Poem of the Day

Thank heavens my poetry buddy bailed me out again today! I seem to have too many things to do which trump sitting around beefing up my poetry file, but I still feel lazy.

Some People Like Poetry
By Wislawa Szymborska

Some people—
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with two per thousand.

Like—
but then, you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf,
your own way,
petting the dog.

Poetry—
but what is poetry, anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.

—Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

This one comes to use from the lovely Valerie. It’s been many years since I played, but if I can convince my parents to deliver my piano when they sell their house, I’d love to take it up again. Maybe I’ll have more discipline to practice than when I was 14.

Piano Lessons
By Billy Collins

1.
My teacher lies on the floor with a bad back
off to the side of the piano.
I sit up straight on the stool.
He begins by telling me that every key
is like a different room
and I am a blind man who must learn
to walk through all twelve of them
without hitting the furniture.
I feel myself reach for the first doorknob.

2.
He tells me that every scale has a shape
and I have to learn how to hold
each one in my hands.
At home I practice with my eyes closed.
C is an open book.
D is a vase with two handles.
G flat is a black boot.
E has the legs of a bird.

3.
He says the scale is the mother of the chords.
I can see her pacing the bedroom floor
waiting for her children to come home.
They are out at nightclubs shading and lighting
all the songs while couples dance slowly
or stare at one another across tables.
This is the way it must be. After all,
just the right chord can bring you to tears
but no one listens to the scales,
no one listens to their mother.

4.
I am doing my scales,
the familiar anthems of childhood.
My fingers climb the ladder of notes
and come back down without turning around.
Anyone walking under this open window
would picture a girl of about ten
sitting at the keyboard with perfect posture,
not me slumped over in my bathrobe, disheveled,
like a white Horace Silver.

5.
I am learning to play
“It Might As Well Be Spring”
but my left hand would rather be jingling
the change in the darkness of my pocket
or taking a nap on an armrest.
I have to drag him in to the music
like a difficult and neglected child.
This is the revenge of the one who never gets
to hold the pen or wave good-bye,
and now, who never gets to play the melody.

6.
Even when I am not playing, I think about the piano.
It is the largest, heaviest,
and most beautiful object in this house.
I pause in the doorway just to take it all in.
And late at night I picture it downstairs,
this hallucination standing on three legs,
this curious beast with its enormous moonlit smile.

This one jumped out at me because I am anti-smoking. I think it’s a very sad poem, but I like that it’s a reminder that smoking almost never only affects the smoker.

Mattress Fire
By Penny Harter

When I was a child, my father
lit a cigarette in the night
and fell back asleep,
his arm dangling over the edge,
his curled fingers holding fire.

My parents dragged the mattress to the bathtub.
Later, they pinned an old blanket, tight
around its sagging middle
where some stuffing had dissolved to soggy lumps.

For years I watched my mother
change the sheets on the burnt mattress,
smoothing them over the old blanket,
the charred hole in the striped ticking.

My mother changed the sheets on that mattress
even when cancer from three packs a day
began to burn my father’s jawbone,
dissolve his soft palate;
even after surgery, when he nestled
into his new life, his body
finding the familiar hollows.

The mattress finally collapsed into itself
twenty years after he stopped smoking.

Somewhere, my father’s mattress still burns,
smouldering in the dumps off the Turnpike
like those underground fires
they can’t put out for years.

This is another sent by my poetry buddy (how lazy have I been lately?). I like my love sonnets to have a dark edge (yay ESVM!) so I can appreciate this one.

XVII
By Pablo Neruda

I do not love you as if you were salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

I love you without knowing how, or when, or from where.
I love you straightforwardly, without complexities or pride;
so I love you because I know no other way

than this: where I does not exist, nor you,
so close that your hand on my chest is my hand,
so close that your eyes close as I fall asleep.

Today is a day for an ESVM poem, without question. I’ve posted so many of hers and don’t currently have any in my file, so I revisited her Collected Poems. It’s been far too long since I’ve done that.

Journey
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Ah, could I lay me down in this long grass
And close my eyes, and let the quiet wind
Blow over me—I am so tired, so tired
Of passing pleasant places! All my life,
Following Care along the dusty road,
Have I looked back at loveliness and sighed;
Yet at my hand an unrelenting hand
Tugged ever, and I passed. All my life long
Over my shoulder have I looked at peace;
And now I fain would lie in this long grass
And close my eyes.

