Posts tagged poetry
“thinking of his jaywalking ticket while boarding a plane at sfo,” by dilruba ahmed. with commentary from rigoberto gonzalez.
I
The calendar is full but the future is blank.
The wires hum the folk-tune of some forgotten land.
Snow-fall on the lead-still sea. Shadows
scrabble on the pier.
II
In the middle of life, death comes
to take your measurements. The visit
is forgotten and life goes on. But the suit
is being sewn on the sly.
joseph brodsky, BAMF.
indeed. how can one resist pasting a poem beneath this picture?
“Belfast Tune”
Here’s a girl from a dangerous town
She crops her dark hair short
so that less of her has to frown
when someone gets hurt.
She folds her memories like a parachute.
Dropped, she collects the peat
and cooks her veggies at home: they shoot
here where they eat.
Ah, there’s more sky in these parts than, say,
ground. Hence her voice’s pitch,
and her stare stains your retina like a gray
bulb when you switch
hemispheres, and her knee-length quilt
skirt’s cut to catch the squall,
I dream of her either loved or killed
because the town’s too small.
yusef komunyakaa.
i read william shakespeare’s sonnet 140, because it is shakespeare, and it is my heart.
read the poem here.
if you’ve got the key
then i’ve got the door
let’s do what we did
when we did it before
if you’ve got the time
i’ve got the way
let’s do what we did
when we did it all day
you get the glass
i’ve got the wine
we’ll do what we did
when we did it overtime
if you’ve got the dough
then i’ve got the heat
we can use my oven
til it’s warm and sweet
i know i’m bold
coming on like this
but the good things in life
are too good to be missed
now time is money
and money is sweet
if you’re busy baby
we can do it on our feet
we can do it on the floor
we can do it on the stair
we can do it on the couch
we can do it in the air
we can do it in the grass
and in case we get an itch
i can scratch it with my left hand
cause i’m really quite a witch
if we do it once a month
we can do it in time
if we do it once a week
we can do it in rhyme
if we do it every day
we can do it everyway
we can do it like we did it
when we did it
that day
From commissars of daylight
Love cannot make us free.
Nights of ungracious darkness
Hang over you and me.
We lie awake together
And hear the clocks strike three.
Our loving cannot exile
The felons but and if.
Yet, being undivided,
Some ways we can contrive
To hold off those besiegers
Who batter round our life:
The thieves of our completeness
Who steal us stone by stone,
The patronage that scowls upon
Our need to be alone,
And all the clever people
Who want us for their own.
The telephone is ringing
And planes and trains depart.
The cocktail party’s forming,
The cruise about to start.
To stay behind is fatal—
Act now, the time is short.
If we refuse the summons
And stand at last alone,
We walk, intact and certain,
As man and woman grown
In the deserted playground
When all the rest have gone.
- philip sidney, sonnet 19, astrophel and stella. i think of wyatt’s character in his poems as a level-headed, essentially sober man with a great talent for love, and the voice of shakespeare’s sonnets as belonging to a ferociously clever, infinitely subtle imagination residing in an sensible exterior of broadcloth and low heels.
of course, the documented philip sidney was a charming, brilliant renaissance man, and he doesn’t write these poems to conceal his better qualities. but astrophil is kind of a windbag, if a talented one. the sidney we eventually come to know is the man who will eventually die to save a fellow soldier on a cold battlefield; perhaps astrophil’s high opinion of himself only seems funny when measured against the adult reality.
shakespeare, sonnet 34. my best-loved, hard as it is to choose. others have more ambitious conceits and dazzling footwork, but this one has such mood and verve. “‘tis not enough that through the cloud thou break / to dry the rain on my storm-beaten face / for no man well of such a salve can speak / that heals the wound, and cures not the disgrace:” wah.
