Love, by Czeslaw Milosz

The same person who wrote the political and psychological Captive Mind also wrote simple, straightforward poems, like this. Milosz, who defected from the Soviet realm,  won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1980.

For the broken-hearted.



Love


Love means to learn to look at yourself

The way one looks at distant things

For you are only one thing among many.

And whoever sees that way heals his heart,

Without knowing it, from various ills—

A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.



Then he wants to use himself and things

So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.

It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:

Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

All in Green Went My Love Riding by e.e. cummings

I believe this was early Cummings, before he stretched and became disjointed. Though Cummings was American, the setting feels British to me, from the time when the island was an expanse of deep-green woods, the land of King Arthur or Robinhood. The four lean hounds are just right.


All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the merry deer ran before.

Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
the swift sweet deer
the red rare deer.

Four red roebuck at a white water
the cruel bugle sang before.

Horn at hip went my love riding
riding the echo down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the level meadows ran before.

Softer be they than slippered sleep
the lean lithe deer
the fleet flown deer.

Four fleet does at a gold valley
the famished arrow sang before.

Bow at belt went my love riding
riding the mountain down
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
the sheer peaks ran before.

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer
the tall tense deer.

Four tall stags at a green mountain
the lucky hunter sang before.

All in green went my love riding
on a great horse of gold
into the silver dawn.

four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
my heart fell dead before.



Pierce me.

Saint Rose Counsels the Washerwomen of Lima

Orlando Ricardo Menes

Some say poems should appeal to the senses, frequently seeing or hearing. This one is about touch. I feel my fingers all around in it. And the only word that doesn't feel right -- feels too contemporary -- is "kids."

Cast off those husbands at the tavern, drag those kids to the
foundling house, & come live in my convent of cleanliness,
sisterhood of thorned habits, thistle sandals, rawhide girdles. Silent
toil will be your rule as you stoke the copper vats, starch wimples
to discipline. Bleach will smother like honey your pruned-up hands.
Your bare knuckles will rasp washboard Te Deums. Want to be
the Bride of Christ? Pain alone can lure his love. The cloistered
coquette learns to flirt by flagellation, wears a goat-hair negligee,
primps with quicklime, red pepper. She distrusts spectacles, demands
caustic benedictions. She has no need of priests in gilded chasubles
or altar boys dancing with silver crowns. Holy is her laundry water
at workday's end, her chapel sooted & clotheslined, her soap
sacramental, lye from Lenten ash.

I feel you speaking.

Hum, by Joshua McKinney

I skim through a lot of poems, and the sounds here made me stop. Blur, were, whir, heard, scales, tell, forked, afloat, tongue, foxglove, work, earth, remote, rote, broken, token, came, kiss, meant, make, matter. The poem reveals an ear. I wouldn't say it hums, exactly. Maybe it huffs. There's some work here.


Hum

When I smelled green through the blur
where its wings were, felt
           the whir of their arc, heard the red
           of its ruby throat-scales, tasted the dart of its forked tongue
                       afloat in the foxglove—my only desire was
to tell you.

                       My weed-work stopped. Hands
in earth, I knelt by the garden wall,
           and suddenly that world seemed remote.

           I called to you, aloud, and the words I spoke
                       were rote, broken, each one an arbitrary token
of the tiny bird that came to kiss the flowers.

                       It was then I knew my exile's full extent.
The phenomenon of pungent sound is brighter—
           sheer iridescent now there then—
           than the hours of thought without flesh. Once, to be
                       at one meant to act, so I have tried to make this
matter.


Published in Boulevard


Hum or whirr here.

The God and the Goat, by Rowan Ricardo Phillips

This poem feels both Christian and pagan. "Deliver me my skin" echoes "deliver me from sin," and the goat takes me to classical mythology. The language is unusual -- subtled as a verb, for example. But it's the sounds and the imagery, like nacre-gnarled and beetle-back sky, that grab me.

