Hail Poetry!

Piffka

I hope you had a nice visit w. Ossobuco.
(we should change her name to Ossonice, don't you think?)

I'm glad you liked the M.O. poem. Isn't she terrific?

I like 'Morning Poem' very much. Thanks for posting it.

Is it my nature to be happy?
I'll answer with a quotation that Kara posted recently . . .It fits me to a 'T':



" Being Irish, he had an abiding sense of tragedy which sustained him through temporary periods of joy"
(W B Yeats)




PS
does my signature look a little dif today?

http://www.authorsontheweb.com/features/0303-irish/irish-q5.asp

Thanks, it was a great visit and she's coming back in a week. We visited with Seattlefriend, went to the beach and ate a late dinner at our local tavern. She left on the early morning airporter...yawn.

I love Kara's quoted Yeats -- that MAY be one of my favorite all-time quotes, in fact. It makes me wonder if I'm not, after all, Irish. The image of Mrs. Aristotle's mouth open is v. funny -- he thought women had fewer teeth?

Here's an interesting poem from Yeats' early work: is this the answer to the ever-mournful Irish soul?


Into the Twilight

OUT-WORN heart, in a time out-worn,
Come clear of the nets of wrong and right;
Laugh heart again in the gray twilight,
Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

Your mother Eire is always young,
Dew ever shining and twilight gray;
Though hope fall from you and love decay,
Burning in fires of a slanderous tongue.

Come, heart, where hill is heaped upon hill:
For there the mystical brotherhood
Of sun and moon and hollow and wood
And river and stream work out their will;

And God stands winding His lonely horn,
And time and the world are ever in flight;
And love is less kind than the gray twilight,
And hope is less dear than the dew of the morn.

Piffka

Very very nice.

I wasn't familiar with it, but it's going into my archive now.

Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things --
For skies of couple-colour as a brindled cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced -- fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beautfy is past change:
Praise him.

Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889)


You may not know that Hopkins converted to Catholicism while at Oxford and became a Jesuit priest in 1877. None of his poetry was published in his lifetime.

One of my favorite lines from this poem is the "landscape all plotted and pieced" -- a sight so many enjoy when they visit the English countryside.

-- edited to fix "áll trádes"

Piffka,

Thanks for posting 'Piéd Beauty'.

It's one of my top twenty. (favorites)




Here is another favorite of mine, by Czeslaw Milosz.

It's in a form that shows the Polish and English together:




Gift

Dar

A day so happy.

Dzien taki szczesliwy.

Fog lifted early, I walked in the garden.

Mgla opadla wczesnie, pracowalein w ogrodzie.

Hummingbirds were stopping over honeysuckle flowers.

Kolibry przystawaly nad kwiatem kaprifolium.

There was no thing on earth I wanted to possess.

Nie bylo na ziemi rzeczy, która chcialbym miec

I knew no one worth my envying him.

Nie zualem nikogo, komu warto byloby zazdroscic.

Whatever evil I had suffered, I forgot.

Co przydarzylo sie zlego, zapamnialem.

To think that once I was the same man did not embarrass me.

Nie wstydzulem sie myslec, ze bylem kim jestem

In my body I felt no pain.

Nie czulem w ciele zadnego bólu.

When straightening up, I saw the blue sea and sails.

Prostujac sie widzialem niebieskie morze i zagle.


Czeslaw Milosz

Omigod, what a great poem - Such Happiness! It is interesting the choices the poet makes in seeing the day and enjoying it. I particularly like the effortlessness of straightening up to see the sea and boats. :wink: It is surely a gift, what this man has including, of course, the gift of tongues. Hummingbirds!!! Kolibry!!!

Did you know that hummingbirds are only found in the New World?



Hummingbirds



I love this, this is the best!


PS -- I like your diacritical markings... felt a little guilty when I dropped them on "all trades" of the Pied Beauty poem. It is almost like Hopkins wants the reader to pronounce it "ah-la tra'des"... what do you think?

quizás, quizás, quizás . . .




Glad you liked Milosz's wonderful poem.

Here is some Ezra Pound, based on the medieval tune: "Summer is icummen In"

Winter is icummen in,
Lhude sing Goddamm,
Raineth drop and staineth slop,
and how the wind doth ramm,
Sing: Goddamm.
Skiddeth bus and sloppeth us,
An ague hath my ham.
Freezeth river, turneth liver,
Damn you, sing: Goddamm.
Goddamm, Goddamm, 'tis why I am, Goddamm,
So 'gainst the winter's balm.
Sing goddamm, damm, sing Goddamm,

Sing goddamm, sing goddamm, DAMM.

Lhude sing Oh-My!

This is a stunner.

It's another one of those poems with a long slow curve and then a fast break.



'Weird Little Wordless Words'

Today I took a bath of mineral waters
in Saratoga Springs. The waters
were warm & fizzy as ginger-ale.

Gertrude, the attendant, kept flicking
the water with her fingers
& adjusting the valves.

The hairs & holes of my body that
daily countered the fumes of exhaust &
the intricate folds of hurry & fear

unclenched.
The window swirled with other
geometries of light:

a wicker chair, a sun-lit porch, &
pools twinkling with the flight
patterns of countless triangular prisms

lifting off & landing, lifting off &
landing. I tell folks they might as well
leave their socks on if they can't quit

their worrying, Gertrude said.
Dripping wet & wrapped
in warm sleeves of cotton, I lay down.

