Poems that you love

[ellajam]

What a great series of poems, thank you, Ray.

[UselessBlueprint]

Too lazy to find a transcript for it, but I quite like this one.

[rayheinrich]

A Dog Was Crying Tonight in Wicklow Also     - Seamus Heaney

When human beings found out about death
They sent the dog to Chukwu with a message:
They wanted to be let back to the house of life.
They didn’t want to end up lost forever
Like burnt wood disappearing into smoke
Or ashes that get blown away to nothing.
Instead they saw their souls in a flock at twilight
Cawing and headed back to the same old roosts
And the same bright airs and wing-stretchings
Each morning.
Death would be like a night spent in the wood:
At first light they’d be back in the house of life.
(The dog was meant to tell all this to Chukwu.)

But death and human beings took second place
When he trotted off the path and started barking
At an other dog in broad daylight just barking
Back at him from the far bank of a river.

And that is how the toad reached Chukwu first,
The toad who’d overheard in the beginning
What the dog was meant to tell.
‘Human beings,’ he said
(And here the toad was trusted absolutely),
‘Human beings want death to last forever.’

Then Chukwu saw the people’s souls in birds
Coming towards him like black spots off the sunset
To a place where there would be neither roosts
Not trees
Nor any way back to the house of life.
And his mind reddened and darkened all at once
And nothing that the dog would tell him later
Could change that vision. Great chiefs and great loves
In obliterated light, the toad in mud,
The dog crying out all night behind the corpse house.

---

A Letter in October     - Ted Kooser

Dawn comes later and later now,  
and I, who only a month ago
could sit with coffee every morning  
watching the light walk down the hill  
to the edge of the pond and place  
a doe there, shyly drinking,

then see the light step out upon  
the water, sowing reflections  
to either side—a garden
of trees that grew as if by magic—
now see no more than my face,  
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd,

startled by time. While I slept,  
night in its thick winter jacket  
bridled the doe with a twist
of wet leaves and led her away,
then brought its black horse with harness  
that creaked like a cricket, and turned

the water garden under. I woke,  
and at the waiting window found  
the curtains open to my open face;  
beyond me, darkness. And I,
who only wished to keep looking out,  
must now keep looking in.

[Todd]

I normally don't like Heaney, but that was wonderful.

And Kooser, I think I love him more and more with each poem.

[milo]

You not liking Heaney makes me sad. It also makes me feel a need to post some of my Heaney favourites.

---

Too lazy to find a transcript for it, but I quite like this one.

For me, this seems like a stand up comedy routine, not a poem. Have you watched Nate Bergatze? Very funny.

---

Strange Fruit by Seamus Heaney

Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.

They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten, nameless, terrible
Beheaded girl, outstaring axe
And beatification, outstaring
What had begun to feel like reverence.

[milo]

Act of Union by Seamus Heaney
I

To-night, a first movement, a pulse,
As if the rain in bogland gathered head
To slip and flood: a bog-burst,
A gash breaking open the ferny bed.
Your back is a firm line of eastern coast
And arms and legs are thrown
Beyond your gradual hills. I caress
The heaving province where our past has grown.
I am the tall kingdom over your shoulder
That you would neither cajole nor ignore.
Conquest is a lie. I grow older
Conceding your half-independant shore
Within whose borders now my legacy
Culminates inexorably.

II

And I am still imperially
Male, leaving you with pain,
The rending process in the colony,
The battering ram, the boom burst from within.
The act sprouted an obsinate fifth column
Whose stance is growing unilateral.
His heart beneath your heart is a wardrum
Mustering force. His parasitical
And ignmorant little fists already
Beat at your borders and I know they're cocked
At me across the water. No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again

[rayheinrich]

There are many poets I worship (embarrassingly enough, I am just a fan).
Heaney just amazes me. How can every line of a poem be a fresh metaphor?
What a fucking show-off.


