Category Archives: poetry

I get a telegram. (poem)

poetry

Just found this sunlight poem on Last American Childhood. It’s reminding me to listen and remember.

THE WORD

Down near the bottom
of the crossed-out list
of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”
and “broccoli,” you find
that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word
is beautiful. It touches you
as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present
he had sent from someplace distant
as this morning—to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing

that also needs accomplishing.
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue,

but today you get a telegram
from the heart in exile,
proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,

—to any one among them
who can find the time
to sit out in the sun and listen.

–Tony Hoagland

California Hills in August

nature, poetry, ,

I’m almost too late to post a poem with this title in a timely manner, not that the hills won’t look pretty much the same for another month or more. This year the grass is especially brown and parched, and we have lots of fires making the sky brown, too.

Over three years ago I posted this poem by Dana Gioia, which was the first time I wrote about him. Just now by putting his name in the search box at the bottom of this blog I discovered that it’s come up repeatedly.

I understand that Gioia has returned to our fair and thirsty state after serving as president of the National Endowment for the Arts for a few years. I wonder if he gets out of town far enough these days to feel the summer as he so aptly conveys it in this poem.


California Hills in August

I can imagine someone who found
these fields unbearable, who climbed
the hillside in the heat, cursing the dust,
cracking the brittle weeds underfoot,
wishing a few more trees for shade.

An Easterner especially, who would scorn
the meagerness of summer, the dry
twisted shapes of black elm,
scrub oak, and chaparral, a landscape
August has already drained of green.

One who would hurry over the clinging
thistle, foxtail, golden poppy,
knowing everything was just a weed,
unable to conceive that these trees
and sparse brown bushes were alive.

And hate the bright stillness of the noon
without wind, without motion,
the only other living thing
a hawk, hungry for prey, suspended
in the blinding, sunlit blue.

And yet how gentle it seems to someone
raised in a landscape short of rain –
the skyline of a hill broken by no more
trees than one can count, the grass,
the empty sky, the wish for water.

-Dana Gioia

In the last minute of the first hour.

humor, poetry, time, ,

My man and I laughed out loud over coffee and Wendy Cope’s poems this morning. I’ve had time and memory on my mind lately so I especially appreciated a lighthearted treatment of the subject in this one:

A Nursery Rhyme
as it might have been written 
by T.S. Eliot

 

Because time will not run backwards
Because time
Because time will not run
                                         Hickory dickory
In the last minute of the first hour
I saw the mouse ascend the ancient timepiece,
Claws whispering like wind in dry hyacinths.
One o’clock,
The street lamp said,
‘Remark the mouse that races towards the carpet.’
And the unstilled wheel still turning
                                                          Hickory dickory
                                                          Hickory dickory

dock

— Wendy Cope             

I lie down in a pasture.

church, education, family, poetry, Psalms, teaching

As my last post was contrary to my blogging principles, describing something Ugly, I now feel it urgent to put up Something I Especially Like.

Last night was one of those when I lie awake for hours in the middle of the time when I want very much to be asleep. (This morning I realized the problem stemmed from drinking very strong tea at an afternoon wedding.) Sometimes while in this predicament I manage to stop grumbling and to pray instead, and my favorite thing to pray is the 23rd Psalm.

20 to 25 years ago and even earlier I used to have the children copy out and learn a poem every month, and I ran across some of their work yesterday. I get sentimental looking at the handwriting and printing, knowing right away what poem was copied by whom. But I won’t reveal that information. I’ll just say for the record that this psalm was printed by a boy! (Click on the picture if you want a more readable version.)