Category Archives: poetry

Savor the heady dry breath.

books, history, poetry, ,

I miss spending time in the public library, not that I have had a great deal of that experience. In my youth the city library was not a convenient place to study, being ten miles from our house, and my elementary school had no library.

When I stayed with my grandma she would actually drop my sisters and me off at the branch library in Berkeley while she ran errands and we could roam at liberty for an hour. I’m sure none of us knew what a lavish gift that was, but from this vantage point I can appreciate the sublimity, and the mental picture of the room where I spent the most time is still there.

Back home in the country we depended on the bookmobile that every two weeks provided plenty of the sensory excitement that is the subject of the poem below. The visits were brief and fairly businesslike, as we had to jostle a bit with the other young patrons in that cramped space and there certainly was nowhere to sit and ponder. Mom was waiting outside in the car.

I paid no conscious attention to anything but the book titles, being mainly interested in getting my stash to take home and savor in a more purely intellectual fashion. But now, so long removed, if I think on that county van for only a minute, I can remember the clunking sounds  of books being pulled off shelves and put back, and our tennis shoes scuffling around in the grit that we’d brought in from the gravelly parking lot. The librarian-driver would speak as few quiet words as possible as she stamped our cards. And the scent of the books — it’s still in me.

Library
by Valerie Worth

No need even
To take out
A book: only
Go inside
And savor
The heady
Dry breath of
Ink and paper,
Or stand and
Listen to the
Silent twitter
Of a billion
Tiny busy
Black words.

From All the Small Poems and Fourteen More

a summery poem

nature, poetry,

The Grass

The grass so little has to do,—
A sphere of simple green,
With only butterflies to brood,
And bees to entertain,

And stir all day to pretty tunes
The breezes fetch along,
And hold the sunshine in its lap
And bow to everything;

And thread the dews all night, like pearls,
And make itself so fine,—
A duchess were too common
For such a noticing.

And even when it dies, to pass
In odours so divine,
As lowly spices gone to sleep,
Or amulets of pine.

And then to dwell in sovereign barns,
And dream the days away,—
The grass so little has to do,
I wish I were the hay!

-Emily Dickinson

I’m posting this poem for Lisa and for Jody, because they appreciate grass. I do too, but I must not be a good grass-photographer. All I could find in my files just now is a picture Pippin took at Hadrian’s Wall. Don’t miss the butterfly!

Hadrian flower-grass

vegetable spirits

poetry

I don’t have all the same reasons as Wendy Cope to appreciate a quiet life, but I do share her contentment with a garden that is growing and someone to stay home with. And you can call me a happy cabbage if you want to.

Being Boring
‘May you live in interesting times.’ Chinese curse

If you ask me ‘What’s new?’, I have nothing to say
Except that the garden is growing.
I had a slight cold but it’s better today.
I’m content with the way things are going.
Yes, he is the same as he usually is,
Still eating and sleeping and snoring.
I get on with my work. He gets on with his.
I know this is all very boring.

There was drama enough in my turbulent past:
Tears and passion – I’ve used up a tankful.
No news is good news, and long may it last.
If nothing much happens, I’m thankful.
A happier cabbage you never did see,
My vegetable spirits are soaring.
If you’re after excitement, steer well clear of me.
I want to go on being boring.

I don’t go to parties. Well, what are they for,
If you don’t need to find a new lover?
You drink and you listen and drink a bit more
And you take the next day to recover.
Someone to stay home with was all my desire
And, now that I’ve found a safe mooring,
I’ve just one ambition in life: I aspire
To go on and on being boring.

–Wendy Cope

One baby died, and one lives.

poetry, ,

When I was browsing works by X.J. Kennedy I found this poem by him that was published in The New Yorker in 1958:

On a Child Who Lived One Minute
by X.J. Kennedy

Into a world where children shriek like suns
sundered from other suns on their arrival,
she stared, and saw the waiting shape of evil,
but could not take its meaning in at once,
so fresh her understanding and so fragile.

Her first breath drew a fragrance from the air
and put it back. However hard her agile
heart danced, however full the surgeon’s satchel
of healing stuff, a blackness tiptoed in her
and snuffed the only candle of her castle.

Oh, let us do away with elegiac
drivel! Who can restore a thing so brittle,
so new in any jingle? Still I marvel
that, making light of mountainloads of logic,
so much could stay a moment in so little.

And in the same week, I read this one on Poem-a-Day:

Another Poem on My Daughter’s Birthday
by Craig Morgan Teicher

There must be soft words
for an evening like this, when the breeze
caresses like gentle fingertips
all over. I don’t know
how not to write darkly and sad.
But it’s two years today since
my little girl was born, cut safely
from the noose.

We meant nothing but hope;
how near death is to that.

Only children, only some children,
get to run free from these snags. She
was born! She lived and she grows
like joy spreading from the syllables

of songs. She reminds me of now
and now and now.
I must learn
to have been so lucky.