A Poem a day keeps the melancholy away

tomasocarthaigh

Dawn at Ballybrit this Easter Morning the sun is not dancing in the sky but hidden behind clouds. There is a Longford tradition referred to in my poem of two years ago �Sleeping I Did Not See the Dancing Sun� that the sun dances for joy on Easter morning for the Resurrenction, only seen by those who have true faith. This was my first Easter to be up so early being at work and it was behind cloud!
At the bottom are links to a number of other poems reflecting on 1916, and in light of the election and hung Dáil and the strange return of pro austerity parties, "Shoulder High Let the Carry Him" is remarkebly appropiate!

No dancing sun the Easter morning
As the birds sing in the sky
I sleepy look out at the dawn
As the clouds slowly roll by.
The black gives way to a grey and blue
Behind which the sun fails to show
That my grandfather said in the sky it dances
For Easter all of those years ago.

One hundred years ago now past
Men in Dublin sat confused
Who expected fighting to be
Wondered was their plot by the British rused
Angered Eoin O� Neill sent out
The word no rising was there to be
From home to home the messengers went round
To tenament and cottage in the country.

But country folk action would see
Who to the city their way had made
A hopeless gesture to fire the blood
Of a nation cowed and afraid.
The nation rose in time as one
But for all the won compared to what they saught
It was as well, we bitter write today
If those men brave risen had not.

Neighbour against neighbour pitched
Freedom or the crown: which flag?
There was freedom of culture and faith here now
Of which any Irishman could brag.
The tenants woes were settled mostly
Bar the labourers on the farm
If the landlord was known the tenant to crush
He in turn gave the Spailpin the strong arm.

In time brother to brother would turn
The Free State whether or not to accept
Partition, a nightmare to all sides, imposed
Most of Ulster by England kept.
A hundred years is passed by now
Thir land is not their own
The Union Jack is the flag of Derry and Belfast
In a land still not their own.

The lockout and the Liverpool ships
Are now but a memory
Paragraph in a childs textbook
Who, bored, learns in school history.
Those who held the chains of power
They are still in command
The rich held onto their cash
Protestant landlords gone: isnt Ireland grand!

People to the roads again have took
As banks take the rooves over their head
The farms from beneath their feet
Farmers distraught, by their own hand dead.
The Proclamation was only words
For which all that blood was shed
All we changed was the flag on the stick
As James Connolly prophetically said.

On a Longford hillside my grandfather stood
My father told me when I was a boy
On an Easter morning as tradition it was
To see the sun in the sky dance with joy.
Only seen by those whose faith was true
He claimed it to have seen
Few of his kind alive today
That on those fields had been.

More poems of reflection on 1916:


1916 War and Revolution

Civiliants Slain - An Empire Saved

Shoulder High Let Them Carry Him

One Faith Under Two Flags

B00!

From Blue Horses by Mary Oliver

I know, you never intended to be in this world.
But you're in it all the same.

so why not get started immediately.

I mean, belonging to it.
There is so much to admire, to weep over.

And to write music or poems about.

Bless the feet that take you to and fro.
Bless the eyes and the listening ears.
Bless the tongue, the marvel of taste.
Bless touching.

You could live a hundred years, it's happened.
Or not.
I am speaking from the fortunate platform
of many years,
none of which, I think, I ever wasted.
Do you need a prod?
Do you need a little darkness to get you going?
Let me be urgent as a knife, then,
and remind you of Keats,
so single of purpose and thinking, for a while,
he had a lifetime.

Ulmus

Bag-snatching in Dublin

Sisely
Walked so nicely
With footsteps so discreet
To see her pass
You'd never guess
She walked upon the street.

Down where the Liffey waters' turgid flood
Churns up to greet the ocean-driven mud,
A bruiser in a fix
Murdered her for 6/6.
Stevie Smith

Did Stevie Smith visit Dublin? Perhaps she read about a streetwalker's murder in a newspaper. I remember the days of 6/6, pre-decimal money.

Damn this man's poems get me every time.




To Say Before Going to Sleep.


I would like to sing someone to sleep,
have someone to sit by and be with.
I would like to cradle you and softly sing,
be your companion while you sleep or wake.
I would like to be the only person
in the house who knew: the night outside was cold.
And would like to listen to you
and outside to the world and to the woods.

The clocks are striking, calling to each other,
and one can see right to the edge of time.
Outside the house a strange man is afoot
and a strange dog barks, wakened from his sleep.
Beyond that there is silence.

My eyes rest upon your face wide-open;
and they hold you gently, letting you go
when something in the dark begins to move.


Rainer Maria Rilke.

B00!

