Every Monday and Friday since July 2016, we publish a poem or prose text from our 'translation workshop'. We've named this section of the site "Omer", in memory of Omer Hadziselimovic, one of the founders of SAMIZDAT.

SESTINA

 

September rain falls on the house.
In the failing light, the old grandmother
sits in the kitchen with the child
beside the Little Marvel Stove,
reading the jokes from the almanac,
laughing and talking to hide her tears.
 
She thinks that her equinoctial tears
and the rain that beats on the roof of the house 
were both foretold by the almanac,
but only known to a grandmother.
The iron kettle sings on the stove.
She cuts some bread and says to the child,
 
It's time for tea now; but the child
is watching the teakettle's small hard tears
dance like mad on the hot black stove,
the way the rain must dance on the house.
Tidying up, the old grandmother
hangs up the clever almanac
 
on its string. Birdlike, the almanac
hovers half open above the child,
hovers above the old grandmother
and her teacup full of dark brown tears.
She shivers and says she thinks the house
feels chilly, and puts more wood in the stove.
 
It was to be, says the Marvel Stove.
I know what I know, says the almanac.
With crayons the child draws a rigid house
and a winding pathway. Then the child
puts in a man with buttons like tears
and shows it proudly to the grandmother.
 
But secretly, while the grandmother
busies herself about the stove,
the little moons fall down like tears
from between the pages of the almanac
into the flower bed the child
has carefully placed in the front of the house.
 
Time to plant tears, says the almanac.
The grandmother sings to the marvelous stove
and the child draws another inscrutable house.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, January 20, 2020

 

 

 

HOWL

​

III

 

Carl Solomon! I'm with you in Rockland

where you're madder than I am

I'm with you in Rockland

where you must feel very strange

I'm with you in Rockland

where you imitate the shade of my mother

I'm with you in Rockland

where you've murdered your twelve secretaries

I'm with you in Rockland

where you laugh at this invisible humor

I'm with you in Rockland

where we are great writers on the same dreadful typewriter

I'm with you in Rockland

where your condition has become serious and

is reported on the radio

I'm with you in Rockland

where the faculties of the skull no longer admit

the worms of the senses

I'm with you in Rockland

where you drink the tea of the breasts of the

spinsters of Utica

I'm with you in Rockland

where you pun on the bodies of your nurses the

harpies of the Bronx

I'm with you in Rockland

where you scream in a straightjacket that you're

losing the game of the actual pingpong of the abyss

I'm with you in Rockland

where you bang on the catatonic piano the soul

is innocent and immortal it should never die

ungodly in an armed madhouse

I'm with you in Rockland

where fifty more shocks will never return your

soul to its body again from its pilgrimage to a

cross in the void

I'm with you in Rockland

where you accuse your doctors of insanity and

plot the Hebrew socialist revolution against the

fascist national Golgotha

I'm with you in Rockland

where you will split the heavens of Long Island

and resurrect your living human Jesus from the

superhuman tomb

I'm with you in Rockland

where there are twenty-five-thousand mad com-

rades all together singing the final stanzas of the Internationale

I'm with you in Rockland

where we hug and kiss the United States under

our bedsheets the United States that coughs all

night and won't let us sleep

I'm with you in Rockland

where we wake up electrified out of the coma

by our own souls' airplanes roaring over the

roof they've come to drop angelic bombs the

hospital illuminates itself imaginary walls col-

lapse O skinny legions run outside O starry

spangled shock of mercy the eternal war is

here O victory forget your underwear we're free

I'm with you in Rockland

in my dreams you walk dripping from a sea-

journey on the highway across America in tears

to the door of my cottage in the Western night

 

Allen Ginsberg, January 17, 2020

 

 

 

POEM IN THREE PARTS

​

1

Oh, on an early morning I think I shall live forever!
I am wrapped in my joyful flesh,
As the grass is wrapped in its clouds of green.

​

2

Rising from a bed, where I dreamt
Of long rides past castles and hot coals,
The sun lies happily on my knees;
I have suffered and survived the night,
Bathed in dark water, like any blade of grass.

​

3

The strong leaves of the box-elder tree,
Plunging in the wind, call us to disappear
Into the wilds of the universe,
Where we shall sit at the foot of a plant,
And live forever, like the dust.

 

Robert Bly, January 13, 2020

 

 

 

NO THINGS

 

This love for the petty things,

part natural from the slow of childhood,

part a literary affectation,

 

this attention to the morning flower

and later in the day to a fly

strolling along the rim of a wineglass —

 

are we just avoiding the one true destiny,

when we do that? averting our eyes from

Philip Larkin who waits for us in an undertaker’s coat?

 

The leafless branches against the sky

will not save anyone form the infinity of death,

nor will the sugar bowl or the sugar spoon on the table.

 

So why bother with the checkerboard lighthouse?

Why waste time on the sparrow,

or the wildflowers along the roadside

 

when we should all be alone in our rooms

throwing ourselves against the wall of life

and the opposite wall of death,

 

the door locked behind us

as we hurl ourselves at the question of meaning,

and the enigma of our origins?

 

What good is the firefly,

the droplet running along the green leaf,

or even the bar of soap spinning around the bathtub

 

when ultimately we are meant to be

banging away on the mystery

as hard as we can and to hell with the neighbors?

 

banging away on nothingness itself,

some with the foreheads,

others with the maul of sense, the raised jawbone of poetry.

​

Billy Collins, January 10, 2020

 

 

 

MY LAST DUCHESS

 

That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now; Fra Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will’t please you sit and look at her? I said

“Fra Pandolf” by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ’twas not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek; perhaps

Fra Pandolf chanced to say, “Her mantle laps

Over my lady’s wrist too much,” or “Paint

Must never hope to reproduce the faint

Half-flush that dies along her throat.” Such stuff

Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough

For calling up that spot of joy. She had

A heart—how shall I say?— too soon made glad,

Too easily impressed; she liked whate’er

She looked on, and her looks went everywhere.

Sir, ’twas all one! My favour at her breast,

The dropping of the daylight in the West,

The bough of cherries some officious fool

Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule

She rode with round the terrace—all and each

Would draw from her alike the approving speech,

Or blush, at least. She thanked men—good! but thanked

Somehow—I know not how—as if she ranked

My gift of a nine-hundred-years-old name

With anybody’s gift. Who’d stoop to blame

This sort of trifling? Even had you skill

In speech—which I have not—to make your will

Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this

Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,

Or there exceed the mark”—and if she let

Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set

Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse—

E’en then would be some stooping; and I choose

Never to stoop. Oh, sir, she smiled, no doubt,

Whene’er I passed her; but who passed without

Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;

Then all smiles stopped together. There she stands

As if alive. Will’t please you rise? We’ll meet

The company below, then. I repeat,

The Count your master’s known munificence

Is ample warrant that no just pretense

Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;

Though his fair daughter’s self, as I avowed

At starting, is my object. Nay, we’ll go

Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,

Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,

Which Claus of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!

 

Robert Browning, January 7, 2020

 

 

 

DREAM SONG 149

 

The world is gradually becoming a place

where I do not care to be anymore. Can Delmore die?

I don't suppose

in all them years a day went ever by

without a loving thought for him. Welladay.

In the brightness of his promise,

 

unstained, I saw him thro' the mist of the actual

blazing with insight, warm with gossip

thro' all our Harvard years

when both of us were just becoming known

I got him out of a police-station once, in Washington, the world is tref


and grief too astray for tears.

 

I imagine you have heard the terrible news,

that Delmore Schwartz is dead, miserably & alone,

in New York: he sang me a song I am the Brooklyn poet Delmore Schwartz

Harms & the child I sing, two parents' torts'

when he was young & gift-strong.

 

John Berryman, January 3, 2020

 

 

 

LOSSES

 

It was not dying: everybody died.
It was not dying: we had died before
In the routine crashes-- and our fields
Called up the papers, wrote home to our folks,
And the rates rose, all because of us.
We died on the wrong page of the almanac,
Scattered on mountains fifty miles away;
Diving on haystacks, fighting with a friend,
We blazed up on the lines we never saw.
We died like aunts or pets or foreigners.
(When we left high school nothing else had died
For us to figure we had died like.)

In our new planes, with our new crews, we bombed
The ranges by the desert or the shore,
Fired at towed targets, waited for our scores--
And turned into replacements and woke up
One morning, over England, operational.

It wasn't different: but if we died
It was not an accident but a mistake
(But an easy one for anyone to make.)
We read our mail and counted up our missions--
In bombers named for girls, we burned
The cities we had learned about in school--
Till our lives wore out; our bodies lay among
The people we had killed and never seen.
When we lasted long enough they gave us medals;
When we died they said, 'Our casualties were low.'

They said, 'Here are the maps'; we burned the cities.

It was not dying --no, not ever dying;
But the night I died I dreamed that I was dead,
And the cities said to me: 'Why are you dying?
We are satisfied, if you are; but why did I die?'

 

Randahl Jarrell, December 30, 2019

 

 

 

CHRISTO'S

 

Two Workmen were carrying a sheet of asbestos

down the main street of Dingle;

it must have been nailed, at a slight angle,

to the same-sized gap between Brandon

 

and whichever's the next mountain.

Nine o'clock. We watched the village dogs

take turns to spritz the hotel's refuse-sacks.

I remembered Tralee's unbiodegradable flags

 

from the time of the hunger-strikes.

We drove all day past mounds of sugar-beet,

hay-stacks, silage-pits, building-sites,

a thatched cottage even—

 

all of them draped in black polythene

and weighted against the north-east wind

by concrete blocks, old tyres; bags of sand

at a makeshift army post

 

across the border. By the time we got to Belfast

the whole of Ireland would be under wraps

like, as I said, 'one of your man's landscapes'.

'Your man's? You don't mean Christo's?'

 

Paul Muldoon, December 27, 2019

 

 

 

BRUSSELS IN WINTER

​

Wandering through cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains rigid in the frost,
Its formula escapes you; it has lost
The certainty that constitutes a thing.

​

Only the old, the hungry and the humbled
Keep at this temperature a sense of place,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like an Opera-House.

​

Ridges of rich apartments loom to-night
Where isolated windows glow like farms,
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,

​

A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn a stranger right
To take the shuddering city in his arms.

 

Wystan Hugh Auden, December 23, 2019

 

 

 

WAITING FOR THE TYPHOON

 

A middle-class district. The hammers tapping 
All day, and all the radios talking of so many 
Metres per second, and all the aerials flapping. 
Cans and candles have vanished from the shops. 
The price of timber, for boarding the windows, 
Has gone up and up. The tapping never stops.

The worst since—when was it? Oh damn it all, 
It is always the worst something since sometime— 
The worst rainy season, the worst A-bomb, the 
Worst H-bomb, the worst political scandal, the 
Worst harvest, or the worst outbreak of sex-crime.

Listening to the hammers and the chattered warning, 
Watching the tethered trees and the urgent clouds— 
       tonight or tomorrow morning? 
One thinks of those who are truly embarrassed, 
Whose houses would faint at the sight of a hammer, 
Whose homes, tomorrow, will have fallen down 
       in the worst way since last time.

Even the cicadas begin to sound a little harassed. 
       Turning a desperate somersault, 
A small green insect shelters in the bowels of my 
       quivering typewriter— 
Good reason for me to call a halt.

