The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherdby Sir Walter Ralegh If all the world and love were young, And truth in every shepherd's tongue, These pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee and be thy love. Time drives the flocks from field to fold, When rivers rage and rocks grow cold, And Philomel becometh dumb; The rest complains of cares to come. The flowers do fade, and wanton fields To wayward winter reckoning yields; A honey tongue, a heart of gall, Is fancy's spring, but sorrow's fall. Thy gowns, thy shoes, thy beds of roses, Thy cap, thy kirtle, and thy posies Soon break, soon wither, soon forgotten, In folly ripe, in reason rotten. Thy belt of straw and ivy buds, Thy coral clasps and amber studs, All these in me no means can move To come to thee and be thy love. But could youth last and love still breed, Had joys no date nor age no need, Then these delights my mind might move To live with thee and be thy love. Follow up to yesterday's poem. I couldn't not send it, could I? Anupama
The Passionate Shepherd to his Love, by Christopher Marlowe Come live with me and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills, and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks, By shallow rivers to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses And a thousand fragrant posies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle; A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull; Fair lined slippers for the cold, With buckles of the purest gold; A belt of straw and ivy buds, With coral clasps and amber studs: And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The shepherds' swains shall dance and sing For thy delight each May morning: If these delights thy mind may move, Then live with me and be my love.
Ode to the Drum
-Yusef KomunyakaaGazelle, I killed you for your skin's exquisite touch, for how easy it is to be nailed to a board weathered raw as white butcher paper. Last night I heard my daughter praying for the meat here at my feet. You know it wasn't anger that made me stop my heart till the hammer fell. Weeks ago, I broke you as a woman once shattered me into a song beneath her weight, before you slouched into that grassy hush. But now I'm tightening lashes, shaping hide as if around a ribcage, stretched like five bowstrings. Ghosts cannot slip back inside the body's drum. You've been seasoned by wind, dusk & sunlight. Pressure can make everything whole again, brass nails tacked into the ebony wood your face has been carved five times. I have to drive trouble from the valley. Trouble in the hills. Trouble on the river too. There's no kola nut, palm wine, fish, salt, or calabash. Kadoom. Kadoom. Kadoom. Ka- doooom. Kadoom. Now I have beaten a song back into you, rise & walk away like a panther.
I Swiftly walk o'er the western wave, Spirit of the Night! Out of the misty eastern cave, Where, all the long and lone daylight, Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear, Which make thee terrible and dear,— Swift be thy flight! II Wrap thy form in a mantle gray, Star-inwrought! Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day; Kiss her until she be wearied out, Then wander o'er city, and sea, and land, Touching all with thine opiate wand— Come, long-sought! III When I arose and saw the dawn, I sighed for thee; When light rode high, and the dew was gone, And noon lay heavy on flower and tree, And the weary Day turned to his rest, Lingering like an unloved guest, I sighed for thee. IV Thy brother Death came, and cried, Wouldst thou me? Thy sweet child Sleep, the filmy-eyed, Murmured like a noontide bee, Shall I nestle near thy side? Wouldst thou me?—And I replied, No, not thee! V Death will come when thou art dead, Soon, too soon— Sleep will come when thou art fled; Of neither would I ask the boon I ask of thee, belovèd Night— Swift be thine approaching flight, Come soon, soon!
An Arbor -Linda Gregerson The world’s a world of trouble, your mother must have told you that. Poison leaks into the basements and tedium into the schools. The oak
is going the way
of the elm in the upper Midwest—my cousin earns a living by taking the dead ones
down.
And Jason’s alive yet, the fair- haired child, his metal crib next
to my daughter’s.
Jason is one but last saw light five months ago and won’t see light again. ·
Leaf against leaf without malice
or forethought,
the manifold species of murmuring harm. No harm intended, there never is.
The new
inadequate software gets the reference librarian fired. The maintenance crew turns off power one
weekend
and Monday the lab is a morgue: fifty-four rabbits and seventeen months of research.
Ignorance loves
as ignorance does and always holds high office.
· Jason had the misfortune to suffer misfortune
the third
of July. July’s the month of hospital ro- tations; on holiday weekends the venerable
stay home.
So when Jason lay blue and inert on the table and couldn’t be made to breathe for three-and-a-
quarter hours,
the staff were too green to let him go. The household gods have abandoned us to the gods
of juris-
prudence and suburban sprawl. The curve of new tarmac, the municipal pool,
the sky at work
on the pock-marked river, fatuous sky, the park where idling cars, mere yards
from the slide
and the swingset, deal beautiful oblivion in nickel bags: the admitting room and its stately drive,
possessed
of the town’s best view.
· And what’s to become of the three-year-old brother?
When Jason was found
face down near the dogdish—it takes just a cupful of water to drown—
his brother stood still
in the corner and said he was hungry and said that it wasn’t his fault.
No fault.
The fault’s in nature, who will without system or explanation
make permanent
havoc of little mistakes. A natural mistake, the transient ill-will we define
as the normal
and trust to be inconsequent, by nature’s own abundance soon absorbed.
· Oak wilt, it’s called, the new disease.
Like any such
contagion—hypocrisy in the conference room, flattery in the halls—it works its mischief mostly
unremarked.
The men on the links haven’t noticed yet. Their form is good. They’re par.
The woman who’s
prospered from hating ideas loves causes instead. A little shade, a little firewood.
I know
a stand of oak on which my father’s earthly joy depends. We’re slow
to cut our losses.
