Poem of the Day

I love poetry about the moon!

Shut Out That Moon
By Thomas Hardy

Close up the casement, draw the blind,
Shut out that stealing moon,
She wears too much the guise she wore
Before our lutes were strewn
With years-deep dust, and names we read
On a white stone were hewn.

Step not forth on the dew-dashed lawn
To view the Lady’s Chair,
Immense Orion’s glittering form,
The Less and Greater Bear:
Stay in; to such sights we were drawn
When faded ones were fair.

Brush not the bough for midnight scents
That come forth lingeringly,
And wake the same sweet sentiments
They breathed to you and me
When living seemed a laugh, and love
All it was said to be.

Within the common lamp-lit room
Prison my eyes and thought;
Let dingy details crudely loom,
Mechanic speech be wrought:
Too fragrant was Life’s early bloom,
Too tart the fruit it brought!

I also procured this one while visiting my poetry pals. Robinson seems to like writing about unhappy men.

Reuben Bright
By Edwin Arlington Robinson

Because he was a butcher and thereby
Did earn an honest living (and did right),
I would not have you think that Reuben Bright
Was any more a brute than you or I;
For when they told him that his wife must die,
He stared at them, and shook with grief and fright,
And cried like a great baby half that night,
And made the women cry to see him cry.

And after she was dead, and he had paid
The singers and the sexton and the rest,
He packed a lot of things that she had made
Most mournfully away in an old chest
Or hers, and put some chopped-up cedar boughs
In with them, and tore down the slaughter house.

Current Tea: Clarksville cordial (Indian Korakundah Estate black tea with ginger, orange, & peach)

I swiped this one from the New Yorker while visiting my poetry pals. Some friends of mine are doing a play about a Hollywood production of Much Ado About Nothing in the 1930s. I’m really looking forward to seeing it!

In Shakespeare
By James Richardson

In Shakespeare a lover turns into an ass
as you would expect. People confuse
their consciences with ghosts and witches.
Old men throw everything away
because they panic and can’t feel their lives.
They pinch themselves, pierce themselves with twigs,
cliffs, lightning, and die—yes, finally—in glad pain.

You marry a woman you’ve never talked to,
a woman you thought was a boy.
Sixteen years go by as a curtain billows
once, twice. Your children are lost,
they come back, you don’t remember how.
A love turns to a statue in a dress, the statue
comes back to life. Oh God, it’s all so realistic
I can’t stand it. Whereat I weep and sing.

Such a relief, to burst from the theatre
into our cool, imaginary streets
where we know who’s who and what’s what,
and command with Metrocards our destinations.
Where no one with a story struggling in him
convulses as it eats its way out,
and no one in an antiseptic corridor,
or in deserts or in downtown darkling plains,
staggers through an Act that just will not end,
eyes burning with the burning of the dead.

Current Tea: captivating caramel (black tea with caramel flavoring)

Here’s a little bit of prose that made me smile.

Please Describe How You Became a Writer
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Possibly I began writing as a refuge from our insulting first grade text book. Come, Jane, come. Look, Dick, look. Were there ever duller people in the world? You had to tell them to look at things? Why weren’t they looking to begin with?

Current Tea: chocolate rum (black tea with chocolate and rum flavoring)

My poetry pals introduced me to Fernando Pessoa, who wrote under many pseudonyms, and I snagged a few poems translated by Richard Zenith in A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe: Selected Poems. This one was XXXI in The Keeper of Sheep by Alberto Caeiro.

If sometimes I say that flowers smile
By Fernando Pessoa

If sometimes I say that flowers smile
And if I should say that rivers sing,
It’s not because I think there are smiles in flowers
And songs in the rivers’ flowing…
It’s so I can help misguided men
Feel the truly real existence of flowers and rivers.

Since I write for them to read me, I sometimes stoop
To the stupidity of their senses…
It isn’t right, but I excuse myself,
Because I’ve only taken on this odious role, an interpreter of Nature,
Because there are men who don’t grasp its language,
Which is no language at all.

Current Tea: Honey Bee tea (black tea with sweet honey flavor from honey bee pollen)

I think Amy Lowell is absolutely amazing. I had included Carrefour in the selections I brought to my poetry pals, and I discovered this one, which is similarly short and powerful.

A Decade
By Amy Lowell

When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.

Current Tea: winter dreams (black tea with chocolate flavoring and peppermint leaves)

I’m back from spending Thanksgiving with my poetry pals and have quite a few poems to share. I’m posting this one first because it seems fitting as it’s finally gotten cold in Texas, and I loved the line: this blank cold, this sadness without cause. It was also really neat that one of my poetry pals has actually seen Stevens’s house and confirmed the images described in the poem.

