1117. Time - Louise Glück

There was too much, always, then too little

Childhood: sickness.

By the side of the bed I had a little bell—

at the other end of the bell, my mother.

Sickness, gray rain. The dogs slept through it. They slept on the bed,

at the end of it, and it seemed to me they understood

about childhood: best to remain unconscious.

The rain made gray slats on the windows.

I sat with my book, the little bell beside me.

Without hearing a voice, I apprenticed myself to a voice.

Without seeing any sign of the spirit, I determined

to live in the spirit.

The rain faded in and out.

Month after month, in the space of a day

Things became dreams; dreams became things.

Then I was well; the bell went back to the cupboard.

The rain ended. The dogs stood at the door,

panting to go outside.

I was well, then I was an adult.

And time went on—it was like the rain,

to much, so much, as though it was a weight that couldn’t be moved.

I was a child, half sleeping.

I was sick: I was proected.

And I lived in the world of the spirit,

the world of the gray rain,

the lost, the remembered.

Then suddenly the sun was shining,

And time went on, even when there was almost none left.

And the perceived became the remembered,

the remembered, the perceived.

1116. The Next Time - Mark Strand

Nobody sees it happening, but the architecture of our time

Is becoming the architecture of the next time. And the dazzle

Of light upon the waters is as nothing beside the changes

Wrought therein, just as our waywardness means

Nothing against the steady purr of things over the edge.

Nobody can stop the flow, but nobody can start it either.

Time slips by; our sorrows do not turn into poems,

And what is invisible stays that way. Desire has fled,

Leaving only a trace of perfume in its wake,

and so many people we loved have gone,

And no voice comes from outer space, from the folds

Of dust and carpets of wind to tell us that this

Is the way it was meant to happen that if only we knew

How long the ruins would last we would never complain.

1115. Excerpt from: What W. H. Auden Can Do For You - Alexander McCall Smith

 “…. Auden wrote a gravely beautiful poem…. Its title was: “New Year Letter,” and it was addressed to Elizabeth Mayer, a refugee from the depredations of Nazi Germany, a translator, and a close friend. Like many of his works, this poem is conversational in tone but contains within it a complex skein of ideas about humanity and history, about art, civilization, and violence. At the end of the letter, through, there occur lines that are among the most beautiful he wrote. Addressing his friend, he draws attention to what she brings to the world through her therapeutic calling:” 

We fall down in the dance, we make

The old ridiculous mistake,

But always there are such as you

Forgiving, helping what we do.

O every day in sleep and labour

Our life and death are with our neighbor,

And love illuminates again

The city and the lion’s den. 

The world’s great rage, the travail of young men.

1114. - Madly Singing In The Mountains - Po Chu - I

 Selected from: A Book Of Luminous Things, Edited by Czeslaw Milosz

Translated from the Chinese by Arthur Waley

There is no one among men that has not a special failing,

I have broken away from the thousand ties of life;

But this infirmity still remains behind.

Each time that I look at a fine landscape,

Each time that I meet a loved friend,

I raise my voice and recite a stanza of poetry

And marvel as though a God had crossed my path.

Ever since the day I was banished to Hsün-yang

Half my time I have lived among the hills.

And often when I have finished a new poem,

Alone I climb the road to the Eastern Rock.

I lean my body on the banks of white Stone;

I pull down with my hands a green cassia branch.

My mad singing startles the valleys and hills;

The apes and birds all come to peep.

Fearing to become a laughing-stock to the world,

I choose a place that is unfrequented by men.

1113. There Is No Insurmountable Solitude - Pablo Neruda

There is no insurmountable solitude,

All paths lead to the same goal:

to convey to others what we are.

And we must pass through solitude and

difficulty, isolation and silence

to find that enchanted place 

where we can dance our clumsy dance 

and sing our sorrowful song.

But in that dance, and in

that song, the most ancient rites 

of our conscience fulfill themselves

in the awareness of being human.

1112. Working Together - David Whyte

We shape our self

to fit this world

and by the world

are shaped again.

The visible

and the invisible

working together

in common cause,

to produce

the miraculous.

I am thinking of the way

the intangible air

traveled at speed

round a shaped wing

easily

holds our weight.

So may we, in this life

trust

to those elements 

we have yet to see

or imagine,

and look for the true

shape of our own self,

by forming it well

to the great 

intangibles about us.

1111. Drinking Alone Beneath the Moon - Li Po (701-762)

Translated by Irving Y. Lo

A pot of wine among the flowers:

I drink alone, no kith or kin near.

I raise my cup to invite the moon to join me;

It and my shadow make a party of three.

Alas, the moon is unconcerned about drinking,

And my shadow merely follows me around.

