*Poem of the day thread

[Dillinger4]

Some Contributions to the Sociology of Numbers by Robert Dawson

The ones you notice first are the natural numbers.
Everybody knows their names; they are the anchors,
the stars, the alphas, the reference points. And of course
the rational numbers, who hang out with them,
sit next to them in arithmetic class.
It must be admitted that some are sidekicks,
spear carriers; 11/17 for instance
is never likely to make headlines.
But the Grade Eight teacher makes sure they all fit in.
Then in high school you start to notice the others, the misfits.
They have weird names, refuse to conform,
are the subjects of sinister rumors:
Did you hear about that Pythagorean ritual murder?
Yeah, creepy: something like that happens,
you bet there’s an irrational mixed up in it. You want
to watch yourself around them. One numerator,
one denominator, that’s what I say.

But not all irrational numbers are the same.
Consider e : poster child for “It Gets Better”.
Awkward and poorly approximated for the first few terms,
but 1⁄n! gets small so fast
that soon e is accepted among the rationals
almost as one of their own. They privately feel
that e ’s exotic air of the transcendental
indicates their own cosmopolitan taste.
Good marks in calculus, outstanding in Theory of Interest.
Ambition: to get an MBA.

And π: happy-go-lucky, Whole-Earth-Catalog spirit,
equally at home in Stats or Industrial Arts.
No one can really explain why π gets on
so flirtingly well with some denominators,
the sevenths, say, or the hundredandthirteenths.
and not with others. That’s just how things are.
But the fit’s never perfect, and some day you’ll see π
leaning against a signpost, thumb-out by the side of the highway,
living in the moment, destination anywhere,
waiting for the wind to change.

φ , long-haired, dressed in black, with a pentacle pendant,
and ill-fitting T-shirt depicting Stonehenge or the Pyramids.
Talks about sunflowers, crystals, numerology,
doesn’t get on with any fractions at all.
It’s hard to be sure if they avoid φ or φ them; but every chance
for approximation misses by the largest possible margin.
1 + 1⁄(1 + 1⁄(1 + 1⁄(1 + ...))) is the loneliest number.

 

[Dillinger4]

Geometry by Rita Dove

I prove a theorem and the house expands:
the windows jerk free to hover near the ceiling,
the ceiling floats away with a sigh.

 

[Dillinger4]

The Invention of Zero by Derek Collins

"The Muslims invented zero"
the taxi driver says
as he drives me home from the dentist.
Back at school in Kashmir
he'd been good at maths
encouraged that it was Muslims
who'd given zero a symbol,
a name, sifr. He's right.
I'd read in Dantzig's book, "Number",
how the Greeks could not imagine
the void, nothingness, as a number,
left it to the Arabs to lass emptiness
in a small circle, give it power
just as the dentist has filled
my hollow tooth to give it bite.
With the numbers the Arabs gave us
sums sharpened, became simple to do.

So simple and yet so difficult
to draw a circle around nothing,
around yearning,
so that it won't remain empty.

 

[Dillinger4]

What Kind Of Times Are These? By Adrienne Rich

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods meeting the unmarked strip of light—
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

 

[Greebo]

On Health

My good and noble health,
Thou matter'st more then wealth.
None know’th thy worth until
Thou fad’st, and we fall ill.

And every man can see,
In stark reality,
And every man will say:
“’Tis health I need today”.

No better thing we know,
No dearer gem we owe,
For all that we possess:
Pearls, stones of great finesse,
High offices and power
– One may enjoy this hour –
And so the gifts of youth,
And beauty are, in truth,
Good things, but only when
Our health is with us then.
For when the body’s weak,
The world around is bleak.
O jewel dear, my home
Awaiteth thee to come;
With thee it shall not perish.
’Tis all for thee to cherish.