The Plain Sense of Things
By Wallace Stevens

After the leaves have fallen, we return
To a plain sense of things. It is as if
We had come to an end of the imagination,
Inanimate in an inert savoir.

It is difficult even to choose the adjective
For this blank cold, this sadness without cause.
The great structure has become a minor house.
No turban walks across the lessened floors.

The greenhouse never so badly needed paint.
The chimney is fifty years old and slants to one side.
A fantastic effort has failed, a repetition
In a repetitiousness of men and flies.

Yet the absence of the imagination had
Itself to be imagined. The great pond,
The plain sense of it, without reflections, leaves,
Mud, water like dirty glass, expressing silence

Of a sort, silence of a rat come out to see,
The great pond and its waste of the lilies, all this
Had to be imagined as an inevitable knowledge,
Required, as a necessity requires.

Current Tea: ginger lime rooibos

I am going out of town for the holiday, so the PotD is on hiatus until I return (sometime over the weekend). Here’s a nice pumpkin poem in honor of Thanksgiving.

The Pumpkin
By John Greenleaf Whittier

Oh, greenly and fair in the lands of the sun,
The vines of the gourd and the rich melon run,
And the rock and the tree and the cottage enfold,
With broad leaves all greenness and blossoms all gold,
Like that which o’er Nineveh’s prophet once grew,
While he waited to know that his warning was true,
And longed for the storm-cloud, and listened in vain
For the rush of the whirlwind and red fire-rain.

On the banks of the Xenil the dark Spanish maiden
Comes up with the fruit of the tangled vine laden;
And the Creole of Cuba laughs out to behold
Through orange-leaves shining the broad spheres of gold;
Yet with dearer delight from his home in the North,
On the fields of his harvest the Yankee looks forth,
Where crook-necks are coiling and yellow fruit shines,
And the sun of September melts down on his vines.

Ah! on Thanksgiving day, when from East and from West,
From North and from South comes the pilgrim and guest;
When the gray-haired New Englander sees round his board
The old broken links of affection restored;
When the care-wearied man seeks his mother once more,
And the worn matron smiles where the girl smiled before;
What moistens the lip and what brightens the eye,
What calls back the past, like the rich Pumpkin pie?

Oh, fruit loved of boyhood! the old days recalling,
When wood-grapes were purpling and brown nuts were falling!
When wild, ugly faces we carved in its skin,
Glaring out through the dark with a candle within!
When we laughed round the corn-heap, with hearts all in tune,
Our chair a broad pumpkin,—our lantern the moon,
Telling tales of the fairy who travelled like steam
In a pumpkin-shell coach, with two rats for her team!

Then thanks for thy present! none sweeter or better
E’er smoked from an oven or circled a platter!
Fairer hands never wrought at a pastry more fine,
Brighter eyes never watched o’er its baking, than thine!
And the prayer, which my mouth is too full to express,
Swells my heart that thy shadow may never be less,
That the days of thy lot may be lengthened below,
And the fame of thy worth like a pumpkin-vine grow,
And thy life be as sweet, and its last sunset sky
Golden-tinted and fair as thy own Pumpkin pie!

Current Tea: Valentine’s blend (black tea with chocolate and rosebuds)

I posted this poem because I have two sisters and love them dearly, even though it really has nothing to do with them.

Sisters
By Adrienne Rich

Can I easily say,
I know you of course now,
no longer the fellow-victim,
reader of my diaries, heir
to my outgrown dresses,
ear for my poems and invectives?
Do I know you better
than that blue-eyed stranger
self-absorbed as myself
raptly knitting or sleeping
through a thirdclass winter journey?
Face to face all night
her dreams and whimpers
tangled with mine,
sleeping but not asleep
behind the engine drilling
into dark Germany,
her eyes, mouth, head
reconstructed by dawn
as we nodded farewell.
Her I should recognize
years later, anywhere.

Current Tea: Diva blend (Ceylon black tea with hints of hazelnut and chocolate)

The book of Margaret Atwood poems I’m currently reading had been put by the wayside, so I pulled it out again. As it’s that time of year when people do a lot of traveling, I thought I’d share this one. The thing I like best about Atwood’s poems are her interesting phrases: “over-furred”, “mundane as knitting”, “rubbed concave with their stiff boots”.

