Poem of the Day

Here’s another at the recommendation of a reader. I swiped it from here.

Your Fear
By Joseph Mary Plunkett

I try to blame
When from your eyes the battle-flame
Leaps: when cleaves my speech the spear
For fear lest I should speak your name:

Your name that’s known
But to your heart, your fear has flown
To mine: you’ve heard not any bird,
No wings have stirred save yours alone.

Alone your wings
Have fluttered: half-forgotten things
Come crowding home into your heart,
Filling your heart with other Springs,

Springs when you’ve sung
Your secret name with happy tongue
Loudly and innocent as the flowers
Through hours of laughter proudly young.

Young is the year
And other wings are waking: near
Your heart my name is knocking loud,
Ah, be not proud! You need not fear.

Fearing lest I
Should wrest your secret from on high
You will not listen to my name,
I cannot blame you though I try.

I haven’t read much of Lawrence’s poetry, but what I have read I’ve liked immensely.

Perfidy
By D.H. Lawrence

Hollow rang the house when I knocked on the door,
And I lingered on the threshold with my hand
Upraised to knock and knock once more:
Listening for the sound of her feet across the floor,
Hollow re-echoed my heart.

The low-hung lamps stretched down the road
With shadows drifting underneath,
With a music of soft, melodious feet
Quickening my hope as I hastened to meet
The low-hung light of her eyes.

The golden lamps down the street went out,
The last car trailed the night behind;
And I in the darkness wandered about
With a flutter of hope and of dark-shut doubt
In the dying lamp of my love.

Two brown ponies trotting slowly
Stopped at a dim-lit trough to drink:
The dark van drummed down the distance slowly;
While the city stars so dim and holy
Drew nearer to search through the streets.

A hastening car swept shameful past,
I saw her hid in the shadow,
I saw her step to the curb, and fast
Run to the silent door, where last
I had stood with my hand uplifted.
She clung to the door in her haste to enter,
Entered, and quickly cast
It shut behind her, leaving the street aghast.

Seeing as how it is a spring night (in Austin at least), I thought I’d share this one.

Spring Night
By Sara Teasdale

The park is filled with night and fog,
The veils are drawn about the world,
The drowsy lights along the paths
Are dim and pearled.

Gold and gleaming are the empty streets,
Gold and gleaming the misty lake.
The mirrored lights like sunken swords,
Glimmer and shake.

Oh, is it not enough to be
Here with this beauty over me?
My throat should ache with praise, and I
Should kneel in joy beneath the sky.
O beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love
With youth, a singing voice, and eyes
To take earth’s wonder with surprise?

Why have I put off my pride,
Why am I unsatisfied,—
I, for whom the pensive night
Binds her cloudy hair with light,—
I, for whom all beauty burns
Like incense in a million urns?
O beauty, are you not enough?
Why am I crying after love?

It’s my birthday, so I’m going to post an ESVM poem. (That makes perfect sense to me, at least!) This was not published in any of her poetry collections during her lifetime, but it’s in her Collected Poems.

If, in the Foggy Aleutians
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Not ever, now, any more, upon this mildewed planet
Shines the sweet, wholesome sun: we live in fog.
Our leaves grow large and green, but we bear no blossom;
No coloured hope unfolds, no poem speaks out
In Dutch, Korean, English or Tagalog.

Yet, if, in the foggy Aleutians, if on the misty
Island of Kiska, island of Attu, any
Flower, however weak and bleak, appears
In spring, between the cloudy craters, why then, although
It should take us a thousand years,
We can stare into the fog until it shines, we can force it to unfold us.
We must ask the men who have been there; they will know.

Cheryl read this aloud to us without telling us who had written it. I closed my eyes and I could totally visualize the scene. For some odd reason, I guessed the author, though I haven’t even read much of his stuff. Go me! (ha ha ha) Anyway, if you can, have someone read this aloud to you, or read it aloud yourself.

