Poem of the Day

Here’s another one I read with my poetry pals. The second stanza is my favorite, and I certainly hope that there are still wonderful poems to be written!

I also wanted to share this quote (which seems appropriate now) that I think was in the beginning of Ten Poems to Last a Lifetime.

“It’s absurd to think that the only way to tell if a poem is lasting is to wait and see if it lasts. The right reader of a good poem can tell the moment it strikes him that he has taken a mortal wound—that he will never get over it. That is to say, permanence in poetry as in love is perceived instantly. It hasn’t to await the test of time.”
—Robert Frost

Rereading Frost
By Linda Pastan

Sometimes I think all the best poems
have been written already,
and no one has time to read them,
so why try to write more?

At other times though,
I remember how one flower
in a meadow already full of flowers
somehow adds to the general fireworks effect

as you get to the top of a hill
in Colorado, say, in high summer
and just look down at all that brimming color.
I also try to convince myself

that the smallest note of the smallest
instrument in the band,
the triangle for instance,
is important to the conductor

who stands there, pointing his finger
in the direction of the percussions,
demanding that one silvery ping.
And I decide not to stop trying,

at least not for a while, though in truth
I’d rather just sit here reading
how someone else has been acquainted
with the night already, and perfectly.

Here is the promised William Carlos Williams poem I mentioned yesterday. Cheryl pointed out that it reminds her of a still life. It’s so short and simple, but if you close your eyes and listen to someone reading it, you’ll really feel like you’re there. I was actually surprised when I looked at the text because it seems so small, but if you hear it, it will be an entirely different experience.

Nantucket
By William Carlos Williams

Flowers through the window
lavender and yellow

changed by white curtains—
Smell of cleanliness—

Sunshine of late afternoon—
On the glass tray

a glass pitcher, the tumbler
turned down, by which

a key is lying— And the
immaculate white bed

I was leafing through The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, and I laughed out loud at today’s selection. I was immediately reminded of a pair of poems I previously posted. Amusingly enough, one of my poetry pals had chosen another William Carlos Williams poem to read on Saturday (which I’ll share tomorrow), but she also read This Is Just To Say. This prompted me to mention the Erica-Lynn Gambino “tribute” and then read Kenneth Koch’s offerings. We all had a good laugh.

Variations on a Theme by William Carlos Williams
By Kenneth Koch

1

I chopped down the house that you had been saving to live in next summer.
I am sorry, but it was morning, and I had nothing to do
and its wooden beams were so inviting.

2

We laughed at the hollyhocks together
and then I sprayed them with lye.
Forgive me. I simply do not know what I am doing.

3

I gave away the money that you had been saving to live on for the next ten years.
The man who asked for it was shabby
and the firm March wind on the porch was so juicy and cold.

4

Last evening we went dancing and I broke your leg.
Forgive me. I was clumsy, and
I wanted you here in the wards, where I am the doctor!

I had a lovely time with some of my poetry pals yesterday afternoon so I have some new fodder. This one was shared my aunt, who read it in JAMA. I thought the end was very sad, but my aunt (who is a doctor) found the poem amusing overall and said that the last five lines aren’t necessarily true, in her experience.

Patient Histories
By Amit Majmudar

Some know what ails them inside and out.
They know where they brushed the ivy, and when,
Tracing for you around their shins
The border that morning between sock and skin.
After resenting their past doctors by name,
They ask you to spell yours, and write
The letters, as you say them, on a yellow pad.
Medication lists, xeroxed, one for you to keep.
They know exactly at what hour of the night
Their pain gave a murmur, or turned in its sleep.

But some speak of their ill health haltingly,
The first chest pressure something overheard
Across a room packed with more pressing events.
A spouse brings the mole to their attention.
When they first slurred their words is a matter of hearsay;
They have no dates for you, much less a time of day.
And they are always the ones who get
The worst news, whose malignancies have trekked
To lung and liver in the sunshine of benign neglect,
The men whose backaches prove bone mets, the women
Who felt the lump but figured it would go away.

This one was in the crossword puzzle the other day.

Easter, 1916
By William Butler Yeats

I have met them at close of day
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head
Or polite meaningless words,
Or have lingered awhile and said
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done
Of a mocking tale or a gibe
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,
Being certain that they and I
But lived where motley is worn:
All changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman’s days were spent
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers
When, young and beautiful,
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school
And rode our winged horse;
This other his helper and friend
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,
So sensitive his nature seemed,
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone
Through summer and winter seem
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road.
The rider, the birds that range
From cloud to tumbling cloud,
Minute by minute they change;
A shadow of cloud on the stream
Changes minute by minute;
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,
And a horse plashes within it;
The long-legged moor-hens dive,
And hens to moor-cocks call;
Minute by minute they live:
The stone’s in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven’s part, our part
To murmur name upon name,
As a mother names her child
When sleep at last has come
On limbs that had run wild.
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith
For all that is done and said.
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;
And what if excess of love
Bewildered them till they died?
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

It’s Australia Day and, in honor of a friend of mine from Down Under, we’re going to Boomerang’s for meat pies and Coopers. I thought I’d post a poem I found here.