The Bus to Alliston, Ontario
By Margaret Atwood

Snow packs the roadsides, sends dunes
onto the pavement, moves
through vision like a wave or sandstorm.
The bus charges this winter,
a whale or blunt gray
tank, wind whipping its flank.

Inside, we sit wool-
swathed and over-furred, made stodgy
by the heat, our boots
puddling the floor, our Christmas bundles
stuffed around us in the seats, the paper bags
already bursting; we trust

the driver, who is plump and garrulous, familiar
as a neighbor, which he is
to the thirty souls he carries, as
carefully as the time-
table permits; he knows
by experience the fragility of skulls.

Travel is dangerous; nevertheless, we travel.
The talk, as usual,
is of disasters: trainwrecks, fires,
herds of cattle killed in floods,
the malice of weather and tractors,
the clogging of hearts known
and unknown to us, illness and death,
true cases of buses

such as ours, which skid, which hurtle
through snake fences and explode
with no survivors.
The woman talking says she heard
their voices at the crossroad
one night last fall, and not
a drop taken.

The dead ride with us on this bus,
whether we like it or not,
discussing aunts and suicides,
wars and the price of wheat,
fogging the close air, hugging us,
repeating their own deaths through these mouths,
cramped histories, violent
or sad, earthstained, defeated, proud,
the pain in small print, like almanacs,
mundane as knitting.

In the darkness, each distant house
glows and marks time,
is as true in attics
and cellars as in its steaming rich
crackling and butter kitchens.
The former owners, coupled and multiple,
seep through the mottled plaster, sigh
along the stairs they once rubbed concave
with their stiff boots, still envious,
breathe roasts and puddings through the floors;
it’s wise
to set an extra plate.
How else can you live but with the knowledge
of old lives continuing in facing
sepia blood under your feet?

Outside, the moon is fossil
white, the sky cold purple, the stars
steely and hard; when there are trees they are dried
coral; the snow
is an unbroken spacelit
desert through which we make
our ordinary voyage,
those who hear voices and those
who do not, moving together, warm
and for the moment safe,
along the invisible road towards home.

Current Tea: chocolate rum (black tea with chocolate and rum flavoring)

There were three or four pregnant women at a baby shower I attended yesterday, so I have to share this one, courtesy of Ted Kooser.

Superhero Pregnant Woman
By Jessy Randall

Her sense of smell is ten times stronger.
And so her husband smells funny;
she rolls away from him in the bed.
She even smells funny to herself,
but cannot roll away from that.

Why couldn’t she get a more useful superpower?
Like the ability to turn invisible, or fly?

The refrigerator laughs at her from its dark corner,
knowing she will have to open it some time
and surrender to its villainous odors.

It’s that time of year in Austin when the weather fluctuates from 85F one day to 60F the next. Though we haven’t had the riot of fall coloring on the trees, leaves are falling and there is often a nice breeze. I’ve kind of been saving this poem until it was weather appropriate (for me at least), but I don’t think that will really happen, so here it is now.

That time of year thou mayst in me behold
By William Shakespeare

That time of year thou mayst in me behold,
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs which shake against the cold,
Bare ruin’d choirs, where late the sweet birds sang.
In me thou see’st the twilight of such day,
As after sunset fadeth in the west,
Which by and by black night doth take away,
Death’s second self that seals up all in rest.
In me thou see’st the glowing of such fire,
That on the ashes of his youth doth lie,
As the death bed whereon it must expire,
Consum’d with that which it was nourish’d by.
   This thou perceiv’st, which makes thy love more strong,
   To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

It’s been quite some time since I posted anything by Shel Silverstein. Technically speaking, this is a song, but it’s Shel Silverstein, so I’m letting it slide.

A Front Row Seat to Hear Ole Johnny Sing
By Shel Silverstein

Now you know some fellahs, they want fame and fortune
Yeah, and other fellahs they just wanna swing
But all I wanted all my life
Was a TV set and a truck and a wife
And a front row seat to hear ole Johnny sing.

Yeah the TV and the truck I got on credit.
And I got that girl with a little old Woolworth ring
And life was warm and life was sweet
But still, it was kinda incomplete
Without a front row seat to hear ole Johnny sing.

Hey, John you walk the line,
Do “Delia” one more time
And when you do them Cottonfields
You warm this heart of mine.

So, one day I thought, Hey, I’m gonna do it!
(That’s what I said)
So, I mortgaged the farm and pawned her wedding ring.
I sold the gold tooth out of my mouth
And jumped in the pickup and headed South.
For a front row seat to hear ole Johnny sing.

