​

AUGUST 1968

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

Wystan Hugh Auden, March 27, 2023

TAKE ONE HOME FOR KIDDIES

On shallow straw, in shadeless glass,

Huddled by empty bowls, they sleep:

No dark, no dam, no earth, no grass -

Mam, get us one of them to keep.

Living toys are something novel,

But it soon wears off somehow.

Fetch the shoebox, fetch the shovel -

Mam, we're playing funerals now.

​

Philip Larkin, March 24, 2023

CIGARETTES AND WHISKEY AND WILD, WILD WOMEN

Perhaps I was born kneeling,
born coughing on the long winter,
born expecting the kiss of mercy,
born with a passion for quickness
and yet, as things progressed,
I learned early about the stockade
or taken out, the fume of the enema.
By two or three I learned not to kneel,
not to expect, to plant my fires underground
where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,
could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,
and let out so many loves, for so many,
and been altogether what I always was –
a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,
I find the effort useless.
Do I not look in the mirror,
these days,
and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?
Do I not feel the hunger so acutely
that I would rather die than look
into its face?
I kneel once more,
in case mercy should come
in the nick of time.

Anne Sexton, March 20, 2023

THE BERLIN WALL TUNE

         for Peter Viereck

​

This is the house destroyed by Jack.
  This is the spot where the rumpled buck
stops, and where Hans gets killed.
  This is the wall that Ivan built.

​

This is the wall that Ivan built.
  Yet trying to quell his sense of guilt,
he built it with modest light-gray concrete,
  and the booby-traps look discreet.

​

Under this wall that a) bores, b) scares
  barbed wire meshes lie flat like skeins
of your granny’s darnings (her chair still rocks!)
  But the voltage’s too high for socks.

​

Beyond this wall throbs a local flag
  against whose yellow, red, and black
Compass and Hammer proclaim the true
  masonic dream came through.

​

The Vopos patiently in their nest
  through binoculars scan the West
and the East; and they like both views
  apparently devoid of Jews.

​

Those who are seen here, thought of, felt,
  were driven away by the sense of Geld
or by a stronger Marxist urge.
  The wall won’t let them merge.

​

Come to this wall if you hate your place
  and face a sample of cosmic space
where no life-forms can exist at all
  and objects only fall.

​

Come to this scornful of peace and war
  petrified version of either/or
meandering through these bleak parts which act
  like a mirror that’s cracked.

​

Sad is the day here. In the night
  searchlights illuminate the blight
making sure that if someone screams,
  it’s not due to bad dreams.

​

For dreams here aren’t bad: just wet with blood
  of one of your likes who left his pad
to ramble here; and in his head
  dreams are replaced by lead.

​

Given that, it’s only Time
  who has guts enough to commit the crime
of passing this place back and forth on foot:
  at pendulums they don’t shoot.

​

That’s why this site will see many moons
  while couples lie in their beds like spoons,
while the rich are wondering what they wish
  and single girls eat fish.

​

Come to this wall that beats other walls:
  Roman, Chinese, whose worn-down, false
molars envy steel fangs that flash
  scrubbed of thy neighbor’s flesh.

​

A bird may twitter a better song.
  But should you consider abortion wrong
(or that the quacks ask too high a fee),
  Come to this wall, and see.

​

Joseph Brodsky, March 17, 2023

​

HEMÅT

​

Ett telefonsamtal rann ut i natten och glittrade

på landsbygden och i förstäderna.

Efteråt sov jag oroligt i hotellsängen.

Jag liknade nålen i en kompas

som orienteringslöparen ber

genom skogen med bultande hjärta.

​

Tomas Tranströmer, March 13, 2023

​

​

​

GORČIN

Here lieth
Gorčin the soldier
In his own land
On an alien
Patrimony

​

I lived
But I summoned death
Night and day

​

I never hurt a fly
I went off
To be a soldier

​

I’ve been
In five and five campaigns
Without shield or armor
So that at last
These throes
Might cease

​

I perished of a strange pain

​

Not pierced by a spear
Not shot by an arrow
Not cut down
By a saber

​

I perished of a pain
That has no cure

​

I loved
My beloved was seized
In bondage

​

If you meet Kosara
On the paths
Of the Lord
I beseech you
To speak unto her
Of my
Truth

​

Mak Dizdar (Translated by Omer Hadžiselimović, Anne Pennington, and Stephen P. Meyer), March 10, 2023

​

​

IN MEMORIAM M.K.H., 1911-1984 

When all the others were away at Mass  

I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.  

They broke the silence, let fall one by one 

Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:

Cold comforts set between us, things to share

Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.   

And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes

From each other's work would bring us to our senses. 

