Did I Miss Anything?

by Tom Wayman

(From The Astonishing Weight of the Dead, Polestar, 1994)

Nothing. When we realized you weren't here
we sat with our hands folded on our desks
in silence, for the full two hours

Everything. I gave an exam worth
40 per cent of the grade for this term
and assigned some reading due today
on which I'm about to hand out a quiz
worth 50 per cent

Nothing. None of the content of this course
has value or meaning
Take as many days off as you like:
any activities we undertake as a class
I assure you will not matter either to you or me
and are without purpose

Everything. A few minutes after we began last time
a shaft of light descended and an angel
or other heavenly being appeared
and revealed to us what each woman or man must do
to attain divine wisdom in this life and
the hereafter
This is the last time the class will meet
before we disperse to bring this good news to all people
on earth

Nothing. When you are not present
how could something significant occur?

Everything. Contained in this classroom
is a microcosm of human existence
assembled for you to query and examine and ponder
This is not the only place such an opportunity has been
gathered

but it was one place

And you weren't here

[artwork: Andy Goldsworthy, Rain Shadow, 1984]

Meditation from the Yizkor Service

I think continually of those who were truly great,
Who from the womb, remembered the soul's history
Through endless corridors of light where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the spirit clothed from head to foot in song,
And who hoarded from the spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious is never to forget
The delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth;
Never to deny its pleasure in the simple morning light,
Nor its grave evening demand for love;
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
see how these names are feted by the waving grass,
And by the streamers of white cloud,
And whispers of wind in the listening sky;
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire's center.
Born of the sun they travelled a short while toward the sun,
And left the vivid air signed with their honor.


(By Stephen Spender. Reprinted in Gates of Repentance, the standard High Holidays prayerbook for Reform Judaism)

Poetry Thursday

A Hand
Jane Hirshfeld

A hand is not four fingers and a thumb. Nor is it palm and knuckles, not ligaments or the fat's yellow pillow, not tendons, star of the wristbone, meander of veins. A hand is not the thick thatch of its lines with their infinite dramas, nor what it has written, not on the page, not on the ecstatic body. Nor is the hand its meadows of holding, of shaping— not sponge of rising yeast-bread, not rotor pin's smoothness, not ink. The maple's green hands do not cup the proliferant rain. What empties itself falls into the place that is open. A hand turned upward holds only a single, transparent question. Unanswerable, humming like bees, it rises, swarms, departs. via the Academy of American Poets image via JosyDoodle

SpamBot Poetry

I love these. From a spambot message I got today:

Forms of life. In the natural world there are need such a
woman for his wife. But that sting and depending upon the
utterances contained in like a circle of fire, and was,
o king, seen sometimes by the civil powers so this church
seems to have and suras, together with the best soldiers
of will cease to live.' sanjaya continued, 'yuvutsu joy
of the real blazing june! Tell me about it? Assuredly protect
you. Ye srinjayas, entertain in the center of the building,
does not contain it's a cool evening and the creek is very
wet, his works both dogmatists and sceptics appealed,.

Poetry Monday

The Rain
by Robert Creeley

All night the sound had
come back again,
and again falls
this quiet, persistent rain.

What am I to myself
that must be remembered,
insisted upon
so often? Is it

that never the ease,
even the hardness,
of rain falling
will have for me

something other than this,
something not so insistent—
am I to be locked in this
final uneasiness.

Love, if you love me,
lie next to me.
Be for me, like rain,
the getting out

of the tiredness, the fatuousness, the semi-
lust of intentional indifference.
Be wet
with a decent happiness.




[via The Poetry Foundation. Image via realtater]

Poetry Tuesday

Persephone, Falling

by Rita Dove

One narcissus among the ordinary beautiful
flowers, one unlike all the others!  She pulled,
stooped to pull harder—
when, sprung out of the earth
on his glittering terrible
carriage, he claimed his due.
It is finished.  No one heard her.
No one!  She had strayed from the herd.

(Remember: go straight to school.
This is important, stop fooling around!
Don't answer to strangers.  Stick
with your playmates.  Keep your eyes down.)
This is how easily the pit
opens.  This is how one foot sinks into the ground.

[poem via poets.org and the Academy of American Poets. Image via Special Organic Soils]

Poetry Thursday: In the City of Eternal Spring

Since 1991, the International Poetry Festival of Medelln has opened the ground for language and human dignity to blossom, focusing on contemporary poetry from Colombia.

The Festival's web site is one way that I discovered Luz Helena Cordero, a poet of deceptively simple statement who is well represented on the Poetry International web site.

I am currently searching for a copy of her most recent book, Cielo Ausente (Absent Heaven), which is published only in Spanish (Ediciones Sociedad de la Imaginacion, 2001). Any leads from my readers on how I can find her book (or the earlier Óyeme con los Ojos/Hear Me With Your Eyes) would be most appreciated.

Here is one of her works, in Spanish first and then English, from the translation of Nicolas Suescun, whose own writing you can sample here. I've appended some of my own arrogant commentary on aspects of this very good translation...I promise, no words were actually harmed in the close reading of these poems.

FANTASMAS (GHOSTS)
by Luz Helena Cordero V.

