Pentecost -- Derek Walcott

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1411) Pentecost Better a jungle in the head than rootless concrete. Better to stand bewildered by the fireflies' crooked street; winter lamps do not show where the sidewalk is lost, nor can these tongues of snow speak for the Holy Ghost; the self-increasing silence of words dropped from a roof points along iron railings, direction, in not proof. But best is this night surf with slow scriptures of sand, that sends, not quite a seraph, but a late cormorant, whose fading cry propels through phosphorescent shoal what, in my childhood gospels, used to be called the Soul. -- Derek Walcott

While Pentecost doesn't map to the current "Ho Ho Ho" season in the United
States, on reading this poem from "Arkansas Testament" a few nights ago,
it occured to me that minus the title, this poem (a call for the tropics
in a tropical "soul"), voices an yearning (and for me personally
more apt) which shines, all the more wonderfuly when contrasted to all
that "White Christmas" noise on the radio.

Of course we have to hand it to Walcott for his perfect "finishes"!

Happy Holidays!
- Sashi

[Martin adds]

The (indeed perfect) finish reminded me of Poem #1197, with its refrain of
"some call it ..., others call it God". The tone is different, though -
today's poem is more nostalgic, and, as Sashi says, more yearning for a
religion that is increasingly missing in the narrator's life. "Childhood" is
a double-edged word, and there is definitely a suggestion that the "childhood
gospels" were in some sense naive, but overall, I think, the poem's burden is
that something of value has been, and is being lost.

Autumn -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1384) Autumn Lord: it is time. The huge summer has gone by. Now overlap the sundials with your shadows, and on the meadows let the wind go free. Command the fruits to swell on tree and vine; grant them a few more warm transparent days, urge them on to fulfillment then, and press the final sweetness into the heavy wine. Whoever has no house now, will never have one. Whoever is alone will stay alone, will sit, read, write long letters through the evening, and wander along the boulevards, up and down, restlessly, while the dry leaves are blowing. -- Rainer Maria Rilke

Notes:

The first fall day is here, at this latitude [Sep 29 - ed]. The long
sleeves come out of the closet as do dawns after 7.00 am. Light and darkness
slice the day almost evenly, two halves of a pumpkin. And as I wander along
the boulevards, up and down, only Rilke sings in the wind.

Sashi

Things I Didn't Know I Loved -- Nazim Hikmet

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1350) Things I Didn't Know I Loved it's 1962 March 28th I'm sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train night is falling I never knew I liked night descending like a tired bird on a smoky wet plain I don't like comparing nightfall to a tired bird I didn't know I loved the earth can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it I've never worked the earth it must be my only Platonic love and here I've loved rivers all this time whether motionless like this they curl skirting the hills European hills crowned with chateaus or whether stretched out flat as far as the eye can see I know you can't wash in the same river even once I know the river will bring new lights you'll never see I know we live slightly longer than a horse but not nearly as long as a crow I know this has troubled people before and will trouble those after me I know all this has been said a thousand times before and will be said after me I didn't know I loved the sky cloudy or clear the blue vault Andrei studied on his back at Borodino in prison I translated both volumes of War and Peace into Turkish I hear voices not from the blue vault but from the yard the guards are beating someone again I didn't know I loved trees bare beeches near Moscow in Peredelkino they come upon me in winter noble and modest beeches are Russian the way poplars are Turkish "the poplars of Izmir losing their leaves. . . they call me The Knife. . . lover like a young tree. . . I blow stately mansions sky-high" in the Ilgaz woods in 1920 I tied an embroidered linen handkerchief to a pine bough for luck I never knew I loved roads even the asphalt kind Vera's behind the wheel we're driving from Moscow to the Crimea Koktebele formerly "Goktepili" in Turkish the two of us inside a closed box the world flows past on both sides distant and mute I was never so close to anyone in my life bandits stopped me on the red road between Bolu and Gered(& when I was eighteen apart from my life I didn't have anything in the wagon they could take and at eighteen our lives are what we value least I've written this somewhere before wading through a dark muddy street I'm going to the shadow play Ramazan night a paper lantern leading the way maybe nothing like this ever happened maybe I read it somewhere an eight-year-old boy going to the shadow play Ramazan night in Istanbul holding his grandfather's hand his grandfather has on a fez and is wearing the fur coat with a sable collar over his robe and there's a lantern in the servant's hand and I can't contain myself for joy flowers come to mind for some reason poppies cactuses jonquils in the jonquil garden in Kadikoy Istanbul I kissed Marika fresh almonds on her breath I was seventeen my heart on a swing touched the sky I didn't know I loved flowers friends sent me three red carnations in prison I just remembered the stars I love them too whether I'm floored watching them from below or whether I'm flying at their side I have some questions for the cosmonauts were the stars much bigger did they look like huge jewels on black velvet or apricots on orange did you feel proud to get closer to the stars I saw color photos of the cosmos in Ogonek magazine now don't be upset comrades but nonfigurative shall we say or abstract well some of them looked just like such paintings which is to say they were terribly figurative and concrete my heart was in my mouth looking at them they are our endless desire to grasp things seeing them I could even think of death and not feel at all sad I never knew I loved the cosmos snow flashes in front of my eyes both heavy wet steady snow and the dry whirling kind I didn't know I liked snow I never knew I loved the sun even when setting cherry-red as now in Istanbul too it sometimes sets in postcard colors but you aren't about to paint it that way I didn't know I loved the sea except the Sea of Azov or how much I didn't know I loved clouds whether I'm under or up above them whether they look like giants or shaggy white beasts moonlight the falsest the most languid the most petit-bourgeois strikes me I like it I didn't know I liked rain whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass my heart leaves me tangled up in a net or trapped inside a drop and takes off for uncharted countries I didn't know I loved rain but why did I suddenly discover all these passions sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train is it because I lit my sixth cigarette one alone could kill me is it because I'm half dead from thinking about someone back in Moscow her hair straw-blond eyelashes blue the train plunges on through the pitch-black night I never knew I liked the night pitch-black sparks fly from the engine I didn't know I loved sparks I didn't know I loved so many things and I had to wait until sixty to find it out sitting by the window on the Prague-Berlin train watching the world disappear as if on a journey of no return -- Nazim Hikmet