Jan Kochanowski

 

[Dillinger4]

Mysteries by Terance Winch

All last night I kept speaking in this
archaic language, because I had been reading
Poe and thinking about him. I read "The Murders
in the Rue Morgue" which is supposedly the first
detective story. Who dun it? I wondered.
It turns out an orangutan was the murderer.
It looks to me like the detective story got off
to a pretty ridiculous start. I used to visit
Poe's house in the Bronx. I used to think,
God, Poe must have been a midget. Everything
was so small. Poe died in Baltimore and I can see why.
In Baltimore, all the people are very big and sincere.
During dinner last night, I told Doug and Susan
about "Murders in the Rue Morgue." I said I hadn't
finished it yet, but it looked like the murderer
was going to turn out to be an orangutan, unless
the plot took a surprising new twist. Then Doug
suggested that he and I collaborate
on a series of detective stories in which
the murderer is always an orangutan.

 

[Santino]

Mysteries by Terance Winch

All last night I kept speaking in this archaic language, because I had been reading Poe and thinking about him. I read "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" which is supposedly the first detective story. Who dun it? I wondered. It turns out an orangutan was the murderer. It looks to me like the detective story got off to a pretty ridiculous start. I used to visit Poe's house in the Bronx. I used to think, God, Poe must have been a midget. Everything was so small. Poe died in Baltimore and I can see why. In Baltimore, all the people are very big and sincere. During dinner last night, I told Doug and Susan about "Murders in the Rue Morgue." I said I hadn't finished it yet, but it looked like the murderer was going to turn out to be an orangutan, unless the plot took a surprising new twist. Then Doug suggested that he and I collaborate on a series of detective stories in which the murderer is always an orangutan.

That's better.

 

[Cheesypoof]

i need to write a poem soon.....it will be as emo as Drew would want....i wont put up anything too crap, it needs to come naturally

 

[Dillinger4]

In honour of World Poetry Day

Mein Kampf by David Lernee

all I want to do is
make poetry famous

all I want to do is
burn my initials into the sun

all I want do do is
read poetry from the middle of a
burning building
standing in the fast lane of the
freeway
falling from the top of the
Empire State Building

the literary world
sucks dead dog dick

I’d rather be Richard Speck
than Gary Snyder
I’d rather ride a rocketship to hell
than a Volvo to Bolinas

I’d rather
sell arms to the Martians
than wait sullenly for a
letter from some diseased clown with a
three-piece mind
telling me that I’ve won a
bullet-proof pair of rose-colored glasses
for my poem “Autumn in the Spring”

I want to be
hated
by everyone who teaches for a living

I want people to hear my poetry and
get headaches
I want people to hear my poetry and
vomit

I want people to hear my poetry and
weep, scream, disappear, start bleeding,
eat their television sets, beat each other to death with
swords and

go out and get riotously drunk on
someone else’s money

 

[ShiftyBagLady]

A Farewell to False Love
BY SIR WALTER RALEGH
Farewell, false love, the oracle of lies,
A mortal foe and enemy to rest,
An envious boy, from whom all cares arise,
A bastard vile, a beast with rage possessed,
A way of error, a temple full of treason,
In all effects contrary unto reason.

A poisoned serpent covered all with flowers,
Mother of sighs, and murderer of repose,
A sea of sorrows whence are drawn such showers
As moisture lend to every grief that grows;
A school of guile, a net of deep deceit,
A gilded hook that holds a poisoned bait.

A fortress foiled, which reason did defend,
A siren song, a fever of the mind,
A maze wherein affection finds no end,
A raging cloud that runs before the wind,
A substance like the shadow of the sun,
A goal of grief for which the wisest run.

A quenchless fire, a nurse of trembling fear,
A path that leads to peril and mishap,
A true retreat of sorrow and despair,
An idle boy that sleeps in pleasure's lap,
A deep mistrust of that which certain seems,
A hope of that which reason doubtful deems.

Sith then thy trains my younger years betrayed,
And for my faith ingratitude I find;
And sith repentance hath my wrongs bewrayed,
Whose course was ever contrary to kind:
False love, desire, and beauty frail, adieu!
Dead is the root whence all these fancies grew.

 

[Dillinger4]

Good Days Coming by Ho Chi Minh

Everything changes, the wheel
of the law turns without pause.

After the rain, good weather.
In the wink of an eye

The universe throws off
its muddy cloths.

For ten thousand miles
the landscape

Spreads out like
a beautiful brocade.