The Tollund Man in Springtime     - Seamus Heaney

Into your virtual city I'll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping time in myself, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost
To you and yours, out under seeding grass
And trickles of kesh water, sphagnum moss,
Dead bracken on the spreadfield, red as rust.
I reawoke to revel in the spirit
They strengthened when they chose to put me down
For their own good. And to a sixth-sensed threat:
Panicked snipe offshooting into twilight,
Then going awry, larks quietened in the sun,
Clear alteration in the bog-pooled rain.
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     -------

"The soul exceeds its circumstances". Yes.
History not to be granted the last word
Or the first claim ... In the end I gathered
From the display-case peat my staying powers,
Told my webbed wrists to be like silver birches,
My old uncallused hands to be young sward,
The spade-cut skin to heal, and got restored
By telling myself this. Late as it was,
The early bird still sang, the meadow hay
Still buttercupped and daisied, sky was new.
I smelled the air, exhaust fumes, silage reek,
Heard from my heather bed the thickened traffic
Swarm at a roundabout five fields away
And transatlantic flights stacked in the blue.

     -------

Through every check and scan I carried with me
A bunch of Tollund rushes — roots and all —
Bagged in their own bog-damp. In an old stairwell
Broom cupboard where I had hoped they'd stay
Damp until transplanted, they went musty.
Every green-skinned stalk turned friable,
The drowned-mouse fibres dried up and the whole
Limp, soggy cluster lost its bouquet
Of weed leaf and turf mould. Dust in my palm
And in my nostrils dust, should I shake it off
Or mix it in with spit in pollen's name
And my own? As a man would, cutting turf,
I straightened, spat on my hands, felt benefit
And spirited myself into the street.

---------------------------------

P.S.
All over the web the second stanza is quoted as the whole poem
and the quotes around "The soul exceeds its circumstances" are
omitted. Now some people attribute this line to Heaney even though
Heaney clearly thought people reading his poem would know it came
from Czeslaw Milosz. Attribution is SO complicated, SO dependent
on the knowledge of the reader. "It's the words that matter, not
the writer." - so it doesn't bother me that much; just makes me aware
of how old I am.

And my favorite "poem" by Milosz (brilliant doesn't even come close):


Ars Poetica?     - Czeslaw Milosz - Translated By Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee

I have always aspired to a more spacious form  
that would be free from the claims of poetry or prose  
and would let us understand each other without exposing  
the author or reader to sublime agonies.  

In the very essence of poetry there is something indecent:  
a thing is brought forth which we didn’t know we had in us,  
so we blink our eyes, as if a tiger had sprung out  
and stood in the light, lashing his tail.  

That’s why poetry is rightly said to be dictated by a daimonion,  
though it’s an exaggeration to maintain that he must be an angel.  
It’s hard to guess where that pride of poets comes from,  
when so often they’re put to shame by the disclosure of their frailty.  

What reasonable man would like to be a city of demons,  
who behave as if they were at home, speak in many tongues,  
and who, not satisfied with stealing his lips or hand,  
work at changing his destiny for their convenience?  

It’s true that what is morbid is highly valued today,  
and so you may think that I am only joking  
or that I’ve devised just one more means  
of praising Art with the help of irony.  

There was a time when only wise books were read,  
helping us to bear our pain and misery.  
This, after all, is not quite the same  
as leafing through a thousand works fresh from psychiatric clinics.  

And yet the world is different from what it seems to be  
and we are other than how we see ourselves in our ravings.
People therefore preserve silent integrity,  
thus earning the respect of their relatives and neighbors.  

The purpose of poetry is to remind us  
how difficult it is to remain just one person,  
for our house is open, there are no keys in the doors,  
and invisible guests come in and out at will.

What I'm saying here is not, I agree, poetry,  
as poems should be written rarely and reluctantly,  
under unbearable duress and only with the hope  
that good spirits, not evil ones, choose us for their instrument.

[Todd]

I apologize that when I first read Seamus Heaney he left me cold and I never went back to him. I like some of what's been posted here so perhaps I've been unfair.

