Post the ONE poem that has influenced you the most!!
grooveamatic
Posts: 1,374
I'm still pondering what mine is....
should be a cool, eclectic thread of poems when all is said and done....
should be a cool, eclectic thread of poems when all is said and done....
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Going
There is an evening coming in
Across the fields, one never seen before,
That lights no lamps.
Silken it seems at a distance, yet
When it is drawn up over the knees and breast
It brings no comfort.
Where has the tree gone, that locked
Earth to sky? What is under my hands,
That I cannot feel?
What loads my hands down?
Gosh! Do we really only get one?
It would be too easy if we could post a bunch....
I'm all about asking the tough questions!
Unfairly, though, I thought about my answer for a few hours before starting the thread (but still wasn't sure until the last moment!)
I think though it's going to have to be ee cummings because I adore him, nobody that I've ever read has been able to create a mood like he did in
in just
in Just-
spring when the world is mud-
luscious the little
lame balloonman
whistles far and wee
and eddieandbill come
running from marbles and
piracies and it's
spring
when the world is puddle-wonderful
the queer
old balloonman whistles
far and wee
and bettyandisbel come dancing
from hop-scotch and jump-rope and
it's
spring
and
the
goat-footed
balloonMan whistles
far
and
wee
e.e. cummings
so there's mine.
(oh my god, yes it is it. Thanks for starting this thread. I forgot how that poem made me feel -- until just now!)
cummings is who got me started, that's for sure. He influenced me quite a bit early on, and his voice can I'm sure still be heard in all of my work (look at how often I use parenthesis!).....my fave Cummings of all time--"since feeling is first"
Instructions to the Artist
by Billy Collins
I wish my head to appear perfectly round
and since the canvas should be of epic dimensions,
please trace the circle with a dinner plate
rather than a button or a dime.
My face should be painted with
an ant-like sense of detail;
pretend you are executing a street map
of Rome and that all the citizens
can lift thirty times their own weight.
The result should be a strained
but self-satisfied expression,
as if I am lifting a Volkswagen with one foot.
The body is no great matter;
just draw some straight lines
with a pencil and ruler.
I will not be around to hear the voice
of posterity calling me Stickman.
The background I leave up to you
but if there is to be a house,
lines of smoke rising from the chimney
should be mandatory.
Never be ashamed of kindergarten--
it is the alphabet's only temple.
Also, have several kangaroos grazing
and hopping around in the distance,
an allusion to my world travels.
Some final recommendations:
I should like to appear hatless.
Kindly limit your palette to a single
primary color, any one but red or blue.
Sign your name on my upper lip
so your name will always be my mustache.
(Sources: Patrick Kavanagh – The Complete Poems [1984], ed. Peter Kavanagh, Newbridge: The Goldsmith Press, pp. 79- 104; Patrick Kavanagh – Selected Poems [1996], ed. Antoinette Quinn, Harmondsworth: Penguin, pp. 18- 44.)
Clay is the word and clay is the flesh
Where the potato-gatherers like mechanised scarecrows move
Along the side-fall of the hill – Maguire and his men.
If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove
Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book 5
Of death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs
And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.
Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?
Or why do we stand here shivering?
Which of these men 10
Loved the light and the queen
Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised
marriage to himself
Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe’en?
We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain, 15
Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay
Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles
Where the plough missed or the spade stands, straitening the way.
A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,
A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing 20
A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart
Legs. October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.
Maguire watches the drills flattened out
And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar
Flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by 25
And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world’s halter.
And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland
When he laughed over pints of porter
Of how he came free from every net spread
In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head 30
And pretended to his soul
That children are tedious in hurrying fields of April
Where men are spanging across wide furrows.
Lost in the passion that never needs a wife –
The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows. 35
Children scream so loud that the crows could bring
The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.
Patrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air
And hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.
Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins. 40
What is he looking for there?
He thinks it is a potato, but we know better
Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.
‘Move forward the basket and balance it steady
In this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe, 45
And straddle the horse,’ Maguire calls.
‘The wind’s over Brannagan’s, now that means rain.
Graip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls
Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass –
And that’s a job we’ll have to do in December, 50
Gravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy’s ass
Out in my clover? Curse o’God –
Where is that dog?
Never where he’s wanted.’ Maguire grunts and spits
Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height. 55
His dream changes like the cloud-swung wind
And he is not so sure now if his mother was right
When she praised the man who made a field his bride.
Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit
Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time. 60
He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body
Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ’s Name.
He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread,
When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant
The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk 65
The easy road to destiny. He dreamt
The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.
O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.
It could not be that back of the hills love was free
And ditches straight. 70
No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes
As here.
‘O God if I had been wiser!’
That was a sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.
He looks towards his house and haggard. ‘O God if I had been wiser!’ 75
But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes
Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence
Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,
And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar
God’s truth is life – even the grotesque shapes of his foulest fire. 80
The horse lifts its head and cranes
Through the whins and stones
To lip late passion in the crawling clover.
In the gap there’s a bush weighted with boulders like morality,
The fools of life bleed if they climb over. 85
The wind leans from Brady’s, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,
Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;
A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne
The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.
