Poems that you love

[wasellajam]

Page 31 is a treasure trove. My favorites:

A Song on the End of the World
BY CZESLAW MILOSZ
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY MILOSZ

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.

On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

BY Maggie Smith

Skeins o Geese

Skeins o geese write a word
across the sky. A word
struck lik a gong
afore I wis born.
The sky moves like cattle, lowin.

I’m as empty as stane, as fields
ploo’d but not sown, naked
an blin as a stane. Blin
tae the word, blin
tae a’ soon but geese ca’ing.

Wire twists lik archaic script
roon a gate. The barbs
sign tae the wind as though
it was deef. The word whistles
ower high for ma senses. Awa.

No lik the past which lies
strewn aroun. Nor sudden death.
No like a lover we’ll ken
an connect wi forever.
The hem of its goin drags across the sky.

Whit dae birds write on the dusk?
A word niver spoken or read.
The skeins turn hame,
on the wind’s dumb moan, a soan,
maybe human, bereft.

Kathleen Jamie

[milo]

The Milozs one is incredible

[wasellajam]

The Milozs one is incredible

I know!! It’s what drove me to post.

[rowens]

At the museum, in 2017, the apexless
pyramid that crowns the floating square
of this nation: After absorbing the rhythms
and colors of comedy, music and art,
and ignoring what the man in the dashiki
told me I should be there for
(in the dark-lit room where shards
of false deliverance shone,
or the relocated cabin
sturdier and more gallied
than untenanted),
I searched and found
the painted and sculpted revenant
of these two men: having read these poems
and little more:

Crispus Attucks

Jay Wright

When we speak
of those musket-draped
and manqué Englishmen;
that cloistered country:
all those common people,
dotting the potted stoves,
hating the king,
shifting uneasily under
the sharp sails
of the unwelcome boats,
sometimes we forget you.
Who asked you
for that impulsive miracle?
I form it now,
with my own motives.
The flag dipping in your hands,
your crafted boots
hammering up the unclaimed streets,
all that was in that unformed moment.
But it wasn’t the feel of those things,
nor the burden of the American character;
it was somehow the sense
of an unencumbered escape,
the breaking of a Protestant host,
the ambiguous, detached
judgment of yourself.
Now, we think of you,
when, through the sibilant streets,
another season drums
your intense, communal daring.



Benjamin Banneker Sends His “Almanac” to Thomas Jefferson


 Jay Wright

Old now,
your eyes nearly blank
from plotting the light's
movement over the years,
you clean your Almanac
and place it next
to the heart of this letter.
I have you in mind,
giving a final brush and twist
to the difficult pages,
staring down the shape of the numbers
as though you would find a flaw
in their forms.
Solid, these calculations
verify your body on God's earth.
At night,
the stars submit themselves
to the remembered way you turn them;
the moon gloats under your attention.
I, who know so little of stars,
whose only acquaintance with the moon
is to read a myth, or to listen
to the surge
of songs the women know,
sit in your marvelous reading
of all movement,
of all relations.

So you look into what we see
yet cannot see,
and shape and take a language
to give form to one or the other,
believing no form will escape,
no movement appear, nor stop,
without explanation,
believing no reason is only reason,
nor without reason.
I read all of this into your task,
all of this into the uneasy
reproof of your letter.

Surely, there must be a flaw.
These perfect calculations fall apart.
There are silences
that no perfect number can retrieve,
omissions no perfect line could catch.
How could a man but challenge God's
impartial distributions?
How could a man sit among
the free and ordered movements
of stars, and waters, beasts and birds,
each movement seen or accounted for,
and not know God jealous,
and not know that he himself must be?

So you go over the pages again,
looking for the one thing
that will not reveal itself,
judging what you have received,
what you have shaped,
believing it cannot be strange
to the man you address.
But you are strange to him
—your skin, your tongue,
the movement of your body,
even your mysterious ways with stars.
You argue here with the man and God,
and know that no man can be right,
and know that no God will argue right.
Your letter turns on what the man knows,
on what God, you think, would have us know.
All stars will forever move under your gaze,
truthfully, leading you from line to line,
from number to number, from truth to truth,
while the man will read your soul's desire,
searcher, searching yourself,
losing the relations.

[matsunosuperfan]

Page 31 is a treasure trove. My favorites:

A Song on the End of the World
BY CZESLAW MILOSZ
TRANSLATED BY ANTHONY MILOSZ

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
       
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

Good Bones

Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.