The God and the Goat

And then the goat said to the God,
Deliver me my skin. And He
Did. Then the goat said to the God,
Anoint me in my skin again.
—And He did. Then the goat said
To the God, Seal me in my skin.
And He did—. He salved the seams.
And subtled him. And Himself, too.
Call it unrecognizable
Weather: boiling snow sidling
Gilt cloudbanks; a beetle-back sky;
Nacre-gnarled écorchés of ought
And nought air; all caught in the thought
That we were the God and the goat,
Once strangers, now just strange, and bound
By the songs of Heaven and wound
That wing out from our one shared throat.




Baaa

Wedding Toast, by Richard Wilbur

A formal poem for the formal celebration of love. The short third line of each verse holds back so that the fourth line feels like an overflow, creating a sense of abundance -- exactly what the poem celebrates. I love the word smack in the last line. It says taste, kiss, and the smack that love can hit you with.



Wedding Toast


St. John tells how, at Cana's wedding feast,
The water-pots poured wine in such amount
That by his sober count
There were a hundred gallons at the least.

It made no earthly sense, unless to show
How whatsoever love elects to bless
Brims to a sweet excess
That can without depletion overflow.

Which is to say that what love sees is true;
That this world's fullness is not made but found.
Life hungers to abound
And pour its plenty out for such as you.

Now, if your loves will lend an ear to mine,
I toast you both, good son and dear new daughter.
May you not lack for water,
And may that water smack of Cana's wine.

In the beginning was the Word. Write one?

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior, by Carolina Ebeid

What causes so much energy in this poem? It is lithe and sinewy in sound and image. The repetitive "was," "was," "was" creates a hurried feel. The poem moves. And I like the end, which alludes quietly to the book of Genesis.

You Ask Me to Talk About the Interior

It was all roadside flowers & grasses
growing over the cities
was made of wilderness & sky
with God washed out of it
was the foreign prayer-word
it was a list of missing persons
was the solid bronze charging
bull on the famous street
was like the Roman method for making bees
was its taken-down carcass
& its bed of apple branches & thyme
was a new anatomy, a beaten hide,
a skeleton sweetening to glowing fluids,
& the bee born out, & the grist of them born
glistening as coins
it was anthem
was the listening,
the way a searchlight listens over a lake
it was the prayer-word out of your mouth
your thousand-noun request
it goes up up to the florescent weather
was an ivory box,
was hurdle & burn, burning through
the infinite, your overbright comet
was made of stones, made of berries & box tops & eggshells
it was like the word having reached the ear
& the words pollinated the dark, there was darkness there,
like the after-hours inside a library

The Colorado Review

Is anyone home?

I awake possessed by God by Catherine Wagner

The language is fractured but, I think, not meaningless. How is a person to know the grandiose and darting mind of God in the midst of dishtowels and pieces of laundry fuzzing out of each other? What is the great throbbing beating? I don't know, but the whole thing says domestic life in a new way.


I awake possessed by God
and annex the darting mind
to replace it and make it know
flung up in a dishtowel
with a sweater fuzzing out of my skirt

But what should I obey or own
if I swallow my sense and my sword
in a great throbbing beating in my face?



Hello, hello, hello....

Skate

Another one of my own. For Spencer when he was little and long of limb.


Skate

Fling of elbow,
spree of wheee,
festivity
of nerve and knee,
love,
you jubilate,
you clop toward grace
but smack into,
collapse onto,
askew,
the curb.

My specimen,
my bony bird.
You’ve hit perdition
gravel gray.
You flap, you flay,
you feather, flop,
you loud squawk up
and scatter sky.
You beak, you bok,
you rage, I rock
you, spew, I coo to
you, the my

whose lashes clump.
Whose chin fits in my palm.
Whose tear slides
toward my fingertip.
Whose ruin I’ll wrap
in ever arm
until you chirp.
Until you fly.

2007?

Blessing Song by Claire Bateman

Good voice here. Like a professor. But what professor would talk about a history of the blessing? And what is the blessing? The poem moves from thing to thing with energy and something like reverent joy. A long poem worth getting to the end of.



