As I grow reluctantly older, I find myself drawn more and more into the world that I unwittingly abandoned so many years ago - poetry. I do read a lot of it, both classical and modern, but I just never feel right about the way I "consume" it. I feel like I am doing it a disservice. I feel that my rudimentary skills at scanning and voicing it are so far away from being even remotely acceptable. It has been about 6 mos since I discovered this wonderful radio show, and it turns out it is quite a phenomenon in Britain (of all the countries!). When I get to a complete rehash of my website, there will be a separate section just for poetry - the art of strumming our brain's inner rhythmic strings overwhelming it with raw emotion while sedating its intellectual zeal. The (proper) opium of the (proper) masses...
Two Poems
Stephen Burt
Hyperborea
after Pindar, Olympian 3
Once past the man-high teeth
and the disintegrating ice
that separate human lands
from the gods’ secret territory, what Herakles found
was nothing on first sight worth even half a breath
to the sort of fortune-tellers and singers who vaunt
celebrities’ pleasures, who promise new heroes the solace
of willing nymphets and smooth-shouldered boys,
then give them marble busts and sapphire crowns.
Behind the curtain of snow
lay temperate air and a firepit, and
what heroes, after labours, really want:
a couple of apple trees; a brook; warm shade where hardwoods stand;
a stump for a table; crisp weather; a place to sit down.
Chlorophyll
Rain at varying rates
Breaks up the queues at our bus stop; most people who know
They waited too long to buy umbrellas stand,
But some sit down on rocks,
While overhead, on long
Clouds sharpened like blades on skates,
We see pneumonia weather sliding in.
All nature seems to be at work
Reluctantly, as Friday’s anxious
Managers, both desultory and eager
To clear their stacked-up paper out of the way,
Go home. Do not start anything today.
Pay less attention to politics. Wrap it all up.
Consider the neighbour whose overstuffed
Three-storey house caught fire from inside,
Who saved cards, cheque stubs, apple wrappers, news,
Who would have gone up
In a fireball had the fire trucks arrived
Five minutes late: we saw him just
This morning, smiling
At us in his loose sweater, out on the kerb
Beside one of his indoor-outdoor cats.
Behind them, all unharmed, we saw his row
Of lilies, opalescent, deaf to us
And focused on their arduous life cycle
Of evapotranspiration:
They work all day, each day, with outstretched
Ignorant leaves that might as well be hands.
Great Western Road
I am like the kind of man you'll sometimes see out late at night
walking, head down, into the rain, no money left for the night bus home,
a little unsure where his next step will come from ... His only friend
the tiny dog who runs beside him, head down too, thinking, no doubt,
doggie thoughts which, were I to translate them, would be both sad and true.
Andrew Elliot
 | Poem du jour |
Stabat Mater
by Kit Wright
Consider the young girl, who for homework or recreation
Was drawing a tree that rose in soaring flight from the gardens
Behind the ground-floor flat. And these
Were dark with buildings in the daytime;
Pressed by walls of lichened brick and a grove of ash and plane.
But this was an evening of lemon September sunlight.
Her mother was taking the washing down from the line.
And the girl from her bedroom window, a sketchpad on her knees,
Looked and looked at the ash tree, saw
It move. It shouldn't have done that.
For this was no shivering of the leaves, or a branch dipping, it stepped
Forward on its own authority,
Made the decision. She screamed.
Her mother, with a clothes-peg in her mouth,
Looked up and saw the great tree like an animal
Considering her and manoeuvering. She hurled
Her body that dragged in dreamtime over the lawn,
Made the back door as it came down like the sky.
It had seemed to rise a shade and swivel,
Then crack like thunder in two along
Three garden walls of shattered masonry
And rubble. From its grave,
Lain where the woman had been standing,
Only the seething of the leaves.
Disbelieving in retribution or providence,
We recoup the moral: proof
That God has a sense of theatre? Salvation through Art?
But the woman and the child,
Crying and shaking in each other's arms,
Come back to me, and what broke cover there
Still feels like the wind of an energy not then blind.
Two Poems
by Stephen Burt
Hyperborea
after Pindar, Olympian 3
Once past the man-high teeth
and the disintegrating ice
that separate human lands
from the gods’ secret territory, what Herakles found
was nothing on first sight worth even half a breath
to the sort of fortune-tellers and singers who vaunt
celebrities’ pleasures, who promise new heroes the solace
of willing nymphets and smooth-shouldered boys,
then give them marble busts and sapphire crowns.