Dennis Joseph Enright, December 20, 2019

THE CYCLES OF DONJI VAKUF 

 

We take Emerald to Bugojno, then the Opal route

to Donji Vakuf where Kalashnikovs still shoot

at retreating Serbs or at the sky   

to drum up the leaden beat of victory.   

Once more, though this time Serbian, homes

get pounded to façades like honeycombs.

This time it’s the Bosnian Muslims’ turn

to ‘cleanse’ a taken town, to loot, and burn

Donji Vakuf fell last night at 11.

Victory’s signaled by firing rounds to Heaven

and for the god to whom their victory’s owed.

We see some victors cycling down the road

on bikes that they’re too big for.  They feel so tall

as victors, all conveyances seem small,

but one, whose knees keep bumping on his chin,

rides a kid’s cycle, with a mandolin,

also childish size, strapped to the saddle,

jogging against him as he tries to pedal.

His machine gun and the mandolin impede

his furious pedaling, and slow down the speed

appropriate to victors, huge limned and big-booted,

and he’s defeated by the small bike that he’s looted. 

 

The luckiest looters come down dragging cattle,

two and three apiece they’ve won in battle.

A goat whose udder seems about to burst

squirts milk to quench a victor’s thirst

which others quench with a shared beer, as a cow,

who’s no idea she’s a Muslim’s now,

sprays a triumphal arch of piss across

the path of her new happy Bosnian boss.

Another struggles with stuffed rucksack, gun, and bike,

small and red, he knows his kid will like,

and he hands me his Kalashnikov to hold

to free his hands.  Rain makes it wet and cold.

When he’s balanced his booty, he makes off,

for a moment forgetting his Kalashnikov,

which he slings with all his looted load

on to his shoulder, and trudges down the road

where a solitary reaper passes by,

scythe on his shoulder, wanting fields to dry,

hoping, listening to the thunder, that the day

will brighten up enough to cut his hay. 

 

And tonight some small boy will be glad

he’s got the present of a bike from soldier dad,

who braved the Serb artillery and fire

to bring back a scuffed red bike with one flat tyre.

And among the thousands fleeing north, another

with all his gladness gutted, with his mother,

knowing the nightmare they are cycling in,

will miss the music of his mandolin. 

 

Tony Harrison, December 16, 2019

 

 

 

THE BRIGHT LIGHTS OF SARAJEVO

 

After the hours that Sarajevans pass

queuing with empty canisters for gas

to get the refills they wheel home in prams,

or queuing for the precious meager grams

of bread they’re rationed to each day,

and often dodging snipers on the way,

or struggling up sometimes eleven flights

of stairs with water, then you’d think that the nights

of Sarajevo would be totally devoid

of people walking streets Serb shells destroyed,

but tonight in Sarajevo that’s just not the case—

 

The young go walking at a stroller’s pace,

black shapes impossible to mark

as Muslim, Serb or Croat in such dark.

In unlit streets you can’t distinguish who

calls bread hljeb or hleb or calls it kruh.

All take the evening air with stroller’s stride,

no torches guide them but they don’t collide

except as one of the flirtatious ploys

when a girl’s dark shape is fancied by some boy’s.

 

Then the tender radar of the tone of voice

shows by its signals she approves his choice.

Then match or lighter to a cigarette

to check in her eyes if he’s made progress yet.

 

And I see a pair who’ve certainly progressed

beyond the tone of voice and match flare test

and he’s about, I think, to take her hand

and lead her away from where they stand

on two shell splash scars, where in ‘92

Serb mortars massacred the breadshop queue

and blood-dunked crusts of shredded bread

lay on the pavement with the broken dead.

And at their feet in holes made by the mortar

that caused the massacre, now full of water

from the rain that’s poured down half the day,

though now even the smallest clouds have cleared

        away,

leaving the Sarajevo star-filled evening sky

ideally bright and clear for bomber’s eye,

in those two rain-full shell-holes the boy sees

fragments of the splintered Pleiades,

sprinkled on those death-deep, death-dark wells

splashed on the pavement by Serb mortar shells.

 

The dark boy shape leads dark girl shape away

To share one coffee in a candlelit café

Until the curfew, and he holds her hand

Behind AID flour sacks refilled with sand.

 

Tony Harrison, December 13, 2019

 

​

 

THE RAIN

 

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quite, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent--
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.

 

Robert Creeley, December 9, 2019

 

 

 

A DREAM OF SUFFOCATION

​

Accountants hover over the earth like helicopters,
Dropping bits of paper engraved with Hegel's name.
Badgers carry the papers on their fur
To their den, where the entire family dies in the night.

A chorus girl stands for hours behind her curtains
Looking out at the street.
In a window of a trucking service
There is a branch painted white.
A stuffed baby alligator grips that branch tightly
To keep away from the dry leaves on the floor.

The honeycomb at night has strange dreams:
Small black trains going round and round--
Old warships drowning in the raindrop.

 

Robert Bly, December 6, 2019

 

 

 

THE MAP

 

Land lies in water; it is shadowed green.
Shadows, or are they shallows, at its edges
showing the line of long sea-weeded ledges
where weeds hang to the simple blue from green.
Or does the land lean down to lift the sea from under,
drawing it unperturbed around itself?
Along the fine tan sandy shelf
is the land tugging at the sea from under?

 

The shadow of Newfoundland lies flat and still.
Labrador’s yellow, where the moony Eskimo
has oiled it. We can stroke these lovely bays,
under a glass as if they were expected to blossom,
or as if to provide a clean cage for invisible fish.
The names of seashore towns run out to sea,
the names of cities cross the neighboring mountains
-the printer here experiencing the same excitement
as when emotion too far exceeds its cause.
These peninsulas take the water between thumb and finger
like women feeling for the smoothness of yard-goods.

 

Mapped waters are more quiet than the land is,
lending the land their waves’ own conformation:
and Norway’s hare runs south in agitation,
profiles investigate the sea, where land is.
Are they assigned, or can the countries pick their colors?
-What suits the character or the native waters best.
Topography displays no favorites; North’s as near as West.
More delicate than the historians’ are the map-makers’ colors.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, December 2, 2019

 

 

 

SONG

​

The weight of the world
is love.
Under the burden
of solitude,
under the burden
of dissatisfaction

the weight,
the weight we carry
is love.

Who can deny?
In dreams
it touches
the body,
in thought
constructs
a miracle,
in imagination
anguishes
till born
in human--
looks out of the heart
burning with purity--
for the burden of life
is love,

but we carry the weight
wearily,
and so must rest
in the arms of love
at last,
must rest in the arms
of love.

No rest
without love,
no sleep
without dreams
of love--
be mad or chill
obsessed with angels
or machines,
the final wish
is love
--cannot be bitter,
cannot deny,
cannot withhold
if denied:

the weight is too heavy

--must give
for no return
as thought
is given
in solitude
in all the excellence
of its excess.

The warm bodies
shine together
in the darkness,
the hand moves
to the center
of the flesh,
the skin trembles
in happiness
and the soul comes
joyful to the eye--

yes, yes,
that's what
I wanted,
I always wanted,
I always wanted,
to return
to the body
where I was born.

 

Allen Ginsberg, November 29, 2019

 

 

 

TIMER 

​

Gold survives the fire that's hot enough

to make you ashes in a standard urn

An envelope of coarse official buff

contains your wedding ring which wouldn't burn.  

Dad told me to tell them at St James's

that the ring should go in the incinerator.

That 'eternity' inscribed with both their names is

his surety that they'd be together, 'later'.

I signed for the parcelled clothing as the son,

a cardy, apron, pants, bra, dress –

the clerk phoned down: 6-8-8-3-1

Has she still a ring on? (Slight pause) Yes! 

It's on my warm palm now, your burnished ring! 

I feel your ashes, head, arms, breasts, womb, legs,

sift through its circle slowly, like that thing

you used to let me watch to time the eggs. 

 

Tony Harrison, November 25, 2019

 

 

 

THE LAUGHING HYENA BY HOKUSAI

 

For him, it seems, everything was molten.  Court ladies flow in gentle streams,

Or, gathering lotus, strain sideways from their curving boat,

A donkey prances, or a kite dances in the sky, or soars like sacrificial smoke.

All is flux: waters fall and leap, and bridges leap and fall.

Even his Tortoise undulates, and his Spring Hat is lively as a pool of fish.

All he ever saw was sea: a sea of marble splinters--

Long bright fingers claw across his pages, fjords and islands and shattered trees--

 

And the Laughing Hyena, cavalier of evil, as volcanic as the rest:

Elegant in a flowered gown, a face like a bomb-burst,

Featured with fangs and built about a rigid laugh,

Ever moving, like a pond's surface where a corpse has sunk.

 

Between the raised talons of the right hand rests and object--

At rest, like a pale island in a savage sea -- a child's head,

Immobile, authentic, torn and bloody--

The point of repose in the picture, the point of movement in us.

 

Terrible enough, this demon.  Yet it is present and perfect,

Firm as its horns, curling among its thick and handsome hair.

I find it an honest visitant, even consoling, after all

Those sententious phantoms, choked with rage and uncertainty,

Who grimace from contemporary pages.  It, at least,

Knows exactly why it laughs.

 

Dennis Joseph Enright, November 22, 2019

​

 

 

THE TROUBLE WITH POETRY

 

The trouble with poetry, I realized
as I walked along a beach one night --
cold Florida sand under my bare feet,
a show of stars in the sky --

the trouble with poetry is
that it encourages the writing of more poetry,
more guppies crowding the fish tank,
more baby rabbits
hopping out of their mothers into the dewy grass.

And how will it ever end?
unless the day finally arrives
when we have compared everything in the world
to everything else in the world,

and there is nothing left to do
but quietly close our notebooks
and sit with our hands folded on our desks.

Poetry fills me with joy
and I rise like a feather in the wind.
Poetry fills me with sorrow
and I sink like a chain flung from a bridge.

But mostly poetry fills me
with the urge to write poetry,
to sit in the dark and wait for a little flame
to appear at the tip of my pencil.

And along with that, the longing to steal,
to break into the poems of others
with a flashlight and a ski mask.

And what an unmerry band of thieves we are,
cut-purses, common shoplifters,
I thought to myself
as a cold wave swirled around my feet
and the lighthouse moved its megaphone over the sea,
which is an image I stole directly
from Lawrence Ferlinghetti --
to be perfectly honest for a moment --

the bicycling poet of San Francisco
whose little amusement park of a book
I carried in a side pocket of my uniform
up and down the treacherous halls of high school.

 

Billy Collins, November 18, 2019

 

 

 

SOMETHING

 

I approach with such
a careful tremor, always
I feel the finally foolish

question of how it is,
then, supposed to be felt,
and by whom. I remember

once in a rented room on
27th street, the woman I loved
then, literally, after we

had made love on the large
bed sitting across from
a basin with two faucets, she

had to pee but was nervous,
embarrassed I suppose I
would watch her who had but

a moment ago been completely
open to me, naked, on
the same bed. Squatting, her

head reflected in the mirror,
the hair dark there, the
full of her face, the shoulders,

sat spread-legged, turned on
one faucet and shyly pissed. What
love might learn from such a sight.

 

Robert Creeley, November 15, 2019

 

 

 

IN DANGER FROM THE OUTER WORLD

 

This burning in the eyes, as we open doors,
This is only the body burdened down with leaves,
The opaque flesh, heavy as November grass,
Growing stubbornly, triumphant even at midnight.