So while the parish priest at her bedside 

Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying

And some were responding and some crying

I remembered her head bent towards my head,

Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives – 

Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

Seamus Heaney, March 6, 2023

KING OF CHINA'S DAUGHTER

The King of China's daughter

She never would love me,

Though I hung my cap and bells upon

Her nutmeg tree.

For oranges and lemons

The stars in bright blue air

(I stole them long ago, my dear)

Were dangling there.

The moon, she gave me silver pence ;

The sun did give me gold :

And both together softly blew

And made my porridge cold.

 
But the King of China's daughter

Pretended not to see,

When I hung my cap and bells upon

Her nutmeg tree.

Dame Edith Sitwell, March 3, 2023

HERMAN MELVILLE 

Towards the end he sailed into an extraordinary mildness,

And anchored in his home and reached his wife

And rode within the harbour of her hand,

And went across each morning to an office

As though his occupation were another island.

Goodness existed: that was the new knowledge

His terror had to blow itself quite out

To let him see it; but it was the gale had blown him

Past the Cape Horn of sensible success

Which cries: ‘This rock is Eden. Shipwreck here.’

But deafened him with thunder and confused with lightning:

– The maniac hero hunting like a jewel

The rare ambiguous monster that had maimed his sex,

Hatred for hatred ending in a scream,

The unexplained survivor breaking off the nightmare – 

All that was intricate and false; the truth was simple.

Evil is unspectacular and always human,

And shares our bed and eats at our own table,

And we are introduced to Goodness every day,

Even in drawing-rooms among a crowd of faults;

He has a name like Billy and is almost perfect

But wears a stammer like a decoration:

And every time they meet the same thing has to happen;

It is the Evil that is helpless like a lover

And has to pick a quarrel and succeeds,

And both are openly destroyed before our eyes.

For now he was awake and knew

No one is ever spared except in dreams;

But there was something else the nightmare had distorted – 

Even the punishment was human and a form of love:

The howling storm had been his father’s presence

And all the time he had been carried on his father’s breast.

Who now had set him gently down and left him.

He stood upon the narrow balcony and listened:

And all the stars above him sang as in his childhood

‘All, all is vanity,’ but it was not the same;

For now the words descended like the calm of mountains – 

– Nathaniel had been shy because his love was selfish – 

But now he cried in exultation and surrender

‘The Godhead is broken like bread. We are the pieces.’

​

And sat down at his desk and wrote a story.

Wystan Hugh Auden, February 27, 2023

MARKED WITH D

When the chilled dough of his flesh went in an oven
not unlike those he fuelled all his life,
I thought of his cataracts ablaze with Heaven
and radiant with the sight of his dead wife,
light streaming from his mouth to shape her name,
'not Florence and not Flo but always Florrie.'
I thought how his cold tongue burst into flame
but only literally, which makes me sorry,
sorry for his sake there's no Heaven to reach.
I get it all from Earth my daily bread
but he hungered for release from mortal speech
that kept him down, the tongue that weighed like lead.
The baker’s man that no one will see rise
and England made to feel like some dull oaf
is smoke, enough to sting one person’s eyes
and ash (not unlike flour) for one small loaf.

Tony Harrison, February 24, 2023

ON AN INVITATION TO THE UNITED STATES

I  
 
My ardours for emprize nigh lost  
Since Life has bared its bones to me,  
I shrink to seek a modern coast  
Whose riper times have yet to be;  
Where the new regions claim them free  
From that long drip of human tears  
Which peoples old in tragedy  
Have left upon the centuried years.  

II  
 
For, wonning in these ancient lands,  
Enchased and lettered as a tomb,  
And scored with prints of perished hands,  
And chronicled with dates of doom,  
Though my own Being bear no bloom  
I trace the lives such scenes enshrine,  
Give past exemplars present room,  
And their experience count as mine. 

​

Thomas Hardy, February 20, 2023

DREAM SONG 125: BARDS FREEZING

Bards freezing, naked, up to the neck in water,
wholly in dark, time limited, different from
initiations now:
the class in writing, clothed & dry & light,
unlimited time, till Poetry takes some,
nobody reads them though,

no trumpets, no solemn instauration, no change;
no commissions, ladies high in soulful praise
(pal) none,
costumes as usual, turtleneck sweaters, loafers,
in & among the busy Many who brays
art is if anything fun.

I say the subject was given as of old,
prescribed the technical treatment, tests really tests
were set by the masters & graded.
I say the paralyzed fear lest one's not one
is back with us forever, worsts & bests
spring for the public, faded.

John Berryman, February 17, 2023

ARACHNE

What is that bundle hanging from the ceiling

Unresting even now with constant slight

Drift in the breeze that breathes through rooms at night?

Can it be something, then, that once had feeling,

A girl, perhaps, whose skill and pride and hope

Strangle against each other in the rope?

