Poems – 12

 

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This is the twelfth post of poems and napkin art at Think in the Morning.  I hope you readers enjoy these as much as we do.  The butterscotch pie at Tre Piatti restaurant in Puerto Vallarta is pure poetry in its own right.  Bravo to Natalie, dessert artist !  You can read our post on Tre Piatti HERE.

 

Life is Fine

Langston Hughes

 

I went down to the river,

I set down on the bank.

I tried to think but couldn’t,

So I jumped in and sank.

 

I came up once and hollered!

I came up twice and cried!

If that water hadn’t a-been so cold

I might’ve sunk and died.

 

But it was Cold in that water! It was cold!

 

I took the elevator

Sixteen floors above the ground.

I thought about my baby

And thought I would jump down.

 

I stood there and I hollered!

I stood there and I cried!

If it hadn’t a-been so high

I might’ve jumped and died.

 

But it was High up there! It was high!

 

So since I’m still here livin’,

I guess I will live on.

I could’ve died for love—

But for livin’ I was born

 

Though you may hear me holler,

And you may see me cry—

I’ll be dogged, sweet baby,

If you gonna see me die.

 

Life is fine! Fine as wine! Life is fine!

 

 

The Horses

Ted Hughes

 

I climbed through woods in the hour-before-dawn dark.

Evil air, a frost-making stillness,

Not a leaf, not a bird-

A world cast in frost. I came out above the wood

Where my breath left tortuous statues in the iron light.

But the valleys were draining the darkness

Till the moorline blackening dregs of the brightening grey

Halved the sky ahead. And I saw the horses:

Huge in the dense grey ten together

Megalith-still. They breathed, making no move,

With draped manes and tilted hind-hooves,

Making no sound.

I passed: not one snorted or jerked its head.

Grey silent fragments

Of a grey still world.

I listened in emptiness on the moor-ridge.

The curlews tear turned its edge on the silence.

Slowly detail leafed from the darkness. Then the sun

Orange, red, red erupted

Silently, and splitting to its core tore and flung cloud,

Shook the gulf open, showed blue,

And the big planets hanging

I turned

Stumbling in a fever of a dream, down towards

The dark woods, from the kindling tops,

And came the horses.

There, still they stood,

But now steaming, and glistening under the flow of light,

Their draped stone manes, their tilted hind-hooves

Stirring under a thaw while all around them

The frost showed its fires. But still they made no sound.

Not one snorted or stamped,

Their hung heads patient as the horizons,

High over valleys, in the red levelling rays

In din of the crowded streets, going among the years, the faces,

May I still meet my memory in so lonely a place

Between the streams and the red clouds, hearing curlews,

Hearing the horizons endure.

 

 

The Button-Down Life

— h.j.s.

 

I can’t live the button-down life like you.

 

I want it all:

the terrifying lows

the dizzying highs

the creamy middles

 

Sure — I might offend a few of the bluenoses

with my cocky stride

and musky odors

 

O — I’ll never be the darling of the so-called City-Fathers

who cluck their tongues

stroke their beards

and talk about

 

“What’s to be done with this Homer Simpson?”

 

 

Find h.j.s. poems here:  https://hjsuter.wordpress.com

 

A Psalm of Life

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

 

What the heart of the young man said to the Psalmist

 

Tell me not, in mournful numbers,

Life is but an empty dream!

For the soul is dead that slumbers,

And things are not what they seem.

 

Life is real! Life is earnest!

And the grave is not its goal;

Dust thou art, to dust returnest,

Was not spoken of the soul.

 

Not enjoyment, and not sorrow,

Is our destined end or way;

But to act, that each tomorrow

Find us farther than today.

 

Art is long, and Time is fleeting,

And our hearts, though stout and brave,

Still, like muffled drums, are beating

Funeral marches to the grave.

 

In the world’s broad field of battle,

In the bivouac of Life,

Be not like dumb, driven cattle!

Be a hero in the strife!

 

Trust no Future, howe’er pleasant!

Let the dead Past bury its dead!

Act,—act in the living Present!

Heart within, and God o’erhead!