My Country
By Dorothea Mackellar

The love of field and coppice,
Of green and shaded lanes,
Of ordered woods and gardens
Is running in your veins.
Strong love of grey-blue distance
Brown streams and soft, dim skies—
I know but I cannot share it,
My love is otherwise.

I love a sunburnt country,
A land of sweeping plains,
Of rugged mountain ranges,
Of droughts and flooding plains.
I love her far horizons,
I love her jewel-sea,
Her beauty and her terror—
The wide brown land for me!

The stark white ring-barked forests,
All tragic to the moon,
The sapphire-misted mountains,
The hot gold rush of noon.
Green tangle of the brushes,
Where lithe lianas coil,
And orchids deck the tree tops
And ferns the warm dark soil.

Core of my heart, my country!
Her pitiless blue sky,
When sick at heart, around us,
We see the cattle die—
But then the grey clouds gather,
And we can bless again
The drumming of an army,
The steady, soaking rain.

Core of my heart, my country!
Land of the Rainbow Gold,
For flood and fire and famine,
She pays us back three-fold.
Over the thirsty paddocks,
Watch, after many days,
The filmy veil of greenness
That thickens as we gaze…

A opal-hearted country,
A wilful, lavish land—
All you who have not loved her,
You will not understand—
Though earth holds many splendours,
Wherever I may die,
I know to what brown country
My homing thoughts will fly.

This one’s for all the older siblings out there…

What She Was Doing At Home
By Naomi Shihab Nye

                     School was like a ship they
                     sent you away upon.
                     —Michael Burkard

The baby was there—unfair.
I knew whatever she was doing
had fluted edges, a cinnamon center.
I knew she placed snipped rounds of waxed paper
between layers of cookies in the tin.

And I was missing it,
missing everything.
As far away as the monkey
in a rocket.

After school, when I tried to swim back
into her day, she had left it already.
She was washing up on the shores of dinner,
wearing a cool rag pressed between her eyes.

I started reminiscing this morning and that led me to post a Lewis Carroll poem.

The Crocodile
By Lewis Carroll

How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!

How cheefully he seems to grin!
How neatly spread his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in
With gently smiling jaws!

This is for Jennifer because I would be lost without her. May we never be as regretful as old Will and always turn to each other for friendship, especially during bouts of melancholy. You’re fabulous!!!

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
By William Shakespeare

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unus’d to flow,
For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night,
And weep afresh love’s long-since cancell’d woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish’d sight.
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restor’d, and sorrows end.

Today has not been the best of days, so I’ve found a poem to make me laugh.

The Quangle Wangle’s Hat
By Edward Lear

I.

On the top of the Crumpetty Tree
The Quangle Wangle sat,
But his face you could not see,
On account of his Beaver Hat.
For his Hat was a hundred and two feet wide,
With ribbons and bibbons on every side
And bells, and buttons, and loops, and lace,
So that nobody every could see the face
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

II.

The Quangle Wangle said
To himself on the Crumpetty Tree,—
“Jam; and jelly; and bread;
“Are the best of food for me!
“But the longer I live on this Crumpetty Tree
“The plainer than ever it seems to me
“That very few people come this way
“And that life on the whole is far from gay!”
Said the Quangle Wangle Quee.

III.

But there came to the Crumpetty Tree,
Mr. and Mrs. Canary;
And they said,—”Did ever you see
“Any spot so charmingly airy?
“May we build a nest on your lovely Hat?
“Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!
“O please let us come and build a nest
“Of whatever material suits you best,
“Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!”

IV.

And besides, to the Crumpetty Tree
Came the Stork, the Duck, and the Owl;
The Snail, and the Bumble-Bee,
The Frog, and the Fimble Fowl;
(The Fimble Fowl, with a corkscrew leg;)
And all of them said,—”We humbly beg,
“We may build out homes on your lovely Hat,—
“Mr. Quangle Wangle, grant us that!
“Mr. Quangle Wangle Quee!”

V.

And the Golden Grouse came there,
And the Pobble who has no toes,—
And the small Olympian bear,—
And the Dong with a luminous nose.
And the Blue Baboon, who played the Flute,—
And the Orient Calf from the Land of Tute,—
And the Attery Squash, and the Bisky Bat,—
All came and built on the lovely Hat
Of the Quangle Wangle Quee.

VI.

