Posts tagged poets
3 notes &
ARS POETICA (Poem by Archibald MacLeish)
A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb
Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown -
A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind -
A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs
A poem should be equal to:
Not true
For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea -
A poem should not mean
But be
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Ann says: I share MacLeish’s sentiments. I’d much rather have a poem make me feel or think something than tell me what to feel or think.
Image: Stock Image from Google Images
49 notes &
GUILT FISH (Luc Bat Poem by Dan Collins)
One morning by a stream
(I thought it was a dream) That fish!
~ Bigger than one could wish.
This scaly monster’s swish I fought
until I was distraught.
When prospect of him caught was lost
(at such a hefty cost).
Then in the stream I tossed my rod;
upon the bank I trod;
in fear of this fish god I stood.
“I’ll do you no good.”
“I am misunderstood” he said
“to eat me you’d be dead,
and a curse on your head, indeed
if on me you do feed”
He spoke now from the reeds unseen,
faintest of glimpses gleaned,
dull eyes poisoned and lean he showed
in the shadows they glowed
telling me what we owed to sea,
to fish, and bird, and tree -
That thought now weighs on me, it seems.
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Ann says: The Luc Bat is a traditional Vietnamese poetry form with an unusual rhyme scheme. Because some lines have a rhymed word in the center and some at the end, this form seems to take the nature of a braid or a twining vine.
Copyright 2013 by Dan Collins (aka Atticus).
Image: DeYoung Fine Art
5 notes &
It happened like this:
when they flew, great wings whistling,
the river leading the way,
you squeezed my crumb-dusted hand
and we watched them go.
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Ann says: Among her many talents, Corinna Parr is a writer of literary erotica par excellance. You can find her work here.
Copyright 2013 by Corinna Parr.
Image: Patrick Seeger
47 notes &
Each of us like you
has felt this surge
the rolling tide
in ceaseless cycle;
it demands we spill
jellied hearts
tangled fronds
sea-picked spines
upon an unforgiving shore.
Ann says: Among her many talents, Corinna Parr is a writer of literary erotica par excellance. You can find her work here.
Copyright 2013 by Corinna Parr.
Image: ILoveShelling.com
3 notes &
Rain, midnight rain, nothing but the wild rain
On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me
Remembering again that I shall die
And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks
For washing me cleaner than I have been
Since I was born into this solitude.
Blessed are the dead that the rain rains upon:
But here I pray that none whom once I loved
Is dying to-night or lying still awake
Solitary, listening to the rain,
Either in pain or thus in sympathy
Helpless among the living and the dead,
Like a cold water among broken reeds,
Myriads of broken reeds all still and stiff,
Like me who have no love which this wild rain
Has not dissolved except the love of death,
If love it be towards what is perfect and
Cannot, the tempest tells me, disappoint.
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Image: wowscreenshots-net
3 notes &
Today, from a distance, I saw you
walking away, and without a sound
the glittering face of a glacier
slid into the sea. An ancient oak
fell in the Cumberlands, holding only
a handful of leaves, and an old woman
scattering corn to her chickens looked up
for an instant. At the other side
of the galaxy, a star thirty-five times
the size of our own sun exploded
and vanished, leaving a small green spot
on the astronomer’s retina
as he stood on the great open dome
of my heart with no one to tell.
Image: AlaskaAlive.com
4 notes &
Look at her. Sleeping. The picture of peace.
No shadows cross over her complacent face.
No frown on her forehead. Unworried. Replete.
She dreams of a planet, and it is just right.
Her galaxy spirals. Its life-span’s immense.
It’s one in ten billion. By some lucky chance
Her planet has water and in liquid state
As it orbits its sun in conditions just right.
Her Earth has a moon whose rotation is such
That neither one wanders or wobbles too much
And all through the night it reflects the sun’s light
And Goldilocks dreams that this is just right.
The physical constants in her universe
Bind atoms in space with precisely the force
That enables their fusion in the star’s heat
So conditions for porridge have turned out just right.
Jupiter’s presence attracts asteroids
Cataclysmic impacts that her world thus avoids
Meanwhile the porridge she left on the plate
Is crawling with microbes that find it just right.
Somehow the microbes produce RNA
Repeat and adapt and grow smarter each day
They swim and they crawl and they even take flight
As they breathe in a mixture of gas that’s just right.