And another day disappears into the cliff,
And the Eskimos come to greet it with sharp cries--
The black water swells up over the new hole.
The grave moves forward from its ambush,

Moving over the hills on black feet,
Living off the country,
Leaving dogs and sheep murdered where it slept;
Some shining thing, inside, that has served us well

Shakes its bamboo bars--
It may be gone before we wake . . .

 

Robert Bly, November 11, 2019

 

 

​

LITTLE FATHER POEM

 

We must stay away from our fathers,

who have big ears.  We must stay away

from our fathers, who are the snow.

We must avoid the touch of the leaves

who are our proud fathers.  We must

watch out for our father underfoot.  Father

forgave us when we did nothing wrong,

Father made us well when we were healthy,

now Father wants to support us

when we weigh nothing, Father in his grave

gives us everything we ever wanted,

in a boat crossing who-knows-where,

mist flat over the water,

the sand smooth because soft.

 

Mervin Bell, November 8, 2019

 

 

 

TURNS

​

I thought it made me look more 'working class'
(as if a bit of chequered cloth could bridge that gap!)
I did a turn in it before the glass.
My mother said: It suits you, your dad's cap.
(She preferred me to wear suits and part my hair:
You're every bit as good as that lot are!)

All the pension queue came out to stare.
Dad was sprawled beside the postbox (still VR) ,
his cap turned inside up beside his head,
smudged H A H in purple Indian ink
and Brylcreem slicks displayed so folks migh think
he wanted charity for dropping dead.

He never begged. For nowt! Death's reticence
crowns his life, and me, I'm opening my trap
to busk the class that broke him for the pence
that splash like brackish tears into our cap.

​

Tony Harrison, November 4, 2019

 

 

 

THE FISH

​

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of his mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
—the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly—
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
—It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
—if you could call it a lip—
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels—until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

​

Elizabeth Bishop, November 1, 2019

 

 

 

I AM A CAMERAMAN

 

They suffer, and I catch only the surface.

The rest is inexpressible, beyond

What can be recorded. You can't be them.

If they'd talk to you, you might guess

What pain is like though they might spit on you.

 

Film is just a reflection

Of the matchless despair of the century.

There have been twenty centuries since charity began.

Indignation is day-to-day stuff;

It keeps us off the streets, it keeps us watching.

 

Film has no words of its own.

It is a silent waste of things happening.

Without us, when it is too late to help.

What of the dignity of those caught suffering?

It hurts me. I robbed them of privacy.

 

My young friends think Film will be all of Art.

It will be revolutionary proof

Their films will not guess wrongly and will not lie.

They'll film what is happening behind barbed wire.

They'll always know the truth and be famous.

 

Politics softens everything.

Truth is known only to its victims.

All else is photographs--a documentary

The starving and the playboys perish in.

Life disguises itself with professionalism.

 

Life tells the biggest lies of all,

And draws wages from itself.

Truth is a landscape the saintly tribes live on,

And all the lenses of Japan and Germany

Wouldn't know how to focus on it.

 

Life flickers on the frame like beautiful hummingbirds.

That is the film that always comes out blank.

The painting the artist can't get shapes to fit.

The poem that shrugs off every word you try.

The music no one has ever heard.

 

Douglas Dunn, October 28, 2019

 

 

 

ODE TO FAILURE

"Many prophets have failed, their voices silent
ghost-shouts in basements nobody heard dusty laughter in family attics
nor glanced them on park benches weeping with relief under empty sky
Walt Whitman viva'd local losers - courage to Fat Ladies in the Freak Show!
nervous prisoners whose mustached lips dripped sweat on chow lines -
Mayakovsky cried, Then die! my verse, die like the workers' rank & file fusilladed in Petersburg!
Prospero burned his Power books & plummeted his magic wand to the bottom of dragon seas
Alexander the Great failed to find more worlds to conquer!
O Failure I chant your terrifying name, accept me your 54 year old Prophet
epicking Eternal Flop! I join your Pantheon of mortal bards, & hasten this ode with high blood pressure
rushing to the top of my skull as if I wouldn't last another minute, like the Dying Gaul! to
You, Lord of blind Monet, deaf Beethoven, armless Venus de Milo, headless Winged Victory!
I failed to sleep with every bearded rosy-cheeked boy I jacked off over
My tirades destroyed no Intellectual Unions of KGB & CIA in turtlenecks & underpants, their woolen suits & tweeds
I never dissolved Plutonium or dismantled the nuclear Bomb before my skull lost hair
I have not yet stopped the Armies of entire Mankind in their march toward World War III
I never got to Heaven, Nirvana, X, Whatchamacallit, I never left Earth,
I never learned to die."

 

Allen Ginsberg, October 25, 2019

 

 

 

SIGHTSEEING IN SIAM

​

Along the long wide temple wall

Extends a large and detailed painting.

 

A demon’s head, its mouth square open,

Inside the mouth a room of people squatting.

 

Its fangs the polished pillars of the room,

The crimson carpet on the floor its tongue.

 

Inside this room a painting on the wall,

A demon’s head, its mouth square open.

 

Inside the mouth a room of people squatting,

Their faces blank, the artist did not care.

 

Inside that room a painting on the wall,

A demon’s head, its mouth square open.

 

Somewhere you are squatting, somewhere there.

Imagination, like the eyes that strain

 

Against the wall, is happily too weak

To number all the jaws there are to slip.

​

Dennis Joseph Enright, October 21, 2019

 

 

 

THE FIRST NIGHT         

 

       The worst thing about death must be
                     the first night.
                        —Juan Ramón Jiménez

​

Before I opened you, Jiménez,

it never occurred to me that day and night

would continue to circle each other in the ring of death,

 

but now you have me wondering

if there will also be a sun and a moon

and will the dead gather to watch them rise and set

 

then repair, each soul alone,

to some ghastly equivalent of a bed.

Or will the first night be the only night,

 

a darkness for which we have no other name?

How feeble our vocabulary in the face of death,

How impossible to write it down.

 

This is where language will stop,

the horse we have ridden all our lives

rearing up at the edge of a dizzying cliff.

 

The word that was in the beginning

and the word that was made flesh—

those and all the other words will cease.

 

Even now, reading you on this trellised porch,

how can I describe a sun that will shine after death?

But it is enough to frighten me

 

into paying more attention to the world’s day-moon,

to sunlight bright on water

or fragmented in a grove of trees,

 

and to look more closely here at these small leaves,

these sentinel thorns,

whose employment it is to guard the rose.

 

Billy Collins, October 18, 2019

 

 

 

THE ELEPHANT IS SLOW TO MATE

 

The elephant, the huge old beast,
is slow to mate;
he finds a female, they show no haste
they wait

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts
slowly, slowly to rouse
as they loiter along the river-beds
and drink and browse

and dash in panic through the brake
of forest with the herd,
and sleep in massive silence, and wake
together, without a word.

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts
grow full of desire,
and the great beasts mate in secret at last,
hiding their fire.

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts
so they know at last
how to wait for the loneliest of feasts
for the full repast.

They do not snatch, they do not tear;
their massive blood
moves as the moon-tides, near, more near
till they touch in flood. 

​

David Herbert Lawrence, October 14, 2019

 

 

 

AFTER LORCA

The church is a business, and the rich
are the business men.
When they pull on the bells, the
poor come piling in and when a poor man dies, he has a
wooden
cross, and they rush through the ceremony.

But when a rich man dies, they
drag out the Sacrament
and a golden Cross, and go doucement, doucement
to the cemetery.

And the poor love it
and think it's crazy.

​

Robert Creeley, October 11, 2019

 

​

​

THE BURIED  TRAIN

 

Tell me about the train that people say got buried
By the avalanche--was it snow?--It was
In Colorado, and no one saw it happen.
There was smoke from the engine curling up

Lightly through fir tops, and the engine sounds.
There were all those people reading--some
From Thoreau, some from Henry Ward Beecher.
And the engineer smoking and putting his head out.

I wonder when that happened. Was it after
High School, or was it the year we were two?
We entered this narrow place, and we heard the sound
Above us--the train couldn't move fast enough.

It isn't clear what happened next. Are you and I
Still sitting there in the train, waiting for the lights
To go on? Or did the real train get really buried;
So at night a ghost train comes out and keeps going...

 

Robert Bly, October 4, 2019

​

 

IN THE WAITING ROOM

 

In Worcester, Massachusetts,
I went with Aunt Consuelo
to keep her dentist's appointment
and sat and waited for her
in the dentist's waiting room.
It was winter. It got dark
early. The waiting room
was full of grown-up people,
arctics and overcoats,
lamps and magazines.
My aunt was inside
what seemed like a long time
and while I waited I read
the National Geographic
(I could read) and carefully
studied the photographs:
the inside of a volcano,
black, and full of ashes;
then it was spilling over
in rivulets of fire.
Osa and Martin Johnson
dressed in riding breeches,
laced boots, and pith helmets.
A dead man slung on a pole
--"Long Pig," the caption said.
Babies with pointed heads
wound round and round with string;
black, naked women with necks
wound round and round with wire
like the necks of light bulbs.
Their breasts were horrifying.
I read it right straight through.
I was too shy to stop.
And then I looked at the cover:
the yellow margins, the date.
Suddenly, from inside,
came an oh! of pain
--Aunt Consuelo's voice--
not very loud or long.
I wasn't at all surprised;
even then I knew she was
a foolish, timid woman.
I might have been embarrassed,
but wasn't. What took me
completely by surprise
was that it was me:
my voice, in my mouth.
Without thinking at all
I was my foolish aunt,
I--we--were falling, falling,
our eyes glued to the cover
of the National Geographic,
February, 1918.

I said to myself: three days
and you'll be seven years old.
I was saying it to stop
the sensation of falling off
the round, turning world.
into cold, blue-black space.
But I felt: you are an I,
you are an Elizabeth,
you are one of them.
Why should you be one, too?
I scarcely dared to look
to see what it was I was.
I gave a sidelong glance
--I couldn't look any higher--
at shadowy gray knees,
trousers and skirts and boots
and different pairs of hands
lying under the lamps.
I knew that nothing stranger
had ever happened, that nothing
stranger could ever happen.

Why should I be my aunt,
or me, or anyone?
What similarities--
boots, hands, the family voice
I felt in my throat, or even
the National Geographic
and those awful hanging breasts--
held us all together
or made us all just one?
How--I didn't know any
word for it--how "unlikely". . .
How had I come to be here,
like them, and overhear
a cry of pain that could have
got loud and worse but hadn't?

The waiting room was bright
and too hot. It was sliding
beneath a big black wave,
another, and another.

Then I was back in it.
The War was on. Outside,
in Worcester, Massachusetts,
were night and slush and cold,
and it was still the fifth
of February, 1918.

 

Elizabeth Bishop, October 4, 2019

 

 

 

THINGS WE DREAMT WE DIED FOR

 

Flags of all sorts.

The literary life.

Each time we dreamt we’d done   

the gentlemanly thing,

covering our causes

in closets full of bones

to remove ourselves forever   

from dearest possibilities,

the old weapons re-injured us,   

the old armies conscripted us,   

and we gave in to getting even,   

la little less like us

if a lot less like others.

Many, thus, gained fame

in the way of great plunderers,   

retiring to the university

to cultivate grand plunder-gardens   

in the service of literature,   

the young and no more wars.   