Come with me, Imagination. Into this iron house 90
And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,
And we will know what a peasant’s left hand wrote on the page.
Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.
Maguire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died 95
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
When she died
The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside 100
And he was sixty-five.
O he loved his mother
Above all others.
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his cows 105
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream;
To smoke his pipe 110
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July –
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh. 115
But his passion became a plague
For he grew feeble bringing the vague
Women of his mind to lust nearness,
Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.
So Maguire got tired 120
Of the no-target gun fired
And returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage
To the fields once again
Where eunuchs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage. 125
III
Poor Paddy Maguire, a fourteen-hour day
He worked for years. It was he that lit the fire
And boiled the kettle and gave the cows their hay.
His mother tall hard as a Protestant spire
Came down the stairs barefoot at the kettle-call 130
And talked to her son sharply: ‘Did you let
The hens out, you?’ She had a venomous drawl
And a wizened face like moth-eaten leatherette.
Two black cats peeped between the banisters
And gloated over the bacon-fizzling pan. 135
Outside the window showed tin canisters.
The snipe of Dawn fell like a whirring stone
And Patrick on a headland stood alone.
The pull is on the traces, it is March
And a cold black wind is blowing from Dundalk. 140
The twisting sod rolls over on her back –
The virgin screams before the irresistible sock.
No worry on Maguire’s mind this day
Except that he forgot to bring his matches.
‘Hop back there Polly, hoy back, woa, wae.’ 145
From every second hill a neighbour watches
With all the sharpened interest of rivalry.
Yet sometimes when the sun comes through a gap
These men know God the Father in a tree:
The Holy Spirit is the rising sap, 150
And Christ will be the green leaves that will come
At Easter from the sealed and guarded tomb.
Primroses and the unearthly start of ferns
Among the blackthorn shadows in the ditch,
A dead sparrow and an old waistcoat. Maguire learns 155
As the horses turn slowly round the which is which
Of love and fear and things half born to mind.
He stands between the plough-handles and he sees
At the end of a long furrow his name signed
Among the poets, prostitutes. With all miseries 160
He is one. Here with the unfortunate
Who for half-moments of paradise
Pay out good days and wait and wait
For sunlight-woven cloaks. O to be wise
As respectability that knows the price of all things 165
And marks God’s truth in pounds and pence and farthings.
IV
April, and no one able to calculate
How far it is to harvest. They put down
The seeds blindly with sensuous groping fingers,
And sensual sleep dreams subtly underground. 170
To-morrow is Wednesday – who cares?
“Remember Eileen Farrelly? I was thinking
A man might do a damned sight worse…” that voice is blown
Through a hole in a garden wall –
And who was Eileen now cannot be known. 175
The cattle are out on grass,
The Corn is coming up evenly.
The farm folk are hurrying to catch Mass:
Christ will meet them at the end of the world, the slow and the speedier.
But the fields say: only Time can bless. 180
Maguire knelt beside a pillar where he could spit
Without being seen. He turned an old prayer round:
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph pray for us
Now and at the Hour.” Heaven dazzled death.
“Wonder should I cross-plough that turnip-ground.” 185
The tension broke. The congregation lifted its head
As one man and coughed in unison.
Five hundred hearts were hungry for life –
Who lives in Christ shall never die the death.
And the candle-lit Altar and the flowers 190
And the pregnant Tabernacle lifted a moment to Prophecy
Out of the clayey hours
Maguire sprinkled his face with holy water
As the congregation stood up for the Last Gospel.
He rubbed the dust off his knees with his palm, and then 195
Coughed the prayer phlegm up from his throat and sighed, Amen.
Once one day in June when he was walking
Among his cattle in the Yellow Meadow
He met a girl carrying a basket –
And he was then a young and heated fellow. 200
Too earnest, too earnest! He rushed beyond the thing
To the unreal. And he saw Sin
Written in letters larger than John Bunyan dreamt of.
For the strangled impulse there is no redemption.
And that girl was gone and he was counting 205
The dangers in the fields where love ranted
He was helpless. He saw his cattle
And stroked their flanks in lieu of wife to handle.
He would have changed the circle if he could,
The circle that was the grass track where he ran. 210
Twenty times a day he ran round the field
And still there was no winning-point where the runner is cheered home.
Desperately he broke the tune,
But however he tried always the same melody leapt up from the background,
The dragging step of a ploughman going home through the guttery 215
Headlands under an April-watery moon.
Religion, the fields and the fear of the Lord
And Ignorance giving him the coward’s blow,
He dare not rise to pluck the fantasies
From the fruited tree of Life. He bowed his head 220
And saw a wet weed twined about his toe.
V
Evening at the cross-roads –
Heavy heads nodding out words as wise
As the rumination of cows after milking.
From the ragged road surface a boy picks up 225
A piece of gravel and stares at it – and then
He flings it across the elm tree on to the railway.
He means nothing.
Not a damn thing.