Briefly I cavort with the moon and my shadow:

Pleasure must be sought while it is spring.

I sing and the moon goes back and forth,

I dance and my shadow falls at random.

While sober we seek pleasure in fellowship;

When drunk we go each our own way.

Then let us pledge a friendship without human ties

And meet again at the far end of the Milky Way

1110. C Is For Charms - Eleanor Farjeon

I met a Strange Woman

With things in her arms.

‘What have you got, Woman?

‘Charms,’ she said, ‘charms.’

‘I will put one on you

‘Ere I have done.

‘Which shall I put on you?’

’None ‘ I said, ’none!’

Oh, how she smiled at me.

’Nay, then, my dear,

Look, do but look at them.

What do you fear?’

‘I’ve a black charm for night

And a gold one for noon,

A white charm for winter,

A rose charm for June;’

‘I’ve a green charm for woods,

And a blue one for water,

And a silver for moons

When they’re in their first quarter.’

‘I’ve a slow charm for growth,

And a swift one for birds,

And a soft one for sleep,

And a sweet one for words.’

‘I’ve a long charm for love,

And a strong charm for youth,

And one you can’t change

Or destroy, for the truth.’

’Sorry’s the man my dear,

Sorry, she said,

‘Who wanders through life 

With no charm on his head.’

O how she smiled at me.

‘Big one or small,

‘Which shall I put on you?’

‘All,’ I said, ‘all!’

1109. Siting Alone In Ching-t'ing Mountain - Li Po (701-762)

Flocks of birds fly high and away

A solitary cloud calmly drifts on

We look at each other and never get bored -

Just me and Ching-t’ing mountain.

1108. Synopsis of the Great Welsh Novel - Harri Web

Dai K lives at the end of a valley. One is not quite sure

Whether it has been drowned or not. His Mam

Loves him too much and his Dada drinks.

As for his girlfriend Blodwen, she’s pregnant. So

Are all the other girls in the village. —  there’s been a Revival.

After a performance of Elijah, the mad preacher

Davies the Doom has burnt the chapel down.

One Saturday night after the dance at the Con Club,

With the Free Wales Army up to no good in the back lanes,

A stranger comes to the village, he is, of course,

God, the well-known television personality. He succeeds

In confusing the issue, whatever it is, and departs

On the last train before the line is closed.

The colliery blows up, there is a financial scandal

Involving the most respected citizens, the Choir

Wins at the National. It is all seen, naturally,

Through eyes of a sensitive boy who never grows up.

The men emigrate to America, Cardiff and the moon. The girls

Find rich and foolish English husbands. Only daft Ianto

Is left to recite the Complete Works of Sir Lewis Morris

To puzzled sheep, before throwing himself over

The edge of the abandoned quarry. One is not quite sure

Whether it is fiction or not.

1107. Cow Worship - Gerald Stern

I love the cows best when they are a few feet away

from my dining-room window and my pine floor,

when they reach in to kiss me with their wet

mouths and their white noses.

I love them when they walk over the garbage cans

and across the cellar doors,

over sidewalk and through the metal chairs

and the birdseed.

—Let me reach out through the thin curtains

and feel the warm air of May.

It is the temperature of the whole galaxy,

all the bright clouds and clusters,

beast and heroes,

glittering singers and isolated thinkers

at pasture.

1106. Blackberry Eating - Galway Kinnell

.

I love to go out in late September

among the fat, overripe, icy, black blackberries

to eat blackberries for breakfast,

the stalks very prickly, a penalty

they earn for knowing the black art

of blackberry making: and as I stand among them

lifting the stalks to my mouth, the ripest berries

fall almost unbidden to my tongue,

as words sometimes do, certain peculiar words

like strengths or squinted, or brougham,

many-lettered, one-syllabled lumps,

which I squeeze, squelch open, and splurge well

in the silent, startled, icy, black language

of blackberry eating in late September.

1105. The Cambridge Songs (ca. 1,000) - Anon

Translated be Willis Barnstone

From: Poetry For The Earth

This planctus (lament) is the best known surviving woman’s lament from the Latin Middle Ages

Wind is thin,

sun warm,

the earth overflows

with good things.

Spring is purple

jewelry;

flowers on the ground

green in the forest.

Quadrupeds shine

and wander. Birds

nest. On blossoming

branches they cry joy!

My eyes see, my ears

hear so much, and

I am thrilled.

Yet I swallow sighs.

Sitting here alone,

I turn pale. When strong

enough to lift my head,

I hear and see nothing.

Spring, hear me.

Despite green woods, 

my spirit rots.

1104. The Sabbath - W. H. Auden

.

Waking on the Seventh Day of Creation,

They cautiously sniffed the air:

The most fastidious nostril among them admitted

That fellow was no longer there.

