Poem of the Day

I’m posting this poem for two reasons.

1) I’m going to visit my sweet little niece this weekend. Of course, she’s not old enough for Winnie the Pooh yet (6 weeks!), but she will be before you know it! (This also means the PotD will be on hiatus until I get back next week.)

2) We are having some insane winds (again). I got home from work yesterday to find my flagpole on the ground, and this morning I saw the trellis in the back had been blown over. (The flagpole is in the garage, but I’m not sure how I’m going to fix the trellis since I’m leaving shortly after I get home from work and it’s too dark now to mess with it now.)

Wind on the Hill
By A.A. Milne

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’?t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes…
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

We had a raging thunderstorm last night. I found this one at the Poetry Foundation.

A Son with a Future
By Charles Reznikoff

When he was four years old, he stood at the window during a
   thunderstorm. His father, a tailor, sat on the table sewing.
   He came up to his father and said, “I know what makes
   thunder: two clouds knock together.”
When he was older, he recited well-known rants at parties.
   They all said that he would be a lawyer.
At law school he won a prize for an essay. Afterwards, he
   became the chum of an only son of rich people. They
   were said to think the world of the young lawyer.
The Appellate Division considered the matter of his disbarment.
   His relatives heard rumours of embezzlement.

When a boy, to keep himself at school, he had worked in a
   drug store.
Now he turned to this half-forgotten work, among perfumes
   and pungent drugs, quiet after the hubble-bubble of the
   courts and the search in law books.
He had just enough money to buy a drug store in a side
   street.
Influenza broke out. The old tailor was still keeping his shop
   and sitting cross-legged on the table sewing, but he was
   half-blind.
He, too, was taken sick. As he lay in bed he thought, “What a
   lot of money doctors and druggists must be making; now
   is my son’s chance.”
They did not tell him that his son was dead of influenza.

I’m still trying to pretend it’s spring, despite the snow we had on Sunday and Monday, and the cold rainy day today. Where’s my sunshine? This one is from American Life in Poetry.

The Garden Buddha
By Peter Pereira

Gift of a friend, the stone Buddha sits zazen,
prayer beads clutched in his chubby fingers.
Through snow, icy rain, the riot of spring flowers,
he gazes forward to the city in the distance—always

the same bountiful smile upon his portly face.
Why don’t I share his one-minded happiness?
The pear blossom, the crimson-petaled magnolia,
filling me instead with a mixture of nostalgia

and yearning. He’s laughing at me, isn’t he?
The seasons wheeling despite my photographs
and notes, my desire to make them pause.
Is that the lesson? That stasis, this holding on,

is not life? Now I’m smiling, too—the late cherry,
its soft pink blossoms already beginning to scatter;
the trillium, its three-petaled white flowers
exquisitely tinged with purple as they fall.

How have I not posted this poem before? It’s from Fuel and it’s fantastic.

The Rider
By Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me
if he roller-skated fast enough
his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard
for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight
pedaling hard down King William Street
is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness
panting behind you on some street corner
while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,
pink petals that have never felt loneliness,
no matter how slowly they fell.

I’m currently listening to an audio recording of The Time Machine by H.G. Wells, and liking it quite a bit more than I expected. Searching for poems about time travel turned up this one.

Time Travel
By Ian Beckett

I was fifty-three this morning,
But I feel so much older now,
Having lived a lifetime in a day.

It started like a thousand others,
Time suddenly skipped a track,
Everyone I know is dead and gone—

I didn’t even get to say goodbye.
I never knew that time was precious,
This morning was a hundred years ago.

For inspiration today, I headed over to American Life in Poetry and found this one. I was reminded of one of the more traumatic reading experiences of my youth, when my mother read Farmer Boy (by Laura Ingalls Wilder) to me. The only detail I remember is when Almanzo (or perhaps another young male character) kicked up a yellowjacket nest in a field and was repeatedly stung. The edition we had included an illustration of the victim swathed in bandages from head to toe. I was morbidly afraid of bee/wasp/hornet/etc. stings for quite some time after that.

Yellowjackets
By Yusef Komunyakaa

When the plowblade struck
An old stump hiding under
The soil like a beggar’s
Rotten tooth, they swarmed up
& Mister Jackson left the plow
Wedged like a whaler’s harpoon.
The horse was midnight
Against dusk, tethered to somebody’s
Pocketwatch. He shivered, but not
The way women shook their heads
Before mirrors at the five
& dime—a deeper connection
To the low field’s evening star.
He stood there, in tracechains,
Lathered in froth, just
Stopped by a great, goofy
Calmness. He whinnied
Once, & then the whole
Beautiful, blue-black sky
Fell on his back.

