A Note -- Wislawa Szymborska

Guest poem sent in by Neville Clemens

(Poem #1797) A Note Life is the only way to get covered in leaves, catch your breath on the sand, rise on wings; to be a dog, or stroke its warm fur; to tell pain from everything it's not; to squeeze inside events, dawdle in views, to seek the least of all possible mistakes. An extraordinary chance to remember for a moment a conversation held with the lamp switched off; and if only once to stumble upon a stone, end up soaked in one downpour or another, mislay your keys in the grass; and to follow a spark on the wind with your eyes; and to keep on not knowing something important. -- Wislawa Szymborska

 (Translated from the Polish, by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.)

It's hard to follow a poetic commentary on Life with a commentary on it.
Every line in this poem draws a sigh out of the reader. And to think of it,
if they stand *alone*, many of the lines might seem quite...well...unpoetic:

  "mislay your keys in the grass"

Hmm. Not quite up there with spectacular descriptions of searing sunsets and
passionate romances. Or is it? The magic of the poem, I daresay, is in the
opening line. It is only when *dovetailed* with this opening line that the
rest of the poem's lines acquire their magical qualities :

  "Life is the only way..."

It wakes the reader up! We're all ears now; what is this Life thing?  Oh
let's see what it's all about. This is going to be deeply philosophical and
wrenching. Intense.

But then Szymborska follows it up with all these simple and yet wonderful,
wonderful lines that defy any sort of intellectual analysis. It defies them.
Denies them the opportunity to probe the poem for this or that with their
rude speculative tools. Follows it up with lines that are almost Koan-esque
in nature, accessible only to the intuition and leaves the reader with the
sense that he/she now shares this secret knowledge of Life with the poet - a
knowing, and at the same time a Not Knowing that gives us joy, the joy

  "to keep on not knowing
  something important."

- Neville

Kimbol Soques had posted a comment on Poem #224 with a link to Szymborska's
Nobel acceptance speech. I think it's worth posting a link to that speech
again, so here it is:
http://nobelprize.org/literature/laureates/1996/szymborska-lecture.html

Dilemma -- David Budbill

Guest poem submitted by Neville Clemens :

(Poem #1752) Dilemma I want to be famous so I can be humble about being famous. What good is my humility when I am stuck in this obscurity? -- David Budbill

A friend of mine sent me this impish poem which she came across in  an
anthology titled "Good Poems", edited by Garrison Keillor - a collection of
American poems. For that, I am grateful to her.

Nothing to be said about this poem. Just read it, enjoy it and find yourself
grinning your sheepish, guilty grin :-).

The poet's website can be found at http://www.davidbudbill.com , with a link
to his biography.

Neville.

On Giving -- Kahlil Gibran

Guest poem sent in by Neville Clemens

(Poem #1750) On Giving There are those who give little of the much which they have - and they give it for recognition and their hidden desire makes their gifts unwholesome. And there are those who have little and give it all. These are the believers in life and the bounty of life, and their coffer is never empty. There are those who give with joy, and that joy is their reward. And there are those who give with pain, and that pain is their baptism. And there are those who give and know not pain in giving, nor do they seek joy, nor give with mindfulness of virtue; They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space. Through the hands of such as these God speaks, and from behind their eyes He smiles upon the earth. -- Kahlil Gibran

I came across this excerpt form Gibran's 'The Prophet' when I was about 13,
courtesy of my father who had it put up on our living room wall. I loved it
then, and as the years have gone by I've grown to love it even more as I
begin to be more aware of and experience the interplay of emotions involved
in simple acts of my life. Gibran forces us to take a harder look at Giving,
forces us to look past fruitive motives for our actions, at a place where
there exists such a thing as a Selfless Deed, stripped clean of ANY reaction
- pure, simple and childlike to grasp....and yet something we struggle with.

"They give as in yonder valley the myrtle breathes its fragrance into space."

THAT, to me, is the clinching line of the poem; the line that holds it all
together and gently pours the poet's wisdom over the reader.

Notes:

1. This is part of a larger passage on Giving in 'The Prophet', but this is
the portion that I came across as a child. Since it seems to me to be a
plenary excerpt and since I am biased towards shorter poems I'd like to
submit just this passage. The entire passage can be read here:

   http://www.katsandogz.com/ongiving.html

2. The poet's first name is spelt as Khalil as well as Kahlil. However, the
former spelling does more justice to the pronunciation. The first syllable
is a 'kha', pronounced thickly from the throat - as anyone familiar with
Urdu or Arabic would know. The 'G' in the last name is pronounced as in
Germany. The source of this is a Lebanese friend of mine (Gibran was
Lebanese, so I assume he was right!). I'm only adding this because for
years I'd always mumble his name in conversations to avoid being caught with
a mispronunciation :-). To sum up : kha-leel jib-raan

3. An extensive biography of this Lebanese poet and artist (a la Blake) is
available at:

   [broken link] http://www.kahlil.org/bio.html

Neville

Temporary Well Being -- Kenneth Burke

Guest poem sent in by Neville Clemens

(Poem #1613) Temporary Well Being The pond is plenteous The land is lush, And having turned off the news I am for the moment mellow. With my book in one hand And my drink in the other What more could I want But fame, Better health, And ten million dollars? -- Kenneth Burke

I was loitering about New York's Pennsylvania Station about a month ago waiting
for my train to arrive when I came across these lines engraved on one of the
walls. The station had been renovated a few years ago and the new polished
granite walls were liberally garnished with delightful short poems (I suppose
one isn't inclined to read epic ballads when there is a train to catch) such as
this one, by poets from in and around the tri-state area.

From the snippets that I remembered when I got back home, I wasn't able to find
the poem on the internet. So last week as I passed by the wall again, I
stopped, stared and memorized it the best I could - and here it is. I'm not
sure if this is part of a larger poem, but in any case I think it stands very
nicely on its own. [verified against a copy on the net -- martin]

This poem, to me, speaks out against what I call 'selective renunciation'. It's
an argument I've had with my parents on many an occasion. We urban people tend
to romanticize the countryside and the hill stations and often express our
desire to leave everything behind and retire to some such place and give it all
up - only we don't *really* want to give it all up. We still want a nice warm
house, a department store nearby, a bank to keep our money safe, a nice school
for our children, a car to move about and so on and so forth till we've utterly
destroyed the charm of the place, and then we move on to romanticizing the next
pristine spot.

So let's stop calling ourselves 'nature lovers'. We're urban animals and living
in an urban jungle is just the cross we'll have to bear, as responsible human
beings. Either that or we go and live by yonder pond in yonder woods like
yonder Dead Poet if we truly wish to 'suck the marrow out of life'.

Neville

[Links]

Biography:

http://www.press.jhu.edu/books/hopkins_guide_to_literary_theory/kenneth_burke.html

Review:
  http://hcl.harvard.edu/houghton/departments/harvardreview/27/giamo.html