Herbivore, parasite, predator scouted,

Migrants flew fast and far-

Not a trace of his presence: holes in the earth,

Beaches covered with tar,

Ruins and metallic rubbish in plenty

Were all that was left of him

Whose birth on the sixth had made of that day

 An unnecessary interim.

Well, that fellow had never really smelled

Like a creature who would survive:

No grace, address of faculty like those

Born on the First Five.

Back, then, at last on a natural economy,

Now His Impudence was gone,

Looking exactly like what it was,

The Seventh Day went on,

Beautiful, happy, perfectly pointless….

A rifles’s ringing crack

Split their Arcadia wide open, cut

Their Sabbath nonsense short.

For whom did they think they had been created?

That fellow was back,

More bloody-minded than they remembered,

More godlike than they thought.

1103. And With March A Decade In Bolinas - Joanne Kyger

  Selected from: A Book Of Luminous Things, 

  Edited by Czeslaw Milosz

Just sitting around smoking, drinking and telling stories,

the news, making plans, analyzing, approaching the cessation

of personality, the single personality understands it demise.

Experience of the simultaneity of all human beings on this planet,

alive when you are alive. This seemingly inexhaustible

sophistication of awareness becomes relentless and horrible, 

trapped. How am I ever going to learn enough to get out.

The beautiful soft and lingering props of the Pacific here.

The back door bangs

So we’ve made a place to live

  here in the greened out 70’s

Trying to talk in the Tremulous

morality of the present

Great Breath. I give you, Great Breath!

1102. For Angela - Margaret Menges

 Selected from: A Book Of Luminous Things, 

  Edited by Czeslaw Milosz

Angela’s coming for dinner, he said and

he bought the card with flowers and red hearts

flashing in circles.

He set the card under the rose light

on the dining room table,

next to the bills and the junk mail

piled there in the daily hubbub

which we promptly cleared away 

             because

Angela, Angela’s coming, he said

and it made me laugh to remember

and I thought it’d be swell to have a theme,

like a national holiday for young love, so

we had Angel-hair pasta and Angel food cake,

white and full of air, whipped cream

and strawberries redder than roses and

blood and fairy-tale apples

Angela, Angela. . . she arrived like the

Fourth of July and sat at the 

end of the table, staring into

the blue eyes of the boy I’ve known forever.

1101. The Widening Sky - Edward Hirsch

I am so small walking on the beach

at night under the widening sky.

The wet sand quickens beneath my feet

and the waves thunder against the shore.

I am moving away from the boardwalk

with its colorful streamers of people

and the hotels with their blinking lights.

The wind sighs for hundreds of miles.

I am disappearing so far into the dark

I have vanished from sight.

I am a tiny seashell

that has secretly drifted ashore

and carries the sound of the ocean

surging through its body.

I am so small now no one can see me.

How can I be filled with such a vast love?

1100. Dog Weather - Stephen Dunn

Earlier, everyone was in knee boots, collars up.

The paper boy’s papers came apart

in the wind.

Now, nothing human moving.

Just a black squirrel fidgeting like Bogart

in The Caine Mutiny 

My breath chalks the window,

gives me away to myself.

I like the intelligibility of old songs.

I prefer yesterday.

Cars pass, the asphalt’s on its back

smudged with skid. It’s potholed

and cracked; it’s no damn good.

Anyone out without the excuse of a dog

should be handcuffed

and searched for loneliness.

My hair is thinning.

I feel like tossing the wind a stick.

The promised snow has arrived,

heavy wet.

I remember the blizzard of…

People I don’t want to be

speak like that

I close my eyes and one

of my many unborn sons

makes a snowball

and lofts it at an unborn friend.

They’ve sent me an AAHP card.

I’m on their list.

I can be discounted now almost anywhere.

1099. Why - Wendell Berry

.

Why all the embarrassment

about being happy?

Sometimes I’m as happy 

as a sleeping dog,

and for the same reasons,

and for others.

1098. In Praise Of Dreams - Wislawa Szymborska

.

In my dreams

I paint like Vermeer van Delft.

I speak fluent Greek

and not just with the living.

I drive a car

that does what I want it to.

I am gifted

and write mighty epics.

I hear voces

as clearly as any venerable saint.

My brilliance as a pianist

would stun you.

I fly the way we ought to,

i.e., on my own.

falling from the roof,

I tumble gently to the grass.

I’ve got no problem

breathing under water.

I can’t complain:

I’ve been able to locate Atlantis.

It’s gratifying that I can always

wake up before dying.

As soon as war breaks out,

I roll over on my other side.

I’m a child of my age,

but I don’t have to be.

A few years ago

I saw two suns

And the night before last a penguin,

clear as day.