               Yet onward!
                                 Cat birds call
Through the long afternoon, and creeks at dusk
Are guttural. Whip-poor-wills wake and cry,
Drawing the twilight close about their throats.
Only my heart makes answer. Eager vines
Go up the rocks and wait; flushed apple-trees
Pause in their dance and break the ring for me;
Dim, shady wood-roads, redolent of fern
And bayberry, that through sweet bevies thread
Of round-faced roses, pink and petulant,
Look back and beckon ere they disappear.
Only my heart, only my heart responds.

Yet, ah, my path is sweet on either side
All through the dragging day,—sharp underfoot
And hot, and like dead mist the dry dust hangs—
But far, oh, far as passionate eye can reach,
And long, ah, long as rapturous eye can cling,
The world is mine: blue hill, still silver lake,
Broad field, bright flower, and the long white road;
A gateless garden, and an open path;
My feet to follow, and my heart to hold.

This poem was snagged from I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You, and I love the contrast between the man and wife in the poem. Which is more important, the camellia viewing platform, or the grass not drying in the dark cave? (The first sentence in the second stanza makes me laugh every time because I can so vividly picture the grass-lover’s look of dismay at the carefully positioned lawn chair.

Camellias
By Linda Pastan

I drag the lawn chair
to the center of the new lawn
where you have warned
it will ruin the delicate
grass. From here
I have a perfect view
of the pink camellia,
the one with rose-shaped flowers
which you secretly think
I have ignored. This is my camellia
viewing platform
I tell you, remembering
signposts in Japan.

You look at the dark cave
beneath my chair where the grass
will die in architectural stripes.
We look at each other.
This is one of the impasses
a marriage must
make a detour around
or else crash into.
Meanwhile the camellia
opens its flesh-colored petals
with utter unself-consciousness,
releasing its scent
into the dangerous air.

This one was sent by my poetry buddy. It made me think about whether it is possible to feel true joy/love/satisfaction without also having felt sadness/hatred/longing. I doubt it.

Why I Am Not A Buddhist
By Molly Peacock

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I’ve sought—
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold—and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

I just watched Gods and Generals (again), and this poem was quoted therein by Fanny Chamberlain, wife of Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain.

To Lucasta, going to the Wars
By Richard Lovelace

Tell me not, Sweet, I am unkind,
That from the nunnery
Of thy chaste breasts, and quiet mind,
To war and arms I fly.

True, a new mistress now I chase,
The first foe in the field;
And with a stronger faith embrace
A sword, a horse, a shield.

Yet this inconstancy is such,
As you too shall adore;
I could not love thee, Dear, so much,
Loved I not honour more.

The lovely Valerie suggested this one, and I think it’s wonderful.

At Becky’s Piano Recital
By Carl Dennis

She screws her face up as she nears the hard parts,
Then beams with relief as she makes it through,
Just as she did listening on the edge of her chair
To the children who played before her,
Wincing and smiling for them
As if she doesn’t regard them as competitors
And is free of the need to be first
That vexes many all their lives.
I hope she stays like this,
Her windows open on all sides to a breeze
Pungent with sea spray or meadow pollen.
Maybe her patience this morning at the pond
Was another good sign,
The way she waited for the frog to croak again
So she could find its hiding place and admire it.
There it was, in the reeds, to any casual passerby
Only a fist-sized speckled stone.
All the way home she wondered out loud
What kind of enemies a frog must have
To make it live so hidden, so disguised.
Whatever enemies follow her when she’s grown,
Whatever worry or anger drives her at night from her room
To walk in the gusty rain past the town edge,
Her spirit, after an hour, will do what it can
To be distracted by the light of a farmhouse.
What are they doing up there so late,
She’ll wonder, then watch in her mind’s eye
As the family huddles in the kitchen
To worry if the bank will be satisfied
This month with only half a payment,
If the letter from the wandering son
Really means he’s coming home soon.
Even old age won’t cramp her
If she loses herself on her evening walk
In piano music drifting from a house
And imagines the upright in the parlor
And the girl working up the same hard passages.

I think the final image in this poem is lovely.

