|
Post by Nalkarj on Nov 13, 2020 1:50:51 GMT
“The Fall of Rome” by W.H. Auden
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Dec 23, 2020 23:31:46 GMT
“Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter” by Robert Bly
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Jan 19, 2021 22:40:51 GMT
“For the Anniversary of My Death” by W.S. Merwin
|
|
|
Post by Morgana on Feb 9, 2021 8:31:52 GMT
There is so much imagery in this poem, it's one of my favourites.
|
|
spiderwort
Junior Member
@spiderwort
Posts: 2,538
Likes: 9,331
|
Post by spiderwort on Feb 19, 2021 15:16:20 GMT
Notes on a Stay in a Hospital Quarantine Cell December 27, 2020 by Patricia Horan
After testing positive with COVID one week earlier, Patricia Horan passed away on December 30, 2020. This was her final poem, written with insistence and ferocity via text from her hospital bed according to her friend Elizabeth Sabo.
|
|
|
Post by Morgana on Feb 19, 2021 17:36:02 GMT
Notes on a Stay in a Hospital Quarantine CellDecember 27, 2020 by Patricia Horan After testing positive with COVID one week earlier, Patricia Horan passed away on December 30, 2020. This was her final poem, written with insistence and ferocity via text from her hospital bed according to her friend Elizabeth Sabo. That's beautiful.
|
|
spiderwort
Junior Member
@spiderwort
Posts: 2,538
Likes: 9,331
|
Post by spiderwort on Feb 19, 2021 22:36:14 GMT
Notes on a Stay in a Hospital Quarantine CellDecember 27, 2020 by Patricia Horan After testing positive with COVID one week earlier, Patricia Horan passed away on December 30, 2020. This was her final poem, written with insistence and ferocity via text from her hospital bed according to her friend Elizabeth Sabo. That's beautiful.
Beautiful and heartbreaking. May she rest in peace.
|
|
|
Post by Morgana on Feb 26, 2021 9:19:25 GMT
From William Blake's Auguries of Innocence.
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Jun 29, 2021 21:40:35 GMT
Noir by A.E. Stallings
Late at night, One of us sometimes has said, Watching a movie in black and white, Of the vivid figures quick upon the screen, “Surely by now all of them are dead”— The yapping, wire-haired terrier, of course— And the patient horse Soaked in an illusion of London rain, The Scotland Yard inspector at the scene, The extras—faces in the crowd, the sailors; The bungling blackmailers, The kidnapped girl’s parents, reunited again With their one and only joy, lisping in tones antique As at that style of pouting Cupid’s bow Or those plucked eyebrows, arched to the height of chic.
Ignorant of so many things we know, How they seem innocent, and yet they too Possess a knowledge that they cannot give, The grainy screen a kind of sieve That holds some things, but lets some things slip through With the current’s rush and swirl. We wonder briefly only about the girl— How old—seven, twelve—it isn’t clear— Perhaps she’s still alive Watching this somewhere at eighty-five, The only one who knows, though we might guess, What the kidnapper whispers in her ear, Or the color of her dress.
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Jul 27, 2021 21:06:54 GMT
A New Lifestyle by James Tate
People in this town drink too much coffee. They’re jumpy all the time. You see them drinking out of their big plastic mugs while they’re driving. They cut in front of you, they steal your parking places. Teenagers in the cemeteries knocking over tombstones are slurping café au lait. Recycling men hanging onto their trucks are sipping espresso. Dogcatchers running down the street with their nets are savoring their cups of mocha java. The holdup man entering a convenience store first pours himself a nice warm cup of coffee. Down the funeral parlor driveway a boy on a skateboard is spilling his. They’re so serious about their coffee, it’s all they can think about, nothing else matters. Everyone’s wide awake but looks incredibly tired.
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Jul 29, 2021 15:32:23 GMT
A Hundred Years from Now by David Shumate
I’m sorry I won’t be around a hundred years from now. I’d like to see how it all turns out. What language most of you are speaking. What country is swaggering across the globe. I’m curious to know if your medicines cure what ails us now. And how intelligent your children are as they parachute down through the womb. Have you invented new vegetables? Have you trained spiders to do your bidding? Have baseball and opera merged into one melodic sport? A hundred years…My grandfather lived almost that long. The doctor who came to the farmhouse to deliver him arrived in a horse-drawn carriage. Do you still have horses?
|
|
|
Post by Morgana on Aug 4, 2021 8:57:43 GMT
Thought I'd post the video of me reading Sylvia Plath's 'Mad Girl's Love Song'.
