Moses' Poem -- Anonymous

Guest poem sent in by Dale Rosenberg

(Poem #1783) Moses' Poem Give ear, O heavens, let me speak; Let the earth hear the words I utter! May my discourse come down as the rain, My speech distill as the dew, Like showers on young growth, Like droplets on the grass. For the name of the Lord I proclaim; Give glory to our God! The Rock! -- His deeds are perfect, Yea, all His ways are just; A faithful God, never false, True and upright is He. Children unworthy of Him -- That crooked, perverse generation -- Their baseness has played Him false. Do you thus requite the Lord, O dull and witless people? Is not He the Father who created you, Fashioned you and made you endure! Remember the days of old, Consider the years of ages past; Ask your father, he will inform you, Your elders, they will tell you: When the Most High gave nations their homes And set the divisions of man, He fixed the boundaries of peoples In relation to Israel's numbers. For the Lord's portion is His people, Jacob His own allotment. He found him in a desert region, In an empty howling waste. He engirded him, watched over him, Guarded him as the pupil of His eye. Like an eagle who rouses his nestlings, Gliding down to his young, So did He spread His wings and take him, Bear him along on His pinions; The Lord alone did guide him, No alien god at His side. He set him atop the highlands, To feast on the yield of the earth; He fed him honey from the crag, And oil from the flinty rock, Curd of kine and milk of flocks; With the best of lambs, And rams of Bashan, and he-goats; With the very finest wheat -- And foaming grape-blood was your drink. So Jeshurun grew fat and kicked -- You grew fat and gross and coarse -- He forsook the God who made him And spurned the Rock of his support. They incensed Him with alien things, Vexed Him with abominations. They sacrificed to demons, no-gods, Gods they had never known, New ones, who came but lately, Who stirred not your fathers' fears. You neglected the Rock that begot you, Forgot the God who brought you forth. The Lord saw and was vexed And spurned His sons and His daughters. He said: I will hide My countenance from them, And see how they fare in the end. For they are a treacherous breed, Children with no loyalty in them. They incensed Me with no-gods, Vexed Me with their futilities; I'll incense them with a no-folk, Vex them with a nation of fools. For a fire has flared in My wrath And burned to the bottom of Sheol, Has consumed the earth and its increase, Eaten down to the base of the hills. I will sweep misfortunes on them, Use up My arrows on them: Wasting famine, ravaging plague, Dedly pestilence, nd fanged beasts Will I let loose against them, With venomous creepers in dust. The sword shall deal death without, As shall the terror within, To youth and maiden alike, The suckling as well as the aged. I might have reduced them to naught, Made their memory cease among men, But for fear of the taunts of the foe, Their enemies who might misjudge And say, "Our own hand has prevailed; None of this was wrought by the Lord!" For they are a folk void of sense, Lacking in all discernment. Were they wise, they would think upon this, Gain insight into their future: "How could one have routed a thousand, Or two put ten thousand to flight, Unless their Rock had sold them, The Lord had given them up?" For their rock is not like our Rock, In our enemies' own estimation. Ah! The vine for them is from Sodom, From the vineyards of Gomorrah; The grapes for them are poison, A bitter growth their clusters. Their wine is the venom of asps, The pitiless poison of vipers. Lo, I have it all put away, Sealed up in My storehouses, To be My vengeance and recompense, At the time that their foot falters. Yea, their day of disaster is near, And destiny rushes upon them. For the Lord will vindicate His people And take revenge for His servants, When He sees that their might is gone, And neither bond nor free is left. He will say: Where are their gods, The rock in whom they sought refuge, Who ate the fat of their offerings And drank their libation wine? Let them rise up to your help, And let them be a shield unto you! See, then, that I, I am He; There is no god beside Me. I deal death and give life; I wounded and I will heal: None can deliver from My hand. Lo, I raise My hand to heaven And say: As I live forever, When I whet My flashing blade And My hand lays hold on judgment, Vengeance will I wreak on My foes, Will I deal to those who reject Me. I will make My arrows drunk with blood -- As My sword devours flesh -- Blood of the slain and the captive From the long-haired enemy chiefs. O nations, acclaim His people! For He'll avenge the blood of His servants, Wreak vengeance on His foes, And cleanse the land of His people. -- Anonymous

(translation provided by the Jewish Theological Seminary)

Much of the Torah (Jewish bible) is poetic, but very little is explicitly
identified as poetry and laid out on the page or scroll as such.  Moses'
poem is one of those exceptions.  I love the vividness of the imagery, even
as I cringe at the vindictiveness of this view of G-d.  G-d is often
portrayed as a parent, but the kind of parenting shown in the middle of the
poem is what I and I believe most loving parents try never to fall into. The
poem does, at least, end with some hope.

I'm fifty years old and will be leyning (chanting in Hebrew directly from
the Torah) for the first time on this coming Saturday on the occasion of my
daughter's bat mitzvah.  It's not easy to do, since the Torah scroll has no
vowels, no punctuation and no musical notes in it, and you're not allowed to
use cheat sheets.  Kendra, my daughter, has been studying for a long time
for her bat mitzvah.  She will also be leyning for the first time this
Saturday, as well as chanting haftarah, leading a service and giving a Dvar
Torah (speech about Torah).

When I was Kendra's age girls were not allowed to leyn, so I never learned,
but I always wanted to.  I decided I'd learn to leyn in time to be part of
her celebration.

I love that my first time I got poetry to read! I also luckily got the first
6 verses of the poem, with the beautiful words but before the
vindictiveness.

