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On Think in the Morning Facebook page we post a poem every day with a selection of Sea Gull Cellar Bar Napkin Art or a photo. To receive these daily poems and napkin art on Facebook, “Like” our Facebook page.

To date we have posted over 100 poems and napkin art from a long list of artists.  Unfortunately Think in the Morning cannot identify all the artists as some of the napkins are unsigned.  We have done our best and welcome any comments from readers who can help us out. Artists identified thus far include:

Sandra Lindström

Goslyn

Dasher

Mike Evans

Sula

Robert Evans

Bob Avery

Efroym

James Maxwell

Mariama Jones

Marjorie Whittig

Olaf Palm

Richard Albright

W.A.H.

Jack Haye

R.T.S.

Sterling

Marina

D.M.C.

Karen Kessler

Lori

Edweena

Q.

Estelle Grunewald

RBH

 

 

Periodically we collect the Think in the Morning poems and art to post on this website. This is the 6th such posting. Links to the other five poem pages are outlined in blue below.

 

Poems – 1

Poems – 2

Poems – 3

Poems – 4

Poems – 5

 

POEMS – 6

 

 

The Good Life

Tracy K. Smith

 

When some people talk about money

They speak as if it were a mysterious lover

Who went out to buy milk and never

Came back, and it makes me nostalgic

For the years I lived on coffee and bread,

Hungry all the time, walking to work on payday

Like a woman journeying for water

From a village without a well, then living

One or two nights like everyone else

On roast chicken and red wine.

 

 

This Unimportant Morning

Lawrence Durrell

 

This unimportant morning

Something goes singing where

The capes turn over on their sides

And the warm Adriatic rides

Her blue and sun washing

At the edge of the world and its brilliant cliffs.

 

Day rings in the higher airs

Pure with cicadas, and slowing

Like a pulse to smoke from farms,

 

Extinguished in the exhausted earth,

Unclenching like a fist and going.

 

Trees fume, cool, pour – and overflowing

Unstretch the feathers of birds and shake

Carpets from windows, brush with dew

The up-and-doing: and young lovers now

Their little resurrections make.

 

And now lightly to kiss all whom sleep

Stitched up – and wake, my darling, wake.

The impatient Boatman has been waiting

Under the house, his long oars folded up

Like wings in waiting on the darkling lake.

 

 

Monday Bonus Poem

The Moon is Happy

 

The moon is happy.

There is a willing tide.

An owl

Responding like grandfather

To a change in the weather

Crosses the limits of

Reflection

Moving confidently

Through his world of dreams.

From where I sit I can see the dust

Upon those gathered dreams.

It does not come off too easily

This dust

Collected over many years

Of waiting.

These are extra dreams.

Dreams left sitting under the doormat

For an emergency

Or an unexpected friend.

 

 

Satellite

Matthew Dickman

 

I’m sitting beneath the bent

live oak, wishing the plane blinking above me

was a satellite that would shoot images

of my older brother back down into my brain

so I could print them out

and paste them on the wall. I have to

keep looking at this one picture of him

to remember how his jaw was and which side of the moon

he parted his hair. He’s always

away from me now, some animal or constellation

that walked out of the world but for rumors

and half skeletons found in the Congo, drawings

of what they might have looked like. My brain dreams

about cities from outer space, a place with a name

like Kilimanjaro where he might still be walking around in his Vision

Street Wear high tops, or even a shadow like my father

who talked about Costco the night of my brother’s cremation and how

pumpkiny the pumpkin pie was

though he bought it in a frozen pack of twenty. Just like a real bakery,

he said, you just throw it in the oven,

he kept saying that, you just throw it in the oven, you just throw it in

the oven.

 

 

The Dawn

Frederico Garcia Lorca

 

The New York dawn has

four columns of filth

and a hurricane of black doves

that splash about in polluted waters.

 

The New York dawn howls

from its teeming fire escapes,

searching between the cracks

of its perfumed anguish.

 

The dawn rises and no one receives communion,

for the morning offers no hope.

There are times when furious swarms of coins

penetrate and devour its abandoned children.

 

The first to go out in the morning know in their bones

that there is no paradise, no petals of love to be pulled:

they know they will be stuck in numbers and laws,

in mindless games, in fruitless labor.

 

The light is buried under chains and sirens

in the shameless pursuit of rootless science.