Somebody is coming over the metal railway bridge 230
And his hobnailed boots on the arches sound like a gong
Calling men awake. But the bridge is too narrow –
The men lift their heads a moment. That was only John,
So they dream on.
Night in the elms, night in the grass. 235
O we are too tired to go home yet. Two cyclists pass
Talking loudly of Kitty and Molly –
Horses or women? Wisdom or folly?
A door closes on an evicted dog
Where prayers begin in Barney Meegan’s kitchen; 240
Rosie curses the cat between her devotions;
The daughter prays that she may have three wishes –
Health and wealth and love –
From the fairy who is faith or hope or compounds of.
At the cross-roads the crowd had thinned out: 245
Last words are uttered. There is no to-morrow;
No future but only time stretched for the mowing of the hay
Or putting an axle in the turf-barrow.
Patrick Maguire went home and made cocoa
And broke a chunk off the loaf of wheaten bread; 250
His mother called down to him to look again
And make sure that the hen- house was locked. His sister grunted in bed,
The sound of a sow taking up a new position.
Pat opened his trousers wide over the ashes
And dreamt himself to lewd sleepiness. 255
The clock ticked on. Time passes.
Health and wealth and love he too dreamed of in May
As he sat on the railway slope and watched the children of the place
Picked up a primrose here and a daisy there –
They were picking up life’s truth singly. But he dreamt of the 260
Absolute envased bouquet –
All or nothing. And it was nothing. For God is not all
In one place, complete
Till Hope comes in and takes it on his shoulder –
O Christ, that is what you have done for us: 265
In a crumb of bread the whole mystery is.
He read the symbol too sharply and turned
From the five simple doors of sense
To the door whose combination lock has puzzled
Philosopher and priest and common dunce. 270
Men build their heavens as they build their circles
Of friends. God is in the bits and pieces of Everyday –
A kiss here and a laugh again, and sometimes tears,
A pearl necklace round the neck of poverty.
He sat on the railway slope and watched the evening, 275
Too beautifully perfect to use,
And his three wishes were three stones too sharp to sit on,
Too hard to carve. Three frozen idols of a speechless muse.
VII
“Now go to Mass and pray and confess your sins
And you’ll have all the luck,” his mother said. 280
He listened to the lie that is a woman’s screen
Around a conscience when soft thighs are spread.
And all the while she was setting up the lie
She trusted in nature that never deceives.
But her son took it as literal truth. 285
Religion’s walls expand to the push of nature. Morality yields
To sense – but not in little tillage fields.
Life went on like that. One summer morning
Again through a hay-field on her way to the shop –
The grass was wet and over-leaned the path – 290
And Agnes held her skirts sensationally up,
And not because the grass was wet either.
A man was watching her, Patrick Maguire.
She was in love with passion and its weakness
And the wet grass could never cool the fire 295
That radiated from her unwanted womb
In that country, in that metaphysical land
Where flesh was a thought more spiritual than music
Among the stars – out of reach of the peasant’s hand.
Ah, but the priest was one of the people too – 300
A farmer’s son – and surely he knew
The needs of a brother and sister.
Religion could not be a counter-irritant like a blister,
But the certain standard measured and known
By which man might re-make his soul though all walls were down 305
And all earth’s pedestalled gods thrown.
VIII
Sitting on a wooden gate,
Sitting on a wooden gate,
Sitting on a wooden gate
He didn’t care a damn. 310
Said whatever came into his head
Said whatever came into his head
Said whatever came into his head
And inconsequently sang.
Inconsequently sang 315
While his world withered away,
He had a cigarette to smoke and a pound to spend
On drink next Saturday.
His cattle were fat
And his horses all that 320
Midsummer grass could make them.
The young women ran wild
And dreamed of a child
Joy dreams though the fathers might forsake them
But no one would take them; 325
No man could ever see
That their skirts had loosed buttons,
O the men were as blind as could be.
And Patrick Maguire
From his purgatory fire 330
Called the gods of the Christian to prove
That this twisted skein
Was the necessary pain
And not the rope that was strangling true love.
But sitting on a wooden gate 335
Sometime in July
When he was thirty-four or five
He gloried in the lie:
He made it read the way it should
He made life read the evil good 340
While he cursed the ascetic brotherhood
Without knowing why.
Sitting on a wooden gate
All, all alone
He sang and laughed 345
Like a man quite daft,
Or like a man on a channel raft
He fantasied forth his groan.
Sitting on a wooden gate,
Sitting on a wooden gate, 350
Sitting on a wooden gate
He rode in day-dream cars.
He locked his body with his knees
When the gate swung too much in the breeze.
But while he caught high ecstasies 355
Life slipped between the bars.
IX
He gave himself another year,
Something was bound to happen before then –
The circle would break down
And he would break down 360
And he would curve the new one to his own will.
A new rhythm is a new life
And in it marriage is hung and money.
He would be a new man walking through unbroken meadows
Of dawn in the year of One. 365
The poor peasant talking to himself in a stable door –
An ignorant peasant deep in dung.
What can the passers-by think otherwise?
Where is his silver bowl of knowledge hung?