 

Lives of great men all remind us

We can make our lives sublime,

And, departing, leave behind us

Footprints on the sands of time;—

 

Footprints, that perhaps another,

Sailing o’er life’s solemn main,

A forlorn and shipwrecked brother,

Seeing, shall take heart again.

 

Let us, then, be up and doing,

With a heart for any fate;

Still achieving, still pursuing,

Learn to labor and to wait.

 

 

Song to Amarantha, that she would Dishevel her Hair

Richard Lovelace

 

Amarantha sweet and fair

Ah braid no more that shining hair! 
As my curious hand or eye 
Hovering round thee let it fly.

Let it fly as unconfin’d

As its calm ravisher, the wind,

Who hath left his darling th’East,

To wanton o’er that spicy nest.

Ev’ry tress must be confest

But neatly tangled at the best;

Like a clue of golden thread,

Most excellently ravelled.

Do not then wind up that light

In ribands, and o’er-cloud in night;

Like the sun in’s early ray,

But shake your head and scatter day.

See ’tis broke! Within this grove

The bower, and the walks of love,

Weary lie we down and rest,

And fan each other’s panting breast.

Here we’ll strip and cool our fire

In cream below, in milk-baths higher:

And when all wells are drawn dry,

I’ll drink a tear out of thine eye,

Which our very joys shall leave

That sorrows thus we can deceive;

Or our very sorrows weep,

That joys so ripe, so little keep.

 

 

Buffalo Soldier

Bob Marley

 

Buffalo Soldier, dreadlock Rasta

There was a Buffalo Soldier

In the heart of America

Stolen from Africa, brought to America

Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival

I mean it, when I analyze these things

To me, it makes a lot of sense

How the dreadlock Rasta was the Buffalo Soldier

And he was taken from Africa, brought to America

Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival

Said he was a Buffalo Soldier, dreadlock Rasta

Buffalo Soldier, in the heart of America

If you know your history

Then you would know where you coming from

Then you wouldn’t have to ask me

Who the heck do I think I am

I’m just a Buffalo Soldier

In the heart of America

Stolen from Africa, brought to America

Said he was fighting on arrival

Fighting for survival

Said he was a Buffalo Soldier

Win the war for America

Said he was a, woe yoy yoy, woe woe yoy yoy

Woe yoy yoy yo, yo yo woy yo, woe yoy yoy

Woe yoe yoe, woe woe yoe yoe

Woe yoe yoe yo, yo yo woe yo woe yo yoe

Buffalo Soldier, troddin’ through the land woo ooh

Said he wanna ran, then you wanna hand

Troddin’ through the land, yea, yea

Said he was a Buffalo Soldier

Win the war for America

Buffalo Soldier, dreadlock Rasta

Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival

Driven from the mainland

To the heart of the Caribbean

Singing, woe yoy yoy, woe woe yoy yoy

Woe yoy yoy yo, yo yo woy yo woy yo yoy

Woy yoy yoy, woy woy yoy yoy

Woy yoy yoy yo, yo yo woe yo woe yo yoy

Troddin’ through San Juan

In the arms of America

Troddin’ through Jamaica, a Buffalo Soldier

Fighting on arrival, fighting for survival

Buffalo Soldier, dreadlock Rasta

Woe yoe yoe, woe woe yoe yoe

Woe yoe yeo yo, yo yo woe yo woe yo

 

 

Ricardo Pau-Llosa

Ganaderia (Cattle Raising)

 

Stories have it that when the rebels

descended on Camaguey province they ordered

the cattle slaughtered to feed the campesinos.

Neither the industry nor the cattle ever recovered.

The guerilla leaders were educated men,

how could they not know you don’t eat breeding stock?

Two decades later Fidel is in love with a cow,

Ubre Blanca (White Udder).  Before the cameras

he explains each step of his gloved penetration,

bull semen dripping from his fist.  Gently he lifts

Ubre Blanca’s tail after reassuring her

with a stroke on the rump.  The foreman sinks

into the cow slowly and his face announces

the moment he opens his fist inside her.

One day the record breaking milk mother died

and a distraught Fidel ordered a monument be built

to White Udder, the revolutionary cow.