Gentle sunshine.
Light breezes. Smiling flowers,

Hang in the trees, amongst the
sparkling leaves,

All the birds sing at once.
Men and animals rise up reborn.

What could be more natural?
After sorrow comes happiness.

 

[ShiftyBagLady]

Rape Joke
By Patricia Lockwood

The rape joke is that you were 19 years old.

The rape joke is that he was your boyfriend.

The rape joke it wore a goatee. A goatee.

Imagine the rape joke looking in the mirror, perfectly reflecting back itself, and grooming itself to look more like a rape joke. “Ahhhh,” it thinks. “Yes. A goatee.”

No offense.

The rape joke is that he was seven years older. The rape joke is that you had known him for years, since you were too young to be interesting to him. You liked that use of the word interesting, as if you were a piece of knowledge that someone could be desperate to acquire, to assimilate, and to spit back out in different form through his goateed mouth.

Then suddenly you were older, but not very old at all.

The rape joke is that you had been drinking wine coolers. Wine coolers! Who drinks wine coolers? People who get raped, according to the rape joke.

The rape joke is he was a bouncer, and kept people out for a living.

Not you!

The rape joke is that he carried a knife, and would show it to you, and would turn it over and over in his hands as if it were a book.

He wasn’t threatening you, you understood. He just really liked his knife.

The rape joke is he once almost murdered a dude by throwing him through a plate-glass window. The next day he told you and he was trembling, which you took as evidence of his sensitivity.

How can a piece of knowledge be stupid? But of course you were so stupid.

The rape joke is that sometimes he would tell you you were going on a date and then take you over to his best friend Peewee’s house and make you watch wrestling while they all got high.

The rape joke is that his best friend was named Peewee.

OK, the rape joke is that he worshiped The Rock.

Like the dude was completely in love with The Rock. He thought it was so great what he could do with his eyebrow.

The rape joke is he called wrestling “a soap opera for men.” Men love drama too, he assured you.

The rape joke is that his bookshelf was just a row of paperbacks about serial killers. You mistook this for an interest in history, and laboring under this misapprehension you once gave him a copy of Günter Grass’s My Century, which he never even tried to read.

It gets funnier.

The rape joke is that he kept a diary. I wonder if he wrote about the rape in it.

The rape joke is that you read it once, and he talked about another girl. He called her Miss Geography, and said “he didn’t have those urges when he looked at her anymore,” not since he met you. Close call, Miss Geography!

The rape joke is that he was your father’s high-school student—your father taught World Religion. You helped him clean out his classroom at the end of the year, and he let you take home the most beat-up textbooks.

The rape joke is that he knew you when you were 12 years old. He once helped your family move two states over, and you drove from Cincinnati to St. Louis with him, all by yourselves, and he was kind to you, and you talked the whole way. He had chaw in his mouth the entire time, and you told him he was disgusting and he laughed, and spat the juice through his goatee into a Mountain Dew bottle.

The rape joke is that come on, you should have seen it coming. This rape joke is practically writing itself.

The rape joke is that you were facedown. The rape joke is you were wearing a pretty green necklace that your sister had made for you. Later you cut that necklace up. The mattress felt a specific way, and your mouth felt a specific way open against it, as if you were speaking, but you know you were not. As if your mouth were open ten years into the future, reciting a poem called Rape Joke.

The rape joke is that time is different, becomes more horrible and more habitable, and accommodates your need to go deeper into it.

Just like the body, which more than a concrete form is a capacity.

You know the body of time is elastic, can take almost anything you give it, and heals quickly.

The rape joke is that of course there was blood, which in human beings is so close to the surface.

The rape joke is you went home like nothing happened, and laughed about it the next day and the day after that, and when you told people you laughed, and that was the rape joke.

It was a year before you told your parents, because he was like a son to them. The rape joke is that when you told your father, he made the sign of the cross over you and said, “I absolve you of your sins, in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit,” which even in its total wrongheadedness, was so completely sweet.

The rape joke is that you were crazy for the next five years, and had to move cities, and had to move states, and whole days went down into the sinkhole of thinking about why it happened. Like you went to look at your backyard and suddenly it wasn’t there, and you were looking down into the center of the earth, which played the same red event perpetually.