           19 April 1962, Moscow
           Trans. by Randy Blasing and Mutlu Konuk (1993)

Notes:

Justice's poem [Poem #1343] was triggered by, as William wrote, something on
the periphery; a light at a window. This brings to my mind a whole slew of
poems that triggered by visions and sightings like that. We have Pasternak's
Winter Night [Poem #45] and that super incantaion "and a candle burned on the
table". This is linked to one of the early scenes of the novel, Dr.  Zhivago,
where he watches a candle burning at a window. We also have Seth's Protocols,
where the narrator is walking past a house and writes "May the sun burn these
footprints on the lawn".

This brings us to this lyrical monolouge of Hikmet in which he lists all
those peripheral things that he had experienced (and which I suppose all
of us have or will experience) in his life and brings to each of those
recollections, a sweet ache of finally talking about them and acknowleding
those experiences. While Justice's poem deals with just a single incident
this poem is almost autobiographical in sweep, making it more "sumptous".

I first came upon a snippet of this poem in the New York Times Book Review
and just loved those lines:

"I didn't know I liked rain
whether it falls like a fine net or splatters against the glass "

And since it had been raining off and on, here in Atlanta, these lines
have been on my periphery in the recent days.

Cheers!
Sashi

Where Everything Is Music -- Jalaluddin Rumi

Guest poem submitted by Sashidhar Dandamudi:

(Poem #1334) Where Everything Is Music Don't worry about saving these songs! And if one of our instruments breaks, it doesn't matter. We have fallen into the place where everything is music. The strumming and the flute notes rise into the atmosphere, and even if the whole world's harp should burn up, there will still be hidden instruments playing. So the candle flickers and goes out. We have a piece of flint, and a spark. This singing art is sea foam. The graceful movements come from a pearl somewhere on the ocean floor. Poems reach up like spindrift and the edge of driftwood along the beach, wanting! They derive from a slow and powerful root that we can't see. Stop the words now. Open the window in the center of your chest, and let the spirits fly in and out. -- Jalaluddin Rumi

Translated by Coleman Barks.

Mallika's "song" bought this fantastic poem up from memory. Even though
I can't claim to have memorized it, the last verse has been a long time
favourite of mine. Also since summer, usually for me, consists of
absorbing a dose of live music as it happens around the city, often a
time I remembered song at those moments of transendent guitar riffs,
when I could only open the window in the center of my chest and let the
spirits fly in and out!

Onwards!
Sashi

Notes:

This poem was a part of the PBS Program "Fooling with Words". I would
also reccomend the viewers to go listen and view to "Jump Mama" here:
        http://www.pbs.org/wnet/foolingwithwords/main_video.html

Poem in Thanks -- Thomas Lux

Guest poem submitted by Sashidhar Dandamudi:

(Poem #1305) Poem in Thanks Lord Whoever, thank you for this air I'm about to in- and exhale, this hutch in the woods, the wood for fire, the light-both lamp and the natural stuff of leaf-back, fern, and wing. For the piano, the shovel for ashes, the moth-gnawed blankets, the stone-cold water stone-cold: thank you. Thank you, Lord, coming for to carry me here -- where I'll gnash it out, Lord, where I'll calm and work, Lord, thank you for the goddamn birds singing! -- Thomas Lux

This poem opens Garrison Keillor's (the funny guy who reads poems on NPR
and of course hosts "The Praire Home Companion") anthology 'Good Poems'.
The section is called "O Lord!".