Look at her. Sleeping. The girl’s had such fun.
She sat on three chairs but she only broke one.
She ate a child’s porridge, which was hardly polite
But she couldn’t resist it for it was just right.
What was that noise? There’s someone downstairs!
If I’m not mistaken it’s three angry bears.
When Goldilocks wakes she’ll get such a fright.
Oh dear! Look away children. Something’s not right.
She’s nowhere to run. She’s already at home.
The house that she ransacked in fact was her own.
Here come Fury and Terror and Black Endless Night.
She’ll be sorry she spoiled it when it was just right.
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Ann says: Wow! What a terrifying allegorical tale of the short-sighted human race and environmental disaster. This is not a fairy tale for children, but adults should take heed.
Copyright 2013 by Mike Ellwood. His excellent book of poems can be purchased here.
Image: GoodFon.com
33 notes &
As when the tuning fork and string vibrate
As one, or eyes meet when first lovers realise
They are in love and cry in shared surprise,
Behold a harmony to celebrate.
Something of grace, perfection, effortless,
As flesh and muscle unleash without strain
And nerves fire pyrotechnics through the brain
Saluting both the power and the finesse.
See gravity’s parabola. Watch in awe
The rise and fall that passion brought to be,
The vectors of divine geometry,
The line none but an eagle’s quill could draw.
The vacant hollow gapes and fulfilment
Surprises like a fortune heaven-sent.
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Ann says: I find this celebration of athleticism and physics quite as beautiful as the famous running sequences in Chariots of Fire.
Mike’s book of golf poetry, Eighteen Holes, can be purchased here. (Kindle format only).
Copyright 2013 by Mike Ellwood.
Image: gallerybandb.net
4 notes &
I meet the mirrored man’s appraising gaze
And focus on the pupils. In return
They peer as if attempting to discern
The nature of the soul behind the maze
Of optic nerves. I frown as if to warn
Those earnest eyes their searching is in vain,
But when I look a smile of cool disdain
Surveys me from the image I have drawn.
The mirrored man is all too well aware
(Enjoying this he sneers at me in scorn)
I see flat glass no matter how I stare,
No secret depths. And now the page is torn.
As if afraid that nothing will remain,
Despite myself I pose and try again.
Ann says: Mike Ellwood one of my favorite poets. He has recently published an awesome book of poems (golf-themed, no less!) which can be purchased here.
Copyright 2013 by Mike Ellwood,
Image: TodayCreate on Tumblr
8 notes &
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.
Note: Edwin Muir published this poem without stanza breaks; I have added them for online readability.
Images: 1. hdw.eweb4.com 2. Sayaka Ganz
1 note &
Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and see
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in silver feathered sleep
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws, and silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream
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Image: Trees in Mooonlight by Rod Schneider
1 note &
I know if I find you I will have to leave the earth
and go on out
over the sea marshes and the brant in bays
and over the hills of tall hickory
and over the crater lakes and canyons
and on up through the spheres of diminishing air
past the blackset noctilucent clouds
where one wants to stop and look
way past all the light diffusions and bombardments
up farther than the loss of sight
into the unseasonal undifferentiated empty stark
And I know if I find you I will have to stay with the earth
inspecting with thin tools and ground eyes
trusting the microvilli sporangia and simplest
coelenterates
and praying for a nerve cell
with all the soul of my chemical reactions
and going right on down where the eye sees only traces
You are everywhere partial and entire
You are on the inside of everything and on the outside
I walk down the path down the hill where the sweetgum
has begun to ooze spring sap at the cut
and I see how the bark cracks and winds like no other bark
chasmal to my ant-soul running up and down
and if I find you I must go out deep into your
far resolutions
and if I find you I must stay here with the separate leaves
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Ann says: A. R. Ammons was a biologist, a closeted pagan, and an excellent poet. A fractal like this is one of the few images that can illustrate nature on almost any scale, as Ammons does in his soaring poem.
Copyright A. R. Ammons
Image: Aerial Photo from the NASA book Earth as Art.
