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A Day Comes
A day comes
when the mouth grows tired
of saying "I."
Yet it is occupied
still by a self which must speak.
Which still desires,
is curious.
Which believes it also has a right.
What to do?
The tongue consults with the teeth
it knows will survive
both mouth and self.
Which grin—it is their natural pose—
and say nothing.
- Jane Hirshfield
Heat
When I was little, young men like my uncles would croon.
Walking on the street or doing chores, a baritone groan:
Blue Skies. The blue of the night meets the gold of the day.
Body and Soul, Ramona, Ballerina, Too-ra-loo-ra-lay.
I asked my mother, why did the uncles sing like that?
Her three-syllable answer puzzled me: They’re in heat.
I remember it today as the young guy driving his van
With sound system blasting stops at a light, windows down.
We want to sound hot and magnetic. Or warm and charming -
Even the folk singer singing a song about global warming.
Folk music? All music is folk music, said a great musician:
I never heard a horse sing. (But they do play percussion.)
The souls deepest in hell don’t burn, they’re frozen in ice.
You’re full of hot air is an insult. But hot breath can be nice.
Your mother, color, class, region all co-author your drama:
Culture. A jerk politician can make hay in Oklahoma
By saying he doesn’t believe in Darwin, or climate change.
Let’s take a kayak to Nyack. Or be more at home on the range.
Vote for you, sigh for you, die for you. Is this the counterfoil
To sweetest music? Entropy, energy. Dead life come back as oil
To enable movement, music, power and light, heat, racket.
Cigarette lipstick traces, you know how we do, an airplane ticket.
Cool or hot music, cold calculation or comfort. Ancestral voice
Of pride or need: keening meaning — will we die of all this?
- Robert Pinsky
Let's Not Waste Time
If the sea is infinite and has nets,
if its music comes from the wave,
if the dawn is red and the sunset green,
if the forest is lust and the moon a caress,
if the rose opens and perfumes the house,
if the girl laughs and perfumes life,
if love comes and kisses me and leaves me trembling,
What does it matter,
while in my neighborhood there's a table without legs,
a child with no shoes or a bookkeeper coughing,
a banquet of potato peels,
a concert of dogs,
an opera of scabs.....
We need to become worried enough to cure the seeds,
bandage the hearts and write the poem
that will infect everyone.
And create the sentence which will embrace the whole world,
poets must smash swords,
must invent more colors and write Paternosters.
Letting laughter stay in the mouths of the tunnel,
not tell what's intimate, but sing in a choir,
not sing to the moon, not sing to the bride,
not write poems with ten-line stanzas, not fabricate sonnets,
Because we know how, we must yell at the mighty,
shout what I'm saying, that there are enough who live
howling under tin roofs with only what they have on their backs,
and mothers who don't comb their children's hair every day,
and fathers who wake up early and don't go to the theatre.
To clothe the humble placing our poems on their shoulders,
it's right to sing to the one who has no song and help him.
To kill usurers and with a rare patience convince them without
disgust,
To thresh in the fields, go down into a mine,
to be a diver for a week, visiting nursing homes,
jails, ruins, play with tiny children,
dance in the leprosaria.
Poets, let's not waste time, let's work,
because very little blood is reaching the heart.
- Gloria Fuertes
(from Anthology and Poems of the Slum, 1954)
Cutting Loose
Sometimes from sorrow, for no reason,
you sing. For no reason, you accept
the way of being lost, cutting loose
from all else and electing a world
where you go where you want to.
Arbitrary, a sound comes, a reminder
that a steady center is holding
all else. If you listen, that sound
will tell you where it is and you
can slide your way past trouble.
Certain twisted monsters
always bar the path -- but that's when
you get going best, glad to be lost,
learning how real it is
here on earth, again and again.
- William Stafford
Falcon Moon
From the glow of dawn a moon appeared
It swept from the sky—speared me with its eyes
With me in its talons, to the sky it soared--
Like a hawk which snatches a songbird by force
I glanced at myself--no me to be seen
The moon of mercy pared my body to a soul
Formless I flew, just seeing the moon--
The moon, and the world lit in its gleam
In the soul I traveled, with the moon as my beacon
Lay bare the secret of the time before time
Sky, and then sky, all merged with the moon
The raft that is me was drowned in the sea
Without the force of that Sunburst of Shams
Neither the moon nor the sea can be seen.