Their continuing tributes   

make them our greatest saviors,   

whose many fortunes are followed   

by the many who have not one.

 

Mervin Bell, September 30, 2019

 

 

 

GIBRALTAR

 

Empire has rotted back,

Like a man-eater

After its aeon of terror, to one fang.

 

Apes1 on their last legs--

Rearguard of insolence--

Snapping at peanuts and defecating.

 

The heirloom garrison's sold as a curio

With a flare of Spanish hands

And a two-way smile, wafer of insult,

 

Served in carefully-chipped English.

The taxi-driver talking broken American

Has this rock in his palm.

 

When the next Empire noses this way

Let it sniff here.

 

Ted Hughes, September 27, 2019

 

 

 

LAST NIGHT IN CALCUTTA

 

Still night. The old clock Ticks,

half past two. A ringing of crickets

awake in the ceiling. The gate is locked

on the street outside sleepers, mustaches,

nakedness, but no desire. A few mosquitos

waken the itch, the fan turns slowly

a car thunders along the black asphalt,

a bull snorts, something is expected

Time sits solid in the four yellow walls.

No one is here, emptiness filled with train

whistles & dog barks, answered a block away.

Pushkin sits on the bookshelf, Shakespeare's

complete works as well as Blake's unread

O Spirit of Poetry, no use calling on you

babbling in this emptiness furnished with beds

under the bright oval mirror perfect

night for sleepers to dissolve in tranquil

blackness, and rest there eight hours

Waking to stained fingers, bitter mouth

and lung gripped by cigarette hunger,

what to do with this big toe, this arm

this eye in the starving skeleton-filled

sore horse tramcar-heated Calcutta in

Eternity sweating and teeth rotted away

Rilke at least could dream about lovers,

the old breast excitement and trembling belly,

is that it? And the vast starry space

If the brain changes matter breathes

fearfully back on man But now

the great crash of buildings and planets

breaks thru the walls of language and drowns

me under its Ganges heaviness forever.

No escape but thru Bangkok and New York death.

Skin is sufficient to be skin, that's all

it ever could be, tho screams of pain in the kidney

make it sick of itself, a wavy dream

dying to finish its all to famous misery

Leave immortality for another to suffer like a fool,

not get stuck in the corner of the universe

sticking morphine in the arm and eating meat.

 

Allen Ginsberg, September 23, 2019

 

 

 

A SMILE TO REMEMBER

​

we had goldfish and they circled around and around

in the bowl on the table near the heavy drapes

covering the picture window and

my mother, always smiling, wanting us all

to be happy, told me, 'be happy Henry!'

and she was right: it's better to be happy if you

can

but my father continued to beat her and me several times a week while

raging inside his 6-foot-two frame because he couldn't

understand what was attacking him from within.

 

my mother, poor fish,

wanting to be happy, beaten two or three times a

week, telling me to be happy: 'Henry, smile!

why don't you ever smile?'

 

and then she would smile, to show me how, and it was the

saddest smile I ever saw

 

one day the goldfish died, all five of them,

they floated on the water, on their sides, their

eyes still open,

and when my father got home he threw them to the cat

there on the kitchen floor and we watched as my mother

smiled

 

Charles Bukowski, September 20, 2019

 

 

 

AROUND, OSTRAVA

 

I’m right and I got kids

he’s vulgar to the last table

he scars the pub

with his thin-veined stories

about a Japanese waitress from Přívoz

in overalls

a drinker’s voice

the pub laughs

Japanese hair everywhere

yanked out of context

around is Ostrava

and kids

 

Petr Hruška (translated by Matthew Sweney), September 16, 2019

​

 

 

LIES ABOUT LOVE

 

We are a liars, because
the truth of yesterday becomes a lie tomorrow,
whereas letters are fixed,
and we live by the letter of truth.
The love I feel for my friend, this year,
is different from the love I felt last year.
If it were not so, it would be a lie.
Yet we reiterate love! love! love!
as if it were a coin with a fixed value
instead of a flower that dies, and opens a different bud.

 

David Herbert Lawrence, September 13, 2019

 

 

 

TALK IN THE DARK

 

We live in history, says one.
We’re flies on the hide of Leviathan, says another.

Either way, says one,
fears and losses.

And among losses, says another,
the special places our own roads were to lead to.

Our deaths, says one.
That’s right, says another,
Now it’s to be a mass death.

Mass graves, says one, are nothing new.
No, says another, but this time there’ll be no graves,
all the dead will lie where they fall.

Except, says one, those that burn to ash.
And are blown in the fiery wind, says another.

How can we live in this fear? Says one.
From day to day, says another.

I still want to see, says one,
where my own road’s going.

I want to live, says another, but where can I live
if the world is gone?

​

Denise Levertov, September 9, 2019

 

 

 

IN MY DREAMS

 

In my dreams I am always saying goodbye and riding away,
Whither and why I know not nor do I care.
And the parting is sweet and the parting over is sweeter,
And sweetest of all is the night and the rushing air.

In my dreams they are always waving their hands and saying goodbye,
And they give me the stirrup cup and I smile as I drink,
I am glad the journey is set, I am glad I am going,
I am glad, I am glad, that my friends don't know what I think.

 

Stevie Smith, September 6, 2019

 

 

 

SNAKE

 

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

 

David Herbert Lawrence, September 2, 2019

 

 

 

THE WHITSUN WEDDINGS

 

That Whitsun, I was late getting away:

    Not till about

One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday

Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out,

All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense   

Of being in a hurry gone. We ran

Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street

Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence   

The river’s level drifting breadth began,

Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

 

All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept   

    For miles inland,

A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept.   

Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and   

Canals with floatings of industrial froth;   

A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped   

And rose: and now and then a smell of grass   

Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth   

Until the next town, new and nondescript,   

Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

 

At first, I didn’t notice what a noise

    The weddings made

Each station that we stopped at: sun destroys   

The interest of what’s happening in the shade,

And down the long cool platforms whoops and skirls   

I took for porters larking with the mails,   

And went on reading. Once we started, though,   

We passed them, grinning and pomaded, girls   

In parodies of fashion, heels and veils,   

All posed irresolutely, watching us go,

 

As if out on the end of an event

    Waving goodbye

To something that survived it. Struck, I leant   

More promptly out next time, more curiously,   

And saw it all again in different terms:   

The fathers with broad belts under their suits   

And seamy foreheads; mothers loud and fat;   

An uncle shouting smut; and then the perms,   

The nylon gloves and jewellery-substitutes,   

The lemons, mauves, and olive-ochres that

 

Marked off the girls unreally from the rest.   

    Yes, from cafés

And banquet-halls up yards, and bunting-dressed   

Coach-party annexes, the wedding-days   

Were coming to an end. All down the line

Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round;

The last confetti and advice were thrown,

And, as we moved, each face seemed to define   

Just what it saw departing: children frowned   

At something dull; fathers had never known

 

Success so huge and wholly farcical;

    The women shared

The secret like a happy funeral;

While girls, gripping their handbags tighter, stared   

At a religious wounding. Free at last,

And loaded with the sum of all they saw,

We hurried towards London, shuffling gouts of steam.   

Now fields were building-plots, and poplars cast   

Long shadows over major roads, and for

Some fifty minutes, that in time would seem

 

Just long enough to settle hats and say

    I nearly died,

A dozen marriages got under way.

They watched the landscape, sitting side by side

—An Odeon went past, a cooling tower,   

And someone running up to bowl—and none   

Thought of the others they would never meet   

Or how their lives would all contain this hour.   

I thought of London spread out in the sun,   

Its postal districts packed like squares of wheat:

 

There we were aimed. And as we raced across   

    Bright knots of rail

Past standing Pullmans, walls of blackened moss   

Came close, and it was nearly done, this frail   

Travelling coincidence; and what it held   

Stood ready to be loosed with all the power   

That being changed can give. We slowed again,

And as the tightened brakes took hold, there swelled

A sense of falling, like an arrow-shower   

Sent out of sight, somewhere becoming rain.

 

Philip Larkin, August  30, 2019

 

 

 

YOUR ATTENTION PLEASE

 

The Polar DEW has just warned that
A nuclear rocket strike of
At least one thousand megatons
Has been launched by the enemy
Directly at our major cities.
This announcement will take
Two and a quarter minutes to make,
You therefore have a further
Eight and a quarter minutes
To comply with the shelter
Requirements published in the Civil
Defence Code – section Atomic Attack.
A specially shortened Mass
Will be broadcast at the end
Of this announcement -
Protestant and Jewish services
Will begin simultaneously -
Select your wavelength immediately
According to instructions
In the Defence Code. Do not
Take well-loved pets (including birds)
Into your shelter – they will consume
Fresh air. Leave the old and bed-
Ridden, you can do nothing for them.
Remember to press the sealing
Switch when everyone is in
The shelter. Set the radiation
Aerial, turn on the Geiger barometer.
Turn off your television now.
Turn off your radio immediately
The services end. At the same time
Secure explosion plugs in the ears
Of each member of your family. Take
Down your plasma flasks. Give your children
The pills marked one and two
In the C D green container, then put
Them to bed. Do not break
The inside airlock seals until
The radiation All Clear shows
(Watch for the cuckoo in your
Perspex panel), or your District
Touring Doctor rings your bell.
If before this your air becomes
Exhausted or if any of your family
Is critically injured, administer
The capsules marked 'Valley Forge'
(Red pocket in No 1 Survival Kit)
For painless death. (Catholics
Will have been instructed by their priests
What to do in this eventuality.)
This announcement is ending. Our President
Has already given orders for
Massive retaliation – it will be
Decisive. Some of us may die.
Remember, statistically
It is not likely to be you.
All flags are flying fully dressed
On Government buildings – the sun is shining.
Death is the least we have to fear.
We are all in the hands of God,
Whatever happens happens by His will.
Now go quickly to your shelters.

                     

Peter Porter, August 26, 2019

 

 

 

MY PARENTS KEPT ME FROM CHILDREN WHO WERE ROUGH

 

My parents kept me from children who were rough

Who threw words like stones and wore torn clothes

Their thighs showed through rags they ran in the street

And climbed cliffs and stripped by the country streams.

 

I feared more than tigers their muscles like iron

Their jerking hands and their knees tight on my arms

I feared the salt coarse pointing of those boys

Who copied my lisp behind me on the road.

 

They were lithe they sprang out behind hedges

Like dogs to bark at my world. They threw mud

While I looked the other way, pretending to smile.

I longed to forgive them but they never smiled.

 

Stephen Spender, August 23, 2019

 

 

 

ILLUSTRIOUS ANCESTORS

 

The Rav

of Northern White Russia declined,
in his youth, to learn the
language of birds, because
the extraneous did not interest him; nevertheless
when he grew old it was found
he understood them anyway, having
listened well, and as it is said, 'prayed
with the bench and the floor.' He used
what was at hand--as did
Angel Jones iz Molda, čije su meditacije

Bile ušite u kapute i hlače(?nemam ovu riječ u rječniku).

Angel Jones of Mold, whose meditations
were sewn into coats and britches.
Well, I would like to make,
thinking some line still taut between me and them,
poems direct as what the birds said,
hard as a floor, sound as a bench,
mysterious as the silence when the tailor
would pause with his needle in the air.

 

Denise Levertov, August 19, 2019

 

 

 

NO SPEECH FROM THE SCAFFOLD

 

There will be no speech from

the scaffold, the scene must

be its own commentary.

