Today's poet

[Alf]

Written shortly before her death and about as autobiographical as you can get I suppose ?

"So Daddy, I'm finally through."

Daddy

You do not do, you do not do
Any more, black shoe
In which I have lived like a foot
For thirty years, poor and white,
Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.

Daddy, I have had to kill you.
You died before I had time---
Marble-heavy, a bag full of God,
Ghastly statue with one grey toe
Big as a Frisco seal

And a head in the freakish Atlantic
Where it pours bean green over blue
In the waters off beautiful Nauset.
I used to pray to recover you.
Ach, du.

In the German tongue, in the Polish town
Scraped flat by the roller
Of wars, wars, wars.
But the name of the town is common.
My Polack friend

Says there are a dozen or two.
So I never could tell where you
Put your foot, your root,
I never could talk to you.
The tongue stuck in my jaw.

It stuck in a barb wire snare.
Ich, ich, ich, ich,
I could hardly speak.
I thought every German was you.
And the language obscene

An engine, an engine
Chuffing me off like a Jew.
A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen.
I began to talk like a Jew.
I think I may well be a Jew.

The snows of the Tyrol, the clear beer of Vienna
Are not very pure or true.
With my gypsy ancestress and my weird luck
And my Taroc pack and my Taroc pack
I may be a bit of a Jew.

I have always been scared of *you*,
With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo.
And your neat mustache
And your Aryan eye, bright blue.
Panzer-man, panzer-man, O You---

Not God but a swastika
So black no sky could squeak through.
Every woman adores a Fascist,
The boot in the face, the brute
Brute heart of a brute like you.

You stand at the blackboard, daddy,
In the picture I have of you,
A cleft in your chin instead of your foot
But no less a devil for that, no not
Any less the black man who

Bit my pretty red heart in two.
I was ten when they buried you.
At twenty I tried to die
And get back, back, back to you.
I thought even the bones would do.

But they pulled me out of the sack,
And they stuck me together with glue.
And then I knew what to do.
I made a model of you,
A man in black with a Meinkampf look

And a love of the rack and the screw.
And I said I do, I do.
So daddy, I'm finally through.
The black telephone's off at the root,
The voices just can't worm through.

If I've killed one man, I've killed two---
The vampire who said he was you
and drank my blood for a year,
Seven years, if you want to know.
Daddy, you can lie back now.

There's a stake in your fat, black heart
And the villagers never liked you.
They are dancing and stamping on you.
They always *knew* it was you.
Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through.

Sylvia Plath

[Stevie]

Excellent choice, Alf. I do like "Daddy".

I have been trying to find a certain Tim Turnbull poem on the web and failing, I will have to type it out some time. In the meantime I have in my drawer at work this morning a book by Paul Farley (The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You). Here is "My Italics"

On waking disappointed from a deep sleep,
he'll boot up his machine, sit down and type

Even though I know that I will never
live the rural life, God knows I've tried
to imagine rising at five in bad weather
carrying a paraffin lamp, peering inside
a fecund dark, up to my elbows in lather
helping pull a shiny calf from its mother.
But five o'clock comes round just once most days.
Deep in quilt, I'm stuck for raw material.
The lamp slips from my hands. After each blaze
I'll stumble from its ashes to my cereal.

His inkjet ploughs the page for all it's worth:
it drops head-first, the easiest of births.

And on lamps, here is one from the same book. The poem is based on a simple idea, but it somehow works
"A Thousand Hours"

There were false starts, but life, for me, really
began the night he unplugged the telly
and snuffed out the pilot light. As last-man-out
he worked right through to dawn, between the street
and this bedroom, until he's stripped it bare,
but he left me in his rush to check the meter,
to turn the stopcock on a copper tank,
count stairs and memorize that manhole's clunk,
the first hawked phlegm, the way a window pane
was answering the early Line Street train;
and posted back his keys to nobody.

I've hung here naked since, by day barely
able to force a shadow to be thrown.
It's nights I come into my own:
a halo for the ceiling, corners for mice,
and through the glass a phantom of all this,
a twin star that is shedding kilowatts
in translation. Beyond these dark outskirts
my creator sleeps. I recall how his eyes
woudl whirr just like this night-time visitor
that might outlive me. Of all his ideas
I burn on, having been conceived in error.

Paul Farley

[Alf]

Excellent choice, Alf. I do like "Daddy".

I have been trying to find a certain Tim Turnbull poem on the web and failing, I will have to type it out some time. In the meantime I have in my drawer at work this morning a book by Paul Farley (The Boy From the Chemist is Here to See You). Here is "My Italics"

On waking disappointed from a deep sleep,
he'll boot up his machine, sit down and type

Even though I know that I will never
live the rural life, God knows I've tried
to imagine rising at five in bad weather
carrying a paraffin lamp, peering inside
a fecund dark, up to my elbows in lather
helping pull a shiny calf from its mother.
But five o'clock comes round just once most days.
Deep in quilt, I'm stuck for raw material.
The lamp slips from my hands. After each blaze
I'll stumble from its ashes to my cereal.

His inkjet ploughs the page for all it's worth:
it drops head-first, the easieest of births.