I hit Nashville cold and wet and hungry.
I said, “I’m here, bring him on let him do his thing.”
But they told me down at the Old Pit Grill
I’d have to go all the way to Andersonville
For a front row seat to hear ole Jonny sing.

I found his house knocked on the door and it was opened
By a brown-haired girl and a baby with a teethin’ ring.
I said “I seen you somewhere before
but don’t stand there and block the door
I want a front row seat to hear ole Johnny sing.”

Hey, John you walk the line,
Do “Delia” one more time
And when you do them Cottonfields
You warm this heart of mine.

She said I’d have to go down to The Opry
And the feller there said I’d have to wait till Spring.
He said, “We’ve been sold out for months and months
And this poor insane fellah wants
A front row seat to hear ole Johnny sing.”

Well, he said a couple more things, and I started cryin’
And then he laughed at me and that’s when I started to swing.
Well I bust through the doors in a roaring rage,
Crawled over the crowd till I reached the stage
For a front row seat to hear ole Johnny sing.

Hey, John you walk the line,
Do “Delia” one more time
And when you do them Cottonfields
You warm this heart of mine.

Then some crazy guard started shootin’
I shot back, and the next thing I know I was winged
and on the floor
When a guy in a voice kinda deep and low
Says, “Boy that’s a mighty long way to go
For a front row seat to hear ANYBODY sing.”

And I guess that judge, he weren’t no music lover.
I got fifteen months but that don’t mean a thing.
Cos’ yesterday in the prison yard
A show come through and HAR! de HAR!
I had a front row seat to hear ole Johnny sing.

Hey, John you walk the line,
Do “Delia” one more time
And when you do them Cottonfields
You warm this heart of mine.

Current Tea: Thai chai (green tea blended with coconut, ginger and lemongrass)

This is for my dear Miss Jennifer.

Autumn Daybreak
By Edna St. Vincent Millay

Cold wind of autumn, blowing loud
At dawn, a fortnight overdue,
Jostling the doors, and tearing through
My bedroom to rejoin the cloud,

I know—for I can hear the hiss
And scrape of leaves along the floor—
How may boughs, lashed bare by this,
Will rake the cluttered sky once more.

Tardy, and somewhat south of east,
The sun will rise at length, made known
More by the meagre light increased
Than by a disk in splendour shown;

When, having but to turn my head,
Through the stripped maple I shall see,
Bleak and remembered, patched with red,
The hill all summer hid from me.

Current Tea: Valentine’s blend (black tea with chocolate and rosebuds)

I realized that I’ve only ever posted one poem by Emerson, which seems odd. Also, someone in my lab said yesterday that he likes to quote Emerson in papers/lab reports/etc., whether the quote is actually from Emerson, or not. (I think he was kidding…)

Bacchus
By Ralph Waldo Emerson

Bring me wine, but wine which never grew
In the belly of the grape,
Or grew on vine whose taproots reaching through
Under the Andes to the Cape,
Suffered no savor of the world to ’scape.
Let its grapes the morn salute
From a nocturnal root
Which feels the acrid juice
Of Styx and Erebus,
And turns the woe of night,
By its own craft, to a more rich delight.

We buy ashes for bread,
We buy diluted wine;
Give me of the true,
Whose ample leaves and tendrils curled
Among the silver hills of heaven,
Draw everlasting dew;
Wine of wine,
Blood of the world,
Form of forms and mould of statures,
That I; intoxicated,
And by the draught assimilated,
May float at pleasure through all natures,
The bird-language rightly spell,
And that which roses say so well.

Wine that is shed
Like the torrents of the sun
Up the horizon walls;
Or like the Atlantic streams which run
When the South Sea calls.

Water and bread;
Food which needs no transmuting,
Rainbow-flowering, wisdom-fruiting;
Wine which is already man,
Food which teach and reason can.

Wine which music is;
Music and wine are one;
That I, drinking this,
Shall hear far chaos talk with me,
Kings unborn shall walk with me,
And the poor grass shall plot and plan
What it will do when it is man:
Quickened so, will I unlock
Every crypt of every rock.

I thank the joyful juice
For all I know;
Winds of remembering
Of the ancient being blow,
And seeming-solid walls ot use
Open and flow.

Pour, Bacchus, the remembering wine;
Retrieve the loss of me and mine;
Vine for vine be antidote,
And the grape requite the lot.
Haste to cure the old despair,
Reason in nature’s lotus drenched,
The memory of ages quenched;—
Give them again to shine.
Let wine repair what this undid,
And where the infection slid,
And dazzling memory revive.
Refresh the faded tints,
Recut the aged prints,
And write my old adventures, with the pen
Which, on the first day, drew
Upon the tablets blue
The dancing Pleiads, and the eternal men.