Blessing Song

After, despite, because & through it all
I believe in the blessing, & here transcribe
for my listening audience a brief version
of its history in local planes
& habitations, beginning
not with the evolution
of angels, of which we know nothing,
though we see their failured adaptations roosting
slack-jawed on high-tension wires,
but with the Israelites in the Bible picture
where they forever stoop, reaching
for manna the illustrators must have struggled to imagine
as they sketched something halfway between
cobwebs & wafers: lace doilies, perhaps, or children’s
snowflakes cut from paper just this side
of transparency, easily torn, yet not torn, held
briefly between thumb & finger. From this early
still comparatively crude version we learn
the lightness of blessing as it descends
like an indolence of feathers,
an insulation of down, or the dew
spangling Gideon’s fleece for a sign
in those days when signs are still meaningful
(having not yet exceeded their quota
in the visible world, & thereafter moving
their headquarters into the heart,
a red-letter date perhaps still to come
in the biography of consciousness).
This lightness Brueghel beholds, being the first
of his nation to portray with flecks of paint
a fall of snow so weightless it seems
to lift off from the manger’s circumambient glow.
Even ethically questionable Frank Capra
dreams it & is awarded
“a Class III Citation of technical excellence
for the development of movie snow, a mixture
of foamite, soap & water blown
through a wind machine.” This is also why
you, listeners, taste
of salt, even if it has been
a long time since your tongue has known
yourself or the world that way.
So fine-grained now, the blessing, as if
pulverized, sifting from the pneumatic
chisel of the cathedral’s
stone carver as she shapes hydrocephalic
bubble-headed monsters with thick
protruding tongues, slit ears, &
bony feathered claws to grip
buttress & balustrade where
mother & infant sit enthroned
in dim clouds of prayer.
Note also its ineluctable motility,
as in spring, veils of gold
pollen float on the air, bridal,
sheer as the fragrance
of the sensimilla stalk placed burning
in Bob Marley’s casket. Nothing
exerts more force
than motion of drift through
crack or cranny,
than powder, ash so white it’s
blue, the fall
from the body into the
the body where there is a glory
around each blossom,
there is a nimbus
around the throne, made up of
dust, foam, smoke, all residue born by
the heart’s varied winds:
periodic, constant, local, &
cyclonic. Either the little stories
are coalescing, or the one big story
is breaking down into song so silent
it won’t leave you alone, & starts
like this.


1997

Bless this blog.

Galileo Galilei by William Jay Smith

From the 20th c., here's a mysterious thing. What is the writer thinking? Is it just that the name Galileo and his awakening, changing, robe-draped world bring to the writer's mind these strange, almost apocalyptic, images? Or is Galileo the scientist knocking as a voice of reason against the chaos? Chaos it is, confined to form: a steady beat of trochees, creating a haunting but controlled sound.



Galileo Galilei
Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In the ordinary brain.

Into light the world is turning,
And the clocks are set for six;
And the chimney pots are smoking,
And the golden candlesticks.

Apple trees are bent and breaking,
And the heat is not the sun’s,
And the Minotaur is waking,
And the streets are cattle runs.

Galileo Galilei,
In the flowing, scarlet robe,
While the stars go down the river
With the turning, turning globe.

Kneels before a black Madonna
And the angels cluster round
With their grave, uplifted faces
Which reflect the shaken ground

And the orchard which is burning,
And the hills which take the light;
And the candles which have melted
On the altars of the night.

Galileo Galilei
Comes to knock and knock again
At a small secluded doorway
In the ordinary brain.

(Thanks to my friend Mary H. for telling me about this poem.)

Please knock.

Dear Eagles by Gabe Gudding

Gabe Gudding again. Here in letter form, a sort of riff on the eagle as a symbol of the U.S. The same craziness and fun and wild use of language. I don't share his sentiment here, but I love the way he writes. He could revive poetry, if people read poetry.

Dear Eagles

I am bored by beagles those happy dogs
so indelibly at gates. They’re unlike
the nation’s eagles who bang on gelid gusts
above our fields and shining logs. I am
not, thus, bored by yóu—all
your pleasures gentried, such epaulets
and fuss—and never over are the clawed towings
of fish with your angled feathers, no: Dó call me
an eagle lover, then. You are possibles.

Yet too you that once that were some symbols
of this nation that dealt some blows: you are not now
—nor are you ever always will be again—
ethicals,

your country’s over. And though you’re here still,
you will surely go.