In the preface of this book, Keillor says these poems were chosen for
"their wit, their frankness, their passion and their utter clarity in
the face of everything else a person has to deal with at 7 a.m." He also
goes on say that  "For writers, it's enough to refer to somebody having
written a good poem. Somebody else can worry about greatness."

I concur wholly with Keillor's view for this indeed is a good poem. And
which I have, since I have read it, passed on to other friends and
remembered it on early mornings when I heard "the goddamn birds
singing".

Also since I personally know Thomas Lux, I would like to share this poem
with other Ministrel-ites, as an introduction to a body of work by a
deligthful poet and person.

Thank you.
Sashi.

Bio:

THOMAS LUX, born in Northampton, Massachusettes in 1946, is a member of
the writing faculty and director of the MFA Program in Poetry at Sarah
Lawrence College. In recent years he has been on the graduate faculties
of Boston University, the University of California (Irvine), Columbia
University, Warren Wilson College, and the Universities of Houston,
Iowa, and Michigan. A former Guggenheim Fellow, the recipient of three
NEA grants, Lux won the Kingsley Tufts Award for his book of poems,
Split Horizon, and has been a finalist for both the Los Angeles Times
Book Award in poetry and the 1998 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

My Father's Love Letters -- Yusef Komunyakaa

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1290) My Father's Love Letters On Fridays he'd open a can of Jax After coming home from the mill, & ask me to write a letter to my mother Who sent postcards of desert flowers Taller than men. He would beg, Promising to never beat her Again. Somehow I was happy She had gone, & sometimes wanted To slip in a reminder, how Mary Lou Williams' "Polka Dots & Moonbeams" Never made the swelling go down. His carpenter's apron always bulged With old nails, a claw hammer Looped at his side & extension cords Coiled around his feet. Words rolled from under the pressure Of my ballpoint: Love, Baby, Honey, Please. We sat in the quiet brutality Of voltage meters & pipe threaders, Lost between sentences . . . The gleam of a five-pound wedge On the concrete floor Pulled a sunset Through the doorway of his toolshed. I wondered if she laughed & held them over a gas burner. My father could only sign His name, but he'd look at blueprints & say how many bricks Formed each wall. This man, Who stole roses & hyacinth For his yard, would stand there With eyes closed & fists balled, Laboring over a simple word, almost Redeemed by what he tried to say. -- Yusef Komunyakaa

Notes:

[1] The recent poem submitted by Jasmina (Poem #1288: Amanda Townsend),
made me remember this poem which I had read a few weeks ago in Komunyaaka's
Pulitzer Prize winning collection "Neon Vernacular". It deals with the same
pieces of conflict and agreement between men and women.

[2] The whole poem seems to be structured in a very beautiful way around
brutality (beat her, claw hammer, pressure of my ballpoint pen, five pound
wedge, concrete floor) and tenderness (desert flowers, Polka Dots and
Moonbeams, sunset, roses & hyacinth) to reflect how the narrator is
similarly caught between the same kind of feeling towards his father. Can't
do anything better than that!

[3] I was also suprised that Komunyakaa was missing from the Minstrels
pantheon! I think he is a great poet, who has written some powerful poetry,
the notable being of his experiences as a black journalist serving in
Vietnam War. So I belive we might consider adding this missing link.

joy!
Sashi

[Bio] [broken link] http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/komunyakaa/bio.html
[Other Poems] http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/komunyakaa/

A Contribution to Statistics -- Wislawa Szymborska

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1267) A Contribution to Statistics Out of a hundred people those who always know better -fifty-two doubting every step -nearly all the rest, glad to lend a hand if it doesn't take too long -as high as forty-nine, always good because they can't be otherwise -four, well maybe five, able to admire without envy -eighteen, suffering illusions induced by fleeting youth -sixty, give or take a few, not to be taken lightly -forty and four, living in constant fear of someone or something -seventy-seven, capable of happiness -twenty-something tops, harmless singly, savage in crowds -half at least, cruel when forced by circumstances -better not to know even ballpark figures, wise after the fact -just a couple more than wise before it, taking only things from life -thirty (I wish I were wrong), hunched in pain, no flashlight in the dark -eighty-three sooner or later, righteous -thirty-five, which is a lot, righteous and understanding -three, worthy of compassion -ninety-nine, mortal -a hundred out of a hundred. thus far this figure still remains unchanged. -- Wislawa Szymborska

Comments:

Since today's poem by Seth (Poem #1226) to me read like a "listing", I
remembered this poem by Szymborska (phew! they should ask this in a
Spelling Bee), which I was reading the other night from the latest
anthology of the Favorite Poem Project. Well, no more commentry because
the poem speaks for itself.

