the frontiers of our uncertain freedom

NO MORE MISTER NICE POEMS. I have to post this one, though.

Too old to carry arms and to fight like others—

they generously assigned to me the inferior role of a chronicler
I record—not knowing for whom—the history of the siege

I have to be precise but I don't know when the invasion began
two hundred years ago in December in autumn perhaps yesterday at dawn
here everybody is losing the sense of time

we were left with the place an attachment to the place
still we keep ruins of temples phantoms of gardens of houses
if we were to lose the ruins we would be left with nothing

I write as I can in the rhythm of unending weeks
monday: storehouses are empty a rat is now a unit of currency
tuesday: the mayor is killed by unknown assailants
wednesday: talks of armistice the enemy interned our envoys
we don’t know where they are being kept i.e. tortured
thursday: after a stormy meeting the majority voted down
the motion of spice merchants on unconditional surrender
friday: the onset of plague saturday: the suicide of
N.N., the most steadfast defender sunday: no water we repulsed
the attack at the eastern gate named the Gate of the Alliance

I know all this is monotonous nobody would care

I avoid comments keep emotions under control describe facts
they say facts only are valued on foreign markets
but with a certain pride I wish to convey to the world
thanks to the war we raised a new species of children
our children don’t like fairy tales they play killing
day and night they dream of soup bread bones
exactly like dogs and cats

in the evening I like to wander in the confines of the City
along the frontiers of our uncertain freedom
I look from above on the multitude of armies on their lights
I listen to the din of drums to barbaric shrieks
it’s incredible that the City is still resisting
the siege has been long the foes must replace each other
they have nothing in common except a desire to destroy us
the Goths the Tartars the Swedes the Emperor’s troops regiments of

Our Lord’s Transfiguration

who could count them
colors of banners change as does the forest on the horizon
from the bird’s delicate yellow in the spring through the green the red

to the winter black

and so in the evening freed from facts I am able to give thought
to bygone far away matters for instance to our
allies overseas I know they feel true compassion
they send us flour sacks of comfort lard and good counsel
without even realizing that we were betrayed by their fathers
our former allies from the time of the second Apocalypse
their sons are not guilty they deserve our gratitude so we are grateful
they have never lived through the eternity of a siege
those marked by misfortune are always alone
Dalai Lama’s defenders Kurds Afghan mountaineers

now as I write these words proponents of compromise
have won a slight advantage over the party of the dauntless
usual shifts of mood our fate is still in the balance

cemeteries grow larger the number of defenders shrinks
but the defense continues and will last to the end
and even if the City falls and one of us survives
he will carry the City inside him on the roads of exile
he will be the City

we look at the face of hunger the face of fire the face of death
and the worst of them all—the face of treason

and only our dreams have not been humiliated

(Warsaw 1982)

—Zbigniew Herbert (1924-1998), "Report from a Besieged City," from Report from a Besieged City, 1983, although dated 1982 in Zbigniew Herbert, The Collected Poems 1956-1998, trans. and ed. Alissa Valles (Harper Collins, 2007), which is the edition of Herbert I own and where I originally read this poem. But this is the Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) translation, which appeared in The New York Review of Books on August 18, 1983.

burning in the open field

It is not uncommon for me to sit on a poem for years and years before posting it, because I collect poems and only have 30(ish) spots per year. I've had this one in the file for long enough that I have it saved in multiple places, but it never does get less evocative or relevant; it's also fascinating to me how different it is from both his earlier and later poetry, while also using language in such a recognizable way. Is Richard Siken in favor with the internet again? I honestly don't care, but I've always liked his poetry, including back when he was a tumblr fandom darling. This is not really a tumblr fandom poem, but it sticks with me.

To have a thought, there must be an object—
the field is empty, sloshed with gold, a hayfield thick
with sunshine. There must be an object so land
a man there, solid on his feet, on solid ground, in
a field fully flooded, enough light to see him clearly,

the light on his skin and bouncing off his skin.
He's easy to desire since there's not much to him,
vague and smeary in his ochers, in his umbers,
burning in the open field. Forget about his insides,
his plumbing and his furnaces, put a thing in his hand

and be done with it. No one wants to know what's
in his head. It should be enough. To make something
beautiful should be enough. It isn't. It should be.
The smear of his head—I paint it out, I paint it in
again. I ask it what it wants. I want to be a cornerstone,

says the head. Let's kill something. Land a man in a
landscape and he'll try to conquer it. Make him
handsome and you're a fascist, make him ugly and
you're saying nothing new. The conqueror suits up
and takes the field, his horse already painted in

beneath him. What do you do with a man like that?
While you are deciding, more men ride in. The hand
sings weapon. The mind says tool. The body swerves
in the service of the mind, which is evidence of
the mind but not actual proof. More conquerors.