Why should men be asked to believe in a soul 370
That is only the mark of a hoof in guttery gaps?
A man is what is written on the label.
And the passing world stares but no more stops
To look closer. So back to the growing crops
And the ridges he never loved. 375
Nobody will ever know how much tortured poetry the pulled weeds on the ridge wrote
Before they withered in the July sun,
Nobody will ever read the wild, sprawling, scrawling mad woman’s signature,
The hysteria and the boredom of the enclosed nun of his thought.
Like the afterbirth of a cow stretched on a branch in the wind 380
Life dried in the veins of these women and men:
The grey and grief and unlove,
The bones in the backs of their hands,
And the chapel pressing its low ceiling over them.
Sometimes they did laugh and see the sunlight, 385
A narrow slice of divine instruction.
Going along the river at the bend of Sunday
The trout played in the pools encouragement
To jump in love through death bait the hook.
And there would be girls sitting on the grass banks of lanes. 390
Stretch-legged and lingering staring –
A man might take one of them if he had the courage.
But “No” was in every sentence of their story
Except when the public-house came in and shouted its piece.
The yellow buttercups and the bluebells among the whin bushes 395
On rocks in the middle of ploughing
Was a bright spoke in the wheel
Of the peasant’s mill.
The goldfinches on the railway paling were worth looking at –
A man might imagine then 400
Himself in Brazil and these birds the birds of paradise
And the Amazon and the romance traced on the school map living again.
Talk in evening corners and under trees
Was like an old book found in a king’s tomb.
The children gathered round like students and listened 405
And some of the saga defied the draught in the open tomb
And was not blown.
Their intellectual life consisted in reading
Reynolds News or the Sunday Dispatch,
With sometimes an old almanac brought down from the ceiling 410
Or a school reader brown with the droppings of thatch.
The sporting results or the headlines of war
Was a humbug profound as the highbrow’s Arcana.
Pat tried to be wise to the abstraction of all that
But its secret dribbled down his waistcoat like a drink from a strainer. 415
He wagered a bob each way on the Derby,
He got a straight tip from a man in a shop –
A double from the Guineas it was and thought himself
A master mathematician when one of them came up
And he could explain how much he’s have drawn 420
On the double if the double leg had followed the first.
He was betting on form and breeding, he claimed,
And the man that did that could never be burst.
After that they went on to the war, and the generals
On both sides were shown to be stupid as hell. 425
If he’d taken that road, they remarked of a Marshal,
He’d have…O they know their geography well.
This was their university. Maguire was an undergraduate
Who dreamed from his lowly position of rising
To a professorship like Larry McKenna or Duffy 430
Or the pig-gelder Nallon whose knowledge was amazing.
“A treble, full multiple odds…That’s flat porter…
Another one… No, you’re wrong about that thing I was telling you….
Did you part with your filly, Jack? I heard that you sold her…”
The students were all savants by the time of pub-close. 435
XI
A year passed and another hurried after it
And Patrick Maguire was still six months behind life –
His mother six months ahead of it;
His sister straddle-legged ahead of it;
One leg in hell and another in heaven 440
And between the purgatory of middle-aged virginity –
She prayed for release to heaven or hell.
His mother’s voice grew thinner like a rust-worn knife
But it cut venomously as it thinned,
It cut him up the middle till he became more woman than man, 445
And it cut through to his mind before the end.
Another field whitened in the April air
And the harrows rattled over the seed.
He gathered the loose stones off the ridges carefully
And grumbled to his men to hurry. He looked like a men who could give advice 450
To foolish young fellows. He was forty-seven,
And there was depth in his jaw and his voice was the voice of a great cattle-dealer,
A man with whom the fair-green gods break even.
“I think I ploughed that lea the proper depth,
She ought to give a crop if any land gives… 455
Drive slower with the foal-mare, Joe.”
Joe, a young man of imagined wives,
Smiles to himself and answered like a slave:
“You needn’t fear or fret.
I’m taking her as easy, as easy as…
Easy there Fanny, easy pet.” 460
They loaded the day-scoured implements on the cart
As the shadows of poplars crookened the furrows.
It was the evening, evening. Patrick was forgetting to be lonely
As he used to be in Aprils long ago.
It was the menopause, the misery-pause. 465
The schoolgirls passed his house laughing every morning
And sometimes they spoke to him familiarly –
He had an idea. Schoolgirls of thirteen
Would see no political intrigue in an old man’s friendship.
Love 470
The heifer waiting to be nosed by the old bull.
That notion passed too – there was the danger of talk
And jails are narrower than the five-sod ridge
And colder than the black hills facing Armagh in February.
He sinned over the warm ashes again and his crime 475
The law’s long arm could not serve with ‘time’.
His face set like an old judge’s pose:
Respectability and righteousness,
Stand for no nonsense.
The priest from the altar called Patrick Maguire’s name 480
To hold the collecting-box in the chapel door
during all the Sundays of may.
His neighbours envied him his holy rise,
But he walked down from the church with affected indifference
And took the measure of heaven angle-wise. 485
He still could laugh and sing,
But not the wild laugh or the abandoned harmony now
That called the world to new silliness from the top of a wooden gate
When thirty-five could take the sparrow’s bow.
