Re: poetry thread

[Guest]

The Country
by Billy Collins

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time –

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

[Guest]

Tipping Point
by Billy Collins

At home, the jazz station plays all day,
so sometimes it becomes indistinct,
like the sound of rain,
birds in the background, the surf of traffic.

But today I heard a voice announce
that Eric Dolphy, 36 when he died,
has now been dead for 36 years.

I wonder –
did anyone sense something
when another Eric Dolphy lifetime
was added to the span of his life,

when we all took another
full Dolphy step forward in time,
flipped over the Eric Dolphy yardstick once again?

It would have been so subtle –
like the sensation you might feel
as you passed through the moment

at the exact center of your life
or as you crossed the equator at night in a boat.

I never gave it another thought,
but could that have been the little shift
I sensed awhile ago
as I walked down in the rain to get the mail?

[Guest]

The Red Wheelbarrow
by William Carlos Williams

so much depends
upon
a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

[Guest]

An Apology
by F. J. Bergmann

Forgive me
for backing over
and smashing
your red wheelbarrow.

It was raining
and the rear wiper
does not work on
my new plum-colored SUV.

I am also sorry
about the white
chickens.

[Guest]

Green Street
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti

The Green Street Mortuary Marching Band
marches right down Green Street
and turns into Columbus Avenue
where all the cafe sitters at
the sidewalk cafe tables
sit talking and laughing and
looking right through it

as if it happened every day in
little old wooden North Beach San Francisco
but at the same time feeling thrilled
by the stirring sound of the gallant marching band
as if it were celebrating life and
never heard of death

And right behind it comes the open hearse
with the closed casket and the
big framed picture under glass propped up
showing the patriarch who
has just croaked

And now all seven members of
the Green Street Mortuary Marching Band
with the faded gold braid on their
beat-up captains' hats
raise their bent axes and
start blowing all more or less
together and
out comes this Onward Christian Soldiers like
you heard it once upon a time only
much slower with a dead beat

And now you see all the relatives behind the
closed glass windows of the long black cars and
their faces are all shiny like they
been weeping with washcloths and
all super serious
like as if the bottom has just dropped out of
their private markets and
there's the widow all in weeds, and the sister with the
bent frame and the mad brother who never got through school
and Uncle Louie with the wig and there they all assembled
together and facing each other maybe for the first time in a long
time but their masks and public faces are all in place as they face
outward behind the traveling corpse up ahead and oompah oompah
goes the band very slow with the trombones and the tuba
and the trumpets and the big bass drum and the corpse hears
nothing or everything and it's a glorious autumn day in old
North Beach if only he could have lived to see it

Only we wouldn't have had the band who half an hour later can be seen
straggling back silent along the sidewalks looking like hungover
brokendown Irish bartenders dying for a drink or a last hurrah

[Guest]

Family Reunion
by Judith Viorst

The first full-fledged family reunion
Was held at the seashore
With 9 pounds of sturgeon
7 pounds of corned beef
1 nephew who got the highest mark on an intelligence test
ever recorded in Hillside, New Jersey
4 aunts in pain taking pills
1 cousin in analysis taking notes
1 sister-in-law who makes a cherry cheesecake a person
would be happy to pay to eat
5 uncles to whom what happened in the stock market
shouldn't happen to their worst enemy
1 niece who is running away from home the minute the
orthodontist removes her braces
1 cousin you wouldn't believe it to look at him only likes
fellows
1 nephew involved with a person of a different racial
persuasion which his parents are taking very well
1 brother-in-law with a house so big you could get lost and
carpeting so thick you could suffocate and a mortgage so
high you could go bankrupt
1 uncle whose wife is a saint to put up with him
1 cousin who has made such a name for himself he was
almost Barbra Streisand's obstetrician
1 cousin who has made such a name for himself he was
almost Jacob Javits' CPA
1 niece it wouldn't surprise anyone if next year she's playing
at Carnegie Hall
1 nephew it wouldn't surprise anyone if next year he's
sentenced to Leavenworth
2 aunts who go to the same butcher as Philip Roth's mother
And me wanting approval from all of them

[Guest]

The Land of Nod
by Robert Louis Stevenson

From Breakfast on through all the day
At home among my friends I stay,
But every night I go abroad
Afar into the land of Nod.

All by myself I have to go,
With none to tell me what to do--
All alone beside the streams
And up the mountain-sides of dreams.

The strangest things are there for me,
Both things to eat and things to see,
And many frightening sights abroad
Till morning in the land of Nod.