Tenderness by Stephen Dunn

Back then when so much was clear
and I hadn't learned
young men learn from women

what it feels like to feel just right,
I was twenty-three,
she thirty-four, two children, a husband

in prison for breaking someone's head.
Yelled at, slapped
around, all she knew of tenderness

was how much she wanted it, and all
I knew
were back seats and a night or two

in a sleeping bag in the furtive dark.
We worked
in the same office, banter and loneliness

leading to the shared secret
that to help
National Biscuit sell biscuits

was wildly comic, which led to my body
existing with hers
like rain that's found its way underground

to water it naturally joins.
I can't remember
ever saying the exact word, tenderness,

though she did. It's a word I see now
you must be older to use,
you must have experienced the absence of it

often enough to know what silk and deep balm
it is
when at last it comes. I think it was terror

at first that drove me to touch her
so softly,
then selfishness, the clear benefit

of doing something that would come back
to me twofold,
and finally, sometime later, it became

reflexive and motiveless in the high
ignorance of love.
Oh abstractions are just abstract

until they have an ache in them. I met
a woman never touched
gently, and when it ended between us

I had new hands and new sorrow,
everything it meant
to be a man changed, unheroic, floating.

[Todd]

It’s Like This By Stephen Dobyns

for Peter Parrish

Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible
.....cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark,
.....the cord that makes him always dissatisfied,
.....has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes.

He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes,
.....but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with
.....different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men
.....that people who hardly know him often mistake
.....for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus.

He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
.....or a library or turning a piece of flat land
.....into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
.....show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
.....like a name he is trying to remember, like
.....expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
.....were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
.....whom he has never met, would never meet again.
.....And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor
.....is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
.....almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
.....of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
.....like white curtains shot full of wind and light.

When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see
.....what person he should be that evening. He wants to say:
.....All day I have been listening, all day I have felt
.....I stood on the brink of something amazing.
.....But he says nothing, and his family walks around him
.....as if he were a stick leaning against a wall.

Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed.
.....He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure
.....of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water
.....drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him.
.....Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress,
.....and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him.
.....Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more,
.....until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.

[rayheinrich]

Tenderness by Stephen Dunn
...

"in the high ignorance of love"

"Oh abstractions are just abstract / until they have an ache in them. "

Love poems about love are the most difficult of types to write well.
This one's better than that.
Thanks, Ray

---

It’s Like This By Stephen Dobyns
...

"He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes,
.....but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with
.....different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men
.....that people who hardly know him often mistake
.....for him"

"When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see
.....what person he should be that evening."

So truthful it scares me.
Ray

[Weeded]

It’s Like This By Stephen Dobyns

Damn, this one is crazy. This piece is proof a poem doesnt always need college-level vocabulary to be amazing. Although it's always nice/essential to learn new words, it feels good to be able to read a great poem without consulting my dictionary every other line. Perhaps I just need to learn more but thanks for sharing tho 
mike

[rayheinrich]

It’s Like This By Stephen Dobyns

Damn, this one is crazy. This piece is proof a poem doesnt always need college-level vocabulary to be amazing. Although it's always nice/essential to learn new words, it feels good to be able to read a great poem without consulting my dictionary every other line. Perhaps I just need to learn more but thanks for sharing tho 
mike

Just for the record: I use a very limited vocabulary in all my poems; common words,
mostly single syllable and hardly ever three. I do this because I like the aesthetic simplicity it
lends to the poem. Using simple words, by the way, does not limit you to simple concepts.

[Weeded]

Yeah that one right there definitely proved it. Simple words sometimes make it a whole lot harder I'd imagine though. Most of my vocabulary is simple so I wouldn't really know hehe. Some of the words I see on here though im just like yup that person went to college haha, i love learning words just sometimes I wonder... is this person showing off or is that really the best word for the piece.

[rayheinrich]

Yeah that one right there definitely proved it. Simple words sometimes make it a whole lot harder I'd imagine though. Most of my vocabulary is simple so I wouldn't really know hehe. Some of the words I see on here though im just like yup that person went to college haha, i love learning words just sometimes I wonder... is this person showing off or is that really the best word for the piece.

Versifiers whose oeuvre is replete with Gaia's progeny wax euphuistic to plebeians,
howbeit illuminati adjudge them conversely.

