Evening -- Gulzar

Guest poem sent in by

(Poem #1296) Evening Day abandons it Night disowns it a poet picks it up threads it into a poem; but sometimes it is barren, so impotent it gives nothing, not even to the poet. -- Gulzar

While surfing through the net, i came across this gem of a poem by Gulzar,
and, wonder of wonders, it's in English. Being a weekend, me and a friend were
exploring various emotionally charged Hindi songs and hit upon the idea of
surfing for Gulzar's creations, one of the geniuses of our time. The poem is
about evening and well.. just go through it!

[Martin adds]

Indeed a beautiful poem - it captures the fleeting, elusive nature of evening
as well as anything I've seen. And it stands in refreshing contrast to all
those poems that rhapsodise about twilit evenings (a time of day and quality of
light that have always struck me as more depressing than otherwise. Give me
dawn any day).

[Biography]

[broken link] http://members.tripod.com/sandyinrhythm/s_gfacts.htm

For the Union Dead -- Robert Lowell

Guest poem submitted by Sheri K. Stoll:

(Poem #1295) For the Union Dead "Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam." The old South Boston Aquarium stands in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded. The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales. The airy tanks are dry. Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled to burst the bubbles drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish. My hand draws back. I often sigh still for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom of the fish and reptile. One morning last March, I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage, yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting as they cropped up tons of mush and grass to gouge their underworld garage. Parking spaces luxuriate like civic sandpiles in the heart of Boston. A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders braces the tingling Statehouse, shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief, propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake. Two months after marching through Boston, half the regiment was dead; at the dedication, William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe. Their monument sticks like a fishbone in the city's throat. Its Colonel is as lean as a compass-needle. He has an angry wrenlike vigilance, a greyhound's gently tautness; he seems to wince at pleasure, and suffocate for privacy. He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely, peculiar power to choose life and die-- when he leads his black soldiers to death, he cannot bend his back. On a thousand small town New England greens, the old white churches hold their air of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic. The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier grow slimmer and younger each year-- wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets and muse through their sideburns . . . Shaw's father wanted no monument except the ditch, where his son's body was thrown and lost with his "niggers." The ditch is nearer. There are no statues for the last war here; on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph shows Hiroshima boiling over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages" that survived the blast. Space is nearer. When I crouch to my television set, the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons. Colonel Shaw is riding on his bubble, he waits for the blessèd break. The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere, giant finned cars nose forward like fish; a savage servility slides by on grease. -- Robert Lowell

[broken link] http://www.latimes.com/features/printedition/books/la-bk-fraser22jun22162422,1,6457119.story

[LA Times free registration required]

The above-referenced article yesterday in the L.A. Times inspired me to
search for Lowell's "For the Union Dead". It is very powerful. Many
people may have seen Ed Zwick's movie "Glory" about the Massachussetts
54th regiment of black soldiers in the Civil War based on the book One
Gallant Rush, by Peter Burchard. I checked 'wondering minstrels' and I
could not find any of Lowell's poems, this is a good one to start with.

--Sheri

The reticent volcano keeps -- Emily Dickinson

Guest poem submitted by Zenobia Driver:

(Poem #1294) The reticent volcano keeps The reticent volcano keeps His never-slumbering plan; Confided are his projects pink To no precarious man. If nature will not tell the tale Jehovah told to her Can human nature not survive Without a listener? Admonished by her buckled lips Let every babbler be The only secret people keep Is immortality. -- Emily Dickinson

I really liked the volcano imagery, especially because it suggests that
a silent person has a never slumbering plan, and he never confides it to
those it affects - the men who eke out a precarious existence on its
slopes. I also really liked the last two lines - I think the way
immortality is used to illustrate that people can never keep things to
themselves is amazing.

Basically I like this poem because most people talk too much and just
can't keep quiet, even when I ignore them and maintain a stony silence.
One more thought - why are people so uncomfortable even with friendly
silences? Why must they rush to fill them in with higgledy-piggledy
words?

Zenobia.

Beloved Dust -- Edna St Vincent Millay

Guest poem submitted by Angela

(Poem #1293) Beloved Dust And you as well must die, beloved dust, And all your beauty stand you in no stead, This flawless, vital hand, this perfect head, This body of flame and steel, before the gust Of Death, or under his autumnal frost, Shall be as any leaf, be no less dead Than the first leaf that fall, --- this wonder fled. Altered, estranged, disintegrated, lost. Nor shall my love avail you in your hour. In spite of all my love, you will arise Upon that day and wander down the air Obscurely as the unattended flower, It mattering not how beautiful you were, Or how beloved above all else that dies. -- Edna St Vincent Millay

This poem is the first I had ever read by Millay. At the time I
discovered it I was 19 and caring for my terminally ill mother. When I
read this poem I felt "This is it. This is how I feel." Acceptance of
the inevitability of her death mingled with a feeling of helplessness in
preventing it from happening. The last 2 lines were to me its clencher:
        It mattering not how beautiful you were,
        Or how beloved above all else that dies.

Angela.

[Millay on the Minstrels]

Poem #34, First Fig
Poem #49, The Unexplorer
Poem #108, The Penitent
Poem #317, Inland
Poem #590, Sonnet XLIII
Poem #604, Euclid Alone Has Looked On Beauty Bare
Poem #817, Grown-up
Poem #860, Sonnet: Love Is Not All
Poem #905, I will put Chaos into fourteen lines
Poem #926, Dirge Without Music
Poem #956, Ashes of Life
Poem #1064, Travel

The Auk and the Orchid -- Robert Williams Wood

Guest poem submitted by Ajit Narayanan :

(Poem #1292) The Auk and the Orchid We seldom meet, when out to walk, Either the orchid or the auk; The auk indeed is only known To dwellers in the Auktic zone, While orchids can be found in legions, Within the equatorial regions. The graceful orchid on its stalk, Resembles so the awkward auk; 'Tis plain we must some means discover, To tell the two from one another: The obvious difference, to be sure, Is merely one of temperature. For eskimos, perhaps the Auk Performs the duties of the stork. -- Robert Williams Wood

There are very few poets whose genius is apparent as soon as one reads
their work. For me, Lewis Carroll is one of them; Wood is another. This
poem is from the book 'How to Tell the Birds from the Flowers'. When it
was published (in 1907, I think), it was primarily a children's book,
but has been described as a book of comic verse pretending to be a
nature book. Wood was a fine illustrator as well as a writer; with each
poem in the book he also drew two pictures, one of the bird and another
of the flower, with such skill that they actually _do_ look almost
indistinguishable! In truth, his poems (this one included) lose much of
their comic appeal without the pictures that go with them, and the whole
book, with the pictures and the verse, can be viewed on several sites on
the net, such as
        [broken link] http://www.geocities.com/Vienna/2406/cov.html
Wood himself was not a full-time writer. He was primarily a scientist, a
brilliant physicist who contributed a great deal especially to Optics.
(This is another striking similarity between Wood and Carroll, who was a
mathematician.)

"Wood was internationally known for his work in optics and spectroscopy,
in which fields he undertook fundamental research in resonance radiation
and in the use of absorption screens in astronomical photography. He
also devised a vastly improved diffraction grating.  In 1897, Wood
became the first to observe field emission,  i.e., charged particles
emitted from a conductor  in an electric field.  This phenomenon is now
used in the field emission microscope  for studying atomic structure.
Wood's work on sodium vapor was especially noteworthy (Dunoyer). Wood
also developed a color-photography process, as well as both infrared and
ultraviolet photography."
        -- http://scienceworld.wolfram.com/biography/Wood.html

Ajit.