Louise Bogan

 

Epitaph for a Romantic Woman

She has attained the permanence 

She dreamed of, where old stones lie sunning. 
Untended stalks blow over her 
Even and swift, like young men running. 

Always in the heart she loved 
Others had lived, -- she heard their laughter. 
She lies where none has lain before, 
Where certainly none will follow after.

Louise Bogan

Men Loved Wholly Beyond Wisdom

Men loved wholly beyond wisdom 
Have the staff without the banner. 
Like a fire in a dry thicket 
Rising within women's eyes 
Is the love men must return. 
Heart, so subtle now, and trembling, 
What a marvel to be wise., 
To love never in this manner! 
To be quiet in the fern 
Like a thing gone dead and still, 
Listening to the prisoned cricket 
Shake its terrible dissembling 
Music in the granite hill.

Louise Bogan

Last Hill In A Vista

Come, let us tell the weeds in ditches
How we are poor, who once had riches,
And lie out in the sparse and sodden
Pastures that the cows have trodden,
The while an autumn night seals down
The comforts of the wooden town.

Come, let us counsel some cold stranger
How we sought safety, but loved danger.
So, with stiff walls about us, we
Chose this more fragile boundary:
Hills, where light poplars, the firm oak,
Loosen into a little smoke.

Louise Bogan

Several Voices Out of a Cloud

Come, drunks and drug-takers; come, perverts unnerved! 

Receive the laurel, given, though late, on merit, to whom

     and wherever deserved.

 

Parochial punks, trimmers, nice people, joiners true-blue,

Get the hell out of the way of the laurel. It is deathless

     And it isn't for you.  

William Butler Yeats

 

In Memory of Eva Gore-Booth and Con Markievicz

The light of evening, Lissadell,

Great windows open to the south,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

But a raving autumn shears

Blossom from the summer's wreath;

The older is condemned to death,

Pardoned, drags out lonely years

Conspiring among the ignorant.

I know not what the younger dreams –

Some vague Utopia – and she seems,

When withered old and skeleton-gaunt,

An image of such politics.

Many a time I think to seek

One or the other out and speak

Of that old Georgian mansion, mix

Pictures of the mind, recall

That table and the talk of youth,

Two girls in silk kimonos, both

Beautiful, one a gazelle.

Dear shadows, now you know it all,

All the folly of a fight

With a common wrong or right.

The innocent and the beautiful

Have no enemy but time;

Arise and bid me strike a match

And strike another till time catch;

Should the conflagration climb,

Run till all the sages know.

We the great gazebo built,

They convicted us of guilt;

Bid me strike a match and blow.

Gwendolyn Brooks

 

To the Young Who Want to Die

Sit down. Inhale. Exhale.

The gun will wait. The lake will wait.

The tall gall in the small seductive vial

will wait will wait:

will wait a week: will wait through April.

You do not have to die this certain day.

Death will abide, will pamper your postponement.

I assure you death will wait. Death has

a lot of time. Death can

attend to you tomorrow. Or next week. Death is

just down the street; is most obliging neighbor;

can meet you any moment.

You need not die today.

Stay here–through pout or pain or peskyness.

Stay here. See what the news is going to be tomorrow.

Graves grow no green that you can use.

Remember, green’s your color. You are Spring.

Amiri Baraka

Snake Eyes 

  

That force is lost 

which shaped me, spent 

in its image, battered, an old brown thing 

swept off the streets 

where it sucked its 

gentle living. 

                        And what is meat 

to do, that is driven to its end 

by words? The frailest gestures grown 

like skirts around breathing. 

                                                        We take 

unholy risks to prove 

we are what we cannot be. For instance,  

  

I am not even crazy. 

William Butler Yeats

Crazy Jane talks with the Bishop

I met the Bishop on the road 

And much said he and I. 
'Those breasts are flat and fallen now, 
Those veins must soon be dry; 
Live in a heavenly mansion, 
Not in some foul sty.' 

'Fair and foul are near of kin, 
And fair needs foul,' I cried. 
'My friends are gone, but that's a truth 
Nor grave nor bed denied, 
Learned in bodily lowliness 
And in the heart's pride. 

'A woman can be proud and stiff 
When on love intent; 
But Love has pitched his mansion in 
The place of excrement; 
For nothing can be sole or whole 
That has not been rent.'

William Butler Yeats

An Irish Airman Forsees his Death

I know that I shall meet my fate 
Somewhere among the clouds above; 
Those that I fight I do not hate, 
Those that I guard I do not love; 
My county is Kiltartan Cross, 
My countrymen Kiltartan's poor, 
No likely end could bring them loss 
Or leave them happier than before. 
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight, 
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds, 
A lonely impulse of delight 
Drove to this tumult in the clouds; 
I balanced all, brought all to mind, 
The years to come seemed waste of breath, 
A waste of breath the years behind 
In balance with this life, this death.

William Butler Yeats

 

Sailing To Byzantium

I 
That is no country for old men. The young 
In one another's arms, birds in the trees 
---Those dying generations---at their song, 
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas, 
Fish, flesh, or fowl commend all summer long 
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies. 
Caught in that sensual music all neglect 
Monuments of unaging intellect. 

II 
An aged man is but a paltry thing, 
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless 
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing 
For every tatter in its mortal dress, 
Nor is there singing school but studying 
Monuments of its own magnificence; 
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come 
To the holy city of Byzantium. 