Preludes
By T.S. Eliot

I

The winter evening settles down
With smell of steaks in passageways.
Six o’clock.
The burnt-out ends of smoky days.
And now a gusty shower wraps
The grimy scraps
Of withered leaves about your feet
And newspapers from vacant lots;
The showers beat
On broken blinds and chimney-pots,
And at the corner of the street
A lonely cab-horse steams and stamps.

And then the lighting of the lamps.

II

The morning comes to consciousness
Of faint stale smells of beer
From the sawdust-trampled street
With all its muddy feet that press
To early coffee-stands.

With the other masquerades
That time resumes,
One thinks of all the hands
That are raising dingy shades
In a thousand furnished rooms.

III

You tossed a blanket from the bed,
You lay upon your back, and waited;
You dozed, and watched the night revealing
The thousand sordid images
Of which your soul was constituted;
They flickered against the ceiling.
And when all the world came back
And the light crept up between the shutters,
And you heard the sparrows in the gutters,
You had such a vision of the street
As the street hardly understands;
Sitting along the bed’s edge, where
You curled the papers from your hair,
Or clasped the yellow soles of feet
In the palms of both soiled hands.

IV

His soul stretched tight across the skies
That fade behind a city block,
Or trampled by insistent feet
At four and five and six o’clock;
And short square fingers stuffing pipes,
And evening newspapers, and eyes
Assured of certain certainties,
The conscience of a blackened street
Impatient to assume the world.

I am moved by fancies that are curled
Around these images, and cling:
The notion of some infinitely gentle
Infinitely suffering thing.

Wipe your hand across your mouth, and laugh;
The worlds revolve like ancient women
Gathering fuel in vacant lots.

This one’s for Jen.

Sound and Sense
By Alexander Pope

True ease in writing comes from art, not chance,
As those move easiest who have learned to dance.
‘Tis not enough no harshness gives offense,
The sound must seem an echo to the sense:
Soft is the strain when Zephyr gently blows,
And the smooth stream in smoother numbers flows;
But when loud surges lash the sounding shore,
The hoarse, rough verse should like the torrent roar;
When Ajax strives some rock’s vast weight to throw,
The line too labors, and the words move slow;
Not so, when swift Camilla scours the plain,
Flies o’er the unbending corn, and skims along the main.
Hear how Timotheus’ varied lays surprise,
And bid alternate passions fall and rise!

When I read this poem, I immediately thought of a song by Margo Hennebach that I love, entitled All That You Are, which I often listen to in times of self-doubt.

The Journey
By Mary Oliver

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice—
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.
“Mend my life!”
each voice cried.
But you didn’t stop.
You knew what you had to do,
though the wind pried
with its stiff fingers
at the very foundations,
though their melancholy
was terrible.
It was already late
enough, and a wild night,
and the road full of fallen
branches and stones.
But little by little,
as you left their voices behind,
the stars began to burn
through the sheets of clouds,
and there was a new voice
which you slowly
recognized as your own,
that kept you company
as you strode deeper and deeper
into the world,
determined to do
the only thing you could do—
determined to save
the only life you could save.

I read this one in The New Yorker.

Secrecy
By Margaret Atwood

Secrecy flows through you,
a different kind of blood.
It’s as if you’ve eaten it
like a bad candy,
taken it into your mouth,
let it melt sweetly on your tongue,
then allowed it to slide down your throat
like the reverse of uttering,
a word dissolved
into its glottals and sibilants,
a slow intake of breath—

And now it’s in you, secrecy.
Ancient and vicious, luscious
as dark velvet.
It blooms in you,
a poppy made of ink.

You can think of nothing else.
Once you have it, you want more.
What power it gives you!
Power of knowing without being known,
power of the stone door,
power of the iron veil,
power of the crushed fingers,
power of the drowned bones
crying out from the bottom of the well.

My sisters and I always picked Queen Anne’s lace and smeared the red dye in the middle all over our hands. I’m sure we didn’t think of it in this context, though!

The Knot
By Adrienne Rich

In the heart of the queen anne’s lace, a knot of blood.
For years I never saw it,

years of metallic vision,
spears glancing off a bright eyeball,

suns off a Swiss lake.
A foaming meadow; the Milky Way;

and there, all along, the tiny dark-red spider
sitting in the whiteness of the bridal web,

waiting to plunge his crimson knifepoint
into the white apparencies.

