Poetry Corner

Afternoon on a Hill

by Edna St. Vincent Millay

I will be the gladdest thing
Under the sun!
I will touch a hundred flowers
And not pick one.

I will look at cliffs and clouds
With quiet eyes,
Watch the wind bow down the grass,
And the grass rise.

And when lights begin to show
Up from the town,
I will mark which must be mine,
And then start down!

The Poetry Teacher

The university gave me a new, elegant
classroom to teach in. Only one thing,
they said. You can't bring your dog.
It's in my contract, I said. (I had
made sure of that.)

We bargained and I moved to an old
classroom in an old building. Propped
the door open. Kept a bowl of water
in the room. I could hear Ben among
other voices barking, howling in the
distance. Then they would all arrive—
Ben, his pals, maybe an unknown dog
or two, all of them thirsty and happy.
They drank, they flung themselves down
among the students. The students loved
it. They all wrote thirsty, happy poems.

"The Poetry Teacher" by Mary Oliver,
from Dog Songs. © Penguin, 2013

Flying Lessons

We'd hide in those years, Kate and I, behind the last station
in the Bio lab—sneaking down from our dorm room, certain

Sister Andrea didn't know. Smoking Salems, we giggled
above the slant of a copped flashlight shrunk to Lady Chatterly

and John Thomas spirited from the nuns' private library
where we smiled our way by dust cloths and Pledge.

We lived as sheltered vagabonds then, roaming the convent halls
in curlers and bunny slippers, dipping out of sight at the swish

of habit skirts, the click of rosary beads: the bed-check patrol
we sidetracked with puffed-up pillows buried beneath blankets

in the low glow of a Virgin Mary night light. Our days opened
and shut like the hard-backed books we lugged around

in drawstring sacks from class to class, skimming their surfaces
like fledglings dipping at the skin of a lake. Only half mindful

of the lessons electric in the passion of our teachers, half alert
to the gaining weight of our widening minds.

by Bernadette McBride

The Lads in Their Hundreds

The lads in their hundreds to Ludlow come in for the fair,
There's men from the barn and the forge and the mill and the fold,
The lads for the girls and the lads for the liquor are there,
And there with the rest are the lads that will never be old.

There's chaps from the town and the field and the till and the cart,
And many to count are the stalwart, and many the brave,
And many the handsome of face and the handsome of heart,
And few that will carry their looks or their truth to the grave.

I wish one could know them, I wish there were tokens to tell
The fortunate fellows that now you can never discern;
And then one could talk with them friendly and wish them farewell
And watch them depart on the way that they will not return.

But now you may stare as you like and there's nothing to scan;
And brushing your elbow unguessed-at and not to be told
They carry back bright to the coiner the mintage of man,
The lads that will die in their glory and never be old.

Alfred Edward Housman: "A. E. Housman Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England, on March 26, 1859, the eldest of seven children. Despite acclaim as a scholar and a poet in his lifetime, Housman lived as a recluse, rejecting honors and avoiding the public eye. He died in 1936 in Cambridge." See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/631#sthash.xm0wXog3.dpuf

i thank You God for most this amazing

by E. E. Cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)

"i thank You God for most this amazing" by E.E. Cummings,
from 100 Selected Poems. © Grove Press, 1994

Things

What happened is, we grew lonely
living among the things,
so we gave the clock a face,
the chair a back,
the table four stout legs
which will never suffer fatigue.

We fitted our shoes with tongues
as smooth as our own
and hung tongues inside bells
so we could listen
to their emotional language,

and because we loved graceful profiles
the pitcher received a lip,
the bottle a long, slender neck.

Even what was beyond us
was recast in our image;
we gave the country a heart,
the storm an eye,
the cave a mouth
so we could pass into safety.

"Things" by Lisel Mueller, from Alive Together.
© Louisiana State University Press, 1996

Originally posted by Grampy Bobby
Alfred Edward Housman: "A. E. Housman Alfred Edward Housman was born in Fockbury, Worcestershire, England, on March 26, 1859, the eldest of seven children. Despite acclaim as a scholar and a poet in his lifetime, Housman lived as a recluse, rejecting honors and avoiding the public eye. He died in 1936 in Cambridge." See more at: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/631#sthash.xm0wXog3.dpuf

Emily Dickinson (1830-86). Complete Poems. 1924.

Part Two: Nature

XCVII

TO make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.

Weather

Some of my friends claim they could
never live in California. They find
the regular beauty too much like
a postcard with its predictable
tanka.

And, anyway, how do I ever get
anything done with the sun luring
everyone to the first tee
or the pari-mutuel windows,

much less the way the chairs
all seem to lean back under a tree,
a cat ready to curl up on my lap
or at my sandaled feet.

They prefer the bracing rigors
of snow and rain. They write
about its feet and inches, all
they endure to buy an orange
or see a movie as they

picture me, probably, still on
my chaise, their letter falling
from one languid hand onto
the voluptuous lawn.

"Weather" by Ron Koertge, from Fever.
© Red Hen Press, 2006

Anecdotal Note: Resided in Northern California west of Sacramento and travelled
CA, OR and WA extensively for eighteen memorable years. Ron Koertge nails it.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example,'The night is shattered
and the blue stars shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me sometimes, and I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is shattered and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight searches for her as though to go to her.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tried to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. Like my kisses before.
Her void. Her bright body. Her inifinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her. 
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her. 