The Apple-Eater
By Linda Curtis Meyers

            (for my mother)

My sister and I used to tease her
about the apple cores.
Away at school,
we thought our rooms
should remain empty—
the sunlight alone on the bed,
dust particles hovering
in warm air. Somewhere
in the recesses of her day—
the cleaning done, dinner
a distant thought—she’d open
one of our doors, an apple
in one hand, a book
in the other. I don’t know how
she chose the room. Perhaps
she followed the sun’s movement
across the house, as it visited
each room with an hour of intensity.
I see her against a pillow, hear
the snap of apple skin, the soft flutter
of pages. While we were gone
she read all of Fitzgerald and Hemingway,
most of Faulkner. I’d come home
to a slightly rumpled bed,
one browning core
on the headboard. Even then,
I knew she was not
inconsiderate. She’d left
in a rush to make dinner, the characters
still talking, the apple
eaten down to the seeds,
stem, the slenderest
of cores.

We’ll go from animal (sort of) to vegetable.

Plant Poem
By Edward Field

The shrimp plant on my desk had one long low branch
that moved mysteriously about,
turning to the sunlight outside
or, on dark days, toward the electric light inside.
You could actually see it travel with a kind of trembling.
Even when the sun was out
it might move across the table
and look right up at me where I sat.
It was like having a little friend, a pet.

I thought maybe the vibration of my typing
gave it the energy to do that.
Sometimes it moved and sometimes not,
it didn’t always have the strength,
but the leaves could always swivel toward the light.
Finally it grew so long it got in my way
and in a merciless moment
I tied it upright to a stake.

I never again felt it looking at me.
I wonder if it was struggling to get free.

I’m currently listening to the audiobook of Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants (and quite enjoying it). Since the book is about a circus, and I just revisited this poem in I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You, it seemed I had to share it.

The Lion Tamer
By Paul Durcan

“Well, what do you work at?” she said to me after about six months
Of what a mutual journalist friend was pleased to call our “relationship.”
“I’m a lion tamer,” I replied, offhandedly as possible,
Hoping she’d say: “Are you really?”
Instead she said: “I don’t believe you.”
I jumped up from my chair and I strode across the room,
Stumbling over a wickerwork magazine rack.
I knelt on one knee at her feet and gazed up at her:
Slowly she edged away from me and backed out the door
And glancing out the window I saw her bounding down the road,
Her fair hair gleaming in the wind, her crimson voice growling.
I kicked over a stool and threw my whip on the floor.
What I had hoped for from her was a thorough mauling.
But she preferred artistic types. She had no appetite for lion tamers.

I still seem to have a few Marge Piercy poems in my file (because she’s awesome). None of them are particularly happy, but don’t let that make you think I’m this depressed at the moment. I wonder if she intended this as a wake-up call. I believe many of her points are valid, but I’m not against nuclear power on principle. It’s like anything else with dangerous effects; it has to be done with appropriate precautions. It’s really a tragedy that there have been so many botched attempts. I’ve always wondered how Marie Curie must have felt to die from the effects of her research, especially after she did so much for humanity. So much was unknown then, but there’s no excuse now.

The long death
By Marge Piercy

for Wendy Teresa Simon (September 25, 1954 – August 7, 1979)

Radiation is like oppression,
the average daily kind of subliminal toothache
you get almost used to, the stench
of chlorine in the water, of smog in the wind.

We comprehend the disasters of the moment,
the nursing home fire, the river in flood
pouring over the sandbag levee, the airplane
crash with fragments of burnt bodies
scattered among the hunks of twisted metal,
the grenade in the marketplace, the sinking ship.

But how to grasp a thing that does not
kill you today or tomorrow
but slowly from the inside in twenty years.
How to feel that a corporate or governmental
choice means we bear twisted genes and our
grandchildren will be stillborn if our
children are very lucky.

Slow death can not be photographed for the six
o’clock news. It’s all statistical,
the gross national product or the prime
lending rate. Yet if our eyes saw
in the right spectrum, how it would shine,
lurid as magenta neon.

If we could smell radiation like seeping
gas, if we could sense it as heat, if we
could hear it as a low ominous roar
of the earth shifting, then we would not sit
and be poisoned while industry spokesmen
talk of acceptable millirems and .02
cancer per population thousand.

