The Poetry Thread

1          You blame me that I do not write
2          with the accent of the age:
3          the eunuch voice of scholarship,
4          or the reformer's rage
5          (blurred by a fag-end in the twisted lip).
6          You blame me that I do not call
7          truculent nations to unite.
8          I answer that my poems all
9          are woven out of love's loose ends;
10        for myself and for my friends.

11        You blame me that I do not face
12        the banner-headline fact
13        of rape and death in bungalows,
14        cities and workmen sacked.
15        Tomorrow's time enough to rant of those,
16        when the whirlpool sucks us in.
17        Turn away from the bitter farce,
18        or have you now forgotten
19        that cloud, star, leaf, and water's dance
20        are facts of life, and worth your glance?

21        You blame me that I do not look
22        at cities, swivelled, from
23        the eye of the crazy gunman, or
24        the man who drops the bomb.
25        Twenty years watching from an ivory tower
26        taller than your chimney-stack,
27        I have seen fields beyond the smoke:
28        and think it better that I make
29        in the sloganed wall the people pass,
30        a window---not a looking-glass.

(TSE, of course. Some poetry to celebrate my birthday! Among some talk --and time for-- you and me.!)

"The Truth About Horace."

It is very aggravating
To hear the solemn prating
Of the fossils who are stating
That old Horace was a prude;
When we know that with the ladies
He was always raising Hades
And with many an escapade his
Best productions are imbued.

There's really not much harm in a
Large number of his carmina
But these people find alarm in a
Few records of his acts;
So they'd squelch the muse caloric,
And to students sophomoric
They'd present as metaphoric
What old Horace meant for facts.

We have always thought 'em lazy;
Now we adjudge 'em crazy!
Why, Horace was a daisy
That was very much alive!
And the wisest of us know him
As his Lydia verses show him,--
Go, read that virile poem,--
It is No. 25.

He was a very owl, sir,
And starting out to prowl, sir,
You bet he made Rome howl, sir,
Until he filled his date;
With a massic-laden ditty
And a classic maiden pretty
He painted up the city,
And Maecenas paid the freight!

The pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee,
Nor lineage of Ecstasy
Delay the Butterfly
On spangle journeys to the peak
Of some perceiveless thing—
The right of way to Tripoli
A more essential thing.

--

The Pedigree of Honey
Does not concern the Bee—
A Clover, any time, to him,
Is Aristocracy—

~Emily Dickinson

[...]
Here I am, floating through the sky
with my head on wrong
so that my hair tickles my neck
and my chin sticks up,
and the lovers kissing in the garden
look comical, their feet straining
to touch the ground.
It's been a long time since someone
kissed me in the garden.
My mouth's up too high.
[...]

Rene Wenger - "After Chagall"

The tide comes in and goes out again, I do not want
To be always stressing either its flux or its permanence,
I do not want to be a tragic or philosophic chorus
But to keep my eye only on the nearer future
And after that let the sea flow over us.

Come then all of you, come closer, form a circle,
Join hands and make believe that joined
Hands will keep away the wolves of water
Who howl along our coast. And be it assumed
That no one hears them among the talk and laughter.

['Wolves' - Louis Macneice]

1 For three days and three nights, he has listened
2 to the pounding of a terrible jug band
3 now reduced to a wheezy concertina
4 and the disinterested thump of a tea-chest bass.
5 It seems safe to look: wires trail on the pillowcase,
6 a drip swings overhead; then the clear tent
7 becomes his father's clapped-out Morris Minor,
8 rattling towards home. The windscreen presents
9 the unshattered myth of a Scottish spring;
10 with discreet complicity, the road
11 swerves to avoid the solitary cloud.
12 On an easy slope, his father lets the engine
13 cough into silence. Everything is still.
14 He frees the brake: the car surges uphill.

- Don Paterson

- Federico Garcia Lorca

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave 'S a sma' request:
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's winds ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' wast,
An' weary Winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' Mice an' Men,
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar'd wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!

(translated by K. Kalocsay)

what language is that translated to/from, chris?

you sweetly laughing, when all my
senses have been torn from me: for, Lesbia,
as soon as I see you I've nothing left
[...]

but my tongue is choked, my limbs
shiver aflame, my ears
echo with their own ringing, my eyes
shroud in night.

Leisure, Catullus, is bad for you:
at leisure you luxuriate and lust too much.
before now, leisure has ruined kings
and great cities.

Catullus 51, translated by me (with much (poetic) licence. pls to forgive).

Casuistry, is that in Esperanto, or?

It's translated from English, but now I'm going to get all coy.

in shoeless corridors, the lights burn. how
isolated, like a fort, it is -
the headed paper, made for writing home
(if home existed) letters of exile: now
night comes on. waves fold behind villages.

philip larkin - friday night in the royal station hotel

(from Ghost of a Pear by Ayala Kingsley)

Tell them
I was a persimmon eater
who liked haiku

--Masaoka Shiki, the fourth "great master" of haiku (the other three are Basho, Buson, and Issa)

Amatory Epigram
(to Aristotle or Ignatius Loyola)

I'd have to be drunk to fuck around with you
And sober to live
Therefore I am dying

[Bernadette Mayer]

I drank at every vine.
The last was like the first.
I came upon no wine
As wonderful as thirst.

I gnawed at every root.
I ate of every plant.
I came upon no fruit
So wonderful as want.

Feed the grape and bean
To the vintner and monger;
I will lie down lean
With my thirst and my hunger.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay

"Air For Mercury" - Brenda Hillman

Once when our blacktop city
was still a topsoil town
we carried to Formicopolis
a cantaloupe rind to share
and stooped to plop it down
in their populous Times Square
at the subway of the ants

and saw that hemisphere
blacken and rise and dance
with antmen out of hand
wild for their melon toddies
just like our world next year
no place to step or stand
except on bodies.

Virginia Hamilton Adair

Singing and singing
A merry air,
Lean out of the window,
Goldenhair.
-James Joyce, Chamber Music

In Breughel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies, (round as the thick-
sided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling about
the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Breughel's great picture, The Kermess.

--William Carlos Mofo Williams

When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover's wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,

I'd say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda's antithesis,
yet still with it own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever - sharing her breath,

watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who'd believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?

Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,

aching at the shearwater's wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.

- Don Paterson.

Today's poem, by Aram Saroyan:

priit

I tell with severity, I think what I feel.
Words are ideas.
The purling river passes, and not its sound,
Which is ours, not the river's.
So I wanted my verse: mine and not-mine,
To be read by me.

--Ricardo Reis

[Paul Muldoon, 'The Avenue']