Current Tea: Valentine’s blend (black tea with chocolate and rosebuds)

I really need to read more Billy Collins, but as I haven’t procured any books of his poems yet, here’s one I found online.

Litany
By Billy Collins

You are the bread and the knife,
The crystal goblet and the wine…
—Jacques Crickillon

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker,
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.

However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way that you are the pine-scented air.

It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general’s head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.

And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.

It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.

I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.

I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman’s tea cup.
But don’t worry, I’m not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

Current Tea: spicy chai (apparently the spicy components are proprietary)

I’ll admit it; I chose this one for the title. Oh, the evil women who do nothing but torture poor innocent men for sport. HA!

His Lady’s Cruelty
By Sir Philip Sidney

With how sad steps, O moon, thou climb’st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What! may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long-with-love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel’st a lover’s case:
I read it in thy looks; thy languish’d grace
To me, that feels the like, thy state descries.
Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deem’d there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call ‘virtue’ there—ungratefulness?

I’ve only posted one of Moulton’s before, so here’s another.

A Painted Fan
By Louise Chandler Moulton

Roses and butterflies snared on a fan,
   All that is left of a summer gone by;
Of swift, bright wings that flashed in the sun,
   And loveliest blossoms that bloomed to die!

By what subtle spell did you lure them here,
   Fixing a beauty that will not change,—
Roses whose petals never will fall,
   Bright, swift wings that never will range?

Had you owned but the skill to snare as well
   The swift-winged hours that came and went,
To prison the words that in music died,
   And fix with a spell the heart’s content,

Then had you been of magicians the chief;
   And loved and lovers should bless your art,
If you could but have painted the soul of the thing,—
   Not the rose alone, but the rose’s heart!

Flown are those days with their winged delights,
   As the odor is gone from the summer rose;
Yet still, whenever I wave my fan,
   The soft, south wind of memory blows.

Somehow I missed yesterday. I think I assumed I’d posted in the morning, but I hadn’t. Oops! Anyway, just under the wire, here’s one for today.

The Emperor of Ice-Cream
By Wallace Stevens

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

I was in the mood for a sonnet.

Autumnal Sonnet
By William Allingham

Now Autumn’s fire burns slowly along the woods,
And day by day the dead leaves fall and melt,
And night by night the monitory blast
Wails in the key-hold, telling how it pass’d
O’er empty fields, or upland solitudes,
Or grim wide wave; and now the power is felt
Of melancholy, tenderer in its moods
Than any joy indulgent summer dealt.
Dear friends, together in the glimmering eve,
Pensive and glad, with tones that recognise
The soft invisible dew in each one’s eyes,
It may be, somewhat thus we shall have leave
To walk with memory,—when distant lies
Poor Earth, where we were wont to live and grieve.

Current Tea: winter dreams (black tea with chocolate flavoring and peppermint leaves)

This one makes me think of my mother, who is a Master Gardener.

In the Garden
By Helena Coleman

The roses blushed a deeper red,
   The lilies looked more saintly,
The sweet-alyssum hung its head,
   And smiled and frowned most quaintly;
The daisies even, at my feet,
Were strangely knowing, strangely sweet.

The hollyhocks against the wall,
   So serious and old-fashioned,
Were all astir, the larkspur tall
   Seemed really quite impassioned.
I pondered, but I could not guess
What made their sudden consciousness.

Where’er I looked, their little eyes
   Were eager, wise, and tender,
As if they had some new surprise
   Or sympathy to render;
But, turning round all unaware,
I saw that she was standing there!

Current Tea: Diva blend (Ceylon black tea with hints of hazelnut and chocolate)

I called on Ted Kooser to help me out today and I was delighted to come across this poem.

The Crossing
By Ruth Moose

The snail at the edge of the road
inches forward, a trim gray finger
of a fellow in pinstripe suit.
He’s burdened by his house
that has to follow
where he goes. Every inch,
he pulls together
all he is,
all he owns,
all he was given.

The road is wide
but he is called
by something
that knows him
on the other side.

Current Tea: Masala chai (Assam Indian black tea, cardamom, cinnamon, ginger and vanilla)

Ah, Yeats, how I love thee!