And the Quangle Wangle said
To himself on the Crumpetty Tree,—
“When all these creatures move
“What a wonderful noise there’ll be!”
And at night by the light of the Mulberry moon
They danced to the Flute of the Blue Baboon,
On the broad green leaves of the Crumpetty Tree,
And all were as happy as happy could be,
With the Quangle Wangle Quee.

I finished The Eyre Affair tonight and I thought I’d share this poem mentioned therein, as rightfully belonging to the People’s Republic of Wales (hahahahahahaha!).

I See the Boys of Summer
By Dylan Thomas

I

I see the boys of summer in their ruin
Lay the gold tithings barren,
Setting no store by harvest, freeze the soils;
There in their heat the winter floods
Of frozen loves they fetch their girls,
And drown the cargoed apples in their tides.

These boys of light are curdlers in their folly,
Sour the boiling honey;
The jacks of frost they finger in the hives;
There in the sun the frigid threads
Of doubt and dark they feed their nerves;
The signal moon is zero in their voids.

I see the summer children in their mothers
Split up the brawned womb’s weathers,
Divide the night and day with fairy thumbs;
There in the deep with quartered shades
Of sun and moon they paint their dams
As sunlight paints the shelling of their heads.

I see that from these boys shall men of nothing
Stature by seedy shifting,
Or lame the air with leaping from its hearts;
There from their hearts the dogdayed pulse
Of love and light bursts in their throats.
O see the pulse of summer in the ice.

II

But seasons must be challenged or they totter
Into a chiming quarter
Where, punctual as death, we ring the stars;
There, in his night, the black-tongued bells
The sleepy man of winter pulls,
Nor blows back moon-and-midnight as she blows.

We are the dark deniers, let us summon
Death from a summer woman,
A muscling life from lovers in their cramp,
From the fair dead who flush the sea
The bright-eyed worm on Davy’s lamp,
And from the planted womb the man of straw.

We summer boys in this four-winded spinning,
Green of the seaweed’s iron,
Hold up the noisy sea and drop her birds,
Pick the world’s ball of wave and froth
To choke the deserts with her tides,
And comb the county gardens for a wreath.

In spring we cross our foreheads with the holly,
Heigh ho the blood and berry,
And nail the merry squires to the trees;
Here love’s damp muscle dries and dies,
Here break a kiss in no love’s quarry.
O see the poles of promise in the boys.

III

I see the boys of summer in their ruin.
Man in his maggot’s barren.
And boys are full and foreign in the pouch.
I am the man your father was.
We are the sons of flint and pitch.
O see the poles are kissing as they cross.

I’m rereading The Eyre Affair (it was chosen for Austin Book Nerds) and I remembered posting this poem by Wordsworth. I found another poem of his to share today.

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
By William Wordsworth

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love:

A violet by a mossy stone
Half hidden from the eye!
—Fair as a star, when only one
Is shining in the sky.

She lived unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her grave, and, oh,
The difference to me!

Here’s another one I found in Honey and Salt.

Fog Numbers
By Carl Sandburg

Birth is the starting point of passion.
Passion is the beginning of death.
How can you turn back from birth?
How can you say no to passion?
How can you bid death hold off?
And if thoughts come and hold you
And if dreams step in and shakes your bones
What can you do but take them and make them
    more your own?

    Of course, a nickel is a nickel,
    and a dime is a dime—sure—
    we learned that—
    why mention it now?
    of course, steel is steel;
    and a hammer is a hammer;
And a thought, a dream, is more than a name,
    a number, a fixed point.

                                .     .

Walk in a midnight fog now and say to it: Tell
    me your number and I’ll tell you mine.
Salute one morning sun falling on a river ribbon
    of mist and tell it: My number is such-and-
    such—what’s yours?

Of what is fog the starting point?
Of what is the red sun the beginning?
Long ago—as now—little men and women knew in
    their bones the singing and the aching of
    these stumbling questions.

I’ve read quite a few Margaret Atwood poems since discovering Women’s Novels, so expect to see her sprinkled liberally throughout future PotDs. This one reminds me of some of Mary Oliver’s poems, especially this one.

The Moment
By Margaret Atwood

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

I think it’s time we heard from Adrienne Jones again. This one’s from Walking Down the Street in the Spirit Place.

Dog Dream
By Adrienne Jones

loneliness is a vicious black dog.
he chases me
as I walk down the road to school.

fangs bared, he must bite something.
I break off pieces of my pencil
and throw them away
for him to chase.
I wake, alone,
and sit down to write again.

Okay, I was going to say that I’m a total tool for saving this poem forever and then not posting it on January 6th. However, then I realized that, even though it’s January 16th, the poem is more appropriate today given our weather and the fact that I’ve been cosy in my apartment drinking tea for several days.