Sashi

Persimmons -- Li-Young Lee

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1245) Persimmons In sixth grade Mrs. Walker slapped the back of my head and made me stand in the corner for not knowing the difference between persimmon and precision. How to choose persimmons. This is precision. Ripe ones are soft and brown-spotted. Sniff the bottoms. The sweet one will be fragrant. How to eat: put the knife away, lay down the newspaper. Peel the skin tenderly, not to tear the meat. Chew on the skin, suck it, and swallow. Now, eat the meat of the fruit, so sweet all of it, to the heart. Donna undresses, her stomach is white. In the yard, dewy and shivering with crickets, we lie naked, face-up, face-down, I teach her Chinese. Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten. Naked: I've forgotten. Ni, wo: you me. I part her legs, remember to tell her she is beautiful as the moon. Other words that got me into trouble were fight and fright, wren and yarn. Fight was what I did when I was frightened, fright was what I felt when I was fighting. Wrens are small, plain birds, yarn is what one knits with. Wrens are soft as yarn. My mother made birds out of yarn. I loved to watch her tie the stuff; a bird, a rabbit, a wee man. Mrs. Walker brought a persimmon to class and cut it up so everyone could taste a Chinese apple. Knowing it wasn't ripe or sweet, I didn't eat but watched the other faces. My mother said every persimmon has a sun inside, something golden, glowing, warm as my face. Once, in the cellar, I found two wrapped in newspaper forgotten and not yet ripe. I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill, where each morning a cardinal sang. The sun, the sun. Finally understanding he was going blind, my father would stay up all one night waiting for a song, a ghost. I gave him the persimmons, swelled, heavy as sadness, and sweet as love. This year, in the muddy lighting of my parents' cellar, I rummage, looking for something I lost. My father sits on the tired, wooden stairs, black cane between his knees, hand over hand, gripping the handle. He's so happy that I've come home. I ask how his eyes are, a stupid question. All gone, he answers. Under some blankets, I find three scrolls. I sit beside him and untie three paintings by my father: Hibiscus leaf and a white flower. Two cats preening. Two persimmons, so full they want to drop from the cloth. He raises both hands to touch the cloth, asks, Which is this? This is persimmons, Father. Oh, the feel of the wolftail on the silk, the strength, the tense precision in the wrist. I painted them hundreds of times eyes closed. These I painted blind. Some things never leave a person: scent of the hair of one you love, the texture of persimmons, in your palm, the ripe weight. -- Li-Young Lee

Today's poem that David Highland submitted written by David Lee, triggered
in my head a memory of this poem from a volume of poem I read an year ago by
another Lee, with language as clear. Instead of feeding pigs, the subject is
eating persimmons. This poem is resonant at many levels most of them
personal.

First comes the manner of speaking of English. By virtue of being a
"non-native" speaker, I usually tend to be very imprecise about my
pronunciation. I simply have a sound within my head that I had to make up
for myself sans any other point of reference for a lot of words. As an
example the other day I was using the word Hyperbole. I said hyper-bol and
had dropped the 'e'. I was corrected:

"the difference between persimmon and precision."

Then a few days ago at a gathering, I was quickly asked to say "Thank
you" in Hindi, when I realised by the virtue of non-use I had forgotten
that sound. It didn't come to me right away.

"Crickets: chiu chiu. Dew: I've forgotten.
Naked: I've forgotten."

Then the rest of the poem goes on use persimmons to link the poet with his
parents and of the days past. Similarly eating mangoes out of a bottle
linked me to summers and mangoes in India and the koel's song.

"I took them and set them both on my bedroom windowsill,
where each morning a cardinal
sang. The sun, the sun."

And then there is this great ending:

"Some things never leave a person:
scent of the hair of one you love,
the texture of persimmons,
in your palm, the ripe weight."

Li-Young Lee also a wrote a spectacular memoir called The Winged Seed,
which I highly reccomend, to memorists!

