Poem du jour

A Maxim

by Carl Dennis

To live each day as if it might be the last
Is an injunction that Marcus Aurelius
Inscribes in his journal to remind himself
That he, too, however privileged, is mortal,
That whatever bounty is destined to reach him
Has reached him already, many times.
But if you take his maxim too literally
And devote your mornings to tinkering with your will,
Your afternoons and evenings to saying farewell
To friends and family, you’ll come to regret it.
Soon your lawyer won’t fit you into his schedule.
Soon your dear ones will hide in a closet
When they hear your heavy step on the porch.
And then your house will slide into disrepair.
If this is my last day, you’ll say to yourself,
Why waste time sealing drafts in the window frames
Or cleaning gutters or patching the driveway?
If you don’t want your heirs to curse the day
You first opened Marcus’s journals,
Take him simply to mean you should find an hour
Each day to pay a debt or forgive one,
Or write a letter of thanks or apology.
No shame in leaving behind some evidence
You were hoping to live beyond the moment.
No shame in a ticket to a concert seven months off,
Or, better yet, two tickets, as if you were hoping
To meet by then someone who’d love to join you,
Two seats near the front so you catch each note.

Poetry Please is 30 Years Old!

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...

Poem du jour

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.

Poems du jour

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.