Today is my aunt’s birthday, so I headed off to The Poetry Foundation to find a related poem. Aunt Helen sounds nothing like my aunt (who has 6 children, 23 grandchildren, and 8 great-grandchildren with three more on the way), but the allure of posting another Eliot poem was irresistible.

Aunt Helen
By T.S. Eliot

Miss Helen Slingsby was my maiden aunt,
And lived in a small house near a fashionable square
Cared for by servants to the number of four.
Now when she died there was silence in heaven
And silence at her end of the street.
The shutters were drawn and the undertaker wiped his feet —
He was aware that this sort of thing had occurred before.
The dogs were handsomely provided for,
But shortly afterwards the parrot died too.
The Dresden clock continued ticking on the mantelpiece,
And the footman sat upon the dining-table
Holding the second housemaid on his knees —
Who had always been so careful while her mistress lived.

From the Poetry Foundation.

Truly Pathetic
By Neal Bowers

Lately, the weather aches;
the air is short of breath,
and morning stumbles in, stiff-jointed.

Day by day, the sun bores the sky,
until the moon begins
its some disappearing act,
making the oceans yawn.

Even the seasons change
with a throb of weariness—
bud, bloom, leaf, fall.

If it would help,
I would paint my house silver
or sell it or buy
a red convertible.

I would, but who am I
to try to cheer up
the self-indulgent universe.

This was sent by my poetry buddy. It was published in her latest collection The Book of Men and it’s amazing. Evidently Garrison Keillor thinks so, too, because he featured it two times.

Antilamentation
By Dorianne Laux

Regret nothing. Not the cruel novels you read
to the end just to find out who killed the cook, not
the insipid movies that made you cry in the dark,
in spite of your intelligence, your sophistication, not
the lover you left quivering in a hotel parking lot,
the one you beat to the punchline, the door or the one
who left you in your red dress and shoes, the ones
that crimped your toes, don’t regret those.
Not the nights you called god names and cursed
your mother, sunk like a dog in the living room couch,
chewing your nails and crushed by loneliness.
You were meant to inhale those smoky nights
over a bottle of flat beer, to sweep stuck onion rings
across the dirty restaurant floor, to wear the frayed
coat with its loose buttons, its pockets full of struck matches.
You’ve walked those streets a thousand times and still
you end up here. Regret none of it, not one
of the wasted days you wanted to know nothing,
when the lights from the carnival rides
were the only stars you believed in, loving them
for their uselessness, not wanting to be saved.
You’ve traveled this far on the back of every mistake,
ridden in dark-eyed and morose but calm as a house
after the TV set has been pitched out the window.
Harmless as a broken ax. Emptied of expectation.
Relax. Don’t bother remembering any of it. Let’s stop here,
under the lit sign on the corner, and watch all the people walk by.

Today is the 150th anniversary of the battle of Fort Sumter, marking the beginning of the U.S. Civil War.

Major Anderson
By J.H. Elliot

February, 1861

Upheld and nerved by God’s unswerving arm,
   Fearless and brave, lion-hearted in the right,
   An armed host in thine own single might,
In storm and tempest, dauntless still and calm;
   Honored by men, by loyal women loved,
The pride and boast of all thy countrymen,
   The Cynosure of all eyes, still unmoved,
Th’ inspiring genius of the Poet’s pen;
   While threatening clouds hang darkly o’er they head,
Thy strong right arm is the whole nation’s head;
We trust in thee, thee and thy gallant band;
   ”They saved their country’s honor!” shall be read
On History’s future page. Thy noble arduous duty done,
America shall know no prouder name than
   ANDERSON.

I found this one at Poetry Daily.

The Sight of Trouble
By Sarah Morgan Piatt

So, then, my boy, you want to know
        Just what is trouble? Some great day, no doubt
When all this world is full of rain or snow,
Or lonesomer because the birds sing so;
Or some strange night, when this same moon drops low
        On many graves—or one—you will find out.

You do not want to wait, I fear—
        You want to see it now, or pretty soon?
The woman dressed in black so who was here
Said she saw trouble always? It is queer
That she sees things you cannot see, my dear.
        —Did I say there was trouble in the moon?

No, but I think it may be there,
        For people see it when they lie awake.
And in the sun as well, and in the air,
And in the tangles of some yellow hair,
And in the wind that blows it everywhere—
        Except to Heaven (if I do not mistake).

Once when her boy was dead, ah, me!
        It would not let her sleep? —Is it a ghost?
Why, if it were a ghost, then it would be
Something, or nothing, that we cannot see!
And yet it is a ghost, sometimes, and we
        Just think we see it, in the dark, at most.

