Horses, Wendell Berry

[yarrowkat]

When I was a boy here,
traveling the fields for pleasure,
the farms were worked with teams.
As late as then a teamster
was thought an accomplished man,
his art an essential discipline.
A boy learned it by delight
as he learned to use
his body, following the example
of men. The reins of a team
were put into my hands
when I thought the work was play.
And in the corrective gaze
of men now dead I learned
to flesh my will in power
great enough to kill me
should I let it turn.
( I learned the other tongue )

a kind of hush (cyril wong)

[pikasu.livejournal.com]

Silent again, we begin to hear
noises in our heads, swelling

to overwhelm the sound of our
breathing. If we are silent for

long enough, something would surface
from under the wind-troubled

faces of murky ponds
our minds have become.

All at once, ripples would flee
in a singular, outward direction-

these questions of guilt or blame.
Then what comes up for air

would be a different quiet
we keep drowning, pinning it

underwater in our pride until
its legs stop kicking.

Different because we may hear
the mirroring of fear and

a time-sharpened dependency
within it. Such a quiet we only

hear when we do not hear:
waking together, every meal,

sharing the same cab home.
Listen. Listen. My hand swims

into the bay area of your hand.
If we are silent for long enough,

we could start over.

(no subject)

[sycea.livejournal.com]

I'm looking for any poems about Shakespeare and his works; I read Hamlet again recently and then a friend gave me the Carl Sandburg poem below, and now I really want to know what else is out there! In return, I offer the two I've found so far.

They All Want To Play Hamlet by Carl Sandburg

They all want to play Hamlet.
They have not exactly seen their fathers killed
Nor their mothers in a frame-up to kill,
Nor an Ophelia dying with a dust gagging the heart,
Not exactly the spinning circles of singing golden spiders,
Not exactly this have they got at nor the meaning of the flowers--O flowers,
flowers slung by a dancing girl--in the saddest play the inkfish, Shakespeare,
ever wrote;
Yet they all want to play Hamlet because it is sad like all actors are sad and to
stand by an open grave with a joker's skull in the hand and then to say over
slow and say over slow wise, keen, beautiful words masking a heart that's
breaking, breaking,
This is something that calls to their blood.
They are acting when they talk about it and they know it is acting to be
particular about it and yet: They all want to play Hamlet.

( Elegy of Fortinbras by Zbigniew Herbert )