Let us be kind, let us be kind and sympathetic: 490
Maybe life is not for joking or for finding happiness in –
This tiny light in Oriental Darkness
Looking out chance windows of poetry or prayer.
And the grief and defeat of men like these peasants
Is God’s way - maybe – and we must not want too much 495
To see.
The twisted thread is stronger than the wind-swept fleece.
And in the end who shall rest in truth’s high peace?
Or whose is the world now, even now?
O let us kneel where the blind ploughman kneels 500
And learn to live without despairing
In a mud-walled space –
Illiterate unknown and unknowing.
Let us kneel where he kneels
And feel what he feels. 505
One day he saw a daisy and he thought it
Reminded him of his childhood –
He stopped his cart to look at it.
Was there a fairy hiding behind it?
He helped a poor woman whose cow had died on her; 510
He dragged home a drunken man on a winter’s night;
And one rare moment he heard the young people playing on the railway stile
And he wished them happiness and whatever they most desired from life.
He saw the sunlight and begrudged no man
His share of what the misery soil and soul 515
Gives in a season to a ploughman.
And he cried for his own loss one late night on the pillow
And yet thanked the God who had arranged these things.
Was he then a saint?
A Matt Talbot of Monaghan? 520
His sister Mary Anne spat poison at the children
Who sometimes came to the door selling raffle tickets
For holy funds.
“get out, you little tramps!” she would scream
As she shook to the hens an armful of crumbs, 525
But Patrick often put his hand deep down
In his trouser-pocket and fingered out a penny
Or maybe a tobacco-stained caramel.
“You’re soft,” said the sister; “with other people’s money
It’s not a bit funny.” 530
The cards are shuffled and the deck
Laid flat for cutting – Tom Malone
Cut for trump. I think we’ll make
This game, the last, a tanner one
Hearts. Right. I see you’re breaking 535
Your two-year-old. Play quick, Maguire,
The clock there says it’s half-past ten –
Kate, throw another sod on that fire.
One of the card-players laughs and spits
Into the flame across a shoulder. 540
Outside, a noise like a rat
Among the hen roosts. The cock crows over
The frosted townland of the night.
Eleven o’clock and still the game
Goes on and the players seem to be 545
Drunk in an Orient opium den.
Midnight, one o’clock, two.
Somebody’s leg has fallen asleep.
What about home? Maguire, are you
Using your double-tree this week? 550
Why? Do you want it? Play the ace.
There’s it, and that’s the last card for me.
A wonderful night, we had. Duffy’s place
Is very convenient. Is that a ghost or a tree?
And so they go home with dragging feet 555
And their voices rumble like laden carts.
And they are happy as the dead or sleeping…
I should have led that ace of hearts.
XII
The fields were bleached white,
The wooden tubs full of water 560
Were white in the winds
That blew through Brannagan’s gap on their way from Siberia;
The cows on the grassless heights
Followed the hay that had wings –
The February fodder that hung itself on the black branches 565
Of the hill-top hedge.
A man stood beside a potato-pit
And clapped his arms
And pranced on the crisp roots
And shouted to warm himself. 570
Then he buck-leaped about the potatoes
And scooped them into a basket.
He looked like a bucking suck-calf
Whose spine was being tickled.
Sometimes he stared across the bogs 575
And sometimes he straightened his back and vaguely whistled
A tune that weakened his spirit
And saddened his terrier dog’s.
A neighbour passed with a spade on his shoulder
And Patrick Maguire bent like a bridge 580
Whistled – good morning under his oxter,
And the man the other side of the hedge
Champed his spade on the road at his toes
And talked an old sentimentality
While the wind blew under his clothes. 585
The mother sickened and stayed in bed in bed all day,
Her head hardly dented the pillow, so light and thin it had worn,
But she still enquired after the household affairs.
She held the strings of her children’s Punch and Judy, and when a mouth opened
It was her truth that the dolls would have spoken 590
If they hadn’t been made of wood and tin –
“Did you open the barn door, Pat, to let the young calves in?”
The priest called to see her every Saturday
And she told him her troubles and fears:
“If Mary Anne was settled I’d die in peace – 595
I’m getting on in years.”
“You were a good woman,” said the priest,
“And your children will miss you when you’re gone.
The likes of you this parish never knew,
I’m sure they’ll not forget the work you’ve done.” 600
She reached five bony crooks under the tick –
‘Five pounds for Masses – won’t you say them quick.”
She died one morning in the beginning of May
And a shower of sparrow-notes was the litany for her dying.
The holy water was sprinkled on the bed-clothes 605
And her children stood around the bed and cried because it was too late for crying.
A mother dead! The tired sentiment:
“Mother, Mother” was a shallow pool
Where sorrow hardly could wash its feet….
Mary Anne came away from the deathbed and boiled the calves their gruel. 610
O what was I doing when the procession passed?
Where was I looking?
Young women and men
And I might have joined them.
