Category: poems

Memorial Day Poem

Karen1 Comment

“A million young workmen,” by Carl Sandberg, 1915

A million young workmen straight and strong lay stiff on the grass and roads,
And the million are now under soil and their rottening flesh will in the years feed roots of blood-red roses.
Yes, this million of young workmen slaughtered one another and never saw their red hands.
And oh, it would have been a great job of killing and a new and beautiful thing under the sun if the million knew why they hacked and tore each other to death.
The kings are grinning, the Kaiser and the czar—they are alive riding in leather-seated motor cars, and they have their women and roses for ease, and they eat fresh-poached eggs for breakfast, new butter on toast, sitting in tall water-tight houses reading the news of war.
I dreamed a million ghosts of the young workmen rose in their shirts all soaked in crimson … and yelled:
God damn the grinning kings, God damn the kaiser and the czar.

Happy Birthday, Theodore Roethke

Karen

My buddy Ted was born today in 1908. His work was one of the first poems I did a close reading of in high school (thanks, Mr. Bickmore!) and I had never experienced anything like it before.

Here’s the end section of that poem, “The Shape of the Fire,” which the close reading told me was about the move from chaos to order (oh, and life? take a hint from that theme):

To have the whole air!—
The light, the full sun
Coming down on the flowerheads,
The tendrils turning slowly,
A slow snail-lifting, liquescent;
To be by the rose
Rising slowly out of its bed,
Still as a child in its first loneliness;
To see cyclamen veins become clearer in early sunlight,
And mist lifting out of the brown cat-tails;
To stare into the after-light, the glitter left on the lake’s surface,
When the sun has fallen behind a wooded island;
To follow the drops sliding from a lifted oar,
Held up, while the rower breathes, and the small boat drifts quietly shoreward;
To know that light falls and fills, often without our knowing,
As an opaque vase fills to the brim from a quick pouring,
Fills and trembles at the edge yet does not flow over,
Still holding and feeding the stem of the contained flower.

3+1 Things: The Late Spring/Early Summer Poem

Karen1 Comment

Deciding to cut my yearly goals from 30 to 3 (because let’s be honest, will I really do the +1 this year?) does give me a lot less to blog about.

On the other hand, I have a much better chance at success: That section of “Ash Wednesday” is memorized and ready to be recited at a moment’s notice, which I have been doing for Toby at home during times of stress. (Eliot is really satisfying to declaim dramatically, I found out.)

That means it’s time to move on to the next poem I want to memorize, “Meditation at Lagunitas” by my old buddy Robert Hass. I have sections of this in my head already but I want to fill in the gaps so I can say it straight through. To Toby. (Yes, it’s probably just as well I am being realistic about that +1.)

Anyway, here’s the poem, one of my favorites, with the most elegant use of “numinous” I’ve encountered:

Meditation at Lagunitas

All the new thinking is about loss.
In this it resembles all the old thinking.
The idea, for example, that each particular erases
the luminous clarity of a general idea. That the clown-
faced woodpecker probing the dead sculpted trunk
of that black birch is, by his presence,
some tragic falling off from a first world
of undivided light. Or the other notion that,
because there is in this world no one thing
to which the bramble of blackberry corresponds,
a word is elegy to what it signifies.
We talked about it late last night and in the voice
of my friend, there was a thin wire of grief, a tone
almost querulous. After a while I understood that,
talking this way, everything dissolves: justice,
pine, hair, woman, you and I. There was a woman
I made love to and I remembered how, holding
her small shoulders in my hands sometimes,
I felt a violent wonder at her presence
like a thirst for salt, for my childhood river
with its island willows, silly music from the pleasure boat,
muddy places where we caught the little orange-silver fish
called pumpkinseed. It hardly had to do with her.
Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Happy Belated Birthday, Gary Snyder

Karen

I was going to post this Gary Snyder poem a few weeks ago when it was still so cold at night, but then I thought, “No, I am not posting any sad hippy poems. I’m past that.”

However, yesterday was the poet’s 81st birthday and, oh look, it’s cold again. So here it is–it’s an old favorite, so the fond memories of first reading it cancel out my desire to shout, “Get a house to sleep in, hippy!” at the end.

Siwashing It Out Once in Suislaw Forest

I slept under     rhododendron
All night    blossoms fell
Shivering on a sheet of cardboard

Feet stuck   in my pack
Hands deep    in my pockets
Barely  able    to   sleep.

I remembered    when we were in school

Sleeping together   in a big warm bed
We were     the youngest lovers
When we broke up     we were still nineteen
Now our   friends are married

You teach  school back east

I don't mind     living this way
Green hills   the long blue beach
But sometimes   sleeping in the open
I think back    when I had you.


