(no subject)

[angabel.livejournal.com]

Any suggestions for funeral-appropriate poems? (It will either be read or posted somewhere; I have one poem already picked out but am unsure whether I will read it aloud or print it.)

Specifically, I'd like to find something that relates to women/women's strength and/or breast cancer, although most of the poems about breast cancer I've found online are amateur or too long/somewhat inappropriate for a funeral (like Adrienne Rich's "A Woman Dead in Her Forties", which I've posted below).

Thanks.

ETA: Actually, I'd be interested in poems about apartments as well--getting them, losing them, funny ones...

( A Woman Dead in Her Forties )

From: John Burnside - Ports

[bohemiabythesea.livejournal.com]

From:

John Burnside
Ports       III      Moorings

 

[…]
                        When we go walking
early
            at the furled edge of the sea

we find dark webs of crabmeat
                                                herring-bone
                                                                        wet
diaphragms of stranded jelly-fish

spring water mingles with salt beneath the church
where Anstruther's dead are harboured in silent loam
sea litter washes the wall where the graveyard ends
a scatter of shells and hairweed
                                                and pebbles of glass
made smooth
                        in the sway of the tide.

[…]

 

(From: John Burnside, Selected Poems, London; Cape, 2006.)

The Problem - Richard Siken

[writtenbyhand.livejournal.com]

The problem (if there was one) was simply a problem with the question. He wants to paint a bird,
needs to, and the problem is why. Why paint a bird? Why do anything at all? Not how, because hows
are easy, series or sequence, one foot after the other, but existentially why bother, what does it solve?
Be the tree, solve for bird. What does that mean? It’s a problem of focus, it’s a problem of diligence,
it’s supposed to be a grackle but it sort of got away from him. But why not let the colors do what
they want, which is blend, which is kind of neighborly, if you think about it. Blackbird, he says. So be
it. Indexed and normative. Who gets to measure the distance between experience and its
representation? Who controls the lines of inquiry? He does, but he’s not very good at it. And just
because you want to paint a bird, do actually paint a bird, it doesn’t mean you’ve accomplished
anything. Maybe if it was pretty, it would mean something. Maybe if it was beautiful it would be true.
But it’s not, not beautiful, not true, not even realistic, more like a man in a birdsuit, blue shoulders
instead of feathers, because he isn’t looking at a bird, real bird, as he paints, he is looking at his heart,
which is impossible, unless his heart is a metaphor for his heart, as everything is a metaphor for itself,
so that looking at the page is like looking out the window at a bird in your chest with a song in its
throat that you don’t want to hear but you paint anyway because the hand is a voice that can sing
what the voice will not and the hand wants to do something useful. Sometimes, at night, in bed, before I
fall asleep, I think about a poem I might write, someday, about my heart, says the heart. Answer: be the heart.
Answer: be the hand. Answer: be the bird. Answer: be the sky.

(Found through this)