Sashi

Links:

To hear the poet reading this poem:
http://www.wwnorton.com/trade/multimedia.htm

Bio Etc.
[broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C040C01

Self-Improvement -- Tony Hoagland

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1236) Self-Improvement Just before she flew off like a swan to her wealthy parents' summer home, Bruce's college girlfriend asked him to improve his expertise at oral sex, and offered him some technical advice: Use nothing but his tonguetip to flick the light switch in his room on and off a hundred times a day until he grew fluent at the nuances of force and latitude. Imagine him at practice every evening, more inspired than he ever was at algebra, beads of sweat sprouting on his brow, thinking, thirty-seven, thirty-eight, seeing, in the tunnel vision of his mind's eye, the quadratic equation of her climax yield to the logic of his simple math. Maybe he unscrewed the bulb from his apartment ceiling so that passersby would not believe a giant firefly was pulsing its electric abdomen in 13 B. Maybe, as he stood two inches from the wall, in darkness, fogging the old plaster with his breath, he visualized the future as a mansion standing on the shore that he was rowing to with his tongue's exhausted oar. Of course, the girlfriend dumped him: met someone, apres-ski, who, using nothing but his nose could identify the vintage of a Cabernet. Sometimes we are asked to get good at something we have no talent for, or we excel at something we will never have the opportunity to prove. Often we ask ourselves to make absolute sense out of what just happens, and in this way, what we are practicing is suffering, which everybody practices, but strangely few of us grow graceful in. The climaxes of suffering are complex, costly, beautiful, but secret. Bruce never played the light switch again. So the avenues we walk down, full of bodies wearing faces, are full of hidden talent: enough to make pianos moan, sidewalks split, streetlights deliriously flicker. -- Tony Hoagland

This poem is from a book of poems I was reading two nights ago, called
Donkey Gospel. And I was rolling in the aisles and speaking in tongues
when I was done as it was just a magnificient take on living (perhaps
living in America), full of humor and irony.

And Self Improvement speaks volumes of a lot of things: relationships
atleast the pathetic aspect of them, the whole self improvement creed,
hidden talents and the need for zany poetry to illumine all of these.

Run this!

Sashi

Other Details:

TONY HOAGLAND's first book, Sweet Ruin, won the Brittingham Prize in
Poetry and the Zacharis Award from Ploughshares at Emerson College. Donkey
Gospel was the recipient of the 1997 James Laughlin Award of The Academy
of American Poets. Hoagland currently teaches at the University of
Pittsburgh.

for a few more poems from the same book:

http://www.graywolfpress.org/resources/excerpts/excerpts-donkeygospel.html

The Gardener (LXXXV) -- Rabindranath Tagore

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1231) The Gardener (LXXXV) Who are you, reader, reading my poems an hundred years hence? I cannot send you one single flower from this wealth of the spring, one single streak of gold from yonder clouds. Open your doors and look abroad. From your blossoming garden gather fragrant memories of the vanished flowers of an hundred years before. In the joy of your heart may you feel the living joy that sang one spring morning, sending its glad voice across a hundred years. -- Rabindranath Tagore

The recent poem by Flecker [Poem #1225] immediately triggered my memory of
this poem, that ends Tagore's "The Gardener". Although the time span across
which he was adressing "you" is only a century instead of a millenium, it
remains IMHO, a great ending for a book of poems. Also since we seem to be
reading a series of poems with the theme, "Spring", this fits right there
with the rest of them.

As an interesting aside, Tagore expanded on this theme in a seperate poem
called "The Year 1400" (the year 1400 (1996) refers to the Bengali
calender), in a poem he wrote in 1896. I was told by a friend from
Bangladesh that this poem was widely circulated and celebrated in 1996.  I
have had this poem read to me in Bengali but since I couldn't find a good
enough translation that does justice to the original, I couldn't submit that
to run it on the list. However for the curious here is a translation:

http://www.parabaas.com/rabindranath/articles/kKetaki1.html

Sashi

Deadline -- Barbara Kingsolver

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1212) Deadline The night before war begins, and you are still here. You can stand in a breathless cold ocean of candles, a thousand issues of your same face rubbed white from below by clear waxed light. A vigil. You are wondering what it is you can hold a candle to. You have a daughter. Her cheeks curve like aspects of the Mohammed's perfect pear. She is three. Too young for candles but you are here, this is war. Flames covet the gold-sparked ends of her hair, her nylon parka laughing in color, inflammable. It has taken your whole self to bring her undamaged to this moment, and waiting in the desert at this moment is a bomb that flings gasoline in a liquid sheet, a laundress's snap overhead, wide as the ancient Tigris, and ignites as it descends. The polls have sung their opera of assent: the land wants war. But here is another America, candle-throated, sure as tide. Whoever you are, you are also this granite anger. In history you will be the vigilant dead who stood in front of every war with old hearts in your pockets, stood on the carcass of hope listening for the thunder of its feathers. The desert is diamond ice and only stars above us here and elsewhere, a thousand issues of a clear waxed star, a holocaust of heaven and somewhere, a way out. -- Barbara Kingsolver