Tea-Strainer
- Joyelle McSweeney
Leaf-keep, un-sibyl; if the soul
Has the weight of a swallow, what less
Has the weight of a sip? You equal
This riddle, unposed in your dish
As a hand at rest in a lap. Held to,
You hold back what can't be
Prevented, what's no more palatable
For that: the unfine; formerly, our future.
This is called "North American Time":(Adrienne Rich) I
When my dreams showed signs
of becoming
politically correct
no unruly images
escaping beyond border
when walking in the street I found my
themes cut out for me
knew what I would not report
for fear of enemies' usage
then I began to wonderII
Everything we write
will be used against us
or against those we love.
These are the terms,
take them or leave them.
Poetry never stood a chance
of standing outside history.
One line typed twenty years ago
can be blazed on a wall in spraypaint
glorify art as detachment
or torture of those we
did not love but also
did not want to kill We move but our words stand
become responsible
and this is verbal privilege III
Try sitting at a typewriter
one calm summer evening
at a table by a window
in the country, try pretending
your time does not exist
that you are simply you
that the imagination simply strays
like a great moth, unintentional
try telling yourself
you are not accountable
to the life of your tribe
the breath of your planet IV
It doesn't matter what you think.
Words are found responsible
all you can do is choose them
or choose
to remain silent. Or, you never had a choice,
which is why the words that do stand
are responsible
and this is verbal privilege V
Suppose you want to write
of a woman braiding
another woman's hair--
staightdown, or with beads and shells
in three-strand plaits or corn-rows--
you had better know the thickness
the length the pattern
why she decides to braid her hair
how it is done to her
what country it happens in
what else happens in that country You have to know these things VI
Poet, sister: words--
whether we like it or not--
stand in a time of their own.
no use protesting I wrote that
before Kollontai was exiled
Rosa Luxembourg, Malcolm,
Anna Mae Aquash, murdered,
before Treblinka, Birkenau,
Hiroshima, before Sharpeville,
Biafra, Bangla Desh, Boston,
Atlanta, Soweto, Beirut, Assam
--those faces, names of places
sheared from the almanac
of North American time VII
I am thinking this in a country
where words are stolen out of mouths
as bread is stolen out of mouths
where poets don't go to jail
for being poets, but for being
dark-skinned, female, poor.
I am writing this in a time
when anything we write
can be used against those we love
where the context is never given
though we try to explain, over and over
For the sake of poetry at least
I need to know these things VIII
Sometimes, gliding at night
in a plane over New York City
I have felt like some messenger
called to enter, called to engage
this field of light and darkness.
A grandiose idea, born of flying.
But underneath the grandiose idea
is the thought that what I must engage
after the plane has rage onto the tarmac
after climbing my old stair, sitting down
at my old window
is meant to break my heart and reduce me to silence. IX
In North America time stumbles on
without moving, only releasing
a certain North American pain.
Julia de Burgos wrote:
That my grandfather was a slave
is my grief; had he been a master
that would have been my shame.
A poet's words, hung over a door
in North America, in the year
nineteen-eighty-three.
The almost-full moon rises
timeless speaking of change
out of the Bronx, the Harlem River
the drowned towns of the Quabbin
the pilfered burial mounds
the toxic swamps, the testing-grounds
and I start to speak again.
Cou'd we stop the time that's flying Or recall itt when 'tis past Put far off the day of Dying Or make Youth for ever last To Love wou'd then be worth our cost. But since we must loose those Graces Which at first your hearts have wonne And you seek for in new Faces When our Spring of Life is done It wou'd but urdge our ruine on Free as Nature's first intention Was to make us, I'll be found Nor by subtle Man's invention Yeild to be in Fetters bound By one that walks a freer round. Mariage does but slightly tye Men Whil'st close Pris'ners we remain They the larger Slaves of Hymen Still are begging Love again At the full length of all their chain.
ABC
-Wislawa SzymborskaI’ll never find out now What A. thought of me. If B. ever forgave me in the end. Why C. pretended everything was fine. What part D. played in E.’s silence. What F. had been expecting, if anything. Why G. forgot when she knew perfectly well. What H. had to hide. What I. wanted to add. If my being around meant anything to J. and K. and the rest of the alphabet.
The Fairy Reel
by Neil Gaiman
If I were young as once I was,and dreams and death more distant then, I wouldn't split my soul in two,and keep half in the world of men, So half of me would stay at home,and strive for Faërie in vain, While all the while my soul would strollup narrow path, down crooked lane, And there would meet a fairy lassand smile and bow with kisses three, She'd pluck wild eagles from the airand nail me to a lightning tree And if my heart would run from heror flee from her, be gone from her, She’d wrap it in a nest of starsand then she'd take it on with her Until one day she'd tire of it,all bored with it and done with it. She'd leave it by a burning brook,and off brown boys would run with it. They'd take it and have fun with itand stretch it long and cruel and thin, They'd slice it into four and thenthey'd string with it a violin. And every day and every nightthey'd play upon my heart a song So plaintive and so wild and strangethat all who heard it danced along And sang and whirled and sank and trodand skipped and slipped and reeled and rolled Until, with eyes as bright as coals,they'd crumble into wheels of gold . . . . But I am young no longer now,for sixty years my heart's been gone To play its dreadful music there,beyond the valley of the sun. I watch with envious eyes and mind,the single–souled, who dare not feel The wind that blows beyond the moon,who do not hear the Fairy Reel. If you don't hear the Fairy Reel,they will not pause to steal your breath. When I was young I was a fool.So wrap me up in dreams and death.
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