Behind the curtain of snow
lay temperate air and a firepit, and
what heroes, after labours, really want:
a couple of apple trees; a brook; warm shade where hardwoods stand;
a stump for a table; crisp weather; a place to sit down.
Chlorophyll
Rain at varying rates
Breaks up the queues at our bus stop; most people who know
They waited too long to buy umbrellas stand,
But some sit down on rocks,
While overhead, on long
Clouds sharpened like blades on skates,
We see pneumonia weather sliding in.
All nature seems to be at work
Reluctantly, as Friday’s anxious
Managers, both desultory and eager
To clear their stacked-up paper out of the way,
Go home. Do not start anything today.
Pay less attention to politics. Wrap it all up.
Consider the neighbour whose overstuffed
Three-storey house caught fire from inside,
Who saved cards, cheque stubs, apple wrappers, news,
Who would have gone up
In a fireball had the fire trucks arrived
Five minutes late: we saw him just
This morning, smiling
At us in his loose sweater, out on the kerb
Beside one of his indoor-outdoor cats.
Behind them, all unharmed, we saw his row
Of lilies, opalescent, deaf to us
And focused on their arduous life cycle
Of evapotranspiration:
They work all day, each day, with outstretched
Ignorant leaves that might as well be hands.
Washing the Elephant
by Barbara Ras
Isn’t it always the heart that wants to wash
the elephant, begging the body to do it
with soap and water, a ladder, hands,
in tree shade big enough for the vast savannas
of your sadness, the strangler fig of your guilt,
the cratered full moon’s light fuelling
the windy spooling memory of elephant?
What if Father Quinn had said, “Of course you’ll recognize
your parents in Heaven,” instead of
“Being one with God will make your mother and father
pointless.” That was back when I was young enough
to love them absolutely though still fear for their place
in Heaven, imagining their souls like sponges full
of something resembling street water after rain.
Still my mother sent me every Saturday to confess,
to wring the sins out of my small baffled soul, and I made up lies
about lying, disobeying, chewing gum in church, to offer them
as carefully as I handed over the knotted handkerchief of coins
to the grocer when my mother sent me for a loaf of Wonder,
Land of Lakes, and two Camels.
If guilt is the damage of childhood, then eros is the fall of adolescence.
Or the fall begins there, and never ends, desire after desire parading
through a lifetime like the Ringling Brothers elephants
made to walk through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel
and down Thirty-fourth Street to the Garden.
So much of our desire like their bulky, shadowy walking
after midnight, exiled from the wild and destined
for a circus with its tawdry gaudiness, its unspoken
pathos.
It takes more than half a century to figure out who they were,
the few real loves-of-your-life, and how much of the rest—
the mad breaking-heart stickiness—falls away, slowly,
unnoticed, the way you lose your taste for things
like popsicles unthinkingly.
And though dailiness may have no place
for the ones who have etched themselves in the laugh lines
and frown lines on the face that’s harder and harder
to claim as your own, often one love-of-your-life
will appear in a dream, arriving
with the weight and certitude of an elephant,
and it’s always the heart that wants to go out and wash
the huge mysteriousness of what they meant, those memories
that have only memories to feed them, and only you to keep them clean.
Не дай мне бог сойти с ума.
Нет, легче посох и сума;
Нет, легче труд и глад.
Не то, чтоб разумом моим
Я дорожил; не то, чтоб с ним
Расстаться был не рад:
Когда б оставили меня
На воле, как бы резво я
Пустился в темный лес!
Я пел бы в пламенном бреду,
Я забывался бы в чаду
Нестройных, чудных грез.
И я б заслушивался волн,
И я глядел бы, счастья полн,
В пустые небеса;
И силен, волен был бы я,
Как вихорь, роющий поля,
Ломающий леса.
Да вот беда: сойди с ума,
И страшен будешь как чума,
Как раз тебя запрут,
Посадят на цепь дурака
И сквозь решетку как зверка
Дразнить тебя придут.
А ночью слышать буду я
Не голос яркий соловья,
Не шум глухой дубров —
А крик товарищей моих,
Да брань смотрителей ночных,
Да визг, да звон оков.
А.С.Пушкин
Preachers Warn
by Charles Simic
This peaceful world of ours is ready for destruction—
And still the sun shines, the sparrows come
Each morning to the bakery for crumbs.