Do women, then, wear glasses so
        They can see trouble? Hardly, I’m afraid;
Perhaps they see it plainer with them, though.
Oh, as to men! Indeed, I do not know.
They miss the train because their watch is slow,
        And drink such coffee as was never made;

They have to wait till some one brings
        Their hat and gloves and overcoat and all,
After that terrible last church-bell rings,
While she is only doing fifty things,
Between the tying of her bonnet-strings,
        The baby’s cries, and putting on her shawl.

So these poor men see trouble too,
        In their own way, a little, I suppose.
Still, what is trouble? Just see here, if you
Tore off that first white rose before I knew
How sweet it was, and cut this lace all through,
        Too well I know how well your mother knows.

I’m listening to the third Flavia de Luce novel, A Red Herring Without Mustard. The Tyger by William Blake was featured, and since I posted that long ago, I thought I’d find another Blake for today.

The Chimney-Sweeper
By William Blake

When my mother died I was very young,
And my father sold me while yet my tongue
Could scarcely cry ‘Weep! weep! weep! weep!’
So your chimneys I sweep, and in soot I sleep.

There’s little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head,
That curled like a lamb’s back, was shaved; so I said,
‘Hush, Tom! never mind it, for, when your head’s bare,
You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair.’

And so he was quiet, and that very night,
As Tom was a-sleeping, he had such a sight!—
That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, and Jack,
Were all of them locked up in coffins of black.

And by came an angel, who had a bright key,
And he opened the coffins, and set them all free;
Then down a green plain, leaping, laughing, they run
And wash in a river, and shine in the sun.

Then naked and white, all their bags left behind,
They rise upon clouds, and sport in the wind;
And the angel told Tom, if he’d be a good boy,
He’d have God for his father, and never want joy.

And so Tom awoke, and we rose in the dark,
And got with our bags and our brushes to work.
Though the morning was cold, Tom was happy and warm:
So, if all do their duty, they need not fear harm.

Today I’m pretending it’s summer (even though spring is barely beginning to start). It’s supposed to be in the 50s and not rain (or snow, for that matter). I’m having people over for dinner and grilling burgers and making strawberry shortcake (among other things).

I found this poem, originally published in Poetry magazine, at The Poetry Foundation.

Last Spring
By Gottfried Benn

Fill yourself up with the forsythias
and when the lilacs flower, stir them in too
with your blood and happiness and wretchedness,
the dark ground that seems to come with you.

Sluggish days. All obstacles overcome.
And if you say: ending or beginning, who knows,
then maybe—just maybe—the hours will carry you
into June, when the roses blow.

I snagged this one from Poetry 180.

Thanks For Remembering Us
By Dana Gioia

The flowers sent here by mistake,
signed with a name that no one knew,
are turning bad. What shall we do?
Our neighbor says they’re not for her,
and no one has a birthday near.
We should thank someone for the blunder.
Is one of us having an affair?
At first we laugh, and then we wonder.

The iris was the first to die,
enshrouded in its sickly-sweet
and lingering perfume. The roses
fell one petal at a time,
and now the ferns are turning dry.
The room smells like a funeral,
but there they sit, too much at home,
accusing us of some small crime,
like love forgotten, and we can’t
throw out a gift we’ve never owned.

Stumbled across this one…

On the Death of Friends in Childhood
By Donald Justice

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven,
Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell;
If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight,
Forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands
In games whose very names we have forgotten.
Come, memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.

This one came from my poetry buddy. It was published in the March 14, 2011 edition of The New Yorker. Clearly pulchritude is the word of the day.

The Imagined
By Stephen Dunn

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?

                     And if the real woman

has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she’s ever wanted,
would you want to know that he slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she’s made for him, that he’s present even when
you’re eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn’t her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn’t the time come,

                     once again, not to talk about it?

I recently read The Colors of Courage: Gettysburg’s Hidden History by Margaret S. Creighton, about women, African Americans, and Germans (mainly the Eleventh Corps of the Union Army) at Gettysburg. This poem was cited in a discussion of John Burns, a famed civilian participant in the battle. The poem’s claim that “all his townsfolk ran away” is completely untrue, but I thought I’d post the poem nonetheless. I snagged the text here.

