Category: April 2015

Poem-a-Day April 30: Air and Angels

Hello Friends,

I hope you’ve enjoyed a little bit of National Poetry Month in your inboxes this month! I didn’t make it to 30 poems and 30 poets this year, but we did manage to cover several centuries and decades and continents as well as a variety of poetic forms in our 30 days together.

Today’s final selection is by Kenneth Rexroth from his Collected Shorter Poems (1964).

Thank you again for spending some time reading poetry with me.

— Ellen

 
Air and Angels: This Night Only

          [Erik Satie: “Gymnopédie #1″]

Moonlight   now    on Malibu
The winter night    the few stars
Far away   millions    of miles
The sea   going on    and on
Forever    around   the earth
Far    and     far     as your lips    are near
Filled    with the same light     as your eyes
Darling     darling     darling
The future     is long gone by
And the past     will never happen
We have     only this
Our one forever
So small    so infinite
So brief    so vast
Immortal     as our hands that touch
Deathless     as the firelit wine we drink
Almighty      as this single kiss
That has no beginning
That will never
Never
End

Poem-a-Day April 25: Wind on the Hill

Wind on the Hill

No one can tell me,
Nobody knows,
Where the wind comes from,
Where the wind goes.

It’s flying from somewhere
As fast as it can,
I couldn’t keep up with it,
Not if I ran.

But if I stopped holding
The string of my kite,
It would blow with the wind
For a day and a night.

And then when I found it,
Wherever it blew,
I should know that the wind
Had been going there too.

So then I could tell them
Where the wind goes . . .
But where the wind comes from
Nobody knows.

— A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six (1927)

Poem-a-Day April 23: There be tygers

Hello Friends,
Long before Pink Floyd, this guy Stephen Vincent Benét (1898–1943) was writing about the dark side of the moon. Though we don’t come across his work as much now, during his lifetime, Benét sold more copies of his poetry collections than contemporaries like Robert Frost or T.S. Eliot.
Enjoy.
Ellen

 
Difference

My mind’s a map. A mad sea-captain drew it
Under a flowing moon until he knew it;
Winds with brass trumpets, puffy-cheeked as jugs,
And states bright-patterned like Arabian rugs.
“Here there be tygers.” “Here we buried Jim.”
Here is the strait where eyeless fishes swim
About their buried idol, drowned so cold
He weeps away his eyes in salt and gold.
A country like the dark side of the moon,
A cider-apple country, harsh and boon,
A country savage as a chestnut-rind,
A land of hungry sorcerers.
                                                  Your mind?

—Your mind is water through an April night,
A cherry-branch, plume-feathery with its white,
A lavender as fragrant as your words,
A room where Peace and Honor talk like birds,
Sewing bright coins upon the tragic cloth
Of heavy Fate, and Mockery, like a moth,
Flutters and beats about those lovely things.
You are the soul, enchanted with its wings,
The single voice that raises up the dead
To shake the pride of angels.
                                                  I have said.

Poem-a-Day April 22: Circles of motion

Hello Friends,

A white reporter once asked the Mvskoke poet and musician Joy Harjo why she plays the saxophone, since it’s not a Native American instrument. Harjo replied, “It is when I play it.”

“Eagle Poem” appears in Harjo’s 1990 collection In Mad Love and War.

Enjoy.
Ellen

Eagle Poem

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear;
Can’t know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren’t always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

Poem-a-Yesterday April 21: If the ocean had a mouth

Hello Friends,
Have you ever wondered what happens when a woman makes a living as an underwater photographer and a desire coach and a poet? The answer is today’s poem-a-day by Marie-Elizabeth Mali.
Enjoy.
Ellen

 
If the ocean had a mouth

I’d lean close, my ear
to her whisper and roar,
her tongue scattered
with stars.

She’d belt her brassy voice
over the waves’ backbeat.
No one sings better than her.

Would she ever bite
the inside of her cheek?

Would she yell at the moon
to quit tugging at her hem,
or would she whistle, drop
her blue dress and shimmy
through space to cleave
to that shimmer?

What did she mean to say
that morning she spit out
the emaciated whale
wearing a net for a corset?

All this emptying
on the sand. Eyeless
shrimp. Oiled pelicans.

Within her jaws the coral forests,
glittering fish, waves like teeth,
her hungry mortal brine.

Poem-a-Day 4/20: Trees

Trees

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

— Joyce Kilmer, Poetry Magazine (August 1913)

Poem-a-Day April 17, 2015: How do you know

Hello Friends,
Naomi Shihab Nye’s poem about “still lying in the backseat behind all my questions” appears in a collection titled Words Under the Words: Selected Poems (1995). Nye was also featured for Poem-a-Day April 2, 2014.
Enjoy.
Ellen

Making a Fist

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

“How do you know if you are going to die?”
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
“When you can no longer make a fist.”

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

Poem-a-Yesterday April 16, 2015: Tropical and changeless

Hello Friends,
I wanted to send out a poem about a mosquito hawk yesterday. So here’s a brief excerpt from Donald Justice’s “Childhood,” which begins by specifying “TIME: the thirties / PLACE: Miami, Florida.”
Enjoy.
Ellen

 
Iridescences of mosquito hawks
Glimmer above brief puddles filled with skies,
Tropical and changeless. And sometimes,
Where the city halts, the cracked sidewalks
Lead to a coral archway still spanning
The entrance to some wilderness of palmetto—

Forlorn suburbs, but with golden names!

Poem-a-Day April 15, 2015: Love’s Philosophy

Hello Friends,
Today’s poem comes to you from an outspoken atheist, proponent of Godwinian free love, and Romantic with a capital R: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822).
Enjoy.
Ellen

Love’s Philosophy

The fountains mingle with the river
And the rivers with the ocean,
The winds of heaven mix for ever
With a sweet emotion;
Nothing in the world is single,
All things by a law divine
In one another’s being mingle—
Why not I with thine?

See the mountains kiss high heaven,
And the waves clasp one another;
No sister-flower would be forgiven
If it disdain’d its brother;
And the sunlight clasps the earth,
And the moonbeams kiss the sea—
What is all this sweet work worth
If thou kiss not me?