Who bent the coin of my destiny 615
That it stuck in the slot?
I remember a night we walked
Through the moon of Donaghmoyne,
Four of us seeking adventure,
It was midsummer forty years ago. 620
Now I know
The moment that gave the turn to my life.
O Christ! I am locked in a stable with pigs and cows for ever.
The world looks on
And talks of the peasant: 625
The peasant has no worries;
In his little lyrical fields
He ploughs and sows;
He eats fresh food,
He loves fresh women, 630
He is his own master
As it was in the Beginning
The simpleness of peasant life.
The birds that sing for him are eternal choirs,
Everywhere he walks there are flowers. 635
His heart is pure,
His mind is clear,
He can talk to God as Moses and Isaiah talked –
The peasant who is only one remove from the beasts he drives.
The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields:- 640
There is the source from which all cultures rise,
And all religions,
There is the pool in which the poet dips
And the musician.
Without the peasant base civilisation must die, 645
Unless the clay is in the mouth the singer’s singing is useless.
The travellers touch the roots of the grass and feel renewed
When they grasp the steering wheels again.
The peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophecy,
The peasant is all virtues – let us salute him without irony, 650
The peasant ploughman who is half a vegetable –
Who can react to sun and rain and sometimes even
Regret that the Maker of Light had not touched him more intensely.
Brought him up from the sub-soil to an existence
Of conscious joy. He was not born blind. 655
He is not always blind: sometimes the cataract yields
To sudden stone-falling or the desire to breed.
The girls pass along the roads
And he can remember what man is,
But there is nothing he can do. 660
Is there nothing he can do?
Is there no escape?
No escape, no escape.
The cows and horses breed,
And the potato-seed 665
Gives a bud and a root and rots
In the good mother’s way with her sons;
The fledged bird is thrown
From the nest – on its own.
But the peasant in his little acres is tied 670
To a mother’s womb by the wind-toughened navel-cord
Like a goat tethered to the stump of a tree –
He circles around and around wondering why it should be.
No crash,
No drama. 675
That was how his life happened.
No mad hooves galloping in the sky,
But the weak, washy way of true tragedy –
A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.
XIV
We may come out in the October reality, Imagination, 680
The sleety wind no longer slants to the black hill where Maguire
And his men are now collecting the scattered harness and baskets.
The dog sitting on a wisp of dry stalks
Watches them through the shadows.
“Back in, back in.” One talks to the horse as to a brother. 685
Maguire himself is patting a potato-pit against the weather –
An old man fondling a new-piled grave:
“Joe, I hope you didn’t forget to hide the spade,
For there’s rogues in the townland. Hide it flat in a furrow.
I think we ought to be finished by to-morrow.” 690
Their voices through the darkness sound like voices from a cave,
A dull thudding far away, futile, feeble, far away,
First cousins to the ghosts of the townland.
A light stands in a window. Mary Anne
Has the table set and the tea-pot waiting in the ashes. 695
She goes to the door and listens and then she calls
From the top of the haggard-wall:
“What’s keeping you
And the cows to be milked and all the other work there’s to do?”
“All right, all right, 700
We’ll not stay here all night.”
Applause, applause,
The curtain falls.
Applause, applause
From the homing carts and the trees 705
And the bawling cows at the gates.
From the screeching water-hens
And the mill-race heavy with the Lammas floods curving over the weir.
A train at the station blowing off steam
And the hysterical laughter of the defeated everywhere. 710
Night, and the futile cards are shuffled again.
Maguire spreads his legs over the impotent cinders that wake no manhood now
And he hardly looks to see which card is trump.
His sister tightens her legs and her lips and frizzles up
Like the wick of an oil-less lamp. 715
The curtain falls –
Applause, applause.
Maguire is not afraid of death, the Church will light him a candle
To see his way through the vaults and he’ll understand the
Quality of the clay that dribbles over his coffin. 720
He’ll know the names of the roots that climb down to tickle his feet.
And he will feel no different than when he walked through Donaghmoyne.
If he stretches out a hand – a wet clod,
If he opens his nostrils – a dungy smell;
If he opens his eyes once in a million years – 725
Through a crack in the crust of the earth he may see a face nodding in
Or a woman’s legs. Shut them again for that sight is sin.
He will hardly remember that life happened to him –
Something was brighter a moment. Somebody sang in the distance.
A procession passed down a mesmerized street. 730
He remembers names like Easter and Christmas
By the colour his fields were.
Maybe he will be born again, a bird of an angel’s conceit
To sing the gospel of life
To a music as flightily tangent 735
As a tune on an oboe.
As the serious look of the fields will have changed to the leer of a hobo
Swaggering celestially home to his three wishes granted.
Will that be? Will that be?
Or is the earth right that laughs haw-haw 740
And does not believe
In an unearthly law?
The earth that says:
Patrick Maguire, the old peasant, can neither be damned nor glorified:
The graveyard in which he will lie will be just a deep-drilled potato-field 745
Where the seed gets no chance to come through
To the fun of the sun.
The tongue in his mouth is the root of a yew.
Silence, silence. The story is done.