For I have seen few snowmen outlast the snows.

Sincerely,

Gabriel Gudding


(First appeared in The Canary)


Speak.

The Book of Life by Laura Kasischke

This one starts out using internal and off rhyme well but largely drops that until the end, with the near rhyming "coat" and "hope," creating a nice finality. But the end confuses me. Is it the body that is skipping along? If so, how, given that it is a bedraggled thing? Anyway, a fun poem with a lightness.


The Book of Life

Pale and naked without their bodies, the souls
examine the book
in which they hope to find
their names inscribed.

Made of soap. Now. Made
of smoke. Now
made of dew
and hairlessness. And how

primitive, I realize, seeing them, it's been:
The body. Its

silly limbs transporting, through the world, our
windblownness. Our
cloud wherever it went.

Teeth, old-fashioned and enameled, so
easily chipped.
The nose, often
runny, sometimes broken.
Heavy eyelids. Ankle twisted. How

did we bear it as it bore us, all
stuttering and limping, clomping, hungry,
shaggy, horny, and diseased. All

that meat—grossly, morosely—weighted
around a soul:

A simple soul!
Exhausting coat!
Skipping along like hope.



Speak,soul.

A Refusal to Mourn the Death by Fire of a Child in London, by Dylan Thomas

Just three sentences here. The syntax of the first is hard to follow, but logical: "Never until ... shall I ... ." The poem has a primal feel, and I think it is Judaeo-Christian. The last line, to me, says that on some level this is about the fall of man. The tragedy of one is the tragedy of us all.


A Refusal to Mourn ...

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death.
I shall not murder
The mankind of her going with a grave truth
Nor blaspheme down the stations of the breath
With any further
Elegy of innocence and youth.

Deep with the first dead lies London’s daughter,
Robed in the long friends,
The grains beyond age, the dark veins of her mother,
Secret by the unmourning water
Of the riding Thames.
After the first death, there is no other.


Unspeakable

Inversnaid by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Hopkins was modern before there was modern. For me that means he did more suggesting than explaining.

Take the line "A windpuff-bonnet of fawn-froth." Inversnaid describes a waterfall in Scotland. Hopkins could have said "the froth, soft and brown like a fawn and also like a bonnet puffed up by the wind," but how prosaic. The final verse is the weakest and most conventional. I feel sure Hopkins knew.

Inversnaid

This darksome burn, horseback brown,
His rollrock highroad roaring down,
In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam
Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth      
Turns and twindles over the broth
Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,
It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew
Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,
Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,
And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;      
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.


Halloo?

Doing the Loop by Andrea Cohen

The use of "howl" must be a shout backward to Allen Ginsberg. The little snippet of an off-rhyming couplet at the end sounds self-satisfied but also sad. There are no rules. Begin again. ... Another workday. Another meal. Another loss. Another "how?" Sounds like life to me.

Doing the Loop

The rules are made in factories.
The rules are made to be broken.

Broken people see themselves in broken things.
Whole towns of broken people work somehow.

Somehow is not a place.
Yet you get there and wonder: how?

How, repeated, is a kind of howl.
In wilds and towns, how answers how.

How do you begin or end?
There are no rules. Begin again.


Beloit Poetry Journal
Winter 2014/2015
Howl here.

The Flower from which Forgetfulness, by Cynthia Marie Hoffman

For context, "lying-in" refers to childbirth or the rest period afterward. I like the sense of urgency created by the run-on language. The delirium conveyed through the mixing up of "melody" and "lemony" and through the confusion of green sky with grass. A poem that combines heaven and earth, childbirth.

The Flower from which Forgetfulness 

Lie down beneath this tree this is the lying-in
velvety sweet this is the green sky dripping with
trumpets do you hear anything if you hear something
you will not remember it the insect that pricks your
arm flick it away you have much to do here do you
smell something lemony twilight the scent is narcotic
wipe the melody from your mind wipe the lemony
you may feel something but you will forget it don't
bother to scream just push do what the doctor
who is not here tells you to allow the invisible
nurses have you forgotten them already to touch you
these are the plants of the gods the hell's bells
the devil's weed push the baby comes in the grass
someone wraps her in a towel and hands
her to you now ah the trumpets swinging the angels
struggling to keep their lips to the stems, sleepy baby.