Its people stagger sleeplessly to the boroughs

as if they just left a bloody disaster.

 

 

Here Where Coltrane Is

Michael S. Harper

 

Soul and race

are private dominions,

memories and modal

songs, a tenor blossoming,

which would paint suffering

a clear color but is not in

this Victorian house

without oil in zero degree

weather and a forty-mile-an-hour wind;

it is all a well-knit family:

a love supreme.

Oak leaves pile up on walkway

and steps, catholic as apples

in a special mist of clear white

children who love my children.

I play “Alabama”

on a warped record player

skipping the scratches

on your faces over the fibrous

conical hairs of plastic

under the wooden floors.

 

Dreaming on a train from New York

to Philly, you hand out six

notes which become an anthem

to our memories of you:

oak, birch, maple,

apple, cocoa, rubber.

For this reason Martin is dead;

for this reason Malcolm is dead;

for this reason Coltrane is dead;

in the eyes of my first son are the browns

of these men and their music.

 

 

Nocturne

Ruben Dario

 

to Mariano de Lavia

 

 

You who’ve heard the heart of the night,

you with your tenacious insomnia, who’ve heard

the closing of a door, the distant resonance of a car,

a vague echo, a thin sound …

In the moments of mysterious silence,

when the forgotten ones arise from your prison,

in the hour of the dead, in the hour of repose,

you’ll read these lines of impregnable bitterness!

Like an emptied glass into which I pour the pain

of distant memories and disgraceful misfortunes,

and the sad nostalgia of my soul, drunk on flowers,

and the grief of my heart, depressed by parties.

And the burden of not being what I could have been,

the loss of the kingdom that was there for me,

the thought that I might have never been born,

and the dream of my life since it began!

All of this emerges from the deep silence

in which the night envelopes the illusion of earth,

and I feel like an echo of the world’s heart,

which penetrates and shakes the core of my own.

 

 

Just You Wait

Written by Alan Jay Lerner, Frederick Loewe

 

Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait

You’ll be sorry but your tears ‘ll be to late

You’ll be broke and I’ll have money

Will I help you? Don’t be funny

Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait

Just you wait, ‘enry ‘iggins, till you’re sick

And you scream to fetch a doctor double quick

I’ll be off a second later and go straight to the theatre

Oh ho ho, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait

Ooo ‘enry ‘iggins

Just you wait until we’re swimmin’ in the sea

Ooo ‘enry ‘iggins

And you get a cramp a little ways from me

When you yell you’re going to drown

I’ll get dressed and go to town

Oh ho ho, ‘enry ‘iggins, oh ho ho, ‘enry ‘iggins, just you wait

One day I’ll be famous, I’ll be proper and prim

Go to St. James so often I will call it St. Jim

One evening the king will say, “Oh, Liza, old thing

I want all of England your praises to sing”

Next week on the twentieth of May

I proclaim Liza Doolittle day

All the people will celebrate the glory of you

And whatever you wish and want I gladly will do

“Oh thanks a lot” king says I, in a manner well bred

But all I want is ‘enry ‘iggins ‘ead

“Done, ” says the king with a stroke

Guard, run and bring in the bloke

Then they’ll march you, ‘enry ‘iggins to the wall

And the king will tell me, “Liza, sound the call”

As they raise their rifles higher, I’ll shout

“Ready, aim, fire”

Oh ho ho, ‘enry ‘iggins down you’ll go

‘Enry ‘iggins, just you wait

 

 

Eye

Charles Wright

 

Insensitive or discreet

In it the passions move

 

Seeking an entrance

In it the seasons meet

 

Mosslike with blood

Blended in clouds

 

The future a certain map

When the lid shuts

 

It is a reflection

It is a drawplate

 

The left and the right

Indistinguishable

 

 

 

Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes

Thomas Gray

 

’Twas on a lofty vase’s side,

Where China’s gayest art had dyed

The azure flowers that blow;

Demurest of the tabby kind,

The pensive Selima, reclined,

Gazed on the lake below.

 

Her conscious tail her joy declared;

The fair round face, the snowy beard,

The velvet of her paws,

Her coat, that with the tortoise vies,

Her ears of jet, and emerald eyes,

She saw; and purred applause.

