Poem of the moment

[DWill]

I thought I'd post a John Updike poem as a way to honor his passing today. I'd never read any of his work until I read this poem.

I hadn't seen this until positing my last, cheerful poem. Thanks for honoring Updike like this. "Penumbrae" is so intensely a love poem, too.

[Saffron]

This is in response to Saffron's request for a "hopeful" poem from me to cunteract the gloom I'm spreading around today. You have to look carefully to see the hopefulness, but I believe it's there.

I raise my glass to you for your selection! Charming and amusing -- hopeful? Maybe a very little. It brought a smile to my face; a face in great need of just such expression -- what a day! You even got to put in a plug for Paradise Lost; how crafty of you.

[MaryLupin]

here is my favourite poem.

ON LIVING

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example-
I mean without looking for something beyond and above living,
I mean living must be your whole occupation.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a laboratory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people-
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees-
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.


II

Let's say you're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast ...
Let's say we're at the front-
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind-
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.


III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet-
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
-you have to feel this sorrow now-
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say ``I lived'' ...


Nazim Hikmet
February, 1948
Trans. Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk - 1993

[Saffron]

Here's a little gem I found today. I think it comes from a collection of poetry for children.

"How to Eat a Poem"

Don't be polite
Bite in
Pick it up with your fingers and lick the juice
that may run down your chin.

You do not need a knife or fork or spoon
or plate or napkin or tablecloth.

For there is no core
or stem
or rind
or pit
or seed
or skin
to throw away

Eve Merriam

[Thomas Hood]

Here's a little gem I found today. I think it comes from a collection of poetry for children.

"How to Eat a Poem"

Well, "Taste and See!" Book eating can be dangerous I find in The Name of the Rose.

[Grim]

Eat Healthy

Avoid

Condiments

On the food...

Condiments is

Making tasty of food...

But...

Healthy is

Dustely waste...

Waste is not

Food...

Food is not

Waste...

Make a food

With out condiments

Eat healthy...!

otteri selvakumar

[Thomas Hood]

BookTalk has blossom-end rot,
'Hollow tail' it's called in cows.
"No posts exist for this topic"
No Topic exist for this post

[Saffron]

Here this is to balance my over posting of Emily Dickinson --

Bright Star, Would I Were Steadfast as Thou Art

Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night,
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature's patient sleepless eremite,
The moving waters at their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth's human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors;
No yet still steadfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever or else swoon to death.

[Saffron]

This morning as I was making my daughter breakfast, I happened to look out the window and a lone bird at the very top of a bare tree caught my attention. I had to keep looking to assure myself that it was indeed a bird at the crown of a tree, on one of the coldest mornings of the year. I couldn't image how such a small creature would be able to perch in such a place and not freeze to death with in a few minutes. How could it possibly stay warm without a jacket, hat and mittens? My daughter's comment to all of this musing was, "Mom, I think you've been alone too long (she has just returned from a boarding school). Off she went to her first day back at public school and I sat down at the computer. One of the first things I came across was discussion by John Hollander on Robert Frost's The Oven Bird, this struck me as amusing -- two birds in one day. Here is the poem and a link to the discussion.

The Oven Bird

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

edit 2/14/09: The link I refer to at the top of the post seems to have disappeared. Sorry.

[DWill]

This poem has puzzled me. It seems simple but obviously isn't. I read some of John Hollander's analysis that you gave the link to, but didn't catch on to it. This is no Drumlin Woodchuck, a Frost animal that I think I do understand.