 

The glossy chipped

surface of the block is like

something for kitchen use.

 

And he masked man with his

chopper: we know him: he

works in a warehouse nearby.

 

Last, the prisoner, he

is pale, he walks through

the dewy grass, nodding

 

a goodbye to acquaintances.

There will ne no speech.  And we

have forgotten his offence.

 

What he did is, now,

immaterial.  It is the

execution that matters, or,

 

rather, it is his conduct

as he rests there, while

he is still a human.

 

Thom Gunn, August 16, 2019

 

 

 

REMOVAL FROM TERRY STREET

 

On a squeaking cart, they push the usual stuff,

A mattress, bed ends, cups, carpets, chairs,

Four paperback westerns. Two whistling youths

In surplus U S Army battle-jackets

Remove their sister’s goods. Her husband

Follows, carrying on his shoulders the son

Whose mischief we are glad to see removed,

And pushing, of all things, a lawnmower.

There is no grass in Terry Street. The worms

Come up cracks in concrete yards in moonlight.

That man, I wish him well. I wish him grass. 

 

Douglas Dunn, August 12, 2019

 

 

 

THE SECOND COMING

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre   

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere   

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst   

Are full of passionate intensity.

 

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.   

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out   

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert   

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,   

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,   

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it   

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.   

The darkness drops again; but now I know   

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,   

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,   

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

William Butler Yeats, August 9, 2019

 

 

 

NOT WAVING BUT DROWNING

 

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

 

Stevie Smith, August 5, 2019

 

 

 

HOW BEASTLY THE BOURGEOIS IS

 

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Presentable, eminently presentable--
shall I make you a present of him?

Isn't he handsome? Isn't he healthy? Isn't he a fine specimen?
Doesn't he look the fresh clean Englishman, outside?
Isn't it God's own image? tramping his thirty miles a day
after partridges, or a little rubber ball?
wouldn't you like to be like that, well off, and quite the
thing

Oh, but wait!
Let him meet a new emotion, let him be faced with another
man's need,
let him come home to a bit of moral difficulty, let life
face him with a new demand on his understanding
and then watch him go soggy, like a wet meringue.
Watch him turn into a mess, either a fool or a bully.
Just watch the display of him, confronted with a new
demand on his intelligence,
a new life-demand.

How beastly the bourgeois is
especially the male of the species--

Nicely groomed, like a mushroom
standing there so sleek and erect and eyeable--
and like a fungus, living on the remains of a bygone life
sucking his life out of the dead leaves of greater life
than his own.

And even so, he's stale, he's been there too long.
Touch him, and you'll find he's all gone inside
just like an old mushroom, all wormy inside, and hollow
under a smooth skin and an upright appearance.

Full of seething, wormy, hollow feelings
rather nasty--
How beastly the bourgeois is!

Standing in their thousands, these appearances, in damp
England
what a pity they can't all be kicked over
like sickening toadstools, and left to melt back, swiftly
into the soil of England.

 

David Herbert Lawrence, August 2, 2019

 

 

 

THE GYPSY

 

A fortnight before Christmas Gypsies were everywhere:
Vans were drawn up on wastes, women trailed to the fair.
'My gentleman,' said one, 'you've got a lucky face.'
'And you've a luckier,' I thought, 'if such grace
And impudence in rags are lucky.' 'Give a penny
For the poor baby's sake.' 'Indeed I have not any
Unless you can give change for a sovereign, my dear.'
'Then just half a pipeful of tobacco can you spare?'
I gave it. With that much victory she laughed content.
I should have given more, but off and away she went
With her baby and her pink sham flowers to rejoin
The rest before I could translate to its proper coin
Gratitude for her grace. And I paid nothing then,
As I pay nothing now with the dipping of my pen
For her brother's music when he drummed the tambourine
And stamped his feet, which made the workmen passing grin,
While his mouth-organ changed to a rascally Bacchanal dance
'Over the hills and far away.' This and his glance
Outlasted all the fair, farmer, and auctioneer,
Cheap-jack, balloon-man, drover with crooked stick, and steer,
Pig, turkey, goose, and duck, Christmas corpses to be.
Not even the kneeling ox had eyes like the Romany.
That night he peopled for me the hollow wooded land,
More dark and wild than the stormiest heavens, that I searched and scanned
Like a ghost new-arrived. The gradations of the dark
Were like an underworld of death, but for the spark
In the Gypsy boy's black eyes as he played and stamped his tune,
'Over the hills and far away,' and a crescent moon.

 

Edward Thomas, July 29, 2019 

​

​

​

AN EPITAPH

 

Here lies a most beautiful lady, 
Light of step and heart was she; 
I think she was the most beautiful lady 
That ever was in the West Country. 

But beauty vanishes, beauty passes; 
However rare -- rare it be; 
And when I crumble,who will remember 
This lady of the West Country.

 

Walter de la Mare, July 26, 2019 

 

 

 

HEDGEHOG

 

The snail moves like a
Hovercraft, held up by a
Rubber cushion of itself,
Sharing its secret

With the hedgehog. The hedgehog
Shares its secret with no one.
We say, Hedgehog, come out
Of yourself and we will love you.

We mean no harm. We want
Only to listen to what
You have to say. We want
Your answers to our questions.

The hedgehog gives nothing
Away, keeping itself to itself.
We wonder what a hedgehog
Has to hide, why it so distrusts.

We forget the god
under this crown of thorns.
We forget that never again
will a god trust in the world.

 

Paul Muldoon, July 22, 2019 

 

 

 

PROVERBS OF HELL 

In seed-time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. 
Drive your cart and your plough over the bones of the dead.
The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.
Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity.
He who desires, but acts not, breeds pestilence. 

The cut worm forgives the plough. 
Dip him in the river who loves water. 
A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees. 
He whose face gives no light shall never become a star. 
Eternity is in love with the productions of time. 
The busy bee has no time for sorrow. 
The hours of folly are measured by the clock,

but of wisdom no clock can measure. 
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap. 
Bring out number, weight, and measure in a year of dearth. 
No bird soars too high if he soars with his own wings. 
A dead body revenges not injuries. 
The most sublime act is to set another before you. 
If the fool would persist in his folly he would become wise. 
Folly is the cloak of knavery. 
Shame is Pride's cloak. 
Prisons are built with stones of law, brothels with bricks of religion. 
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God. 
The lust of the goat is the bounty of God. 
The wrath of the lion is the wisdom of God.
The nakedness of woman is the work of God. 
Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps. 
The roaring of lions, the howling of wolves, the raging of the stormy sea, 
and the destructive sword, are portions of Eternity too great for the eye of man. 
The fox condemns the trap, not himself. 
Joys impregnate, sorrows bring forth.

 

William Blake, July 19, 2019 

 

 

 

AFTER AUSCHWITZ

 

Anger, 
as black as a hook, 
overtakes me. 
Each day, 
each Nazi
took, at 8: 00 A.M., a baby
and sauteed him for breakfast
in his frying pan. 

And death looks on with a casual eye
and picks at the dirt under his fingernail. 

Man is evil, 
I say aloud.
Man is a flower
that should be burnt, 
I say aloud.
Man
is a bird full of mud, 
I say aloud. 

And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus. 

Man with his small pink toes, 
with his miraculous fingers
is not a temple
but an outhouse, 
I say aloud.
Let man never again raise his teacup.
Let man never again write a book.
Let man never again put on his shoe.
Let man never again raise his eyes, 
on a soft July night.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
I say those things aloud. 

I beg the Lord not to hear.

 

Anne Sexton, July 15, 2019 

 

 

 

THE HANGING MAN

 

By the roots of my hair some god got hold of me.
I sizzled in his blue volts like a desert prophet.

The nights snapped out of sight like a lizard's eyelid :
A world of bald white days in a shadeless socket.

A vulturous boredom pinned me in this tree.
If he were I, he would do what I did.

 

Sylvia Plath, July 12, 2019 

 

 

 

LIFE

 

Autoplay next video

I leave the office, take the stairs, 
in time to mail a letter 
before 3 in the afternoon--the last dispatch. 
The red, white and blue air mail 
falls past the slot for foreign mail 
and hits bottom with a sound 
that tells me my letter is alone. 
They will have to bring in a plane 
from a place of coastline and beaches, 
from a climate of fresh figs and apricot, 
to cradle my one letter. Up in the air 
it will leave behind some of its ugly nuance, 
its unpleasant habit of humanity 
which wants to smear itself over others:
the spot in which it wasn't clear, perhaps, 
how to take my words, which were suggestive, 
the paragraph in which the names of flowers, 
ostensibly to indicate travel, 
make a bed for lovers, 
the parts that contain spit and phlegm, 
the words only a wet tongue can manage, 
hissing sounds and letters of the alphabet 
which can only be formed 
by biting down on the bottom lip. 
In the next-to-last paragraph, some hair 
came off in the comb. Then clothes 
were gathered from everywhere in the room 
in one sentence, and the sun rose 
while a door closed with sincerity. 
No doubt such sincerity will be judged, 
but first the investigation of the postmark. 
Am I where I was expected? Did I have at hand 
the right denominations of stamps, 
or did I make a childish quilt of ones and sevens?
Ah yes, they will have to cancel me twice.
Once to make my words worthless.
Once more to stop me from writing. 

 

Mervin Bell, July 08, 2019 

 

 

 

AMERICAN POETRY

 

Whatever it is, it must have

A stomach that can digest

Rubber, coal, uranium, moons, poems.

 

Like the shark it contains a shoe.

It must swim for miles through the desert

Uttering cries that are almost human.

​

Louis Simpson, July 05, 2019

 

 

 

THE LOST PILOT

 

        for my father, 1922-1944

​

Your face did not rot
like the others—the co-pilot,
for example, I saw him

yesterday. His face is corn-
mush: his wife and daughter,
the poor ignorant people, stare

as if he will compose soon.
He was more wronged than Job.
But your face did not rot

like the others—it grew dark,
and hard like ebony;
the features progressed in their

distinction. If I could cajole
you to come back for an evening,
down from your compulsive

orbiting, I would touch you,
read your face as Dallas,
your hoodlum gunner, now,


with the blistered eyes, reads
his braille editions. I would
touch your face as a disinterested

scholar touches an original page.
However frightening, I would
discover you, and I would not

turn you in; I would not make
you face your wife, or Dallas,
or the co-pilot, Jim. You

could return to your crazy
orbiting, and I would not try
to fully understand what

it means to you. All I know
is this: when I see you,
as I have seen you at least

once every year of my life,
spin across the wilds of the sky
like a tiny, African god,

I feel dead. I feel as if I were
the residue of a stranger’s life,
that I should pursue you.

My head cocked toward the sky,
I cannot get off the ground,
and, you, passing over again,

fast, perfect, and unwilling
to tell me that you are doing
well, or that it was mistake

that placed you in that world,
and me in this; or that misfortune
placed these worlds in us.

 

James Tate, July 01, 2019

 

 

 

1002

 

Aurora is the effort
Of the Celestial Face
Unconsciousness of Perfectness
To simulate, to Us.

 

Emily Dickinson, June 28, 2019

 

 

 

RICHARD CORY

​

Whenever Richard Cory went down town,

We people on the pavement looked at him:

He was a gentleman from sole to crown,

Clean favored, and imperially slim.

 

And he was always quietly arrayed,

And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,

"Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked.