III 
O sages standing in God's holy fire 
As in the gold mosaic of a wall, 
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre, 
And be the singing-masters of my soul. 
Consume my heart away; sick with desire 
And fastened to a dying animal 
It knows not what it is; and gather me 
Into the artifice of eternity. 

IV 
Once out of nature I shall never take 
My bodily form from any natural thing, 
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make 
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling 
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; 
Or set upon a golden bough to sing 
To lords and ladies of Byzantium 
Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

William Butler Yeats

                                               William Blake

The Second Coming

TURNING and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, 
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere 
The ceremony of innocence is drowned; 
The best lack all conviction, while the worst 
Are full of passionate intensity. 
Surely some revelation is at hand; 
Surely the Second Coming is at hand. 
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out 
When a vast image out of i{Spiritus Mundi} 
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert 
A shape with lion body and the head of a man, 
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun, 
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it 
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds. 
The darkness drops again; but now I know 
That twenty centuries of stony sleep 
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, 
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last, 
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Seamus Heaney

Anything Can Happen 

  

Anything can happen. You know how Jupiter 

Will mostly wait for clouds to gather head 

Before he hurls the lightning? Well, just now 

He galloped his thunder cart and his horses 

  

Across a clear blue sky. It shook the earth 

And the clogged underearth, the River Styx, 

The winding streams, the Atlantic shore itself. 

Anything can happen, the tallest towers 

  

Be overturned, those in high places daunted, 

Those overlooked regarded. Stropped-beak Fortune 

Swoops, making the air gasp, tearing the crest off one, 

Setting it down bleeding on the next. 

  

Ground gives. The heaven’s weight 

Lifts up off Atlas like a kettle-lid. 

Capstones shift, nothing resettles right. 

Telluric ash and fire-spores boil away. 

John Wieners

You Talk of Going but Don’t Even Have a Suitcase

 

I will be an old man sometime

And live in a dark room somewhere.

 

I will think of this night someplace

the rain falling on stone.

 

There will be no one near

no whisper on the street

 

only this song of old yearning

and the longing to be young

 

with you together on some street.

 

Now is the time for retreat,

This is the last chance.

 

This is not the last chance.

Why only yesterday I lay drugged

on the dark bed while they came

and went as the wind

 

and they shall come again

and bear me down into that pit

there is no returning from.

 

Old age, disaster, doom.

 

It shall be as this room

With you by the sink, pinching your face

 

in the mirror.

Time is as a river

 

and I shall forget this night,

its joy.

 

You shall disappear down the road

and I shall moan your name

 

in the pillow, while candles burn outside

in windows of strange houses

to mark our fame. 

Seamus Heaney

Requiem for the Croppies

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley...
No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day: 
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry, 
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.

Seamus Heaney

Bogland

                for T. P. Flanagan 

We have no prairies 
To slice a big sun at evening-- 
Everywhere the eye concedes to 
Encrouching horizon, 

Is wooed into the cyclops' eye 
Of a tarn. Our unfenced country 
Is bog that keeps crusting 
Between the sights of the sun. 

They've taken the skeleton 
Of the Great Irish Elk 
Out of the peat, set it up 
An astounding crate full of air. 

Butter sunk under 
More than a hundred years 
Was recovered salty and white. 
The ground itself is kind, black butter 

Melting and opening underfoot, 
Missing its last definition 
By millions of years. 
They'll never dig coal here, 

Only the waterlogged trunks 
Of great firs, soft as pulp. 
Our pioneers keep striking 
Inwards and downwards, 

Every layer they strip 
Seems camped on before. 
The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage. 
The wet centre is bottomless.

Seamus Heaney

 The Railway Children

 

When we climbed the slopes of the cutting

We were eye-level with the white cups

Of the telegraph poles and the sizzling wires.

 

Like lovely freehand they curved for miles

East and miles west beyond us, sagging

Under their burden of swallows.

 

We were small and thought we knew nothing

Worth knowing. We thought words travelled the wires

In the shiny pouches of raindrops,

 

Each one seeded full with the light

Of the sky, the gleam of the lines, and ourselves

So infinitesimally scaled

 

We could stream through the eye of a needle.

John Berryman

DREAM SONG 13 God bless Henry.  He lived like a rat, with a thatch of hair on his head in the beginning. Henry was not a coward. Much. He never deserted anything; instead he stuck, when things like pity were thinning. So may be Henry was a human being Let's investigate that ..... We did; okay. He is a human American man. That's true.  My lass is braking. My brass is aching.  Come % diminish me, & map my way. God's Henry's enemy.  We're in business . . . Why, what business must be clear. A cornering. I couldn't feel more like it. - Mr Bones, as I look on the saffron sky, you strikes me ornery.

Lucille Clifton

why some people be mad at me sometimes

 

they ask me to remember 

but they want me to remember 

their memories 

and i keep on remembering 

mine 

Donald Justice

  

On the death of Friends in Childhood

We shall not ever meet them bearded in heaven 

Nor sunning themselves among the bald of hell; 

If anywhere, in the deserted schoolyard at twilight, 

forming a ring, perhaps, or joining hands 

In games whose very names we have forgotten. 

Come memory, let us seek them there in the shadows.