Category: Poetry

These Low, Old Places

On By JonathanIn History, Nature, PoetryLeave a comment

The ceilings are five feet high, house crowded
by history and rotting rafters he’ll have to tear out-
the tall, young man who just bought it.
Beside a stooped old apple
(too long un-pruned to be bowed by fruit),
while the day backs down
behind the ridge, he makes plans.
He wonders, for a moment, what it would have been
like to be born here, though he is hearing
the answer when peepers in the boggy places below
send up their little staggered songs
and let them fall down. If you have had
spring evenings, then you know
how it has always been here: Love always shot
with the feeling this is the last of it.
Always told to outgrow
the mountains that would block your view,
these serious, sad playhouses, these low, old places
where you want to hunker, where you can’t
stand up straight.

Rose McLarney, ‘Living Up,’ in The Always Broken Plates of Mountains (New York: Four Ways Books, 2012).

Reluctant Whsipers of Kissed Lips

On By JonathanIn PoetryLeave a comment

Reluctant whispers of kissed lips
that are smiling Yes-
I’ve long since ceased to hear them.
Nor do they belong to me.
Yet I’d still love to find words
kneaded from
bread dough
or the fragrance of lindens.
But the bread’s become moldy
and the fragrance bitter.

And all around me the words sneak on tiptoe
and strangle me
when I try to catch them.
I cannot kill them
but they’re killing me.
And blows of curses crash against my door.
If I forced them to dance for me
they’d stay mute.
And yet they hobble.

But I know very well
that a poet must always say more
than is hidden in the roar of words.
And that is poetry.
Else he would not with her verses lever out
a bud from honeyed veils
or force a shiver
to run down your spine
as he strips down the truth.

‘Reluctant whispers of kissed lips,’ Jaroslav Seifert (1901-1986), translated by Ewald Osers.

Some Poems

On By JonathanIn PoetryLeave a comment

Some poetry of my own composition, for a change. I can’t pretend that these are brilliant verses or anything, but I liked them, even after re-reading them. I hope you do too.

*

I nestle into her back, and close
Ourselves in, this woven little world of ours,
And of others’, of God: so not so small, yet closer
Than our softly throbbing veins.
This place we have made, we have had made
For us, this little land we cultivate,
Is cultivated in us, slowly grows.
We took up crowns,
Not as rulers one of the other,
But as martyrs of the heart and hearth, toiling
At a small new world, taking care
Lest we let the soil go sterile
Or the land be sold and be turned to death
Out from under our tired feet.
But. So long as we warm one another,
And hold close to each other,
In the dark thicket
And in the wide bright plains, in snow
And in fire, wind and wreck, all:
Dying to each other, and resurrecting,
In each sharp moment, and those tender,
We will weather it all, and better,
When we rise together, old, and new.

*

All of a sudden, then—
Sparrows burst
Upon our rose bush

*

Dill seedlings—unbidden,
Sprung up here. Still—
Winter is coming

*

In a flash, the beauty
And the majesty are here
Under this overpass—
A sparrow takes flight

*

But Your light is this place
And all places, no place, the living
Sap within the tree, the all,
And no thing.
Out of the corner of my eye
I see the edge of a glimpse,
And it shivers my blood to my core,
And past.
What would unveiling be?

*

The sunflowers and prairie grasses
Were growing on borrowed time, after all this, all
Our times are borrowed here, waged, time-
Tabled, clocked in and out. The mechanical
Hearts and schedules, the grey men, and the black
Suited men, from worlds that dull and buzz.
They sent the reapers, if anyone can be said
To have sent, all those voices passive.
The slow steady system
Works itself out, an endless tide. Washing
Over everything, scrubbed sterile. Yet
How I relished those patches of sunflowers, changing
With each week, and day, with the sun and clouds
Overhead, also changing  (and they cannot not yet
Scrub those, the further heavens). The strange weave
Of dock and bluestem and aster
With cement interchanges, the hurtling
Engines of our individual deaths,
Whirling, spinning by this patch
Of earth’s own deep flow and interchange.
Still I trust their seeds survive the neatly mown
Fields there. Things must die back, anyway.
And I trust that sunflowers, and prairie dock
Will outlive state, capital, highway, the bitter self
Commanding to evil, and the banal.
When all those things are forgotten ruins
Crumbling into the new prairie, the old
Glacier of those forces long melted,
The face of the earth, again, blooms.

Blackberry-Picking

On By JonathanIn PoetryLeave a comment

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You are the first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk-cans, pea-tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full,
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard’s.

We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A ray-grey fungus, glutting in our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelled of rot.
Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.

Seamus Heaney, ‘Blackberry-Picking,’ in Death of a Naturalist (1966)

Here Four Mountains Circled Round

On By JonathanIn Nature, PoetryLeave a comment

Plans beginning to form, I set out,
walking-stick in hand, hiking alone

through gorges and across streams,
into mountains and over ridgelines,

crossing summits without resting,
tracing creeks back without pause.

Combed by wind and rinsed by rain,
or stepping into dew among the stars,

I sifted through our shallow thoughts
and left their tight compass behind.

Without shell or stalk for divination,
I picked out the fine and wondrous,

cut thornwood staffs and blazed trails
in my search for boulders and cliffs.

Here, four mountains circled round,
a pair of streams winding through,

I soon had a library
facing south ridges

and a teaching hall
against north slopes

a hall for meditation
among sheer peaks

and huts for monks
along deep streams.

Looking into these towering forests hundreds of years old,
I inhabit the savory fragrance of ten thousand passing ages,

and turning to the fresh springs of all boundless antiquity,
treasure the inexhaustible clarity of their glistening liquid.

