Monday, July 26, 2021
Sunday, July 25, 2021
Saturday, July 24, 2021
ROBERT HAYDEN ~
Those Winter Sundays
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
__________________________
Robert Hayden
African American Poetry
250 Years of struggle & song
Kevin Young, editor
Library of America
2020
Friday, July 23, 2021
Thursday, July 22, 2021
Wednesday, July 21, 2021
Tuesday, July 20, 2021
Monday, July 19, 2021
PABLO NERUDA~
Is the sea there? Tell it to come in.
Bring me
the great bell, one of the green race.
Not that one, the other one, the one that has
a crack in its bronze mouth,
and now, nothing more, I want to be alone
with my essential sea and the bell.
I don't want to speak for a long time,
silence! I still want to learn,
I want to know if I exist.
______________________
PABLO NERUDA
translated by William O'Daly
THE SEA AND THE BELLS
Copper Canyon Press 2002
Saturday, July 17, 2021
DAVID YOUNG ~
Occupational Hazards
Butcher
If I want to go to pieces
I can do that. When I try
to pull myself together
I get sausage.
Bakers
Can't be choosers. Rising
from a white bed, from dreams
of kings, bright cities, buttocks,
to see the moon by daylight.
Tailor
It's not the way the needle
drags the poor thread around.
It's sewing the monster together,
my misshapen son.
Gravediggers
To be the baker's dark opposite,
to dig the anti-cake, to stow
the sinking loaves in the unoven —
then to be dancing on the job!
Woodcutter
Deep in my hands
as far as I can go
the fallen trees
keep ringing.
_________________
David Young
The Names of a Hare in English
Pittsburgh 1979
Friday, July 16, 2021
Wednesday, July 14, 2021
Monday, July 12, 2021
EDWIN MUIR ~
The Animals
They do not live in the world,
And not in time and space.
From birth to death hurled
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.
For with names the world was called
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square,
Dust and emerald;
Snatched from deceiving death
By the articulate breath.
But these have never trod
Twice the familiar track,
Never never turned back
Into the memorized day.
All is new and near
In the unchanging Here
Of the fifith great day of God,
That shall remain the same,
Never shall pass away.
On the sixth day we came.
______________________
Edwin Muir
One Foot In Eden
Grove 1958
Sunday, July 11, 2021
Saturday, July 10, 2021
Friday, July 9, 2021
Wednesday, July 7, 2021
Monday, July 5, 2021
Sunday, July 4, 2021
Saturday, July 3, 2021
Friday, July 2, 2021
TED JOANS ~
The Truth
IF YOU SHOULD SEE A MAN
walking down a crowded
street
talking
ALOUD
TO HIMSELF
DON'T RUN
IN THE
OPPOSITE DIRECTION
BUT RUN
TOWARD HIM
for he is a
POET
you have NOTHING to
FEAR
FROM THE
POET
BUT THE
TRUTH
_____________________________
Ted Joans (1928-2003)
African American Poetry
250 Years of struggle & song
edited by Kevin Young
Library of America
2020
Wednesday, June 30, 2021
Tuesday, June 29, 2021
CID CORMAN ~
Cid Corman
June 29, 1924 ~ March 12, 2004_______________
for all
poets
At the shrine
on the altar
not one relic
but in one way
or another
I remain.
A LORD will dismount
at the imperative of
the cherry blossoms.
DON'T LET the poet
get you down
when he rages
His letter kills but
his spirit
resuscitates.
AN
effulgence
a glory
a subtle
insistent
falling a
lucid rain
a torrent
guttural
clear and shrill
a run of
color con-
fused and con-
fusing a
sky full of
them! Alone
on the downs
on a bright
windless day
NOTRE DAME
Where Roman law made aliens bend
Stands a church, original, vital,
Like Adam once, all nerve and mettle,
Muscles aquiver at the end.
From outside you see the inner plan:
Flying buttresses forestalling
That mass from breaking against those walls
Upholding the vault's outstretching strain.
Labyrinth, impenetrable wood,
Soul of Gothic's rational abyss,
Egyptian might and Christian meekness,
By slim reed oak, by plumb line — lord.
But the more, fortified Notre Dame,
I studied your immense example,
The more I thought: one day I too will
Build from meaningless a dream.
TU FU is long dead.
Leaves have fallen —
leaves will fall.
Every
thing in his words
on a far lookout.
MAKING
of rock. Letting as
Michelangelo
does the prisoner
becoming the rock
escape.
MOVED — three blocks up
and around in
a row of old
houses under
the bells of St
Stainslas and
cherry blossoms.
Must go get a
sink stopper and
a curtain rod —
if life is to
be tenable.
HERE I am
like a leaf
falling or
fallen. Point-
less as one —
as any —
all. Holding
mother's hand
though she's gone.
WE COME out
in the end
at the end
beginning
to see where
the stars are.
THE HILL
beyond the
gate
the temple
almost
mist.
__________________________
from TU
Cid Corman
The Toothpaste Press
1983
Monday, June 28, 2021
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Saturday, June 26, 2021
GEORGE KALAMARAS ~
Below Buffalo Willows
Give us a kiss. Goodbye, dear. The buffalo
willows were full of hurt, and then the fire died.
Kiss the neck, the nape, the cheek. Somehow we survive
all the depths of deaths living gifts us. I have cried.
I am not a we, but you are me,
and we are here. Whenever we die. Wherever
we had lived before, with the sheep, the cattle,
all the long grass long as a ribbed rib of sleep.
Yes, there was dust. We slept the animal.
We slipped back and forth many times until
we got it right. The woman the man hoped
to be was scarred. The man she bled, hurt.
Say some touch or other. The way we hold
a hand grieves us tough gusts that beat us
back. A kiss. Give it. Grieve it. Give us a way.
This mouth or that, we are all tick-tonguing
our way around the tree bark of the heart. Say something.
This time. Anything. Nothing would be enough.
_________________________
GEORGE KALAMARAS
We Slept the Animal
(Letters from the American West)
Dos Madres Books
2021
Friday, June 25, 2021
LEONARD CROW DOG ~
Aug. 18, 1942, Rosebud Sioux reservation in South Dakota ~
June 5, 2021, Rapid City, S.D.
JAMES LAUGHLIN ~
A Letter to Hitler
Last winter we were
short of firewood and
it was good and cold
so we used a lot of
old books that were
in the attic just old
novels nobody would
ever want to read but
we found they made
plenty of heat and
twice they set the
chimney afire when
a burning page went
up with the draft and
we found they would
smoulder a long time
after you thought the
fire was all out and
then suddenly burst
into flame & another
thing they made ashes
that wouldn't stay in
the grate but floated
out all over the room!
______________________
JAMES LAUGHLIN
Some Natural Things
New Directions
1945

















