Recent Forum Topics › Forums › The Public House › "classic" modern poem
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wv.
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June 3, 2016 at 10:47 am #45265
znModerator“For a Coming Extinction” (1967)
BY W. S. MERWIN
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothingI write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another dayThe bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And oursWhen you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And fore-ordaining as stars
Our sacrificesJoin your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are importantJune 3, 2016 at 2:42 pm #45278wvParticipantYeah, thats a good one for sure. I’ve had that one saved
in a poem-folder titled ‘nature/animals’ for a while now.
One of my favorites.w
v
—
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreamsbasho
June 3, 2016 at 5:01 pm #45291znModeratorYeah, thats a good one for sure. I’ve had that one saved
in a poem-folder titled ‘nature/animals’ for a while now.
One of my favorites.w
v
—
Summer grasses:
all that remains of great soldiers’
imperial dreamsbasho
Here’s a couple more, same guy.
—
“For the Anniversary of My Death” (1967)
BY W. S. MERWIN
Every year without knowing it I have passed the day
When the last fires will wave to me
And the silence will set out
Tireless traveler
Like the beam of a lightless starThen I will no longer
Find myself in life as in a strange garment
Surprised at the earth
And the love of one woman
And the shamelessness of men
As today writing after three days of rain
Hearing the wren sing and the falling cease
And bowing not knowing to what—
“Yesterday” (1983)
W. S. Merwin
My friend says I was not a good son
you understand
I say yes I understandhe says I did not go
to see my parents very often you know
and I say yes I knoweven when I was living in the same city he says
maybe I would go there once
a month or maybe even less
I say oh yeshe says the last time I went to see my father
I say the last time I saw my fatherhe says the last time I saw my father
he was asking me about my life
how I was making out and he
went into the next room
to get something to give meoh I say
feeling again the cold
of my father’s hand the last time
he says and my father turned
in the doorway and saw me
look at my wristwatch and he
said you know I would like you to stay
and talk with meoh yes I say
but if you are busy he said
I don’t want you to feel that you
have to
just because I’m hereI say nothing
he says my father
said maybe
you have important work you are doing
or maybe you should be seeing
somebody I don’t want to keep youI look out the window
my friend is older than I am
he says and I told my father it was so
and I got up and left him then
you knowthough there was nowhere I had to go
and nothing I had to doJune 4, 2016 at 9:46 am #45318wvParticipantMerwin is good. What i like about him, is he’s accessible.
I know what he’s talking about. It annoys me that i can’t appreciate poets like Yeats, cause i dunno what they are talking about,
except for a few poems.Merwin has always reminded me just a bit of Billy Collins. I’m not sure why, cause Merwin can be a lot more eastern-buddhist-ish, seems to me.
The hardest thing to write, is a GOOD political poem, i think. I go to a little poetry-reading group here in motown, once a month. And people stand up and read their stuff, and the worst stuff by far is the political stuff. The political poems just turn out to be rants. Not really ‘poetic’ in any way that i can see. And mostly they are leftist-rants, and i agree with the points, but they are just awful as ‘poems’.
Neruda has a good one, about the United Fruit company, but i cant think of many good ones.
This one is not good, but…ya know…here it is anyway.
w
v
———-
Apolitical Intellectuals
Rene CastilloOne day
the apolitical
intellectuals
of my country
will be interrogated
by the simplest
of our people.They will be asked
what they did
when their nation died out
slowly,
like a sweet fire
small and alone.No one will ask them
about their dress,
their long siestas
after lunch,
no one will want to know
about their sterile combats
with “the idea
of the nothing”
no one will care about
their higher financial learning.They won’t be questioned
on Greek mythology,
or regarding their self-disgust
when someone within them
begins to die
the coward’s death.They’ll be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications,
born in the shadow
of the total life.On that day
the simple men will come.Those who had no place
in the books and poems
of the apolitical intellectuals,
but daily delivered
their bread and milk,
their tortillas and eggs,
those who drove their cars,
who cared for their dogs and gardens
and worked for them,
and they’ll ask:“What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness
and life
burned out of them?”Apolitical intellectuals
of my sweet country,
you will not be able to answer.A vulture of silence
will eat your gut.Your own misery
will pick at your soul.And you will be mute in your shame.
(Rene Castillo)June 4, 2016 at 11:10 am #45326znModeratorThe hardest thing to write, is a GOOD political poem, i think.
I think that’s true. Here’s one effort…again Merwin.
—
The Asians Dying (1967)
BY W. S. MERWIN
When the forests have been destroyed their darkness remains
The ash the great walker follows the possessors
Forever
Nothing they will come to is real
Nor for long
Over the watercourses
Like ducks in the time of the ducks
The ghosts of the villages trail in the sky
Making a new twilightRain falls into the open eyes of the dead
Again again with its pointless sound
When the moon finds them they are the color of everythingThe nights disappear like bruises but nothing is healed
The dead go away like bruises
The blood vanishes into the poisoned farmlands
Pain the horizon
Remains
Overhead the seasons rock
They are paper bells
Calling to nothing livingThe possessors move everywhere under Death their star
Like columns of smoke they advance into the shadows
Like thin flames with no light
They with no past
And fire their only futureJune 4, 2016 at 11:16 am #45328znModeratorThe hardest thing to write, is a GOOD political poem, i think.
I think that’s true. Here’s one effort…again Merwin.
And another. You are right they are rare. This is P.Neruda in the era of the Spanish Civil War. It’s a political poem about political poetry (you probably know it but not everyone will).
..
I Explain A Few Things (1937)
by Pablo Neruda
You are going to ask: and where are the lilacs?
and the poppy-petalled metaphysics?
and the rain repeatedly spattering
its words and drilling them full
of apertures and birds?
