Category Archives: poetry

To the oar your strength bringing.

poetry, , ,

When I was in India I browsed through the poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, because it would have been so natural and fitting to share from this favorite literary man of that nation. I did not find anything that resonated with me then, but just today I stumbled on this. I don’t know if the swelling waves are felt in the original; certainly the translator has done a good work in any case.

FROM JOY’S LOVELIEST OCEAN

From joy’s loveliest ocean
there’s a flood springing.
Embark all, and set to –
to the oar your strength bringing.
No matter its burden,
our boat sorrow-laden
(if death comes, so let it)
moves through the waves winging.
From joy’s loveliest ocean

there’s a flood springing.

Who cries from behind us
of doubt or of danger?
Who harps on their fear now,
where fear is no stranger?
What curse, or star’s showing
has frowned on our going?
Hoist a sail to the wind now
and we’ll move on singing.
From joy’s loveliest ocean
there’s a flood springing.

– Rabindranath Tagore, 1861-1941 – translated by Joe Winter

Three poets and a desk.

poetry, writing, , ,

It’s National Poetry Month and now that I take notice, we are nearly at the end of it. That prompts me to finally take this bit out of my files to give you in celebration.

I read a post from Malcolm Guite two years ago in which he tells about his visit to the Emily Dickinson home/museum, and seeing her little desk; his musings provoked me to think, too. He wonders if the physical narrowness of her space somehow helped her to turn “restraint to grace,” in this poem which, as always, you can hear him read if you like: Emily Dickinson’s Desk

That’s two poets to honor this month, and here is a poetry from a third, that may have nothing really to do with Malcolm and Emily — but I think it does. If not in any other way, then because Jane (photo above) is in a “room” with the other poets…. where, I suppose, they are all scratching out, or typing their lines… or only composing mentally and invisibly for the moment…. each wishing she could just be alone in a quiet room with a tiny writing table… I better stop or I’ll have to write a poem about my three poets.

AN HOUR IS NOT A HOUSE

An hour is not a house,
a life is not a house,
you do not go through them as if
they were doors to another.

Yet an hour can have shape and proportion,
four walls, a ceiling.
An hour can be dropped like a glass.

Some want quiet as others want bread.
Some want sleep.

My eyes went
to the window, as a cat or dog left alone does.

-Jane Hirshfield

Easter Dawn

Pascha, poetry

XV EASTER DAWN

He blesses every love which weeps and grieves
And now he blesses hers who stood and wept
And would not be consoled, or leave her love’s
Last touching place, but watched as low light crept
Up from the east. A sound behind her stirs
A scatter of bright birdsong through the air.
She turns, but cannot focus through her tears,
Or recognise the Gardener standing there.
She hardly hears his gentle question ‘Why,
Why are you weeping?’, or sees the play of light
That brightens as she chokes out her reply
‘They took my love away, my day is night’
And then she hears her name, she hears Love say
The Word that turns her night, and ours, to Day.

by Malcolm Guite, who reads his sonnet here.

Mary and Gardener yellow orange