 

Still had she gazed; but ’midst the tide

Two angel forms were seen to glide,

The genii of the stream;

Their scaly armour’s Tyrian hue

Through richest purple to the view

Betrayed a golden gleam.

 

The hapless nymph with wonder saw;

A whisker first and then a claw,

With many an ardent wish,

She stretched in vain to reach the prize.

What female heart can gold despise?

What cat’s averse to fish?

 

Presumptuous maid! with looks intent

Again she stretch’d, again she bent,

Nor knew the gulf between.

(Malignant Fate sat by, and smiled)

The slippery verge her feet beguiled,

She tumbled headlong in.

Eight times emerging from the flood

She mewed to every watery god,

Some speedy aid to send.

No dolphin came, no Nereid stirred;

Nor cruel Tom, nor Susan heard;

A Favourite has no friend!

 

From hence, ye beauties, undeceived,

Know, one false step is ne’er retrieved,

And be with caution bold.

Not all that tempts your wandering eyes

And heedless hearts, is lawful prize;

Nor all that glistens, gold.

 

 

Getting in the Wood

Gary Snyder

 

The sour smell,

blue stain,

water squirts out round the wedge,

 

Lifting quarters of rounds

covered with ants,

“a living glove of ants upon my hand”

the poll of the sledge a bit peened over

so the wedge springs off and tumbles

ringing like high-pitched bells

into the complex duff of twigs

poison oak, bark, sawdust,

shards of logs,

 

And the sweat drips down.

Smell of crushed ants.

The lean and heave on the peavey

that breaks free the last of a bucked

three-foot round,

it lies flat of smashed oaklings –

 

Wedge and sledge, peavey and maul,

little axe, canteen, piggyback can

of saw-mix gas and oil for the chain,

knapsack of files and goggles and rags,

 

All to gather the dead and the down.

the young men throw splits on the piles

bodies hardening, learning the pace

and the smell of tools from this delve

in the winter

death-topple of elderly oak.

Four cords.

 

 

The Darkling Thrush

Thomas Hardy

 

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-grey,

And Winter’s dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

Had sought their household fires.

 

The land’s sharp features seemed to be

The Century’s corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

 

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

 

So little cause for carolings

Of such ecstatic sound

Was written on terrestrial things

Afar or nigh around,

That I could think there trembled through

His happy good-night air

Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew

And I was unaware.

 

 

If I Could Tell You

WH Auden

 

Time will say nothing but I told you so

Time only knows the price we have to pay;

If I could tell you I would let you know.

 

If we should weep when clowns put on their show,

If we should stumble when musicians play,

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

 

There are no fortunes to be told, although,

Because I love you more than I can say,

If I could tell you I would let you know.

 

The winds must come from somewhere when they blow,

There must be reason why the leaves decay;

Time will say nothing but I told you so.

 

Perhaps the roses really want to grow,

The vision seriously intends to stay;

If I could tell you I would let you know.

 

Suppose the lions all get up and go,

And the brooks and soldiers run away;

Will Time say nothing but I told you so?

If I could tell you I would let you know.

 

 

A Red, Red Rose

Robert Burns

 

O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,

That’s newly sprung in June:

O my Luve’s like the melodie,

That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

 

As fair art thou, my bonie lass,

So deep in luve am I;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

Till a’ the seas gang dry.

 

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

 

And fare-thee-weel, my only Luve!

And fare-thee-weel, a while!

And I will come again, my Luve,

Tho’ ’twere ten thousand mile!

 

 

To the Muses

by William Blake

 

Whether on Ida’s shady brow,

Or in the chambers of the East,

The chambers of the sun, that now

From ancient melody have ceas’d;

Whether in Heav’n ye wander fair,

Or the green corners of the earth,

Or the blue regions of the air,

Where the melodious winds have birth;

Whether on crystal rocks ye rove,

Beneath the bosom of the sea

Wand’ring in many a coral grove,

Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!

How have you left the ancient love

That bards of old enjoy’d in you!

The languid strings do scarcely move!

The sound is forc’d, the notes are few!

 

 

Phantom Limbs

Anne Michaels

 

“The face of the city changes more quickly, alas! than the mortal heart.”
      —Charles Baudelaire

 

 

So much of the city

is our bodies. Places in us

old light still slants through to.

Places that no longer exist but are full of feeling,

like phantom limbs.

 

Even the city carries ruins in its heart.

