Poetry

It's hard, sometimes, to find a reason to be happy. Happiness can seem so trivial, so selfish. How can we be happy, we ask, when the world is what the world is? How can we laugh, while the Nigerian girls are still captive? How can we forgive golf in the face of a beheading? Where is the activism in a smile?

I try to take my cue from Mary Oliver, who cites

Mozart, For Example Read more about Smile for Peace

I heard Paul Hunter read at R.A.S.P. last winter. He writes poems about farming the way it used to be.

Hold Your Horses

First he taught me how to hold
come carrot or apple
fingers together palm up
because they can't see down past
that velvety nose to their mouth

so the treat even offered
by a harmless eight year old
might still cost a stray nip

Recently, my daily walks were accompanied by this series of lectures, 24 in all, from The Learning Company on Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey, and I was inspired to add them to my Morning Yoga Poetry list. I start next week.

Sing, goddess, the anger of Peleus' son Achilleus

On the Pulse of Morning

A Rock, A River, A Tree
Hosts to species long since departed,
Marked the mastodon.
The dinosaur, who left dry tokens
Of their sojourn here
On our planet floor,
Any broad alarm of their hastening doom
Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages.

But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully,
Come, you may stand upon my Read more about Good Morning

For the past ten years or so, I've been trying to catch a glimpse of the world through the eyes of the poets, particularly American poets of the 19th century. I'm interested in what they make of their world. This month, I dug back into Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, picking up where I had left off, with Poems 1859-63. Read more about Back to Longfellow

Ralph Waldo Emerson's poetry is a bit too didactic for my taste - I wouldn't call most of it poetry. Generally speaking, Emerson seems to think a poem is an essay with shorter lines. Read more about A Moment in Time

They Feed They Lion
Philip Levine

Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter,
Out of black bean and wet slate bread,
Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar,
Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies,
They Lion grow.

Out of the gray hills
Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride,
West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,

The Poet with His Face in His Hands

You want to cry aloud for your
mistakes. But to tell the truth the world
doesn’t need anymore of that sound.

So if you’re going to do it and can’t
stop yourself, if your pretty mouth can’t
hold it in, at least go by yourself across

the forty fields and the forty dark inclines
of rocks and water to the place where
the falls are flinging out their white sheets

Night Snow
Bai Juyi

I was surprised my quilt and pillow were cold,
I see that now the window's bright again.
Deep in the night, I know the snow is thick,
I sometimes hear the sound as bamboo snaps.

Read more about The Sound of Cold

from The Courtship of Miles Standish
by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The scene: John Alden, having totally screwed up proposing to Priscilla in the name of Miles Standish, is standing around feeling sorry for himself when Priscilla confronts him and asks why he is angry with her for being so blunt. For asking, Why don't you speak for yourself, John?" Read more about Tell it, Priscilla!