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Aug 11, 2021 17:20:36 GMT
Finding a Box of Family Letters by Dana Gioia
The dead say little in their letters they haven’t said before. We find no secrets, and yet how different every sentence sounds heard across the years.
My father breaks my heart simply by being so young and handsome. He’s half my age, with jet-black hair. Look at him in his navy uniform grinning beside his dive-bomber.
Come back, Dad! I want to shout. He says he misses all of us (though I haven’t yet been born). He writes from places I never knew he saw, and everyone he mentions now is dead.
There is a large, long photograph curled like a diploma—a banquet sixty years ago. My parents sit uncomfortably among tables of dark-suited strangers. The mildewed paper reeks of regret.
I wonder what song the band was playing, just out of frame, as the photographer arranged your smiles. A waltz? A foxtrot? Get out there on the floor and dance! You don’t have forever.
What does it cost to send a postcard to the underworld? I’ll buy a penny stamp from World War II and mail it downtown at the old post office just as the courthouse clock strikes twelve.
Surely the ghost of some old postal worker still makes his nighty rounds, his routine too tedious for him to notice when it ended. He works so slowly he moves back in time carrying our dead letters to their lost addresses.
It’s silly to get sentimental. The dead have moved on. So should we. But isn’t it equally simple-minded to miss the special expertise of the departed in clarifying our long-term plans?
They never let us forget that the line between them and us is only temporary. Get out there and dance! the letters shout adding, Love always. Can’t wait to get home! And soon we will be. See you there.
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Sept 2, 2021 2:27:05 GMT
Fall Rain by Robert Bly
In the rain the sodden leaffloor shudders faintly as if ruffling its feathers; it is the time when bark hangs from old birch and poplar trees, like rags, and the moss gains new foothold on the sodden cedar trunk leaning out over the water. The husband, in the damp bed covered with blankets, dreams of aunts he has never heard of, dead grandfathers still alive, and strange earth- quakes as they walk the street. Now on the roof the delicate rain whispers of wet sails falling over abandoned junks in ancient har- bors of China, and of young women wandering in the rain to die, and it whispers of drowned bodies floating on the stairs of the lake floor, ascending to the eternal balconies of death, and of the souls of those of the first World War beneath the tangled metal, the buckles and the ghosts of leather, ghosts of wooden wagon wheels, of shell casings and bandages. Now the sound of geese is heard.
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Sept 15, 2021 20:58:23 GMT
Section 15, Song of Myself by Walt Whitman
The pure contralto sings in the organ loft, The carpenter dresses his plank, the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp, The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner, The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, The mate stands braced in the whale-boat, lance and harpoon are ready,
The duck-shooter walks by silent and cautious stretches, The deacons are ordain’d with cross’d hands at the altar, The spinning-girl retreats and advances to the hum of the big wheel, The farmer stops by the bars as he walks on a First-day loafe and looks at the oats and rye, The lunatic is carried at last to the asylum a confirm’d case, (He will never sleep any more as he did in the cot in his mother’s bed-room;) The jour printer with gray head and gaunt jaws works at his case, He turns his quid of tobacco while his eyes blurr with the manuscript; The malform’d limbs are tied to the surgeon’s table, What is removed drops horribly in a pail; The quadroon girl is sold at the auction-stand, the drunkard nods by the bar-room stove, The machinist rolls up his sleeves, the policeman travels his beat, the gate-keeper marks who pass, The young fellow drives the express-wagon, (I love him, though I do not know him;) The half-breed straps on his light boots to compete in the race, The western turkey-shooting draws old and young, some lean on their rifles, some sit on logs, Out from the crowd steps the marksman, takes his position, levels his piece; The groups of newly-come immigrants cover the wharf or levee, As the woolly-pates hoe in the sugar-field, the overseer views them from his saddle, The bugle calls in the ball-room, the gentlemen run for their partners, the dancers bow to each other, The youth lies awake in the cedar-roof’d garret and harks to the musical rain, The Wolverine sets traps on the creek that helps fill the Huron, The squaw wrapt in her yellow-hemm’d cloth is offering moccasins and bead-bags for sale, The connoisseur peers along the exhibition-gallery with half-shut eyes bent sideways, As the deck-hands make fast the steamboat the plank is thrown for the shore-going passengers, The young sister holds out the skein while the elder sister winds it off in a ball, and stops now and then for the knots, The one-year wife is recovering and happy having a week ago borne her first child, The clean-hair’d