Longs to be touched in places

only it remembers.

 

Through the yellow hooves

of the ginkgo, parchment light;

in that apartment where I first

touched your shoulders under your sweater,

that October afternoon you left keys

in the fridge, milk on the table.

The yard – our moonlight motel –

where we slept summer’s hottest nights,

on grass so cold it felt wet.

Behind us, freight trains crossed the city,

a steel banner, a noisy wall.

Now the hollow diad !

floats behind glass

in office towers also haunted

by our voices.

 

Few buildings, few lives

are built so well

even their ruins are beautiful.

But we loved the abandoned distillery:

stone floors cracking under empty vats,

wooden floors half rotted into dirt;

stairs leading nowhere; high rooms

run through with swords of dusty light.

A place the rain still loved, its silver paint

on rusted things that had stopped moving it seemed, for us.

Closed rooms open only to weather,

pungent with soot and molasses,

scent-stung. A place

where everything too big to take apart

had been left behind.

 

 

Double, Double Toil and Trouble

William Shakespeare from Macbeth

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble. 
Fillet of a fenny snake, 
In the caldron boil and bake; 
Eye of newt and toe of frog, 
Wool of bat and tongue of dog, 
Adder’s fork and blind-worm’s sting, 
Lizard’s leg and howlet’s wing, 
For a charm of powerful trouble, 
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;

Fire burn and caldron bubble.

Cool it with a baboon’s blood,

Then the charm is firm and good.

 

 

The Yellow Stocking

Masoud Ahmadi

Ah

what is that blessed rain doing

to these late days of July

the Persian silk tree         the black locust tree

that late-blooming fireweed

and this weeping willow

which only just turned a deep green

To windows         rooftops

to words we remember less

Don’t hang up

wait to hear the gutter’s cough         the sparrow’s sneeze

and the sigh of a me who still thinks of you

Ah

what is that blessed rain doing

to these late days of July

the leaves poised to fall         ancient benches

and the empty chair of a woman

who left          in the corner of my mind

a sidelong glass

a slanted smile         and one yellow stocking

 

 

A Meditation in the Desert

Ursula K. Le Guin

As thought to mind, so to the string

plucked, or touched, or bowed, the music is,

a wrinkling of the air as immaterial

and brief as sunlight glancing on a wave.

The silence in these empty lands is long.

Voice is as mortal as the word it says,

with little time to speak the thought, to tell

or sing the quick idea of those who live.

So brief the spoken word, the airy thing

in which are placed our deepest constancies,

though by it love or life may stand or fall,

and in it is the power to ruin or save.

The silence in these empty lands is long.

Rock has no tongue to speak or voice to sing,

mute, heavy matter. Yet as I life up this

dull desert stone, the weight of it is full

of slower, longer thoughts than mind can have.

Be my mind, stone lying on my grave.

The silence in these empty lands is long.

The stars have long to listen. Be my song.

 

 

Liberty

Edward Thomas

 

The last light has gone out of the world, except

This moonlight lying on the grass like frost

Beyond the brink of the tall elm’s shadow.

It is as if everything else had slept

Many an age, unforgotten and lost –

The men that were, the things done, long ago,

All I have thought; and but the moon and I

Live yet and here stand idle over a grave

Where all is buried. Both have liberty

To dream what we could do if we were free

To do some thing we had desired long,

The moon and I. There’s none less free than who

Does nothing and has nothing else to do,

Being free only for what is not to his mind,

And nothing is to his mind. If every hour

Like this one passing that I have spent among

The wiser others when I have forgot

To wonder whether I was free or not,

Were piled before me, and not lost behind,

And I could take and carry them away

I should be rich; or if 1 had the power

To wipe out every one and not again

Regret, I should be rich to be so poor.

And yet I still am half in love with pain,

With what is imperfect, with both tears and mirth,

With things that have an end, with life and earth,

And this moon that leaves me dark within the door.

 

 

Skunk Hour

Robert Lowell

 

(For Elizabeth Bishop)Dedication Lowell’s poem is modeled on Elizabeth Bishop’s poem “The Armadillo,” which Bishop had dedicated to Lowell

 

Nautilus Island’s hermit

heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;

her sheep still graze above the sea.

Her son’s a bishop. Her farmer

is first selectman in our village;

she’s in her dotage.

