The poetry thread

Miscellaneous
72

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

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.

2 Likes
74

One her most beloved poems. She was absolutely brilliant. I guess the poem was about her experience in the hospital after appendectomy, where she received some tulips and contrasted the color of the flowers with the sterility of the hospital.

Here is an excerpt from an analysis I read:

“The choice she must make is to either embrace death or painfully return to life.”

I think it was Oscar Wilde who said that behind everything exquisite was something tragic.

2 Likes
75

This one is dark and kind of chilling. I remember reading it in college and have never forgotten it.

Formal Application

“ The poets apparently want to rejoin the human race .” ~ TIME

I shall begin by learning to throw
the knife, first at trees, until it sticks
in the trunk and quivers every time;

next from a chair, using only wrist
and fingers, at a thing on the ground,
a fresh ant hill or a fallen leaf;

then at a moving object, perhaps
a pieplate swinging on twine, until
I pot it at least twice in three tries.

Meanwhile, I shall be teaching the birds
that the skinny fellow in sneakers
is a source of suet and breadcrumbs,

first putting them on a shingle nailed
to a pine tree, next scattering them
on the needles, closer and closer

to my seat, until the proper bird,
a towhee, I think, in black and rust
and gray, takes tossed crumbs six feet away.

Finally, I shall coordinate
conditioned reflex and functional
form and qualify as Modern Man.

You see the splash of blood and feathers
and the blade pinning it to the tree?
It’s called an “Audubon Crucifix.”

The phrase has pleasing (even pious)
connotations, like Arbeit Macht Frei ,
“Molotov Cocktail,” and Enola Gay .

–Donald W. Baker

(I did some research and learned that Donald Baker was a navigator in the Army Air Corps’ 382nd Bomb Group, serving in B-29 bombers in the American, European, and Asian theatres during World War II.)

3 Likes
76

Hallelujah: A sestina

A wind’s word, the Hebrew Hallelujah.
I wonder they never gave it to a boy
(Hal for short) boy with wind-wild hair.
It means Praise God, as well it should since praise
Is what God’s for. Why didn’t they call my father
Hallelujah instead of Ebenezer?

Eben, of course, but christened Ebenezer,
Product of Nova Scotia (hallelujah).
Daniel, a country doctor, was his father
And my father his tenth and final boy.
A baby and last, he had a baby’s praise:
Red petticoats, red cheeks, and crow-black hair.

A boy has little to say about his hair
And little about a name like Ebenezer
Except that you can shorten either. Praise
God for that, for that shout Hallelujah.
Shout Hallelujah for everything a boy
Can be that is not his father or grandfather.

But then, before you know it, he is a father
Too and passing on his brand of hair
To one more perfectly defenseless boy,
Dubbing him John or James or Ebenezer
But never, so far as I know, Hallelujah,
As if God didn’t need quite that much praise.

But what I’m coming to - Could I ever praise
My father half enough for being a father
Who let me be myself? Sing Hallelujah.
Preacher he was with a prophet’s head of hair
And what but a prophet’s name was Ebenezer,
However little I guessed it as a boy?

Outlandish names of course are never a boy’s
Choice. And it takes some time to learn to praise.
Stone of Help is the meaning of Ebenezer.
Stone of Help - what fitter name for my father?
Always the Stone of Help however his hair
Might graduate from black to Hallelujah.

Such is the old drama of boy and father.
Praise from a grayhead now with thinning hair.
Sing Ebenezer, Robert, sing Hallelujah!

Robert Francis

(A sestina is a fixed verse form consisting of six stanzas of six lines each, normally followed by a three-line envoi. The words that end each line of the first stanza are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern.)

2 Likes
77

Mama never forgets her birds,

Though in another tree –

She looks down just as often

And just as tenderly

As when her little mortal nest

With cunning care she wove –

If either of her sparrows fall,

She notices, above.

– Emily Dickinson

It is believed that Emily Dickinson wrote this poem for her young cousins to console them upon the death of their mother.

1 Like
78

I lost my last living grandparent recently so I wrote this for them all.

—Out of Grandparents—

May I borrow a Grandparent?
It seems I’ve ran out.
By luck I once had six.
Now there aint none about.

Grandma Arlene was the first one to go.
She ran out of soaps to watch I suppose.
Grandpa Hy said goodbye way down the road.
Just a horned frog’s spit from ole Mexico.

Grandpa Leroy could sing but he couldn’t drive.
85 and cruisin’ for chicks he lived like he died.
Grandma Yvonne had the most fun in life.
Walla Bing Bang the Witch Doctor’s advice.

'Pa and 'Ma Southworth we lost just this year.
They lived the longest, no smoking no beer.
Doris after Joe just three months between.
Their only time apart that I’ve ever seen.

I miss them all they all were so dear.
Though one thing makes me smile sincere.
I was wrong when I said they’re no longer here.
If I look hard I’ll see them in my mirror.