He stands in the doorway of his house 750
A ragged sculpture of the wind,
October creaks the rotted mattress,
The bedposts fall. No hope. No lust.
The hungry fiend
Screams the apocalypse of clay 755
In every corner of this land.
but most importantly....
William Shakespeare was a literary genious.I would date him.:)
A whisper and a chill
adv2005
"Why do I bother?"
The 11th Commandment.
"Whatever"
PETITION TO STOP THE BAN OF SMOKING IN BARS IN THE UNITED STATES....Anyone?
Our conversation was short and sweet
It nearly swept me off-a my feet.
And I'm back in the rain, oh, oh,
And you are on dry land.
You made it there somehow
You're a big girl now.
Bird on the horizon, sittin' on a fence,
He's singin' his song for me at his own expense.
And I'm just like that bird, oh, oh,
Singin' just for you.
I hope that you can hear,
Hear me singin' through these tears.
Time is a jet plane, it moves too fast
Oh, but what a shame if all we've shared can't last.
I can change, I swear, oh, oh,
See what you can do.
I can make it through,
You can make it too.
Love is so simple, to quote a phrase,
You've known it all the time, I'm learnin' it these days.
Oh, I know where I can find you, oh, oh,
In somebody's room.
It's a price I have to pay
You're a big girl all the way.
A change in the weather is known to be extreme
But what's the sense of changing horses in midstream?
I'm going out of my mind, oh, oh,
With a pain that stops and starts
Like a corkscrew to my heart
Ever since we've been apart.
Bob Dylan....anything he writes is poetic
but memories...they eat me
I've seen it all before,...
bring it on cause I'm no victim.
-Ghost
they're at my desk - i look at them everyday and read them over in my head
The Eternal Questioner
If time could stand still
How long life should seem
For life is but an illusion
A state of concious dream
And when life is all but over
Time will wait no more
Life but just the question
Did you see the things you saw
And when questions can't be answered
Answer is not to gain
Was my concious worth the effort
And time but stopped in vain.
and
"question and answer"
he sat naked and drunk in a room of summer
night, running the blade of the knife
under his fingernails, smiling, thinking
of all the letters he had received
telling him that
the way he lived and wrote about
that--
it had kept them going when
all seemed
truly
hopeless.
putting the blade on the table, he
flicked it with a finger
and it whirled
in a flashing circle
under the light.
who the hell is going to save
me? he
thought.
as the knife stopped spinning
the answer came:
you're going to have to
save yourself.
still smiling,
a: he lit a
cigarette
b: he poured
another
drink
c: gave the blade
another
spin.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm a number that doesn't count
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the nothing ventured - the nothing feigned
I heard of a man
who says words so beautifully
that if he only speaks their name
women give themselves to him.
If I am dumb beside your body
while silence blossoms like tumours on our lips
it is because I hear a man climb the stairs
and clear his throat outside our door.
a major impact on you.
Has our whole union been a sham?
"Or you are abominably wicked;
You are a toad."
And after I had thought of it,
I said, "I will, then, be a toad."
-- Stephen Crane
(There are so many reasons... but there's no point in saying them. I love Stephen Crane's poetry.)
Bob Dylan - Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands
With your mercury mouth in the missionary times,
And your eyes like smoke and your prayers like rhymes,
And your silver cross, and your voice like chimes,
Oh, who among them do they think could bury you?
With your pockets well protected at last,
And your streetcar visions which you place on the grass,
And your flesh like silk, and your face like glass,
Who among them do they think could carry you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse ass, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Oh, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
With your sheets like metal and your belt like lace,
And your deck of cards missing the jack and the ace,
And your basement clothes and your hollow face,
Who among them can think he could outguess you?
With your silhouette when the sunlight dims
Into your eyes where the moonlight swims,
And your match-book songs and your gypsy hymns,
Who among them would try to impress you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse ass, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Oh, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
The kings of Tyrus with their convict list
Are waiting in line for that geranium kiss,
And you wouldn't know it would happen like this,
But who among them really wants just to kiss you?
With your childhood flames on your midnight rug,
And your Spanish minors and your mother's drugs,
And your cowboy mouth and your curfew plugs,
Who among them do you think could resist you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse ass, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Oh, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
Oh, the farmers and the businessmen, they all did decide
To show you where the dead angels were that they used to hide.
But why did they pick you to sympathize with their side?
Oh, how could they ever mistake you?
They wished you'd accepted the blame for the farm,
But with the sea at your feet and the phony false alarm,
And with the child of the hoodlum wrapped up in your arms,
How could they ever have persuaded you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse ass, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Oh, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
With your sheet-metal memory of Cannery Row,
And your magazine-husband, who one day just had to go,
And your gentleness now, which you just can't help but show,
Who among them do you think would employ you?
Now you stand with your thief, you're on his parole
With your holy medallion, and your fingertips now which fold,
And your saint-like face, and your ghost-like soul,
Oh, who among them do you think could destroy you?