7 notes &
A Spirit Terzanelle
The breath of Divine wind, where the river bends
Attached to the infinite Creator, we are greater ( than we imagine)
There is no end to eternity and forever Spirit ascends
We seem to believe, we must wait ‘til much later
And as above, so below is the same here as there
Attached to the infinite Creator, we are greater (than we imagine)
The Creator is Spirit of all life whether dark or fair
Our thoughts we connect, we create our own strife
And as above, so below is the same here as there
He is not a respecter of persons, we have choice in life
“As I and my Father are One”, He needs no appeasing
Our thoughts we connect, we create our own strife
One cannot reach their spirit with the mind of reasoning
But passion of feeling, the desire to become with One
“As I and my Father are One”; He needs no appeasing
There are gifts of the spirit, don’t think there are none
But passion of feeling, the desire to become with One
The breath of Divine wind, where the river bends
There is no end to eternity and forever Spirit ascends
52 notes &
I. Neptune’s Theater
A spinning sphere sheds heat
as a warm sea calcimines.
Turquoise Neptune in his tepid bath
drips epochs of lace from his fingertips
Sculpts a submerged garden of orange, pink, chlorophyll-green
where painted parrots chat up cardinals
butterfly and angel fry sway with wave-pulse
and foliate fingers beckon from arched windows.
Neptune’s children are curiously flat-bright
at night, jigsaw pieces meekly spine-locked in a labyrinth
beneath an array of bioluminescent stars
as a gangly pretender watches and blows bubbles.
II. Sapien Siege
The hot acidic hand of death grasps
and bleached spires implode
shattering the labyrinth
Reef’s children scream beneath planet’s stars
Butterflies impaled
Cyanide-swooning damsels
Mesh-tangled angels hauled heavenward
Spires to potash, corpses to coal.
The pretender to the throne blinks
rubs blurry lenses,
kicks plastic fins
and moves on to the next show.
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Ann says: All of the animal and human characters in this poem (except Neptune and The Pretender) are named after coral reef fish. Coral reefs, one of the most diverse ecosystems, are expected to be largely extinct within one human generation.
Copyright 2013 by Ann Marcaida.
Images:1. Andrey Narchuk 2. Neil Craver Photography
6 notes &
I THE ROOD ONES
i
The mythic wooden rood
Shadows the zodiac’s sun as son
Improvising on its pagan astral attitude
Older than naked Semitic prophets
Cashed in later as the church’s earthly profits.
ii
Its solar nexus reveals the binary coding
Sun/Son as the crux of the twelve disciples
and the night’s sky twelve heavenly houses
Systems of both cosmic and seasonal kinds
False coins, both minted in darkened minds.
iii
The church remains a piscine scheme
Preceding, by meaning, the water-carrier’s dream
Extolled in gospels and leather-bound missals
Pandered from pulpits to baptismal regenerates
Cowered and frightened, these tithed pagan celebrants.
II THE CRESCENT WATCHERS
i
The crescent moon neither waxes nor wanes
Frozen in time and the desert dwellers’ mind
It upholds the themes of piscine dreams
Based on the codex of an immutable recitation
In a final edition, prayerfully memorized.
ii
Soon the moon rose and covered their lands
They strained to maintain an historical connection
To Sumer’s Abraham, Moses, and Jesus
Based on the stories that Arabized Sumerians knew
From common ancestors the legends of the Jews.
iii
The idolized prophet’s words became chanted melodies
Breaking stone and wooden gods into dust and memory
While the chanters’ swords took the souls of their foes
Revived African economies at the price of its soul
They revived Europe’s Grecian ideas and their dominant role.
III THE MENORAH MENSCHES
i
Built in the shadows of the menorah,
Magical hexagrams minted from Solomon, David
(and Satan as well), the wandering fathers knew
That Sumer’s moon shone the path to hell
After they drank wisely from old Egypt’s well.
ii
Moon worshippers all, they roamed in darkness
Where they prostrated in the shadow of stone idols
Reconciling their beginnings without a place for endings
They slew those found and claimed their ground
Where the others buried their kith and kin.
iii
Would only Abraham had known
The lost and the found would wander
To distant regions, barren moonscapes in mind
From Ur to Sinai, fertilized by the Nilotic grace
To lead the world’s fervent moon-centered race
He may have slain his son after all
To block the path of mankind’s fall.
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Copyright 2012 by Umar Hassan. All rights reserved.
Images: 1. WildAbouttexas.blogspot.com 2. MuslimMediaNetwork.com 3. Marilyse Saporta