I think it is a tangle of despair

As shapeless as a bit of woven nest,

Blackened and matted, quivering without rest

At the mercy of the movements of the air

Where half-lodged, half-fallen from the hedge

It hangs tormented at a season's edge.

What an exact artificer she had been!

Her daintiness and firmness are reduced

To lumpy shadow that the dark has noosed.

Something is changing, though.  Movements begin

Obscurely as the court of night adjourns,

A tiny busyness at the center turns.

So she spins who was monarch of the loom,

Reduced indeed, but she lets out a fine

And delicate yet tough and tensile line

That catches full day in the little room,

Then sways minutely, suddenly out of sight,

And then again the thread invents the light.

Thom Gunn, February 13, 2023

CLEARANCES IV

Fear of affectation made her affect
 

Inadequacy whenever it came to       

Pronouncing words ‘beyond her’. Bertold Brek.
 

She’d manage something hampered and askew
 

Every time, as if she might betray 

The hampered and inadequate by too 

Well-adjusted a vocabulary. 

With more challenge than pride, she’d tell me, ‘You   

Know all them things.’ So I governed my tongue 

In front of her, a genuinely well- 

Adjusted adequate betrayal 

Of what I knew better. I’d naw and aye   

And decently relapse into the wrong 

Grammar which kept us allied and at bay.     

Seamus Heaney, February 10, 2023

THE STOLEN CHILD

Where dips the rocky highland

Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,

There lies a leafy island

Where flapping herons wake

The drowsy water-rats;

There we've hid our faery vats,

Full of berries

And of reddest stolen cherries.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you

can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses

The dim grey sands with light,

Far off by furthest Rosses

We foot it all the night,

Weaving olden dances,

Mingling hands and mingling glances

Till the moon has taken flight;

To and fro we leap

And chase the frothy bubbles,

While the world is full of troubles

And is anxious in its sleep.

Come away, O human child!

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For the world's more full of weeping than you

can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes

From the hills above Glen-Car,.

In pools among the rushes

That scarce could bathe a star,

We seek for slumbering trout

And whispering in their ears

Give them unquiet dreams;

Leaning softly out

From ferns that drop their tears

Over the young streams.

Come away, O human child!

To to waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

For to world's more full of weeping than you

can understand.

Away with us he's going,

The solemn-eyed:

He'll hear no more the lowing

Of the calves on the warm hillside

Or the kettle on the hob

Sing peace into his breast,

Or see the brown mice bob

Round and round the oatmeal-chest.

For be comes, the human child,

To the waters and the wild

With a faery, hand in hand,

from a world more full of weeping than you.

William Butler Yeats, February 6, 2023

LIBERTY

When liberty is headlong girl

And runs her roads and wends her ways

Liberty will shriek and whirl

Her showery torch to see it blaze.

​

When liberty is wedded wife

And keeps the barn and counts the byre

Liberty amends her life.

She drowns her torch for fear of fire.

Archibald MacLeish, February 3, 2023

FIRST FROST

The time of the year for the mystics.

October sky and the Cloud of Unknowing.

The routes of eternity beckoning.

Sign and enigma in the humblest of things.

Master cobbler Jakob Boehme

Sat in our kitchen all morning.

He sipped tea and warned of the quiet

To which the wise must school themselves.

The young woman paid no attention.

Hair fallen over her eyes,

Breasts loose and damp in her robe,

Stubbornly scrubbing a difficult stain.

Then the dog’s bark brought us all outdoors.

And that wasn’t just geese honking

But Dame Julian of Norwich herself discoursing

On the marvelous courtesy and homeliness of the Maker.

Charles Simic, January 30, 2023

BLOOD ORANGE

It looks so dark the end of the world may be near.
I believe it’s going to rain.
The birds in the park are silent.
Nothing is what it seems to be,
Nor are we.

​

There’s a tree on our street so big
We can all hide in its leaves.
We won’t need any clothes either.
I feel as old as a cockroach, you said.
In my head, I’m a passenger on a ghost ship.

​

Not even a sigh outdoors now.
If a child was left on our doorstep,
It must be asleep.
Everything is teetering on the edge of everything
With a polite smile.

​

It’s because there are things in this world
That just can’t be helped, you said.
Right then, I heard the blood orange
Roll off the table with a thud
And lie cracked open on the floor.

Charles Simic, January 27, 2023

SUNDAY PAPERS

​

The butchery of innocents

Never stops. That is about all

We can ever be sure of, love,

Even more sure than of this roast

You are bringing out from the oven.

It's Sunday. The congregation

Files slowly out of the church

Across the street. A good many

Carry bibles in their hands.

It's the vague desire for truth

And the mighty fear of it

That makes them turn up

Despite the glorious spring weather.

