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.
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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.

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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

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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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