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Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Fri Jun 10, 2011 1:56 pm
by Penelope
A Poem on the Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy by Nikki Giovanni

Trees are never felled … in summer … Not when the fruit …
is yet to be borne … Never before the promise … is fulfilled …
Not when their cooling shade … has yet to comfort …

Yet there are those … unheeding of nature … indifferent to
ecology … ignorant of need … who … with ax and sharpened
saw … would … in boots … step forth damaging …

Not the tree … for it falls … But those who would … in
summer’s heat … or winter’s cold … contemplate … the
beauty …

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2011 7:11 pm
by giselle

Code: Select all


Pilgrim's Progress

At the start, it goes like this--
One's childhood has a tremendous shape,
                                    and moves like a wild animal
Through the deadfall and understory.
It's endlessly beautiful,
                        elusive and on to something.
It hides out but never disappears.

Later, the sacred places Delphi and Italy on us,
Flicking and flashing through the forest,
                                        half seen, half remembered.
And with them the woods itself,
Each tree, each interlude of marsh grass and beaver shade
Something to tug the sleeve with.

In the end, of course, one's a small dog
At night on the front porch,
                           barking into the darkness
At what he can't see, but smells, somehow, and is suspicious of.
Barking, poor thing, and barking,
With no one at home to call him in,
                                 with no one to turn the light on.


Charles Wright, Scar Tissue
from the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2011 8:51 pm
by Saffron
I like the Charles Wright poem. Serendipity that it ends with the dog - I was just going to post a poem I heard today called "Dog". Now I have to go find it.

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2011 8:54 pm
by Saffron
Saffron wrote:I like the Charles Wright poem. Serendipity that it ends with the dog - I was just going to post a poem I heard today called "Dog". Now I have to go find it.
Poem found!

Dogs

by Aaron Kramer

Looking foolish next to the tree in a one o'clock rain:
umbrella aloft, the leash in my other hand—
I wanted my late-coming neighbor to understand
that dogs are worth the expense, inconvenience, and pain;

their tails are truthful, no coiled rebellion beneath
a loving look; they are quick to kiss you, and quick
to fetch for you, and —should you raise a stick
threateningly—they are quick to show their teeth;

and better still (but this I never revealed),
when you bring downfall home, the death of a hope,
their nonchalant manner does more for you than a drink;
and best of all, when triumph's to be unsealed,
such lack of respect they show for the envelope,
—your fingers halt, the brain cools, and you think.

"Dogs" by Aaron Kramer, from Wicked Times. © University of Illinois Press, 2004.

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Tue Nov 08, 2011 10:11 pm
by giselle
Saffron wrote:I like the Charles Wright poem. Serendipity that it ends with the dog - I was just going to post a poem I heard today called "Dog". Now I have to go find it.
That is kind of coincidental! Thanks for the 'Dog' poem, its great. I thought the Wright poem was quite clever in its transition to the dog (is that like 'going to the dogs'?!) ... its an interesting thought ... we might end as a small dog stuck on the porch barking into the darkness at the unknown and unseen. Almost funny in a dark way, definitely ironic and kind of sad at the same time ... much like life is sometimes.

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2011 3:30 pm
by Saffron
This poem reminds me of some of Robert Frost's poetry.

Men Untrained to Comfort
by Wendell Berry

Jason Needly found his father, old Ab, at work
at the age of eighty in the topmost
tier of the barn. "Come down!" Jason called.
"You got no business up there at your age."
And his father descended, not by a ladder,
there being none, but by inserting his fingers
into the cracks between the boards and climbing
down the wall.

And when he was young
and some account and strong and knew
nothing of weariness, old man Milt Wright,
back in the days they called him "Steady,"
carried the rastus plow on his shoulder
up the high hill to his tobacco patch, so
when they got there his mule would be fresh,
unsweated, and ready to go.

Early Rowanberry,
for another, bought a steel-beam breaking plow
at the store in Port William and shouldered it
before the hardly-believing watchers, and carried it
the mile and a half home, down through the woods
along Sand Ripple.

"But the tiredest my daddy
ever got," his son, Art, told me one day
"was when he carried fifty rabbits and a big possum
in a sack on his back up onto the point yonder
and out the ridge to town to sell them at the store."

"But why," I asked, "didn't he hitch a team
to the wagon and haul them up there by the road?"

"Well," Art said, "we didn't have but two
horses in them days, and we spared them
every way we could. A many a time I've seen
my daddy or grandpa jump off the wagon or sled
and take the end of a singletree beside a horse."

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2011 7:07 pm
by DWill
He had me at the title. Wendell Berry, like Robert Frost, never tries to obscure a subject. I think readers who don't generally like modern poetry might like him, because he doesn't care at all to be fashionable, he's direct and concrete. He must have a collected poems, and it would be well worth reading.

Checked on Amazon. He has Collected Poems, but the pub. date is 1987! A number of books of poems after that, but no updated collected poems, which is odd.

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Sun Dec 04, 2011 7:54 pm
by Saffron
DWill wrote:He had me at the title. Wendell Berry, like Robert Frost, never tries to obscure a subject. I think readers who don't generally like modern poetry might like him, because he doesn't care at all to be fashionable, he's direct and concrete. He must have a collected poems, and it would be well worth reading.

Checked on Amazon. He has Collected Poems, but the pub. date is 1987! A number of books of poems after that, but no updated collected poems, which is odd.
Thanks! I have read a bit of Berry's poetry. I definately think it is worth looking into a collection.

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Mon Dec 05, 2011 1:26 pm
by giselle

Code: Select all

Deep Midwinter

   Snow had fallen, snow on snow
   snow on snow
       -- Christina Rosetti

Once upon a time the sky's
eternal silence broke up into bits, fresh
new-angled nothings
sowing the wind with pique.
                           Not wing,
though it flies, nor spirit,
though it isn't and it is, nor song,
though it could be said to sing
inaudibly, and though it falls
it's liable to forget and float
or sift, indulged by gravity, as though
that hard-and-fast rule had gone
soft and slow.
               Finally,
it settles in the earth, eternal
silence once again, but
tangible, depthed, an unbreathed
breath.
     Long ago -
it is always long ago -
before there were beds,
or blankets, or animals to wish
they had them, snow:
                   snow on snow
on snow.
       
Don McKay from The 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology

Re: Poem on your mind

Posted: Tue Dec 06, 2011 12:31 pm
by Penelope
I am sorry that this is so bleak - but it is also so beautiful:-

In Life after Death, Ted Hughes recalls in painful and moving detail how he and the children coped with the immediate aftermath of the suicide of Silvia Plath, in a flat in Primrose Hill, near London Zoo, in the frozen weeks of one of the coldest winters of the century. Only to find a strange sort of solace:

Dropped from life,
We three made a deep silence
In our separate cots.

We were comforted by wolves.
Under that February moon and the moon of March
The Zoo had come close.
And in spite of the city
Wolves consoled us. Two or three times each night
For minutes on end
They sang. They had found where we lay....

They wound us and enmeshed us
In their wailing for you, their mourning for us,
They wove us into their voices. We lay in your death,
In the fallen snow, under falling snow.