They swarm the field and their painted flags unfurl.
Crown yourself with leaves and stake your claim
before something smears up the paint. I turned away
from darkness to see daylight, to see what would
happen. What happened? What does a man want?

Power. The men spread, the thought extends. I paint
them out, I paint them in again. A blur of forces.
Why take more than we need? Because we can.
Deep footprint, it leaves a hole. You'd break your
heart to make it bigger, so why not crack your skull

when the mind swells. A thought bigger than your
own head. Try it. Seriously. Cover more ground.
I thought of myself as a city and I licked my lips.
I thought of myself as a nation and I wrung my hands,
I put a thing in your hand. Will you defend yourself?

From me, I mean. Let’s kill something. The mind
moves forward, the paint layers up: glop glop and
shellac. I shovel the color into our faces, I shovel our
faces into our faces. They look like me. I move them
around. I prefer to blame others, it's easier. King me.

—Richard Siken, "Landscape with a Blur of Conquerors," from War of the Foxes (2015), although I believe it was originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 28, 2014.

ache for your life

I promised y'all some bangers.

I've been taught that bloodstones can cure a snakebite,
can stop the bleeding—most people forgot this
when the war ended. The war ended
depending on which war you mean: those we started,
before those, millennia ago and onward,
those which started me, which I lost and won—
these ever-blooming wounds.
I was built by wage. So I wage love and worse—
always another campaign to march across
a desert night for the cannon flash of your pale skin
settling in a silver lagoon of smoke at your breast.
I dismount my dark horse, bend to you there, deliver you
the hard pull of all my thirsts—
I learned Drink in a country of drought.
We pleasure to hurt, leave marks
the size of stones—each a cabochon polished
by our mouths. I, your lapidary, your lapidary wheel
turning—green mottled red—
the jaspers of our desires.
There are wildflowers in my desert
which take up to twenty years to bloom.
The seeds sleep like geodes beneath hot feldspar sand
until a flash flood bolts the arroyo, lifting them
in its copper current, opens them with memory—
they remember what their god whispered
into their ribs: Wake up and ache for your life.
Where your hands have been are diamonds
on my shoulders, down my back, thighs—
I am your culebra.
I am in the dirt for you.
Your hips are quartz-light and dangerous,
two rose-horned rams ascending a soft desert wash
before the November sky untethers a hundred-year flood—
the desert returned suddenly to its ancient sea.
Arise the wild heliotrope, scorpion weed,
blue phacelia which hold purple the way a throat can hold
the shape of any great hand—
Great hands is what she called mine.
The rain will eventually come, or not.
Until then, we touch our bodies like wounds—
the war never ended and somehow begins again.

—Natalie Diaz, "Postcolonial Love Poem," from Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). I believe this poem was originally published (in a slightly earlier form) in The New Republic on February 19, 2016, and I've had it on my list for a while, possibly even since before the collection won a Pulitzer. Like I said, it's a banger.

home

This year in particular, I can't wrap up poetry month without Mahmoud Darwish. At the beginning of the month, I think there was a part of me that hoped that by the time we got here, he might not feel quite so immediately and desperately relevant—but that's not where we are, and frankly it's not where we've been for all eighteen years that I've been posting poems (and longer). I could have done an entire month of Mahmoud Darwish at basically any point in those eighteen years, even if it feels more acute and immediate right now.

It was also a challenge to decide on a poem, but earlier in the month I committed to this one, and I stand by it—I love this one. That said, you should also (at the least) go read Think of Others and In Jerusalem.

I belong there. I have many memories. I was born as everyone is born.
I have a mother, a house with many windows, brothers, friends, and a prison cell
with a chilly window! I have a wave snatched by seagulls, a panorama of my own.
I have a saturated meadow. In the deep horizon of my word, I have a moon,
a bird’s sustenance, and an immortal olive tree.
I have lived on the land long before swords turned man into prey.
I belong there. When heaven mourns for her mother, I return heaven to her mother.
And I cry so that a returning cloud might carry my tears.
To break the rules, I have learned all the words needed for a trial by blood.
I have learned and dismantled all the words in order to draw from them a
single word: Home.

—Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008), "I Belong There," from Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, translated and edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein (2003).

a kiss or a bullet

So, obviously, I haven't posted a poem in a week. I did have some of the last week already planned out on my spreadsheet, but I haven't had the wherewithal to do the posting itself—this trip has been really wonderful in a lot of ways (leaving aside the couple of days last week when I was super sick), but it's also been absolutely packed, and when I haven't been actively doing something, I have mostly been lying on my hotel bed trying to recoup my energy. We fly home tomorrow, and I might spend the last few days of the month doubling up on poems, but I may also come in a little short, this year. It happens! Sometimes life is a lot!

With all that being said, here is a poem for yesterday, April 22 (which is when I started writing this post). Later today, if I can get the internet to work a little better than it's working right now, I might post a poem in honor of Shakespeare's birth/day day; but for now, this one. Warnings for references to gun violence.

Say Stop.

Keep your lips pressed together
after you say the p:

(soon they'll try
and pry

your breath out—)

―

Whisper it
three times in a row:

Stop Stop Stop

In a hospital bed
like a curled up fish, someone's

gulping at air—

How should you apply
your breath?

—

List all of the people
you would like
to stop.

Who offers love,
who terror—

Write Stop.
Put a period at the end.

Decide if it's a kiss
or a bullet.

—Dana Levin, "Instructions for Stopping," 2017. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 6, 2017, and in Bullets into Bells: Poets and Citizens Respond to Gun Violence in the U.S. (Beacon, 2017). In the notes on the poem, Levin says, "To write this poem, I sat in a room, saying 'stop' over and over in order to hear how it sounded, to feel how it felt in my mouth. Then I wrote it down. Then I added a period, which posed the deciding question."

flowers

Today was a long travel day, and I was going to post something kind of low-key because I am pretty tired. But we're staying with my wonderful friend K, and when I mentioned that it was poetry month and I needed to post something, she sent me this one. Which, you know, well. It sticks with you.

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks
seconds before becoming daisies.
I want to be like those poets who care about the moon.
Palestinians don’t see the moon from jail cells and prisons.
It’s so beautiful, the moon.
They’re so beautiful, the flowers.
I pick flowers for my dead father when I’m sad.
He watches Al Jazeera all day.
I wish Jessica would stop texting me Happy Ramadan.
I know I’m American because when I walk into a room something dies.
Metaphors about death are for poets who think ghosts care about sound.
When I die, I promise to haunt you forever.
One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

—Noor Hindi, "Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People Are Dying," published in Poetry, December 2020.

one small hand

Is it perhaps a little early in the month to be throwing down Naomi Shihab Nye? Maybe. On the other hand, I sure am feeling some type of way about the world, these days, and she's an incredible poet for those feelings—including that time I accidentally went viral on tumblr with Gate A-4. So here's another Nye poem that fucks me up.

        We forget that we are all dead men conversing with dead men.
                                                                                —Jorge Luis Borges

For the first time, on the road north of Tampico,
I felt the life sliding out of me,
a drum in the desert, harder and harder to hear.
I was seven, I lay in the car
watching palm trees swirl a sickening pattern past the glass.
My stomach was a melon split wide inside my skin.

"How do you know if you are going to die?"
I begged my mother.
We had been traveling for days.
With strange confidence she answered,
"When you can no longer make a fist."

Years later I smile to think of that journey,
the borders we must cross separately,
stamped with our unanswerable woes.
I who did not die, who am still living,
still lying in the backseat behind all my questions,
clenching and opening one small hand.

—Naomi Shihab Nye, "Making a Fist" from Grape Leaves: A Century of Arab American Poetry (University of Utah Press, 1988).

the daffodils can go fuck themselves

Starting the war poems early this year.

The daffodils can go fuck themselves.
I'm tired of their crowds, yellow rantings
about the spastic sun that shines and shines
and shines. How are they any different

from me? I, too, have a big messy head
on a fragile stalk. I spin with the wind.
I flower and don't apologize. There's nothing
funny about good weather. Oh, spring again,

the critics nod. They know the old joy,
that wakeful quotidian, the dark plot
of future growing things, each one
labeled Narcissus nobilis or Jennifer Chang.