John Burns of Gettysburg
By Bret Harte

Have you heard of a story that gossips tell
Of Burns of Gettysburg? No? Ah, well:
Brief is the glory that hero earns,
Briefer the story of poor John Burns:
He was the fellow who won renown,—
The only man who didn’t back down
When the rebels rode through his native town;
But held his own in the fight next day,
When all his townsfolk ran away.
That was in July, sixty-three,—
The very day that General Lee,
Flower of Southern chivalry,
Baffled and beaten, backward reeled
From a stubborn Meade and a barren field,

I might tell how, but the day before,
John Burns stood at his cottage-door,
Looking down the village street,
Where, in the shade of his peaceful vine,
He heard the low of his gathered kine,
And felt their breath with incense sweet;
Or I might say, when the sunset burned
The old farm gable, he thought it turned
The milk that fell like a babbling flood
Into the milk-pail, red as blood!
Or how he fancied the hum of bees
Were bullets buzzing among the trees.
But all such fanciful thoughts as these
Were strange to a practical man like Burns,
Who minded only his own concerns,
Troubled no more by fancies fine
Than one of his calm-eyed, long-tailed kine,
Quite old-fashioned and matter-of-fact,
Slow to argue, but quick to act.
That was the reason, as some folks say,
He fought so well on that terrible day.

And it was terrible. On the right
Raged for hours the heady fight,
Thundered the battery’s double brass,—
Difficult music for men to face;
While on the left—where now the graves
Undulate like the living waves
That all the day unceasing swept
Up to the pits the rebels kept—
Round-shot ploughed the upland glades,
Sown with bullets, reaped with blades;
Shattered fences here and there,
Tossed their splinters in the air;
The very trees were stripped and bare;
The barns that once held yellow grain
Were heaped with harvests of the slain;
The cattle bellowed on the plain,
The turkeys screamed with might and main,
And the brooding barn-fowl left their rest
With strange shells bursting in each nest.

Just where the tide of battle turns,
Erect and lonely, stood old John Burns.
How do you think the man was dressed?
He wore an ancient, long buff vest,
Yellow as saffron,—but his best;
And, buttoned over his manly breast,
Was a bright blue coat with a rolling collar,
And large gilt buttons—size of a dollar,—
With tails that the country-folk called “swaller.”
He wore a broad-brimmed, bell-crowned hat,
White as the locks on which it sat.
Never had such a sight been seen
For forty years on the village green,
Since old John Burns was a country beau,
And went to the “quiltings” long ago.

Close at his elbow all that day
Veterans of the Peninsula,
Sunburnt and bearded, charged away;
And striplings, downy of lip and chin,—
Clerks that the Home-Guard mustered in,—
Glanced, as they passed, at the hat he wore,
Then at the rifle his right hand bore;
And hailed him, from out their youthful lore,
With scraps of a slangy repertoire:
“How are you, White Hat?” “Put her through!”
“Your head’s level!” and “Bully for you!”
Called him “Daddy,”—begged he’d disclose
The name of the tailor who made his clothes,
And what was the value he set on those;
While Burns, unmindful of jeer and scoff,
Stood there picking the rebels off,—
With his long brown rifle, and bell-crowned hat,
And the swallow-tails they were laughing at.

‘Twas but a moment, for that respect
Which clothes all courage their voices checked;
And something the wildest could understand
Spake in the old man’s strong right hand,
And his corded throat, and the lurking frown
Of his eyebrows under his old bell-crown;
Until, as they gazed, there crept an awe
Through the ranks in whispers, and some men saw,
In the antique vestments and long white hair,
The Past of the Nation in battle there;
And some of the soldiers since declare
That the gleam of his old white hat afar,
Like the crested plume of the brave Navarre,
That day was their oriflamme of war.

So raged the battle. You know the rest:
How the rebels, beaten and backward pressed,
Broke at the final charge and ran.
At which John Burns—a practical man—
Shouldered his rifle, unbent his brows,
And then went back to his bees and cows.

That is the story of old John Burns;
This is the moral the reader learns:
In fighting the battle, the question’s whether
You’ll show a hat that’s white or a feather.

My Civil War obsession has taken a front seat of late. This poem was quoted in Robin Young’s book For Love and Liberty: The Untold Civil War Story of Major Sullivan Ballou and His Famous Love Letter.

Killed at the Ford
By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

He is dead, the beautiful youth,
The heart of honor, the tongue of truth,
He, the life and light of us all,
Whose voice was blithe as a bugle-call,
Whom all eyes followed with one consent,
The cheer of whose laugh, and whose pleasant word,
Hushed all murmurs of discontent.

Only last night, as we rode along,
Down the dark of the mountain gap,
To visit the picket-guard at the ford,
Little dreaming of any mishap,
He was humming the words of some old song:
“Two red roses he had on his cap
And another he bore at the point of his sword.”

Sudden and swift a whistling ball
Came out of a wood, and the voice was still;
Something I heard in the darkness fall,
And for a moment my blood grew chill;
I spake in a whisper, as he who speaks
In a room where some one is lying dead;
But he made no answer to what I said.