Next door, two men deliver a bed for a pair of newlyweds
And stop to admire a bicycle chained to a parking meter.
Its owner is making lunch for his ailing grandmother.
He heats the soup and serves it to her in a bowl.
The windows are open, there’s a warm breeze.
The young trees on our street are delirious to have leaves.
Italian opera is on the radio, the volume too high.
Brevi e tristi giorni visse, a baritone sings.
Everyone up and down our block can hear him.
Something about the days that remain for us to enjoy
Being few and sad. Not today, Maestro Verdi!
At the hairdresser’s a girl leaps out of a chair,
Her blond hair bouncing off her bare shoulders
As she runs out the door in her high heels.
“I must be off,” says the handsome boy to his grandmother.
His bicycle is where he left it.
He rides it casually through the heavy traffic
His white shirttails fluttering behind him
Long after everyone else has come to a sudden stop.
by Derek Marhon
A blink of lightning, then
a rumor, a grumble of white rain
growing in volume, rustling over the ground,
drenching the gravel in a wash of sound.
Drops tap like timpani or shine
like quavers on a line.
It rings on exposed tin,
a suite for water, wind and bin,
plinky Poulenc or strongly groaning Brahms’
rain-strings, a whole string section that describes
the very shapes of thought in warm
self-referential vibes
and spreading ripples. Soon
the whispering roar is a recital.
Jostling rain-crowds, clamorous and vital,
struggle in runnels through the afternoon.
The rhythm becomes a regular beat;
steam rises, body heat—
and now there’s city noise,
bits of recorded pop and rock,
the drums, the strident electronic shock,
a vast polyphony, the dense refrain
of wailing siren, truck and train
and incoherent cries.
All human life is there
in the unconfined, continuous crash
whose slow, diffused implosions gather up
car radios and alarms, the honk and beep,
and tiny voices in a crèche
piercing the muggy air.
Squalor and decadence,
the rackety global-franchise rush,
oil wars and water wars, the diatonic
crescendo of a cascading world economy
are audible in the hectic thrash
of this luxurious cadence.
The voice of Baal explodes,
raging and rumbling round the clouds,
frantic to crush the self-sufficient spaces
and re-impose his failed hegemony
in Canaan before moving on
to other simpler places.
At length the twining chords
run thin, a watery sun shines out,
the deluge slowly ceases, the guttural chant
subsides; a thrush sings, and discordant thirds
diminish like an exhausted concert
on the subdominant.
The angry downpour swarms
growling to far-flung fields and farms.
The drains are still alive with trickling water,
a few last drops drip from a broken gutter;
but the storm that created so much fuss
has lost interest in us.
Опустись, занавеска линялая,
На больные герани мои.
Сгинь, цыганская жизнь небывалая,
Погаси, сомкни очи твои!
Ты ли, жизнь, мою горницу скудную
Убирала степным ковылём!
Ты ли, жизнь, мою сонь непробудную
Зеленым отравляла вином!
Как цыганка, платками узорными
Расстилалася ты предо мной,
Ой ли косами иссиня-чёрными,
Ой ли бурей страстей огневой!
Что рыдалось мне в шёпоте, в забытьи,
Неземные ль какие слова?
Сам не свой только был я, без памяти,
И ходила кругом голова…
Спалена моя степь, трава свалена,
Ни огня, ни звезды, ни пути…
И кого целовал — не моя вина,
Ты, кому обещался, — прости…
30 декабря 1908
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Sit back, relax, click the play button on the mp3 player below,
listen to the music and read the poem.
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For the Cosmonauts
by Meirion Jordan
I, Yuri Gagarin, having not seen God,
wake now to the scrollwork of a body,
to my own white fibres leafing into the bone:
know that beyond this dome of rain there is
only the nothing where the soul sweers
out its parallax like a distant star and truth
brightens to X, to gamma, through a metal sail.
So I return to you, cramming your pockets
with the atmosphere and the evening news,
fumbling for gardens in the moon's shadow,
in its waterfalls of silence. I wish for you
familiar towns, their piers and amusement arcades
unpeopled at dusk, the unicorn tumbling by
on china hooves behind the high walls
of parks, among congregating lamps.
May you find Earth rising there, between
your steepled hands. May your voyages
end. May you have a cold unfurling
of limbs each morning, when I am fallen
out of the world.