If I died falling from a helicopter, then
this would be an important poem. Then
the ex-boyfriends would swim to shore
declaiming their knowledge of my bulbous

youth. O, Flower, one said, why aren't you
meat? But I won't be another bashful shank.
The tulips have their nervous joie-de-vivre,
the lilacs their taunt. Fractious petals, stop

interrupting me with your boring beauty.
All the boys are in the field gnawing raw
bones of ambition and calling it ardor. Who
the hell are they? This is a poem about war.

—Jennifer Chang, "Dorothy Wordsworth," 2012. I got this poem from poets.org, which tells me that it was previously published in The Nation and Best American Poetry. I really like this poem. Dorothy Wordsworth deserved better.

where language is concealed

Getting this in just under the wire, tonight. I've never posted any Eavan Boland before—I hadn't even read her before a friend introduced me to her work last year—and she is absolutely fucking incredible.

In my last year in College
I set out
to write an essay on
the Art of Rhetoric. I had yet to find

the country already lost to me
in song and figure as I scribbled down
names for sweet euphony
and safe digression.

And when I came to the word insinuate
I saw that language could writhe and creep
and the lore of snakes
which I had learned as a child not to fear—
because the Saint had sent them out of Ireland—
came nearer.

Chiasmus. Litotes. Periphrasis. Old
indices and agents of persuasion. How
I remember them in that room where
a girl is writing at a desk with
dusk already in
the streets outside. I can see her. I could say to her–

we will live, we have lived
where language is concealed. Is perilous,
We will be—we have been—citizens
of its hiding place. But it is too late

to shut the book of satin phrases,
to refuse to enter
an evening bitter with peat smoke,
where newspaper sellers shout headlines
and friends call out their farewells in
a city of whispers
and interiors where

the dear vowels
Irish Ireland ours are
absorbed into Autumn air,
are out of earshot in the distances
we are stepping into where we never

imagine words such as hate
and territory and the like—unbanished still
as they always would be—wait
and are waiting under
beautiful speech. To strike.

—Eavan Boland (1944-2020), "Writing in a Time of Violence," from In a Time of Violence, 1994.

after every war

I bought a used copy of Poems New and Collected: 1957-1997 by Wisława Szymborska earlier this year. It's wonderful, and I love the translations in the book, but I still found myself coming back to this one, and to the translation I first read at the Poetry Foundation.

After every war
someone has to clean up.
Things won’t
straighten themselves up, after all.

Someone has to push the rubble
to the side of the road,
so the corpse-filled wagons
can pass.

Someone has to get mired
in scum and ashes,
sofa springs,
splintered glass,
and bloody rags.

Someone has to drag in a girder
to prop up a wall.
Someone has to glaze a window,
rehang a door.

Photogenic it’s not,
and takes years.
All the cameras have left
for another war.

We’ll need the bridges back,
and new railway stations.
Sleeves will go ragged
from rolling them up.

Someone, broom in hand,
still recalls the way it was.
Someone else listens
and nods with unsevered head.
But already there are those nearby
starting to mill about
who will find it dull.

From out of the bushes
sometimes someone still unearths
rusted-out arguments
and carries them to the garbage pile.

Those who knew
what was going on here
must make way for
those who know little.
And less than little.
And finally as little as nothing.

In the grass that has overgrown
causes and effects,
someone must be stretched out
blade of grass in his mouth
gazing at the clouds.

—Wisława Szymborska (1923-2012), "The End and the Beginning" from Miracle Fair: Selected poems of Wisława Szymborska, translated by Joanna Trzeciak, 2001.

what stories

The thing about war poetry is that sometimes it's just kind of emotionally necessary. This poem is definitely a punch in the gut, and I love it—it also seems like the right kind of poem to post on a night like tonight, when the rain is pounding against my windows (as it has been on and off all day), and I mainly want to crawl into bed and stay there forever.