 

And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—

And admirably schooled in every grace:

In fine, we thought that he was everything

To make us wish that we were in his place.

 

So on we worked, and waited for the light,

And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;

And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,

Went home and put a bullet through his head.

​

Edwin Arlington Robinson, June 24, 2019

 

 

 

CHRISTMAS: 1924

 

Peace upon earth!" was said. We sing it, 
And pay a million priests to bring it. 
After two thousand years of mass 
We've got as far as poison-gas.

 

Thomas Hardy, June 21, 2019

 

 

 

ON THE EXTINCTION OF THE VENETIAN REPUBLIC

 

ONCE did she hold the gorgeous East in fee; 
   And was the safeguard of the West: the worth 
   Of Venice did not fall below her birth, 
Venice, the eldest Child of Liberty.


She was a maiden City, bright and free; 
   No guile seduced, no force could violate; 
   And, when she took unto herself a mate, 
She must espouse the everlasting Sea.


And what if she had seen those glories fade, 
   Those titles vanish, and that strength decay; 
Yet shall some tribute of regret be paid


   When her long life hath reach'd its final day: 
Men are we, and must grieve when even the Shade 
   Of that which once was great is pass'd away.

 

Villiam Wordsworth, June 17, 2019

 

 

 

PATIENCE

 

Patience is wider
than one once envisioned,
with ribbons of rivers
and distant ranges
and tasks undertaken 
and finished with modest 
relish by natives 
in their native dress.
Who would have 
guessed it possible
that waiting is 
sustainable — a place 
with its own harvests.
Or that in time's 
fullness the diamonds 
of patience couldn't be 
distinguished from 
the genuine in 
brilliance or hardness.

 

Kay Ryan, June 14, 2019

 

 

 

 

NO SECOND TROY

​

Why should I blame her that she filled my days 

With misery, or that she would of late 

Have taught to ignorant men most violent ways, 

Or hurled the little streets upon the great, 

Had they but courage equal to desire? 

What could have made her peaceful with a mind 

That nobleness made simple as a fire, 

With beauty like a tightened bow, a kind 

That is not natural in an age like this, 

Being high and solitary and most stern? 

Why, what could she have done, being what she is? 

Was there another Troy for her to burn?

​

William Butler Yeats, June 10, 2019

​

MORT AUX CHATS

 

There will be no more cats.

Cats spread infection,

Cats pollute the air,

Cats consume seven times

their own weight in food a week,

Cats were worshipped in

decadent societies (Egypt

and Ancient Rome); the Greeks

had no use for cats. Cats

sit down to pee (our scientists

have proved it). The copulation

of cats is harrowing; they

are unbearably fond of the moon.

Perhaps they are all right in

their own country but their

traditions are alien to ours.

Cats smell, they can't help it,

you notice it going upstairs.

Cats watch too much television,

they can sleep through storms,

they stabbed us in the back

ast time. There have never been

any great artists who were cats.

They don't deserve a capital C

except at the beginning of a sentence.

I blame my headaches and my

plants dying on cats.

Our district is full of them,

property values are falling.

When I dream of God I see

a Massacre of Cats. Why

should they insist on their own

language and religion, who

needs to purr to make his point?

Death to all cats! The Rule

of Dogs shall last a thousand years!

​

Peter Porter, June 7, 2019

 

 

 

HEREDITY

​

How you became a poet's a mystery!
Wherever did you get your talent from?

I say: I had two uncles, Joe and Harry-
one was a stammerer, the other dumb.

 

Tony Harrison, June 3, 2019

 

 

 

ULTIMA RATIO REGUM

​

The guns spell money's ultimate reason
In letters of lead on the spring hillside.
But the boy lying dead under the olive trees
Was too young and too silly
To have been notable to their important eye.
He was a better target for a kiss.

When he lived, tall factory hooters never summoned him.
Nor did restaurant plate-glass doors revolve to wave him in.
His name never appeared in the papers.
The world maintained its traditional wall
Round the dead with their gold sunk deep as a well,
Whilst his life, intangible as a Stock Exchange rumour, drifted outside.

O too lightly he threw down his cap
One day when the breeze threw petals from the trees.
The unflowering wall sprouted with guns,
Machine-gun anger quickly scythed the grasses;
Flags and leaves fell from hands and branches;
The tweed cap rotted in the nettles.

Consider his life which was valueless
In terms of employment, hotel ledgers, news files.
Consider. One bullet in ten thousand kills a man.
Ask. Was so much expenditure justified
On the death of one so young and so silly
Lying under the olive tree, O world, O death? 

 

Stephen Spender, May 31, 2019

 

 

 

THE WHITE HORSE

 

The youth walks up to the white horse, to put its halter on
and the horse looks at him in silence.
They are so silent, they are in another world.

 

David Herbert Lawrence, May 27, 2019

 

 

 

AUTUMN

 

A touch of cold in the Autumn night --

I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded, 
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children. 

 

Thomas Ernest Hulme, May 24, 2019

 

 

 

KALEIDOSCOPE

 

To climb these stairs again, bearing a tray, 
Might be to find you pillowed with your books, 
Your inventories listing gowns and frocks
As if preparing for a holiday.
Or, turning from the landing, I might find
My presence watched through your kaleidoscope, 
A symmetry of husbands, each redesigned
In lovely forms of foresight, prayer and hope.
I climb these stairs a dozen times a day
And, by the open door, wait, looking in
At where you died. My hands become a tray
Offering me, my flesh, my soul, my skin.
Grief wrongs us so. I stand, and wait, and cry
For the absurd forgiveness, not knowing why. 

 

Douglas Dunn, May 20, 2019

 

 

 

EPITAPH ON A PESSIMIST

 

I'm Smith of Stoke aged sixty odd
I've lived without a dame all my life
And wish to God
My dad had done the same.

 

Thomas Hardy, May 17, 2019

 

 

 

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE

​

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

 

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,

And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

 

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

 

William Butler Yeats, May 13, 2019

 

 

 

CREEPER

 

With what stoic delicacy does

Virginia creeper let go:

the feeblest tug brings down

a sheaf of leaves kite-high,

as if to say, To live is good

but not to live--to be pulled down

with scarce a ripping,

still flourishing, still

stretching toward the sun--

is good also, all photosynthesis

abandoned, quite quits.  Next spring

the hairy rootlets left unpulled

snake out a leafy afterlife

up that same smooth-barked oak.

 

John Updike, May 10, 2019

 

 

 

THE NEW HOUSE

 

Now first, as I shut the door, 

  I was alone

In the new house; and the wind

  Began to moan.

 

Old at once was the house,

  And I was old;

My ears were teased with the dread

 Of what was foretold,

 

Nights of storm, days of mist, without end;

  Sad days when the sun

Shone in vain: old griefs and griefs

  Not yet begun.

 

All was foretold me; naught

  Could I foresee;

But I learned how the wind would sound

  After these things should be.

 

Edward Thomas, May 6, 2019

 

 

 

THE HAND THAT SIGNED THE PAPER

 

The hand that signed the paper felled a city;

Five sovereign fingers taxed the breath,

Doubled the globe of dead and halved a country;

These five kings did a king to death.

​

The mighty hand leads to a sloping shoulder,

The finger joints are cramped with chalk;

A goose's quill has put an end to murder

That put an end to talk.

​

The hand that signed the treaty bred a fever,

And famine grew, and locusts came;

Great is the hand that holds dominion over

Man by a scribbled name.

​

The five kings count the dead but do not soften

The crusted wound nor pat the brow;

A hand rules pity as a hand rules heaven;

Hands have no tears to flow.

 

Thomas Dylan, May 3, 2019

 

 

 

A PRAYER

 

When I am dying, let me know

That I loved the blowing snow

Although it stung like whips;

That I loved all lovely things

And I tried to take their stings

With gay unembittered lips;

That I loved with all my strength,

To my soul's full depth and length,

Careless if my heart must break,

That I sang as children sing

Fitting tunes to everything,

 

Sara Teasdale, April 29, 2019

​

​

​

REQUIEM

 

UNDER the wide and starry sky

Dig the grave and let me lie:

Glad did I live and gladly die,

And I laid me down with a will.

 

This be the verse you 'grave for me:

Here he lies where he long'd to be;

Home is the sailor, home from the sea,

And the hunter home from the hill.

 

Robert Louis Stevenson, April 26, 2019

​

 

 

GRANNY SCARECROW

   

              Tears flowed at the chapel funeral,

     more beside the grave on the hill. Nevertheless,

                  after the last autumn ploughing,

       they crucified her old flowered print housedress

                               live, on a pole.

 

                Marjorie and Emily, shortcutting to school,

      used to pass and wave; mostly Gran would wave back

                         Two white Sunday gloves

    flapped good luck from the crossbar; her head's plastic sack

                            would nod, as a rule.

 

                But when winter arrived her ghost thinned.

      The dress began to look starved in its field of snowcorn.

                         One glove blew off and was lost.

    The other hung blotchy with mould from the hedgerow, torn

                                       by the wind.

 

                 Emily and Marjorie noticed this.

      Without saying why, they started to avoid the country way

                  through the cornfield. Instead they walked

             from the farm up the road to the stop where they

                                       caught the bus.

 

                 And it caught them. So in time they married.

       Marjorie, divorced, rose high in the catering profession.

               Emily had children and grandchildren, though,

          with the farm sold, none found a cross to fit their clothes when

                              Emily and Marjorie died.

 

Anne Stevenson, April 22, 2019

 

 

 

ALONE IN THE WOODS

 

Alone in the woods I felt
The bitter hostility of the sky and the trees
Nature has taught her creatures to hate
Man that fusses and fumes
Unquiet man
As the sap rises in the trees
As the sap paints the trees a violent green
So rises the wrath of Nature's creatures
At man
So paints the face of Nature a violent green.
Nature is sick at man
Sick at his fuss and fume
Sick at his agonies
Sick at his gaudy mind
That drives his body
Ever more quickly
More and more
In the wrong direction.

 

Stevie Smith, April 19, 2019

 

 

 

AMERICAN DREAMS

 

In dreams my life came toward me,

my loves that were slender as gazelles.

But America also dreams…

Dream, you are flying over Russia,

dream, you are falling in Asia.

 

As I look down the street

on a typical sunny day in California

it is my house that is burning

and my dear ones that lie in the gutter

as the American army enters.

 

Every day I wake far away

from my life, in a foreign country.

These people are speaking a strange language.

It is strange to me

and strange, I think, even to themselves.

 

Louis Simpson, April 15, 2019

 

 

 

AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN

 

You said the anger would come back

just as the love did.

 

I have a black look I do not

like. It is a mask I try on.

I migrate toward it and its frog

sits on my lips and defecates.

It is old. It is also a pauper.

I have tried to keep it on a diet.

I give it no unction.

 

There is a good look that I wear

like a blood clot. I have

sewn it over my left breast.

I have made a vocation of it.

Lust has taken plant in it

and I have placed you and your

child at its milk tip.

 

Oh the blackness is murderous

and the milk tip is brimming

and each machine is working

and I will kiss you when

I cut up one dozen new men

and you will die somewhat,

again and again.

 

Anne Sexton, April 12,2019

 

 

 

GLORY OF WOMEN 

​

You love us when we're heroes, home on leave,

Or wounded in a mentionable place.

You worship decorations; you believe

That chivalry redeems the war's disgrace.

