Today's poet

[freckle]

I was refilling the bird feeders that hang in the two Silver Birch trees in my garden this morning and it reminded me that these trees were saplings when my young family moved into our house and we have grown up with them over the years. Both these poems link trees to personal lives.

Russian Birch


Is it agony that has bleached them to such beauty? Their stand
is at the edge of our property—white spires like fingers, through which
the deer emerge with all the tentative grace of memory. Your father

loved these trees. When you try to imagine his childhood, it is all old
footage, in a similar scheme: black and white. But he died, and all you know
is that they reminded him of home. As they remind you he is gone

to a country as unimaginable as his life before you were born, before
the woman who would be your mother lived as she does now—lost,
wandering at the edge of her life’s whitened gates.

After a storm, one birch fell in the field, an ivory buttress collapsed across
the pasture. Up close there is pink skin beneath the paper, green lichen
ascending in settlements of scales. In the dark yard it beckons you back

to snow, the static of the past—your father, a boy, speaking in a tongue
you never knew, calling down from the branches. Or the letter you wrote
to a mother you weren’t allowed to miss—black ink scrawled across

the white pulp of the page: I am very lonely without you.


Nathaniel Bellows

Gosh such a moving piece of work...trees can indeed be very symbolic...I love the idea of planting a tree that grows with you and your family

[Alf]

The Unborn

Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.

Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing
In some antechamber - servants, half-
Listening for the bell.

Sometimes I see them lying like love letters
In the Dead Letter Office

And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.

Sharon Olds

[Alf]

Pad, Pad

I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.

What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.

Stevie Smith

[Alf]

'Tis a good dullness,. And give it way. I know thou canst not choose.' "You look sleepy. It's a nice hazy feeling, so give in to it. I know you have no choice. "

Night all

[freckle]

The Unborn

Sometimes I can almost see, around our heads,
Like gnats around a streetlight in summer,
The children we could have,
The glimmer of them.

Sometimes I feel them waiting, dozing
In some antechamber - servants, half-
Listening for the bell.

Sometimes I see them lying like love letters
In the Dead Letter Office

And sometimes, like tonight, by some black
Second sight I can feel just one of them
Standing on the edge of a cliff by the sea
In the dark, stretching its arms out
Desperately to me.

Sharon Olds

this one got me...permission for bottom lip to wobble

[freckle]

'Tis a good dullness,. And give it way. I know thou canst not choose. You look sleepy. It's a nice hazy feeling, so give in to it. I know you have no choice. "

Night all

where is this from alf? you are so learned I am impressed...funnily enough i was just dropping off into a pleasant slumber and treating myself to a relatively early night when my bleedin i phone went off with a notification from Face book...pah! ah well never mind at least I got a chance to dip into "Soul Food" a bloodaxe book of poems given to me by my better half...I found this poem by the polish poet Milosz ....incidentally I have no idea whatsoever how to pronounce his name...on a recent trip to Poland I found out that the city of "Ludz" is pronounced "Wooj" what chance do I stand ? loved Poland can't wait to go back...

Hope

Hope is with you when you believe
The earth is not a dream but living flesh,
That sight, touch, and hearing do not lie,
That all things you have ever seen here
Are like a garden looked at from a gate.

You cannot enter. But you're sure it's there.
Could we but look more clearly and wisely
We might discover somewhere in the garden
A strange new flower and an unnamed star.

Some people say we should not trust our eyes,
That there is nothing, just a seeming,
These are the ones who have no hope.
They think that the moment we turn away,
The world, behind our backs, ceases to exist,
As if snatched up by the hands of thieves.

~ Czeslaw Milosz ~

[freckle]

The tempest...kind of :thumbup:

at some point in my life i will find the time and energy to read shakespeare tho not sure when!

[Alf]

The tempest...kind of :thumbup:

at some point in my life i will find the time and energy to read shakespeare tho not sure when!

I was watching a film version of 'The Tempest' last night with the role of Prospero played by a woman (Helen Mirren) this time called Prospera
Mirren was good but its Shakespeare's last play and I always picture him as Prospero signing off his career.

“Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.”

[Hes]

Can I have permission too? What a beautiful sad poem.

this one got me...permission for bottom lip to wobble

[Hes]

Thanks Freckle and Alf for some really lovely choices over the last few posts.

Incident
by Norman MacCaig

I look across the table and think
(fiery with love)
Ask me, go on, ask me
to do something impossible,
something freakishly useless,
something unimaginable and inimitable

Like making a finger break into blossom
or walking for half an hour in twenty minutes
or remembering tomorrow.

I will you to ask it.
But all you say is
Will you give me a cigarette?
And I smile and,
returning to the marvellous world
of possibility
I give you one
with a hand that trembles
with a human trembling.