We lifted him up to his saddle again,
And through the mire and the mist and the rain
Carried him back to the silent camp,
And laid him as if asleep on his bed;
And I saw by the light of the surgeon’s lamp
Two white roses upon his cheeks,
And one, just over his heart, blood-red!

And I saw in a vision how far and fleet
That fatal bullet went speeding forth,
Till it reached a town in the distant North,
Till it reached a house in a sunny street,
Till it reached a heart that ceased to beat
Without a murmur, without a cry;
And a bell was tolled, in that far-off town,
For one who had passed from cross to crown,
And the neighbors wondered that she should die.

I had a little trouble getting back in the swing of things after I got home. This is me trying to get back on the wagon. My book club just met to discuss The Crimson Rooms by Katharine McMahon, which is set between WWI and WWII, and which all of us quite liked. This poem is included before the first chapter, aptly as Wilfred Owen wrote it during WWI before he was killed. I also found this critique when I was searching for the text to cut & paste.

The Kind Ghosts
By Wilfred Owen

She sleeps on soft, last breaths; but no ghost looms
Out of the stillness of her palace wall,
Her wall of boys on boys and dooms on dooms.

She dreams of golden gardens and sweet glooms,
Not marvelling why her roses never fall
Nor what red mouths were torn to make their blooms.

The shades keep down which well might roam her hall.
Quiet their blood lies in her crimson rooms
And she is not afraid of their footfall.

They move not from her tapestries, their pall,
Nor pace her terraces, their hecatombs,
Lest aught she be disturbed or grieved at all.

I’ve been listening to David Kincaid’s fantastic album The Irish Volunteer, and I can’t get enough of it. Today’s selection is the title song, sung to the tune of The Irish Jaunting Car (or The Bonnie Blue Flag, as I’m familiar with). Check out more from the album here.

I’m going out of town until mid-next week, so it’s possible the PotD will be on hiatus until then.

The Irish Volunteer
By Joe English

My name is Tim McDonald, I’m a native of the Isle,
I was born among old Erin’s bogs when I was but a child.
My father fought in ” ‘Ninety-eight,” for liberty so dear;
He fell upon old Vinegar Hill, like an Irish volunteer.
Then raise the harp of Erin, boys, the flag we all revere—
We’ll fight and fall beneath its folds, like Irish volunteers!

When I was driven form my home by an oppressor’s hand,
I cut my sticks and greased my brogues, and came o’er to this land.
I found a home and many friends, and some that I love dear;
Be jabbers! I’ll stick to them like bricks and an Irish volunteer.
Then fill your glasses up, my boys, and drink a hearty cheer,
To the land of our adoption and the Irish volunteer!

Now when the traitors in the south commenced a warlike raid,
I quickly then laid down my hoe, to the devil went my spade!
To a recruiting-office then I went, that happened to be near,
And joined the good old “Sixty-ninth,” like an Irish volunteer.
Then fill the ranks and march away!—no traitors do we fear;
We’ll drive them all to blazes, says the Irish volunteer.

When the Prince of Wales came over here, and made a hubbaboo,
Oh, everybody turned out, you know, in gold and tinsel too;
But then the good old Sixty-ninth didn’t like these lords or peers—
They wouldn’t give a damn for kings, the Irish volunteers!
We love the land of Liberty, its laws we will revere,
“But the divil take nobility!” says the Irish volunteer!

Now if the traitors in the South should ever cross our roads,
We’ll drive them to the divil, as Saint Patrick did the toads;
We’ll give them all short nooses that come just below the ears,
Made strong and good of Irish hemp by Irish volunteers.
Then here’s to brave McClellan, whom the army now reveres—
He’ll lead us on to victory, the Irish volunteers.

Now fill your glasses up, my boys, a toast come drink with me,
May Erin’s Harp and the Starry Flag united ever be;
May traitors quake, and rebels shake, and tremble in their fears,
When next they meet the Yankee boys and Irish volunteers!
God bless the name of Washington! that name this land reveres;
Success to Meagher and Nugent, and their Irish volunteers!

Well, this sure sums up how I’ve felt for much of this past winter. At present, the snow is melting, the temperature is rising, and the ground is muddy and covered with trash and snow mold (ew). Here’s hoping spring will penetrate the monotony and change things up! The text was taken from here.

Monotony
By Constantine P. Cavafy

One monotonous day is followed
by another monotonous, identical day. The same
things will happen, they will happen again—
the same moments find us and leave us.

A month passes and ushers in another month.
One easily guesses the coming events;
they are the boring ones of yesterday.
And the morrow ends up not resembling a morrow anymore.

