Poetry Month

I end, as usual, with my favorite poet:

Sonnet 138

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearned in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed:
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O! love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love, loves not to have years told:
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

--William Shakespeare

Poetry Month

To honor the end of poetry month:

{h/t Cheesehead}

I can't help but poke fun, y'know.

Poetry Month

Address to A Haggis *

    1

Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
                Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
                As lang's my arm.

   2

The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill   
                In time o' need,
While thro' your pores the dews distil
                Like amber bead.

   3

His knife see rustic Labour dight,
An' cut you up wi' ready sleight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
                Like ony ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
                Warm-reekin, rich!

   4

Then, horn for horn, they stretch an' strive:
Deil tak the hindmost, on they drive,
Till a' their weel-swall'd kytes belyve,
                Are bent lyke drums;
Then auld Guidman, maist like to rive,
                "Bethankit!" hums.

   5

Is there that owre his French ragout
Or olio that wad staw a sow,
Or fricassee wad mak her spew
                Wi' perfect sconner,
Looks down wi' sneering, scornfu' view
                On sic a dinner?

   6

Poor devil! see him ower his trash,
As feckless as a wither'd rash,
His spindle shank, a guid whip-lash,
               His nieve a nit;
Thro' bloody flood or field to dash,
               O how unfit!

   7

But mark the Rustic, haggis fed,
The trembling earth resounds his tread.
Clap in his walie nieve a blade,
               He'll mak it whissle;
An' legs an' arms, an' heads will sned,
               Like taps o' thrissle.

   8

Ye Pow'rs wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o' fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
               That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu' prayer,
               Gie her a haggis!
--Robert Burns

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* those of ye not verst in the Scots toung', see here

Poetry Month

Scars

They tell how it was, and how time
came along, and how it happened
again and again. They tell
the slant life takes when it turns
and slashes your face as a friend.

Any wound is real. In church
a woman lets the sun find
her cheek, and we see the lesson:
there are years in that book; there are sorrows
a choir can't reach when they sing.

Rows of children lift their faces of promise,
places where the scars will be.

--William Stafford

Poetry Month

Yet Do I Marvel

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus

To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!

--Countée Cullen

Poetry Month

Dirge without Music

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.
Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poetry Month

Way of the Water-Hyacinth

Bobbing on the breeze blown waves
Bowing to the tide
Hyacinth rises and falls

Falling but not felled
By flotsam, twigs, leaves
She ducks, bobs, and weaves

Ducks, ducks by the score
Jolting, quacking and more
She spins through -

Spinning, swamped, slimed, sunk
She rises, resolute
Still crowned by petals.

--Zawgee (translated from the Burmese by Lyn Aye)

Poetry Month

Remembered

Your little sister
Has tossed her
Untied hair forward
Like a living veil,
Like a fragrant hedge,
And peers, with such eyes!
Through a fragrant veil,
Through a dark hedge ...
How sweet it is to only
Think of such little things.

Fruits have ripened
On all the longing branches
In your nightly garden,
Chinese lanterns like red fruits
Sway and illuminate
The longing branches
Rustled by the night wind
In your little garden ...

How sweet it is to only
Think of such little things.

-- Hugo von Hofmannsthal (translated from the German by Johannes Beilharz)

Poetry Month

Happiness

John had
Great Big
Waterproof
Boots on;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Hat;
John had a
Great Big
Waterproof
Mackintosh --
And that
(Said John)
Is
That.

--A.A. Milne

Poetry Month

Prospective Immigrants Please Note

Either you will
go through this door
or you will not go through.

If you go through
there is always the risk
of remembering your name.

Things look at you doubly
and you must look back
and let them happen.

If you do not go through
it is possible
to live worthily

to maintain your attitudes
to hold your position
to die bravely

but much will blind you,
much will evade you,
at what cost who knows?

The door itself
makes no promises.
It is only a door.

--Adrienne Rich

Poetry Month

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,—
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.

Why should the world be over-wise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
          We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
         We wear the mask! 

--Paul Lawrence Dunbar

Poetry Month

Preface to a Twenty Volume Suicide Note
(For Kellie Jones, born 16 May 1959)

Lately, I've become accustomed to the way
The ground opens up and envelopes me
Each time I go out to walk the dog.
Or the broad edged silly music the wind
Makes when I run for a bus . . .

Things have come to that.

And now, each night I count the stars.
And each night I get the same number.
And when they will not come to be counted,
I count the holes they leave.

Nobody sings anymore.

And then last night I tiptoed up
To my daughter's room and heard her
Talking to someone, and when I opened
The door, there was no one there...
Only she on her knees, peeking into

Her own clasped hands.

--Amiri Baraka (LeRoi Jones)

Poetry Month

from Tao te Ching

To understand others is to be knowledgeable;
To understand yourself is to be wise.
To conquer others is to have strength;
To conquer yourself is to be strong.
To know when you have enough is to be rich.
To go forward with strength is to have ambition.
To not lose your place is to last long.
To die but not be forgotten--that's true long life.

--Lao Tzu (translated from the Chinese by Robert G. Henricks)

Poetry Month

from Zeitgehoft

Not until
as a shade I touch you
will you believe
my mouth,

that clambers about
with late-minded things
up there
in time-courts

you come to the host
of the seconds-utilizers among
the angels,

and a body that rages for silence
stars.

--Paul Celan (translated from the German by Michael Hamburger)

Poetry Month

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

--Elizabeth Bishop

Poetry Month

Merry-Go-Round

   COLORED CHILD AT CARNIVAL

Where is the Jim Crow section
On this merry-go-round,
Mister, cause I want to ride?
Down South where I come from
White and colored
Can't sit side by side.
Down South on the train
There's a Jim Crow car.
On the bus we're put in the back--
But there ain't no back
To a merry-go-round!
Where's the horse
For a kid that's black?

--Langston Hughes

Poetry Month

The Bean Eaters

They eat beans mostly, this old yellow pair.
Dinner is a casual affair.
Plain chipware on a plain and creaking wood,
Tin flatware.

Two who are Mostly Good.
Two who have lived their day,
But keep on putting on their clothes
And putting things away.

And remembering . . .
Remembering, with twinklings and twinges,
As they lean over the beans in their rented back room that
is full of beads and receipts and dolls and cloths,
tobacco crumbs, vases and fringes.

--Gwendolyn Brooks

Poetry Month

Dulce et Decorum Est *

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

--Wilfred Owen

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* A nice critical discussion of this poem is here

Poetry Month

The Moon Wakes

   When the moon sails out
the bells fade into stillness
and there emerge the pathways
that can’t be penetrated.

   When the moon sails out
the water hides earth’s surface,
the heart feels like an island
in the infinite silence.

   Nobody eats an orange
under the moon's fullness.
It is correct to eat, then,
green and icy fruit.

   When the moon sails out
with a hundred identical faces,
the coins made of silver
sob in your pocket.

--Federico Garcia Lorca (translated from the Spanish by A. S. Kline)

Poetry Month

Some Days

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs,
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds,
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

--Billy Collins