2 Likes
79

The Truth the Dead Know

BY ANNE SEXTON

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,

refusing the stiff procession to the grave,

letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.

It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate

myself where the sun gutters from the sky,

where the sea swings in like an iron gate

and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones

from the whitehearted water and when we touch

we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.

Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes

in their stone boats. They are more like stone

than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse

to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

80

The earliest published version of this limerick appeared in 1902 in the Princeton Tiger :

"There once was a man from Nantucket

Who kept all his cash in a bucket.

But his daughter, named Nan,

Ran away with a man

And as for the bucket, Nantucket."

It evokes such feeling, such thought. Anyone care to help me do a proper explication? @NewbombTurk?

1 Like
81

This was the precursor to the same man going to hell in a bucket.

2 Likes
82

THE ROMANCE, by Shel Silverstein

Said the pelican to the elephant,
“I think we should marry, I do.
’Cause there’s no name that rhymes with me,
And no one else rhymes with you.”

Said the elephant to the pelican,
“There’s sense to what you’ve said,
For rhyming’s as good a reason as any
For any two to wed.”

And so the elephant wed the pelican,
And they dined upon lemons and limes,
And now they have a baby pelicant,
And everybody rhymes.

3 Likes
83

Adam Cast Forth (English)

Was there a Garden or was the Garden a dream?

Amid the fleeting light, I have slowed myself and queried,

Almost for consolation, if the bygone period

Over which this Adam, wretched now, once reigned supreme,

Might not have been just a magical illusion

Of that God I dreamed. Already it’s imprecise

In my memory, the clear Paradise,

But I know it exists, in flower and profusion,

Although not for me. My punishment for life

Is the stubborn earth with the incestuous strife

Of Cains and Abels and their brood; I await no pardon.

Yet, it’s much to have loved, to have known true joy,

To have had – if only for just one day –

The experience of touching the living Garden.

Gurarie, Genia

-Jorge Luis Borges

1 Like
84

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lt Col. John McCrae WWI

3 Likes
85

For the Fallen

BY LAURENCE BINYON

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,

England mourns for her dead across the sea.

Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,

Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal

Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,

There is music in the midst of desolation

And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,

Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.

They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;

They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning

We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;

They sit no more at familiar tables of home;

They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;

They sleep beyond England’s foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,

Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,

To the innermost heart of their own land they are known

As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,

Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;

As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,

To the end, to the end, they remain.

I should add here that the stanza:

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.”

is recited at Remembrance Day ceremonies across the country on November 11. It is known as the Act of Remembrance. A dignitary recites the Act and the assemby responds “We will remember them” This is usually done either immediately prior to the 2 minutes silence or just after.

2 Likes
86

For Malcolm X

BY MARGARET WALKER

All you violated ones with gentle hearts;

You violent dreamers whose cries shout heartbreak;

Whose voices echo clamors of our cool capers,

And whose black faces have hollowed pits for eyes.

All you gambling sons and hooked children and bowery bums

Hating white devils and black bourgeoisie,

Thumbing your noses at your burning red suns,

Gather round this coffin and mourn your dying swan.

Snow-white moslem head-dress around a dead black face!

Beautiful were your sand-papering words against our skins!

Our blood and water pour from your flowing wounds.

You have cut open our breasts and dug scalpels in our brains.

When and Where will another come to take your holy place?

Old man mumbling in his dotage, crying child, unborn?

1 Like
87

. “Poetry lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world, and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar.” *— Percy Bysshe Shelley

I’m glad this thread has been such a success. Poetry makes life worth living.

88

Some things deserve to be shared over and over. This one says a lot, and I encourage you not just to find your own meaning in the words, but also to understand why it was written.

One Art

BY ELIZABETH BISHOP

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.

2 Likes
89

dirty old rag 2020-12-19 154039
dirty old rag 2020-12-19 154039637×533 19.7 KB

By Rodney Southworth

1 Like
90

–Magic Pen–

By Rodney Southworth

I have a funny magic pen,
it’s where all my poems begin.
I just wave it all about,
and the witty words dance out.

2020 for my pen has been a test,
a year that’s not quite been the best.
For the magic ink is running thin,
and everywhere I see less grins.

Am I the fool who waves the pen about,
believing there’s still magic to come out?
There has to be and so I’ll hold that belief,
for I miss the grins seen more frequently.

I would not make a promise of things to be,
though I would say there is something we all need.
My friends, wave your magic pens and wave them true,
then soon this world of ours won’t seem so blue.

1 Like
91

My dad passed away a while back. I was going thru some of his things and found this poem in his handwriting. He was an avid hiker and a quiet person. He wrote and sketched quite a bit about the things he saw and did.

The blue silent hills
lay
gathering the sun
and sagebrush,
collecting sego lilies
and ravens,
spreading them across the ridges,
tucking them
into the gullies,
holding them hidden
so no one could find them
except those
who like to smell the sage
and feel the wind
on the face.

7 Likes
92

That’s a lovely poem.
Thanks for sharing

1 Like