greatpoetry | Entries tagged with james wright

moireach.livejournal.com

Hook
James Wright

I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.

I stood on the street corner
In Minneapolis, lashed
This way and that.
Wind rose from some pit,
Hunting me.
Another bus to Saint Paul
Would arrive in three hours,
If I was lucky.

Then the young Sioux
Loomed beside me, his scars
Were just my age.

Ain't got no bus here
A long time, he said.
You got enough money
To get home on?

What did they do
To your hand? I answered.
He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
And slashed the wind.

Oh, that? he said.
I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
You take this.

Did you ever feel a man hold
Sixty-five cents
In a hook,
And place it
Gently
In your freezing hand?

I took it.
It wasn't the money I needed.
But I took it.

lilac-spring.livejournal.com

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass,
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the
darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

Current Music: "The Part Where You Let Go" - Hem

tijolos.livejournal.com

Hello everyone! Would y'all be kind enough to share your favourite poems about financial struggle? I'm feeling pretty drained due to lack of moneys, and I don't know. Anything helps.
Thank you.

As a giveback, here's some underrated Canadian poetry.

I've tasted my blood by Milton Acorn

If this brain's over-tempered
consider that the fire was want
and the hammers were fists.
I've tasted my blood too much
to love what I was born to.

But my mother's look
was a field of brown oats, soft-bearded;
her voice rain and air rich with lilacs:
and I loved her too much to like
how she dragged her days like a sled over gravel.

Playmates? I remember where their skulls roll!
One died hungry, gnawing grey porch-planks;
one fell, and landed so hard he splashed;
and many and many
came up atom by atom
in the worm-casts of Europe.

My deep prayer a curse.
My deep prayer the promise that this won't be.
My deep prayer my cunning,
my love, my anger,
and often even my forgiveness
that this won't be and be.
I've tasted my blood too much
to abide what I was born to.

xxx.

assugostars.livejournal.com

The End of the World
Joao Cabral De Melo Neto

At the end of a melancholy world
men read the newspapers.
Indifferent men eating oranges
that flame like the sun.

They gave me an apple to remind me
of death. I know that cities telegraph
asking for kerosene. The veil I saw flying
fell in the desert.

No one will write the final poem
about this private twelve o'clock world.
Instead of the last judgment, what worries me
is the final dream.

-translated from the Portuguese by James Wright

cseresznie.livejournal.com

This is the not a poem . . .
This is the cold-blooded plea of a homesick vampire
To his brother and friend.
If you do not care one way or another about
The preceding lines,
Please do not go on listening
On any account of mine.
Please leave the poem.
Thank you.
. . .
Work be damned, the kind
Of poetry I want
Is to lie down with my love.
. . .
I don't have anything
Except my brother
And many of our waters in our native country . . .
And when they break,
They break in a woman's body,
They break in your man's heart,
And they break in mine.

birdcages.livejournal.com

James Wright
Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

birdcages.livejournal.com

Honey

My father died at the age of eighty. One of the last things he did
in his life was to call his fifty-eight-year-old son-in-law "honey." One
afternoon in the early 1930's, when I bloodied my head by pitching
over a wall at the bottom of a hill and believed that the mere sight
of my own blood was the tragic meaning of life, I heard my father
offer to murder his future son-in-law. His son-in-law is my brother-
in-law, whose name is Paul. These two grown men rose above me
and knew that a human life is murder. They weren't fighting about
Paul's love for my sister. They were fighting with each other because
one strong man, a factory worker, was laid off from his work, and
the other strong man, the driver of a coal truck, was laid off from
his work. They were both determined to live their lives, and so they
glared at each other and said they were going to live, come hell or
high water. High water is not trite in southern Ohio. Nothing is trite
along a river. My father died a good death. To die a good death
means to live one's life. I don't say a good life.
I say a life.

cloudwrapdcity.livejournal.com

I have a request. I read a poem on this site a while ago (at least half a year or a year ago) about seeing a woman at the supermarket and how she was beautiful like an angel with white hair. .I'd love to be able to read it again. And in payment, I give you "Hook" by James Wright
Hook
James Wright

I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.

( more below )

nattyleedread.livejournal.com

I am about to embark on creating a newsletter for the new Poetry Center at my university, something that I am very excited about and also very invested in.
For the first issue, I'd like to include a poem about any of these things: new beginnings, the importance/beauty/wonder of poetry, celebration, finding a personal voice, the creative/human spirit, and/or anything else in this general vein. Basically, I want to invite the readers of the newsletter to engage with the Center and with Poetry, and to see this as a joyful, bountiful process.

Any and all suggestions for poems would be highly appreciated! Thank you so very much to anyone that takes time to help me.