The rape joke is that after a while you weren’t crazy anymore, but close call, Miss Geography.

The rape joke is that for the next five years all you did was write, and never about yourself, about anything else, about apples on the tree, about islands, dead poets and the worms that aerated them, and there was no warm body in what you wrote, it was elsewhere.

The rape joke is that this is finally artless. The rape joke is that you do not write artlessly.

The rape joke is if you write a poem called Rape Joke, you’re asking for it to become the only thing people remember about you.

The rape joke is that you asked why he did it. The rape joke is he said he didn’t know, like what else would a rape joke say? The rape joke said YOU were the one who was drunk, and the rape joke said you remembered it wrong, which made you laugh out loud for one long split-open second. The wine coolers weren’t Bartles & Jaymes, but it would be funnier for the rape joke if they were. It was some pussy flavor, like Passionate Mango or Destroyed Strawberry, which you drank down without question and trustingly in the heart of Cincinnati Ohio.

Can rape jokes be funny at all, is the question.

Can any part of the rape joke be funny. The part where it ends—haha, just kidding! Though you did dream of killing the rape joke for years, spilling all of its blood out, and telling it that way.

The rape joke cries out for the right to be told.

The rape joke is that this is just how it happened.

The rape joke is that the next day he gave you Pet Sounds. No really. Pet Sounds. He said he was sorry and then he gave you Pet Sounds. Come on, that’s a little bit funny.

Admit it.

 

[ShiftyBagLady]

Milk For The Cat
by Harold Munro

When the tea is brought at five o'clock,
And all the neat curtains are drawn with care,
The little black cat with bright green eyes
Is suddenly purring there.

At first she pretends, having nothing to do,
She has come in merely to blink by the grate,
But, though tea may be late or the milk may be
sour,
She is never late.

And presently her agate eyes
Take a soft large milky haze,
And her independent casual glance
Becomes a stiff, hard gaze.

Then she stamps her claws or lifts her ears,
Or twists her tail and begins to stir,
Till suddenly all her lithe body becomes
One breathing, trembling purr.

The children eat and wriggle and laugh;
The two old ladies stroke their silk:
But the cat is grown small and thin with desire,
Transformed to a creeping lust for milk.

The white saucer like some full moon descends
At last from the clouds of the table above;
She sighs and dreams and thrills and glows,
Transfigured with love.

She nestles over the shining rim,
Buries her chin in the creamy sea;
Her tail hangs loose; each drowsy paw
Is doubled under each bending knee.

A long, dim ecstasy holds her life;
Her world is an infinite shapeless white,
Till her tongue has curled the last holy drop,
Then she sinks back into the night,

Draws and dips her body to heap
Her sleepy nerves in the great arm-chair,
Lies defeated and buried deep
Three or four hours unconscious there.

 

[ShiftyBagLady]

And another by Harold Munro because I'm digging his anthropomorphism this evening
(heh, funny I should say digging as I've had Heaney's 'Digging' going round in my head intermittently for the past few days. I won't post it as I"m sure it's been done already)

edit: ah look, there's another Munro poem called 'Week-End' in which he does this charming anthropomorphism and it goes:
' ....All their hands are out
To greet us, and the gentle blankets seem
Purring and crooning: 'Lie in us, and dream.'
Isn't that great
On that note I shall retire to my crooning coverlets.

Every Thing

Since man has been articulate,
Mechanical, improvidently wise,
(Servant of Fate),
He has not understood the little cries
And foreign conversations of the small
Delightful creatures that have followed him
Not far behind;
Has failed to hear the sympathetic call
Of Crockery and Cutlery, those kind
Reposeful Teraphim
Of his domestic happiness; the Stool
He sat on, or the Door he entered through:
He has not thanked them, overbearing fool!
What is he coming to?

But you should listen to the talk of these.
Honest they are, and patient they have kept,
Served him without his Thank you or his Please. . .
I often heard
The gentle Bed, a sigh between each word,
Murmuring, before I slept.
The Candle, as I blew it, cried aloud,
Then bowed,
And in a smoky argument
Into the darkness went.