Rainer Maria Rilke is one of my absolute favourites. I don't recall reading that poem before (but my memory's wrecked). Beautiful Persepoly!

marienbad

I am rereading The Iliad at the moment in a new translation by Peter Green and I am reminded of that great poem by John Keats.


On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific—and all his men
Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

Lavinia

I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.



Pablo Neruda

B00!

On New Terms
by Deborah Garrison

I’d like to begin again. Not touch my
own face, not tremble in the dark before
an intruder who never arrives. Not
apologize. No scurry, not pace. Not
refuse to keep notes of what means the most.
Not skirt my father’s ghost. Not abandon
piano, or a book before the end.
Not count, count, count and wait, poised — the control,
the agony controlled — for the loss of
the one, having borne, I can’t be, won’t breathe
without: the foregone conclusion, the pain
not yet met, the preemptive mourning
about which
nothing left of me but smoke.

B00!

Victory comes late,
And is held low to freezing lips
Too rapt with frost
To take it.
How sweet it would have tasted,
Just a drop!
Was God so economical?
His table's spread too high for us
Unless we dine on tip-toe.
Crumbs fit such little mouths,
Cherries suit robins;
The eagle's golden breakfast
Strangles them.
God keeps his oath to sparrows,
Who of little love
Know how to starve!

~Emily Dickinson

I Like Sheep

The Terracotta Girls

Butchered, in the modern Kiln of the obsequious,
Infected, by the septic words
Of a feral Baachus,
Laying, tongue tied by the Ghosts
Of the All quietened,
Damned, by brotherly Disputation.

Their sadness shimmers in ‘Ciceric’ ripples,
Slain by the hair of horse,
Pommelled by the Rustic Marionette,
They lay Silently Screaming, unheard
Amid the Vapours, of pungent still air….

It ends, outside the Maternal Asclepeion,
Cut by the sharpened lips of Orphic Adsentatores,
Broken by the beating heart of Humos,
They are Drown, beneath waves of Nobian tears,
Holding the hand of Isis….

~James Fitzpatrick

B00!

Knowledge by Kim Addonizio

Even when you know what people are capable of,
even when you pride yourself on knowing,
on not evading history, or the news,
or any of the quotidian, minor, but still endlessly apparent
and relevant examples of human cruelty–even now
there are times it strikes you anew, as though
you’d spent your whole life believing that humanity
was fundamentally good, as though you’d never thought,
like Schopenhauer, that it was all blind, impersonal will,
never chanted perversely, almost gleefully,
the clear-sighted adjectives learned from Hobbes–
solitary, poor, nasty, brutal, and short—
even now you’re sometimes stunned to hear
of some terrible act that sends you reeling off, too overwhelmed
even to weep, and then you realize that your innocence,
which you had thought no longer existed,
did, in fact, exist–that somewhere underneath your cynicism
you still held out hope. But that hope has been shattered now,
irreparably, or so it seems, and you have to go on, afraid
that there is more to know, that one day you will know it.

SmallTeapot

Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spáre, strange;
Whatever is fickle, frecklèd (who knows how?)
With swíft, slów; sweet, sóur; adázzle, dím;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is pást change:

Praise hím.





(Heard it on an ad for paint! :pac: )

marienbad

The Sightseers

By Paul Muldoon


My father and mother, my brother and sister
and I, with uncle Pat, our dour best-loved uncle,
had set out that Sunday afternoon in July
in his broken-down Ford

not to visit some graveyard -- one died of shingles,
one of fever, another's knees turned to jelly --
but the brand-new roundabout at Ballygawley,
the first in mid-Ulster.

Uncle Pat was telling us how the B-Specials
had stopped him one night somewhere near Ballygawley
and smashed his bicycle

and made him sing the Sash and curse the Pope of Rome.
They held a pistol so hard against his forehead
there was still the mark of an O when he got home.

Lavinia

I am not jealous
of what came before me.

Come with a man
on your shoulders,
come with a hundred men in your hair,
come with a thousand men between your breasts and your feet,
come like a river
full of drowned men
which flows down to the wild sea,
to the eternal surf, to Time!

Bring them all
to where I am waiting for you;
we shall always be alone,
we shall always be you and I
alone on earth
to start our life!




Pablo Neruda
(1904 - 1973)

That's beautiful Lavinia.

I Like Sheep

On arrival, I found the Poop Deck
Captained by two lonely spinners,
One young Spartan
Under the tutelage
Of a rugged thesaurus of the Sea.
Their top turned then rolled
Standing to attention,
It’s peg leg stuck to the open deck,
A frozen asset, quiet immovable.
Here third would entertain,
Profligate about the seasons,
Pass on their prospective knowledge,
In an open field of information,
Uncultivated, unkempt.

