
@jame: I am a fan of robert graves..
Nancy
@Dr. Jakyll and Miss Deride:
Ugh. I’ve seen the movie but didn’t remember that.
As I recall the seducer was a douche who wanted a needy woman. He reconciled with his wife after playing upon her insecurities so that she doubted herself. But he was played by Michael Caine so he was good as a douche.
Nancy
@Jack Canuck: I agree. I bought a book of his love poems thinking to find similar beauty. None touched me like this one.
Perhaps this one is enough.
Nancy
@Jack Canuck: yes, I agree. It can stop me. I bought a book of his love poems. This one is still
@Gloria DryGarden: I am saddened to read about your many losses of your mother, renewed each time you saw her, I’d guess.