You make us shells. You listen with delight,

By tales of dirt and danger fondly thrilled.

You crown our distant ardours while we fight,

And mourn our laurelled memories when we're killed. 

You can't believe that British troops "retire"

When hell's last horror breaks them, and they run,

Trampling the terrible corpses - blind with blood.

O German mother dreaming by the fire,

While you are knitting socks to send your son

His face is trodden deeper in the mud.

 

Siegfried Sassoon, April 8, 2019

 

 

 

A CERTAIN KIND OF EDEN

 

It seems like you could, but

you can’t go back and pull

the roots and runners and replant.

It’s all too deep for that.

You’ve overprized intention,

have mistaken any bent you’re given

for control. You thought you chose

the bean and chose the soil.

You even thought you abandoned

one or two gardens. But those things

keep growing where we put them —

if we put them at all.

A certain kind of Eden holds us thrall.

Even the one vine that tendrils out alone

in time turns on its own impulse,

twisting back down its upward course

a strong and then a stronger rope,

the greenest saddest strongest

kind of hope.

 

Kay Ryan,  April 5, 2019

 

 

 

AUGUST 1914

 

What in our lives is burnt

In the fire of this?

The heart’s dear granary?

The much we shall miss?

 

Three lives hath one life –

Iron, honey, gold.

The gold, the honey gone –

Left is the hard and cold.

 

Iron are our lives

Molten right through our youth.

A burnt space through ripe fields

A fair mouth’s broken tooth.

 

Isaac Rosenberg, April 1, 2019

 

 

 

ELEGI FOR JANE

(My student, thrown by a horse)

​

I remember the neckcurls, limp and damp as tendrils; 
And her quick look, a sidelong pickerel smile; 
And how, once started into talk, the light syllables leaped for her. 
And she balanced in the delight of her thought, 
A wren, happy, tail into the wind, 
Her song trembling the twigs and small branches. 
The shade sang with her; 
The leaves, their whispers turned to kissing, 
And the mould sang in the bleached valleys under the rose. 

Oh, when she was sad, she cast herself down into such a pure depth, 
Even a father could not find her: 
Scraping her cheek against straw, 
Stirring the clearest water. 
My sparrow, you are not here, 
Waiting like a fern, making a spiney shadow. 
The sides of wet stones cannot console me, 
Nor the moss, wound with the last light. 

If only I could nudge you from this sleep, 
My maimed darling, my skittery pigeon. 
Over this damp grave I speak the words of my love: 
I, with no rights in this matter, 
Neither father nor lover.

​

Teodore Roethke, March 29, 2019

 

 

 

ENVOI

 

Go, dumb-born book,

Tell her that sang me once that song of Lawes:

Hadst thou but song

As thou hast subjects known,

Then were there cause in thee that should condone

Even my faults that heavy upon me lie

And build her glories their longevity.

 

Tell her that sheds

Such treasure in the air,

Recking naught else but that her graces give

Life to the moment,

I would bid them live

As roses might, in magic amber laid,

Red overwrought with orange and all made

One substance and one colour

Braving time.

 

Tell her that goes

With song upon her lips

But sings not out the song, nor knows

The maker of it, some other mouth,

May be as fair as hers,

Might, in new ages, gain her worshippers,

When our two dusts with Waller’s shall be laid,

Siftings on siftings in oblivion,

Till change hath broken down

All things save Beauty alone.

 

Ezra Pound, March 25, 2019

 

 

 

IN PLASTER

 

I shall never get out of this!  There are two of me now:
This new absolutely white person and the old yellow one,
And the white person is certainly the superior one.
She doesn't need food, she is one of the real saints.
At the beginning I hated her, she had no personality --
She lay in bed with me like a dead body
And I was scared, because she was shaped just the way I was

Only much whiter and unbreakable and with no complaints.
I couldn't sleep for a week, she was so cold.
I blamed her for everything, but she didn't answer.
I couldn't understand her stupid behavior!
When I hit her she held still, like a true pacifist.
Then I realized what she wanted was for me to love her:
She began to warm up, and I saw her advantages.

Without me, she wouldn't exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain,
And it was I who attracted everybody's attention,
Not her whiteness and beauty, as I had at first supposed.
I patronized her a little, and she lapped it up --
You could tell almost at once she had a slave mentality.

I didn't mind her waiting on me, and she adored it.
In the morning she woke me early, reflecting the sun
From her amazingly white torso, and I couldn't help but notice
Her tidiness and her calmness and her patience:
She humored my weakness like the best of nurses,
Holding my bones in place so they would mend properly.
In time our relationship grew more intense.

She stopped fitting me so closely and seemed offish.
I felt her criticizing me in spite of herself,
As if my habits offended her in some way.
She let in the drafts and became more and more absent-minded.
And my skin itched and flaked away in soft pieces
Simply because she looked after me so badly.
Then I saw what the trouble was:  she thought she was immortal.

She wanted to leave me, she thought she was superior,
And I'd been keeping her in the dark, and she was resentful --
Wasting her days waiting on a half-corpse!
And secretly she began to hope I'd die.
Then she could cover my mouth and eyes, cover me entirely,
And wear my painted face the way a mummy-case
Wears the face of a pharaoh, though it's made of mud and water.

I wasn't in any position to get rid of her.
She'd supported me for so long I was quite limp --
I had forgotten how to walk or sit,
So I was careful not to upset her in any way
Or brag ahead of time how I'd avenge myself.
Living with her was like living with my own coffin:
Yet I still depended on her, though I did it regretfully.

I used to think we might make a go of it together --
After all, it was a kind of marriage, being so close.
Now I see it must be one or the other of us.
She may be a saint, and I may be ugly and hairy,
But she'll soon find out that that doesn't matter a bit.
I'm collecting my strength; one day I shall manage without her,
And she'll perish with emptiness then, and begin to miss me.

 

Sylvia Plath, March 22, 2019

 

 

 

WHY BROWNLEE LEFT

 

Why Brownlee left, and where he went,

Is a mystery even now.

For if a man should have been content

It was him; two acres of barley,

One of potatoes, four bullocks,

A milker, a slated farmhouse.

He was last seen going out to plough

On a March morning, bright and early.

 

By noon Brownlee was famous;

They had found all abandoned, with

The last rig unbroken, his pair of black

Horses, like man and wife,

Shifting their weight from foot to

Foot, and gazing into the future.

 

Paul Muldoon, March 18, 2019

 

 

 

THE STEP
 

From where you are at any moment you
may step off into death.
Is it not a clinching thought?
I do not mean a stoical bravado
of making the great decision blade in hand
but the awareness, all so simple, that
right in the middle of the day
you may be called to an adjoining room.

 

Frederick Morgan, March 15, 2019

 

 

 

SPENSER'S IRELAND

 

has not altered; -

a place as kind as it is green,

the greenest place I've never seen.

Every name is a tune.

Denunciations do not affect

the culprit; nor blows, but it

is torture to him to not be spoken to.

They're natural -

the coat, like Venus

mantle lined with stars,

buttoned close at the neck-the sleeves new from disuse

 

If in Ireland

they play the harp backward at need,

and gather at midday the seed

of the fern, eluding

their “giants all covered with iron,” might

there be fern seed for unlearn

ing obduracy and for reinstating

the enchantment?

Hindered сharacters

seldom have mothers

in Irish stories, but they all have grandmothers.

 

It was Irish;

a match not a marriage was made  

when my great grandmother'd said  

with native genius for

disunion, “Although your suitor be

perfection, one objection

is enough; he is not

Irish.” Outwitting

the fairies, befriending the furies,

whoever again

and again says: “I'll never give in,” never sees

 

that you're not free:

until you've been made captive by

supreme belief-credulity

you say? When large dainty

fingers tremblingly divide the wings

of the fly for mid-July

with a needle and wrap it with peacock tail,

or tie wool and

buzzard's wing, their pride,  

like the enchanter's

is in care, not madness. Concurring hands divide  

 

flax for damask

that when bleached by Irish weather  

has the silvered chamois-leather  

water-tightness of a

skin. Twisted tores and gold new moon-shaped

lunulae aren't jewelry

like the purple-coral fuchsia-tree's. Eire -

the guillemot

so neat and the hen  

of the heath and the

linnet spinet-sweet-bespeak relentlessness? Then   

 

they are to me

like enchanted Earl Gerald who

changed himself into a stag, to

a great green-eyed cat of

the mountain. Discommodity makes

them invisible; they've dis-

appeared. The Irish say your trouble is their

trouble and your

joy their joy? I wish 

I could believe it;

I am troubled, I'm dissatisfied, I'm Irish.  

 

Marianne Moor, March 11, 2019

 

 

 

THE COURAGE THAT MY MOTHER HAD

​

The courage that my mother had

Went with her, and is with her still:

Rock from New England quarried;

Now granite in a granite hill.

 

The golden brooch my mother wore

She left behind for me to wear;

I have no thing I treasure more:

Yet, it is something I could spare.

 

Oh, if instead she'd left to me

The thing she took into the grave!—

That courage like a rock, which she

Has no more need of, and I have.

 

Edna St. Vincent Milla, March 8, 2019

 

 

 

A SOLITUDE

 

A blind man. I can stare at him

ashamed, shameless. Or does he know it?

No, he is in a great solitude.

 

O, strange joy,

to gaze my fill at a stranger s face.

No, my thirst is greater than before.

 

In his world he is speaking

almost aloud. His lips move.

Anxiety plays about them. And now joy

 

of some sort trembles into a smile.

A breeze I can't feel

crosses that face as if it crossed water.

 

The train moves uptown, pulls in and

pulls out of the local stops. Within its loud

jarring movement a quiet,

 

the quiet of people not speaking,

some of them eyeing the blind man

only a moment though, not thirsty like me,

 

and within that quiet his

different quiet, not quiet at all, a tumult

of images, but what are his images,

 

he is blind? He doesn't care

that he looks strange, showing

his thoughts on his face like designs of light

 

flickering on water, for he doesn't know

what look is.

I see he has never seen.

 

And now he rises, he stands at the door ready,

knowing his station is next. Was he counting?

No, that was not his need.

 

When he gets out I get out.

“Can I help you towards the exit?”

“Oh, alright.” An indifference.

 

But instantly, even as he speaks,

even as I hear indifference, his hand

goes out, waiting for me to take it,

 

and now we hold hands like children.

His hand is warm and not sweaty,

the grip firm, it feels good.

 

And when we have passed through the turnstile,

he going first, his hand at once

waits for mine again.

 

“Here are the steps. And here we turn

to the right. More stairs now.” We go

up into sunlight. He feels that,

 

the soft air. “A nice day,

isn't it?” says the blind man. Solitude

walks with me, walks

 

beside me, he is not with me, he continues

his thoughts alone. But his hand and mine

know one another,

 

it's as if my hand were gone forth

on its own journey. I see him

across the street, the blind man,

 

and now he says he can find his way. He knows

where he is going, it is nowhere, it is filled

with presences. He says. I am.

 

Priscilla Denise Levertov, March 4, 2019

 

 

 

AT THE BANK IN SPAIN

 

Even the old priest, in his long black robe and silvery hair

came to the counter with his hat off, humble at the shrine,

and was immensely flattered when one of the fat little

       clerks of the bank

shook hands with him.