As always, here's the poem. Someone else posted some James Wright earlier, so here's one that gets me everytime :).

A BLESSING
Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.
-James Wright

rainebm1185.livejournal.com

by James Wright

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies.

the-grynne.livejournal.com

FIRST SONG

The field has drawn back
when it saw man, muscles
tightened, rush into it.

What an abyss appears
between the olive tree and man!

The animal who sings:
the animal who is able
to weep and to sink roots,
remembered his claws.

Claws that he adorned
with silkiness and flowers
but at last allows to be bare
in all their cruelty.

My claws are snapping on my hands.
Keep away from them, my son.
I am liable to plunge them,
I am liable to thrust them
into your fragile body.

I have turned back into the tiger.
Keep away, or I will destroy you.

Today love is death,
and man is a hunter of man.

MIGUEL HERNANDEZ

Translated from the Spanish by James Wright

screendoor3.livejournal.com

A Centenary Ode: Inscribed to
Little Crow, Leader of the Sioux Rebellion
in Minnesota, 1862

I had nothing to do with it. I was not here.
I was not born.
In 1962, when your hotheads
Raised hell from here to South Dakota,
My own fathers scattered into West Virginia
And southern Ohio.
My family fought the Confederacy
And fought the Union.
None of them got killed.
But for all that, it was not my fathers
Who murdered you.
Not much.

I don't know
Where the fathers of Minneapolis finalized
Your flayed carcass.
Little Crow, true father
Of my dark America,
When I close my eyes I lose you among
Old lonelinesses.
My family were a lot of singing drunks and good carpenters.
We had brothers who loved one another no matter what they did.
And they did plenty.

I think they would have run like hell from your Sioux.
And when you caught them you all would have run like hell
From the Confederacy and from the Union
Into the hills and hunted for a few things,
Some bull-cat under the stones, a gar maybe,
If you were hungry, and if you were happy,
Sunfish and corn.

If only I knew where to mourn you,
I would surely mourn.

But I don't know.

( Read more... )

whos-on-1st.livejournal.com

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans.They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

sina-says.livejournal.com

In the Shreve High football stadium,
I think of Polacks nursing long beers in Tiltonsville,
And gray faces of Negroes in the blast furnace at Benwood,
And the ruptured night watchman of Wheeling Steel,
Dreaming of heroes.

All the proud fathers are ashamed to go home.
Their women cluck like starved pullets,
Dying for love.

Therefore,
Their sons grow suicidally beautiful
At the beginning of October,
And gallop terribly against each other's bodies

-James Wright

i-hunger.livejournal.com

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota-

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distance of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last years's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

-James Wright

sfllaw.livejournal.com

I was only a young man
In those days. On that evening
The cold was so God damned
Bitter there was nothing.
Nothing. I was in trouble
With a woman, and there was nothing
There but me and dead snow.

I stood on the street corner
In Minneapolis, lashed
This way and that.
Wind rose from some pit,
Hunting me.
Another bus to Saint Paul
Would arrive in three hours,
If I was lucky.

Then the young Sioux
Loomed beside me, his scars
Were just my age.

Ain't got no bus here
A long time, he said.
You got enough money
To get home on?

What did they do
To your hand? I answered.
He raised up his hook into the terrible starlight
And slashed the wind.

Oh that? he said.
I had a bad time with a woman. Here,
You take this.

Did you ever feel a man hold
Sixty-five cents
In a hook,
And place it
Gently
In your freezing hand?

I took it.
It wasn't the money I needed.
But I took it.

mizraim.livejournal.com

The Frontier

The man on the radio mourns
That another endless American winter
Daybreak is beginning to fall
On Idaho, on the mountains.

How many scrawny children
Lie dead and half-hidden among frozen ruts
In my body, along my dark roads.
Lean cayotes pass among clouds
On mountain trails, and smile,
And pass on in the snow.

A girl stands in a doorway.
Her arms are bare to the elbows,
Her face gray, she stares coldly
At the daybreak.
When the howl goes up, her eyes
Flare white, like a mare's.

- James Wright

allisonmeyer.livejournal.com

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota
James Wright

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

seamusd.livejournal.com

James Wright

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly,
Alseep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year's horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.

penguinboy.livejournal.com

A Blessing

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more, they begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

by James Wright

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I Eat Poetry

Entries tagged with james wright

Hook, James Wright

"A Blessing" by James Wright

request: financial struggle

(no subject)

james wright, to the ohio

I remember to read this on the 1st every year. . .

James Wright

Hook by James Wright

help, a dire request!

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

Miguel Hernandez, "First Song"

James Wright - A Centenary Ode

A Blessing by James Wright

Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio

Lying in a Hammock

Hook, by James Wright

(no subject)

Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy's Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota

(no subject)

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