           January 15, 1991

Keeping with yesterday's Owen's submission, I add two more cents to the
gory word heap. Kingsolver, better known for her essays, captures the
landscape of the impending Gulf War perfectly. Since folks are back at
it again: same place, almost same time, same villains and same heroes,
only this time with "smart" bombs, perhaps smarter than those that
flung

     "...gasoline in a liquid sheet,
      a laundress's snap overhead, wide as the ancient Tigris,
      and ignites as it descends."

These lines bring up image of Kim Phuc, and her photograph as a little girl,
her clothes seared from her body by a Napalm bomb, running screaming from her
burning village, arms are outstretched in terror and pain. This in Vietnam.

Then the last two lines, "a holocaust of heaven/and somewhere, a way out."
resonate strongly with Bob Dylan's "All along the Watchtower":

    "There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
    "There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
    Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
    None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

If poets are "jokers", whose duty, as Lucille Clifton at a poetry reading here
said is "to comfort the afflicted, and to afflict the comfortable.", then I
think this poem does that very well.

There must be some way out of here... to peace!

Sashi

Links:

Kingsolver's Web Page
http://www.kingsolver.com/home/index.asp

Bob Dylan's lyric
http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/watchtower.html

Nick Ut's Pulitzer Prize winning photo of the girl
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/museums/images/pgallery/gallery2.htm

Advice to a Prophet -- Richard Wilbur

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1195) Advice to a Prophet When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city, Mad-eyed from stating the obvious, Not proclaiming our fall but begging us In God's name to have self-pity, Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range, The long numbers that rocket the mind; Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind, Unable to fear what is too strange. Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race. How should we dream of this place without us?-- The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us, A stone look on the stone's face? Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost, How the view alters. We could believe, If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy, The lark avoid the reaches of our eye, The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn As Xanthus once, its gliding trout Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without The dolphin's arc, the dove's return, These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken? Ask us, prophet, how we shall call Our natures forth when that live tongue is all Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean Horse of our courage, in which beheld The singing locust of the soul unshelled, And all we mean or wish to mean. Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding Whether there shall be lofty or long standing When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close. -- Richard Wilbur

Over the past few days, we have seen quite a few poems dealing with themes
of war: pain, irony, death. This is another fine poem to the collection.
The language is fresh (live tongue is all/Dispelled, that glass obscured or
broken ; The singing locust of the soul unshelled) and the voice of the
poet takes the prophetic ring.

This poem also took me back to the 'sonnets' of Vikram Seth's Golden Gate
and this speech in that book given by a Catholic priest, against the
nuclear weapons and Cold War.

And the poem says all of the 'two-cents' I have to say about war.

And the poet had to this to say:

"Wilbur: Yes. I believe that what I was trying to do in that poem was to
provide - myself, of course - with a way of feeling the enormity of
nuclear war, should it come. The approach of that poem, which comes at
such a war through its likely effect on the creatures who surround us, is
a very "thingy" one. It made it possible for me to feel something beside a
kind of abstract horror, a puzzlement, at the thought of nuclear war; and
it may so serve other people. I hope so."

Peace!
Sashi

Links:

The Academy of American Poets
http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C04050F