Little wonder the eye, healing sees
for a long time through a mist of blood.

I couldn’t resist one more children’s poem, but this will be the last one for a little bit.

Topsy Turvey World
By Albert Midlane

If the butterfly courted the bee,
And the owl the porcupine;
If the churches were built in the sea,
And three times one was nine;
If the pony rode his master,
If the buttercups ate the cows,
If the cat had the dire disaster
To be worried, sir, by the mouse;
If mamma, sir, sold the baby
To a gypsy for half-a-crown;
If a gentleman, sir, was a lady—
The world would be Upside Down!
If any or all of these wonders
Should ever come about,
I should not consider them blunders,
For I should be Inside Out!

I’ll just squeak this one in before midnight as I’m off to bed.

A Child’s Evening Prayer
By Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Ere on my bed my limbs I lay
God grant me grace my prayers to say:
O God! preserve my mother dear
In strength and health for many a year;
And, O! preserve my father too,
And may I pay him reverence due;
And may I my best thoughts employ
To be my parents’ hope and joy;
And O! preserve my brothers both
From evil doings and from sloth,
And may we always love each other,
Our friends, our father, and our mother:
And still, O Lord, to me impart
An innocent and grateful heart,
That after my last sleep I may
Awake to thy eternal day!
                              Amen.

I feel a bit like a kid, so here’s one from Edward Lear.

The Pobble Who Has No Toes
By Edward Lear

The Pobble who has no toes
Had once as many as we;
When they said “Some day you may lose them all;”
He replied “Fish, fiddle-de-dee!”
And his Aunt Jobiska made him drink
Lavender water tinged with pink,
For she said “The World in general knows
There’s nothing so good for a Pobble’s toes!”

The Pobble who has no toes
Swam across the Bristol Channel;
But before he set out he wrapped his nose
In a piece of scarlet flannel.
For his Aunt Jobiska said “No harm
Can come to his toes if his nose is warm;
And it’s perfectly known that a Pobble’s toes
Are safe,—provided he minds his nose!”

The Pobble swam fast and well,
And when boats or ships came near him,
He tinkledy-blinkledy-winkled a bell,
So that all the world could hear him.
And all the Sailors and Admirals cried,
When they saw him nearing the further side—
“He has gone to fish for his Aunt Jobiska’s
Runcible Cat with crimson whiskers!”

But before he touched the shore,
The shore of the Bristol Channel,
A sea-green porpoise carried away
His wrapper of scarlet flannel.
And when he came to observe his feet,
Formerly garnished with toes so neat,
His face at once became forlorn,
On perceiving that all his toes were gone!

And nobody ever knew,
From that dark day to the present,
Whoso had taken the Pobble’s toes,
In a manner so far from pleasant.
Whether the shrimps, or crawfish grey,
Or crafty Mermaids stole them away—
Nobody knew: and nobody knows
How the Pobble was robbed of his twice five toes!

The Pobble who has no toes
Was placed in a friendly Bark,
And they rowed him back, and carried him up
To his Aunt Jobiska’s Park.
And she made him a feast at his earnest wish
Of eggs and buttercups fried with fish,—
And she said “It’s a fact the whole world knows,
That Pobbles are happier without their toes!”

I headed over to Sonnet Central to find a poem for today and I’m glad I stumbled over this one almost right away. I love the dark stuff…

A Petition
By Fanny Kemble

Lady, whom my belovéd loves so well!
When on his clasping arm thy head reclineth,
When on thy lips his ardent kisses dwell,
And the bright flood of burning light that shineth
In his dark eyes, is poured into thine;
When thou shalt lie enfolded to his heart
In all the trusting helplessness of love;
If in such joy sorrow can find a part,
Oh, give one sigh unto a doom like mine!
Which I would have thee pity, but not prove.
One cold, calm, careless, wintry look that fell
Haply by chance on one, is all that he
Ever gave my love; round that, my wild thoughts dwell
In one eternal pang of memory.