BY Maggie Smith

Skeins o Geese

Skeins o geese write a word
across the sky. A word
struck lik a gong
afore I wis born.
The sky moves like cattle, lowin.

I’m as empty as stane, as fields
ploo’d but not sown, naked
an blin as a stane. Blin
tae the word, blin
tae a’ soon but geese ca’ing.

Wire twists lik archaic script
roon a gate. The barbs
sign tae the wind as though
it was deef. The word whistles
ower high for ma senses. Awa.

No lik the past which lies
strewn aroun. Nor sudden death.
No like a lover we’ll ken
an connect wi forever.
The hem of its goin drags across the sky.

Whit dae birds write on the dusk?
A word niver spoken or read.
The skeins turn hame,
on the wind’s dumb moan, a soan,
maybe human, bereft.

Kathleen Jamie

The first two here are among my very favorites as well <3

[rowens]

Every Sunday is new,
as we remember
the pattern isn't,
space . . . time,
though for us,
individually . . . 
(for some, sadly, not
groups . . . ); 
some cultures start (fresh labor?) 
around the moon. . . .


The Guardian Angel of the Private Life
Jorie Graham

All this was written on the next day’s list.
On which the busyness unfurled its cursive roots, 
pale but effective,
and the long stern of the necessary, the sum of events,
built-up its tiniest cathedral ...
(Or is it the sum of what takes place?)
If I lean down, to whisper, to them,
down into their gravitational field, there where they head busily on
into the woods, laying the gifts out one by one, onto the path, 
hoping to be on the air,
hoping to please the children—
(and some gifts overwrapped and some not wrapped at all)—if 
I stir the wintered ground-leaves
up from the paths, nimbly, into a sheet of sun,
into an escape-route-width of sun, mildly gelatinous where wet, though 
                                                                              mostly crisp, 
fluffing them up a bit, and up, as if to choke the singularity of sun
with this jubilation of manyness, all through and round these passers-by—
just leaves, nothing that can vaporize into a thought, 
no, a burning-bush’s worth of spidery, up-ratcheting, tender-cling leaves, 
oh if—the list gripped hard by the left hand of one, 
the busyness buried so deep into the puffed-up greenish mind of one,
the hurried mind hovering over its rankings,
the heart—there at the core of the drafting leaves—wet and warm at the 
                                                                                        zero of
the bright mock-stairwaying-up of the posthumous leaves—the heart, 
formulating its alleyways of discovery,
fussing about the integrity of the whole,
the heart trying to make time and place seem small,
sliding its slim tears into the deep wallet of each new event
                                                                  on the list
then checking it off—oh the satisfaction—each check a small kiss,
an echo of the previous one, off off it goes the dry high-ceilinged 
                                                                                  obligation, 
checked-off by the fingertips, by the small gust called done that swipes
the unfinishable’s gold hem aside, revealing
what might have been, peeling away what should ... 
There are flowerpots at their feet.
There is fortune-telling in the air they breathe.
It filters in with its flashlight-beam, its holy-water-tinted air,
down into the open eyes, the lampblack open mouth. 
Oh listen to these words I’m spitting out for you. 
My distance from you makes them louder. 
Are we all waiting for the phone to ring? 
Who should it be? What fountain is expected to
thrash forth mysteries of morning joy? What quail-like giant tail of 
promises, pleiades, psalters, plane-trees, 
what parapets petalling-forth the invisible 
into the world of things,
turning the list into its spatial form at last,
into its archival many-headed, many-legged colony.... 
Oh look at you.
What is it you hold back? What piece of time is it the list 
won’t cover?  You down there, in the theater of 
operations—you, throat of the world—so diacritical—
(are we all waiting for the phone to ring?)—
(what will you say? are you home? are you expected soon?)—
oh wanderer back from break, all your attention focused
—as if the thinking were an oar, this ship the last of some 
original fleet, the captains gone but some of us 
who saw the plan drawn out
still here—who saw the thinking clot-up in the bodies of the greater men,
who saw them sit in silence while the voices in the other room
lit up with passion, itchings, dreams of landings, 
while the solitary ones,
heads in their hands, so still,
the idea barely forming
at the base of that stillness,
the idea like a homesickness starting just to fold and pleat and knot 
                                                                                          itself
out of the manyness—the plan—before it’s thought, 
before it’s a done deal or the name-you’re-known-by—
the men of x, the outcomes of y—before—
the mind still gripped hard by the hands
that would hold the skull even stiller if they could,
that nothing distract, that nothing but the possible be let 
                                                      to filter through—
the possible and then the finely filamented hope, the filigree, 
without the distractions of wonder—
oh tiny golden spore just filtering in to touch the good idea, 
which taking-form begins to twist,
coursing for bottom-footing, palpating for edge-hold, limit, 
now finally about to
rise, about to go into the other room—and yet
not having done so yet, not yet—the
intake—before the credo, before the plan—
right at the homesickness—before this list you hold 
in your exhausted hand. Oh put it down.


