No Man Is An Island


No man is an island,
Entire of itself;
Every man is a piece of the continent,
A part of the main.


If a clod be washed away by the sea,

Proclamation

Whereas the world is a house on fire;
Whereas the nations are filled with shouting;
Whereas hope seems small, sometimes
a single bird on a wire
left by...

Rearmament

These grand and fatal movements toward death: the grandeur
of the mass
Makes pity a fool, the tearing pity
For the atoms of the mass, the persons, the victims, makes it
seem...

The Laughing Child


When she looked down from the kitchen window
into the back yard and the brown wicker
baby carriage in which she had tucked me
three months old to lie out in the fresh air...

Family Syllabus

The butterfly is quickly seized and eaten just above their lifted heads
the children had trapped it in the house under glass and card
the father brought it to freedom in the...

Politics


How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics,
Yet here's a travelled man that knows
What he talks about,
And there's a...

Theories of Time and Space



You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.

Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been. Try this:

Plums Failing Well


So what if plums fall
out of the tree, to lie
squashed and decomposing
on the earth? So what if
the only attention they receive
is from the ants and birds
who find...

Frost on Fire

A thing that melts can also burn: like a
Thicket of ice in the pond, the cold net
Of stars, even the hard white ax of the
Heart. A man can freeze without getting wet

Just as he...

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Background image taken one evening from the Jr. College's Maginni Hall's 3rd floor.

How It Happens


The sky said I am watching

to see what you

can make out of nothing

I was looking up and I said

The Gift

Time wants to show you a different country. It's the one
that your life conceals, the one waiting outside
when curtains are drawn, the one Grandmother hinted at
in her crochet design,...

The End and the Beginning


After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,

Top right image taken from Peruvian Nasca hummingbird line.


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When Death Comes

When death comes
like the hungry bear in autumn;
when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse

to buy me, and snaps the purse shut;
when death comes
like...

Extra, Extra

All hail the yellow flag of spring waving on the earth,
the fields striking light against the bell of the sky
in one triumphant peal announcing revolution.
Sing hail to the...

Wildpeace

Not the peace of a cease-fire
not even the vision of the wolf and the lamb,
but rather
as in the heart when the excitement is over
and you can talk only about a great...

In The Absence Of Bliss

Museum of the Diaspora, Tel Aviv

The roasting alive of rabbis
in the ardor of the Crusades
went unremarked in Europe from
the Holy Roman Empire to 1918,
open without...

The Last Dog In The World

The last dog in the world

stands outside the dismantled city

A forest of buildings falls down
inside him. When he sleeps

he dreams of forests, but awake

The Call

Women in black picked up their violins
To play, backs turned to the mirror.
The wind died as it does on the best days
To hear better their dark music.
But almost at once,...

Danse Russe
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,-
if I in my north room
dance naked,...

Shoveling Snow With Buddha

In the usual iconography of the temple or the local Wok
you would never see him doing such a thing,
tossing the dry snow over a mountain
of his bare, round shoulder,...

The Spring

(After Rilke)

Spring has returned! Everything has returned!
The earth, just like a schoolgirl, memorizes
Poems, so many poems. ... Look, she has learned
So many famous poems, she...

Why Should Not Old Men Be Mad

Why should not old men be mad?
Some have known a likely lad
That had a sound fly fisher's wrist
Turn to a drunken journalist;
A girl that knew all Dante once...

For The Children


The rising hills, the slopes
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up
up, as we all
go down.

The Song of Wandering Aengus


I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the...

Reinventing America

The city was huge. A boy of twelve could walk
for hours while the closed houses stared down at him
from early morning to dusk, and he'd get nowhere.
Oh no, I was not that...

What Do Women Want?

I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress,...

On a Lamp Post Long Ago

I don’t know what to think of first
in the list

of all the things that are disappearing: Fishes, birds, trees, flowers, bees,

and languages too. They say that if...

Dover Beach

The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full,
the moon lies fair
Upon the straits;
on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand;
Glimmering and...

Thanksgiving Day

Over the river, and through the wood,
To grandfather’s house we go;
The horse knows the way
To carry the sleigh
Through the white and drifted snow.

Over...

A Word On Statistics
<o:p> </o:p>
Out of every hundred people

those who always know better:
fifty-two.

Unsure of every step:
nearly all the rest.

See:
Robert Robert Lowell's "For the Union Dead" and St. Gaudens' Memorial to Robert Gould Shaw

Street Musicians


One died, and the soul was wrenched out
Of the other in life, who, walking the streets
Wrapped in an identity like a coat, sees on and on
The same corners, volumetrics,...

Why Then Do We Not Despair?

Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold,
Death's great black wing scrapes the air,
Misery gnaws to the bone.
Why then do we not despair?

By day, from the...

American Nightmare

I'm in bed with America.
America is writhing and moaning in her sleep,
twisting the bed sheets around her
as if coiled in the grip of a giant boa constrictor.
America...

How Could I Ever Forget That Flash

How could I ever forget that flash of light! https://www.WaccoBB.net/forums/waccobb/keep90days/2017-08-07_10-17-47.png
In a moment, thirty thousand people...

Via a colleague, here's today's opinion piece from New York Times columnist. Jude

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Reading an Anthology of Chinese Poems of the Sung Dynasty,
I Pause to Admire the Length and Clarity of Their Titles



It seems these poets have nothing
up their ample sleeves
they turn over...

Love Comes Quietly

Love comes quietly,
Finally drops around me,
On me, in the old way.

What did I know,
Thinking myself able to go alone
All the way?

Meditations At Lagunitas


All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general...

Rain

A teacher asked Paul
what he would remember
from third grade, and he sat
a long time before writing
"this year sumbody tutched me
on the sholder"
and turned his paper in.
Later she...

St. Roach

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you,
for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth,
they showed me by every action to despise your kind;
for that I...

Watching

for my father

You and I used to talk about
Lear and his girls
(I read it in school,

you saw it on the Yiddish stage
where the audience yelled:

What Song Should We Sing

The massive overhead crane comes
when we wave to it, lets down
its heavy claws and waits tamely
within its power while we hook up
the slabs of three-quarter-inch...

The Fall of Rome
(for Cyril Connolly)


The piers are pummelled by the waves;
In a lonely field the rain
Lashes an abandoned train;
Outlaws fill the mountain caves.

Fantastic grow the...

On the fifth day
the scientists who studied the rivers
were forbidden to speak
or to study the rivers.

The scientists who studied the air
were told not to speak of the air,
and the ones who...

The Lights Are On Everywhere

The Emperor must not be told night is coming.
His armies are chasing shadows,
Arresting whip-poor-wills and hermit thrushes
And setting towns and villages on fire....

The Wings of Love



I will row my boat on Muckross Lake when the grey of the dove

Comes down at the end of the day; and a quiet like prayer

Grows soft in your eyes, and among your...

Heritage

The ram came last
And Abraham did not know that he
Came in answer to the boy’s request
His first strength at the time of the waning day.

The old man raised his head.
When he saw...