Author: mary

Tap, Tap… This Thing On?

It’s a bit dusty here but that seems almost normal for such a collection of beloved poems and their criticism set about them like baby’s breath in a flower arrangement.

But it’s that time of year again and I do mean poems, not spring, although if spring were to arrive with a poem, how joyous that would be here in northern climes.

So have a poem.

Weeds by Abbie Huston Evans

Weeds need no man’s abetting,
It well may be a sin,
But I am all for letting
The worst of all come in:

Hawkweed, that pest pernicious,
(More orange than a flame!)
And blue vetch, full as vicious,
(Too beautiful to tame!)

Frown now, it is your duty,
Chide me for one who dotes.
I cannot sleep for beauty
Of charlock in the oats.

And some pictures of charlock, hawkweed, blue vetch, and oats.

Adrienne Rich’s “The Explorers”

I found this in Rich’s second book, The Diamond Cutters, but there isn’t a citation noting whether it was published prior to this book.

Why should you read this? Because it’s a science fiction poem and rather excellent, only the latter of which you might have expected from Adrienne Rich but you will not be disappointed.

The Explorers

Beside the Mare Crisium, that sea
Where water never was, sit down with me,
And let us talk of Earth, where long ago
We drank the air and saw the rivers flow
Like comets through the green estates of man,
And fruit the colour of Aldebaran
Weighted the curving boughs. The route of stars
Was our diversion, and the fate of Mars
Our grave concern; we stared through night
On these uncolonized demesnes of light.
We read of stars escaping Newton’s chain
Till only autographs of fire remain;
We aimed our mortal searchlights into space
As if in hopes to find a mortal face.

O little Earth, our village, where the day
Seemed all too brief, and starlight would not stay,
We were provincials on the grand express
That whirled us into dark and loneliness.
We thought to bring you wonder with a tale
Huger than those that turned our fathers pale.
Here in this lunar night we watch alone
Longer than ever men have watched for dawn.
Beyond this meteor-bitten plain we see
More starry systems than you dream to be,
And while their clockwork blazes overhead,
We speak the names we learned as we were bred,
We tell of places seen each day from birth—
Obscure and local, patois of the Earth!
O race of farmers, plowing year by year
The same few fields, I sometimes seem to hear
The far-off echo of a cattle-bell
Against the cratered cliff of Arzachel,
And weep to think no sound can ever come
Across that outer desert, from my home.

The Heart’s Astronomy

by Julia Ward Howe, published in Passion-Flowers, 1854

This evening, as the twilight fell,
My younger children watched for me;
Like cherubs in the window frame,
I saw the smiling group of three.

While round and round the house I trudged,
Intent to walk a weary mile,
Oft as I passed within their range,
The little things would beck and smile.

They watched me, as Astronomers
Whose business lies in heaven afar,
Await, beside the slanting glass,
The re-appearance of a star.

Not so, not so, my pretty ones,
Seek stars in yonder cloudless sky;
But mark no steadfast path for me,
A comet dire and strange am I.

Now to the inmost spheres of light
Lifted, my wondering soul dilates,
Now dropped in endless depth of night,
My hope God’s slow recall awaits.

Among the shining I have shone,
Among the blessing, have been blest,
Then wearying years have held me bound
Where darkness deadness gives, not rest.

Between extremes distraught and rent,
I question not the way to go,
Who made me, gave it me, I deem,
Thus to aspire, to languish so.

But Comets too have holy laws,
Their fiery sinews to restrain,
And from their outmost wanderings
Are drawn to heaven’s dear heart again.

And ye, beloved ones, when ye know
What wild, erratic natures are,
Pray that the laws of heavenly force
Would hold and guide the Mother star.

Who Am I?

I am trajectory and flight—
The archer, arrow, and the bow—
The swift parabola of light—
And I the rising and the flow,
The falling feather of the cock,
The point, propulsion, and the flood
Of blackbirds twanging from the nock,
And I the target and the blood.

Who am I? (And what poet wrote this riddle?)

Robin Morgan’s “Monster”

I have been struggling to find all of Robin Morgan’s poem “Monster” since I read an excerpt of it on Feminist SF – The Blog.

It’s an angry poem and I adore it. I would love to quote you the entirety of the piece, all 6 pages of its glory, but I would also like to respect Morgan‘s creative ownership of the piece.

I admire its bravery, I admire the descent to violence but not the submission to violence. I need it because it reminds me that there are ways of writing that align with my ways of being and that most of the written word and the spoken word are not written and spoken in those ways. It reminds me that there is nothing wrong or despicable about who I am.

Here is an excerpt:

And you, men. Lovers, brothers, fathers, sons.
I have loved you and love you still, if for no other reason
than that you came wailing from the monster
while the monster hunched in pain to give you the power
to break her spell.
Well, we must break it ourselves, at last.
And I will speak less and less and less to you
and more and more in crazy gibberish you cannot understand:
witches’ incantations, poetry, old women’s mutterings,
schizophrenic code, accents, keening, firebombs,
poison, knives, bullets, and whatever else will invent
this freedom.

This is adult, end-of-the-day Poetry Friday.

Off My Desk

Christian Wiman‘s book, Hard Night, has been sitting on my desk for months, wedged open to “Reading Herodotus” and I have been able to set nothing on top of it—or nothing stably—for that whole time. Perhaps I can exorcise the need for the poem’s presence by sharing some of it with you folks.

It opens:

Sadness is to lie uneaten
among the buried dead, to die
without feeling a fire
kindled in your honor, that clean smell
of cypress rising and the chants, heat
increasing under you, into you, an old man
whose name the feasters weep and sing.

and closes:

Close your eyes
just this side of sleep and you can almost hear them,
all the long wonder of it, the lost gods
and the languages, the strange names and their fates,
lives unlike our own, as alien and unknowable
as the first hour on this earth for a womb-slick babe
around whom the whole tribe has formed a ring,
wailing as one for what the child must learn.

and dies the entire time in between. So powerful.

Not Even Squeaking

One of travel’s many perks (up there with drunken coworkers and blizzards) is that the notebook sits beside the bed and so I miss the dateline but can scribble easily something that may turn poem. Draft begins:

Better to praise Demeter
for when the horsemen cut you down
as farmers turn their stalks to food
your harvest will have joy
…

Not About Snow

Nothing new for the L sequence, nothing stand alone, the great quote I
misheard from Thoreau notwithstanding. Colorado makes better drivel than this but here it is anyway.

The stars my only respite
reserving judgement
flirting behind haze
constant in the houses
to which I am always welcome
horizon to horizon
empty of the heat
of my aching heart.

What kind of ending line is that? Useless prepositional phrase, not even a decent Simic.