I May Not Be In The Desert, But At Least It’s Sunny

Karen

Today’s poem is “Keys,” by Nancy Henry, from Our Lady of Let’s All Sing, found via The Writer’s Almanac a few weeks ago.

When things got hard
I used to drive and keep on driving
once to North Carolina
once to Arizona
I’m through with all that now, I hope.
The last time was years ago.

But oh, how I would drive
and keep on driving!
The universe around me
all well in my control;
anything I wanted on the radio,
the air blasting hot or cold;
sobbing as loudly as I cared to sob,
screaming as loudly as I needed to scream.
I would live on apples and black coffee,
shower at truck stops,
sleep curled up
in the cozy back seat I loved.

The last time, I left at 3 a.m.
By New York state,
I stopped screaming;
by Tulsa
I stopped sobbing;
by the time I pulled into Flagstaff
I was thinking
about the Canyon,
I was so empty.
Thinking about the canyon
I was.

I sat on the rim at dawn,
let all the colors fill me.
It was cold. I saw my breath
like steam from a soup pot.
I saw small fossils in the gravel.
I saw how much world there was

how much darkness
could be swept out
by the sun.

The Coat Poem

Karen

You didn’t think I’d miss a chance to quote from “Le Manteau de Pascal,” did you? I had to go read it mid-way through the coat sewing. Here’s the whole thing and here’s the parts I thought about:

A Jacob’s ladder with hovering empty arms, an open throat,
a place where a heart might beat if it wishes,
pockets that hang awaiting the sandy whir of a small secret,
folds where the legs could be, with their kneeling mechanism,
the floating fatigue of an after-dinner herald,
not guilty of any treason towards life except fatigue,
a skillfully cut coat, without chronology,
filled with the sensation of being suddenly completed —
as then it is, abruptly, the last stitch laid in, the knot bit off —

[…]
the neck like a vase awaiting its cut flower,
a skirting barely visible where the tucks indicate
the mild loss of bearing in the small of the back,
the grammar, so strict, of the two exact shoulders —
and the law of the shouldering —
and the chill allowed to skitter up through,
and those crucial spots where the fit cannot be perfect —
oh skirted loosening aswarm with lessenings,
with the mild pallors of unaccomplishment,
flaps night-air collects in,
folds.

Now I’m going to go around muttering, “Oh skirted loosening aswarm with lessenings” all day.

Let’s Not Be So Hard On Ourselves

Karen

The bud

stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing

(From “Saint Francis and the Sow,” by Galway Kinnel)

Next Poem, Please

Karen

I picked the next poem in my 3+1 Things project–most of the final section of “Ash Wednesday,” by our buddy Tom Eliot–to coincide with Lent and Easter. (Actually, they’re all seasonally appropriate–“Starlings in Winter” falls in December, Dark Harbor comes in summer, etc.)

Since today is indeed the actual Ash Wednesday in the Christian calendar, I guess it’s time to move on from “The Poems of Our Climate” and start memorizing this one:

Although I do not hope to turn again
Although I do not hope
Although I do not hope to turn

Wavering between the profit and the loss
In this brief transit where the dreams cross
The dreamcrossed twilight between birth and dying
(Bless me father) though I do not wish to wish these things
From the wide window towards the granite shore
The white sails still fly seaward, seaward flying
Unbroken wings

And the lost heart stiffens and rejoices
In the lost lilac and the lost sea voices
And the weak spirit quickens to rebel
For the bent golden-rod and the lost sea smell
Quickens to recover
The cry of quail and the whirling plover
And the blind eye creates
The empty forms between the ivory gates
And smell renews the salt savour of the sandy earth

How’s The Memorization Coming?

Karen

Remember before all the house news that I wanted to memorize six poems this year? I gave myself two months for each one, and now that it’s nearly the end of February I’d better step up the work on “The Poems of Our Climate.” I have the first stanza down, but there are two more. Here’s what I have memorized, just right for a snowy morning:


I
Clear water in a brilliant bowl,
Pink and white carnations. The light
In the room more like a snowy air,
Reflecting snow. A newly-fallen snow
At the end of winter when afternoons return.
Pink and white carnations – one desires
So much more than that. The day itself
Is simplified: a bowl of white,
Cold, a cold porcelain, low and round,
With nothing more than the carnations there.

Lines For Winter

Karen

If you have the day off, enjoy the thaw while it lasts–because I think more snow is on the way this week. Here’s a poem about surviving winter:

Lines for Winter
by Mark Strand

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself—
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon’s gaze in the valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back
and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.