Pablo Neruda

The Book of A

Raised during the Depression, my stepfather
responded to the economic opportunity
of the 1950s by buying more
and more cheap, secondhand things
meant to transform his life.
I got this for a hundred bucks,
he said, patting the tractor that listed
to one side, or the dump truck that started
with a roar and wouldn't dump.
Spreading their parts out on his tarp,
he'd make the strange whistle
he said he learned from the birds
for a whole morning
before the silence set in.
"Who knows where he picked up
the complete A-Z encyclopedias
embossed in gold and published
in 1921? They were going to take these
to the dump, he said. Night after night
he sat up, determined to understand
everything under the sun
worth knowing, and falling asleep
over the book of A. Meanwhile, as the weeks,
then the months passed, the moon
went on rising over the junk machines
in the tall grass of the only
world my stepfather ever knew,
and nobody wrote to classify
his odd, beautiful whistle, formed,
somehow, in the back of his throat
when a new thing seemed just about to happen
and no words he could say expressed his hope.

"The Book of A" by Wesley McNair, from Talking in the Dark.
© David R. Godine, 1998.

Young

A thousand doors ago,
when I was a lonely kid
in a big house with four
garages and it was summer
as long as I could remember,
I lay on the lawn at night,
clover wrinkling over me,
the wise stars bedding over me,
my mother's window a funnel
of yellow heat running out,
my father's window, half shut,
an eye where sleepers pass,
and the boards of the house
were smooth and white as wax
and probably a million leaves
sailed on their strange stalks
as the crickets ticked together
and I, in my brand new body,
which was not a woman's yet,
told the stars my questions
and thought God could really see
the heat and the painted light,
elbows, knees, dreams, goodnight.

"Young" by Anne Sexton, from The Complete Poems.
© Mariner Books, 1999.

"Tests: No Poison in Chilean Poet Neruda's Remains" SANTIAGO, Chile November 8, 2013 (AP) By LUIS ANDRES HENAO Associated Press

"The four-decade mystery of whether Chilean Nobel Prize-winning poet Pablo Neruda was poisoned was seemingly cleared up on Friday, when forensic test results showed no chemical agents in his bones. But his family and driver were not satisfied and said they'll request more tests. Neruda died under suspicious circumstances in the chaos that followed Chile's 1973 military coup. The official version is that the poet died of cancer. But Neruda's driver and aide has said for years that dictatorship agents injected poison into the poet's stomach while he was bedridden at the Santa Maria clinic in Santiago. His body was exhumed in April to determine the cause of his death.

"No relevant chemical substances have been found that could be linked to Mr. Neruda's death," Patricio Bustos, the head of Chile's medical legal service said as he read the test results of the seven-month investigation by the 15-member forensic team. Bustos said experts found traces of medicine used to treat cancer in Neruda's remains but that there's no forensic evidence to prove that Neruda died from anything else other than a natural cause. The highly-anticipated results didn't satisfy Neruda's family members and friends who said the poet's case remains unsolved.

"The Neruda case doesn't close today," said Chilean Communist Party lawyer Eduardo Contreras. "Today we're going to request more samples. They referred to chemical agents but there are no studies about biological agents. A very important chapter has closed and was done very seriously but this is not over."

Neruda, who won the Nobel prize for literature in 1971, was best known for his love poems. But he was also a leftist politician and diplomat and close friend of socialist President Salvador Allende, who committed suicide rather than surrender to troops during the Sept. 11, 1973, bloody coup led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Neruda, who at the time was 69 and suffered from prostate cancer, was traumatized by the coup and the persecution and killing of his friends. He planned to go into exile, where he would have been an influential voice against the dictatorship.

But a day before he planned to leave, he was taken by ambulance to the Santa Maria clinic, where he was being treated for cancer and other ailments. Officially, Neruda died there on Sept. 23 from natural causes. But suspicions that the dictatorship had a hand in the death have lingered long after Chile returned to a democracy in 1990.

"We're not satisfied with this but it's an objective result and there's still a way to go," said Rodolfo Reyes, one of Neruda's nephews. "A deeper investigation is needed." Luis Andres Henao on Twitter: https://twitter.com/LuisAndresHenao

http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/tests-chemical-agents-chile-poets-remains-20826850

Greenwich

At the naval museum I look at Nelson's uniform, the one
he was wearing the day he was killed, and the bullet's damage
to the blue coat is surprisingly slight.

Just before he died he said thank God I have done my duty.
He must have been a little afraid of not being able to do
the heroic work required of him.

It's a lovely day in late March, the sun and daffodils are out.
We walk to the observatory, straddle the prime meridian,
try to feel our blood flowing back and forth between hemispheres.

There's a lot of laughter, young people clowning around,
adults striking silly poses for photographs. And why not?
One day, won't we all have to be brave?

"Greenwich" by Kirsten Dierking, from Tether.
© Spout Press, 2013.

Baloney

There's a young couple in the parking lot, kissing.
Not just kissing, they look as though they might eat
each other up, kissing, nibbling, biting, mouths wide
open, play fighting like young dogs, wrapped around
each other like snakes. I remember that, sort of, that
hunger, that passionate intensity. And I get a kind of
nostalgic craving for it, in the way that I get a craving,
occasionally, for the food of my childhood. Baloney
on white bread, for instance: one slice of white bread
with mustard or Miracle Whip or ketchup-not
ketchup, one has to draw the line somewhere-and
one slice of baloney. It had a nice symmetry to it, the
circle of baloney on the rectangle of bread. Then you
folded the bread and baloney in the middle and took
a bite out of the very center of the folded side. When
you unfolded the sandwich you had a hole, a circle in
the center of the bread and baloney frame, a window,
a porthole from which you could get a new view of
the world.

"Baloney" by Louis Jenkins, from Tin Flag:
New and Selected Prose Poems, 2013.