In the hallway, the old mutt

Just now had the honesty

To growl at his own image in the mirror,

Before lumbering off to the kitchen

Where the lamb roast sat

In your outstretched hands

Smelling of garlic and rosemary.

Charles Simic, January 23, 2023

PSALM

You've been a long time making up your mind,
O Lord, about these madmen
Running the world. Their reach is long
And their claws must have frightened you.

One of them found me with his shadow.
The day turned chill. I dangled
Between terror and valor
In the darkest corner of my son's bedroom.

I sought with my eyes, You in whom I do not believe.
You've been busy making the flowers pretty,
The lambs run after their mother,
Or perhaps you haven't been doing even that?

It was spring. The killers were full of sport
And merriment, and your divines
Were right at their side, to make sure
Our final goodbyes were said properly.

Charles Simic, January 20, 2023

ENCYCLOPEDIA OF HORROR 

​

Nobody reads it but the insomniacs.
How strange to find a child,
Slapped by his mother only this morning,
And the mad homeless woman
Who squatted to urinate in the street.

Perhaps they’ve missed something?
That smoke-shrouded city after a bombing raid,
The corpses like cigarette butts
In a dinner plate overflowing with ashes.
But no, everyone is here.

O were you to come, invisible tribunal,
There’d be too many images to thumb through,
Too many stories to listen to,
Like the one about guards playing cards
After they were done beating their prisoner.

Charles Simic, January 16, 2023

BEGOTTEN OF THE SPLEEN

The Virgin Mother walked barefoot
Among the land mines.
She carried and old man in her arms
Like a howling babe.

The earth was an old people's home.
Judas was the night nurse,
Emptying bedpans into the river Jordan,
Tying people on a dog chain.

The old man had two stumps for legs.
St. Peter came pushing a cart
Loaded with flying carpets.
They were not flying carpets.

They were piles of blood diapers.
The Magi stood around
Cleaning their nails with bayonets.
The old man gave little Mary Magdalene

A broke piece of a mirror.
She hid in the church outhouse.
When she got thirsty she licked
the steam off the glass.

That leaves Joseph. Poor Joseph,
Standing naked in the snow.
He only had a rat
To load his suitcases on.

The rat wouldn't run into its hold.
Even when the lights came on--
And the lights came on:
The floodlights in the guard towers.

Charles Simic, January 13, 2023

KRUHOVÝ OBJEZD V IOWĚ

veprostřed zarostlý

vzpřímeným plevelem tak prostopášným

že jsme jej v rozechvění

dvakrát objeli

na své nevyhnutelné cestě

k Velkým pláním

Petr Hruška, January 9, 2023

1047

​

The Opening and the Close
Of Being, are alike
Or differ, if they do,
As Bloom upon a Stalk.

That from an equal Seed
Unto an equal Bud
Go parallel, perfected
In that they have decayed.

Emily Dickinson, January 6, 2023

HISTORY OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, 1911

​

1911 is wholly given
to looking balanced albeit uneven.
In Hamburg, stirring his nation's helm
the German Kaiser (for you, Wilhelm
the Second) demands what sounds weird for some:
"A Place for Germany in the Sun".
It you were French, you would say C'est tout.
Yet Hitler is barely twenty-two
and things in the sun aren't so hot besides.
The activity of the sun excites
the Chinese to abolish pigtails and then
proclaim a republic with Sun Yat-Sen
their first President. (Although how three hundred
twenty-five millions can be handled
by a Parliament, frankly, beats
me. That is, how many seats
would they have had in that grand pavilion?
And even if it's just one guy per million
what would a minority of, say, ten percent
add up to? This is like counting sand!
For this democracy has no lexicon!)
Along the same latitude, the Mexican
Civil War is over, and saintly, hesitant
Francisco Madero becomes the President.
Italy finding the Turks too coarse
to deal with, resorts to the air force
for the first time in history, while da Vinci's
Mona Lisa gets stolen from the Louver - which is
why the cops in Paris grab Monsieur Guillaume
Apollinaire who though born in Rome,
writes in French, and has other energies.
Rilke prints his Duinese Elegies
and in London, suffragettes poke their black
umbrellas at Whitehall and cry Alack!

Man of the year is a great Norwegian.
The crucial word in their tongue is "Skol".
They are born wearing turtlenecks in that region.
When they go South, they hit the Pole.

(Roald Amundsen)

"I am Roald Amundsen. I like ice.
The world is my oyster for it's capped twice
with ice: first, Arctical, then Antarctical.
Human life in those parts is a missing article.
O! when the temperature falls subzero
the eyes grow blue, the heart sincere.
There are neither doubts nor a question mark:
it's the tails of your huskies which pull and bark".

Joseph Brodsky, January 2, 2023

​