[Weeded]

Versifiers whose oeuvre is replete with Gaia's progeny wax euphuistic to plebeians,
howbeit illuminati adjudge them conversely.

You say this, and after 5 minutes of dictionary flippin this is how i now read it:

Writers whose works carry much of Gods works
sound deep to pissants
however there's deeper depths

[rayheinrich]

 
Versifiers whose oeuvre is replete with Gaia's progeny wax euphuistic to plebeians,
howbeit illuminati adjudge them conversely.

You say this, and after 5 minutes of dictionary flippin this is how i now read it:

Writers whose works carry much of Gods works
sound deep to pissants
however there's deeper depths

Yes, pretty good.
My "translation" would go like this:

"Poets who write crap full of Greek god stuff seem full of shit to pissants,
but those who know fucking more about it think otherwise."

Of course, it depends on how well you do the Greek god shit.
Leanne does it well; most contemporary writers don't know their Hades from a hole in the ground.

[milo]

Lament

A Villanelle
The sting of bees took away my father
who walked in a swarming shroud of wings
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

Lightning licked in a yellow lather
but missed the mark with snaking fangs:
the sting of bees too away my father.

Trouncing the sea like a ragin bather,
he rode the flood in a pride of prongs
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

A scowl of sun struck down my mother,
tolling her grave with golden gongs,
but the sting of bees took away my father.

He counted the guns of god a bother,
laughed at the ambush of angels’ tongues,
and scorned the tick of the falling weather.

O ransack the four winds and find another
man who can mangle the grin of kings:
the sting of bees took away my father
who scorned the tick of the falling weather.

Sylvia Plath

(can't remember if I already posted this one but still love it)

[ellajam]

Wonderful poem by the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith, adept equally with English and Gaelic. One of my favorite poems of all time



Two Girls Singing

It neither was the words nor yet the tune.
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener or no listener at all.

As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.

So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together

and it wasn't the words or tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
the unpredicted voices of our kind.

Lovely, I plan to spend some more time with it. During the summer those songs drift in from the lake, I know just what he means.

[Magpie]

Wonderful poem by the Scottish poet Iain Crichton Smith, adept equally with English and Gaelic. One of my favorite poems of all time

Two Girls Singing

It neither was the words nor yet the tune.
Any tune would have done and any words.
Any listener or no listener at all.

As nightingales in rocks or a child crooning
in its own world of strange awakening
or larks for no reason but themselves.

So on the bus through late November running
by yellow lights tormented, darkness falling,
the two girls sang for miles and miles together

and it wasn't the words or tune. It was the singing.
It was the human sweetness in that yellow,
the unpredicted voices of our kind.

Yes, thank you also for sharing this. Is Hallaig a Sorley MacLean reference or the place or both even, it's a good choice either way. Do you speak Gaelic?

[Todd]

I've been really getting into Stephen Dobyns lately.

Pastel Dresses by Stephen Dobyns

Like a dream, which when one
becomes conscious of it
becomes a confusion, so her name
slipped between the vacancies.
 
As little more than a child
I hurried among a phalanx
of rowdy boys across a dance floor—
such a clattering of black shoes.
 
Before us sat a row of girls
in pastel dresses waiting.
One sat to the right. I uttered
some clumsy groping of sounds.
 
She glanced up to where I stood
and the brightness of her eyes
made small explosions within me.
That’s all that’s left.
 
I imagine music, an evening,
a complete story, but truly
there is only her smile and my response—
warm fingerprints crowding my chest.
 
A single look like an inch of canvas
cut from a painting: the shy complicity,
the expectation of pleasure, the eager
pushing forward into the mystery.
 
Maybe I was fourteen. Pressed
to the windows, night bloomed
in the alleyways and our futures
rushed off like shafts of light.
 
My hand against the small of a back,
the feel of a dress, that touch
of starched fabric, its damp warmth—
was that her or some other girl?
 
Scattered fragments, scattered faces—
the way a breeze at morning
disperses mist across a pond,
so the letters of her name
 
return to the alphabet. Her eyes,
were they gray? How can we not love
this world for what it gives us? How
can we not hate it for what it takes away?