Weird little words began dancing
around me as if
my body were a satellite dish

drawing to itself a magnetic constellation
of voices like exotic fish
from the tropics of space.

Weird little wordless words
like pink mother-of-pearls or
the unending soft &

sensual sands that create crystals &
a desert's golden night-glow
of blues on tip-toe.

Weird little wordless words
like fresh-scented breath,
soft lips, pagan clits

responding to memory's tongue
transforming the debris
of incest into living flesh,

cascaded down the domes of my breath.
They balanced on the brink
of my blood, then somersaulted

into blue vaults of lightning
where passion's way of talking
woke me up to a trace of

irretrievable years
& these moments now
mine to embody and savor.

Weird Little Wordless Words

(Nuala Archer, from 'THE HOUR OF PAN/AMA')

Wonderful jjorge

This is Late Ripeness by Czeslaw Milosz I hope you like it :

Not soon, as late as the approach of my ninetieth year,
I felt a door opening in me and I entered
the clarity of early morning.

One after another my former lives were departing,
like ships, together with their sorrow.

And the countries, cities, gardens, the bays of seas
assigned to my brush came closer,
ready now to be described better than they were before.

I was not separated from people,
grief and pity joined us.
We forget - I kept saying - that we are all children of the King.

For where we come from there is no division
into Yes and No, into is, was, and will be.

We were miserable, we used no more than a hundredth part
of the gift we received for our long journey.

Moments from yesterday and from centuries ago -
a sword blow, the painting of eyelashes before a mirror
of polished metal, a lethal musket shot, a caravel
staving its hull against a reef - they dwell in us,
waiting for a fulfillment.

I knew, always, that I would be a worker in the vineyard,
as are all men and women living at the same time,
whether they are aware of it or not.

hiama

I am old enough that poems like 'This is Late Ripeness' really speak to me.

Thanks for sharing it.

-jj

As always a pleasure

Poetry.
I like the words.

Gee, those are good.

Here's another about growing old...

Sonnet
(one of several from Huntsman, What Quarry?)
by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Be sure my coming was a sharp offense
And trouble to my mother in her bed;
And harsh to me must be my going hence,
Though I were old and spend and better dead;
Between the awful spears of birth and death
I run a grassy gauntlet in the sun;
And curdled in me is my central pith,
Remembering there is dying to be done.

O Life, my little day, at what a cost
Have you been purchased! What a bargain's here!
(And yet, thou canny Lender, thou hast lost:
Thumb thy fat book until my debt appear:
So... art though stuck? ... thou canst not strike that through
For the small dying that a man can do!)

(And yet, thou canny Lender, thou hast lost:
Thumb thy fat book until my debt appear:
So... art though stuck? ... thou canst not strike that through
For the small dying that a man can do!)


I love it.

Hi Jjorge! Edna outdid herself on that one, I think. I'm loving this old book.

Here's another sonnet of similar bent, a few pages after that one:

Now let the mouth of wailing for a time
Be shut, ye happy mourners; and return
To the marked door, the ribbon and the fern,
Without a tear. The good man in his prime,
The pretty child, the Gone -- from a fair clime
Above the ashes of the solemn urn
Behold you; wherefore, then, these hearts that burn
With hot remorse, these cheeks the tears begrime?

Grief that is grief and worthy of that word
Is ours alone for whom no hope can be
That the loved eyes look down and understand.
Ye true believers, trusters in the Lord,
Today bereft, tomorrow hand in hand,
Think ye not shame to show your tears to me?

hmmm. Speaking of tears:

Roman Lachrymatory Bottles by Elizabeth Spires from Wordling. (I was inspired to buy this anthology after Bree posted several Spires' poems. In Wordling, Spires addresses birth, death and creation. I also bought Spires' Now the Green Blade Rises
Thank you Bree. And thanks to all here for contributing to my poetry notebooks.

Of glass, of alabaster, these phials
that held the tears of this one, that one...
O who among the dead would hold
tears dear enough to keep forever?

We stand in front of the lit case,
the room bright and hushed, awash
in grief's evaporate, and feel
the need to whisper, as in a church.

Now tears go uncollected, are wept
in secret and run out to sea,
mingling freely with others not of
our making, losing their history.

O let us make a gift to each other:
our stoppered tears, liquid and alive,
poured into jars and bottles
that we drink to the very bottom.

Then we shall be as we once were,
children crying freely, without shame,
then done completely, whole again.
Our tears shall wash our faces clean.

There is a liveliness in weeping,
and tears admit no stain, no impediment.
A face shatters, a countenance dissolves,
and wave after wave breaks against the shore.

Our tears rise out of the spray, hang
for a second in grand illumination,
a cherished face, a picture held
in every one of them, and are gone.

Gosh, that's nice, RaggedyAggie. I love the line about the tears making us whole again, but then I am a crier.

There was a New Yorker story we read about a month ago or so on a2k, that included the detail that one of the heroines saved handkerchiefs from crying times... weddings, funerals, etc. It was very touching, I thought, and easier to keep than vials of tears.