A Favorite Poem

Saffron · Posted: Sun Aug 24, 2008 2:48 pm Post subject:

Here is a poem I first read in college. It was the first poem I considered a favorite. At the time it rang loud and clear in my heart. At 20 I longed to find my way to be of use in the world. The bold is mine. That stanza I took as my own creed.

To Be of Use

The people I love the best
jump into work head first
without dallying in the shallows
and swim off with sure strokes almost out of sight.
They seem to become natives of that element,
the black sleek heads of seals
bouncing like half-submerged balls.

I love people who harness themselves, an ox to a heavy cart,
who pull like water buffalo, with massive patience,
who strain in the mud and the muck to move things forward,
who do what has to be done, again and again.

I want to be with people who submerge
in the task, who go into the fields to harvest
and work in a row and pass the bags along,
who are not parlor generals and field deserters
but move in a common rhythm
when the food must come in or the fire be put out.

Marge Piercy

DWill · Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 7:33 am Post subject:

That really is a great credo poem. It's also one that might cause a twinge to some who have reached the age of 56, naming no names.

Here's another by Robt. Frost that I thought of last week while watching and listening to the ocean waves. The poem has nothing to do with waves or water, but sometimes the mind works that way.

WINDOW TREE

Tree at my window, window tree,
My sash is lowered when night comes on;
But let there never be curtain drawn
Between you and me.

Vague dream-head lifted out of the ground,
And thing next most diffuse to cloud,
Not all your light tongues talking aloud
Could be profound.

But tree, I have seen you taken and tossed,
And if you have seen me when I slept,
You have seen me when I was taken and swept
And all but lost.

That day she put our heads together,
Fate had her imagination about her,
Your head so much concerned with outer,
Mine with inner, weather.

There aren't two other lines that I like better than these last two. This a terrific "relationship" poem, isn't it?

DWill

Saffron · Posted: Mon Aug 25, 2008 9:08 am Post subject:

Grim · Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 10:15 pm Post subject: Re: The Road Not Taken

[quote="DWill"]

Grim · Posted: Tue Aug 26, 2008 10:23 pm Post subject:

Saffron · Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2008 11:25 am Post subject:

I Go Back to May 1937
by Sharon Olds

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

GentleReader9 · Posted: Sat Sep 27, 2008 2:34 pm Post subject:

Oh, Saffron!

What a poem. Thank you for sharing it. I hadn't read it before. All I can say is too bad Sharon Olds wasn't around when I was about to get married at 19 to tell me all that. (Like I would have listened...) Wink

Saffron · Posted: Wed Oct 01, 2008 9:41 pm Post subject:

I heard Jane Hirshfield read this at the 2008 Dodge Poetry Festival.

"For What Binds Us"
Jane Hirshfield

There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down --
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.

And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,

as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest --

And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.

GentleReader9 · Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 7:20 pm Post subject:

Saffron,

I'm sorry if I missed the answer to this recently, but it seems as if maybe you write poetry yourself (?) only I don't remember seeing it. Is there any poetry by you here? If so, where is it posted? I want to give you this poem which I wrote and put up on a creative contributions board in the volunteer office where I work to encourage volunteers to put their work up, too.

Sometimes the Words Are Blocks

Sometimes the words are blocks
You cannot force your heart to birth
Through oval openings; they stick
Fast, corner-first in the tri-foliar valves
While every beat creates contusions
In discreet, unmentioned places
Felt from the inside, yet far beyond expression.

So your heart teaches a speech.
It whispers:
just to you, just to you, just to you
It whispers with your blood
Around the edges of the words too sharp,
Too hard to speak, stuck like ice crystals
In a snowbank smothering your throat.

You think to melt them with your anger,
But that heat comes and goes too quickly,
Leaving only solid freeze.

There is a legend breathed by Spring against the panes
That Love will softly round the corners
So sense can flow again inside your veins.
For now you hear this silently and wait in faith.

(by GentleReader9's alter ego)

Saffron · Posted: Thu Oct 02, 2008 7:32 pm Post subject:

GentleReader9 · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:41 pm Post subject:

I warn you this poem is long, kind of intense, and it is supposed to be centered. It hangs on the wall of the agency where I work. I have read it many times and copied it by hand and with a keyboard. In working here my heart sometimes feels like one of those oxen in the poem above that Saffron shared, but words like these help me practice regard and love for all the people I work with and respect for the diversity of people's experiences in general.

The Courage to Heal
A Tribute
by
Ellen Bass

We were five in a plaid dress with a little white collar.
We were nine, it was after school in the garage, the smell
of motor oil and cut grass through the open window.
We were twelve, fourteen, sixteen in our own beds, in seersucker pajamas,
the rain pelting down and running through the gutters.

It was a neighbor, a priest, a stranger, our father, our mother.
It was every day. It was when he got drunk.
It was before our class trip to the state capitol. When our mother
was in the hospital giving birth. Just once.

We were left for dead.
We were barely scratched.
We were found in a coal bin, so wild they couldn’t catch us to wash, to comb our hair.
Nothing showed.

We lay at the bottom of the stairs. We found ourselves
looking down from a corner of the ceiling.
We found ourselves out on a limb of the maple tree,
in the night sky, up in the stars, where it was cool and there was so much empty space.

We found ourselves in our own beds where it was morning
and our clothes were laid out neatly on the chair,
our mothers prompting us to come for breakfast.

We told an English teacher with straight brown hair
clasped at the nape with a silver barrette.
We told our mother who slapped us once across the face and closed herself like a fist.
We told by carving our skin like a pumpkin.
We never told.

