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Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2019 11:18 am
by DWill
"Window Tree" might be my favorite of Frost's, too. Imagine all the stitching and unstitching that went into that one. But a close second is "Into My Own." Despite its somewhat fusty diction, it gets me, especially at the end.

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2019 4:08 pm
by Saffron
A friend posted this poem online this Gerard Manley Hopkins poem morning. 2 or 3 of his poems rank among my most favorite poems. A big YES to wildness and wet. I now need to go investigate to see if this is the whole poem or just a part of a larger. I will report back.

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.
--Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1899)

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Mon Apr 15, 2019 4:12 pm
by Saffron
So, it is only part of a larger work. Here is the whole.

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.

Ok, so the first 3 stanzas need some explaining or rather some of the words need defining. I will that a go too.

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2019 1:53 am
by ellisacoy
So happy to have found this thread. Going to leave some Mary Oliver here. She is my absolute favourite.

for forty years
the sheets of white paper have
passed under my hands and I have tried
    to improve their peaceful

emptiness putting down
little curls little shafts
of letters words
    little flames leaping

not one page
was less to me than fascinating
discursive full of cadence
    its pale nerves hiding

in the curves of the Qs
behind the soldierly Hs
in the webbed feet of the Ws
    forty years

and again this morning as always
I am stopped as the world comes back
wet and beautiful I am thinking
    that language

is not even a river
is not a tree is not a green field
is not even a black ant traveling
    briskly modestly

from day to day from one
golden page to another.

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Tue Apr 16, 2019 8:17 pm
by Saffron
Mary Oliver is a favorite of mine. I had not read that poem before, Thank you, ellisacoy!

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Thu Apr 18, 2019 5:47 pm
by Saffron
I have been participating in a poetry workshop online. The instructions the first day told participants to download a packet of poems that would not have the poets names with the poems. A very refreshing idea! No cues to tell us if the poem was "good" or not. Here is one of the poems from that packet and in order to give credit, I looked up the name of the poet (we are done with that part of the packet). Her name is Nicole Sealey.

Unfurnished /

Something was said and she felt /
a certain way about said something. /
—————————————–Certain only /
because there was no mistaking the feeling /
she felt—the sound empty makes inside /
———–a vacant house.

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Sat Apr 20, 2019 5:36 pm
by Saffron
I missed a day and yesterday was a day to miss. Here we go, a new favorite of mine. I really like the opening lines.

Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón, 1976

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Sun Apr 21, 2019 6:06 am
by Saffron
For anyone not familiar, myself included, Tanka is:
a Japanese poem consisting of five lines, the first and third of which have five syllables and the other seven, making 31 syllables in all and giving a complete picture of an event or mood.

I like the first one best. How about you?

Tanka
Sadakichi Hartmann
I.

Winter? Spring? Who knows?
White buds from the plumtrees wing
And mingle with the snows.
No blue skies these flowers bring,
Yet their fragrance augurs Spring.

II.

Oh, were the white waves,
Far on the glimmering sea
That the moonshine laves,
Dream flowers drifting to me,—
I would cull them, love, for thee.

III.

Moon, somnolent, white,
Mirrored in a waveless sea,
What fickle mood of night
Urged thee from heaven to flee
And live in the dawnlit sea?

IV.

Like mist on the leas,
Fall gently, oh rain of Spring
On the orange trees
That to Ume’s casement cling—
Perchance, she’ll hear the love-bird sing.

V.

Though love has grown cold
The woods are bright with flowers,
Why not as of old
Go to the wildwood bowers
And dream of--bygone hours!

VI.

Tell, what name beseems
These vain and wandering days!
Like the bark of dreams
That from souls at daybreak strays
They are lost on trackless ways.

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2019 6:43 am
by Saffron
A belated Earth Day Poem

Planet
Catherine Pierce

This morning this planet is covered by winds and blue.
This morning this planet glows with dustless perfect light,
enough that I can see one million sharp leaves
from where I stand. I walk on this planet, its hard-packed

dirt and prickling grass, and I don’t fall off. I come down
soft if I choose, hard if I choose. I never float away.
Sometimes I want to be weightless on this planet, and so

I wade into a brown river or dive through a wave
and for a while feel nothing under my feet. Sometimes
I want to hear what it was like before the air, and so I duck
under the water and listen to the muted hums. I’m ashamed

to say that most days I forget this planet. That most days
I think about dentist appointments and plagiarists
and the various ways I can try to protect my body from itself.

Last weekend I saw Jupiter through a giant telescope,
its storm stripes, four of its sixty-seven moons, and was filled
with fierce longing, bitter that instead of Ganymede or Europa,
I had only one moon floating in my sky, the moon

called Moon, its face familiar and stale. But this morning
I stepped outside and the wind nearly knocked me down.
This morning I stepped outside and the blue nearly

crushed me. This morning this planet is so loud with itself—
its winds, its insects, its grackles and mourning doves—
that I can hardly hear my own lamentations. This planet.
All its grooved bark, all its sand of quartz and bones

and volcanic glass, all its creeping thistle lacing the yards
with spiny purple. I’m trying to come down soft today.
I’m trying to see this place even as I’m walking through it.

Re: National Poetry Month: April 2019

Posted: Tue Apr 23, 2019 10:04 pm
by DWill
Saffron wrote:For anyone not familiar, myself included, Tanka is:
a Japanese poem consisting of five lines, the first and third of which have five syllables and the other seven, making 31 syllables in all and giving a complete picture of an event or mood.

I like the first one best. How about you?
I like 'em all about equally. A little more satisfying for me than haiku. I wonder if the rhyme is in the Japanese original. I'm still apt to like a rhyming poem more than free-verse. I like the artifice of it.