The Kettle puffed a tentacle of breath : --
' Pooh! I have boiled his water, I don't know
Why; and he always says I boil too slow,
He never calls me 'Sukie, dear,' and oh,
I wonder why I squander my desire
Sitting submissive on his fire.'

Now the old Copper Basin suddenly
Rattled and tumbled from the shelf,
Bumping and crying: ' I can fall by myself;
Without a woman's hand
To patronize and coax and flatter me,
I understand
The lean and poise of gravitable land.'
It gave a raucous and tumultuous shout,
Twisted itself convulsively about,
Rested upon the foor, and, while I stare,
It stares and grins at me.

The old impetuous Gas above my head
Begins irascibly to flare and fret,
Wheezing into its epileptic jet,
Reminding me I ought to go to bed.

The Rafters creak; an Empty-Cupboard door
Swings open; now a wild Plank of the floor
Breaks from its joist, and leaps behind my foot.
Down from the chimney half a pound of Soot
Tumbles, and lies, and shakes itself again.
The Putty cracks against hte window-pane.
A piece of Paper in the basket shoves
Another piece, and toward the bottom moves.
My independent Pencil, while I write,
Breaks at the point: the ruminating Clock
Stirs all its body and begins to rock,
Warning the waiting presence of the Night,
Strikes the dead hour, and tumbles to the plain
Ticking of ordinary work again.

You do well to remind me, and I praise
Your strangely individual foreign ways.
You call me from myself to recognize
Companionship in your unselfish eyes.
I want your dear acquaintances, although
I pass you arrogantly over, throw
Your lovely sounds, and squander them along
My busy days. I 'll do you no more wrong.

Purr for me, Sukie, like a faithful cat.
You, my well trampled Boots, and you, my Hat,
Remain my friends: I feel, though I don't speak,
Your touch grow kindlier from week to week.
It well becomes our mutual happiness
To go toward the same end more or less.
There is not much dissimilarity,
Not much to choose, I know it well, in fine,
Between the purposes of you and me,
And your eventual Rubbish Heap, and mine.

 

[Greebo]

A Ritual To Read To Each Other

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider -
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

William Stafford

 

[Greebo]

Just Thinking

Got up on a cool morning. Leaned out a window.
No cloud, no wind. Air that flowers held
for awhile. Some dove somewhere.

Been on probation most of my life. And
the rest of my life been condemned. So these moments
count for a lot--peace, you know.

Let the bucket of memory down into the well,
bring it up. Cool, cool minutes. No one
stirring, no plans. Just being there.

This is what the whole thing is about.

William Stafford

 

[mansonroad]

may well have been posted before but I can't bring myself to trawl through 12 years worth of posts to check haha, this is probably my favourite poem of all time

In Memory of W.B. Yeats by W.H. Auden

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.



III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.
- See more at: http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15544#sthash.qvFXxwdQ.dpuf

 

[Greebo]

may well have been posted before but I can't bring myself to trawl through 12 years worth of posts to check <snip>

For future reference, you don't need to read the entire thread, you can use the search box (top right) put the poet's name or the poem's first line, and then select "search this thread only".

 

[mansonroad]

cheers, should have done that in the first place

 

[Dillinger4]

.

 

[Dillinger4]

Thus shall you think of this fleeting world:
A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream,
A flash of lightning in a summer cloud,
A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream.

 

[Greebo]

See You

Take the first train to Cuntsville
I won't meet you at the station.
I'd be glad to wave you off
you are a human aberration.

Take that first train to Cuntsville
every coach is standing only.
Every toilet's blocked and leaking
liquid reused in the buffet.

Buy a single to Cuntsville
it's a oneway destination
all your boats and bridges left in
flames have made this situation.

Off you go
just bloody go
why don't you go?
Or you can miss the train and pick with me this bone.

 

[Dillinger4]

spoils (of) by Jessica Morey-Collins

My elbows root a new kitchen table
to my chin. My eyes, brief peonies,
scatter across the last two years:​

hours bunch around you--ridge or valley,
eclipse: no lonesome quota of good books
or aged teas can quite silver past
your shoulders, your stone-
ground coffee, the gentle shake of your hands
plunging the French press and rarely

spilling. No matter how
thick I corded the dig of my heels,
you slid away. My wish just tin foil
over a dish we swung around in meticulous jibe
but forgot to write a recipe for. My wish, the tin
foil: cragged backtalk to the tink of the refrigerator
light bulb. Nothing keeps forever.