Greetings from the Grinch of V-Day. I was wildly amused by the poems here and this stuff (loosely) inspired by Robert Burns, but I’m going with this one for maximum bitterness in minimal lines.

Carrefour
By Amy Lowell

O you,
Who came upon me once
Stretched under apple-trees just after bathing,
Why did you not strangle me before speaking
Rather than fill me with the wild honey of your words
And then leave me to the mercy
Of the forest bees?

A couple items of business:

1) I was confined to my bed yesterday and regrettably couldn’t work up the energy to post a poem. I’m still sick, but not feverish or headachy any longer, thank heavens.

2) I listened to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. As such, I was inspired to find a poem by RLS, which was also fueled a bit by nostalgia for my childhood and A Child’s Garden of Verses. Imagine my delight at finding this recording of the following poem.

My Shadow
By Robert Louis Stevenson

I have a little shadow that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from the heels up to the head;
And I see him jump before me, when I jump into my bed.

The funniest thing about him is the way he likes to grow—
Not at all like proper children, which is always very slow;
For he sometimes shoots up taller like an India-rubber ball,
And he sometimes gets so little that there’s none of him at all.

He hasn’t got a notion of how children ought to play,
And can only make a fool of me in every sort of way.
He stays so close beside me, he’s a coward you can see;
I’d think shame to stick to nursie as that shadow sticks to me!

One morning, very early, before the sun was up,
I rose and found the shining dew on every buttercup;
But my lazy little shadow, like an arrant sleepy-head,
Had stayed at home behind me and was fast asleep in bed.

I just listened to The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde this afternoon. I thought I’d find a poem by him since I was reminded how much I like his writing. You may also listen to this at LibriVox.

Les Silhouettes
By Oscar Wilde

The sea is flecked with bars of grey,
The dull dead wind is out of tune,
And like a withered leaf the moon
Is blown across the stormy bay.

Etched clear upon the pallid sand
The black boat lies: a sailor boy
Clambers aboard in careless joy
With laughing face and gleaming hand.

And overhead the curlews cry,
Where through the dusky upland grass
The young brown-throated reapers pass,
Like silhouettes against the sky.

Thanks to Chris for posting this poem by Garrison Keillor for Molly Ivins.

Molly Ivins Enlivens Us All
By Garrison Keillor

Molly Ivins
Enlivens us all.
She was tossed in—
To Austin
But could thrive in
St. Paul.
If you’re arrivin’ —
Whenever you’re due—
Give me a call
Soon as you’re here.
I’ll find a drive-in
That serves barbecue
And Lone Star beer.

Two-thousand seven
She’s flown up to heaven
And is giving St. Peter
(Who came out to meet her)
A piece of her mind.
We miss you, old girl,
It’s a poorer world
You’ve left behind.

Thanks to Heather for alerting me to this poem posted by a friend.

Witchgrass
By Louise Glück

Something
comes into the world unwelcome
calling disorder, disorder—

If you hate me so much
don’t bother to give me
a name: do you need
one more slur
in your language, another
way to blame
one tribe for everything—

as we both know,
if you worship
one god, you only need
One enemy—

I’m not the enemy.
Only a ruse to ignore
what you see happening
right here in this bed,
a little paradigm
of failure. One of your precious flowers
dies here almost every day
and you can’t rest until
you attack the cause, meaning
whatever is left, whatever
happens to be sturdier
than your personal passion—

It was not meant
to last forever in the real world.
But why admit that, when you can go on
doing what you always do,
mourning and laying blame,
always the two together.

I don’t need your praise
to survive. I was here first,
before you were here, before
you ever planted a garden.
And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon
are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

I know there are quite a few Emily Dickinson fans out there, so this one’s for you.

Heart, not so heavy as mine
By Emily Dickinson

Heart not so heavy as mine,
Wending late home,
As it passed my window
Whistled itself a tune,—

A careless snatch, a ballad,
A ditty of the street;
Yet to my irritated ear
An anodyne so sweet,

It was as if a bobolink,
Sauntering this way,
Carolled and mused and carolled,
Then bubbled slow away.