My poetry pal sent me the 10th stanza of this poem and I was intrigued so I Googled it. It would seem Garrison Keillor prefers stanza 11. Luckily, I found what I hope is the complete text here. The poem is from the book of the same title, which I’d like to read some time.

When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone
By Galway Kinnell

1

When one has lived a long time alone
one refrains from swatting the fly
and lets him go, and one hesitates to strike
the mosquito, though more than willing go slap
the flesh under her, and one lifts the toad
from the pit too deep for him to hop out of
and carries him to the grass, without minding
the toxic urine he slicks his body with,
and one envelops, in a towel, the swift
who fell down the chimney and knocks herself
against the window glass and releases her outside
and watches her fly free, a life line flung at reality,
when one has lived a long time alone.

2

When one has lived a long time alone,
one grabs the snake behind the head
and holds him until he stops trying to stick
the orange tongue, which splits at the end
into two black filaments and jumps out
like a fire-eater’s belches and has little
in common with the pimpled pink lump that shapes
sounds and sleeps inside the human mouth,
into one’s flesh, and clamps it between his jaws,
letting the gaudy tips show, as children do
when concentrating, and as very likely
one down oneself, without knowing it,
when one has lived a long time alone.

3

When one has lived a long time alone,
among regrets so immense the past occupies
nearly all the room there is in consciousness,
one notices in the snake’s eyes, which look back
without paying less attention to the future,
the first coating of the opaque milky-blue
leucoma snakes to get when about to throw
their skins and become new—meanwhile continuing,
of course, to grow old—the exact bleu passé
that discolors the corneas of the blue-eyed
when they lie back at last and look for heaven,
a blurring one can see means they will never find it,
when one has lived a long time alone.

4

When one has lived a long time alone,
one holds the snake near a loudspeaker disgorging
gorgeous sound and watches him crook
his forepart into four right angles
as though trying to slow down the music
flowing through him, in order to absorb it
the milk of paradise into the flesh,
and now a glimmering appears at his mouth,
such a drop of intense fluid as, among humans,
could form after long exiting at the tip
of the the penis, and as he straightens himself out
he has the pathos one finds in the penis,
when one has loved a long time alone.

5

When one has lived a long time alone,
one can fall to poring upon a creature,
contrasting its eternity’s-face to one’s own
full of hours, taking note of each difference,
exaggerating it, making it everything,
until the other is utterly other, and then,
with hard effort, possibly with tongue sticking out,
going back over each one once again
and cancelling it, seeing nothing now
but likeness, until… half an hour later
one starts awake, taken aback at how eagerly
one swoons into the happiness of kinship,
when one has lived a long time alone.

6

When one has lived a long time alone
and listens at morning to mourning doves
sound their kyrie eleison, or the small thing
spiritualizing onto one’s shoulder cry “pewit-phoebe!”
or peabody-sparrows at midday send schoolboys’
whistlings across the field, or at dusk, undamped,
unforgiving clinks, as from stonemasons’ chisels,
or on trees’ backs tree frogs scratch the thighs’
needfire awake, or from the frog pond pond frogs
raise their ave verum corpus—listens to those
who hop or fly call down upon us the mercy
of other tongues—one hears them as inner voices,
when one has lived a long time alone.

7

When one has lived a long time alone,
one knows only consciousness consummates,
and as the conscious one among these others
uttering compulsory cries of being here—
the least flycatcher witching up “che-bec,”
or redheaded woodpecker clanging out his
music from a metal drainpipe, or ruffed grouse
drumming “thump thrump thrump thrump-thrump-
thrump-thrump-rup-rup-rup-rup-rup-r-r-r-r-r-r”
through the trees, all of them in time’s
unfolding trying to cry themselves into self-knowing—
one knows one is here to hear them into shining,
when one has lived a long time alone.

8

When one has loved a long time alone,
one likes alike the pig, who brooks no deferment
of gratification, and the porcupine, or thorned pig,
who enters the cellar but not the house itself
because of eating down the cellar stairs on the way up,
and one likes the worm, who by bunching herself together
and expanding rubs her way through the ground,
no less than the butterfly, who totters full of worry
among the day-lilies, as they darken,
and more and more one finds one likes
any other species better than one’s own,
which has gone amok, making one self-estranged,
when one has lived a long time alone.

9

When one has lived a long time alone,
sour, misanthropic, one fits to one’s defiance
the satanic boast—It is better to reign
in hell than to submit on earth—
and forgets one’s kind, as does the snake,
who has stopped trying to escape and moves
at ease across one’s body, slumping into its contours,
adopting its temperature, and abandons hope
of the sweetness of friendship or love
—before long can barely remember what they are—
and covets the stillness in organic matter,
in a self-dissolution one may not know how to halt,
when one has lived a long time alone.