- Jelalludin Rumi
Ghazal 19
(Translation by Shantanu Phukan)
Falcon Moon
Dar Charkh-e sahargah yaki mah ayan shud
Vaz charkh bazer amad o bar ma nigran shud
Chun baz ke birbayad murghi ba-gahe said
Birbud mara an mah o bar charkh ravan shud
Dar khud chun nazar kardam, khud ra banadidam
Zeera ke dar an mah tanamaz lutf chun jan shud
Dar jan chun safar kardam juz mah nadidam
Ta sirr-e tajalliye azal jumle bayan shud
Na charkh-e falakjumle dar an mah firo shud
Kashtiyye vujudam hame dar bahr-e nihan shud
An bahr bazad mauj o khirad baz bar amad
V-avaz dar afgand, chunin gasht o chunan shud
An bahr kafi kard ba har pareh az an kaf
Naqshi zi falan amad o jismi zi fulan shud
Be daulate makhdumiye shams al haqi tabrez
Nai mah tavan didan, o nai bahr tavan shud
When the Horses Gallop Away from Us, It's a Good Thing
I always find it strange though I shouldn't how creatures don't
care for us the way we care for them.
Horses, for instance, and chipmunks, and any bird you'd name.
Empathy's only a one-way street.
And that's all right, I've come to believe.
It sets us up for ultimate things,
and penultimate ones as well.
It's a good lesson to have in your pocket when the Call comes to
call.
- Charles Wright
Something About Habit
Habit goes a long way
to explain us, but not
far enough. Take Mother.
Dying of leukemia, she wanted
to leave early for the doctor’s one morning
so that I could see a new restaurant.
“It’s a greenhouse and a restaurant!”
She didn’t know that at that point
she had five more days to live.
Restaurants, we know, are places
of pilgrimage for the middle class.
Mother wanted nothing more
than to keep living as she had.
Even when she could no longer eat
she kept going out with friends,
ordering, then staring at her food.
It wasn’t only habit, of course,
but the love of life itself.
Sometimes love can also bring us
to question a habit. Each morning
I receive an e-mail forecast
for the weather in two places: my home
and St. Louis, where Mother lived.
Home again after her funeral,
that e-mail looked strange one morning.
I kept thinking, “Why does it matter
what the weather is in St. Louis?”
- Max Reif
The Hunters
(after the /xam Bushman)
To see where the animals hide
is what we wish.
For the stars to take our hearts,
our hungry hearts,
and give us star-plenty, star-fullness,
is what we wish.
Always the stars are calling out:
"Tsau! Tsau!"
They are cursing the springbok's eyes
for men to kill.
Sitting outside in the cool of night
my grandfather spoke,
he said the springbok's eyes are cursed
by the sound of stars.
I listen for it now on summer nights
the "tsau! tsau!" of stars.
My grandfather said to the Ant Egg Star
when she rose,
"Take away my heart and change it
for a star-heart,
so my hunger, my burning hunger
will be satisfied.
I want a star's belly which is always full
and star arms.
My arrows stray and the game gets away
but stars aim well."
He sat down, he was silent,
he sharpened his arrows.
- Harold Farmer
Housecleaning
I packed up my ambition and sent it to the Salvation Army,
hoping for a tax deduction
hoping its remnants might better serve some other lost soul.
I washed my ego carefully
and put it at the curb with the other recyclables,
hoping it would come back in a milder form
seven generations from now.
I dismantled my arrogance
and bubble wrapped it for shipping to far-off places
more in need of my aggressive idealism,
hoping its use would better balance justice in the world.
I turned my jacket of pride inside out
and found humility hiding in the lining.
My karma exhausted by this cleaning, I took a nap.
And awoke in the autumn afternoon light
to find the last of the golden summer lilies in bloom.
- Laura Freebairn-Smith
Sympathy
I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft though the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opens,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals--
I know what the caged bird feels!
I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-wing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting--
I know why he beats his wing!
I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,--
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart's deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings--
I know why the caged bird sings!
- Paul Laurence Dunbar (1899)
Everyone Sang
Everyone suddenly burst out singing;
And I was fill’d with such delight
As prison’d birds must find freedom
Winging wildly across the white
Orchards and dark-green fields; on; on and out of sight.
Everyone’s voice was suddenly lifted,
And beauty came like the setting sun.
