Other people's poems

[Eight of nine lives]

One of my favourites:

Aubade

JANE, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;

Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane, come down the stair.

Each dull blunt wooden stalactite
Of rain creaks, hardened by the light,

Sounding like an overtone
From some lonely world unknown.

But the creaking empty light
Will never harden into sight,

Will never penetrate your brain
With overtones like the blunt rain.

The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden,

Cockscomb flowers that none will pluck,
And wooden flowers that 'gin to cluck.

In the kitchen you must light
Flames as staring, red and white,

As carrots or as turnips shining
Where the cold dawn light lies whining.

Cockscomb hair on the cold wind
Hangs limp, turns the milk's weak mind . . .

Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again!

Dame Edith Sitwell

[chicken]

marlon l. fick:

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Crows

Crows love midwinter mornings
as I do
staggering, black
and shiny--out of their asylum.
Mornings so cold the air is seized
in the impasse
of its bitterness, a white, violet mist
hovering in the absence.

They drop from the naked trees for what remains.
Suet that hangs in a cage,
tethered to a limb.
Too bright, like lacquered boxes.
Too bright the shine on them.
Not yet defined from darkness.

We hope for what we understand,
pain that comes and goes and comes like winter,
in welcomed revelations.
A cardinal blooming on some January thorn.
Doves weeping, eating seeds that rained through cracks.
Sparrows purchased for pennies in Jerusalem
and eaten by the poor. It's what we
learned by repetition, first having, then
not having. Seeing
and not seeing.
Not a force of darkness spinning on beyond our reach.

Jesus says to live like crows.
It's remembering the sermon
as one of them jabs its black beak in the suet.
Don't worry a minute of your life.
Don't gather stores for winter.
Don't plant or harvest.
But the other birds are worried. A blue jay swoops
under a nearby pine shrill with jealousy. And
a sparrow in a leafless redbud is occupied by a mute terror.

In another account by the French explorer, de Creve Coeur,
crows leave a man hanging in a cage with his eyes picked out,
staring out of nothing at the empty horizon.

I'm outside.
I'm shivering.
I begin to not understand the need I have
to gather details.
That rabbis, for example, forbid mentioning of crows in prayer.
Or Pliny thinking crows were absent-minded
and couldn't find their ways back home.
I can't stop shivering.

The search for paradise, for the pain that goes away,
was not a search but a wandering. Haphazard.
And the black roots
so deep in me. The bitterness.
It's staggering.


--Marlon Ohnesorge-Fick <!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->


he's quite good.
and he's my friend.

[madmancmonkey]

marlon l. fick:

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->Crows

Crows love midwinter mornings
as I do
staggering, black
and shiny--out of their asylum.
Mornings so cold the air is seized
in the impasse
of its bitterness, a white, violet mist
hovering in the absence.

They drop from the naked trees for what remains.
Suet that hangs in a cage,
tethered to a limb.
Too bright, like lacquered boxes.
Too bright the shine on them.
Not yet defined from darkness.

We hope for what we understand,
pain that comes and goes and comes like winter,
in welcomed revelations.
A cardinal blooming on some January thorn.
Doves weeping, eating seeds that rained through cracks.
Sparrows purchased for pennies in Jerusalem
and eaten by the poor. It's what we
learned by repetition, first having, then
not having. Seeing
and not seeing.
Not a force of darkness spinning on beyond our reach.

Jesus says to live like crows.
It's remembering the sermon
as one of them jabs its black beak in the suet.
Don't worry a minute of your life.
Don't gather stores for winter.
Don't plant or harvest.
But the other birds are worried. A blue jay swoops
under a nearby pine shrill with jealousy. And
a sparrow in a leafless redbud is occupied by a mute terror.

In another account by the French explorer, de Creve Coeur,
crows leave a man hanging in a cage with his eyes picked out,
staring out of nothing at the empty horizon.

I'm outside.
I'm shivering.
I begin to not understand the need I have
to gather details.
That rabbis, for example, forbid mentioning of crows in prayer.
Or Pliny thinking crows were absent-minded
and couldn't find their ways back home.
I can't stop shivering.