Then to the middle’s Lair of ripened papered
History, reeking of an Adam’s style in
Sumptuous first’s surrounds.
It is a
Glassed Libraried room, with tables
Painted in Postcarded litter,
Situated within the crowded
Tent of recently dined explorers.
Many strain to read the
Massive Progress Charts,
Teachers, Miners, Bankers, Lawyers,
Most gambling on speed and time of landing.

feargale

Guest, by Rabindranath Tagore

Lady, you have filled these exile days of mine
With sweetness, made a foreign traveler your own
As easily as these unfamiliar stars, quietly,
Coolly smiling from heaven, have likewise given me
Welcome. When I stood at this window and stared
At the southern sky, a message seemed to slide
Into my soul from the harmony of the stars,
A solemn music that said, "We know you are ours-
Guest of our light from the day you passed
From darkness into the world, always our guest."

Lady, your kindness is a star, the same solemn tune
In your glance seems to say, "I know you are mine."
I do not know your language, but I hear your melody:
"Poet, guest of my love, my guest eternally."

Translated by William Radice

B00!

wow, lovely feargale

B00!

(from a childs book of feelings)

What Are You Glad About? What Are You Mad About?
By Judith Viorst

If you had just one color to paint the whole world,
Would it be orange or gray?
If you had just one message to give to the world,
Would it be grrr or hooray?
If you had just one place you could live in this world,
Would you choose here or away?
What are you glad about?
What are you mad about?
How are you feeling today?

Did you wake up this morning all smiley inside?
Does life taste like ice cream and cake?
Or does it seem more like your goldfish just died
And your insides are one great big ache?
Do you wish you could go in a closet and hide?
Or would you rather go play?
What are you glad about?
Mad about? Sad about?
How are you feeling today?

When they ask you to do something, will you say yes?
Or will your answer be no?
Do you think that you get what you want - or much less?
Are you shrinking or starting to grow?
Is that person you see in the mirror a mess?
Or is that person okay?
What are you glad about?
Mad, sad, or bad about?
How are you feeling today?

Lavinia

when I look back now

at the abuse I took from

her

I feel shame that I was so

innocent,

but I must say

she did match me drink for

drink,

and I realized that her life

her feelings for things

had been ruined

along the way

and that I was no mare than a

temporary

companion;

she was ten years older

and mortally hurt by the past

and the present;

she treated me badly:

desertion, other

men;

she brought me immense

pain,

continually;

she lied, stole;

there was desertion,

other men,

yet we had our moments; and

our little soap opera ended

with her in a coma

in the hospital,

and I sat at her bed

for hours

talking to her,

and then she opened her eyes

and saw me:

"I knew it would be you,"

she said.

then she closed her

eyes.


the next day she was

dead.


I drank alone

for two years

after that.



Charles Bukowski

I Like Sheep

Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Swiper the fox

That's an absolute cracker Lavinia, you're on a roll.

I Like Sheep

A Blank Letter
by Sudeep Sen

An envelope arrives unannounced from overseas
containing stark white sheets,

perfect in their presentation of absence.
Only a bold logo on top

revealed its origin, but absolutely nothing else.
I examined the sheets,

peered through their grains —
heavy cotton-laid striations —

concealing text, in white ink, postmarked India.
Even the watermark's translucence

made the script’s invisibility transparent.
Buried among the involute contours, lay sheets

of sophisticated pulp, paper containing
scattered metaphors — uncoded, unadorned,

untouched — virgin lines that spill, populate
and circulate to keep alive its breathings.

Corpuscles of a very different kind —
hieroglyphics, unsolved, but crystal-clear.

B00!

Lines by Kate Northrup

The unluckiest among us fall in love
with such a thing as a line,

and from the beginning, it goes badly.

You can bring a line into your home
but your gestures so alarm it
it breaks into two, four,

sixteen lines and they keep
breeding, breeding. There’s no

maneuvering them. One line
escapes you

and appears years later
aimless in the garden. If you had been wise,

you would not have fallen for a nature
so given to infidelity:

Lines always go in two directions.

I myself was in love with a line.
I took it to a field
And lay down next to it

Whispering Relax, we’re alone
but the line would have none of it.

Soon night had fallen
and rising over the hill came cars, stories,

came windows through which I saw
everything as it must remain:

singular, burning, private.

marienbad

Though There Are Torturers


Though there are torturers in the world
There are also musicians.
Though, at this moment,
Men are screaming in prisons,
There are jazzmen raising storms
Of sensuous celebration,
And orchestras releasing
Glories of the Spirit.
Though the image of God
Is everywhere defiled,
A man in West Clare
Is playing the concertina,
The Sistine Choir is levitating
Under the dome of St. Peter’s,
And a drunk man on the road
Is singing, for no reason.