My heart was shaken with tears; and horror
Drifted away . . . O but every one
Was a bird; and the song was wordless; the singing will never be done.
- Siegfried Sasson
Sunday Phone Call
Drab December, sleet falling.
Dogs loosely coiled in torpor.
Horses nose-down in hay.
It's the hour years ago
I used to call my parents
or they'd call me.
The phone rings. Idly
empty of expectation
I answer. It's my father's
voice. Pop! I say, you're dead!
Don't you remember
that final heart attack,
Dallas, just before
Kennedy was shot?
Time means nothing here,
kiddo. He's jolly, expansive.
You can wait eons for an open line.
Time gets used up but
comes back. You know.
Like Ping-Pong.
Ping-Pong! The table in
the attic. My father, shirtsleeves
rolled, the wet stub of
a burnt-out cigarette
stuck to his lower lip as
he murdered each one
of my three older brothers
and me yearning under the eaves,
waiting for my turn.
You sound ... just like yourself,
I say. I am myself, goddammit!
Anyway, what's this
about an accident?
How did you hear about it?
I read it somewhere. Broke
your neck, et cetera.
He says this vaguely,
his shorthand way
of keeping feelings at bay.
Now I'm indignant.
But I almost died!
Didn't I tell you
never buy land on a hill?
It's worthless. What's
an educated dame like you
doing messing with horses?
Messing with horses is
for punks. Then, a little
softer, I see you two've
put a lot of work into
that hunk of real estate.
Thanks. Thanks for even
noticing. We love it here.
We'll never sell.
Like hell you won't!
You will!
Pop, I say, tearing up,
let's not fight for once.
My only Poppa, when
do I get to see you?
A long pause. Then,
coughing his cigarette cough,
Pupchen, he says,
I may be dead but
I'm not clairvoyant.
Behave yourself.
The line clicks off.
- Maxine Kumin
this amazing day
i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky;and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday;this is the birth
day of life and love and wings:and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)
how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any-lifted from the no
of all nothing-human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?
(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)
- e.e. cummings
Arrival
Evening arrives unnoticed,
like a large black cat
lying down,
encircling the house,
its purring felt,
not heard,
stars in its
curled
tail.
- Scott O'Brien
wow, that was gorgeous.
Thanks! :):
Quote:
Posted in reply to the post by Larry Robinson:
Begin
*
Begin again to the summoning birds
to the sight of light at the window,
begin to the roar of morning traffic
all along Pembroke Road.
Every beginning is a promise
born in light and dying in dark
determination and exaltation of springtime
flowering the way to work.
Begin to the pageant of queuing girls
the arrogant loneliness of swans in the canal
bridges linking the past and future
old friends passing though with us still.
Begin to the loneliness that cannot end
since it perhaps is what makes us begin,
begin to wonder at unknown faces
at crying birds in the sudden rain
at* branches stark in the willing sunlight
at seagulls foraging for bread
at couples sharing a sunny secret
alone together while making good.
Though we live in a world that dreams of*ending
that always seems about to give in
something that will not acknowledge conclusion
insists that we forever*begin.
*
- Brendan Kennelly
Where Does the Dance Begin, Where Does It End?
Don't call this world adorable, or useful, that's not it.
It's frisky, and a theater for more than fair winds.
The eyelash of lightning is neither good nor evil.
The struck tree burns like a pillar of gold.
But the blue rain sinks, straight to the white
feet of the trees
whose mouths open.
Doesn't the wind, turning in circles, invent the dance?
Haven't the flowers moved, slowly, across Asia, then Europe,
until at last, now, they shine
in your own yard?
Don't call this world an explanation, or even an education.
When the Sufi poet whirled, was he looking
outward, to the mountains so solidly there
in a white-capped ring, or was he looking
to the center of everything: the seed, the egg, the idea
that was also there,
beautiful as a thumb
curved and touching the finger, tenderly,
little love-ring,
as he whirled,
oh jug of breath,
in the garden of dust?
- Mary Oliver
*Promise of Blue Horses
A blue horse turns into a streak of lightning,
then the sun --
relating the difference between sadness
and the need to praise
that which makes us joyful, I can't calculate
how the earth tips hungrily
toward the sun - then soaks up rain -- or the density
of this unbearable need
to be next to you. It's a palpable thing -- this earth
philosophy
and familiar in the dark
like your skin under my hand. We are a small earth. It's no
simple thing. Eventually
we will be dust together; can be used to make a house, to stop
a flood or grow food
for those who will never remember who we were, or know
that we loved fiercely.
