Every day I love her poetry more...

[jadedpoet84.livejournal.com]

Decor


John and Eve live in New York white.
Even their Christmas trees
wear only white lights, white angels.
Their doorsills hoard no dust.
Their dressertops are bare.
On one white wall, off center,
hangs a face. Round holes
for eyes. Where the mouth
would be, perfectly smooth.

Deb wraps all in blue. Blue willow
for breakables. Blue quilt, blue
rug, blue lights. Otherwise, white
only, for how it looks against blue.
She longs for a man but says men
bode bad wind, like a bruised sky.
Deb is obsessed with sky.

I look for earth. Green and brown,
ecru for the clay women licked
on the beaches of South Carolina
because they lacked something
they could not name. Day after
day they returned. palms flat,
wide skirts spread, and one by
one, silent, ashamed of such need,
they'd rise and go home.


--Lola Haskins

Random poem of the day.

[jadedpoet84.livejournal.com]

He's Lost

We prefer if you don't step too close
to his pedestal. Yes. He's been
coming here for years, but only
in the evening. Yes. He's gainfully
employed, his body still worth
its own salt. He can add
fast as a calculator, he can file,
he knows how to talk to people.
What? Oh, well you see, he's lost
a good--yes, that's his investment
portfolio. As you might deduce,
it's empty. He's lost--no, don't poke him
with your cane, we prefer that you step
back and give breathing room. Behind,
please, the velvet rope. Ah, quite true--
I suppose auto-erotic activities
would be the norm. He's lost, you see,
a very good--no, he doesn't mind looking
at pictures of your spinster sister.
He can't see them, though he wears
this helmet we've devised that holds
one's eyes open through weary hours.
Yes, we've a patent. Alright, let us
not gawk, but press onward. Oh him?
He's lost a damn good woman, he's lost
quite everything. Onward, my friend.



© Jenniffer Lesh

A Private Man on Public Men

[ex-riverblue937.livejournal.com]

"A Private Man on Public Men"
by Thomas Hardy

When my contemporaries were driving
Their coach through Life with strain and striving,
And raking riches into heaps,
And ably pleading in the Courts
With smart rejoinders and retorts,
Or where the Senate nightly keeps
Its vigils, till their fames were fanned
By rumour's tongue throughout the land,
I lived in quiet, screened, unknown,
Pondering upon some stick or stone,
Or news of some rare book or bird
Latterly bought, or seen, or heard,
Not wishing ever to set eyes on
The surging crowd beyond the horizon,
Tasting years of moderate gladness
Mellowed by sundry days of sadness,
Shut from the noise of the world without,
Hearing but dimly its rush and rout,
Unenvying those amid its roar,
Little endowed, not wanting more.

Invitation by Carl Dennis

[ex-riverblue937.livejournal.com]

"Invitation" by Carl Dennis

This is your invitation to the Ninth-Grade Play
At Jackson Park Middle School
8:00 P.M., November 17, 1947.
Macbeth, authored by Shakespeare
And directed by Mr. Grossman and Mrs. Silvio
With scenery from Miss Ferguson's art class.

A lot of effort has gone into it.
Dozens of students have chosen to stay after school
Week after week with their teachers
Just to prepare for this one evening,
A gift to lift you a moment beyond the usual.
Even if you've moved away, you'll want to return.
Jackson Park, in case you've forgotten, stands
At the end of Jackson Street at the top of the hill.
Doubtless you recall that Macbeth is about ambition.
This is the play for you if you've been tempted
To claw your way to the top. If you haven't been,
It should make you feel grateful.
Just allow time to get lost before arriving.
So many roads are ready to take you forward
Into the empty world to come, misty with promises.
So few will lead you back to what you've missed.

Just get an early start.
Call in sick to the office this once.
Postpone your vacation a day or two.
Prepare to find the road neglected,
The street signs rusted, the school dark,
The doors locked, the windows broken.
This is where the challenge comes in.

Do you suppose our country would have been settled
If the pioneers had worried about being lonely?

Somewhere the students are speaking the lines
You can't remember. Somewhere, days before that,
This invitation went out, this one you're reading
On your knees in the attic, the contents of a trunk
Piled beside you. Forget about your passport.
You don't need to go to Paris just yet.
Europe will seem even more beautiful
Once you complete the journey you begin today.

