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Poems for the 21at Century
National Poetry Month has had an effect on me - snapped me back into the poetry habit. So, I've decided to open a new thread. I am calling it Poems for the 21st Century. Please join me in posting poems that are relevant to life in the 21st, poems do not need to have been written in the 2000s. Here is my first contribution. This is a new poem to me and I will have to think about it today and will comment in my next post.
Miscegenation Nick Laird
Even this freckle testifies to the strength of second thoughts. My family
is a poem, the clear expression of mixed feelings, and your emergent
system at five years old fires like the shoal of neon tetra kept
in the depths of a ten gallon darkness. As for infinity, it’s there,
haggling with contradiction, asking each question but one.
You will find for a while there you held the exquisite to daylight
before setting it down on the baize, conquering.
Sometimes it will feel like the entire body consists of flames;
and sometimes concrete; sometimes collapsing like a waterfall
or steady as a lake of evening lapping, the midges clouding the surface.
Sometimes it will feel like air just before the air itself
turns to snow. The solution is a solution, by which I mean
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
Yes, this is just what I mean a poem describing life in the 21st - Magpies Recognize Themselves in the Mirror. A few years ago I read Jared Diamond's Collapsed. He muses over what, whoever cut down the last of the trees on the Pitcairn Islands, he/she was thinking - "Oh, well, what good could only 2 trees be when all the others are gone?!" Are we there yet? Are we so far down the path that we might as well cut the final tree?
Magpies Recognize Themselves in the Mirror Kelli Russell Agodon
The night sounds like a murder of magpies and we’re replacing our cabinet knobs because we can’t change the world, but we can change our hardware. America breaks my heart some days, and some days it breaks itself in two. I watched a woman have a breakdown in the mall today and when the security guard tried to help her what I could see was all of us peeking from her purse as she threw it across the floor into Forever 21. And yes, the walls felt like another way to hold us in and when she finally stopped crying, I heard her say to the fluorescent lighting, Some days the sky is too bright. And like that we were her flock in our black coats and white sweaters, some of us reaching our wings to her and some of us flying away.
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
This William Stafford poem that might be familiar was written pretty far back in the previous C., but I think about it often as having increasing relevance as our presence expands.
Traveling through the Dark BY WILLIAM E. STAFFORD
Traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of the Wilson River road. It is usually best to roll them into the canyon: that road is narrow; to swerve might make more dead.
By glow of the tail-light I stumbled back of the car and stood by the heap, a doe, a recent killing; she had stiffened already, almost cold. I dragged her off; she was large in the belly.
My fingers touching her side brought me the reason— her side was warm; her fawn lay there waiting, alive, still, never to be born. Beside that mountain road I hesitated.
The car aimed ahead its lowered parking lights; under the hood purred the steady engine. I stood in the glare of the warm exhaust turning red; around our group I could hear the wilderness listen.
I thought hard for us all—my only swerving—, then pushed her over the edge into the river.
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
I am going to try to post at least once a week. I hope those of you out there reading will join in and post poems and your response to the poems that get posted. Here is my offering for today -
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
Failing and Flying by Jack Gilbert is definitely a poem for the times we are in. It is a lovely, sad and hopeful poem.
Failing and Flying Jack Gilbert - 1925-2012
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew. It's the same when love comes to an end, or the marriage fails and people say they knew it was a mistake, that everybody said it would never work. That she was old enough to know better. But anything worth doing is worth doing badly. Like being there by that summer ocean on the other side of the island while love was fading out of her, the stars burning so extravagantly those nights that anyone could tell you they would never last. Every morning she was asleep in my bed like a visitation, the gentleness in her like antelope standing in the dawn mist. Each afternoon I watched her coming back through the hot stony field after swimming, the sea light behind her and the huge sky on the other side of that. Listened to her while we ate lunch. How can they say the marriage failed? Like the people who came back from Provence (when it was Provence) and said it was pretty but the food was greasy. I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell, but just coming to the end of his triumph.
Jack Gilbert. From Refusing Heaven, 2005, Alfred A. Knopf
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
I really like this poem. Thanks for posting it.
It reminded me of something else I read that may have been about Icarus too. One of the lines goes something like this: "not falling, but flying." Unfortunately I can't remember much more than that, and Google doesn't help.
Of course, there's this one by William Carlos Williams.
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel when Icarus fell it was spring
a farmer was ploughing his field the whole pageantry
of the year was awake tingling near
the edge of the sea concerned with itself
sweating in the sun that melted the wings' wax
unsignificantly off the coast there was
a splash quite unnoticed this was Icarus drowning
_________________ -Geo Question everything
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
I was going to post this Lucille Clifton poem on the Poem of the Day thread but then thought this is a poem for this whole year, for this whole first part of the 21st Century and most of all for my dear friend who lost her sister yesterday.
blessing the boats BY LUCILLE CLIFTON (at St. Mary's)
may the tide that is entering even now the lip of our understanding carry you out beyond the face of fear may you kiss the wind then turn from it certain that it will love your back may you open your eyes to water water waving forever and may you in your innocence sail through this to that
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
This little snippet is from a poem written in the 19th century, but I feel is even more relevant to the 21st. Anyone want to take a guess at who the poet it?
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
Saffron wrote:
Of course, it is Gerard Manley Hopkins! Thanks, DWill and Sarena for playing along with me.
What's the title of the poem? I wasn't sure about the poet, because I don't think of Hopkins as a nature poet in some sense of the word. I like the pairing of "wet" with "wildness." It's unexpected. Easy to speak in favor of wildness, maybe without really experiencing it. Less easy to praise the wet, because being wet or in the wet is often uncomfortable and messy.
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Re: Poems for the 21at Century
Here is the whole Hopkins poem. I am not sure about the whole thing but love the last stanza. I need to explore some of the words in the first 3 stanzas so I understand what he is describing. I assumed the title was a place name and indeed, it is. I was struck by the pairing of wet and wildness for the same reason you, DWill, expressed.
Inversnaid is a small rural community on the east bank of Loch Lomond in Scotland, near the north end of the loch.
Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89). Poems. 1918.
33. Inversnaid
This darksome burn, horseback brown, His rollrock highroad roaring down, In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam Flutes and low to the lake falls home.
A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth Turns and twindles over the broth Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning, It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.
Degged with dew, dappled with dew Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through, Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern, And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.
What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
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