Sad-eyed lady of the lowlands,
Where the sad-eyed prophet says that no man comes,
My warehouse ass, my Arabian drums,
Should I leave them by your gate,
Oh, sad-eyed lady, should I wait?
I had withdrawn in forest, and my song
Was swallowed up in leaves that blew alway;
And to the forest edge you came one day
(*This was my dream) and looked and pondered long,
But did not enter, though the wish was strong:
you shook your pensive head as who should say,
'I dare not--to far in his footsteps stray-
He must seek me would he undo the wrong.'
Not far, but near, I stood and saw it all
behind low boughs the trees let down outside;
And the sweet pang it cost me not to call
And tell you that I saw does still abide.
But 'tis not true that thus I dwelt aloof,
For the wood wakes, and you are here for proof.
-Robert Frost-
~it is shining it is shining~
hey grooveamatic
the first is aleister crowley and the second is charles bukowski
maybe kitts' is his own??
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
I'm a number that doesn't count
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
the nothing ventured - the nothing feigned
that a thought is the same
to the heart as a touch
-S. McLachlan
That's awesome!
-S. McLachlan
sorry folks, I thought I had put Leonard Cohen's name at the end of the poem. 'cause it's his.
into the strenuous briefness
Life:
handorgans and April
darkness, friends
i charge laughing.
Into the hair-thin tints
of yellow dawn,
into the women-coloured twilight
i smilingly
glide. I
into the big vermilion departure
swim,sayingly;
(Do you think?)the
i do,world
is probably made
of roses & hello:
(of solongs and,ashes)
They're selling postcards of the hanging
They're painting the passports brown
The beauty parlor is filled with sailors
The circus is in town
Here comes the blind commissioner
They've got him in a trance
One hand is tied to the tight-rope walker
The other is in his pants
And the riot squad they're restless
They need somewhere to go
As Lady and I look out tonight
From Desolation Row
Cinderella, she seems so easy
"It takes one to know one," she smiles
And puts her hands in her back pockets
Bette Davis style
And in comes Romeo, he's moaning
"You Belong to Me I Believe"
And someone says," You're in the wrong place, my friend
You better leave"
And the only sound that's left
After the ambulances go
Is Cinderella sweeping up
On Desolation Row
Now the moon is almost hidden
The stars are beginning to hide
The fortunetelling lady
Has even taken all her things inside
All except for Cain and Abel
And the hunchback of Notre Dame
Everybody is making love
Or else expecting rain
And the Good Samaritan, he's dressing
He's getting ready for the show
He's going to the carnival tonight
On Desolation Row
Now Ophelia, she's 'neath the window
For her I feel so afraid
On her twenty-second birthday
She already is an old maid
To her, death is quite romantic
She wears an iron vest
Her profession's her religion
Her sin is her lifelessness
And though her eyes are fixed upon
Noah's great rainbow
She spends her time peeking
Into Desolation Row
Einstein, disguised as Robin Hood
With his memories in a trunk
Passed this way an hour ago
With his friend, a jealous monk
He looked so immaculately frightful
As he bummed a cigarette
Then he went off sniffing drainpipes
And reciting the alphabet
Now you would not think to look at him
But he was famous long ago
For playing the electric violin
On Desolation Row
Dr. Filth, he keeps his world
Inside of a leather cup
But all his sexless patients
They're trying to blow it up
Now his nurse, some local loser
She's in charge of the cyanide hole
And she also keeps the cards that read
"Have Mercy on His Soul"
They all play on penny whistles
You can hear them blow
If you lean your head out far enough
From Desolation Row
Across the street they've nailed the curtains
They're getting ready for the feast
The Phantom of the Opera
A perfect image of a priest
They're spoonfeeding Casanova
To get him to feel more assured
Then they'll kill him with self-confidence
After poisoning him with words
And the Phantom's shouting to skinny girls
"Get Outa Here If You Don't Know
Casanova is just being punished for going
To Desolation Row"
Now at midnight all the agents
And the superhuman crew
Come out and round up everyone
That knows more than they do
Then they bring them to the factory
Where the heart-attack machine
Is strapped across their shoulders
And then the kerosene
Is brought down from the castles
By insurance men who go
Check to see that nobody is escaping
To Desolation Row
Praise be to Nero's Neptune
The Titanic sails at dawn
And everybody's shouting
"Which Side Are You On?"
And Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot
Fighting in the captain's tower
While calypso singers laugh at them
And fishermen hold flowers
Between the windows of the sea
Where lovely mermaids flow
And nobody has to think too much
About Desolation Row
Yes, I received your letter yesterday
(About the time the door knob broke)
When you asked how I was doing
Was that some kind of joke?
All these people that you mention
Yes, I know them, they're quite lame
I had to rearrange their faces
And give them all another name
Right now I can't read too good
Don't send me no more letters no
Not unless you mail them
From Desolation Row
Copyright © 1965; renewed 1993 Special Rider Music
As she slams the door in his drunken face
And now he stands outside
And all the neighbours start to gossip and drool
He cries oh, girl you must be mad,
What happened to the sweet love you and me had?
Against the door he leans and starts a scene,
And his tears fall and burn the garden green