Category Archives: poetry

Love Poem for Frances

love, poetry, , ,

Ogden Nash wrote so many loving letters and poems to and about his wife Frances. Here is one typically playful poem on a favorite subject:

FOR FRANCES

Geniuses of countless nations
Have told their love for generations
Till all their memorable phrases
Are common as goldenrod or daisies.
Their girls have glimmered like the moon,
Or shimmered like a summer noon,
Stood like lily, fled like fawn,
Now like sunset, now like dawn,
Here the princess in the tower,
There the sweet forbidden flower.
Darling, when I think of you
Every aged phrase is new,
And there are moments when it seems
I’ve married one of Shakespeare’s dreams.

-Ogden Nash

Paintings About Love
Chez le Père Lathuille by Édouard Manet

Because time.

humor, poetry, time, , ,

More than ten years ago I first posted this poem, after my late husband and I had been laughing over Cope’s poetry while drinking our morning coffee. 

Now, I’m amused, and wondering, at how fast January has gone by. Because time, and the unstilled wheel still turning. We may as well keep a sense of humor about it!

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             

That was indeed the Rain.

poetry, weather,

LIKE RAIN IT SOUNDED TILL IT CURVED

Like Rain it sounded till it curved
And then I knew ‘twas Wind—
It walked as wet as any Wave
But swept as dry as sand—
When it had pushed itself away
To some remotest Plain
A coming as of Hosts was heard
That was indeed the Rain—
It filled the Wells, it pleased the Pools
It warbled in the Road—
It pulled the spigot from the Hills
And let the Floods abroad—
It loosened acres, lifted seas
The sites of Centres stirred
Then like Elijah rode away
Upon a Wheel of Cloud.

-Emily Dickinson

Oregon 2017

A breath leaves the sentences.

poetry, the language, ,

LOSING A LANGUAGE

A breath leaves the sentences and does not come back
yet the old still remember something that they could say

but they know now that such things are no longer believed
and the young have fewer words

many of the things the words were about
no longer exist

the noun for standing in mist by a haunted tree
the verb for I

the children will not repeat
the phrases their parents speak

somebody has persuaded them
that it is better to say everything differently

so that they can be admired somewhere
farther and farther away

where nothing that is here is known
we have little to say to each other

we are wrong and dark
in the eyes of the new owners

the radio is incomprehensible
the day is glass

when there is a voice at the door it is foreign
everywhere instead of a name there is a lie

nobody has seen it happening
nobody remembers

this is what the words were made
to prophesy

here are the extinct feathers
here is the rain we saw

-W.S. Merwin, from The Rain in the Trees, 1988

Royal Hawaiian feather work