 

[Dillinger4]

in cherry blossom
shadows, no one really, is
a stranger now

 

[Dillinger4]

A voice said, Look me in the stars
And tell me truly, men of earth,
If all the soul-and-body scars
Were not too much to pay for birth.

 

[Dillinger4]

The talking heads who
Would destroy the magic
Lived inside my mind
Too long
They sneered at paper tigers
Other charms I had
To ward off evil demons
While I slept.

And all the dragons
Turned back into windmills. There
Was no writing
On my paper sword.

The dragons took their fire
When they went away.
It’s hard to love or hate
The cold bleak structures
Littering the landscape
In their place.
We paint the colors
In ourselves.

And King Tut’s throne
I saw
Was really just the carcass
Of a long forgotten tree
With paint
And shelf life that would
Make a Twinkie proud.

And I myself became
A case, a vote, consumer
Human resource
Number on a census page,
And paid my taxes
Right on time
Stuck in limbo
Squashed between
Some other lonesome robots.

But now, I want to see
The iridescent spirits
Play among the leaves
And weeds of summer.
I want to see the
Snail trails sparkle
On the morning grass
And think they’re beautiful.

I want to feel again
some scorching heats and
Passions, exiles
Banished long ago
By common sense and logic.
I want those trolls
To get back under bridges.

I want to be
A person once again
And climb the beanstalks
Rage at giants
And believe that
Dog spit makes it better.

I must pack up
Those dreary demons
Logic, and his
Henchman Fact
Stick them back into
Their books and close
Their closets, two locks,
Maybe three
And only I
Possess the key.

And now, from down
Another road
I see the Tiger
Beckons me, and
Elves smile welcome
As I peek around that
Ancient corner in my mind.

I know I can reenter
Once again
The magic wondrous place
That knows no chemistry
Where I can think
and dream the world.

 

[sojourner]

Happy Anniversary!!

Dear Margaret


For Orgreave, the Beanfield, and Hillsborough.
For Operation Swamp 81.
For rejoicing in the burning and drowning of men.
For the miners, the unions,
the working class heroes,
the people whose skin you denied.
For the innocents turned into criminals.
For giving the Force a free rein
to wield batons and tear gas and horses,
to weaken and batter them all.

For the families who died.
For the lies you allowed to be told
all this time, not giving an ounce
of the truth or of justice for this 96.
For the mass destruction of all our communities,
psyches and spirits and faith.

For my dad, ex-Services, thrown on the dole
fifteen times in as many long months.

For my mother, dug deeper in poor mental health;
the poverty making her sicker, and sadder,
and madder than she’d ever been.

For my brother, who lived without wages for years,
burned out
on a pyre of your making.

For the youth of myself, for the public disgrace
of the free-dinner-queue, for the old cast-off shoes,
for none of the school trips or cookery lessons;
for the shrinking grey socks, for the punches and kicks
that my mother let fly in her madness.
For the ice and the mould inside every window.
For the hunger, the shame, my family’s pain,
for the living we scraped hand to mouth.

For all the above, for all our lost years,
for all of the grief and the depths that we reached…
dear Margaret,
there’s no absolution,
no forgiveness, or pity or grief.
Your legacy lives in the fat of the rich.
May your soul never find any peace.

 

[sojourner]

And here's one for spanglechick and the rest of the teachers on here. Jess Green, an amazing young poet, on Mr Gove...

http://www.pixable.com/share/5tFnT/?tracksrc=SHFAIPH3

 

[Boru]

My Piney Wood by Robert William Service

I have a tiny piney wood;
my trees are only fifty,
Yet give me shade and solitude
For they are thick and thrifty.
And every day to me they fling
With largess undenying,
Fat cones to make my kettle sing
And keep my pan a-frying.

Go buy yourself a piney wood
If you have gold for spending,
Where you can dream in mellow mood
With peace and joy unending;
Where you can cheerfully retreat
Beyond all churchly chiding,
And make yourself a temple sweet
Of rapturous abiding.