The Sixth of January
By David Budbill

The cat sits on the back of the sofa looking
out the window through the softly falling snow
at the last bit of gray light.

I can’t say the sun is going down.
We haven’t seen the sun for two months.
Who cares?

I am sitting in the blue chair listening to this stillness.
The only sound: the occasional gurgle of tea
coming out of the pot and into the cup.

How can this be?
Such calm, such peace, such solitude
in this world of woe.

I have never once chopped an onion without ending up with tears streaming down my cheeks and my eyes burning as if they were on fire. It’s such a shame that so many dishes taste better with onions or I’d avoid them like the plague!

Peeling Onions
By Adrienne Rich

Only to have a grief
equal to all these tears!

There’s not a sob in my chest.
Dry-hearted as Peer Gynt
I pare away, no hero,
merely a cook.

Crying was labor, once
when I’d good cause.
Walking, I felt my eyes like wounds
raw in my head,
so postal-clerks, I though, must stare.
A dog’s look, a cat’s, burnt to my brain—
yet all that stayed
stuffed in my lungs like smog.

These old tears in the chopping-bowl.

Here’s another one from Lorca, courtesy of the lovely Katie.

Wounds of Love
By Federico García Lorca

This light, this fire that devours,
this gray landscape that surrounds me,
this pain that comes from one idea,
this anguish of the sky, the earth, the hour,

and this lament of blood that decorates
a pulseless lyre, a lascivious torch,
this burden of the sea that beats upon me,
this scorpion that dwells within my breast

are all a wreath of love, bed of one wounded,
where, sleepless, I dream of your presence,
amid the ruins of my fallen breast.

And though I seek the summit of discretion,
your heart gives me a valley spread below
with hemlock and passion of bitter wisdom.

I’ve been watching From the Earth to the Moon and I came across this poem while searching for “space poetry”.

On the beach at night alone
By Walt Whitman

On the beach at night alone,
As the old mother sways her to and fro singing her husky song,
As I watch the bright stars shining, I think a thought of the clef of the universes and of the future.

A vast similitude interlocks all,
All spheres, grown, ungrown, small, large, suns, moons, planets,
All distances of place however wide,
All distances of time, all inanimate forms,
All souls, all living bodies though they be ever so different, or in different worlds,
All gaseous, watery, vegetable, mineral processes, the fishes, the brutes,
All nations, colors, barbarisms, civilizations, languages,
All identities that have existed or may exist on this globe, or any globe,
All lives and deaths, all of the past, present, future,
This vast similitude spans them, and always has spann’d,
And shall forever span them and compactly hold and enclose them.

I found another of Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s poems here.

Wounds
By Yevgeny Yevtushenko

To D.G.

I have been wounded so often and so painfully,
dragging my way home at the merest crawl,
impaled not only by malicious tongues—
one can be wounded even by a petal.

And I myself have wounded—quite unwittingly—
with casual tenderness while passing by,
and later someone felt the pain,
it was like walking barefoot over the ice.

So why do I step upon the ruins
of those most near and dear to me,
I, who can be so simply and so sharply wounded
and can wound others with such deadly ease?

I’m quickly cycling through the poets in my usual rotation, and while I love my old standby poets, I need new material (and time to read it)!

The Man Watching
By Rainer Maria Rilke

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great!
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

I’m very excited to bake some sourdough bread this weekend, since I was parted from my starter over the holidays. I thought this poem from American Life in Poetry was appropriate.

Bread Soup: An Old Icelandic Recipe
By Bill Holm

Start with the square heavy loaf
steamed a whole day in a hot spring
until the coarse rye, sugar, yeast
grow dense as a black hole of bread.
Let it age and dry a little,
then soak the old loaf for a day
in warm water flavored
with raisins and lemon slices.
Boil it until it is thick as molasses.
Pour it in a flat white bowl.
Ladle a good dollop of whipped cream
to melt in its brown belly.
This soup is alive as any animal,
and the yeast and cream and rye
will sing inside you after eating
for a long time.

After a hectic (but fun) “vacation” over the holidays, and a long drive, I’m back home and sick as a dog. However, I do want to start up the PotD again, so let’s ease in with a selection from ESVM (who else?).

I see so clearly now my similar years
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

I see so clearly now my similar years
Repeat each other, shod in rusty black,
Like one hack following another hack
In meaningless procession, dry of tears,
Driven empty, lest the noses sharp as shears
Of gutter-urchins at a hearse’s back
Should sniff a man died friendless, and attack
With silly scorn his deaf triumphant ears;
I see so clearly now how my life must run
One year behind another year until
At length these bones that leap into the sun
Are lowered into the gravel, and lie still,
I would at times the funeral were done
And I abandoned on the ultimate hill.