It was as if a chirping brook
Upon a toilsome way
Set bleeding feet to minuets
Without the knowing why.

To-morrow, night will come again,
Weary, perhaps, and sore.
Ah, bugle, by my window,
I pray you stroll once more!

George told me about recordings of Robert Frost reading his poems and I found them online. I chose one for today that is at the end of this .au file, but I pulled it out so you can listen to it alone here. (It is not my intent to discredit those responsible for the recordings.)

Reluctance
By Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world, and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question ‘Whither?’

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

I heard about a great site called LibriVox, which has public domain audiobooks and poems. This one was added recently and I like it, so here you go. You should definitely listen to it!

Sympathy
By Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

I need to stop my slide into ESVM withdrawal.

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Oh, oh, you will be sorry for that word!
Give me back my book and take my kiss instead.
Was it my enemy or my friend I heard,
“What a big book for such a little head!”
Come, I will show you now my newest hat,
And you may watch me purse my mouth and prink!
Oh, I shall love you still, and all of that.
I never again shall tell you what I think.
I shall be sweet and crafty, soft and sly;
You will not catch me reading any more:
I shall be called a wife to pattern by;
And some day when you knock and push the door,
Some sane day, not too bright and not too stormy,
I shall be gone, and you may whistle for me.

As recommended by a reader…

The Wayfarer
By Padraic Pearse

The beauty of the world hath made me sad,
This beauty that will pass:
Sometimes my heart hath shaken with great joy
To see a leaping squirrel in a tree
Or a red lady-bird upon a stalk,
Or little rabbits in a field at evening, lit by a slanting sun,
Or some green hill where shadows drifted by,
Some quiet hill where mountainy man hath sown
And soon would reap; near to the gates of heaven;
Or children with bare feet upon the sands
Of some ebbed sea, or playing on the streets
Of little towns in Connacht,
Things young and happy,
And then my heart hath told me:
These will pass,
Will pass and change, will die and be no more,
Things bright and green, things young and happy;
And I have gone upon my way
Sorrowful.

I read this poem with my poetry pals and we had a lovely conversation about it. I found another one by Donald Hall to share.

The Old Pilot
By Donald Hall

He discovers himself on an old airfield.
He thinks he was there before,
but rain has washed out the lettering of a sign.
A single biplane, all struts and wires,
stands in the long grass and wildflowers.
He pulls himself into the narrow cockpit
although his muscles are stiff
and sits like an egg in a nest of canvas.
He sees that the machine gun has rusted.
The glass over the instruments
has broken, and the red arrows are gone
from his gas gauge and his altimeter.
When he looks up, his propeller is turning,
although no one was there to snap it.
He lets out the throttle. The engine catches
and the propeller spins into the wind.
He bumps over holes in the grass,
and he remembers to pull back on the stick.
He rises from the land in a high bounce
which gets higher, and suddenly he is flying again.
He feels the old fear, and rising over the fields
the old gratitude. In the distance, circling
in a beam of late sun like birds migrating,
there are the wings of a thousand biplanes.

Another one from my poetry pals…

Opus 21
By William Kloefkorn

How satisfying to have gone to a concert
featuring someone now famous you have broken
bread with. There was music, too, in the way

she lifted her fork to her mouth, music in the fork
that delivered the music that was the food
to sustain her. I meanwhile hum along

with the breeze that plays the oak leaves
like the fretted instrument my mother refused
to buy me. Obviously, I am looking

for something more than a mother to lay the wreaths
of my imperfections at the foot of. The bread
she baked was worth far more than the price

of forgiveness. In the kitchen its aroma
continues to drive me insane. In Gilead there is
neither sustenance nor balm. William, you should

stop your whining and buy yourself a good used
violin. Your audience cannot sit
silent on its hands forever, now can it.

I’m listening to Jasper Fforde’s The Well of Lost Plots on CD and this poem is quoted therein, so I thought I’d share.

Jerusalem
By William Blake

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England’s mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England’s green and pleasant land.