Two older Wilbur poems on Minstrels:
Poem #322
Poem #1116

Cherrylog Road -- James Dickey

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1193) Cherrylog Road Off Highway 106 At Cherrylog Road I entered The '34 Ford without wheels, Smothered in kudzu, With a seat pulled out to run Corn whiskey down from the hills, And then from the other side Crept into an Essex With a rumble seat of red leather And then out again, aboard A blue Chevrolet, releasing The rust from its other color, Reared up on three building blocks. None had the same body heat; I changed with them inward, toward The weedy heart of the junkyard, For I knew that Doris Holbrook Would escape from her father at noon And would come from the farm To seek parts owned by the sun Among the abandoned chassis, Sitting in each in turn As I did, leaning forward As in a wild stock-car race In the parking lot of the dead. Time after time, I climbed in And outthe other side, like An envoy or movie star Met at the station by crickets. A radiator cap raised its head, Become a real toad or a kingsnake As I neared the hub of the yard, Passing through many states, Many lives, to reach Some grandmother's long Pierce-Arrow Sending platters of blindness forth From its nickel hubcaps And spilling its tender upholstery On sleepy roaches, The glass panel in between Lady and colored driver Not all the way broken out, The back-seat phone Still on its hook. I got in as though to exclaim, "Let us go to the orphan asylum, John; I have some old toys For children who say their prayers." I popped with sweat as I thought I heard Doris Holbrook scrape Like a mouse in the southern-state sun That was eating the paint in blisters >>From a hundred car tops and hoods. She was tapping like code, Loosening the screws, Carrying off headlights, Sparkplugs, bumpers, Cracked mirrors and gear-knobs, Getting ready, already, To go back with something to show Other than her lips' new trembling I would hold to me soon, soon Where I sat in the ripped back seat Talking over the interphone, Praying for Doris Holbrook To come from her father's farm And to get back there With no trace of me on her face To be seen by her red-haired father Who would change, in the squalling barn, Her back's pale skin with a strop, Then lay for me In a bootlegger's roasting car With a sting-triggered 12-guage shotgun To blast the breath from the air. Not cut by the jagged windshields, Through the acres of wrecks she came With a wrench in her hand, Through dust where the blacksnake dies Of boredom, and the beetle knows The compost has no more life. Someone's outside would have seen The oldest car's door inexplicably Close from within: I held her and held her and held her, Convoyed at terrific speed By the stalled, dreaming traffic around us, So the blacksnake, stiff With inaction, curved back Into life, and hunted the mouse With deadly overexcitement, The beetles reclaimed their field As we clung, glued together With the hooks of the seat springs Working through to catch us red-handed Amidst the gray breathless batting That burst from the seat at our backs. We left by separate doors Into the changed, other bodies Of cars, she down Cherrylog Road And I to my motorcycle Parked like the soul of the junkyard Restored, a bicycle fleshed With power, and tore off Up Highway 106, continually Drunk on the wind in my mouth, Wringing the handlebar for speed, Wild to be wreckage forever. -- James Dickey

I was talking to Thomas Lux, a poet in residence at Tech, about James
Dickey the other day, when he mentioned this poem to me. He called it
memorable and solidly rooted in the South. But what he didn't say was
how powerful and vivid this poem was, I had to find that out for myself.
And what I haven't been able to get out of my head, ever since I read
this poem, are the lines at the closing:

        "Drunk on the wind in my mouth,
        Wringing the handlebar for speed,
        Wild to be wreckage forever."

These alone are worth reading this poem, the power those lines evoke/
invoke! I have felt these emotions many times, when I wrung "the
handlebar for speed, wild to be wreckage forever"!

Also since a recent theme has been poetry and movies, James Dickey apart
from being a powerful poet, wrote the novel Deliverance. It was on
this book, the smash movie Deliverance was based. Infact he figures in
the movie as the sheriff towards the closing, which I think is pretty
unusual, instead of a poem in a movie, it's a poet in a movie.

The movie is worth watching too, if only to see that jam/duel of a
guitar and a banjo. And since I have hiked along the river(Chattooga
River in Georgia) on which it is set, I could experience first hand the
wildness Dickey managed to capture in his work.

So be sure to watch this movie too!

Sashi

Links:

Deliverance:  http://www.destgulch.com/movies/deliver/

Listen to Sheep Child, another powerful poem here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/dickey/jdindex.htm

A very extensive special at NYT. Be sure to read Barnstorming for Poetry.
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/30/specials/dickey.html

Finally, a sometimes painful memoir, one of the best I think that can be
ever written by a son about his father, that first lead me to James
Dickey, Summer of Deliverance:
http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/08/30/reviews/980830.30kirbyt.html

- Sashi

Broadway -- Mark Doty

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1175) Broadway Under Grand Central's tattered vault --maybe half a dozen electric stars still lit-- one saxophone blew, and a sheer black scrim billowed over some minor constellation under repair. Then, on Broadway, red wings in a storefront tableau, lustrous, the live macaws preening, beaks opening and closing like those animated knives that unfold all night in jewelers' windows. For sale, glass eyes turned outward toward the rain, the birds lined up like the endless flowers and cheap gems, the makeshift tables of secondhand magazines and shoes the hawkers eye while they shelter in the doorways of banks. So many pockets and paper cups and hands reeled over the weight of that glittered pavement, and at 103rd a woman reached to me across the wet roof of a stranger's car and said, I'm Carlotta, I'm hungry. She was only asking for change, so I don't know why I took her hand. The rooftops were glowing above us, enormous, crystalline, a second city lit from within. That night a man on the downtown local stood up and said, My name is Ezekiel, I am a poet, and my poem this evening is called fall. He stood up straight to recite, a child reminded of his posture by the gravity of his text, his hands hidden in the pockets of his coat. Love is protected, he said, the way leaves are packed in snow, the rubies of fall. God is protecting the jewel of love for us. He didn't ask for anything, but I gave him all the change left in my pocket, and the man beside me, impulsive, moved, gave Ezekiel his watch. It wasn't an expensive watch, I don't even know if it worked, but the poet started, then walked away as if so much good fortune must be hurried away from, before anyone realizes it's a mistake. Carlotta, her stocking cap glazed like feathers in the rain, under the radiant towers, the floodlit ramparts, must have wondered at my impulse to touch her, which was like touching myself, the way your own hand feels when you hold it because you want to feel contained. She said, You get home safe now, you hear? In the same way Ezekiel turned back to the benevolent stranger. I will write a poem for you tomorrow, he said. The poem I will write will go like this: Our ancestors are replenishing the jewel of love for us. -- Mark Doty

