11.27.07
Praise Song by Barbara Crooker
Praise Song
Praise the light of late November,
the thin sunlight that goes deep in the bones.
Praise the crows chattering in the oak trees;
though they are clothed in night, they do not
despair. Praise what little there’s left:
the small boats of milkweed pods, husks, hulls,
shells, the architecture of trees. Praise the meadow
of dried weeds: yarrow, goldenrod, chicory,
the remains of summer. Praise the blue sky
that hasn’t cracked yet. Praise the sun slipping down
behind the beechnuts, praise the quilt of leaves
that covers the grass: Scarlet Oak, Sweet Gum,
Sugar Maple. Though darkness gathers, praise our crazy
fallen world; it’s all we have, and it’s never enough.
~ Barbara Crooker ~
(Abalone Moon, Summer 2004)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Praise_Song.html
Web archive of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html
maryt
11.11.07
Omoni by Soo Young Lim
She cleans out mackerel in the sink,
running a knife neatly through the silver underbelly
just as her mother had shown her so many years ago.
At fourteen, she ran away to Seoul,
living with a distant aunt and working
long hours in a factory.
She lasted a month in night school,
taking pills to stay awake until her nose bled from exhaustion.
For six years, she was begged to return home
before her mother and three brothers came to the city
without choice.
After moving to America, she saw her mother only once more,
who was by then frail from decades of wear,
her once-soft voice stolen by sickness.
Now, after three years of grief,
she has yet to visit the grave of the woman she called omoni.
She cries softly in the bathroom each night.
I pretend not to hear the sobs escaping through
the sound of running water.
Soo Young Lim
via Poetry.com
10.21.07
Dublin by Louis MacNeice
Grey brick upon brick, Declamatory bronze On sombre pedestals - O'Connell, Grattan, Moore - And the brewery tugs and the swans On the balustraded stream And the bare bones of a fanlight Over a hungry door And the air soft on the cheek And porter running from the taps With a head of yellow cream And Nelson on his pillar Watching his world collapse. This never was my town, I was not born or bred Nor schooled here and she will not Have me alive or dead But yet she holds my mind With her seedy elegance, With her gentle veils of rain And all her ghosts that walk And all that hide behind Her Georgian facades - The catcalls and the pain, The glamour of her squalor, The bravado of her talk. The lights jig in the river With a concertina movement And the sun comes up in the morning Like barley-sugar on the water And the mist on the Wicklow hills Is close, as close As the peasantry were to the landlord, As the Irish to the Anglo-Irish, As the killer is close one moment To the man he kills, Or as the moment itself Is close to the next moment. She is not an Irish town And she is not English, Historic with guns and vermin And the cold renown Of a fragment of Church latin, Of an oratorical phrase. But oh the days are soft, Soft enough to forget The lesson better learnt, The bullet on the wet Streets, the crooked deal, The steel behind the laugh, The Four Courts burnt. Fort of the Dane, Garrison of the Saxon, Augustan capital Of a Gaelic nation, Appropriating all The alien brought, You give me time for thought And by a juggler's trick You poise the toppling hour - O greyness run to flower, Grey stone, grey water, And brick upon grey brick. -- Louis MacNeice
10.04.07
Fall Song by Mary Oliver
Fall Song
Another year gone, leaving everywhere
its rich spiced residues: vines, leaves,
the uneaten fruits crumbling damply
in the shadows, unmattering back
from the particular island
of this summer, this NOW, that now is nowhere
except underfoot, moldering
in that black subterranean castle
of unobservable mysteries – roots and sealed seeds
and the wanderings of water. This
I try to remember when time’s measure
painfully chafes, for instance when autumn
flares out at the last, boisterous and like us longing
to stay – how everything lives, shifting
from one bright vision to another, forever
in these momentary pastures.
~ Mary Oliver ~
(American Primitive)
09.29.07
I Might Act Serious by Tukaram
I MIGHT ACT SERIOUS
If God would stop telling jokes
I might act
serious.
~ Tukaram ~
(Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West by Daniel Ladinsky)
09.19.07
Everything Is Going To Be All Right by Derek Mahon
How should I not be glad to contemplate
the clouds clearing beyond the dormer window
and a high tide reflected on the ceiling?
There will be dying, there will be dying,
but there is no need to go into that.
The poems flow from the hand unbidden
and the hidden source is the watchful heart.
The sun rises in spite of everything
and the far cities are beautiful and bright.
I lie here in a riot of sunlight
watching the day break and the clouds flying.
Everything is going to be all right.
