Inferno - Dante

[scytheandroses.livejournal.com]

There sighs and moans and utter wailing swept
resounding through the dark and starless air.
I heard them for the first time, and I wept.
Shuddering din of strange and various tongues,
sorrowful words and accents pitched with rage
shrill and harsh voices, blows of hands with these
Raised up a tumult ever swirling round
in that dark air untinted by a dawn,
as sand-grains whipping when the whirlwind blows.
Said I—a blind of horror held my brain—
“My Teacher, what are all these cries I hear?
Who are these people conquered by their pain?”

-Dante Alighiere, Inferno (Canto 3, ll. 22-33)
Trans. Anthony Esolen

"Deer Season" by Barbara Tanner Angell

[bennmorland.livejournal.com]

Deer Season
Barbara Tanner Angell, from The Long Turn toward the Light (1991)

My sister and her friend, Johnny Morley,
used to go on Saturdays to the Bancroft Hotel
to visit his grandfather.

One autumn, the beginning of deer season,
the old man told them,

“Used to hunt when I was a boy,
woods all around here then,
but I never went again after that time…

the men went out, took me with them,
and I shot my first buck.
It was wounded, lying in the leaves,

so they told me,
take the pistol, shoot it in the head.
I went straight up to it,
looked right into its eyes.

Just before I pulled the trigger,
it licked my hand.”

(no subject)

[agiel.livejournal.com]

1835's recent post reminded me of ( Margaret Atwood's Variation on the Word Sleep: )

Switching to deer time, Bob Hicok

[moireach.livejournal.com]

Switching to deer time
Bob Hicok

Three deer on the nearby hill and maybe more
on the farby hill and probably every hill
in this place of hills had deer on it
eating the gray-green grass of December
in the early light. How I decide

to get out of bed these days is deer.
If I look out my window and see them
I know it's time to feed my feet
to the mouths of my jeans
and when I told my wife the deer
are my new clock she said they won't fit
on the mantle. The clock of three deer

watched me walk down the drive
to get the paper but I was alone
at the bottom of the hill when I read
there were twenty thousand dead
in Iran from a quake. Yesterday
it was twelve thousand dead
and the day before ten thousand dead
and I sensed a pattern. In the cold
sensed a pattern, with mittens on
sensed a pattern and coming back
into view of the clock of three deer
I waved and shouted I have sensed a pattern.

( Of course they were intuitively aware  )

And deer are the best clocks because time

is twitchy, is a nervous thing
running away from us into woods,
into its own death and I don't like
wrist watches, have never worn one,
don't like cuckoos, all birds should fly,
don't like Big Ben because people
were tortured in that tower, time
is politics of the worst sort,
is who controls the numbers
and it isn't me, is never you
and just three days ago the clock
of the ground struck the hour

of twenty thousand deaths and tomorrow
the paper will say otherwise, will say more
and if I look into the brown eyes
of deer there is no time, no feeling
except peace, which isn't real but neither
I sometimes hope are we.


(from This Clumsy Living)

I just found Andrea Gibson, but I had to share this one

[chreebomb.livejournal.com]

See-Through

Andrea Gibson (listen to it here

we're on our way back to school from gymnastics class
and only in boulder, colorado
my kids are singing john lennon's "imagine"
at the back of the bus
when jesse stops herself mid-verse
stretches her arm across the aisle like a sunbeam
tugs at the hem of my shirt and asks
what does hatred mean?

jesse's five years old
anything i say she's going to believe
but i realize i don't know the answer
i don't know what hatred means
i could guess and say it's the opposite of love
i could guess and say
jesse, hatred's why there are nothing but white faces
on our private-school bus
but jesse isn't white yet
go ahead and ask her
what color are you jesse?
well, it looks like i'm pink
shane thinks he's orange
skylar says she's tan
rhett says he's see-through
see, you can see how my veins are blue
but they're red when i bleed

and i wish there was no such thing as springtime
because i don't trust the machines
that will one day be planting seeds in these gardens
teaching them
some people are flowers
some people are weeds
rip the weeds by their roots
ignore their screams
tilt your own face to the sun
take what you want
you are the chosen ones

Sitting Bull said white people are liars and thieves

i'd like to tell jesse he was wrong
i'd like to tell her we didn't come like a time bomb
teeth built of bullets
gunpowder on our breath
that this land didn't weep when our feet
first mercilessly hit the ground
i don't want to say we drowned and maimed the children
sliced long strips of their skin for bridal reigns
i don't want to say the moon was slain
the constellations dispersed like shrapnel
mother's killed their babies
then killed themselves
when they saw our faces on the horizon
and all that we left was a trail of tears

but if i have to say that i want to say
the boats stopped there
i'd want to say the eaves never saw the sails of slave ships
never heard the sound of chain links
but jesse think slaughterhouse
think people branded suffocating foaming at the mouth
can you imagine what kind of pain you would have to endure
to throw yourself overboard 2000 miles out to sea
lungs gratefully engorged with saltwater
can you imagine being chained to your dead daughter

how many days would it take you to stop
searching her hands for lifelines
to stop searching her fingertips for memories of sunshine
to stop searching her wrists for a pulse
for just some sign of time turning backwards
to when you just knew
people would never do things like this

and jesse this
is not just a picture of our history
not just a picture of our past
we've been hundreds of years
measuring the size of their hearts
by the size of our fists
erecting our bliss
on the broken backs of dark skin
the present is far from gift wrapped

( ask new orleans )