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?