When my older brother
came back from war
he had on his forehead a little silver star
and under the star
an abyss

a splinter of shrapnel
hit him at Verdun
or perhaps at Grünwald
(he’d forgotten the details)

he used to talk much
in many languages
but he liked most of all
the language of history

until losing breath
he commanded his dead pals to run
Roland Kowaski Hannibal

he shouted
that this was the last crusade
that Carthage soon would fall
and then sobbing confessed
that Napoleon did not like him

we looked at him
getting paler and paler
abandoned by his senses
he turned slowly into a monument

into musical shells of ears
entered a stone forest
and the skin of his face
was secured
with the blind dry
buttons of eyes

nothing was left him
but touch

what stories
he told with his hands
in the right he had romances
in the left soldier’s memories

they took my brother
and carried him out of town
he returns every fall
slim and very quiet
he does not want to come in
he knocks at the window for me

we walk together in the streets
and he recites to me
improbable tales
touching my face
with blind fingers of rain

—Zbigniew Herbert (1924–1998), "The Rain," translated by Czeslow Milosz (1911-2004), from Selected Poems of Zbigniew Herbert, edited and translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott (1968).

when day is gone and night is come

My quarantine Dorothy Dunnett book club finished reading A Game of Kings yesterday and started Queens' Play today, so here's some good old classic Robbie Burns, in honor of Scotland (and the OT3 I believe in most strongly in the Lymond Chronicles: Francis/Scotland/Naps).

It was a' for our rightful king
       That we left fair Scotland's strand;
It was a' for our rightful king
       We e'er saw Irish land,
              My dear,
       We e'er saw Irish land.

Now a' is done that men can do,
       And a' is done in vain!
My love, and native land, fareweel!
       For I maun cross the main,
              My dear,
       For I maun cross the main.

He turn'd him right and round about,
       Upon the Irish shore,
He gave his bridle-reins a shake,
       With, Adieu for evermore,
              My dear!
       And adieu for evermore!

The soldier frae the war returns,
       And the merchant frae the main.
But I hae parted frae my love,
       Never to meet again,
              My dear,
       Never to meet again.

When day is gone and night is come,
       And a' folk bound to sleep,
I think on him that's far awa
       The lee-lang night, and weep,
              My dear,
       The lee-lang night, and weep.

—Robert Burns (1759–1796), "It was a' for our Rightful King." According to a very small amount of Googling, likely originally published in 1796 anonymously, and "supposed to be spoken by a Jacobite" (I mean, yes). This poem reportedly provides "an interesting example of the use which Burns often made of earlier Scottish songs and ballads and is based on the ballad of Mallie Stewart." I am not a Burns expert in any way, but this seems plausible.

on the day the world ends

Today is April 1, which seems pretty bizarre since time no longer has any meaning. Nevertheless, it's a beautiful spring day here in New York City, and it's the first day of National Poetry Month. For anybody new (is there anybody new? after thirteen years that seems sort of doubtful, but you're very welcome here), that means I try to post a poem a day for the month of April. I almost never manage all thirty days, but I do my best; I also try not to repeat poems I've posted before, except in special circumstances.

I think the challenge, in this year of global pandemic, is going to be variety—I am sure I will be posting some depressing poems, war poems and grief poems and loss poems, and probably quite a few poems about finding joy in small things and perseverance and triumphing against the odds. It just seems...likely. But I'll try to shake it up a little, as much as one can when living in a fairly constant state of intense anxiety. The good news, at least for me, is that I find poetry to be enormously helpful when dealing with complex emotions and hard times.

I've been doing this since 2007, when I was 21 and a senior in college. This April I turn 35, and it's kind of incredible to look back on all these years of Aprils as a chronicle of my life and the world I've lived in and what's changed and what's stayed the same; a lot of it is pretty crappy, but a lot of it is pretty beautiful, too. I don't mean to make it a bigger thing than it is, but I feel very aware, this year in particular, of what it can mean to keep that kind of record. I guess this is my quarantine journal, in its own way.

Let's start, this year, with Czeslaw Milosz:

On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
       
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.

And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.

Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

Warsaw, 1944

—Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004), "A Song on the End of the World," translated by Anthony Milosz, and in this case from The Collected Poems: 1931-1987 by Czeslaw Milosz (Ecco Press, 1988).

to reach the limits of ourselves

I went to see Cradle Will Rock at Classic Stage Company tonight (the first of three shows I am seeing this week). It was an amazing production, but I totally didn't realize how well I still knew the show from my obsession with the 1999 movie and the Patti Lupone recording of the musical (I know it...really well?!). Anyway, there are a shortage of poems about unions and labor organizing and the Federal Theatre Project. But I've been sitting on this poem since the beginning of the month, and although it's not directly related, it seems appropriate to me, in a sort of two-steps-sideways kind of way. 

I lived in the first century of world wars.

Most mornings I would be more or less insane,

The newspapers would arrive with their careless stories,

The news would pour out of various devices

Interrupted by attempts to sell products to the unseen.

I would call my friends on other devices;

They would be more or less mad for similar reasons.

