Today's poet

[Mossdog]

This is sweet (not!)

The Arrival of the Bee Box

I ordered this, clean wood box
Square as a chair and almost too heavy to lift.
I would say it was the coffin of a midget
Or a square baby
Were there not such a din in it.

The box is locked, it is dangerous.
I have to live with it overnight
And I can't keep away from it.
There are no windows, so I can't see what is in there.
There is only a little grid, no exit.

I put my eye to the grid.
It is dark, dark,
With the swarmy feeling of African hands
Minute and shrunk for export,
Black on black, angrily clambering.

How can I let them out?
It is the noise that appalls me most of all,
The unintelligible syllables.
It is like a Roman mob,
Small, taken one by one, but my god, together!

I lay my ear to furious Latin.
I am not a Caesar.
I have simply ordered a box of maniacs.
They can be sent back.
They can die, I need feed them nothing, I am the owner.

I wonder how hungry they are.
I wonder if they would forget me
If I just undid the locks and stood back and turned into a tree.
There is the laburnum, its blond colonnades,
And the petticoats of the cherry.

They might ignore me immediately
In my moon suit and funeral veil.
I am no source of honey
So why should they turn on me?
Tomorrow I will be sweet God, I will set them free.

The box is only temporary.

Sylvia Plath

[Mossdog]

Had the most deliciously wonderful run up onto Wildboar and Swarth Fell today, with the colours of the blanket bog, radiant in their full acid hues. Looking to the north west the Hows were stunning - what a day.


Howgill

If you came this way
along a climbing path
you might sit awhile
with all kinds of human notions
until your mind eventually
slowed, senses awoke,
and took in that mammoth
mountain in front – bathed
into sunlight and darting
with swifts.
The wonder of it
could make you kneel and pray,
overwhelmed and tearful,
until nothing arises
and fear itself flies
with a tremulous influx
of Love.

John Lavan?

[freckle]

Had the most deliciously wonderful run up onto Wildboar and Swarth Fell today, with the colours of the blanket bog, radiant in their full acid hues. Looking to the north west the Hows were stunning - what a day.


Howgill

If you came this way
along a climbing path
you might sit awhile
with all kinds of human notions
until your mind eventually
slowed, senses awoke,
and took in that mammoth
mountain in front – bathed
into sunlight and darting
with swifts.
The wonder of it
could make you kneel and pray,
overwhelmed and tearful,
until nothing arises
and fear itself flies
with a tremulous influx
of Love.

John Lavan?

This is deliciously evocative and makes me wish I had some time in the hills this week instead of surburbia...thank you for posting mossy this mysterious John Lavan geezer sure is good ;-)

[freckle]

AND THE CITY STOOD IN ITS BRIGHTNESS
by Czesław Miłosz

And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,
And life was running out, Ruteboeuf’s or Villon’s,
Descendants already born were dancing their dances,
Women looked in their mirrors, made from a new metal,
What was it all for, if I cannot speak?
She stood above me, head like the earth on its axis,
My ashes were laid in a can under the bistro counter,
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,
To my home in the display case of a granite museum
Beside eyelash mascara, alabaster vials, and menstruation girdles of an Egyptian princess,
There was only a sun forged out of gold plate,
On darkening parquetry the creep of unhurried steps,
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned,
My face covered with a coat though now no one was left
Of those who could have remembered my debts never paid,
My shames not forever, base deeds to be forgiven.
And the city stood in its brightness when years later I returned.

[Alf]

Some Like Poetry

Some -
thus not all. Not even the majority of all but the minority.
Not counting schools, where one has to,
and the poets themselves,
there might be two people per thousand.

Like -
but one also likes chicken soup with noodles,
one likes compliments and the color blue,
one likes an old scarf,
one likes having the upper hand,
one likes stroking a dog.

Poetry -
but what is poetry.
Many shaky answers
have been given to this question.
But I don't know and don't know and hold on to it
like to a sustaining railing.


Wislawa Szymborska

[Alf]

Morning all (well the two people out of a thousand who read this thread )


At a Window


Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

Carl Sandburg

[Alf]

Probably a week too early for Yeats 'Wild swans at Coole' but this one will do nicely.

Wild Swans

I looked in my heart while the wild swans went over.
And what did I see I had not seen before?
Only a question less or a question more;
Nothing to match the flight of wild birds flying.
Tiresome heart, forever living and dying,
House without air, I leave you and lock your door.
Wild swans, come over the town, come over
The town again, trailing your legs and crying!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Alf]

I was reading 'Black Roses' by Simon Armitage tonight. Its written from the point of view of Sophie Lancaster the young woman who was brutally beaten and later died trying to protect her boyfriend in a park in Bacup in 2007. It’s a short poetic narrative and really hard going as its very upsetting considering the subject.

“Had we only known....

that this was a place
where shadows waited,
where wolves ran wild
where alcohol poisoned
the watering hole”

[freckle]

Morning all (well the two people out of a thousand who read this thread )


At a Window


Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

Carl Sandburg

Oh this is very lovely Alf thank you for posting ...by the way is that you with your cat?

[freckle]

Pigtail by Tadeusz Rozewicz

When all the women in the transport
had their heads shaved
four workmen with brooms made of birch twigs
swept up
and gathered up the hair

Behind clean glass
the stiff hair lies
of those suffocated in gas chambers
there are pins and side combs
in this hair

The hair is not shot through with light
is not parted by the breeze
is not touched by any hand
or rain or lips

In huge chests
clouds of dry hair
of those suffocated
and a faded plait
a pigtail with a ribbon
pulled at school
by naughty boys.