We acquiesce at murder so long as it is slow,
murder from asbestos dust, from tobacco,
from lead in the water, from sulphur in the air,
and fourteen years later statistics are printed
on the rise in leukemia among children.
We never see their faces. They never stand,
those poisoned children together in a courtyard,
and are gunned down by men in three-piece suits.

The shipyard workers who built nuclear
submarines, the soldiers who were marched
into the Nevada desert to be tested by the H-
bomb, the people who work in power plants,
they die quietly years after in hospital
wards and not on the evening news.

The soft spring rain floats down and the air
is perfumed with pine and earth. Seedlings
drink it in, robins sip it in puddles,
you run in it and feel clean and strong,
the spring rain blowing from the irradiated
cloud over the power plant.

Radiation is oppression, the daily average
kind, the kind you’re almost used to
and live with as the years abrade you,
high blood pressure, ulcers, cramps, migraine,
a hacking cough: you take it inside
and it becomes pain and you say, not
They are killing me, but I am sick now.

I like how Atwood has highlighted differences in perspective with this poem. My favorite lines are Empty can mean either/peaceful or desolate. I also like the comment at the end that we (I assume that to mean humans) are the only ones who find aspects of nature sad.

Georgia Beach
By Margaret Atwood

In winter the beach is empty
but south, so there is no snow.

Empty can mean either
peaceful or desolate.

Two kinds of people walk here:
those who think they have love
and those who think they are without it.

I am neither one nor the other.

I pick up the vacant shells,
for which open means killed,
saving only the most perfect,
not knowing who they are for.

Near the water there are skinless
trees, fluid, grayed by weather,
in shapes of agony, or you could say
grace or passion as easily.
In any case twisted.

By the wind, which keeps going.
The empty space, which is not empty
space, moves through me.

I come back past the marsh,
dull yellow and rust-colored,
which whispers to itself,
which is sad only to us.

It’s not October, but this poem was satisfyingly not about love.

Poppies in October
By Sylvia Plath

Even the sun-clouds this morning cannot manage such skirts.
Nor the woman in the ambulance
Whose red heart blooms through her coat so astoundingly—

A gift, a love gift
Utterly unasked for
By a sky

Palely and flamily
Igniting its carbon monoxides, by eyes
Dulled to a halt under bowlers.

O my God, what am I
That these late mouths should cry open
In a forest of frost, in a dawn of cornflowers.

This one was sent to me by a poetry buddy and I think it’s absolutely lovely.

somewhere i have never travelled
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 will easily 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 color 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

I love the idea that a poem can be an image or a taste or a scent, or anything less ordered than words on a page (or screen). Is the poem the poet’s experience eating her lunch, or the words she wrote about it? Maybe it’s both.

A Geography of Lunch
By Mary Jo Schimelpfenig

My mother asks me if I like my sandwich.
I say I haven’t tasted it yet.
“What are you doing? Are you dreaming
off into space?” she says.
I am doing nothing, mother.
I am writing.
I am writing it all down
and remembering the woman I will become.

I lift my sandwich, sinking teeth into toasted wheat.
I locate the precise taste of ham in my mind.
I eat slowly, like my grandmother, who savors her salad
as everyone inhales dessert.
I chew the poem forming,
mozzarella and words traveling the impossible road
to daylight.

It’s been a very long and tiring day and I wanted to post something that made me smile. Also, a friend and I were just talking about eye tests yesterday, so this seems apropos.

Eye Test
By Naomi Shihab Nye

The D is desperate.
The B wants to take a vacation,
live on a billboard, be broad and brave.
The E is mad at the R for upstaging him.
The little c wants to be a big C if possible,
and the P pauses long between thoughts.

How much better to be a story, story.
Can you read me?

We have to live on this white board
together like a neighborhood.
We would rather be the tail of a cloud,
one letter becoming another,
or lost in a boy’s pocket
shapeless as lint,
the same boy who squints to read us
believing we convey a secret message.
     Be his friend.
We are so tired of meaning nothing.

This is another contribution from my poetry buddy. I’m rather surprised I’ve never seen it before.

Desert Places
By Robert Frost

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it—it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less—
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars—on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Wendell Berry was mentioned in Home to Holly Springs and I was reminded how much I liked the poems of his that I’ve read. So I went looking for another. Reading this made me think of ESVM’s Apostrophe to Man. The idea of the lunacy of the human race because of its actions and vague motives shows up in both pieces, I think.