We slept clutching a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary.
By day, we couldn’t concentrate. The long division
on the blackboard smeared in our minds.
We memorized everything. Our handwriting
an exact replica of Palmer cursive, only smaller.

We ate to erect a bulwark. We wouldn’t eat.
We didn’t want bodies. We didn’t want to be a part of the
food chain – eater or eaten.
We took enough pills to kill a horse.
We were in a coma for a month. And emerged in rage.
We smiled. We smiled. We were drunk
the first six years of our daughter’s life.
We held our son’s hand over a candle.
We somehow knew how to mother. That
gave us joy.

Deciding to heal was a choice. The first one
we ever clearly made. We didn’t decide.
The alternatives just became too painful.
We cried every day. We only cried once
but it went on for a year. We never cried.
We gave up and drove a motorcycle into a guard rail.
We threw a chair through the window.
We stood on the steps of the psychaiatric unit
weeping about something we couldn’t remember.
We remembered everything it seemed, each
detail etched into the soft organ of our minds.

We blamed ourselves because he gave us a bicycle.
We blamed ourselves because we didn’t stop it.
We blamed ourselves because our bodies responded.

We stopped blaming ourselves. We beat
a hundred pillows and tore up a year’s worth of the Sunday Times.
We filled forty notebooks with writing that dug through the pages like a plow.
We said once in a quiet voice, I’m angry.

We told our stories and we were believed.
We told our stories and our families denied it. Never
were we left alone like that. It couldn’t have happened.
We told our stories and the faces that listened told theirs.

Once, we held out one fingertip to a woman with kind eyes
and she touched the pad of her finger to ours – for a moment.
Once, we were rocked in a safe lap and someone smoothed
back our hair with a tenderness not even we could deny.

But that wasn’t the end of it. It went on and on
beyond what we’d imagined, beyond what we’d signed up for.
We sat in fear like in our own urine. Our hearts
aching in our hollowed-out chests and down our empty arms.
We thought we would not survive.
Like stroke patients, we had to learn everything anew.
We saw how it had seeped into the corners of our lives like smoke.
Nothing was untainted, except the tough kernel we were born with,
the seed of who we could have been, could still be.

We reclaimed our bodies, inch by precious inch.
Feeling our own skin, astonished, like touching a newborn.
We tried out trust, like experimenting with drugs.
We went back to school. We took a vacation.
We spoke the truth. We did what we wanted.
We learned to sleep. We ate when we were hungry.

We woke in the morning, willing. We wanted
to be alive. We were hungry for all we’d missed.
We took it with eager, patient, or tentative hands
but we took it. We made a cup of tea
in our own kitchen and drank it at a blue table
on which we’d set a small bouquet of daffodils.

Interbane · Posted: Wed Oct 08, 2008 11:10 pm Post subject:

Is that about what I think it's about? I didn't intend to read it, then read it all...

GentleReader9 · Posted: Fri Oct 10, 2008 6:08 pm Post subject:

Thanks for reading it all, Interbane.

I don't know for sure what you think it's about, but if it's about what most people don't like to talk about and say, "Is that what I think it's about?" instead... yep. That's what it's about, okay.

DWill · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 7:18 pm Post subject:

One of the Washington Post's "Poet's Choice" columns Saffron posted (thanks, Saffron) quoted form W.D. Snodgrass's "April Inventory." It's jumping the seasonal gun, but I'll post this poem because I like it. Incidentally, does anyone know the title of a poem by Theodore Roethke containing the line, "I have know the inexorable sadness of pencils."?

April Inventory
by W. D. Snodgrass

The green catalpa tree has turned
All white; the cherry blooms once more.
In one whole year I haven't learned
A blessed thing they pay you for.
The blossoms snow down in my hair;
The trees and I will soon be bare.

The trees have more than I to spare.
The sleek, expensive girls I teach,
Younger and pinker every year,
Bloom gradually out of reach.
The pear tree lets its petals drop
Like dandruff on a tabletop.

The girls have grown so young by now
I have to nudge myself to stare.
This year they smile and mind me how
My teeth are falling with my hair.
In thirty years I may not get
Younger, shrewder, or out of debt.

The tenth time, just a year ago,
I made myself a little list
Of all the things I'd ought to know,
Then told my parents, analyst,
And everyone who's trusted me
I'd be substantial, presently.

I haven't read one book about
A book or memorized one plot.
Or found a mind I did not doubt.
I learned one date. And then forgot.
And one by one the solid scholars
Get the degrees, the jobs, the dollars.

And smile above their starchy collars.
I taught my classes Whitehead's notions;
One lovely girl, a song of Mahler's.
Lacking a source-book or promotions,
I showed one child the colors of
A luna moth and how to love.

I taught myself to name my name,
To bark back, loosen love and crying;
To ease my woman so she came,
To ease an old man who was dying.
I have not learned how often I
Can win, can love, but choose to die.

I have not learned there is a lie
Love shall be blonder, slimmer, younger;
That my equivocating eye
Loves only by my body's hunger;
That I have forces true to feel,
Or that the lovely world is real.

While scholars speak authority
And wear their ulcers on their sleeves,
My eyes in spectacles shall see
These trees procure and spend their leaves.
There is a value underneath
The gold and silver in my teeth.

Though trees turn bare and girls turn wives,
We shall afford our costly seasons;
There is a gentleness survives
That will outspeak and has its reasons.
There is a loveliness exists,
Preserves us, not for specialists.

Saffron · Posted: Mon Oct 13, 2008 7:40 pm Post subject:


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