Laughter and sadness eventually become the same song turning us
toward the nearest star --
a star constructed of eternity and elements of dust barely visible
in the twilight as you travel
east. I run with the blue horses of electricity who surround
the heart
and imagine a promise made when no promise was possible.
- Joy Harjo
Global Vomit
some black gooey stuff
emerged from the bottom
under emerald water
trapping an entire civilization
in its fragrance
its convenient charming essence
of self propulsion and frantic travel
it fooled us all
the wealthy and impoverished alike
accepted the inevitable
oil cracking to gasoline
transforming our lush world
addiction rules the land
now we feel the pangs of remorse
as the vomit rages across air land and sea
taking life and livelihood at will
defiling and dishonoring everything it touches
we, back in the driver's seat
check the rearview mirror
for what is to come
- Richard Nichols
Already The Ripening Barberries
Already the ripening barberries are red
and the old asters hardly breathe in their beds.
The man who is not rich now as summer goes
will wait and wait and never be himself.
The man who cannot quietly close his eyes
certain that there is vision after vision inside,
simply waiting for nighttime
to rise all around him in darkness –
it’s all over for him, he’s like an old man.
Nothing else will come; no more days will open
and everything that does happen will cheat him.
Even You, my God. And You are like a stone
that draws him daily deeper into the depths
- Rainer Maria Rilke
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 boy. Even at twelve I knew
enough to stay in my own neighborhood,
I knew anyone who left might not return.
Boys were animals with animal hungers
I learned early. Better to stay close to home.
I'd try to bum cigarettes from the night workers
as they left the bars in the heavy light of noon
or I'd hang around the grocery hoping
one of the beautiful young wives would ask me
to help her carry her shopping bags home.
You're wondering what I was up to. Not much.
The sun rose late in November and set early.
At times I thought life was rushing by too fast.
Before I knew it I'd be my half-blind uncle
married to a woman who cried all day long
while in the basement he passed his time working
on short-wave radio calls to anywhere.
I'd sneak down and talk to him, Uncle Nathan,
wiry in his boxer's shorts and high-topped boots,
chewing on a cigar, the one dead eye catching
the overhead light while he mused on his life
on the road or at sea. How he loved the whores
in the little Western towns and the Latin ports!
He'd hold his hands out to approximate
their perfect breasts. The months in jail had taught him
a man had only his honor and his ass
to protect. "You turn your fist this way," he said,
taking my small hand in both of his, "and fire
from the shoulder, so," and he'd extend it out
to the face of an imaginary foe.
Why he'd returned to this I never figured out,
though life was ample here, a grid of crowded blocks
of Germans, Wops, Polacks, Jews, wild Irish,
plus some square heads from the Upper Peninsula.
Six bakeries, four barber shops, a five and dime,
twenty beer gardens, a Catholic church with a shul
next door where we studied the Talmud-Torah.
Wonderful how all the old hatreds bubbled
So quietly on the back burner you could
forget until one day they tore through the pool halls,
the bowling alley, the high school athletic fields
leaving an eye gone, a long fresh, livid scar
running to touch a mouth, young hands raw or broken,
boys and girls ashamed of what they were, ashamed
of what they were not. It was merely village life,
exactly what our parents left in Europe
brought to America with pure fidelity.
- Philip Levine
Twilight in Hendy Woods
This is the hour of magic
When this world and the other world
Touch in a lingering kiss
And a deep stillness settles over all things.
This is the hour of magic
When the Earth,
For one eternal moment, holds its breath
Before turning from the sun.
This is the hour of magic
When, if you listen
With an open heart and a quiet mind,
You can hear the Ancient Ones, the elders of the forest
Telling the old stories:
Of the chainsaw massacres and the fires;
Of the great ice ages and the birth of mountain ranges;
Of the times long past when they were many and covered the Earth.
They are leaving us now.
When they are gone,
Who will tell these stories?
- Larry Robinson
Saint Francis And The Sow
The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don't flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
Put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch
blessing of the earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and blowing
beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.
- Galway Kinnell
A Story That Could Be True
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.
He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by -
you wonder at their calm.