Slowly I would get to pen and paper,

Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.

In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,

Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,

Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.

As the lights darkened, as the lights of night brightened,

We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,

To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile

Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,

Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means

To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,

To let go the means, to wake.

I lived in the first century of these wars.

—Muriel Rukeyser, "Poem" from The Speed of Darkness, 1968. With thanks to N., who brought this poem to my attention.

five ways to kill a man

I collect war poetry. It's not really intentional, it's just a thing I do. I collect a lot of different kinds of poetry, to be fair—in the back of my mind I am always thinking "What will I post next April?"—but war poetry is one of my major categories. War poetry gets under my skin.

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man:
you can make him carry a plank of wood
to the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this
properly you require a crowd of people
wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak
to dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one
man to hammer the nails home.

Or you can take a length of steel,
shaped and chased in a traditional way,
and attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears.
But for this you need white horses,
English trees, men with bows and arrows,
at least two flags, a prince and a
castle to hold your banquet in.

Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind
allows, blow gas at him. But then you need
a mile of mud sliced through with ditches,
not to mention black boots, bomb craters,
more mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs
and some round hats made of steel.

In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly
miles above your victim and dispose of him by
pressing one small switch. All you then
require is an ocean to separate you, two
systems of government, a nation's scientists,
several factories, a psychopath and
land that no one needs for several years.

These are, as I began, cumbersome ways
to kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat
is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle
of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

—Edwin Brock (1927-1997), "Five Ways to Kill a Man," 1972. In this case, from Five Ways to Kill a Man: New and Selected Poems (Enitharmon, 1997), though also, reportedly, heavily anthologized. I learned when looking up the poem that Brock wrote it after hearing Britten's War Requiem for the first time, which is not a huge surprise to me, somehow.

each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen

Nobody can convince me that this is not a poem about Steve Rogers.

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off our heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you'll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you'll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you'll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

—Anne Sexton (1928-1974), "Courage" from The Awful Rowing Toward God (Houghton Mifflin, 1975).

I mean, just saying.

and when the sun rises we are afraid

Posting poetry this week has been difficult. On the one hand, I find great solace in poetry, especially in difficult times; on the other hand, this week I have wanted the poems I post to say more than I think they ever really can. It's times like these that I wish I wrote my own poetry, and am simultaneously very glad that I don't; I'm not a very big fan of feeling like I'm living in a historical moment, or a dystopia, or the apocalypse. (And I really wish I was all-the-way kidding about any of those things.) The point is, poetry is hard right now. I wish I had a poem that encapsulated all of the things I want to say. In lieu of that, however, I figure erring on the side of Audre Lorde is probably better than erring on the side of Percy Shelley.

For those of us who live at the shoreline
standing upon the constant edges of decision
crucial and alone
for those of us who cannot indulge
the passing dreams of choice
who love in doorways coming and going
in the hours between dawns
looking inward and outward
at once before and after
seeking a now that can breed
futures
like bread in our children's mouths
so their dreams will not reflect
the death of ours:

For those of us
who were imprinted with fear
like a faint line in the center of our foreheads
learning to be afraid with our mother's milk
for by this weapon
this illusion of some safety to be found
the heavy-footed hoped to silence us
For all of us
this instant and this triumph
We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid
it might not remain
when the sun sets we are afraid
it might not rise in the morning
when our stomachs are full we are afraid
of indigestion
when our stomachs are empty we are afraid
we may never eat again
when we are loved we are afraid
love will vanish
when we are alone we are afraid
love will never return
and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid

So it is better to speak
remembering
we were never meant to survive

—Audre Lorde (1934-1992), "A Litany for Survival" from The Black Unicorn, 1976.

follow, poet, follow right

There are some things about poetry month that are really inevitable: like, at some point I am going to post some Auden. The end of this month has actually been inscribed in my spreadsheet since sometime in March; but picking which Auden poem to post can be a challenge. This one is more well-known than some of my usual selections, and it is an elegy to another poet, which is a kind of poetry to which I am particularly attached. I really, really love this poem.

I

He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

II

You were silly like us; your gift survived it all:
The parish of rich women, physical decay,
Yourself. Mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.
Now Ireland has her madness and her weather still,
For poetry makes nothing happen: it survives
In the valley of its making where executives
Would never want to tamper, flows on south
From ranches of isolation and the busy griefs,
Raw towns that we believe and die in; it survives,
A way of happening, a mouth.