Dale

A Place To Be -- Nick Drake

Guest poem sent in by Janice

(Poem #1782) A Place To Be When I was younger, younger than before I never saw the truth hanging from the door And now I'm older see it face to face And now I'm older gotta get up clean the place. And I was green, greener than the hill Where the flowers grew and the sun shone still Now I'm darker than the deepest sea Just hand me down, give me a place to be. And I was strong, strong in the sun I thought I'd see when day is done Now I'm weaker than the palest blue Oh, so weak in this need for you. -- Nick Drake

All of Drake's songs have this touch of melancholy, a very strong sense of
loss and beauty all at the same time. With this poem, simple yet powerful,
there is a feeling that the poet/songwriter is seeking yet looking back, of
knowing where he is and being lost at the same time.  'Now I'm darker that
the deepest sea' ....how much better can anyone else put it.

Nick Drake was a artist in the late 60's, often called England's Best Kept
Secret, he produced only three albums before dying at the age of 26 from an
accidental(?) overdose of sleeping pills. Suffering from clinical
depression, he was a Keatsian figure who never found a wide audience during
his lifetime. He is known for his gentle, lyrical songs and great plucking
on the guitar. He was depressed because he thought he could not write well
enough.

I do hope you enjoy this poem...and if you do please do listen to his
music:)

cheers,
Janice

[Links]

Biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nick_Drake

To Autumn -- John Keats

Guest poem submitted by Bill Whiteford

(Poem #1781) To Autumn Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun; Conspiring with him how to load and bless With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run; To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees, And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core; To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells With a sweet kernel; to set budding more, And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells. Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store? Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find Thee sitting careless on a granary floor, Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind; Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep, Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers: And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep Steady thy laden head across a brook; Or by a cyder-press, with patient look, Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours. Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they? Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-- While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day, And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue; Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn Among the river sallows, borne aloft Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies; And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft; And gathering swallows twitter in the skies. -- John Keats

I'm not a great fan of the romantic poets, but was struck that colleagues
didn't know where the phrase "season of mists and mellow fruitfulness" came
from . I think quite a lot of Keats is not great, but some of the images
here are memorable. Here in Scotland the twittering swallows are long gone,
but the barred clouds sometimes bloom the soft-dying day. There's lots of
other analysis you could do here (the erotic language of the second verse,
the sense of impending loss of the third), but mainly I would just enjoy the
turn of phrase and the images.

Bill Whiteford.

The Fish -- Elizabeth Bishop

Guest poem sent in by Melanie Albrecht

(Poem #1780) The Fish I caught a tremendous fish and held him beside the boat half out of water, with my hook fast in a corner of its mouth. He didn't fight. He hadn't fought at all. He hung a grunting weight, battered and venerable and homely. Here and there his brown skin hung in strips like ancient wallpaper, and its pattern of darker brown was like wallpaper: shapes like full-blown roses stained and lost through age. He was speckled with barnacles, fine rosettes of lime, and infested with tiny white sea-lice, and underneath two or three rags of green weed hung down. While his gills were breathing in the terrible oxygen --- the frightening gills, fresh and crisp with blood, that can cut so badly --- I thought of the coarse white flesh packed in like feathers, the big bones and the little bones, the dramatic reds and blacks of his shiny entrails, and the pink swim-bladder like a big peony. I looked into his eyes which were far larger than mine but shallower, and yellowed, the irises backed and packed with tarnished tinfoil seen through the lenses of old scratched isinglass. They shifted a little, but not to return my stare. --- It was more like the tipping of an object toward the light. I admired his sullen face, the mechanism of his jaw, and then I saw that from his lower lip --- if you could call it a lip --- grim, wet, and weaponlike, hung five old pieces of fish-line, or four and a wire leader with the swivel still attached, with all their five big hooks grown firmly in his mouth. A green line, frayed at the end where he broke it, two heavier lines, and a fine black thread still crimped from the strain and snap when it broke and he got away. Like medals with their ribbons frayed and wavering, a five-haired beard of wisdom trailing from his aching jaw. I stared and stared and victory filled up the little rented boat, from the pool of bilge where oil had spread a rainbow around the rusted engine to the bailer rusted orange, the sun-cracked thwarts, the oarlocks on their strings, the gunnels --- until everything was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! And I let the fish go. -- Elizabeth Bishop

I just love this poem. I love how she describes the fish without overt
romanticism, but it comes across as beautiful anyway. The fish is homely,
his skin hangs in strips, and he is infested with sea-lice. His eyes turn
towards her, but she doesn't anthropomorphise it: it's just like tipping an
"object toward the light". But still, his ugly skin is like wallpaper with
roses, and his eyes are backed with tinfoil! Lovely.

Through the poem, she moves from describing the fish's physical presence to
seeing human-like virtues in him. The fish is venerable, sullen, grim, wise,
and victorious. His victory over circumstance fills the nasty rented boat
with rainbow - how can she *not* let him go?

Regards, Melanie

You -- Carol Ann Duffy

Guest poem submitted by Jennifer Cushion :

(Poem #1779) You Uninvited, the thought of you stayed too late in my head, so I went to bed, dreaming you hard, hard, woke with your name, like tears, soft, salt, on my lips, the sound of its bright syllables like a charm, like a spell. Falling in love is glamorous hell; the crouched, parched heart like a tiger ready to kill; a flame's fierce licks under the skin. Into my life, larger than life, beautiful, you strolled in. I hid in my ordinary days, in the long grass of routine, in my camouflage rooms. You sprawled in my gaze, staring back from anyone's face, from the shape of a cloud, from the pining, earth-struck moon which gapes at me and I open the bedroom door. The curtains stir. There you are on the bed, like a gift, like a touchable dream. -- Carol Ann Duffy

I feel this poem captures the initial stages of resistance people go through
when they fall in love.  It is so much easier to pretend it isn't happening,
to immerse yourself in "ordinary days".  Yet, despite all the efforts, the
person invades your every thought.  The first verse in particular conveys
this.

Jennifer Cushion.