Poetry

When icicles hang by the wall
And Dick the shepherd blows his nail
And Tom bears logs into the hall,
And milk comes frozen home in pail,
When Blood is nipped and ways be foul,
Then nightly sings the staring owl,
Tu-who;
Tu-whit, tu-who: a merry note,
While greasy Joan doth keel the pot.

Two poems today, celebrating my first November in Wisconsin after 32 years.

"Dull November brings the blast,
Then the leaves are whirling fast."
- Sara Coleridge

"How silently they tumble down
And come to rest upon the ground
To lay a carpet, rich and rare,
Beneath the trees without a care,
Content to sleep, their work well done,
Colors gleaming in the sun. Read more about I Remember November

To Autumn Read more about Keats on Autumn

A small collection of Solar Eclipse verses:

Didn't the Connecticut Yankee pull this trick in King Arthur's Court?

And it shall come to pass in that day, saith the Lord God, that I will cause the sun to go down at noon, and I will darken the earth in the clear day.
— Bible

Fairly upbeat for ancient times: Read more about Solar Eclipse 2017

Some years ago, Tom Robbins wrote this piece of prose that reads like an epic poem, a piece that will always make me homesick for the Pacific Northwest. Read more about This Is the Place

Looking for a timely poem celebrating the merrie month of May, I finally gave up. Poems about the flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la, don't seem to fit my mood this year.

Then a Facebook post reminded me that today, May 10, 2017, is Vesak. I snagged the following poem from the net. Seems a better fit to me.

Vesak poem

There would be lanterns alighted all over the island
vanishing your darkness of ignorance

Stealing a line from Proust to introduce an old poem of my own from a springtime long ago.

The Ensnaring Glances of Men

Their faces line the fence posts with
Their brown beards waving in the wind and
Laughing eyes that call me from the road
(And singing, singing...)

The heads that laughed on London Bridge and
Grinned on pikes from ear to ear
Could not have touched me more.
(Oh, good Christ, they sing! Their voices!) Read more about Remembrance of Things Past

What to do with words
that have no object behind them
nothing to touch or taste
on which to rest the eyes
nothing to relate to human temperature

Lines Written in the Days of Growing Darkness
Mary Oliver

Every year we have been
witness to it: how the
world descends

into a rich mash, in order that
it may resume.
And therefore
who would cry out

to the petals on the ground
to stay,
knowing as we must,
how the vivacity of what was is married

'Tis no good pretending that this Midwinter is a merry one.

Stanzas

by John Keats

IN a drear-nighted December
Too happy happy tree
Thy branches ne'er remember
Their green felicity:
The north cannot undo them
With a sleety whistle through them;
Nor frozen thawings glue them
From budding at the prime.