III

Earth, receive an honoured guest:
William Yeats is laid to rest.
Let the Irish vessel lie
Emptied of its poetry.

In the nightmare of the dark
All the dogs of Europe bark,
And the living nations wait,
Each sequestered in its hate;

Intellectual disgrace
Stares from every human face,
And the seas of pity lie
Locked and frozen in each eye.

Follow, poet, follow right
To the bottom of the night,
With your unconstraining voice
Still persuade us to rejoice;

With the farming of a verse
Make a vineyard of the curse,
Sing of human unsuccess
In a rapture of distress;

In the deserts of the heart
Let the healing fountain start,
In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

—W. H. Auden, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats (d. Jan. 1939)," February 1939, from Another Time, 1940.

The things I love about this poem are legion, but here are a few of them: I love that it is exemplary of Auden's extraordinary poetic competence (pace Christopher Isherwood), and that it is both very Auden and very Yeats -- and that Auden, in tribute to Yeats, writes like both of them; I love that it is about Yeats, on the eve of WWII; I love that it's an elegy, but also very ironic; I love that even though it's ironic, it also means what it says; I love that, like Yeats and sometimes -- although not always -- like Wystan, it believes in the power of poetry to stand tall in the face of darkness.

easing the spring

Variations on a theme: war poetry of 1942, continued. This one is Dira's fault, but also a classic, and also pretty extraordinary. I think I might just let it speak for itself; I am thinking I might get offline for a while, and go sit on my couch under the open window and read.

To-day we have naming of parts. Yesterday,
We had daily cleaning. And to-morrow morning,
We shall have what to do after firing. But to-day,
To-day we have naming of parts. Japonica
Glistens like coral in all of the neighboring gardens,
     And to-day we have naming of parts.

This is the lower sling swivel. And this
Is the upper sling swivel, whose use you will see,
When you are given your slings. And this is the piling swivel,
Which in your case you have not got. The branches
Hold in the gardens their silent, eloquent gestures,
     Which in our case we have not got.

This is the safety-catch, which is always released
With an easy flick of the thumb. And please do not let me
See anyone using his finger. You can do it quite easy
If you have any strength in your thumb. The blossoms
Are fragile and motionless, never letting anyone see
     Any of them using their finger.

And this you can see is the bolt. The purpose of this
Is to open the breech, as you see. We can slide it
Rapidly backwards and forwards: we call this
Easing the spring. And rapidly backwards and forwards
The early bees are assaulting and fumbling the flowers:
     They call it easing the Spring.

They call it easing the Spring: it is perfectly easy
If you have any strength in your thumb: like the bolt,
And the breech, and the cocking-piece, and the point of balance,
Which in our case we have not got; and the almond-blossom
Silent in all of the gardens and the bees going backwards and forwards,
     For to-day we have naming of parts.

—Henry Reed (1914-1986), "Naming of Parts," New Statesman and Nation 24, no. 598 (8 August 1942): 92. From Lessons of the War.

though the world explode

This is the poem I have been holding in reserve for a day when I have lots of feelings that do not easily align themselves with poetry. Although actually this poem is totally relevant today, because I have wonderful friends who take really good care of me when I am totally insane and on the wrong drugs. In truth this is a great poem, and I really appreciate a fandom that is as long-lasting and literary as this one.

Here dwell together still two men of note
Who never lived and so can never die:
How very near they seem, yet how remote
That age before the world went all awry.
But still the game’s afoot for those with ears
Attuned to catch the distant view-halloo:
England is England yet, for all our fears—
Only those things the heart believes are true.

A yellow fog swirls past the window-pane
As night descends upon this fabled street:
A lonely hansom splashes through the rain,
The ghostly gas lamps fail at twenty feet.
Here, though the world explode, these two survive,
And it is always eighteen ninety-five.

—Vincent Starrett (1886–1974), "221B," 1942.

So actually I have two other things to say about this poem: first, it is a sonnet, and I really love sonnets. Second, I didn't know the date of this poem until I looked it up to make this post, and I just -- it's a war poem. It's a war poem about Sherlock Holmes fandom, and nostalgia, and how stories survive, and about protecting ourselves from the terrors of the world with stories, and yes, there are some potentially problematic things about all of that (also Starrett was an American, which seems kind of strange to me in the context of this poem, despite being an American myself), but nevertheless: Holmes and Watson, always, against all odds.