 

Fidel’s parents finally married to get him

into the Jesuit school in Oriente.  The bovine

mother, the stern father, illegitimate Edmund

pulling a revolver against his rival’s head

in a café, the autonomous University his hideout.

He married the convenient daughter of a batistiano,

In exile former classmates will talk of his brutality,

but none opposed him when he descended from the Sierra.

They were educated men, how could they not know

what was coming?  How could they not save Ubre Blanca

from the endless speeches, the cameras, and the fist?

 

 

Point of View

a.a.

 

Every day

When you’re walking

Down the street,

 

Everybody

That you meet,

 

Has an original

Point of view

 

And I say HEY!  (Hey!)

What a wonderful kind of day!

 

Where you can learn to work and play

And get along with each other.

 

 

An Upper Chamber in a Darkened House

Frederick Tuckerman

 

An upper chamber in a darkened house,

Where, ere his footsteps reached ripe manhood’s brink,

Terror and anguish were his cup to drink, –

I cannot rid the thought, nor hold it close;

But dimly dream upon that man alone; –

Now though the autumn clouds most softly pass;

The cricket chides beneath the doorstep stone,

And greener than the season grows the grass.

Nor can I drop my lids, nor shade my brows,

But there he stands beside the lifted sash;

And, with a swooning of the heart,

I think where the black shingles slope to meet the boughs,

And – shattered on the roof like smallest snows –

The tiny petals of the mountain-ash.

 

 

Final Notations

Adrienne Rich

 

it will not be simple, it will not be long

it will take little time, it will take all your thought

it will take all your heart, it will take all your breath

it will be short, it will not be simple

it will touch through your ribs, it will take all your heart

it will not be long, it will occupy your thought

as a city is occupied, as a bed is occupied

it will take all your flesh, it will not be simple

You are coming into us who cannot withstand you

you are coming into us who never wanted to withstand you

you are taking parts of us into places never planned

you are going far away with pieces of our lives

it will be short, it will take all your breath

it will not be simple, it will become your will

 

 

“A Ghost, a Real Ghost”

Randall Jarrell

 

“I think of that old woman in the song

Who could not know herself without the skirt

They cut off while she slept beside a stile.

Her dog jumped at the unaccustomed legs

And barked till she turned slowly from her gate

And went – I never asked them where she went.

 

The child is hopeful and unhappy in a world

Whose future is his recourse: she kept walking

Until the skirt grew, cleared her head and dog –

Surely I thought so when I laughed. If skirts don’t grow,

If things can happen so, and you not know

What you could do, why, what is there you could do?

 

I know now she went nowhere; went to wait

In the bare night of the fields, to whisper:

“I’ll sit and wish that it was never so.”

I see her sitting on the ground and wishing,

The wind jumps like a dog against her legs,

And she keeps thinking: “This is all a dream.”

 

“Who would cut off a poor old woman’s skirt?

So good too. No, it’s not so:

No one could feel so, really.” And yet one might.

A ghost must; and she was, perhaps, a ghost.

The first night I looked into the mirror

And saw the room empty, I could not believe

 

That it was possible to keep existing

In such pain: I have existed.

 

Was the old woman dead? What does it matter?

– Am I dead? A ghost, a real ghost

Has no need to die: what is he except

A being without access to the universe

That he has not yet managed to forget?”

 

 

Poetry

Marianne Moore

 

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all

this fiddle.

Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one

discovers in

it after all, a place for the genuine.

Hands that can grasp, eyes

that can dilate, hair that can rise

if it must, these things are important not because a

 

high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because

they are

useful. When they become so derivative as to become

unintelligible,

the same thing may be said for all of us, that we

do not admire what

we cannot understand: the bat

holding on upside down or in quest of something to

 

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf

under

a tree, the immovable critic twitching his skin like a horse that

feels a

flea, the base-

ball fan, the statistician–

nor is it valid

to discriminate against ‘business documents and

 

school-books’; all these phenomena are important. One must

make a distinction

however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the

result is not poetry,

nor till the poets among us can be

‘literalists of

the imagination’–above

insolence and triviality and can present

 

for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them’, shall

we have

it. In the meantime, if you demand on the one hand,

the raw material of poetry in

all its rawness and

that which is on the other hand

genuine, you are interested in poetry.