Poetry ABCs

[Saffron]

Gettysburg
by Herman Melville

O Pride of the days in prime of the months
Now trebled in great renown,
When before the ark of our holy cause
Fell Dagon down-

[Saffron]

Allen Ginsberg

Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, on June 3, 1926. As a student at Columbia University, in the 1940s, he formed close friendships with William S. Burroughs, Neal Cassady, and Jack Kerouac, all of whom later became leading figures of the Beat movement.

[GentleReader9]

Gawain and the Green Knight.

I love the part below, just previously the Green Knight has ridden on horseback, into the feast hall at Yuletide and challenged any of King Arthur's Knights to hit him once while he lets them, and then to stand and bear the blow he will deliver to them in return. Gawain, a young knight showing off, agrees to this challenge, but cuts the Green Knight's head off with one blow like a smart aleck to try to get out of the return blow. So below, the Green Knight has picked up his head, caught his horse's halter and mounted, and he holds his head in his hand upright so it can talk, turns it to face them, it opens its eyes and speaks, telling Gawain he will expect him to visit the Green Chapel to receive his blow. I'm not putting a real translation because 1) I'm lazy and 2) it's fun to try to puzzle through the Middle English before you go look the translation up yourself. Try it. You might like it. It's a wonderful, exciting medieval epic full of all kinds of nutty and whole-grainy pieces of numerology and symbolism and overlapping Christian and pagan syncretism. Yum, yum, good for you.

For þe hede in his honde he haldez vp euen,
Toward þe derrest on þe dece he dressez þe face,
And hit lyfte vp þe yȝe-lyddez and loked ful brode,
And meled þus much with his muthe, as ȝe may now here:
'Loke, Gawan, þou be grayþe to go as þou hettez,
And layte as lelly til þou me, lude, fynde,
As þou hatz hette in þis halle, herande þise knyȝtes;
To þe grene chapel þou chose, I charge þe, to fotte
Such a dunt as þou hatz dalt--disserued þou habbez
To be ȝederly ȝolden on Nw Ȝeres morn.

[GentleReader9]

Now that I have said and thought "green" I have thought of two other things I should have thought of during the "F" day for "Fernhill" or "Force" or during the "D" day for "Dylan Thomas." I'm going to cheat andy emphasize green to sneak them in.

I adore Fernhill, but it is too long for this space, so I will post the resounding and lyricaly haunting conclusion:

As I was young and easy in the mercy of his means,
Time held me green and dying,
Though I sang in my chains like the sea.

and the first line of another Dylan Thomas poem I like just a little less, but still very much:

That force that through the green fuse drives the flower,
Drives my green age, that blasts the roots of trees,
Is my destroyer.

(I have these in my ears instead of in my eyes, so I might not have written them right in terms of line breaks and punctuation. As I said in my previous post above -- lazy, and typing in haste now.)

[MaryLupin]

It's a wonderful, exciting medieval epic full of all kinds of nutty and whole-grainy pieces of numerology and symbolism and overlapping Christian and pagan syncretism.

Love this about the green knight and his lady. Glad you thought to add it.

[Saffron]

It's a wonderful, exciting medieval epic full of all kinds of nutty and whole-grainy pieces of numerology and symbolism and overlapping Christian and pagan syncretism.

Love this about the green knight and his lady. Glad you thought to add it.

Me too!

[Saffron]

H

[MaryLupin]

"The Mystery" by Christopher Howell

I built my hut amongst the townsmen,
Yet here no hoof-beat or creaking wheel assails me.
You ask how can this be? It is because
The quiet heart brings solitude unto itself.
I pick chrysanthemums by the eastern fence,
And gaze into the distant hills of summer.
Mountain freshness fills the long dusk:
Fluttering in by twos the birds return.
Such a deep omen is here, somewhere,
Yet who can speak its name with mere words?

[MaryLupin]

Deer Dancer by Joy Harjo

Nearly everyone had left that bar in the middle of winter except the
hardcore. It was the coldest night of the year, every place shut down, but
not us. Of course we noticed when she came in. We were Indian ruins. She
was the end of beauty. No one knew her, the stranger whose tribe we
recognized, her family related to deer, if that's who she was, a people
accustomed to hearing songs in pine trees, and making them hearts.

The woman inside the woman who was to dance naked in the bar of misfits
blew deer magic. Henry jack, who could not survive a sober day, thought she
was Buffalo Calf Woman come back, passed out, his head by the toilet. All
night he dreamed a dream he could not say. The next day he borrowed
money, went home, and sent back the money I lent. Now that's a miracle.
Some people see vision in a burned tortilla, some in the face of a woman.

This is the bar of broken survivors, the club of the shotgun, knife wound, of
poison by culture. We who were taught not to stare drank our beer. The
players gossiped down their cues. Someone put a quarter in the jukebox to
relive despair. Richard's wife dove to kill her.
We had to keep her still, while Richard secretly bought the beauty a drink.

How do I say it? In this language there are no words for how the real world
collapses. I could say it in my own and the sacred mounds would come into
focus, but I couldn't take it in this dingy envelope. So I look at the stars in
this strange city, frozen to the back of the sky, the only promises that ever
make sense.

My brother-in-law hung out with white people, went to law school with a
perfect record, quit. Says you can keep your laws, your words. And
practiced law on the street with his hands. He jimmied to the proverbial
dream girl, the face of the moon, while the players racked a new game.
He bragged to us, he told her magic words and that when she broke,
became human. But we all heard his voice crack:

What's a girl like you doing in a place like this?

That's what I'd like to know, what are we all doing in a place like this?

You would know she could hear only what she wanted to; don't we all? Left
the drink of betrayal Richard bought her, at the bar. What was she on? We all
wanted some. Put a quarter in the juke. We all take risks stepping into thin
air. Our ceremonies didn't predict this. or we expected more.

I had to tell you this, for the baby inside the girl sealed up with a lick of
hope and swimming into the praise of nations. This is not a rooming house, but
a dream of winter falls and the deer who portrayed the relatives of
strangers. The way back is deer breath on icy windows.

The next dance none of us predicted. She borrowed a chair for the stairway
to heaven and stood on a table of names. And danced in the room of children
without shoes.

You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille With four hungry children and a
crop in the field.

And then she took off her clothes. She shook loose memory, waltzed with the empty lover we'd all become.

She was the myth slipped down through dreamtime. The promise of feast we
all knew was coming. The deer who crossed through knots of a curse to find
us. She was no slouch, and neither were we, watching.

The music ended. And so does the story. I wasn't there. But I imagined her
like this, not a stained red dress with tape on her heels but the deer who
entered our dream in white dawn, breathed mist into pine trees, her fawn a
blessing of meat, the ancestors who never left.

[MaryLupin]

Sorry, couldn't quit without Nazim Hikmet.

One of my favourite poems and has been so for years:

http://www.nazimhikmetpoetryfestival.org/index.php?id=3


"On Living" by Nazim Hikmet

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" ...

Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)