And on lamps, here is one from the same book. The poem is based on a simple idea, but it somehow works
"A Thousand Hours"

There were false starts, but life, for me, really
began the night he unplugged the telly
and snuffed out the pilot light. As last-man-out
he worked right through to dawn, between the street
and this bedroom, until he's stripped it bare,
but he left me in his rush to check the meter,
to turn the stopcock on a copper tank,
count stairs and memorize that manhole's clunk,
the first hawked phlegm, the way a window pane
was answering the early Line Street train;
and posted back his keys to nobody.

I've hung here naked since, by day barely
able to force a shadow to be thrown.
It's nights I come into my own:
a halo for the ceiling, corners for mice,
and through the glass a phantom of all this,
a twin star that is shedding kilowatts
in translation. Beyond these dark outskirts
my creator sleeps. I recall how his eyes
woudl whirr just like this night-time visitor
that might outlive me. Of all his ideas
I burn on, having been conceived in error.

Paul Farley

Very good those Stevie. I particularly liked "A thousand Hours" although it took me two reads to get it

[freckle]

great choices...daddy being one of my favorites.

here is one from donald hall who i don't recall coming across before...

Affirmation
by Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years. Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

[Hes]

Gosh....that's a very thought provoking poem but a bit sad (however true it may be). Thanks for your nice comments re the horseshoe Freckle (and Alf). There have been some really good posts on here over the last couple days. Really good reading.

great choices...daddy being one of my favorites.

here is one from donald hall who i don't recall coming across before...

Affirmation
by Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years. Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

[Mossdog]

Can't believe we've been relegated to the second page - yikes! That's a first.


A Baby Running Barefoot

When the bare feet of the baby beat across the grass
The little white feet nod like white flowers in the wind,
They poise and run like ripples lapping across the water;
And the sight of their white play among the grass
Is like a little robin’s song, winsome,
Or as two white butterflies settle in the cup of one flower
For a moment, then away with a flutter of wings.

I long for the baby to wander hither to me
Like a wind-shadow wandering over the water,
So that she can stand on my knee
With her little bare feet in my hands,
Cool like syringa buds,
Firm and silken like pink young peony flowers.

D H Lawrence

[Mossdog]

great choices...daddy being one of my favorites.

here is one from donald hall who i don't recall coming across before...

Affirmation
by Donald Hall
To grow old is to lose everything. Aging, everybody knows it. Even when we are young, we glimpse it sometimes, and nod our heads when a grandfather dies. Then we row for years on the midsummer pond, ignorant and content. But a marriage,that began without harm, scatters into debris on the shore, and a friend from school drops cold on a rocky strand. If a new love carries us past middle age, our wife will die at her strongest and most beautiful. New women come and go. All go. The pretty lover who announces that she is temporary is temporary. The bold woman, middle-aged against our old age, sinks under an anxiety she cannot withstand. Another friend of decades estranges himself in words that pollute thirty years. Let us stifle under mud at the pond's edge and affirm that it is fitting and delicious to lose everything.

'tis a bit dismay our Freckle. Are you feeling ok? I know life can't always be a Berni Inn basket of chicken and chips, but I can't help thinking Donald has been gratuitously bleak.

[Mossdog]

The Door

I sit in the garden
taking the late sun
as it sinks and slides
between the side
of the house
and the hawthorn.
Trailing the bench
across the lawn
to catch a final
finger of warmth,
a golden stretch
comes to rest
on a patch
of grass at my feet
— like a door.
A door in which
I wait for your
shadow to darken;
the door, which is
always left open.

Adam Wyeth

Ooooh! Now that is lovely - thanks Hes.

[Mossdog]

Posted before by surprise surprise freckle! But well worth another look.

Sleeping in the Forest

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.

Mary Oliver

She really is so very talented - Nice one Alf.

[freckle]

'tis a bit dismay our Freckle. Are you feeling ok? I know life can't always be a Berni Inn basket of chicken and chips, but I can't help thinking Donald has been gratuitously bleak.

I am good thanks Mossy...just liked the poem! and your baby running bare foot choice too! Good that we can rely on old stalwarts such as yourself to drag this thread back from the brink of the second page (she states aghast!) ....

here is a little offering inspired by my love of autumn (amongst other things)...

Tricking the sloes

I was so satiated words vanished
And all that remained was a wish for time
to be frozen by a great imaginary shutter
capable of snapping this golden leitmotif,
writ large in the forest with its slight clart underfoot,
and leaves in varying continua of life and death.

Through the lens a discrete image would form
our hands unknotting, working in unison
to capture with enthusiasm
each purple waxy drupe before the frost.
It would remember with ease our discussion
of how simple trickery via a blast in the freezer,
would transform the astringent blooms
into sweet heady fruit ripe for infusion.

Yet try as I might, time cannot be paused
I failed to develop the camera of my dreams
And as the light fell in dappled blankets
Over the hush of secret elms
it was time to go home.
Passing an elderly couple
who were one step ahead of us
with their own blend of liquid memories
I was reminded with a small pang of reality

It will not always be time to trick the sloes.