A Timbered Choir
By Wendell Berry

Even while I dreamed I prayed that what I saw was only fear and no foretelling,
for I saw the last known landscape destroyed for the sake
of the objective, the soil bludgeoned, the rock blasted.
Those who had wanted to go home would never get there now.

I visited the offices where for the sake of the objective the planners planned
at blank desks set in rows. I visited the loud factories
where the machines were made that would drive ever forward
toward the objective. I saw the forest reduced to stumps and gullies; I saw
the poisoned river, the mountain cast into the valley;
I came to the city that nobody recognized because it looked like every other city.
I saw the passages worn by the unnumbered
footfalls of those whose eyes were fixed upon the objective.

Their passing had obliterated the graves and the monuments
of those who had died in pursuit of the objective
and who had long ago forever been forgotten, according
to the inevitable rule that those who have forgotten forget
that they have forgotten. Men, women, and children now pursued the objective
as if nobody ever had pursued it before.

The races and the sexes now intermingled perfectly in pursuit of the objective.
the once-enslaved, the once-oppressed were now free
to sell themselves to the highest bidder
and to enter the best paying prisons
in pursuit of the objective, which was the destruction of all enemies,
which was the destruction of all obstacles, which was the destruction of all objects,
which was to clear the way to victory, which was to clear the way to promotion, to salvation, to progress,
to the completed sale, to the signature
on the contract, which was to clear the way
to self-realization, to self-creation, from which nobody who ever wanted to go home
would ever get there now, for every remembered place
had been displaced; the signposts had been bent to the ground and covered over.

Every place had been displaced, every love
unloved, every vow unsworn, every word unmeant
to make way for the passage of the crowd
of the individuated, the autonomous, the self-actuated, the homeless
with their many eyes opened toward the objective
which they did not yet perceive in the far distance,
having never known where they were going,
having never known where they came from.

I was going to save this until summer when I was rolling in tomatoes (figuratively), but I made some killer salsa over the weekend and my poetry file is low again, so I’m sharing it now. Yum!

Ode to Tomatoes
By Francisco X. Alarcón

they make
friends
anywhere

red
smiles
in salads

tender
young
generous

hot
salsa
dancers

round
cardinals
of the kitchen

hard
to imagine
cooking

without
first asking
their blessings!

It’s been a busy day. Here’s a little short one before I collapse into bed. This yielded the title for Naomi Shihab Nye and Paul B. Janeczko’s collaboration I Feel a Little Jumpy Around You, from which I snaked this poem.

Jump City
By Harryette Mullen

I feel a little jumpy around you.
Like when I think a house has
roaches, and I watch everything
out the corner of my eye to see
if it crawls away.

I’m still listening to Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon. Dunbar was mentioned and an excerpt of one of his poems quoted. As I don’t have the book (just the audiobook), I’m not positive, but I think it was this poem.

The Seedling
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

As a quiet little seedling
     Lay within its darksome bed,
To itself it fell a-talking,
     And this is what it said:

“I am not so very robust,
     But I’ll do the best I can;”
And the seedling from that moment
     Its work of life began.

So it pushed a little leaflet
     Up into the light of day,
To examine the surroundings
     And show the rest the way.

The leaflet liked the prospect,
     So it called its brother, Stem;
Then two other leaflets heard it,
     And quickly followed them.

To be sure, the haste and hurry
     Made the seedling sweat and pant;
But almost before it knew it
     It found itself a plant.

The sunshine poured upon it,
     And the clouds they gave a shower;
And the little plant kept growing
     Till it found itself a flower.

Little folks, be like the seedling,
     Always do the best you can;
Every child must share life’s labor
     Just as well as every man.

And the sun and showers will help you
     Through the lonesome, struggling hours,
Till you raise to light and beauty
     Virtue’s fair, unfading flowers.

Here’s another one shared by one of my poetry buddies. I’m pretty sure I would have been struggling with the PotD if it wasn’t for him. This is the first thing by Updike that I’ve ever read. I’m quite impressed.