I’ll tell you all the news.I lived in a suburb,
a suburb of Madrid, with bells,
and clocks, and trees.From there you could look out
over Castille’s dry face:
a leather ocean.
My house was called
the house of flowers, because in every cranny
geraniums burst: it was
a good-looking house
with its dogs and children.
Remember, Raul?
Eh, Rafel? Federico, do you remember
from under the ground
my balconies on which
the light of June drowned flowers in your mouth?
Brother, my brother!
Everything
loud with big voices, the salt of merchandises,
pile-ups of palpitating bread,
the stalls of my suburb of Arguelles with its statue
like a drained inkwell in a swirl of hake:
oil flowed into spoons,
a deep baying
of feet and hands swelled in the streets,
metres, litres, the sharp
measure of life,
stacked-up fish,
the texture of roofs with a cold sun in which
the weather vane falters,
the fine, frenzied ivory of potatoes,
wave on wave of tomatoes rolling down the sea.And one morning all that was burning,
one morning the bonfires
leapt out of the earth
devouring human beings —
and from then on fire,
gunpowder from then on,
and from then on blood.
Bandits with planes and Moors,
bandits with finger-rings and duchesses,
bandits with black friars spattering blessings
came through the sky to kill children
and the blood of children ran through the streets
without fuss, like children’s blood.Jackals that the jackals would despise,
stones that the dry thistle would bite on and spit out,
vipers that the vipers would abominate!Face to face with you I have seen the blood
of Spain tower like a tide
to drown you in one wave
of pride and knives!Treacherous
generals:
see my dead house,
look at broken Spain :
from every house burning metal flows
instead of flowers,
from every socket of Spain
Spain emerges
and from every dead child a rifle with eyes,
and from every crime bullets are born
which will one day find
the bull’s eye of your hearts.And you’ll ask: why doesn’t his poetry
speak of dreams and leaves
and the great volcanoes of his native land?Come and see the blood in the streets.
Come and see
The blood in the streets.
Come and see the blood
In the streets!June 4, 2016 at 3:46 pm #45381wvParticipantNeruda is just ridiculous. I dont have adjectives for that guy. I mean he didn’t write poems in English did he? The poems we read are all translations, right? And they are STILL god-dam-great. Even in translation. Thats just ridiculous.
I think he was as good as it gets, really. Maybe. I dunno.
A few years ago, i dated a doctor who gave up doctoring to write poetry.
From time to time, she’d tell me about this or that problem and like an idiot I’d tell her meaningless drivel like ‘just learn to flow.’ I don’t do that much anymore, but i used to. Anyway, she wrote a poem for me once, and it made me laff:
—————Flow!
Christine xxxxx
my mystic friend says.
And the poet in me answers,
like a river, do you mean?or more, molasses, or warm
syrup from wedged Maples.
Golden beer inside saloons.Nyquil, pouring onto moons.
Or streusel dough from
Christmas bowls. Wetpolish from red toenails,
early summer. I don’t know
how I should do it –only “be”. So many words
encumber brainwaves.
How do I ebb into his sea?Every particle of me
becoming liquid?
I have worn my orange vestlike consonants, providing
vowels shelter, in uncertain,
rising tides. Have brokenlines of poetry. With my
axe handle! Written stanzas
thick as quicksand.When I flow, it’s like
some turbine, lugging cargo –
giant cans of salty word-soup,crates of rhyming contraband.
And the land on my horizon
calls for dashes, colons, slants.Mystic, I begin my answer,
I’m just a blotch upon a page.
A drip that leads to text –dry, sooty spots of fallen rain.
I am sure he’s slyly grinning
at the sound of my discourse.One must start at one’s
beginning. One must
throw away one’s ‘oars’,he’s kvelling back to me.
And still my fingertips
are struggling on square keys.And my brain is coughing
harshly, and my heart
begins to seize, whenthe bottoms of my footsoles
slide, like oil, against the floor.
Yes, I’m trying! I shriek loudly,Seeking waterways thru doorjambs,
pipes transgressing window panes!
Ways to loose the craft! to swim!He says it’s more like floating.
So I ask him, like a duck? My “I”, my
concrete-anchor pronoun, back at work.————
Animal GamesChristine xxxx
1
Summer ’62, my brother rides a dented Schwinn
across fat bellies of wart-strewn toads, front lawn,
just to watch their jelly innards ooze into dry fescue.2
Bluegrass is
what the crickets use to hide and roost, and
where they whistle, twitch in summer. Some escape
into a basement
where they find their midget warden
who locks them inside lidded bottle-prisons,
where they spit their sticky mud on curving glass,
until each thorax shrinks, gasps its final breath.When they’re finally freed, it’s only for his masquerade,
where, on a shoebox stage, each black exoskeleton,
pinned, impaled with sewing needles from below,
will prance and dance and sing his boyish stories.3
Bunker in the blooming rhododendrons – check.
Pile of rounded stones – check.
Slingshot made from the lower half of a stolen doll – check.
Duskfall, summer – check.Because the only good bat is a dead one.
4
I apologize great and noble spider.
Grieve the way that, while he detached
each of your daddy-limbs, I only thought
of me, and how he planned to toss
your useless eyeball-corpse into my hair.
Animal game of summer.
You, flicked into long, brown ringlets.
Shaken out by panicked girly fingers,
Tumbling like a marble toward earth.While you fell, did you find your voice?
That question’s why I’m sorry most –
because my screams so nullified your own.June 4, 2016 at 7:45 pm #45387znModeratorI have to say wv that’s pretty good.
.
June 4, 2016 at 11:03 pm #45393wvParticipantI have to say wv that’s pretty good.
—————-
Yep. I lost touch with her, but i always thot she
had major talent.w
v
————–
“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually. (92)”
― Joseph Campbell, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor——————–
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