The Visible World

I dig my hands into the absolute. The surface
                                                                breaks
into shingled, grassed clusters; lifts.
If I press, pick-in with fingers, pluck,
I can unfold the loam. It is tender. It is a tender
maneuver, hands making and unmaking promises.
Diggers, forgetters. . . . A series of successive single instances . . .
Frames of reference moving . . .
The speed of light, down here, upthrown, in my hands:
bacteria, milky roots, pilgrimages of spores, deranged
                                                                and rippling
mosses. What heat is this in me
that would thaw time, making bits of instance
                                                                  overlap
shovel by shovelful—my present a wind blowing through
                                                                        this culture
slogged and clutched-firm with decisions, overridings,
                                                                    opportunities
taken? . . . If I look carefully, there in my hand, if I
                                                    break it apart without
crumbling: husks, mossy beginnings and endings, ruffled
                                                                          airy loambits,
and the greasy silks of clay crushing the pinerot
                                                                            in . . .
Erasure. Tell me something and then take it back.
Bring this pellucid moment—here on this page now
                                                      as on this patch
of soil, my property—bring it up to the top and out
                                                                              of
sequence. Make it dumb again—won’t you?—what
                                                                    would it
take? Leach the humidities out, the things that will
                                                                        insist on
making meaning. Parch it. It isn’t hard: just take this
                                                                          shovelful
and spread it out, deranged, a vertigo of single
                                                                    clots
in full sun and you can, easy, decivilize it, un-
                                                                hinge it
from its plot. Upthrown like this, I think you can
                                                            eventually
abstract it. Do you wish to?
Disentangled, it grows very very clear.
Even the mud, the sticky lemon-colored clay
hardens and then yields, crumbs.
I can’t say what it is then, but the golden-headed
                                                  hallucination,
mating, forgetting, speckling, inter-
                                          locking,
will begin to be gone from it and then its glamorous
                                                                            veil of
echoes and muddy nostalgias will
be gone. If I touch the slender new rootings they show me
                                                                            how large I
am, look at these fingers—what a pilot—I touch, I press
                                                                        their slowest
electricity. . . . What speed is it at?
What speed am I at here, on my knees, as the sun traverses now
                                                                                and just begins
to touch my back. What speed where my fingers, under the
                                                                              dark oaks,
are suddenly touched, lit up—so white as they move, the ray for
                                                                                        a moment
on them alone in the small wood.
White hands in the black-green glade,
opening the muddy cartoon of the present, taking the tiny roots
                                                                                        of the moss
apart, hired hands, curiosity’s small army, so white
                                                        in these greens—
make your revolution in the invisible temple,
make your temple in the invisible
revolution—I can’t see the errands you run, hands gleaming
                                                            for this instant longer
like tinfoil at the bottom here of the tall
                                      whispering oaks . . .
Listen, Boccioni the futurist says a galloping horse
                                                              has not four
legs (it has twenty)—and “at C there is no sequence
because there is no time”—and since
at lightspeed, etc. (everything is simultaneous): my hands
serrated with desires, shoved into these excavated
                                                                          fates
—mauve, maroons, gutters of flecking golds—
my hands are living in myriad manifestations
                                                      of light. . . .
“All forms of imitation are to be despised.”
“All subjects previously used must be discarded.”
“At last we shall rush rapidly past objectiveness” . . .
Oh enslavement, will you take these hands
                                      and hold them in
for a time longer? Tops of the oaks, do you see my tiny
                                                                      golden hands
pushed, up to the wrists,
into the present? Star I can’t see in daylight, young, light
                                                                    and airy star—
I put the seed in. The beam moves on.