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Is It Far To Go?
by Cecil Day Lewis
Is it far to go?
A step -- no further.
Is it hard to go?
Ask the melting snow,
The eddying feather.
What can I take there?
Not a hank, not a hair.
What shall I leave behind?
Ask the hastening wind,
The fainting star.
Shall I be gone long?
For ever and a day.
To whom there belong?
Ask the stone to say,
Ask my song.
Who will say farewell?
The beating bell.
Will anyone miss me?
That I dare not tell --
Quick, Rose, and kiss me.
(c. 1940)
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For All Children
by Andréana Elise
For all children in conflict zones
by Andréana Elise
Dear One,
I love you more than you know.
In fact, my soul flies to you each night,
sitting beside you as you sleep,
holding your hand
so you will not be afraid.
Then I fly to the grown ups
and tell them what I saw–
their nightmares
inflicted on you.
I hold up a mirror
and show them
your face.
Dear one,
I see you, running free and happy
playing football and swimming in the sea.
I see you at school, learning and growing,
clean water to drink, good food to eat.
I see you, happy and at peace,
in your own bodies, lands and minds.
It might not feel like it, but there’s a place
in this world where you belong,
a place with your name.
Each night, we meet in soul space–
long lost friends, racing to hug and kiss each other,
never leaving, never separate, ever again.
I embrace you across continents,
imagining you here, curled in soft blankets,
drinking tea and sharing stories.
Just you and me.
When threats and pain are loud on all sides,
come, sit with me,
under this shady tree.
My love is free and soft
as rain.
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I am the Moon. You are the Man on me.
by Claire Askew
Tonight, I am white and full.
My surface is all curves
and craters, but you don’t mind.
You have travelled alone through the dark,
through the vacuum of dark;
training your hands for this task,
building imaginary engines.
This is the kind of territory you were born
to navigate. You know by heart
every treacherous route
through these white dunes;
you have drawn maps of every scar,
and you sense storms.
Your compass does not work here,
but you are sexy
in your spaceman suit.
We twirl giddily, in orbit
around the days, the months.
You are wary of my high tides –
I am your escape-pod.
A familiar world spins below,
tracked by the beam of your telescope;
we shudder at passing asteroids,
send messages home by satellite.
Tonight, I am white and full.
You are the man on me,
and I am the moon.
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Lament
by Gillian Clarke
For the green turtle with her pulsing burden,
in search of the breeding ground.
For her eggs laid in their nest of sickness.
For the cormorant in his funeral silk,
the veil of iridescence on the sand,
the shadow on the sea.
For the ocean's lap with its mortal stain.
For Ahmed at the closed border.
For the soldier with his uniform of fire.
For the gunsmith and the armourer,
the boy fusilier who joined for the company,
the farmer's sons, in it for the music.
For the hook-beaked turtles,
the dugong and the dolphin,
the whale struck dumb by the missile's thunder.
For the tern, the gull and the restless wader,
the long migrations and the slow dying,
the veiled sun and the stink of anger.
For the burnt earth and the sun put out,
the scalded ocean and the blazing well.
For vengeance, and the ashes of language.
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The Song of Wandering Aengus
('Aengus': rish god of love, youth, and poetic inspiration)
by William Butler Yeats
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread;
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout.
When I had laid it on the floor
I went to blow the fire a-flame,
But something rustled on the floor,
And someone called me by my name:
It had become a glimmering girl
With apple blossom in her hair
Who called me by my name and ran
And faded through the brightening air.
Though I am old with wandering
Through hollow lands and hilly lands,
I will find out where she has gone,
And kiss her lips and take her hands;
And walk among long dappled grass,
And pluck till time and times are done,
The silver apples of the moon,
The golden apples of the sun.
Source: The Wind Among the Reeds (1899)
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That is no country for old men. The young
In one another’s arms, birds in the trees
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.
An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium.
O sages standing in God’s holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.
This poem is in the public domain.
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The Makers
by Howard Nemorov
Who can remember back to the first poets,
The greatest ones, greater even than Orpheus?
No one has remembered that far back
Or now considers, among the artifacts
And bones and cantilevered inference
The past is made of, those first and greatest poets,
So lofty and disdainful of renown
They left us not a name to know them by.
