stonepicnicking_okapi

In honor of Juneteenth!

[I read the annotated version on the Poetry Foundation website and liked the first footnote. The last sentence is especially important to remember: In an interview for Callaloo literary journal, Walker remarked: “I remember hearing a criticism of ‘For My People’ by two white critics whom I admired. They said my ballads either sounded like Paul Laurence Dunbar gone modern or Langston Hughes gone sour. They said some very nasty things about me, all of which I could proceed to ignore, because if one worried about the critics, one would never write.”]

For My People by Margaret Walker [from Poetry 1937]

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs
repeatedly: their dirges and their ditties and their blues
and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an
unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an
unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the
gone years and the now years and the maybe years,
washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending
hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching
dragging along never gaining never reaping never
knowing and never understanding;

( Read more... )

So I am a week behind on my 52 poem challenge. Last week the prompt was to write a poem about a famous person (who is dead) and the focus is on a small incident in their lives. So I chose Rilke and found an anecdote about how he had received a business letter and was composing a response, pacing near the castle where he was staying, and the first line of the first of the Duino Elegies came to him. So that's what I wrote about.


Dear Sir: Regarding a matter which requires your urgent attention... by okapi

The letter arrived in the morning post.
The envelope was dull, the lettering
was careful and upright. The poet sighed.
He slit the shroud, unfolded the dead words,
and read and sighed again. It must be deal with.
Sums would be required. On paper too fine
for the purpose, he began then stopped, stood,
and left, marching from castle to bastions
overlooking the sea, he paced the length,
back and forth, as the strong bora wind blew,
his mind was full of numbers and figures,
back and forth, he paced, back and forth until—
he heard it
on the roar—
“Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels’
hierarchies?”
by nightfall, there would be a birth, a verse
long-awaited as well as a piece
of correspondence, dull, careful, upright
left unanswered on the edge of a desk.


---

And here is the first stanza of the first elegy of the Duino Elegies

from The First Elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke [trans. Stephen Mitchell}

Who, if I cried out, would hear me among the angels' hierarchies?
and even if one of them pressed me suddenly against his heart:
I would be consumed in that overwhelming existence.
For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure,
and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.
Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware
that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;
there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease
when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,
which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.
Don't you know yet?
Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;
perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

Field Guide by Tony Hoagland

Once, in the cool blue middle of a lake,
up to my neck in that most precious element of all,

I found a pale-gray, curled-upwards pigeon feather
floating on the tension of the water

at the very instant when a dragonfly,
like a blue-green iridescent bobby pin,

hovered over it, then lit, and rested.
That’s all.

I mention this in the same way
that I fold the corner of a page

in certain library books,
so that the next reader will know

where to look for the good parts.

-------

My prompt was 'insects' and technically worms aren't insects, but they are in a section of Hamlet with maggots and that's how I came by them. I tried to do a poem in the manner of the one above. The title and references are from that section of Hamlet (Act 4, Scene 3).


we fat all creatures else to fat us by okapi

worms, those that feast on beggar and on king,
Hamlet’s only emperor for diet, his certain convocation

of politic, the ones who supped on Polonius, the ones that baited
hooks so that kings might progress through the guts of beggars,

twice coated, by slime and by scale, these worms
did not note the variable service of fat and lean,

and never once did they shove a fist of too many plastic
wrappers

to the bottom of the bin
and wince

at the crinkling

Birdsong by Matt Merritt

This evening, a call I don’t know,
and will never know, perhaps, drowning
the lisp and whisper of goldcrests
at the edge of the new plantation.

Something hard, metallic, insistent,
but quite distinct from the blackbird,
hammering chinks of light from the dusk
to ward off darkness at this time each night.

Across the street, somebody is yelling
you don’t listen. You never listen,
a door’s half-heartedly slammed,
and a car radio plays to no one,

but still the unseen bird sings on,
that urgency pitched above
and beyond the background clutter.
Its only sense is now. Is this. Is gone.

Prose in a Small Space by Rita Dove

It’s supposed to be prose if it runs on and on, isn’t it? All those words, too many to fall into rank and file, stumbling bareassed drunk onto the field reporting for duty, yessir, spilling out as shamelessly as the glut from a megabillion dollar chemical facility, just the amount of glittering effluvium it takes to transport a little girl across a room, beige carpet thick under her oxfords, curtains blowzy with spring — is that the scent of daffodils drifting in?
( Read more... )

Piano by D. H. Lawrence

Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano, in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.

In spite of myself, the insidious mastery of song
Betrays me back, till the heart of me weeps to belong
To the old Sunday evenings at home, with winter outside
And hymns in the cosy parlour, the tinkling piano our guide.

So now it is vain for the singer to burst into clamour
With the great black piano appassionato. The glamour
Of childish days is upon me, my manhood is cast
Down in the flood of remembrance, I weep like a child for the past.

Wind by Ted Hughes

This house has been far out at sea all night,
The woods crashing through darkness, the booming hills,
Winds stampeding the fields under the window
Floundering black astride and blinding wet
( Read more... )

The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The Singularity by Marie Howe

(after Stephen Hawking)

Do you sometimes want to wake up to the singularity
we once were?

so compact nobody
needed a bed, or food or money—

nobody hiding in the school bathroom
or home alone

pulling open the drawer
where the pills are kept.

For every atom belonging to me as good
Belongs to you. Remember?
There was no Nature. No
them. No tests
to determine if the elephant
grieves her calf or if

the coral reef feels pain. Trashed
oceans don’t speak English or Farsi or French;

would that we could wake up to what we were
—when we were ocean and before that
to when sky was earth, and animal was energy, and rock was
liquid and stars were space and space was not

at all—nothing

before we came to believe humans were so important
before this awful loneliness.

Can molecules recall it?
what once was? before anything happened?

No I, no We, no one. No was
No verb no noun
only a tiny tiny dot brimming with

is is is is is

All everything home

Song by Louise Glück

Leo Cruz makes the most beautiful white bowls;
I think I must get some to you
but how is the question
in these times

He is teaching me
the names of the desert grasses;
I have a book
since to see the grasses is impossible

Leo thinks the things man makes
are more beautiful
than what exists in nature

and I say no.
And Leo says
wait and see.

We make plans
to walk the trails together.
When, I ask him,
when? Never again:
that is what we do not say.

He is teaching me
to live in imagination:

a cold wind
blows as I cross the desert;
I can see his house in the distance;
smoke is coming from the chimney

That is the kiln, I think;
only Leo makes porcelain in the desert

Ah, he says, you are dreaming again

And I say then I’m glad I dream
the fire is still alive