~ Derek Mahon ~
(Collected Poems)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Everything_Is_Going_to_Be_All_Right.html
09.16.07
Philosophy by Billy Collins
Philosophy
I used to sit in the cafe of existentialism,
lost in a blue cloud of cigarette smoke,
contemplating the suicide a tiny Frenchman
might commit by leaping from the rim of my brandyglass.
I used to hunger to be engaged
as I walked the long shaded boulevards,
eyeing women of all nationalities,
a difficult paperback riding in my raincoat pocket.
But these days I like my ontology in an armchair,
a rope hammock, or better still, a warm bath
in a cork-lined room–disengaged, soaking
in the calm, restful waters of speculation.
Afternoons, when I leave the house
for the woods, I think of Aquinas at his desk,
fingers interlocked upon his stomach,
as he deduces another proof for God’s existence,
intricate as the branches of these bare November trees.
And as I kick through the leaves and snap
the windfallen twigs, I consider Leibniz on his couch
reaching the astonishing conclusion that monads,
those windowless units of matter, must have souls.
But when I finally reach the top of the hill
and sit down on the flat tonnage of this boulder,
I think of Spinoza, most rarefied of them all.
I look beyond the treetops and the distant ridges
and see him sitting in a beam of Dutch sunlight
slowly stirring his milky tea with a spoon.
Since dawn he has been at his bench grinding lenses,
but now he is leaving behind the saucer and table,
the smokey chimneys and tile roofs of Amsterdam,
even the earth itself, pale blue, aqueous,
cloud-enshrined, titled back on the stick of its axis.
He is rising into that high dome of thought
where loose pages of Shelley float on the air,
where all the formulas of calculus unravel,
tumbling in the radiance of a round Platonic sun–
that zone just below the one where angels accelerate
and the amphitheatrical rose of Dante unfolds.
And now I stand up on the ledge to salute you, Spinoza,
and when I whistle to the dog and start down the hill,
I can feel the thick glass of your eyes upon me
as I step from the rock to glacial rock, and on her
as she sniffs her way through the leaves,
her tail straight back, her body low to the ground.
~ Billy Collins ~
(The Art of Drowning)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Philosophy.html
Web archive of Panhala postings: www.panhala.net/Archive/Index.html
09.06.07
Window, Window by Wendell Berry
Window, Window
13.
Sometimes he thinks the earth
might be better without humans.
He’s ashamed of that.
It worries him,
him being a human, and needing
to think well of others
in order to think well of himself.
And there are
a few he thinks well of,
a few he loves
as well as himself almost,
and he would like to say
better. But history
is so largely unforgivable.
And now his might government
wants to help everybody
even if it has to kill them
to do it – like the fellow in the story
who helped his neighbor to Heaven:
‘I heard the Lord calling him,
Judge, and I sent him on.’
According to the government
everybody is just waiting
to be given a chance
to be like us. He can’t
go along with that.
Here is a thing, flesh of his flesh,
that he hates. He would like
a little assurance
that no one will destroy the world
for some good cause.
Until he dies, he would like his life
to pertain to the earth.
But there is something in him
that will wait, even
while he protests,
for things turn out as they will.
Out his window this morning
he saw nine ducks in flight,
and a hawk dive at his mate
in delight.
The day stands apart
from the calendar. There is a will
that receives it as enough.
He is given a fragment of time
in this fragment of the world.
He likes it pretty well.
~ Wendell Berry ~
(Window Poems)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/Window_Window.html
maryt
08.31.07
No Postmortems Please by Gregory Orr
No postmortems, please.
The world is immortal.
The world renews itself.
What about poems and songs –
Do they perish?
Maybe they only
Vanish awhile.
Maybe they go underground
To gather some other
Knowledge and come back
In another form:
New words, a new melody,
Yet somehow
The same beloved,
Singing the same song.
~ Gregory Orr ~
(Concerning the Book that is the Body of the Beloved)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/No_Postmortems.html
08.30.07
The Time by Naomi Shihab Nye
Summer is the time to write. I tell myself this
in winter especially. Summer comes,
I want to tumble with the river
over rocks and mossy dams.
A fish drifting upside down.
Slow accordians sweeten the breeze.
The Sanitary Mattress Factory says,
“Sleep is Life.”
Why do I think of forty ways to spend an afternoon?
Yesterday someone said, “It gets late so early.”
I wrote it down. I was going to do something with it.
Maybe it is a title and this life is the poem.
~ Naomi Shihab Nye ~
(Fuel)
Web version: www.panhala.net/Archive/The_Time.html