Try as I like to find the way,
I never can get back by day,
Nor can remember plain and clear
The curious music that I hear.

[Guest]

Is it me or Spanish poetry tends to be mushier?
I think I am learning to read poetry in English... and sounds better to my ears, although I have to look up words in the dictionary.

[Guest]

...you have a great grasp of the English language...most people I know don't use or understand many words you seem familiar with, like 'tacit'.
...there's stacks of mushy poetry in english...I'm trying to appeal to a variety of tastes...although i suspect there's not much traffic through these pages.

[Guest]

In my life I've only spent about an hour or so in sea. And it was great. Maybe you would like Alberti's Sailor On Dry Land. I posted a poem from that book once.

Tacit means Tácito in Spanish... many words are similar, like similar which means similar in Spanish.

[Guest]

...I just googled around and there's a selection of Alberti's poems in Spanish, but sadly, no translations.
...that's interesting, how similar some of the words are...

[Guest]

Googling I didn't find it either. But I've found this other poem only in Spanish also.


Illustration by Gloria Hernández.

EL AGUA Y ROMA SEGÚN ALBERTI
A Vicente Valero Costa

Oyes correr en Roma eternamente
en la noche, en el día, a toda hora
el agua, el agua corredora
de una fuente a otra fuente y otra fuente
arrebatada, acústica, demente
infinita insistencia corredora
cante en lo oscuro, gima bullidora
es su fija locura ser corriente.
Ría sobre un ojo, llore de unos senos,
salte de un caracol, de entre la boca
de la más afilada dentadura
o de las ingles de unos muslos llenos
correrá siempre, desbandada y loca
libre y presa y perdida en su locura.

By Rafael Alberti



It's about the water that runs in the fountains in Rome. He lived in exile there.

[Guest]

...what a fabulous illustration!

[Guest]

In a Dark Time
by Theodore Roethke

In a dark time, the eye begins to see,
I meet my shadow in the deepening shade;
I hear my echo in the echoing wood--
A lord of nature weeping to a tree,
I live between the heron and the wren,
Beasts of the hill and serpents of the den.

What's madness but nobility of soul
At odds with circumstance? The day's on fire!
I know the purity of pure despair,
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall,
That place among the rocks--is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

A steady storm of correspondences!
A night flowing with birds, a ragged moon,
And in broad day the midnight come again!
A man goes far to find out what he is--
Death of the self in a long, tearless night,
All natural shapes blazing unnatural light.

Dark,dark my light, and darker my desire.
My soul, like some heat-maddened summer fly,
Keeps buzzing at the sill. Which I is I?
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.
The mind enters itself, and God the mind,
And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

[Guest]

Je Est un Autre
by Lawrence Durrell.


'Je Est un Autre'

—Rimbaud.

He is the man who makes notes,
The observer in the tall black hat
Face hidden in the brim:
He has watched me watching him.

The street-corner in Buda and after
By the post-office a glimpse
Of the disappearing tails of his coat,
Gave the same illumination, spied upon,
The tightness in the throat.

Once too meeting by the Seine
The waters a moving floor of stars,
He had vanished when I reached the door,
But there on the pavement burning
Lay one of his familiar black cigars.

The meeting on the stairway
Where the tide ran clean as a loom:
The betrayal of her, her kisses
He has witnessed them all: often
I hear him laughing in the other room.

He watched me now, working late,
Bringing a poem to life, his eyes
Reflect the malady of De Nerval:
O useless in this old house to question
The mirrors, his impenetrable disguise.

[eddie]

Thanks.

[Guest]

...the poor boy begs,
the senior mod
hangs him out to dry

it's enough to make
Frances Farmer cry

[Guest]

Be Drunk
by Charles Baudelaire
translated by Louis Simpson



You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it—it's the only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is singing, everything that is speaking. . .ask what time it is and wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you: "It is time to be drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

[Guest]

To Celia
by Ben Jonson
1573–1637

DRINK to me only with thine eyes,
And I will pledge with mine;
Or leave a kiss but in the cup
And I'll not look for wine.
The thirst that from the soul doth rise
Doth ask a drink divine;
But might I of Jove's nectar sup,
I would not change for thine.

I sent thee late a rosy wreath,
Not so much honouring thee
As giving it a hope that there
It could not wither'd be;
But thou thereon didst only breathe,
And sent'st it back to me;
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,
Not of itself but thee!

[Guest]

...I've posted this before, but I'd like to post it again.

A Dream Within a Dream
by Edgar Allan Poe

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?


