Little Father by Li-Young Lee

[ravengirl.livejournal.com]

It's the second anniversary of my father's death and I wanted to share a Li-Young Lee poem with you all. Then I realized that I found that poem in these very pages as my dad lay terminally ill. So this is a small "thank you" to this community that I've treasured for years. To those of you out there posting your favorite poems and opening up new worlds to me, thank you. This community touches my life in very real ways.


I buried my father
in the sky.
Since then, the birds
clean and comb him every morning
and pull the blanket up to his chin
every night.

I buried my father underground.
Since then, my ladders
only climb down,
and all the earth has become a house
whose rooms are the hours, whose doors
stand open at evening, receiving
guest after guest
Sometimes I see past them
to the tables spread for a wedding feast.

I buried my father in my heart.
Now he grows in me, my strange son,
my little root who won't drink milk,
little pale foot sunk in unheard-of night,
little clock spring newly wet
in the fire, little grape, parent to the future
wine, a son the fruit of his own son,
little father I ransom with my life.

A request and Auden for your time

[penguin-dodger.livejournal.com]

Dear fellow poetry lovers, I'm currently working on a project about 20th century British poetry. The theme is along the lines of "has poetry of the 20th century managed to be both simple and significant?" Obviously: what do we mean by simple? Simple in form/meter/metaphor/content? And by significant - socially important/political, dealing with the eternal metaphysical questions, influential etc?
I would be very grateful for any suggestions on what poets I could focus on. So far I have Eliot for complexity and Auden for somewhat diminished complexity.

And here is Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden

About suffering they were never wrong, 
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.