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Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 8:21 am
by Saffron
14

The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter
by Ezra Pound


While my hair was still cut straight across my forehead
I played about the front gate, pulling flowers.
You came by on bamboo stilts, playing horse,
You walked about my seat, playing with blue plums.
And we went on living in the village of Chokan:
Two small people, without dislike or suspicion.

At fourteen I married My Lord you.
I never laughed, being bashful.
Lowering my head, I looked at the wall.
Called to, a thousand times, I never looked back.

At fifteen I stopped scowling,
I desired my dust to be mingled with yours
Forever and forever and forever.
Why should I climb the look out?

At sixteen you departed,
You went into far Ku-to-yen, by the river of swirling eddies,
And you have been gone five months.
The monkeys make sorrowful noise overhead.

You dragged your feet when you went out.
By the gate now, the moss is grown, the different mosses,
Too deep to clear them away!
The leaves fall early this autumn, in wind.
The paired butterflies are already yellow with August
Over the grass in the West garden;
They hurt me. I grow older.
If you are coming down through the narrows of the river Kiang,
Please let me know beforehand,
And I will come out to meet you
As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

By Rihaku

"The River-Merchant's Wife: A Letter" is based on the first of Li Po's "Two Letters from Chang-Kan."

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 9:18 am
by Saffron
giselle wrote:I like Jack Frost 'Number Eleven', a plane crash in the desert can be a romantic situation, if you crash with the right person. Makes me wonder why he called it 'Number Eleven'?
Look what I found to go with DWill's #11 contribution. Another association between a plane crash and love.

Love Poem
by Gregory Orr

A black biplane crashes through the window
of the luncheonette. The pilot climbs down,
removing his leather hood.
He hands me my grandmother's jade ring.
No, it is two robin's eggs and
a telephone number: yours.

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 11:22 am
by DWill
I have to find out saffron's method. It may be she won't be stumped. And such a good poem, too, for the # 14. Mine's a sonnet from Wilfred Owen, the war poet.

1914

War broke: and now the Winter of the world
With perishing great darkness closes in.
The foul tornado, centred at Berlin,
Is over all the width of Europe whirled,
Rending the sails of progress. Rent or furled
Are all Art's ensigns. Verse wails. Now begin
Famines of thought and feeling. Love's wine's thin.
The grain of human Autumn rots, down-hurled.

For after Spring had bloomed in early Greece,
And Summer blazed her glory out with Rome,
An Autumn softly fell, a harvest home,
A slow grand age, and rich with all increase.
But now, for us, wild Winter, and the need
Of sowings for new Spring, and blood for seed.

Wilfred Owen

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Sat Apr 14, 2012 9:11 pm
by Saffron
I'm gonna post my number 15 before I go to bed. Just feel like it - that's why.

Still Life
by Carl Sandburg

Cool your heels on the rail of an observation car.
Let the engineer open her up for ninety miles an hour.
Take in the prairie right and left, rolling land and new hay crops, swaths of new hay laid in the sun.
A gray village flecks by and the horses hitched in front of the post-office never blink an eye.
A barnyard and fifteen Holstein cows, dabs of white on a black wall map, never blink an eye.
A signalman in a tower, the outpost of Kansas City, keeps his place at a window with the serenity of a bronze statue on a dark night when lovers pass whispering.

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2012 7:39 pm
by DWill
I like the Carl Sandburg. Amazing how many of the poems are good and not just number-holders.

Fifteen

South of the bridge on Seventeenth
I found back of the willows one summer
day a motorcycle with engine running
as it lay on its side, ticking over
slowly in the high grass. I was fifteen.

I admired all that pulsing gleam, the
shiny flanks, the demure headlights
fringed where it lay; I led it gently
to the road, and stood with that
companion, ready and friendly. I was fifteen.

We could find the end of a road, meet
the sky on out Seventeenth. I thought about
hills, and patting the handle got back a
confident opinion. On the bridge we indulged
a forward feeling, a tremble. I was fifteen.

Thinking, back farther in the grass I found
the owner, just coming to, where he had flipped
over the rail. He had blood on his hand, was pale-
I helped him walk to his machine. He ran his hand
over it, called me good man, roared away.