10

When one has loved a long time alone,
and the hermit thrush calls and there is an answer,
and the bullfrog, head half out of water, remembers
the exact sexual cantillations of his first spring,
and the snake slides over the threshold and disappears
among the stones, one sees they all live
to mate with their kind, and one knows,
after a long time of solitude, after the many steps taken
away from one’s kind, toward the kingdom of strangers,
the hard prayer inside one’s own singing
is to come back, if one can, to one’s own,
a world almost lost, in the exile that deepens,
when one has lived a long time alone.

11

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one’s ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now
also of history glimmers its firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great-granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy from kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth’s and heaven’s,
until the sun has risen, and they stand
in a light of being united: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

Happy Pi Day! Because I’m a nerd I baked two pies to take to work and found a pi poem to post. 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288…

Pi
By Wislawa Szymborska

The admirable number pi:
three point one four one.
All the following digits are also just a start,
five nine two because it never ends.
It can’t be grasped, six five three five, at a glance,
eight nine, by calculation,
seven nine, through imagination,
or even three two three eight in jest, or by comparison
four six to anything
two six four three in the world.
The longest snake on earth ends at thirty-odd feet.
Same goes for fairy tale snakes, though they make it a little longer.
The caravan of digits that is pi
does not stop at the edge of the page,
but runs off the table and into the air,
over the wall, a leaf, a bird’s nest, the clouds, straight into the sky,
through all the bloatedness and bottomlessness.
Oh how short, all but mouse-like is the comet’s tail!
How frail is a ray of starlight, bending in any old space!
Meanwhile two three fifteen three hundred nineteen
my phone number your shirt size
the year nineteen hundred and seventy-three sixth floor
number of inhabitants sixty-five cents
hip measurement two fingers a charade and a code,
in which we find how blithe the trostle sings!
and please remain calm,
and heaven and earth shall pass away,
but not pi, that won’t happen,
it still has an okay five,
and quite a fine eight,
and all but final seven,
prodding and prodding a plodding eternity
to last.

This one comes from American Life in Poetry. I’m still feeling very special to be an aunt!

The Aunts
By Joyce Sutphen

I like it when they get together
and talk in voices that sound
like apple trees and grape vines,

and some of them wear hats
and go to Arizona in the winter,
and they all like to play cards.

They will always be the ones
who say “It is time to go now,”
even as we linger at the door,

or stand by the waiting cars, they
remember someone—an uncle we
never knew—and sigh, all

of them together, like wind
in the oak trees behind the farm
where they grew up—a place

I remember—especially
the hen house and the soft
clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

My sweet niece is 2 days old today, but she does have a name - Josephine Grace! This is from Songs of Innocence, as you may have guessed.

Infant Joy
By William Grace

“I have no name:
I am but two days old.”
What shall I call thee?
“I happy am,
Joy is my name.”
Sweet joy befall thee!

Pretty joy!
Sweet joy but two days old,
Sweet joy I call thee:
Thou dost smile,
I sing the while,
Sweet joy befall thee!

This is another one found at The Poetry Foundation. I also want to highlight his previously posted For My Daughter.

Listening
By David Ignatow

You wept in your mother’s arms
and I knew that from then on
I was to forget myself.

Listening to your sobs,
I was resolved against my will
to do well by us
and so I said, without thinking,
in great panic, To do wrong
in one’s own judgment,
though others thrive by it,
is the right road to blessedness.
Not to submit to error
is in itself wrong
and pride.

Standing beside you,
I took an oath
to make your life simpler
by complicating mine
and what I always thought
would happen did:
I was lifted up in joy.

Today I became an aunt, about which I am indescribably thrilled! I snagged this from The Poetry Foundation.

A Prayer for My Daughter
By William Butler Yeats

Once more the storm is howling, and half hid
Under this cradle-hood and coverlid
My child sleeps on. There is no obstacle
But Gregory’s Wood and one bare hill
Whereby the haystack and roof-levelling wind,
Bred on the Atlantic, can be stayed;
And for an hour I have walked and prayed
Because of the great gloom that is in my mind.

I have walked and prayed for this young child an hour,
And heard the sea-wind scream upon the tower,
And under the arches of the bridge, and scream
In the elms above the flooded stream;
Imagining in excited reverie
That the future years had come
Dancing to a frenzied drum
Out of the murderous innocence of the sea.

May she be granted beauty, and yet not
Beauty to make a stranger’s eye distraught,
Or hers before a looking-glass; for such,
Being made beautiful overmuch,
Consider beauty a sufficient end,
Lose natural kindness, and maybe
The heart-revealing intimacy
That chooses right, and never find a friend.

