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The
following selections are representative of the works of some poetry friends.
Many (though not all) are long dead, but their company is enjoyed by this
editor anyway. Consider the following by Countee
Cullen --- A poem likely to leave a mark on the heart of the all but the most
damaged and demented racist. jrg
Incident
Once riding in old
Heart-filled,
head-filled with glee,
I saw a Baltimorean
Keep
looking straight at me.
Now I was eight and very small,
And he was
no whit bigger
And so I smiled, but he poked out,
His tongue
and called me “Nigger.”
I saw the whole of
From May
until December;
Of all the things that happened there
That’s all
that I remember.
§
Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Her Kind
I
have gone out, a possessed witch,
Haunting
the black air, braver at night;
Dreaming
evil, I have done my hitch
Over
the plain houses, light by light:
Lonely
thing, twelve fingered, out of mind.
A
woman like that is not a woman, quite.
I
have been her kind.
I
have found the warm caves in the woods,
Filled
them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
Closets,
silk, innumerable goods;
Fixed
the supper for the worms and the elves:
Whining,
rearranging the disaligned.
A
woman like that is misunderstood.
I
have been her kind.
I
have ridden in y our cart, driver,
Waved
my nude arms at the villages going by,
Learning
the last bright routes, survivor
Where
you flames still bite my thigh
And
my ribs crack where your wheels wind.
A
woman like that is not ashamed to die.
I
have been her kind.
§
Geoffrey
Chaucer
Eds.
Note – I studied Chaucer (ca. 1342—1400) in a graduate course at
I have of sorwe
so grete woon (“I have of sorrow so great {a}
wound”)
I
have of sorwe so grete woon
That joye I get I never
Now
that I see my lady bright
Which
I have loved with al my might
Is
from me deed and is a-goon.
Alas,
Deeth, what ayleth thee
That
thou toke my lady sweet
That
was so fayr, so fresh, so fre,
So
good that men may wel se
Of al
goodnease she had no mete.
§
The following two poets are anything but long dead.
MARY OLIVER AT CLAREMONT MCKENNA COLLAGE (jrg)
Mary Oliver's reading at picturesque
A poem on her affectionate small white dog
Percy, shifted to the political, and posits what peace might occur if loving
Percy could be seen in
One is left with the impression
,not just of an exemplary poet, but of a person of profound wisdom,
insight, and compassion.
As in Blue Pastures, the poet
emphasized the need for discipline in writing--keeping an appointment with the
writer within, the subconscious,and
writing daily at the same time each day.
One of the poems Oliver read is as
follows:
WILD
GEESE
You do
not have to be good.
You do
not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only
have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me
about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile
the world goes on.
Meanwhile
the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile
the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever
you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
§
The Road to St. Andrew’s Abbey
The
road that crawls through pachyderm hills
Eagles
in the unending turquoise vault.
the sparse dry chaparral
the dead and yellow grass made brittle by the sun
In a small
valley
a stream of water flows like mercies
through sycamore shading the yard,
aspen leaves waving their trembling hello,
Joshua
trees, spiked bent limbs
writhing upwards like spinning dervishes,
as dry and glabrous mountains,
peer down jealously.
Yellow
tips strain toward the sun,
Crisp
leaves abut the windfall limbs
scoured smooth by desert wind and sand.
On
the apple trees beside the road,
leaves yellow, stiffen and curl
to return to the earth below.
Mute
monks, mute,
hands folded within their cassock fronts
Walk
to mealtime prayers.
Humankind,
naked and unknowing,
entered the world
In a place such as this.
John
R. Guthrie
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