"An Ill Wind" by Louis Jenkins

[ex-riverblue937.livejournal.com]

An Ill Wind
by Louis Jenkins

Today there's a cold northeast wind blowing,
piling up ice allalong the water's edge.
The Point is deserted,
no one for fivemiles down the beach.
Just the way I like it.
The sand is frozen mostly,
so the walking is easy as I pick my way
through the wrack and drift.
Today I don't even leave footprints.
Wind, sand, sun and water.
A simplicity that defies comprehension.
The barest essentials for the imagination's work.
This shore has been pretty much the same for ten thousand years.
Countless others have been here before me,
musing and pondering,
as they walked down the beach and disappeared forever.
So here's what I'm thinking:
wouldn't it be great if one of them
dropped a big roll of hundred dollar bills and I found it?

(no subject)

[redheartleaf.livejournal.com]

Cut Grass

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne's lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer's pace.

Larkin, Philip. Collected Poems: Philip Larkin. (Noonday
Press - 1993).

Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a highly-regarded English poet and novelist known for his anti-romantic sensibility and terse style. Educated at Oxford University, Larkin published his first two volumes of poems - The North Ship and XX Poems - at his own expense in 1945 and 1951, respectively. His third volume, The Less Deceived, was published by more conventional means in 1955 to critical acclaim. In addition to writing numerous novels and volumes of verse, Larkin was jazz critic for The Daily Telegraph and librarian at the University of Hull, Yorkshire. He also edited the Oxford Book of Twentieth-Century English Verse (1973).

so much macneice to choose from

[lunar-endeavor.livejournal.com]

Prayer Before Birth
Louis MacNeice


I am not yet born; O hear me.
Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
   club-footed ghoul come near me.

I am not yet born, console me.
I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
   with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
     on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

I am not yet born; provide me
With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
     in the back of my mind to guide me.

I am not yet born; forgive me
For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
   when they speak to me, my thoughts when they think me,
     my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
       my life when they murder by means of my
         hands, my death when they live me.

I am not yet born; rehearse me
In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
   old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
     frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
       waves call me to folly and the desert calls
         me to doom and the beggar refuses
           my gift and my children curse me.

I am not yet born; O hear me,
Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
   come near me.

I am not yet born; O fill me
With strength against those who would freeze my
   humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
     would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
       one face, a thing, and against all those
         who would dissipate my entirety, would
           blow me like thistledown hither and
             thither or hither and thither
               like water held in the
                  hands would spill me.

Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

The Man-Moth, by Elizabeth Bishop

[upendedurn.livejournal.com]

Man-Moth: Newspaper misprint for "mammoth."

         Here, above,
cracks in the buldings are filled with battered moonlight.
The whole shadow of Man is only as big as his hat.
It lies at his feet like a circle for a doll to stand on,
and he makes an inverted pin, the point magnetized to the moon.
He does not see the moon; he observes only her vast properties,
feeling the queer light on his hands, neither warm nor cold,
of a temperature impossible to records in thermometers.

         But when the Man-Moth
pays his rare, although occasional, visits to the surface,
the moon looks rather different to him. He emerges
from an opening under the edge of one of the sidewalks
and nervously begins to scale the faces of the buildings.
He thinks the moon is a small hole at the top of the sky,
proving the sky quite useless for protection.
He trembles, but must investigate as high as he can climb.

         Up the façades,
his shadow dragging like a photographer's cloth behind him
he climbs fearfully, thinking that this time he will manage
to push his small head through that round clean opening
and be forced through, as from a tube, in black scrolls on the light.
(Man, standing below him, has no such illusions.)
But what the Man-Moth fears most he must do, although
he fails, of course, and falls back scared but quite unhurt.

         Then he returns
to the pale subways of cement he calls his home. He flits,
he flutters, and cannot get aboard the silent trains
fast enough to suit him. The doors close swiftly.
The Man-Moth always seats himself facing the wrong way
and the train starts at once at its full, terrible speed,
without a shift in gears or a gradation of any sort.
He cannot tell the rate at which he travels backwards.

         Each night he must
be carried through artificial tunnels and dream recurrent dreams.
Just as the ties recur beneath his train, these underlie
his rushing brain. He does not dare look out the window,
for the third rail, the unbroken draught of poison,
runs there beside him. He regards it as a disease
he has inherited the susceptibility to. He has to keep
his hands in his pockets, as others must wear mufflers.

         If you catch him,
hold up a flashlight to his eye. It's all dark pupil,
an entire night itself, whose haired horizon tightens
as he stares back, and closes up the eye. Then from the lids
one tear, his only possession, like the bee's sting, slips.
Slyly he palms it, and if you're not paying attention
he'll swallow it. However, if you watch, he'll hand it over,
cool as from underground springs and pure enough to drink.