Helen, being chosen, found life flat and dull,
And later had much trouble from a fool;
While that great Queen that rose out of the spray,
Being fatherless, could have her way,
Yet chose a bandy-leggèd smith for man.
It’s certain that fine women eat
A crazy salad with their meat
Whereby the Horn of Plenty is undone.

In courtesy I’d have her chiefly learned;
Hearts are not had as a gift, but hearts are earned
By those that are not entirely beautiful.
Yet many, that have played the fool
For beauty’s very self, has charm made wise;
And many a poor man that has roved,
Loved and thought himself beloved,
From a glad kindness cannot take his eyes.

May she become a flourishing hidden tree,
That all her thoughts may like the linnet be,
And have no business but dispensing round
Their magnanimities of sound;
Nor but in merriment begin a chase,
Nor but in merriment a quarrel.
Oh, may she live like some green laurel
Rooted in one dear perpetual place.

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Considering that, all hatred driven hence,
The soul recovers radical innocence
And learns at last that it is self-delighting,
Self-appeasing, self-affrighting,
And that its own sweet will is heaven’s will,
She can, though every face should scowl
And every windy quarter howl
Or every bellows burst, be happy still.

And may her bridegroom bring her to a house
Where all’s accustomed, ceremonious;
For arrogance and hatred are the wares
Peddled in the thoroughfares.
How but in custom and in ceremony
Are innocence and beauty born?
Ceremony’s a name for the rich horn,
And custom for the spreading laurel tree.

I recently got This Same Sky: A Collection of Poems from Around the World selected by Naomi Shihab Nye. No time to read it yet, but I randomly opened to this one from a South Korean poet.

Jasmine
By Kyongjoo Hong Ryou

Saturday evening grows
darker as the teapot
whistles. I get a mug,
humming, and breathe
the ancient scent,
faintly familiar.

Every summer we
gathered the young
jasmine leaves, while I sang
songs that I learned in school.
On sunny days, she spread
the leaves out in the back
yard where I sat and dreamt
the scent of long winter
nights beside the hot stove.
Immense warmth calms my throat

as I hear
what’s not there anymore.
Mama’s dead: someone else
is picking the leaves,
drinking my tea
in nights of winter.

My poetry pal sent me An Old Man’s Winter Night and I was all set to post it until I realized I already had. So I found another Frost instead. I get my Frost poems from here.

Meeting and Passing
By Robert Frost

As I went down the hill along the wall
There was a gate I had leaned at for the view
And had just turned from when I first saw you
As you came up the hill. We met. But all
We did that day was mingle great and small
Footprints in summer dust as if we drew
The figure of our being less that two
But more than one as yet. Your parasol
Pointed the decimal off with one deep thrust.
And all the time we talked you seemed to see
Something down there to smile at in the dust.
(Oh, it was without prejudice to me!)
Afterward I went past what you had passed
Before we met and you what I had passed.

A reader suggested this poem. The text was taken from here. P.S. A matelot is a sailor. I had no idea!

The Middle of a War
By Roy Fuller

My photograph already looks historic.
The promising youthful face, the matelot’s collar,
Say ‘This one is remembered for a lyric.
His place and period—nothing could be duller.’

Its position is already indicated—
The son or brother in the album; pained
The expression and the garments dated,
His fate so obviously preordained.

The original turns away: as horrible thoughts,
Loud fluttering aircraft slope above his head
At dusk. The ridiculous empires break like biscuits.
Ah, life has been abandoned by the boats—
Only the trodden island and the dead
Remain, and the once inestimable caskets.

A poetry buddy brought me the February 14 & 21, 2011 issue of The New Yorker for an article about George Eliot. I’m also pilfering this poem.

The Rhythms Pronounce Themselves Then Vanish
By Dean Young

After they told me the CT showed
there was nothing wrong with my stomach
but my heart was failing, I plunked
one of those weird two-dollar tea balls
I bought in Chinatown and it bobbed
and bloomed like a sea monster and tasted
like feet and I had at this huge
chocolate bar I got at Trader Joe’s
and didn’t answer the door even though
I could see it was UPS with the horse
medication and I thought of that picture
Patti took of me in an oval frame. Sweat
itself is odorless, composed of water,
sodium chloride, potassium salts,
and lactic acid; it’s the bacteria growing
on dead skin that provides the stench.
The average life span of a human taste bud
is seven to ten days. Nerve pulses
can travel up to a hundred and seventy miles per hour.
All information is useless.
The typical lightning bolt
is one inch wide and five miles long.