Paper Doll Fetus 2015

Persea Books

La la la la leave a note.

And then a darkness

Posting one of my own for kicks. A voice from the heart, mostly iambic. da DA da DA da DA da DA. 


  
And then a darkness

I lost me in the restaurant. Yes.

I lost me in the spicy wings. But no,

before the wings, before the greasy dripping of the wings.

I lost me when you handed me the napkins.

The giving of the napkins made me love you.

The giving and the arching of the eyebrows that said laugh.

The giving and the arching of your eyebrows going gray

and saying laugh, and saying funny, glad, and it can happen, have me,

lean across the booth and kiss, right now,

the one whom love has zapped you with.

I also lost my scarf that night, the silky purple one

with deeper purple fringe I’d had for 20 years.

I lost you too, somehow, that night — no, not that night,

but later. How that mattered. 

I’m 52 and didn’t know that I could be

so deeply purple lost it’s almost black.

I’m 52 and didn’t know that I could die like this,

with a memory of your hand outstretched toward mine and then a darkness.

K.R. 4-2-14
Voices carry.
Leave a comment.

Boy Breaking Glass by Gwendolyn Brooks

This poem is soupy with sound. The "fidgety revenge."  The "metal little man," already hardened. 

The "sloppy amalgamation," which really is an amalgamation of Anglo and Latinate words.

Its perfections outweigh its moments of overstatement. It is urban desperation mixed with erudition.

Boy Breaking Glass 

Whose broken window is a cry of art
(success, that winks aware
as elegance, as a treasonable faith)
is raw: is sonic: is old-eyed première.
Our beautiful flaw and terrible ornament.
Our barbarous and metal little man.

“I shall create! If not a note, a hole.
If not an overture, a desecration.”

Full of pepper and light
and Salt and night and cargoes.

“Don’t go down the plank
if you see there’s no extension.

Each to his grief, each to
his loneliness and fidgety revenge.

Nobody knew where I was and now I am no longer there.”

The only sanity is a cup of tea.
The music is in minors.

Each one other
is having different weather.

“It was you, it was you who threw away my name!
And this is everything I have for me.”

Who has not Congress, lobster, love, luau,
the Regency Room, the Statue of Liberty,
runs. A sloppy amalgamation.
A mistake.
A cliff.
A hymn, a snare, and an exceeding sun.


Who said?

Oh'd to a Goober Pea by Liza Field

A poem of praise about a thing of the earth. A poem that builds beauty out of the wildness of words that are ours.


Pale brown peanut:
Ah, true!
White veins of rivers
mold you in a shape
obscure, odd as earth
how it holds two hands together!

Your sheen is the oiled skin
of a brown man, working.
Your dust, of powdercake dirt;
light within your opaque globe
retains rain in a bloom,
waterfalls and leaves,
the corky gourd of a tree.

Truly, Who finds you
has entered the ball of the Beautiful,
Who stays here, the whole,
one seed of the world.


Published in Mirare, 1995




Take it away.

Darling we've crept through the bluegrass

Little odd love poem. I think of railroad tracks and rusty water towers:



Darling, we've crept through the bluegrass & we've slipped in the waste slurry, we dug breakfast out of dumpsters & we stole fourteen-hundred dollars from the Grace Street Laundromat. I think it's time we made a child, the way we make starlight out of a bent & pin-pocked Coke can.

Mathias Svalina
Fence magazine 2006


Voices. I hear them.

Silver by Walter de la Mare

When it's dark and the clouds are blowing, who hasn't seen the moon "walking the night"? The "s" sounds create a hushed feel. The moveless fish, the silver reeds—they take me outside on a summer night. A lovely oldie from many childhoods.

Silver

Slowly, silently, now the moon
Walks the night in her silver shoon;
This way, and that, she peers, and sees
Silver fruit upon silver trees;
One by one the casements catch
Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;
Couched in his kennel, like a log,
With paws of silver sleeps the dog;
From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep
Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;
A harvest mouse goes scampering by,
With silver claws and a silver eye;
And moveless fish in the water gleam,
By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Pow. Comment.