Perfection Wasted
By John Updike

And another regrettable thing about death
is the ceasing of your own brand of magic,
which took a whole life to develop and market—
the quips, the witticisms, the slant
adjusted to a few, those loved ones nearest
the lip of the stage, their soft faces blanched
in the footlight glow, their laughter close to tears,
their tears confused with their diamond earrings,
their warm pooled breath in and out with your heartbeat,
their response and your performance twinned.
The jokes over the phone. The memories
packed in the rapid-access file. The whole act.
Who will do it again? That’s it: no one;
imitators and descendants aren’t the same.

I’m listening to the audio recording of Home to Holly Springs by Jan Karon during my daily commute. Father Tim (the main character) is quite a fan of Wordsworth and I realized I haven’t posted anything by him in a while.

Ode to Duty
By William Wordsworth

Stern Daughter of the Voice of God!
O Duty! if that name thou love
Who art a light to guide, a rod
To check the erring, and reprove;
Thou, who art victory and law
When empty terrors overawe;
From vain temptations dost set free;
And clam’st the weary strife of frail humanity!

There are who ask not if thine eye
Be on them; who, in love and truth,
Where no misgiving is, rely
Upon the genial sense of youth:
Glad Hearts! without reproach or blot;
Who do thy work, and know it not:
Oh! if through confidence misplaced
They fail, thy saving arms, dread Power! around them cast.

Serene will be our days and bright,
And happy will our nature be,
When love is an unerring light,
And joy its own security.
And they a blissful course may hold
Even now, who, not unwisely bold,
Live in the spirit of this creed;
Yet seek thy firm support, according to their need.

I, loving freedom, and untried:
No sport of every random gust,
Yet being to myself a guide,
Too blindly have reposed my trust:
And oft, when in my heart was heard
Thy timely mandate, I deferred
The task, in smoother walks to stray;
But thee I now would serve more strictly, if I may.

Through no disturbance of my soul,
Or strong compunction in me wrought,
I supplicate for thy control;
But in the quietness of thought:
Me this unchartered freedom tires;
I feel the weight of chance desires:
My hopes no more must change their name,
I long for a repose that ever is the same.

Stern Lawgiver! yet thou dost wear
The Godhead’s most benignant grace;
Nor know we anything so fair
As is the smile upon thy face:
Flowers laugh before thee on their beds
And fragrance in thy footing treads
Thou dost preserve the stars from wrong;
And the most ancient heavens, through Thee, are fresh and strong.

To humbler functions, awful Power!
I call thee: I myself command
Unto thy guidance from this hour;
Oh! let my weakness have an end!
Give unto me, made lowly wise,
The spirit of self-sacrifice;
The confidence of reason give;
And, in the light of truth, thy Bondman let me live!

Another one shared by a poetry buddy. I know I say this often, but I truly am always amazed when a poet can describe a very simple event eloquently, yet with such conservation of language. Every word really says something.

Daybreak
By Galway Kinnell

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity they sank down
into the mud; they faded down
into it and lay still; and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

I’m generally leery of translated poems, but I really like this one, and can only hope that it’s true to the original. It’s so simple, but says so much, especially in the final image of the pearl.

Your Hands
By Gevorg Emin (translated by Diana Der Hovanessian)

I love your hands
which hold me,
held me,
for so many years
without
binding me,

hands which make
me master
without mastering me,

encircle
without
strangling me,

lift me
the way the drowning
man is lifted,

hands
whose cupped shells
change me

slowly slowly
into the pearl
they wanted
all the time.

This is another contributed by a reader. I like the sense of everything being connected, and don’t get a negative connotation from the phrase to all I am bounden that I might have expected without reading the entire poem.

The Debtor
By Edwin Muir

I am debtor to all, to all I am bounden
Fellowman and beast, season and solstice,
darkness and light,
And life and death.

On the backs of the dead,
See I am borne, on lost errands led,
By spent harvests nourished. Forgotten prayers
To gods forgotten bring blessings upon me.

Rusted arrow and broken bow, look, they preserve me
Here in this place. The never-won stronghold
That sank in the ground as years into time,
Slowly with all its men steadfast and watching,
Keeps me safe now.

The ancient waters
Cleanse me, revive me.
Victor and vanquished
Give me their passion, their peace and the field.
The meadows of Lethe shed twilight around me.
The dead in their silence, keep me in memory,
Have me in hold. To all I am bounden.