(From My Alexandria, published by University of Illinois Press.)

My Alexandria (1993), was chosen by Philip Levine for the National
Poetry Series. It won the National Book Critics Circle Award and
Britain's T.S. Eliot Prize, and was also a National Book Award finalist.

-----------------------------------------------------

I, by happenstance, came upon this volume of poems in which Doty explores
landscape in poetry. This poem is one such piece. I have never been to New
York, but the setting can be any city of the world. The woman who asks for
money and the poet by the name Ezekiel, can be people we have met somewhere
sometime. And most important this poem reminds us how the "impulse to
touch her" is one way (and perhaps the only way) to "feel contained".

Sashi

[Martin adds]

I *have* been to New York. The poem is perfect.

Links:

Biography:
  [broken link] http://www.poets.org/poets/poets.cfm?45442B7C000C0F07

We did a "Songs of the City" theme a while ago:
  [broken link] http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/collections/44.html

Sandinista Avioncitos -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Guest poem sent in by Sashidhar Dandamudi

(Poem #1114) Sandinista Avioncitos The little airplanes of the heart with their brave little propellers What can they do against the winds of darkness even as butterflies are beaten back by hurricanes yet do not die They lie in wait wherever they can hide and hang their fine wings folded and when the killer-wind dies they flutter forth again into the new-blown light live as leaves -- Lawrence Ferlinghetti

Patten's poem submitted by Nandini [Poem #1084] triggered a rememberance of
this poem.  I read it in a Metro bus one day (as a part of the Poetry In
Motion project) and it has stayed with me since then. This poem evoked and
still evokes in me "Great Expectations" after the "hurricanes" to go forth
into the wind "live as leaves". And since trees will soon change colors and
leaves will fall, the imagery somehow adds to the current season, a positive
vibe. This is quite unlike Rilke's Autumn.

And if nothing else the poem should go forth on to the list for the
*complexity*  (O(n^2)) of the title!! ;-)

Sashi

Links:
  The Poetry in Motion project:
    [broken link] http://www.mta.nyc.ny.us/nyct/pim/pg_1.htm
    [broken link] http://www.poetrysociety.org/motion/mapsite/pimpoems/newyork/ny.html

Sailing -- Henrik Nordbrandt

Guest poem submitted by Sashidhar Dandamudi:

(Poem #1046) Sailing After having loved we lie close together and at the same time with distance between us like two sailing ships that enjoy so intensely their own lines in the dark water they divide that their hulls are almost splitting from sheer delight while racing, out in the blue under sails which the night wind fills with flower-scented air and moonlight - without one of them ever trying to outsail the other and without the distance between them lessening or growing at all. But there are other nights, where we drift like two brightly illuminated luxury liners lying side by side with the engines shut off, under a strange constellation and without a single passenger on board: On each deck a violin orchestra is playing in honor of the luminous waves. And the sea is full of old tired ships which we have sunk in our attempt to reach each other. -- Henrik Nordbrandt

Translated from the Danish by the author and Alexander Taylor.

The punch is in the last two lines: "And the sea is full of old tired ships
/ which we have sunk in our attempt to reach each other." What a wonderful
way to describe all the relationships one has gone through to arrive at the
present. Also this one captures the languidness of the post-coital trance
very well, like that Seth poem "To Make Love to A Stranger".

Sashi.

[Links]

Here's a rather LitCritty essay on Nordbrandt's poetic themes:
http://www.litteraturnet.dk/danvalg/frameit.asp?dest=http://www.litteraturne
t.dk/danvalg/f_portraet.asp!fid=56&fid=56

Here's a nice drawing of the poet:
http://www.qikrux.com/henrik_nordbrandt.htm

Here's Google:
http://www.google.com/