 

David Herbert Lawrence, March 1, 2019

 

 

 

ONE FLESH

 

Lying apart now, each in a separate bed,

He with a book, keeping the light on late,

She like a girl dreaming of childhood,

All men elsewhere -- it is as if they wait

Some new event: the book he holds unread, 

Her eyes fixed on the shadows overhead. 

 

Tossed up like flotsam from a former passion,

How cool they lie. They hardly ever touch,

Or if they do, it is like a confession 

Of having little feeling -- or too much.

Chastity faces them, a destination

For which their whole lives were a preparation.

​

Strangely apart, yet strangely close together,

Silence between them like a thread to hold

And not wind in. And time itself's a feather 

Touching them gently. Do they know they're old,

These two who are my father and my mother

Whose fire from which I came, has now grown cold?  

 

Elizabeth Jennings, February 25, 2019

​

​

​

A WOMAN UNCONSCIOUS

​

Russia and America circle each other; 
Threats nudge an act that were without doubt 
A melting of the mould in the mother,
Stones melting about the root. 

The quick of the earth burned out:
The toil of all our ages a loss
With leaf and insect. Yet flitting thought 
(Not to be thought ridiculous) 

Shies from the world-cancelling black
Of its playing shadow: it has learned 
That there's no trusting (trusting to luck) 
Dates when the world's due to be burned; 

That the future's no calamitous change 
But a malingering of now, 
Histories, towns, faces that no 
Malice or accident much derange. 

And though bomb be matched against bomb, 
Though all mankind wince out and nothing endure -- 
Earth gone in an instant flare -- 
Did a lesser death come 

Onto the white hospital bed 
Where one, numb beyond her last of sense, 
Closed her eyes on the world's evidence 
And into pillows sunk her head.

 

Ted Hughes, February 22, 2019

 

 

 

REQUIEM FOR THE CROPPIES

​

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day: 
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry, 
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave. 

 

Seamus Heaney, February 18, 2019

 

 

 

BOOK ENDS

  
Baked the day she suddenly dropped dead  
we chew it slowly that last apple pie.  
Shocked into sleeplessness you're scared of bed.  
We never could talk much, and now don't try.  
 

You're like book ends, the pair of you, she'd say,  
Hog that grate, say nothing, sit, sleep, stare…  
The 'scholar' me, you, worn out on poor pay,  
only our silence made us seem a pair.  
 

Not as good for staring in, blue gas,  
too regular each bud, each yellow spike.  
At night you need my company to pass  
and she not here to tell us we're alike!  
 

You're life's all shattered into smithereens.  
Back in our silences and sullen looks,  
for all the Scotch we drink, what's still between 's  
not the thirty or so years, but books, books, books.  

​

Tony Harrison, February 15, 2019

 

​

 

THE BUTCHER'S SON

​

Mr Pierce the butcher
Got news his son was missing
About a month before
The closing of the war.
A bald man, tall and careful,
He stood in his shop and found
No bottom to his sadness,
Nowhere for it to stop.
When my aunt came through the door
Delivering the milk,
He spoke, with his quiet air
Of a considerate teacher,
But words weren't up to it,
He turned back to the meat.

 

The message was in error.

Later that humid summer
At a local high school fete,
I saw, returned, the son
Still in his uniform.
Mr Pierce was not there
But was as if implied
In the son who looked like him
Except he had red hair.
For I recall him well
Encircled by his friends,
Beaming a life charged now
Doubly because restored,
And recall also how
Within his hearty smile
His lips contained his father's
Like a light within the light
That he turned everywhere. 

 

Thom Gunn, February 11, 2019

 

 

 

THE PERSIAN VERSION

 

Truth-loving Persians do not dwell upon

The trivial skirmish fought near Marathon.

As for the Greek theatrical tradition

Which represents that summer's expedition

Not as a mere reconnaissance in force

By three brigades of foot and one of horse

(Their left flank covered by some obsolete

Light craft detached from the main Persian fleet)

But as a grandiose, ill-starred attempt

To conquer Greece - they treat it with contempt;

And only incidentally refute

Major Greek claims, by stressing what repute

The Persian monarch and the Persian nation

Won by this salutary demonstration:

Despite a strong defence and adverse weather

All arms combined magnificently together.

 

Robert Graves, February 8, 2019

 

 

 

AUTUMN LEAVES

 

At 66 just learning how to take care of my body

Wake cheerful 8 A.M. & write in a notebook

rising from bed side naked leaving a naked boy asleep by the wall

mix miso mushroom leeks & winter squash breakfast (macrobiotic),

Check bloodsugar, clean teeth exactly, brush, toothpick, floss, mouth

              wash

oil my feet (or anoint my feet with oil), put on white shirt white pants white sox

sit solitary by the sink

a moment before brushing my hair, happy not yet

to be a corpse.

 

Allen Ginsberg, February 4, 2019

 

 

 

ON THE DEATH OF A CHILD

 

The greatest griefs shall find themselves inside the smallest cage. 

 It's only then that we can hope to tame their rage.                         

 

 The monsters we must live with. For it will not do                       

 To hiss humanity because one human threw                                           

 Us out of heart and home. Or part                                                                      

 

 At odds with life because one baby failed to live                        

 Indeed, as little as its subject, is the wreath we give --              

 

 The big words fail to fit. Like giant boxes                               

 Round small bodies. Taking up improper room,                     

 Where so much withering is, and so much bloom.

 

Dennis Joseph Enright, February 1, 2019

 

 

 

A SONG FOR SIMEON

 

Lord, the Roman hyacinths are blooming in bowls and

The winter sun creeps by the snow hills;

The stubborn season has made stand.

My life is light, waiting for the death wind,

Like a feather on the back of my hand.

Dust in sunlight and memory in corners

Wait for the wind that chills towards the dead land.

 

Grant us thy peace.

I have walked many years in this city,

Kept faith and fast, provided for the poor,

Have taken and given honour and ease.

There went never any rejected from my door.

Who shall remember my house, where shall live my children’s children

When the time of sorrow is come?

They will take to the goat’s path, and the fox’s home,

Fleeing from the foreign faces and the foreign swords.

 

Before the time of cords and scourges and lamentation

Grant us thy peace.

Before the stations of the mountain of desolation,

Before the certain hour of maternal sorrow,

Now at this birth season of decease,

Let the Infant, the still unspeaking and unspoken Word,

Grant Israel’s consolation

To one who has eighty years and no to-morrow.

 

According to thy word,

They shall praise Thee and suffer in every generation

With glory and derision,

Light upon light, mounting the saints’ stair.

Not for me the martyrdom, the ecstasy of thought and prayer,

Not for me the ultimate vision.

Grant me thy peace.

(And a sword shall pierce thy heart,

Thine also).

I am tired with my own life and the lives of those after me,

I am dying in my own death and the deaths of those after me.

Let thy servant depart,

Having seen thy salvation.

 

Thomas Stearns Eliot, January 28, 2019

 

 

 

MODERN LOVE

 

It is summer, and we are in a house
That is not ours, sitting at a table
Enjoying minutes of a rented silence,
The upstairs people gone. The pigeons lull
To sleep the under-tens and invalids,
The tree shakes out its shadows to the grass,
The roses rove through the wilds of my neglect.
Our lives flap, and we have no hope of better
Happiness than this, not much to show for love
Than how we are, and how this evening is,
Unpeopled, silent, and where we are alive
In a domestic love, seemingly alone,
All other lives worn down to trees and sunlight,
Looking forward to a visit from the cat. 

​

Douglas Dunn, January 25, 2019

​

 

 

YOU SHALL ABOVE ALL THINGS BE GLAD AND YOUNG...

 

you shall above all things be glad and young

For if you're young, whatever life you wear

 

It will become you; and if you are glad

whatever's living will yourself become.

Girlboys may nothing more than boygirls need:

i can entirely her only love

 

whose any mystery makes every man's

flesh put space on; and his mind take off time

 

that you should ever think, may god forbid

and (in his mercy) your true lover spare:

for that way knowledge lies, the foetal grave

called progress, and negation's dead undoom.

 

I'd rather learn from one bird how to sing

than teach ten thousand stars how not to dance

 

Edward Estlin Cummings, January 21, 2019

​

 

 

THE WORLD

 

I wanted so ably

to reassure you, I wanted

the man you took to be me,

 

to comfort you, and got

up, and went to the window,

pushed back, as you asked me to,

 

the curtain, to see

the outline of the trees

in the night outside.

 

The light, love,

the light we felt then,

greyly, was it, that

 

came in, on us, not

merely my hands or yours,

or a wetness so comfortable,

 

but in the dark then

as you slept, the grey

figure came so close

 

and leaned over,

between us, as you

slept, restless, and

 

my own face had to

see it, and be seen by it,

the man it was, your

 

grey lost tired bewildered

brother, unused, untaken—

hated by love, and dead,

 

but not dead, for an

instant, saw me, myself

the intruder, as he was not.

 

I tried to say, it is

all right, she is

happy, you are no longer

 

needed. I said,

he is dead, and he

went as you shifted

 

and woke, at first afraid,

then knew by my own knowing

what had happened –

 

and the light then

of the sun coming

for another morning

in the world.

 

Robert Creeley, January 18, 2019

​

​

​

LOOKING FOR A FRIEND IN A CROWD OF ARRIVING PASSENGERS: A SONNET

​

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

Not John Whalen.

John Whalen.

 

Billy Collins, January 14, 2019

​

 

 

COUNTING SMALL-BONED BODIES

 

Let's count the bodies over again.

If we could only make the bodies smaller 
The size of skulls 
We could make a whole plain white with skulls 
in the moonlight!

If we could only make the bodies smaller 
Maybe we could get
A whole year's kill in front of us on a desk!

If we could only make the bodies smaller 
We could fit
A body into a finger-ring for a keepsake forever.

​

Robert Bly, January 11, 2019

 

 

 

ANAPHORA

 

Each day with so much ceremony
begins, with birds, with bells,
with whistles from a factory; 
such white-gold skies our eyes
first open on, such brilliant walls
that for a moment we wonder
'Where is the music coming from, the energy? 
The day was meant for what ineffable creature
we must have missed? ' Oh promptly he
appears and takes his earthly nature
   instantly, instantly falls
   victim of long intrigue,
   assuming memory and mortal
   mortal fatigue.

More slowly falling into sight
and showering into stippled faces,
darkening, condensing all his light; 
in spite of all the dreaming
squandered upon him with that look,
suffers our uses and abuses,
sinks through the drift of bodies,
sinks through the drift of classes
to evening to the beggar in the park
who, weary, without lamp or book
   prepares stupendous studies:
   the fiery event
   of every day in endless
   endless assent. 
 

Elizabeth Bishop, January 7, 2019

 

 

 

DREAM SONGS No 67: I DON’T OPERATE OFTEN

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I don’t operate often. When I do,

persons take note.

Nurses look amazed. They pale.

The patient is brought back to life, or so.

The reason I don’t do this more (I quote)

is: I have a living to fail —

 

because of my wife & son — to keep from earning.

— Mr Bones, I sees that.  

They for these operations thanks you, what?

not pays you. — Right.

You have seldom been so understanding.

Now there is further a difficulty with the light:

 

I am obliged to perform in complete darkness

operations of great delicacy

on my self.

— Mr Bones, you terrifies me.

No wonder they didn’t pay you. Will you die?

— My

friend, I succeeded. Later.

​

John Berryman, January 4, 2019

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