They were the ones that in whatever tongue
Worded the world, that were the first to say
Star, water, stone, that said the visible
And made it bring invisibles to view
In wind and time and change, and in the mind
Itself that minded the hitherto idiot world
And spoke the speechless world and sang the towers
Of the city into the astonished sky.
They were the first great listeners, attuned
To interval, relationhsip, and scale,
The first to say above, beneath, beyond,
Conjurors with love, death, sleep, with bread and wine,
Who having uttered vanished from the world
Leaving no memory but the marvelous
Magical elements, the breathing shapes
And stops of breath we build our Babels of.
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Coyote, Coyote
by Peter Blue Cloud
Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
What is a shaman?
A shaman I don’t know
anything about.
I’m a doctor, myself.
When I use medicine,
it’s between me,
my patient,
and the Creation.
Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
What is power?
It is said that power
is the ability to start
your chainsaw
with one pull.
Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
What is magic?
Magic is the first taste
of ripe strawberries and
magic is a child dancing
in a summer’s rain.
Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
Why is Creation?
Creation is because I
went to sleep last night
with a full stomach,
and when I woke up
this morning,
everything was here.
Coyote, Coyote, Please tell me
Who you belong to?
According to the latest
survey, there are certain
persons who, in poetic
or scholarly guise,
have claimed me like
a conqueror’s prize.
Let me just say
once and for all,
just to be done:
Coyote,
he belongs to none.
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Radical Hospitality
by Rumi
This being human is a guest house.
Every morning is a new arrival.
A joy, a depression, a meanness,
some momentary awareness comes
as an unexpected visitor.
Welcome and entertain them all!
Even if they're a crowd of sorrows,
who violently sweep your house
empty of its furniture,
still, treat each guest honorably.
[S]he may be clearing you out
for some new delight.
The dark thought, the shame, the malice,
meet them at the door laughing,
and invite them in.
Be grateful for whoever comes,
because each has been sent
as a guide from beyond.
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Will Mary, Joseph and the Baby God be turned away?
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Persephone the Wanderer
by Louise Gluck
In the first version, Persephone
is taken from her mother
and the goddess of the earth
punishes the earth—this is
consistent with what we know of human behavior,
that human beings take profound satisfaction
in doing harm, particularly
unconscious harm:
we may call this
negative creation.
Persephone's initial
sojourn in hell continues to be
pawed over by scholars who dispute
the sensations of the virgin:
did she cooperate in her rape,
or was she drugged, violated against her will,
as happens so often now to modern girls.
As is well known, the return of the beloved
does not correct
the loss of the beloved: Persephone
returns home
stained with red juice like
a character in Hawthorne
I am not certain I will
keep this word: is earth
"home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably,
in the bed of the god? Is she
at home nowhere? Is she
a born wanderer, in other words
an existential
replica of her own mother, less
hamstrung by ideas of causality?
You are allowed to like
no one, you know. The characters
are not people.
They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict.
Three parts: just as the soul is divided,
ego, superego, id. Likewise
the three levels of the known world,
a kind of diagram that separates
heaven from earth from hell.
You must ask yourself:
where is it snowing?
White of forgetfulness,
of desecration—
It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says
Persephone is having sex in hell.
Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know
what winter is, only that
she is what causes it.
She is lying in the bed of Hades.
What is in her mind?
Is she afraid? Has something
blotted out the idea
of mind?
She does know the earth
is run by mothers, this much
is certain. She also knows
she is not what is called
a girl any longer. Regarding
incarceration, she believes
she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter.
The terrible reunions in store for her
will take up the rest of her life.
When the passion for expiation
is chronic, fierce, you do not choose
the way you live. You do not live;
you are not allowed to die.
You drift between earth and death
which seem, finally,
strangely alike. Scholars tell us
that there is no point in knowing what you want
when the forces contending over you
could kill you.
White of forgetfulness,
white of safety—
They say
there is a rift in the human soul
which was not constructed to belong
entirely to life. Earth
asks us to deny this rift, a threat
disguised as suggestion
as we have seen
in the tale of Persephone
which should be read
as an argument between the mother and the lover
the daughter is just meat.
When death confronts her, she has never seen
the meadow without the daisies.
