REAL POETRY

[Fangorn]

Just when I think I am any kind of half-way decent poet, a very sobering piece will illuminate my straying mind. I just HAVE to share this with you. I hope I have all the accreditations in proper place....


Love Letter to India

India, I have never even tried to write to you before.
Thirty years exactly have passed since I ran my fingers
through your hair, sweetly oiled, dreamed of your tangled history
transforming itself into one brilliant braid of diversity.

My Burmese ayah sang to me of love between
a rani and her rajah, taught me how to pull a long twist
of her ebony hair into a tight bun,
image of perfection without one single pin.

She walked out on her eleven brown-eyed children,
her scandalous husband, and me to search for some
hard pressed truth in a country that wouldn't yet
look a woman in the eye.

When I go to you now, only at night, I wander past
cow patties steaming like bowls of hot rice, past ancient
crumbling temples, rivers of people, past the Taj Mahal,
the Red Fort, the Ganges, each richly spiced in pungent fields of memory.

Your daughters disrupt the air as they pass by me in compliant rows,
dark eyes lined heavily in kohl, still climbing out of the rut
of Mohammed's conversion. I can still feel the weight of their blind
obedience, to Brahma, to Buddha, to centuries of rules.

In the cloying sweetness of gardenia's breath, of banana tree shade,
there still stands the inimitable Saturday morning bazaar.
Glimmering silk saris stacked upon tables like giant hibiscus
simmer in the heat of the stalls, unearthed jewels just dying to be bought.

Row after glittering row of glass bangles, abundant silver and gold
to adorn the body, I find the bejeweled wooden elephants
still standing silent guard over the hope for salvation,
for prosperity, and for peace.

And though I still dream of you in startling detail,
I am never closer to an understanding of you than
when I lean into the sun, eyes fixed on some distant planet
and sing my ayah's love song to myself.

Vicki F. Chavis

[Fangorn]

OK...this is good too....I promise to stop soon, LOL!!!

Spring Love

The black smoke rises from the pan,
you smile and whisper that I will make a good wife.
Scrambled eggs with thousand island dressing
and oven-baken tortillas from the grocery.
You wince and eat the food all the same.
I don't mind you not liking breakfast
but that's all I have. Please leave soon-
your fiancee may wonder at
the sudden sweetness of your smile.

Your belly's a beer barrel's paradise- warmth in the cold night.
Your skin shines like moonlight and breath- the beat of my heart.
I notice a little mole under your armpit and
you try to peer with all your might. I laugh.
You shimmer among a million scattered dreams
and the haze arrives as you hold me in your arms.

I know there will never be another man like you.
And you, with a serious look, tell me I am your only Spring-
beauty with eyes of a doe and smiles of butterflies.
I worry about her but you just hold me in your arms.
For now, hush,
let the Spring be savored and our woes be gone-
two souls in a field of tulips and the smell of cut grass.

Sophie Leu

[Andorinha]

Ah, both of these are VERY real indeed! Thanks!

[Fangorn]

Is it just me, or did the maps Tolkien made by hand say "beyond here there be dragons"?

Allen Braden

Beyond There Be Dragons
for Zach Green
How easy it must have been

to believe their great bones



solidified in the mountainside

unearthed the first couplets



of greed and legend, easy to see

why every invented dragon



must have harbored some weakness:

an obsession with riddles perhaps



or tender flesh between the scales

over a deep and venomous heart.



How easy today to translate a ceiling

luminous with the inscrutable



stars whose shapes foretell a miracle.

Listen, poetry comes down to this:



some say to hold water in your hands

is to lose it. How they must believe



in the well. Choose the water itself.

Anything everlasting.

[Andorinha]

Here's one of my favorite REAL POEMS:

Billy Collins -- "Nine Horses: Poems"

The Country

I wondered about you
when you told me never to leave
a box of wooden, strike-anywhere matches
lying around the house because the mice

might get into them and start a fire.
But your face was absolutely straight
when you twisted the lid down on the round tin
where the matches, you said, are always stowed.

Who could sleep that night?
Who could whisk away the thought
of the one unlikely mouse
padding along a cold water pipe

behind the floral wallpaper
gripping a single wooden match
between the needles of his teeth?
Who could not see him rounding a corner,

the blue tip scratching against a rough-hewn beam,
the sudden flare, and the creature
for one bright, shining moment
suddenly thrust ahead of his time—

now a fire-starter, now a torchbearer
in a forgotten ritual, little brown druid
illuminating some ancient night.
Who could fail to notice,

lit up in the blazing insulation,
the tiny looks of wonderment on the faces
of his fellow mice, onetime inhabitants
of what once was your house in the country?

[Stormrider]

So that's how those unexpected house fires start! I better lock up my matches and put out the mousetraps! lol!

[Fangorn]

While I am not sure how they would reconcile the title; the poem is MOST outstanding!

[Andorinha]

Wallace Stevens "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" has some deep images that can put me into an almost trance-like state of calming contemplation. I'm especially taken with the dynamics of antithesis I find between anticipation and performance in number V:

I
Among twenty snowy mountains,
The only moving thing
Was the eye of the blackbird.

II
I was of three minds,
Like a tree
In which there are three blackbirds.

III
The blackbird whirled in the autumn winds.
It was a small part of the pantomime.

IV
A man and a woman
Are one.
A man and a woman and a blackbird
Are one.

V
I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendoes,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

VI
Icicles filled the long window
With barbaric glass.
The shadow of the blackbird
Crossed it, to and fro.
The mood
Traced in the shadow
An indecipherable cause.