Oh silence has a secret voice
That claims the soul for portal,
And those who hear it may rejoice
Since they are more than mortal.
So sitting in my piney wood
When soft the owl is winging,
As still as Druid stone I brood . . .
For hark! the stars are singing.

 

[Dillinger4]

Tintern Abbey by William Wordsworth

Five years have past; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! and again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain-springs
With a soft inland murmur.—Once again
Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
'Mid groves and copses. Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.

These beauteous forms,
Through a long absence, have not been to me
As is a landscape to a blind man's eye:
But oft, in lonely rooms, and 'mid the din
Of towns and cities, I have owed to them
In hours of weariness, sensations sweet,
Felt in the blood, and felt along the heart;
And passing even into my purer mind,
With tranquil restoration:—feelings too
Of unremembered pleasure: such, perhaps,
As have no slight or trivial influence
On that best portion of a good man's life,
His little, nameless, unremembered, acts
Of kindness and of love. Nor less, I trust,
To them I may have owed another gift,
Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,
In which the burthen of the mystery,
In which the heavy and the weary weight
Of all this unintelligible world,
Is lightened:—that serene and blessed mood,
In which the affections gently lead us on,—
Until, the breath of this corporeal frame
And even the motion of our human blood
Almost suspended, we are laid asleep
In body, and become a living soul:
While with an eye made quiet by the power
Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,
We see into the life of things.


If this
Be but a vain belief, yet, oh! how oft—
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart—
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! thou wanderer thro' the woods,
How often has my spirit turned to thee!
And now, with gleams of half-extinguished thought,
With many recognitions dim and faint,
And somewhat of a sad perplexity,
The picture of the mind revives again:
While here I stand, not only with the sense
Of present pleasure, but with pleasing thoughts
That in this moment there is life and food
For future years. And so I dare to hope,
Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
I came among these hills; when like a roe
I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
Wherever nature led: more like a man
Flying from something that he dreads, than one
Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
(The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
And their glad animal movements all gone by)
To me was all in all.—I cannot paint
What then I was. The sounding cataract
Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
Their colours and their forms, were then to me
An appetite; a feeling and a love,
That had no need of a remoter charm,
By thought supplied, nor any interest
Unborrowed from the eye.—That time is past,
And all its aching joys are now no more,
And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
Abundant recompence. For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,—both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.


Nor perchance,
If I were not thus taught, should I the more
Suffer my genial spirits to decay:
For thou art with me here upon the banks
Of this fair river; thou my dearest Friend,
My dear, dear Friend; and in thy voice I catch
The language of my former heart, and read
My former pleasures in the shooting lights
Of thy wild eyes. Oh! yet a little while
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; 'tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy: for she can so inform
The mind that is within us, so impress
With quietness and beauty, and so feed
With lofty thoughts, that neither evil tongues,
Rash judgments, nor the sneers of selfish men,
Nor greetings where no kindness is, nor all
The dreary intercourse of daily life,
Shall e'er prevail against us, or disturb
Our cheerful faith, that all which we behold
Is full of blessings. Therefore let the moon
Shine on thee in thy solitary walk;
And let the misty mountain-winds be free
To blow against thee: and, in after years,
When these wild ecstasies shall be matured
Into a sober pleasure; when thy mind
Shall be a mansion for all lovely forms,
Thy memory be as a dwelling-place
For all sweet sounds and harmonies; oh! then,
If solitude, or fear, or pain, or grief,
Should be thy portion, with what healing thoughts
Of tender joy wilt thou remember me,
And these my exhortations! Nor, perchance—
If I should be where I no more can hear
Thy voice, nor catch from thy wild eyes these gleams
Of past existence—wilt thou then forget
That on the banks of this delightful stream
We stood together; and that I, so long
A worshipper of Nature, hither came
Unwearied in that service: rather say
With warmer love—oh! with far deeper zeal
Of holier love. Nor wilt thou then forget,
That after many wanderings, many years
Of absence, these steep woods and lofty cliffs,
And this green pastoral landscape, were to me
More dear, both for themselves and for thy sake!