Yankee girl works with her sewing-machine or in the factory or mill, The paving-man leans on his two-handed rammer, the reporter’s lead flies swiftly over the note-book, the sign-painter is lettering with blue and gold, The canal boy trots on the tow-path, the book-keeper counts at his desk, the shoemaker waxes his thread, The conductor beats time for the band and all the performers follow him, The child is baptized, the convert is making his first professions, The regatta is spread on the bay, the race is begun, (how the white sails sparkle!) The drover watching his drove sings out to them that would stray, The pedler sweats with his pack on his back, (the purchaser higgling about the odd cent;) The bride unrumples her white dress, the minute-hand of the clock moves slowly, The opium-eater reclines with rigid head and just-open’d lips, The prostitute draggles her shawl, her bonnet bobs on her tipsy and pimpled neck, The crowd laugh at her blackguard oaths, the men jeer and wink to each other, (Miserable! I do not laugh at your oaths nor jeer you;) The President holding a cabinet council is surrounded by the great Secretaries, On the piazza walk three matrons stately and friendly with twined arms, The crew of the fish-smack pack repeated layers of halibut in the hold, The Missourian crosses the plains toting his wares and his cattle, As the fare-collector goes through the train he gives notice by the jingling of loose change, The floor-men are laying the floor, the tinners are tinning the roof, the masons are calling for mortar, In single file each shouldering his hod pass onward the laborers; Seasons pursuing each other the indescribable crowd is gather’d, it is the fourth of Seventh-month, (what salutes of cannon and small arms!) Seasons pursuing each other the plougher ploughs, the mower mows, and the winter-grain falls in the ground; Off on the lakes the pike-fisher watches and waits by the hole in the frozen surface, The stumps stand thick round the clearing, the squatter strikes deep with his axe, Flatboatmen make fast towards dusk near the cotton-wood or pecan-trees, Coon-seekers go through the regions of the Red river or through those drain’d by the Tennessee, or through those of the Arkansas, Torches shine in the dark that hangs on the Chattahooche or Altamahaw,
Patriarchs sit at supper with sons and grandsons and great-grandsons around them, In walls of adobie, in canvas tents, rest hunters and trappers after their day’s sport, The city sleeps and the country sleeps, The living sleep for their time, the dead sleep for their time, The old husband sleeps by his wife and the young husband sleeps by his wife; And these tend inward to me, and I tend outward to them, And such as it is to be of these more or less I am, And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
|
|
|
Post by mikef6 on Oct 12, 2021 20:57:16 GMT
“Cradle Song” from the play “Patient Grissel” (1603) by Thomas Dekker
Golden slumbers kiss your eyes, Smiles awake you when you rise. Sleep, pretty wantons; do not cry, And I will sing a lullaby: Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Care is heavy, therefore sleep you; You are care, and care must keep you; Sleep, pretty wantons; do not cry, And I will sing a lullaby: Rock them, rock them, lullaby.
Another song from the same play:
Art thou poor, yet hast thou golden slumbers? O sweet content! Art thou rich, yet is thy mind perplexed? O punishment! Dost thou laugh to see how fools are vexed To add to golden numbers, golden numbers? O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace; Honest labour bears a lovely face; Then hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny!
Canst drink the waters of the crisped spring? O sweet content! Swimm'st thou in wealth, yet sink'st in thine own tears? O punishment! Then he that patiently want's burden bears No burden bears, but is a king, a king: O sweet content! O sweet, O sweet content!
Work apace, apace, apace, apace; Honest labour bears a lovely face; Then hey nonny nonny, hey nonny nonny!
|
|
|
Post by Nalkarj on Dec 22, 2021 3:17:43 GMT
The Shortest Day by Susan Cooper
So the shortest day came, and the year died, And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world Came people singing, dancing, To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees, They hung their homes with evergreen, They burned beseeching fires all night long To keep the year alive.
And when the new year’s sunshine blazed awake, They shouted, reveling. Through all the frosty ages you can hear them Echoing behind us—listen!
All the long echoes sing the same delight, This shortest day, As promise wakens in the sleeping land: They carol, feast, give thanks, And dearly love their friends, And hope for peace.
And so do we, here, now, This year and every year. Welcome Yule!
|
|
|
Post by nutsberryfarm 🏜 on Dec 23, 2021 11:46:21 GMT
Before The Dawn by Federico Garcia Lorca
But like love the archers are blind
Upon the green night, the piercing saetas leave traces of warm lily.
The keel of the moon breaks through purple clouds and their quivers fill with dew.
Ay, but like love the archers are blind!
|
|
|
Post by Carl LaFong on Dec 24, 2021 6:04:34 GMT
|
|
|
Post by nutsberryfarm 🏜 on Dec 25, 2021 13:43:36 GMT
|
|