VII
O thin men of Haddam,
Why do you imagine golden birds?
Do you not see how the blackbird
Walks around the feet
Of the women about you?

VIII
I know noble accents
And lucid, inescapable rhythms;
But I know, too,
That the blackbird is involved
In what I know.

IX
When the blackbird flew out of sight,
It marked the edge
Of one of many circles.

X
At the sight of blackbirds
Flying in a green light,
Even the bawds of euphony
Would cry out sharply.

XI
He rode over Connecticut
In a glass coach.
Once, a fear pierced him,
In that he mistook
The shadow of his equipage
For blackbirds.

XII
The river is moving.
The blackbird must be flying.

XIII
It was evening all afternoon.
It was snowing
And it was going to snow.
The blackbird sat
In the cedar-limbs.

[Fangorn]

Midges and Madness

Is there ever a break?
between midges and madness I mean

The FBI. NCIS,and the ilk...will telll you it be so
but rest assured, it is not so
there is no rest to be had, no succor no sleep
and if you breathe a word....no peep

There is only ONE thing definate in this world
You will not see another one, to be sure....

[Andorinha]

Now that is REAL poetry, Fangorn.

"Midges and Madness" -- grim stuff, reality, don't have much use for it of late. I find myself instead (preferentially) slipping into escapism: viewing closely, and for many long minutes the details of a leaf, the frayed-end of a twig that has dropped from a frost-bitten geranium. Certainly beats reading the morning reports...

Black Rook in Rainy Weather -- Sylvia Plath

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, not seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can't honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Leap incandescent

Out of the kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then ---
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); sceptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait's begun again,
The long wait for the angel.
For that rare, random descent.

[Fangorn]

The morning reports aside, I am most in your debt as of late. From what I remember, Sylvia Plath was in a bell jar with a host of psychiatrists at her beck and call. I could be wrong.

Isn't it pleasant and nice to hear such wonderful verses when in such need. A VERY pleasant New Year to you~~

[Andorinha]

Howdee, Fangorn!

Yep, S. Plath's autobiographical novel was "The Bell Jar." I've read heaps of her poetry, but have not yet read her book. Her's was another of those "sad stories," like Virginia Woolf... There was a recent movie/ video made about Plath (also one about Woolf) -- both excellent viewing!

Sometimes it seems 'funny-strange" to me that simple devices of patterned words can create such an impact on one's mood -- better than a chest full of subtle pills and potions. I guess that's why I like Tolkien, even his prose approaches the medicinal quality of poetics, sweeps away my "hypos" (see Moby Dick, opening) every time I read about Frodo and Sam in Ithilien.

You have a grand New Year, all 365 1/4 days worth!

[Andorinha]

Back on my Cousin's Farm

The small growth weeds
of a mild winter
give up their green
reluctantly,
protected
in the south-facing angle
of the once red,
now rotting barn.

Thin sunlight
pale and quiet stuff
collects here,
held in the summer-pocket
embrace
of the acute dihedral
where
with leather gloves taped to my wrists
I used to stem across the boards
and push my way up
slowly, carefully
into the eave-shadows
twenty feet above the ground.

When my head touched the ceiling,
I could turn
and look out from under
the cap-brim of the barn,
seeing past the line of the lilacs
right down into
the
more-often-dry-than-not
creek bed.

The goats who lay in the cooling sands,
would turn their
sidewise-irised eyes
up
and watch my progress
without comment,
their jaws slipping like scissors
across one-another
as they cut their feeds
and waited
for something of more interest,
like, perhaps
a tumbling fall?

Slapping a bare palm against one plane
and with a bent leg
to place the sole of my boot
against the other,
I try the old-familar moves
and succeed,
succeed in holding myself
a brief second or two
suspended
maybe three feet up,
lacking the power
to scoot any higher,
lacking the grip
and having long ago lost the determination
to advance --
this static lift
is all that I can manage.

At least there are no goats
to record
my dilapidation.
A shrugging laugh,
a bit of wistful
remembrance
and I start back to the car,
carrying a small splinter
as a reminder,
next time I'll wear my gloves.

Andorinha 2008

[Stormrider]

I thought this one from Pablo Neruda was interesting, especially the very last stanza. It is called "Verb" from his book entitled Five Decades.

Verbo by Pablo Neruda Voy a arrugar esta palabra voy a torcerla si, es demasiado lisa es como si un gran perro o un gran río le hubiera repasado lengua o agua durante muchos años. Quiero que en la palabra se vea la aspereza la sal ferruginosa la fuerza destentada de la tierra , la sangre de los que hablaron y de los que no hablaron Quiero ver la sed adentro de las sílabas: quiero tocare el fuego en el sonido: quiero sentir la oscuridad del grito. Quiero palabras ásperas como piedras vírgenes.

Verb by Pablo Neruda translated by T.M. Lauth I’m going to wrinkle this word, I’m going to twist it, yes, it is much too flat it is as if a great dog or great river had passed its tongue or water over it during many years. I want that in the word the roughness is seen the iron salt The de-fanged strength of the land, the blood of those who have spoken and those who have not spoken. I want to see the thirst Inside the syllables I want to touch the fire in the sound: I want to feel the darkness of the cry. I want words as rough as virgin rocks.

[Andorinha]

Oooo, THANKS, Stormrider! I'll memorize the both the English and Spanish portions, reel them off to me wife and "pretend" I understand every line!