 

Thirsting for

the hierarchic privacy

of Queen Victoria’s century,

she buys up all

the eyesores facing her shore,

and lets them fall.

 

The season’s ill—

we’ve lost our summer millionaire,

who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean

catalogue. His nine-knot yawl

was auctioned off to lobstermen.

A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.

 

And now our fairy

decorator brightens his shop for fall;

his fishnet’s filled with orange cork,

orange, his cobbler’s bench and awl;

there is no money in his work,

he’d rather marry.

 

One dark night,

my Tudor Ford climbed the hill’s skull;

I watched for love-cars . Lights turned down,

they lay together, hull to hull,

where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .

My mind’s not right.

 

A car radio bleats,

“Love, O careless Love. . . .” I hear

my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,

as if my hand were at its throat. . . .

I myself am hell;

nobody’s here—

 

only skunks, that search

in the moonlight for a bite to eat.

They march on their soles up Main Street:

white stripes, moonstruck eyes’ red fire

under the chalk-dry and spar spire

of the Trinitarian Church.

 

I stand on top

of our back steps and breathe the rich air—

a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail

She jabs her wedge-head in a cup

of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,

and will not scare.

 

 

The Blue House

Tomas Tranströmer

 

It is night with glaring sunshine. I stand in the woods and look towards my house with its misty blue walls. As though I were recently dead and saw the house from a new angle.

It has stood for more than eighty summers. Its timber has been impregnated, four times with joy and three times with sorrow. When someone who has lived in the house dies it is repainted. The dead person paints it himself, without a brush,  from the inside.

On the other side is open terrain. Formerly a garden, now wilderness. A still surf of weed, pagodas of weed, an unfurling body of text, Upanishades of weed, a Viking fleet of weed, dragon heads, lances, an empire of weed.

Above the overgrown garden flutters the shadow of a boomerang, thrown again and again. It is related to someone who lived in the house long before my time. Almost a child. An impulse issues from him, a thought, a thought of will: “create. . .draw. ..”  In order to escape his destiny in time.

The house resembles a child’s drawing.  A deputizing childishness which grew forth because someone prematurely renounced the charge of being a child. Open the doors, enter! Inside unrest dwells in the ceiling and peace in the walls. Above the bed there hangs an amateur painting representing a ship with seventeen sails, rough sea and a wind which the gilded frame cannot subdue.

It is always so early in here, it is before the crossroads, before the irrevocable choices. I am grateful for this life!  And yet I miss the alternatives. All sketches wish to be real.

A motor far out on the water extends the horizon of the summer night. Both joy and sorrow swell in the magnifying glass of the dew. We do not actually know it, but we sense it: our life has a sister vessel which plies an entirely different route. While the sun burns behind the islands.

 

 

Throw Yourself Like Seed

Miguel de Unamuno

 

Shake off this sadness, and recover your spirit;

Sluggish you will never see the wheel of fate

That brushes your heel as it turns going by,

The man who wants to live is the man in whom life is abundant.

 

Now you are only giving food to that final pain

Which is slowly winding you in the nets of death,

But to live is to work, and the only thing which lasts

Is the work; start there, turn to the work.

 

Throw yourself like seed as you walk, and into your own field,

Don’t turn your face for that would be to turn it to death,

And do not let the past weigh down your motion.

 

Leave what’s alive in the furrow, what’s dead in yourself,

For life does not move in the same way as a group of clouds;

From your work you will be able one day to gather yourself.

 

 

Respublica

Geoffrey Hill

 

The strident high

civic trumpeting

of misrule. It is

what we stand for.

 

Wild insolence,

aggregates without

distinction. Courage

of common men:

 

spent in the ruck

their remnant witness

after centuries

is granted them

 

like a pardon.

And other fealties

other fortitudes

broken as named—

 

Respublica

brokenly recalled,

its archaic laws

and hymnody;

 

and destroyed hope

that so many times

is brought with triumph

back from the dead.

 

 

Limits

Jorge Luis Borges

 

There is a line of Verlaine I shall not recall again,

There is a nearby street forbidden to my step, 
There is a mirror that has seen me for the last time, 
There is a door I have shut until the end of the world. 
Among the books in my library (I have them before me) 
There are some I shall never reopen.
This summer I complete my fiftieth year: 
Death reduces me incessantly.

 

—Translated by Anthony Kerrigan