Los fantasmas nacen desnudos, como sus dueños,
pero luego se visten con ropas color atardecer
en los ojos de la muchacha que tiembla.
Son títeres que armamos en la infancia,
pedazos de piel, retazos de voces,
crecen como lama detrás de la frente
y nunca nos abandonan.
Son tan personales como la voz o la memoria.
Nadie ha visto un fantasma que no le pertenezca,
que no ame como a sus ojos cerrados ante el espejo.**
Los fantasmas tienen nombre y apellido,
son ciudadanos dentro de nuestros huesos.
Claro que existen. Tienen el rostro de tu miedo.

GHOSTS

Ghosts are born naked, like their owners
but then they dress with twilight-colored clothes*
in the eyes of the trembling girl.
They are puppets we assemble in childhood,
scraps of skin, snippets of voices,
they grow like moss behind our foreheads
and they never abandon us.
They are as personal as voice or memory.
No one has seen a ghost that doesn't belong to them
that does not love as their eyes close in front of the mirror. **
Ghosts have names and surnames,
they are citizens in our bones.
Of course, they exist. They wear the face of your fear.

[Image by Fernando Botero]

*********************************
My nitpicking notes:
* "dueños" might be translated as the sterner word "masters" instead of "owners." And the efficient verb form "atardecer" implies action, either "dusk coming on" or literally "afternoon growing." I might have opted for "but then they dress in clothes the color of dusk" or the simpler "but then they dress in dusky clothes."

** I might have translated this differently, to say "that doesn't love [them] like their own closed eyes before the mirror"

Babel Babel

Last week I picked up a charming reader, poet Marcelo Valdes from Chile, which in turn has inspired me to dust off my Spanish grammar and head south in search of information on a Colombian poet I'd admired, Luz Helena Cordero.

Seeking her, in turn, led me to this excellent blog, El Libro de Isaías, in Colombia.

Perhaps I will actually speak proper Spanish one of these days. One can hope for miracles.

Or one can work around them, thusly.

[image of the Tower of Babel by Hendrick van Cleve]

Shakespeare's Birthday

It's the 443rd birthday (and also deathday) of a remarkable mind.

Also the day Miguel de Cervantes died. Those were years when giants walked the earth.

Here is Sonnet 98, a springtime poem with the chill whiff of mortality from which Shakespeare seldom strayed far. I particularly like the odd use of a colon at the end of this poem; a wonderfully open-ended ending, as if he would go on. I could not find a different version, so I guess this is the punctuation he intended.

SONNET 98

From you have I been absent in the spring,
When proud-pied April dress'd in all his trim
Hath put a spirit of youth in every thing,
That heavy Saturn laugh'd and leap'd with him.
Yet nor the lays of birds nor the sweet smell
Of different flowers in odour and in hue
Could make me any summer's story tell,
Or from their proud lap pluck them where they grew;
Nor did I wonder at the lily's white,
Nor praise the deep vermilion in the rose;
They were but sweet, but figures of delight,
Drawn after you, you pattern of all those.
Yet seem'd it winter still, and, you away,
As with your shadow I with these did play:

Grass
by Kim Su-yŏng

The grass is lying flat.
Fluttering in the east wind that brings rain in its train,
the grass lay flat
and at last it wept.
As the day grew cloudier, it wept even more
and lay flat again.

The grass is lying flat.
It lies flat more quickly than the wind.
It weeps more quickly than the wind.
It rises more quickly than the wind.

The day is cloudy, the grass is lying flat.
It lies low as the ankles
low as the feet.
Though it lies flat later than the wind,
it rises more quickly than the wind
and though it weeps later than the wind,
it laughs more quickly than the wind.
The day is cloudy, the grass's roots are lying flat.


[Translated and copyrighted by Brother Anthony of Taize]

All Souls' Day

The feast of little goblins
is over again. Your own
was a pirate, her small hat
askew. And you
are everywhere
absent, as ever. and I
live without you
just this side
of that door.

A man
in the suburbs
where we went
trick or treating
threw candy from
his second story
window. "Are you
brave? Are you brave?"
He asked
the children.

Of course they said yes.
Of course they couldn't know.

Wordless, I can't
everywhere
wordless
without you.
I never can. Never can
live. I live.

Without you,
a lot of things
make me angry at once.
I can't seem to stay
where I should be, in this
velvet darkness, at the edge
of a safe lawn
on a safe street, waiting
for our daughter to return
with her treats.

When you say you are brave
you get candy. That is still
what we have to believe.

Poetry Thursday

What Kind of a Person

by Yehuda Amichai

"What kind of a person are you," I heard them say to me.
I'm a person with a complex plumbing of the soul,
Sophisticated instruments of feeling and a system
Of controlled memory at the end of the twentieth century,
But with an old body from ancient times
And with a God even older than my body.

I'm a person for the surface of the earth.
Low places, caves and wells
Frighten me. Mountain peaks
And tall buildings scare me.
I'm not like an inserted fork,
Not a cutting knife, not a stuck spoon.

I'm not flat and sly
Like a spatula creeping up from below.
At most I am a heavy and clumsy pestle
Mashing good and bad together
For a little tasteAnd a little fragrance.

Arrows do not direct me. I conduct
My business carefully and quietly
Like a long will that began to be written
The moment I was born.

Now I stand at the side of the street
Weary, leaning on a parking meter.
I can stand here for nothing, free.

I'm not a car, I'm a person,
A man-god, a god-man
Whose days are numbered. Hallelujah.