National Poetry Month
April is National Poetry Month. To celebrate, I’m sharing one of my favorite poems with you. This is Sharon Olds’ “I go Back to May 1937.”
I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks with the
wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips black in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it–she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you never heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty blank face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome blind face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips like chips of flint as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.
—
What are your favorite poems? Any favorite poets?
I love Tennyson’s The Lady of Shalott. It’s a long ballad, so I won’t excerpt it here. Instead, let me stun you with a couplet from Yeats’ incredible The Second Coming.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
Every time I read those lines, I get the chills.
And then. And then. And then is probably my favorite poem EVER. I present to you, Langston Hughes’ Genius Child.
This is a song for the genius child.
Sing it softly, for the song is wild.
Sing it softly as ever you can –
Lest the song get out of hand.
[i]Nobody loves a genius child. [/i]
Can you love an eagle,
Tame or wild?
Can you love an eagle,
Wild or tame?
Can you love a monster
Of frightening name?
[i]Nobody loves a genius child. [/i]
[i]Kill him[/i] – and let his soul run wild.
One more….
may the sun
bring you new energy by day,
may the moon
softly restore you by night,
may the rain
wash away your worries,
may the breeze
blow new strength into your being,
may you walk
gently through the world and know
its beauty all the days of your life.
-apache blessing
(I gave this poem framed to my daughter when she left home for her 1st year in college.)
I have several favorites. Robert Frost’s “Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening” is probably at the top of the list. “To Lucasta, going to the Wars” by Richard Lovelace has a line that has always held my attention ” I could not love thee, Dear, so much Loved I not Honour more.” “An Irish Airmen Forsees His Death” by W.B. Yeats is also very, very good. I was floored when a character read it in the movie “Memphis Belle”. Wonderful, read aloud poem. Randall Jarell’s “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” has an ending line which haunts me — “When I died they washed me out with a rubber hose.” “A Poem” by Delemore Schwarz is another favorite. “The Man from Snowy River” by Andrew Barton Paterson. And “In Memoriam” by Alfred Lord Tenyson.
maggie b.
I have so many favorite poems and poets that I could list a lot, but I’ll just provide one.
THE LOOK
Strephon kissed me in the spring,
Robin in the fall,
But Colin only looked at me
And never kissed at all.
Strephon’s kiss was lost in jest,
Robin’s lost in play,
But the kiss in Colin’s eyes
Haunts me night and day.
Sara Teasdale [1884-1933]
My mother would read us poetry at times when we were growing up. I’m not sure my brother and sister loved it, but I always found it very relaxing. Still do. My favorites? I have many, but two poems that have stuck with me are…
No Man Is An Island by John Donne
No man is an island entire of itself, every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; (it goes on..)
Also…The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost… the entire poem is lovely but the end of the poem is so beautiful and telling of life in general…
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
**sigh**
Very interesting how the Thomas Lux poem illustrates what Meredith Duran mentions in her interview about not having a place in the intimate relationship between a book and its reader.
I love John Donne’s poetry with a fierce love. He is so passionate whether he is writing about love or religion. For nonsense, you can’t beat Edward Lear. I love his poem The Pobble Who Has No Toes.
THE VOICE YOU HEAR WHEN YOU READ SILENTLY
is not silent, it is a speaking-
out-loud voice in your head; it is *spoken*,
a voice is *saying* it
as you read. It’s the writer’s words,
of course, in a literary sense
his or her “voice” but the sound
of that voice is the sound of *your* voice.
Not the sound your friends know
or the sound of a tape played back
but your voice
caught in the dark cathedral
of your skull, your voice heard
by an internal ear informed by internal abstracts
and what you know by feeling,
having felt. It is your voice
saying, for example, the word “barn”
that the writer wrote
but the “barn” you say
is a barn you know or knew. The voice
in your head, speaking as you read,
never says anything neutrally- some people
hated the barn they knew,
some people love the barn they know
so you hear the word loaded
and a sensory constellation
is lit: horse-gnawed stalls,
hayloft, black heat tape wrapping
a water pipe, a slippery
spilled *chirr* of oats from a split sack,
the bony, filthy haunches of cows…
And “barn” is only a noun- no verb
or subject has entered into the sentence yet!
The voice you hear when you read to yourself
is the clearest voice: you speak it
speaking to you.
~~-Thomas Lux
I really like that poem! Thanks for sharing, AndyR.
Colours by Yevtushenko
WHEN your face
appeared over my crumpled life
at first I understood
only the poverty of what I have.
Then its particular light
on woods, on rivers, on the sea,
became my beginning in the coloured world
in which I had not yet had my begninning.
I am so frightened, I am so frightened,
of the unexpected sunrise finishing,
of revelations
and tears and the excitement finishing.
I don’t fight it, my love is this fear,
I nourish it who can nourish nothing,
love’s slipshod watchman.
Fear hems me in.
I am conscious that these minutes are short
and that the colours in my eyes will vanish
when your face sets.