Suddenly she is no longer
singing her maidenly songs
about her mother's
beauty and fecundity. Where
the rift is, the break is.
Song of the earth,
song of the mythic vision of eternal life—
My soul
shattered with the strain
of trying to belong to earth—
What will you do,
when it is your turn in the field with the god?
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My Wicked, Wicked Ways
by Sandra Cisneros
This is my father.
See? He is young.
He looks like Errol Flynn.
He is wearing a hat
that tips over one eye,
a suit that fits him good,
and baggy pants.
He is also wearing
those awful shoes,
the two-toned ones
my mother hates.
Here is my mother.
She is not crying.
She cannot look into the lens
because the sun is bright.
The woman,
the one my father knows,
is not here.
She does not come till later.
My mother will get very mad.
Her face will turn red
and she will throw one shoe.
My father will say nothing.
After a while everyone
will forget it.
Years and years will pass.
My mother will stop mentioning it.
This is me she is carrying.
I am a baby.
She does not know
I will turn out bad.
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Image: a MS Copilot interpretation of a verse in Catness
Catness
by Sue Silver
One night with the wind blowing wildly
my cat climbs down from the porch chair.
She rolls around on the ground.
I wait, hold the door open ‘til she,
in her own time, makes her way inside.
The wind, all this while,
works to wrest the door from my grasp.
I run my hand over her black fur.
Her yellow eyes gaze at me steadily.
She purrs, her claws extend and retract on the cushion
that protects my legs as she sits in my lap.
I see the Egyptian Goddess, Sekhmet,
who did Ra’s bidding annihilating evil hordes,
after which she became the Great Healer, they say.
Ancient one - She who lives with the wind,
her eyes and paws reaching to me.
Her body, an echo
of all cats - tiger, panther, bobcat.
Her stride, her stance
that stillness in her strength.
The stalk, the pounce.
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Billy Collins excerpt:
Poem of the Week
Early Cinema
by Elizabeth Alexander
According to Mister Hedges, the custodian
who called upon their parents
after young Otwiner and young Julia
were spotted at the matinee
of Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik
at the segregated Knickerbocker Theater
in the uncommon Washington December
of 1922, “Your young ladies
were misrepresenting themselves today,”
meaning, of course, that they were passing.
After coffee and no cake were finished
and Mister Hedges had buttoned his coat
against the strange evening chill,
choice words were had with Otwiner and Julia,
shame upon the family, shame upon the race.
How they’d longed to see Rudolph Valentino,
who was swarthy like a Negro, like the finest Negro man.
In The Sheik, they’d heard, he was turbaned,
whisked damsels away in a desert cloud.
They’d heard this from Lucille and Ella
who’d put on their fine frocks and French,
claiming to be “of foreign extraction”
to sneak into the Knickerbocker Theater
past the usher who knew their parents
but did not know them.
They’d heard this from Mignon and Doris
who’d painted carmine bindis on their foreheads
braided their black hair tight down the back,
and huffed, “We’ll have to take this up with the Embassy”
to the squinting ticket taker.
Otwiner and Julia were tired of Oscar Michaux,
tired of church, tired of responsibility,
rectitude, posture, grooming, modulation,
tired of homilies each way they turned,
tired of colored right and wrong.
They wanted to be whisked away.
The morning after Mister Hedges’ visit
the paperboy cried “Extra!” and Papas
shrugged camel’s hair topcoats over pressed pajamas,
and Mamas read aloud at the breakfast table,
“No Colored Killed When Roof Caves In”
at the Knickerbocker Theater
at the evening show
from a surfeit of snow on the roof.
One hundred others dead.
It appeared that God had spoken.
There was no school that day,
no movies for months after.
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A Lemon
by Pablo Neruda
A Lemon
Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium
Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.
Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.
So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.
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Every time I kiss you
After a long separation
I feel
I am putting a hurried love letter
In a red mailbox.
Translated by B. Frangieh And C. Brown
A Microsoft Copilot Interpretation
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The Poetry Show
image generated by MS Copilot from the above quote
Masks
by Shel Silverstein
She had blue skin,
And so did he.
He kept it hid
And so did she.
They searched for blue
Their whole life through.
Then passed right by
And never knew.
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