Leaving behind the elegant towers that stand outside cities
and the human enterprise bustling inside every village wall,

I delight here in origin’s weave, embrace uncarved simplicity,
heaven and earth mingling sweet dew in these fields of Way.

Hsieh Ling-yun (385-433), trans. David Hinton

The War Works Hard

On By JonathanIn Culture, Current Events, East & West, Poetry, WarLeave a comment

I posted this poem here in 2007- at the height of the US surge in Iraq, actually. It is still all too relevant four years later. I tried to write something to post today summing up my own very small and insignificant experience of the last ten years of war and everything that has gone with it; I wasn’t able to do it, at least not today, not in one sweep. Maybe I will try again soon, in smaller installments.

Dunya Mikhail says it better than I ever could, anyway.

*

How magnificent the war is!
How eager
and efficient!
Early in the morning,
it wakes up the sirens
and dispatches ambulances
to various places,
slings corpses through the air,
rolls stretchers to the wounded,
summons rain
from the eyes of mothers,
digs into the earth
dislodging many things
from under the ruins…
Some are lifeless and glistening,
others are pale and still throbbing…
It produces the most questions
in the minds of children,
entertains the gods
by shooting fireworks and missles
into the sky,
sows mines in the fields
and reaps punctures and blisters,
urges families to emigrate,
stands beside the clergymen
as they curse the devil
(poor devil, he remains
with one hand in the searing fire)…
The war continues working, day and night.
It inspires tyrants
to deliver long speeches,
awards medals to generals
and themes to poets.
It contributes to the industry
of artificial limbs,
provides food for flies,
adds pages to the history books,
achieves equality
between killer and killed,
teaches lovers to write letters,
accustoms young women to waiting,
fills the newpapers
with articles and pictures,
builds new houses
for the orphans,
invigorates the coffin makers,
gives grave diggers
a pat on the back
and paints a smile on the leader’s face.
The war works with unparalleled diligence!
Yet no one gives it
a word of praise.

Dunya Mikhail, from The War Works Hard (2004)

And Elderberry I Have Learned to Call It

On By JonathanIn PoetryLeave a comment

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,
Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:
It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank
And snapping memory as I get older.
And elderberry I have learned to call it.
I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,
Its berries a swart caviar of shot,
A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.
Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.
Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’
And felt another’s texture quick on mine.
So, etymologist of roots and graftings,
I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch
Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.

Seamus Heaney, Glanmore Sonnets V

Even When He Chatters a Lot

On By JonathanIn Gospel, History, Orthodoxy, Patristics, Poetry, SyriacLeave a comment

One can never be faulted who speaks of Love and Beauty,
For however far his speaking goes, it will never reach the end.
A child speaks to his parent with love,
While his father listens affectionately to all that he says to him.
And when he hears the questions that are posed to him,
He accepts them just as if someone were speaking of serious things.
Even when he chatters a lot without making clear what he is saying,
He is happier with his speech than he would be the speech of philosophers.
So I, like the child before his father,
I am going to speak now before God with great love.
Now I am going to speak, and if I say too little- oh, I will not say too little!
For it is easier for love to speak too much, as much as it desires!

Jacob of Serug (d. 521), Homily on the Judgment of Solomon, ll. 37-48, trans. by Stephen A. Kaufman

Distance From You is Death and Nearness to You is Life

On By JonathanIn Arabic, East & West, History, Islam, PoetryLeave a comment

The world confines us when You are absent from us,
And our souls abandon us because of desire.

Distance from You is death and nearness to You is life,
Were You absent for but the moment of a breath we would die.

Far from You we die and in nearness to You we live,
And if good tidings of reunion reach us from You we revive.

We remain alive in remembrance of You when we do not see You,
For only remembrance of the Beloved enlivens us.

Were it not for the quintessence of You that our hearts perceive,
In wakefulness or sleep, when we are absent,

We would surely die from grieving and yearning out of separation from You;
Yet, in reality, Your essence is within us.

Remembrance motivates us without need for word of You;
Were it not because of the desire for You within us our limbs would not move.

So say to one who would forbid ecstasy from those who experience it,
‘If you have not tasted the draught of Desire with us, be off!

‘When souls tremble, desirous of reunion,
‘Even phantoms dance, oh uncomprehending one!’

Do you not see how a cage bird, oh youth,
Breaks into song when it recalls its ancestral home?

With its chirping that which is in its heart bursts forth,
And its extremities are agitated with feeling and spirit.

It dances in the cage, desirous of reunion,
So that even sentient beings are moved when it sings.

Such are the souls of lovers, oh youth,
Desires propel them to the most sublime world.

Are we to force patience upon souls when they are enraptured?
Is one who has perceived the Quintessence able to be patient?

If you have not tasted the desire that true human beings have tasted,
Then by God, oh empty husk, do not defame us!

Concede to us what we advocate, for
When our desires overcome us we are likely to cry aloud.

Our hearts vibrate during sessions of invocation,
And when we cannot hide our ecstasies we lose control.

In the Divine Mystery are fine and subtle secrets
That perceptibly surrounds us. If only we could utter them!

Oh Distractors of Lovers, arise and openly proclaim!
Fill us to the brim and refresh us with the Name of the Beloved!

Because of our gratitude, preserve our secret from those who envy us,
And if Your eyes disapprove of something, then forgive us.

When we have become light-headed and carefree,
And the wine of Love intoxicates us, we are exposed.

Do not blame the drunkard for his state of drunkenness,
For in our drunkenness we have been absolved of responsibility.

Abu Madyan Shu’ayb ibn al-Husayn al-Ansari (1115-1198), Qasida in Nun, trans. By Vincent J. Cornell