Red Hanrahan’s Song About Ireland
By William Butler Yeats

The old brown thorn-trees break in two high over Cummen Strand,
Under a bitter black wind that blows from the left hand;
Our courage breaks like an old tree in a black wind and dies,
But we have hidden in our hearts the flame out of the eyes
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The wind has bundled up the clouds high over Knock-narea,
And thrown the thunder on the stones for all that Maeve can say.
Angers that are like noisy clouds have set our hearts abeat;
But we have all bent low and low and kissed the quiet feet
Of Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

The yellow pool has overflowed high up on Clooth-na-Bare,
For the wet winds are blowing out of the clinging air;
Like heavy flooded waters our bodies and our blood;
But purer than a tall candle before the Holy Rood
Is Cathleen, the daughter of Houlihan.

I haven’t posted anything by Tennyson in a while and this came up while I was searching for Celtic poetry. Naturally I took that as a sign that I should share it.

Home they brought her warrior dead
By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Home they brought her warrior dead:
She nor swooned, nor uttered cry:
All her maidens, watching, said,
‘She must weep or she will die.’

Then they praised him, soft and low,
Called him worthy to be loved,
Truest friend and noblest foe;
Yet she neither spoke nor moved.

Stole a maiden from her place,
Lightly to the warrior stepped,
Took the face-cloth from the face;
Yet she neither moved nor wept.

Rose a nurse of ninety years,
Set his child upon her knee—
Like summer tempest came her tears—
‘Sweet my child, I live for thee.’

I’m off to the Austin Celtic Festival today, so here’s a poem by an Irishman.

Stony Grey Soil
By Patrick Kavanagh

O stony grey soil of Monaghan
The laugh from my love you thieved;
You took the the gay child of my passion
And gave me your clod-conceived.

You clogged the feet of my boyhood
And I believed that my stumble
Had the poise and stride of Apollo
And his voice my thick-tongued mumble.

You told me the plough was immortal!
O green-life-conquering plough!
Your mandril strained, your coulter blunted
In the smooth lea-field of my brow.

You sang on steaming dunghills
A song of coward’s brood,
You perfumed my clothes with weasel itch,
You fed me on swinish food.

You flung a ditch on my vision
Of beauty, love and truth.
O stony grey soil of Monaghan
You burgled my bank of youth!

Lost the long hours of pleasure
All the women that love young men.
O can I still stroke the monster’s back
Or write with unpoisoned pen

His name in these lonely verses
Or mention the dark fields where
The first gay flight of my lyric
Got caught in a peasant’s prayer.

Mullahinsha, Drummeril, Black Shanco—
Wherever I turn I see
In the stony grey soil of Monaghan
Dead loves that were born for me.

Here’s another one from a poet scheduled to appear at my cousin’s bookstore this month. I snagged it from The Cortland Review.

With Some Poets In Baltimore, 2003
By Steven Huff

Only now in America could such a harbor
be empty of ships save
one moored permanently
and lighted for tourists, for our tips.
We walk by the water until the snow becomes heavy;
the poets are the ones who
come in from the weather
and drink in the bar, others out walking
are homeless. All of us
have lost loves, some lost families;
but the worst losses even poets are unable to name.
Our hands push money across the bar.
The seafood is from somewhere else,
not from this water, and never will be.
Some stay here forever and wait, some move
inland and try their luck. Others
simply wonder why things continue. Look,
the president is on the TV above the lobby
like a talking clock. You look
at your watch—you want to dispute the time.
And there’s always more news,
isn’t there? A rumor of war
means there is a war. There’s always
more harbor, rumor of harbor, always more dark.

My cousin owns an awesome bookstore and I saw in her newsletter that a couple poets are doing events at the store this month. I found some poems online to share. This one is from seastories.com.

The Love of Aurelia labiata
Karla Linn Merrifield

So now is the time of high tide,
I am afraid; I will give in
just as the moon jellies do, be flung
inland in tidal marshes, returned on
the ebb of relief toward the west.

Here I go—flinging
myself into the seething brine
with millions of my kind,
for now my skin too is fragile,
my heart translucent,
my flesh pliable. Look,
you can see through me,
you, the high tide come now,
bidding me ever out to sea
and into the great Pacific Gyre.
See, here I go spiraling.

I am as a white angel among an abundance
of angels. But here we float, spin,
pulse, without the gravitas of hierarchy
among us. We are not of the earth,
we are not of the heavens,
we are of water like you, ephemeral.

And because you are the high tide,
I will swim again in you
as you sweep me from swirling current’s
edge inexorably toward shore, and
into the harbor where I must become
human once more, I am afraid.