Dream of the old man.
Surrealism of Igor Lysenko.
Original painting.

[Guest]

In my life I've only spent about an hour or so in sea. And it was great. Maybe you would like Alberti's Sailor On Dry Land. I posted a poem from that book once.

...it was here on page 6

El mar. La mar.
El mar. ¡Sólo la mar!

¿Por qué me trajiste, padre,
a la ciudad?

¿Por qué me desenterraste
del mar?

En sueños, la marejada
me tira del corazon.
Se lo quisiera llevar.

Padre, ¿por qué me trajiste
acá?




The sea. The sea.
The sea. Only the sea!

Why did you bring me, father,
to the city?

Why did you uproot me
from the sea?

In dreams, the rip tide
pulls at my heart.
It wants to take it back.

Father, why did you bring me
here?


Rafael Alberti.
From Sailor on Land (Marinero en tierra)

_________________

[Constance]

The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

[Guest]

The Shield of Achilles
W. H. Auden

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well-governed cities
And ships upon untamed seas,
But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.

A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
No blade of grass, no sign of neighborhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
Without expression, waiting for a sign.

Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.

She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
White flower-garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge-light
Quite another scene.

Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.

The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes like to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.

She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and women in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing-floor
But a weed-choked field.

A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,
Loitered about that vacancy; a bird
Flew up to safety from his well-aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.

The thin-lipped armorer,
Hephaestos, hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cried out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
To please her son, the strong
Iron-hearted man-slaying Achilles
Who would not live long.

...thanks for posting this constance.

[Guest]

Shield of Achilles
from Wiki


The shield's design as interpreted by Angelo Monticelli, from Le Costume Ancien ou Moderne, ca. 1820.

The Shield of Achilles is the shield that Achilles uses to fight Hector, famously described in a passage in Book 18, lines 478-608 of Homer's Iliad. In the poem, Achilles has lost his armour after lending it to his companion Patroclus. Patroclus has been killed in battle by Hector and his weapons taken as spoils. Achilles' mother Thetis asks the god Hephaestus to provide replacement armor for her son.

The passage describing the shield is an early example of ecphrasis (a literary description of a work of visual art) and influenced many later poems, including The Shield of Heracles once attributed to Hesiod. Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneas in Book Eight of the Aeneid is clearly modelled on Homer. The poem The Shield of Achilles (1952) by W. H. Auden reimagines Homer's description in 20th century terms.

Contents
1 Description
2 Interpretation
3 References
4 External links

Description
Homer gives a detailed description of the imagery which decorates the new shield. Starting from the shield's center and moving outward, circle layer by circle layer, the shield is laid out as follows:

1.The Earth, sky and sea, the sun, the moon and the constellations (484-89)
2."Two beautiful cities full of people": in one a wedding and a law case are taking place (490-508); the other city is besieged by one feuding army and the shield shows an ambush and a battle (509-540).
3.A field being ploughed for the third time (541-549).
4.A king's estate where the harvest is being reaped (550-560).
5.A vineyard with grape pickers (561-572).
6.A "herd of straight-horned cattle"; the lead bull has been attacked by a pair of savage lions which the herdsmen and their dogs are trying to beat off (573-586).
7.A picture of a sheep farm (587-589).
8.A dancing-floor where young men and women are dancing (590-606).
9.The great stream of Ocean (607-609).

Interpretation
The Shield of Achilles can be read in a variety of different ways. One interpretation is that the shield is simply a physical encapsulation of the entire world. The shield’s layers are a series of contrasts – i.e. war and peace, work and festival, although the presence of a murder in the city at peace suggests that man is never fully free of conflict. Wolfgang Schadewaldt, a German writer, argues that these intersecting antitheses show the basic forms of a civilized, essentially orderly life. This contrast is also seen as a way of making “us…see [war] in relation to peace." The shield’s description falls between the fight over Patroclus’ body and Achilles’ reentry into battle, the latter being the impetus to one of the poem’s bloodiest parts. Consequently, the shield could be read as a “calm before an impending doom,” used to emphasize the brutality of violence during the Trojan War. It could also be read as a reminder to the reader of what will be lost once Troy ultimately falls.

[Guest]

I've just read Dad wants to work in a gold mine. I didn't understand it well... too many words to look up in the dictionary...
Surreptitious... I wanted to know what that means. It means subrepticio, that's the Spanish word for it... I never heard it before

What you wrote in the Mark Twain thread left me thinking about you (I don't know how to describe it) and now I liked reading that, despite I miss a lot of it.
I know... I should divide the work from the poet

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