Child by Sylvia Plath

Everyday words become surprising: ducks, zoo, new, stalk, wrinkle... The final two lines end with the mournful, wailing "ar" sound, apt noises for the sad turn the poem takes. Beautiful.


Child

Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with color and ducks,
The zoo of the new

Whose names you meditate ---
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little

Stalk without wrinkle,
Pool in which images
Should be grand and classical

Not this troublous
Wringing of hands, this dark
Ceiling without a star.


Pow. Leave a note.

No, Popsickle by Gabe Gudding

I hardly know what to say. A case of nonsense and anthropomorphism: The popsicle as a resilient child. The popsicle as a metaphor for not giving up. Maybe Gudding didn't mean that. But I love the sounds and the craziness of it. It's delightful to me.

No, Popsickle

No, popsickle: stay.
Don’t be eaten. Remain in the freezer, the
super market, lodge in the long
far-traveling fridge truck—Be convoyed: indeed
be conveyed for a Dakota
a Missouri—but when the truck arrive
at its depository
—or store—at the end of what hot bridge in the dim forenoon,
stay, little bulb of colored cold,
far in your cozy no-no.
I say chill, be a child, popsickle, refuse.

First appeared in Court Green

To leave a comment, click below.

Blue Tattoo, by Mitchell Metz

Voice seems often lacking in contemporary poetry. Not here. The poem's voice jumps with a hip sweetness and cavorts by linking sounds. I see the speaker in a college town, hanging out in a cluttered coffee shop. His hair's probably hanging down in his eyes.


Blue Tattoo

Thanks for attaching the pic
of the dragon tattoo on your tricep
Downloaded just fine. Can't say I've fashioned
a strong opinion on the tat, except that it looks like a seahorse
Which I suspect —
and I don't know much
about body art, or mythical creatures
for that matter — is not the effect you're shooting for.
Couldn't help but notice, though,
that there seems to be a woman
lurking beneath the beast.
May be wrong. Been wrong before
about girly lurking. But I think I see
some flesh and the strong presence
of no blood & some meat — the meat
that is you, peeking. Definite sinew.
Are you pale, or what? I knew
you were. You told me. White as a wafer.
Didn't figure you'd make it some kind of sacrament
in a new sect. Christ,
you're almost transparent!
White that wanes past itself
cannibalizes into blue. A blue needing. A blue
needing to be eaten by the suggestion of shadow,
of me. Speaking of me
speaking of shadow, I'm, yum, all over
your lack of cleavage. That pretty hint of not much
is about the most feminine thing I've ever not seen.
Your tits are double negatives,
baby, and I'm turned on
by bad logic.
Oh, and those stray curls
that fall from frame's edge to
kiss the rise of your shoulder?
Never used the word tendril before.
Consider this a first. Consider it tender.
They're gray!
Blonde, yeah. But gray, too.
Screw auburn and platinum, henceforth
blondeyeahbutgraytoo's the best color curls
could possibly be. I said best,
which brings us to the show stopper. (Sure,
I understand that your seahorse is the star,
the marquee act in our peek-a-boo drama,
so fierce and manifest and full of intent
blah, blah, blah ...),
but from the wings
a bit player steals the scene.
She's a swan; the luxurious longitude
of your neck's tendon. Bold. Fragile.
Plunging provocatively
to the shadowed grotto, the shallow pocket
where the sternum bolsters throat, that very atrium
of flesh responsible for ... severe over-writing.
Point is,
it got me going.
And thanks for that.
I like the pic. Not bad.

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Ars Poetica, Archibald MacLeish

I love the rhymes, the simplicity. And there's maybe an irony or a paradox here. Despite the last two lines, the poem doesn't just be; it is active with similes, and the whole thing is a metaphor that builds something meaningful: a poem about the art of poems.



Ars Poetica by Archibald MacLeish

A poem should be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,

Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,

Silent as the sleeve-worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—

A poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.


A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs,

Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night-entangled trees,

Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind—

A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.


A poem should be equal to:
Not true.

For all the history of grief
An empty doorway and a maple leaf.

For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea—

A poem should not mean
But be.


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