They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?” -
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
- William Stafford
A Name For All
Moonmoth and grasshopper that flee our page
And still wing on, untarnished of the name
We pinion to your bodies to assuage
Our envy of your freedom—we must maim
Because we are usurpers, and chagrined—
And take the wing and scar it in the hand.
Names we have, even, to clap on the wind;
But we must die, as you, to understand.
I dreamed that all men dropped their names, and sang
As only they can praise, who build their days
With fin and hoof, with wing and sweetened fang
Struck free and holy in one Name always.
- Hart Crane
My beloved caressed me yesterday
and let me,
who has tasted nothing but sorrow,
taste his soul.
He gave wisdom to my mind
and put an earring my ear.
He gave light to my eyes
and brought sweetness to my taste.
He spoke to me:
"O one who's become wasted
because of me,
O one who is afraid of me,
know that I'm kind.
I would never sell a slave I've bought."
Look and see
how he does help,
the differences he makes.
Joseph remembers the ones
who cut off their hands for him.
He embraced me like his own soul.
My doubts and ill feelings left me.
He put his beautiful face on my shoulder.
- Jellaludin Rumi
(translation by Nevit O. Ergin & Will Johnson)
Reckless Poem
Today again I am hardly myself.
It happens over and over.
It is heaven-sent.
It flows through me
like the blue wave.
Green leaves – you may believe this or not –
have once or twice
emerged from the tips of my fingers
somewhere
deep in the woods,
in the reckless seizure of spring.
Though, of course, I also know that other song,
the sweet passion of one-ness.
Just yesterday I watched an ant crossing a path, through the
**********tumbled pine needles she toiled.
And I thought: she will never live another life but this one.
And I thought: if she lives her life with all her strength
**********is she not wonderful and wise?
And I continued this up the miraculous pyramid of everything
**********until I came to myself.
And still, even in these northern woods, on these hills of sand,
I have flown from the other window of myself
to become white heron, blue whale,
**********red fox, hedgehog.
Oh, sometimes already my body has felt like the body of a flower!
Sometimes already my heart is a red parrot, perched
among strange, dark trees, flapping and screaming.
- Mary Oliver
The One Thing You Can Do
You cannot by willing it alter the vast world outside of you.
You cannot cut the lash from one whip.
You cannot strike the handcuffs from one chained hand.
You cannot even remake your own soul so that there shall be no inclination to evil in it.
The great world rolls on, and you can do nothing to change it.
But this one thing you can do.
In that one, small, minute, almost infinitesimal place
in the universe where you stand,
there where, as God, your will prevails,
strive to make what you hunger for real.
- Howard Thurman
Ithaca
When you set out on your journey to Ithaca,
pray that the road is long,
full of adventure, full of knowledge.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the angry Poseidon -- do not fear them:
You will never find such as these on your path,
if your thoughts remain lofty, if a fine
emotion touches your spirit and your body.
The Lestrygonians and the Cyclops,
the fierce Poseidon you will never encounter,
if you do not carry them within your soul,
if your soul does not set them up before you.
Pray that the road is long.
That the summer mornings are many, when,
with such pleasure, with such joy
you will enter ports seen for the first time;
stop at Phoenician markets,
and purchase fine merchandise,
mother-of-pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
and sensual perfumes of all kinds,
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
visit many Egyptian cities,
to learn and learn from scholars.
Always keep Ithaca in your mind.
To arrive there is your ultimate goal.
But do not hurry the voyage at all.
It is better to let it last for many years;
and to anchor at the island when you are old,
rich with all you have gained on the way,
not expecting that Ithaca will offer you riches.
Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her you would have never set out on the road.
She has nothing more to give you.
And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, with so much experience,
you must already have understood what Ithacas mean.
- C.P. Cavafy
In Praise of Feeling Bad About Yourself
The buzzard never says it is to blame.
The panther wouldn't know what scruples mean.
When the piranha strikes, it feels no shame.
If snakes had hands, they'd claim their hands were clean.
A jackal doesn't understand remorse.
Lions and lice don't waver in their course.
Why should they, when they know they're right?
Though hearts of killer whales may weigh a ton,
in every other way they're light.
On this third planet of the sun
among the signs of bestiality
a clear conscience is Number One.
- Wislawa Szymborska
(Translated by Stanislaw Baraczak and Clare Cavanagh)