Michael Coady

I've been trying to write something myself for a while now. It isn't happening for me. All I have are a bunch of words like "I'm thinking of
you", "coward". Today I sat somewhere busy and watched all the people. Still nothing came. It's easy when I'm sad and part of me is a little so maybe there is some more sitting and watching to be done. So instead of my ramblings here is the beautiful Dorianne Laux.

Heart

The heart shifts shape of its own accord—
from bird to ax, from pinwheel
to budded branch. It rolls over in the chest,
a brown bear groggy with winter, skips
like a child at the fair, stopping in the shade
of the fireworks booth, the fat lady's tent,
the corn dog stand. Or the heart
is an empty room where the ghosts of the dead
wait, paging through magazines, licking
their skinless thumbs. One gets up, walks
through a door into a maze of hallways.
Behind one door a roomful of orchids,
behind another, the smell of burned toast.
The rooms go on and on: sewing room
with its squeaky treadle, its bright needles,
room full of file cabinets and torn curtains,
room buzzing with a thousand black flies.
Or the heart closes its doors, becomes smoke,
a wispy lie, curls like a worm and forgets
its life, burrows into the fleshy dirt.

Heart makes a wrong turn.
Heart locked in its gate of thorns.
Heart with its hands folded in its lap.
Heart a blue skiff parting the silk of the lake.
It does what it wants, takes what it needs, eats
when it's hungry, sleeps when the soul shuts down.
Bored, it watches movies deep into the night,
stands by the window counting the streetlamps
squinting out one by one.
Heart with its hundred mouths open.
Heart with its hundred eyes closed.
Harmonica heart, heart of tinsel,
heart of cement, broken teeth, redwood fence.
Heart of bricks and boards, books stacked
In devoted rows, their dusty spines
unreadable. Heart
with its hands full.
Hieroglyph heart, etched deep with history's lists,
things to do. Near-sighted heart. Club-footed heart.

Hard-headed heart. Heart of gold, coal.
Bad juju heart, singing the low down blues.
Choir boy heart. Heart in a frumpy robe.
Heart with its feet up reading the scores.
Homeless heart, dozing, its back against the Dumpster.
Cop-on-the-beat heart with its black billy club,
banging on the lid.

Dorianne Laux.

B00!

Quarantine

In the worst hour of the worst season
of the worst year of a whole people
a man set out from the workhouse with his wife.
He was walking – they were both walking – north.

She was sick with famine fever and could not keep up.
He lifted her and put her on his back.
He walked like that west and west and north.
Until at nightfall under freezing stars they arrived.

In the morning they were both found dead.
Of cold. Of hunger. Of the toxins of a whole history.
But her feet were held against his breastbone.
The last heat of his flesh was his last gift to her.

Let no love poem ever come to this threshold.
There is no place here for the inexact
praise of the easy graces and sensuality of the body.
There is only time for this merciless inventory:

Their death together in the winter of 1847.
Also what they suffered. How they lived.
And what there is between a man and woman.
And in which darkness it can best be proved.

Eavan Boland

B00!

Love Sorrow

Love sorrow. She is yours now, and you must
take care of what has been
given. Brush her hair, help her
into her little coat, hold her hand,
especially when crossing a street. For, think,

what if you should lose her? Then you would be
sorrow yourself; her drawn face, her sleeplessness
would be yours. Take care, touch
her forehead that she feel herself not so

utterly alone. And smile, that she does not
altogether forget the world before the lesson.
Have patience in abundance. And do not
ever lie or ever leave her even for a moment

by herself, which is to say, possibly, again,
abandoned. She is strange, mute, difficult,
sometimes unmanageable but, remember, she is a child.
And amazing things can happen. And you may see,

as the two of you go
walking together in the morning light, how
little by little she relaxes; she looks about her;
she begins to grow.

Mary Oliver

Lavinia

.......

Lavinia

"After a while you learn the subtle difference between
holding a hand and chaining a soul.
And you learn that love doesn’t mean leaning and
that company doesn’t mean security.
And you begin to learn that kisses aren’t contracts
and presents aren’t promises.
And you begin to accept your defeats with your head up
and your eyes open and with the grace of an adult not the grief of a child.
And you learn to build all your roads on today
because tomorrow`s ground is too uncertain for your plans.
After a while you learn that even sunshine burns if you get too much.

So plant your own garden and decorate your own soul
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you will learn that you can endure that you really are special
and that you really do have worth.
So live to learn and know yourself.
In doing so, you will learn to live."




Mario Quintana
(from beautiful Joü)