Carl Sandberg – Our Prayer of Thanks

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

Chicago Poems. 1916.

For the gladness here where the sun is shining at evening on the weeds at the river,
Our prayer of thanks.

For the laughter of children who tumble barefooted and bareheaded in the summer grass,
Our prayer of thanks.

For the sunset and the stars, the women and the white arms that hold us,
Our prayer of thanks.

God,
If you are deaf and blind, if this is all lost to you,
God, if the dead in their coffins amid the silver handles on the edge of town, or the reckless dead of war days thrown unknown in pits, if these dead are forever deaf and blind and lost,
Our prayer of thanks.

God,
The game is all your way, the secrets and the signals and the system; and so for the break of the game and the first play and the last.
Our prayer of thanks.

Elizabeth Bishop – One Art

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Seamus Heaney – The Birch Grove

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

At the foot of a garden, in earshot of river water,
In a corner walled off like the baths or bake-house
Of an unroofed abbey or broken-floored Roman villa,
They have planted their birch grove. Planted it recently only
But already each morning it puts forth in the sun
Like their own long grown-up selves, the white of the bark
As suffused and cool as the white of the satin nightdress
She bends and straightens up in, pouring tea,
Sitting across from where he dandles a sandal
On his big time-keeping foot, as bare as an abbot’s.
Red brick and slate, plum tree and apple retain
Their credibility, a CD of Bach is making the rounds
Of the common or garden air. Above them a jet trail
Tapers and waves like a willow wand or a taper.
“If art teaches us anything,” he says, trumping life
With a quote, “it’s that the human condition is private.”

Carrie Etter – The Bonds

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

What wharf has neither metal anchor nor heavy coils of rope?
Farther down the Thames is a bridge once favoured
by prostitutes for its low guardrail, the ease of descent,
though other, unmentioned girls came to prop a heel
on its cold steel and so divulge a shapely calf.

Which is to say that a search of the dock would find the usual
instruments of restraint, but of such strange material
that though their forms would foster recognition, you’d yearn
to touch them, to weigh in a palm the anchor that could not
pin a bird, the rope as light as a mouthful of fruit.

Hard science might explain the boat’s fidelity by reckoning the waves’
relative stillness, the craft’s weight, the distance of the moon.
And as for “soft” science, the -ologies of more- elusive chemistries,
leave them to speak amongst themselves with a shrug
of your pale shoulders, with the memory of one deepening kiss

Simon Carnell – The Dead Letter

 Poems
Nov 192010
 

The study as if someone has just left the room
and failed, for sixty-odd years, to return.
On its desk a last dead letter, faded ink
all but gone. A copy of Empire and Democracy?;

an igneous paperweight suffocating in its dust.
On the floor an antique, outsize Dictaphone;
a smell of desiccated newsprint and hooks;
two-volume Stalin, in several languages,

and besuited Chinese visitors, conspicuous.
And the narrow, low, bullet-proof doors
of the blossoming bouganvillea-draped house
seem small as an entrance to a tomb:

rusted home-made and riveted like those
on a prototype tank, time-lock or submarine –
fitted after Siqueiros’s (brief crazed and failed)
left-handed foray into homicide. The earth-

floored guardhouse is a converted garden shed
next the chicken coops; its guard’s toy-like
Remington with red-painted stock
is kept in the lobby with the photographs:

Trotsky with head in a big bandage.
“moments before death”. Detectives in hats,
grouped around exhibit A, the ice-pick.
Trotsky with nurses and medics, “moments after”