I stood there, fifteen.

William Stafford

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Sun Apr 15, 2012 7:51 pm
by Saffron
DWill wrote:I like the Carl Sandburg. Amazing how many of the poems are good and not just number-holders.
Well, I don't just post the first one I find. I read a few and pick the one I think best of the lot.

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Mon Apr 16, 2012 5:42 pm
by Saffron
April 16

As Befits a Man
By Langston Hughes

I don’t mind dying—
But I’d hate to die all alone!
I want a dozen pretty women
To holler, cry, and moan.

I don’t mind dying
But I want my funeral to be fine:
A row of long tall mamas
Fainting, Fanning, and crying.

I want a fish-tail hearse
And sixteen fish-tail cars,
A big brass band
And a whole truck load of flowers.

When they let me down,
Down into the clay,
I want the women to holler:
Please don’t take him away!
Ow-ooo-oo-o!
Please don’t take daddy away!

Okay, not my favorite Hughes poem. Is seems 16 does not appear in so many poems - only one I could find :thmmm2:

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 5:34 am
by DWill
I did find one with 16, but it's not available, apparently, on the internet. It's "Girl," by A. W. Purdy, and it starts:

Sixteen years old and beautiful
all her white blood boiling red
under the not-brown skin maybe
attending music class in winter a
whaler's hornpipe danced the brown girl white as
she sinks from the crew's quarters back
in the 19th century to flattered husband remembering
a blond sailor later remembering
a dark husband remembering
both of them courting her
in 1965.

And goes on, a good poem, really, by a poet I found in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry--Canadian guy born in 1918 and died in 2000. One of the most important 20th century Canadian poets, acc. to wikipedia. As a bonus, there's a "nineteenth," so I can take that day off.

And for my "17," Janis Ian song of the same title. Listen to her do the song at http://www.last.fm/music/Janis+Ian/_/At+Seventeen

At Seventeen

Janis Ian
"At Seventeen"
I leaned the truth at seventeen that love was meant for beauty queens
And high school girls with clear-skinned smiles who married young and then
retired.
The valentines I never knew, the Friday night charades of youth
Were spent on one more beautiful. At seventeen I learned the truth.
And those of us with ravaged faces, lacking in the social graces,
Desperatly remained at home, inventing lovers on the phone
Who called to say, "Come dance with me," and murmured vague obscenities.
It isn't all it seems at seventeen.
A brown-eyed girl in hand-me-downs whose name I never could pronounce
Said, "Pity, please, the ones who serve; they only get what they deserve.
The rich relationed hometown queen marries into what she needs.
A guarantee of company and haven for the elderly."
Remember those who win the game lose the love they sought to gain.
In debentures of quality and dubious integrity.
Their small-town eyes will gape at you in dull surprise when payment due
Exceeds accounts received at seventeen.
To those of us who know the pain of valentines that never came,
And those whose names were never called when choosing sides for basketball.
It was long ago and far away; the world was much younger than today
And dreams were all they gave away for free to ugly duckling girls like me.
We all play the game and when we dare to cheat ourselves at solitaire.
Inventing lovers on the phone, repenting other lives unknown
That call and say, "Come dance with me," and murmur vague obscenities
At ugly duckling girls like me at seventeen.

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 5:56 am
by Saffron
DW: 16 and 17 nicely done!

Re: Poetry by Numbers: National Poetry Month game

Posted: Tue Apr 17, 2012 4:31 pm
by Saffron
Homesick
By Helmut Heissenbuttel

for the clouds above the garden in Papenburg
for the small boy that I was
for the black flakes of peat in the bog
for the smell of highways when I turned 17
for the smell of foot lockers when I served as a soldier
for the trip with my mother through the desolate city
for the spring afternoons on small train platforms
for the walks I took with Lilo Ahlendorf in Dresden
for the sky one snowy day in November
for the face of Jeanne d’Arc on the movie by Dreyer
for the cancelled dates on old calendars
for the cries of the gulls
for the nights without sleep
for the rumble of nights without sleep

for the rumble of nights without sleep.

--from “City Lights: Pocket Poets Anthology”
Ed. Lawrence Ferlinghetti p. 49

I think this poem must lose a little in translation.