The search for paradise, for the pain that goes away,
was not a search but a wandering. Haphazard.
And the black roots
so deep in me. The bitterness.
It's staggering.


--Marlon Ohnesorge-Fick

he's quite good.
and he's my friend.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

That's a great poem. I was on a 24 mile walk the other day with only the crows in poppy fields for company.

[chicken]

That's a great poem. I was on a 24 mile walk the other day with only the crows in poppy fields for company.

so very glad you liked it. his poems are an under-toe in consciousness; hidden recesses rise and sink with regularity.

i'm too lazy to see if his "Untitled" poem is on the internet, but i promise if you find it you'll be impressed. i have copies of all his published work in my office (as well as numerous manuscripts). soon his first non-fiction book will be published. it's about his experiences teaching graduate literature courses last year at an all female university in north-western Pakistan :huh: yeah. some heavy stuff in it...he's going to cite me for helping with a few different chapters (the one on "unholy writings" is a real mind-bender :blink: )

[Boxguy]

Here's [Untitled]. It's out of Marlon's book Selected Poems. I'd strongly urge everyone to pick up a copy if you can find one. If you do, read "Stick Figure". It's incredible.

<!--quoteo--><div class='quotetop'>QUOTE</div><div class='quotemain'><!--quotec-->[Untitled]

I will be with you,
a common thing you use everyday,
a brush, a necklace,
the favorite stone you hold in your hand
when you're afraid.

I can't be more than this
and I've gone deaf to the world
like an old man whose thoughts
are the white birds asleep in the stones of cathedrals,
like the emptiness inside them.
<!--QuoteEnd--></div><!--QuoteEEnd-->

[chicken]

thanks for posting that boxguy. i adore that poem.

[chicken]

Robert Bly: "The Blinding of Samson"


I used his string of thoughts in a poem I wrote called: "Isaac, revisited" because Isaac, like Samson, was blind later in life (though from different causes).

One more from Robert Bly. In this one he is reading his translation of a poem by a guy named Kabir--who was an Indian poet from a very long time ago. This clip is totally awesome because the musical accompaniment by Armenian brilliance (when "Arto" sings at the end, it's just beautiful!!!!!!).

[chicken]

has anyone ever heard of Billy Collins?

[chicken]

has anyone ever heard of Billy Collins?

yeah, this guy, right?


the same guy who does this?



indeed, a respected poet....and if the constellations come together correctly, i'll be chumming with him this coming fall.

[Boxguy]

indeed, a respected poet....and if the constellations come together correctly, i'll be chumming with him this coming fall.

You're going to be rubbing elbows with a former poet laureate of the US?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!
If I were any more green I would likely be hard to distinguish from the Hulk.

[chicken]

You're going to be rubbing elbows with a former poet laureate of the US?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

Only if a large array of both financial and professional things come together just the right way. Billy charges $15,000. In today's economic atmosphere, it's going to be hard for the uni to come up with that sort of money...and it's not really for the uni! (It's complicated.) I'd also have to get a professional presentation ready to go for an audience of teachers of English, somehow involving what's called the "Millennial Generation" (or perhaps "Gen Y" or "The Fragile Generation" or "The Re-Boomers" or.....) I've some ideas, believe me

On an entirely different note, and specifically regarding that Robert Bly poem I posted earlier: "The Blinding of Samson": it appears I'm going to receive a student paper from that crazy psych of religion class all about that poem. Given the student who is writing it, I'm stupidly excited!
Woot for the goofy job of teaching!

[Noonan McKane]

silhouettes and shadows
watch the revolution
no more free steps to heaven
just walky talky
heaven or hearth
just big heads and drums
full speed and pagan

it's no game

i am barred from the event
i really don't understand the situation

it's no game

documentaries on refugees
couples 'gainst the target
you throw a rock against the road
and it breaks into pieces
draw the blinds on yesterday
and it's all so much scarier
put a bullet in my brain
and it makes all the papers

and it's no game

[chicken]

The Summer Day by Mary Oliver
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean--
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down--
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

i've loved this at first sight.