JCpoetryblog

 I was browsing a selection of War Poems and each was more distressing than the one before.  Then I found WAR GIRLS by Jessie Pope who found a glimmer of positivity in the way that women rose to the occasion and filled the roles, left vacant by the men going off to war. There's the girl who clips your ticket for the train,   And the girl who speeds the lift from floor to floor, There's the girl who does a milk-round in the rain,   And the girl who calls for orders at your door.       Strong, sensible, and fit,       They're out to show their grit,     And tackle jobs with energy and knack.       No longer caged and penned up,       They're going to keep their end up     Till the khaki soldier boys come marching back. There's the motor girl who drives a heavy van,   There's the butcher girl ...

That man to me seems equal to the gods, the man who sits opposite you and close by listens to your sweet voice   and your enticing laughter— that indeed has stirred up the heart in my breast. For whenever I look at you even briefly I can no longer say a single thing,   but my tongue is frozen in silence; instantly a delicate flame runs beneath my skin; with my eyes I see nothing; my ears make a whirring noise.   A cold sweat covers me, trembling seizes my body, and I am greener than grass. Lacking but little of death do I seem.                    

 Billy Collins was the American Poet Laureate from 2001 to 2003.  That seems a pretty short period to fill this role. I suppose they must have fixed terms over there or do they stand for election.  Introduction to Poetry I ask them to take a poem and hold it up to the light like a color slide   or press an ear against its hive.   I say drop a mouse into a poem and watch him probe his way out, or walk inside the poem's room and feel the walls for a light switch.   I want them to waterski across the surface of a poem waving at the author's name on the shore. But all they want to do is tie the poem to a chair with rope and torture a confession out of it.   They begin beating it with a hose to find out what it really means.

 Again, I find myself muttering lines from Tennyson.  We studied The Brook in Primary School and the first few lines are as familiar to me now as they were then. I come from haunts of coot and hern, I make a sudden sally And sparkle out among the fern, To bicker down a valley. By thirty hills I hurry down, Or slip between the ridges, By twenty thorpes, a little town, And half a hundred bridges. Till last by Philip's farm I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I chatter over stony ways, In little sharps and trebles, I bubble into eddying bays, I babble on the pebbles. With many a curve my banks I fret By many a field and fallow, And many a fairy foreland set With willow-weed and mallow. I chatter, chatter, as I flow To join the brimming river, For men may come and men may go, But I go on for ever. I wind about, and in and out, With here a blossom sailing, And here and there a lusty trout, And here and there a grayling, And here...

 Rabindranath Tagore was the first Asian to win a Nobel Prize for Literature.  This poem is deceptively simple but there is something indefinably beautiful about it. IN the dusky path of a dream I went to seek the love who was mine in a former life. Her house stood at the end of a desolate street. In the evening breeze her pet peacock sat drowsing on its perch, and the pigeons were silent in their corner. She set her lamp down by the portal and stood before me. She raised her large eyes to my face and mutely asked, 'Are you well, my friend?' I tried to answer, but our language had been lost and forgotten. I thought and thought; our names would not come to my mind. Tears shone in her eyes. She held up her right hand to me. I took it and stood silent. Our lamp had flickered in the evening breeze and died.

 There's not much to say about this poem by Edward Arlington Robinson.  Perhaps the message is that we shouldn't judge a person by his appearance and, certainly, we're becoming more and more aware of the fact that many people put on a good front but, behind the facade, are living lives of quiet desperation.  Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. And he was always quietly arrayed, And he was always human when he talked; But still he fluttered pulses when he said, "Good-morning," and he glittered when he walked. And he was rich — yes, richer than a king — And admirably schooled in every grace: In fine, we thought that he was everything To make us wish that we were in his place. So on we worked, and waited for the light, And went without the meat, and cursed the bread; And Richard Cory, one calm summer night, Went home and put a bullet through his head.

 This poem is by Patricia Pettett who is a fellow-member of the two groups I belong to: Creative Writing Circle and Poetry Appreciation.  If you compare her poem with others in this collection which talk about Covid, especially the one by Simon Armitage, there is an optimism which the others lack. A Different Time   We fell asleep in one world and woke up in another. Universally we are locked away like prisoners behind bars.   For years we have tarnished our world. Have envied and coveted, argued and blamed, discarded and littered, threatened and killed.   Now in isolation it’s different. Families are distant, friends remote, hugs are the weapons.   Power, money, beauty, mean nothing. People young and old struggle with Covid Thousands die.   But strangely the world continues to live without us.   New found beauty reveals fresh air clear skies sparkling rivers.   Is this s...

  When I die I want your hands on my eyes I want the light and the wheat of your beloved hands to pass their freshness over me one more time to feel the smoothness that changed my destiny. I want you to live while I wait for you, asleep, I want for your ears to go on hearing the wind, for you to smell the sea that we loved together and for you to go on walking the sand where we walked. I want for what I love to go on living and as for you I loved you and sang you above everything, for that, go on flowering, flowery one, so that you reach all that my love orders for you, so that my shadow passes through your hair, so that they know by this the reason for my song.

 Pete Hay is a Tasmanian and writes of people and places, and of environmental concerns.  This poem, 'Possums in the Book of Kells', offers an explanation for a cluster of small animals among the elaborate illustrations of the  Book of Kells: not mice or cats, he says, but possums.   ‘A strange group of animals’. Mice perhaps, or kittens perched bizarre upon adult backs. That  does  stretch a long catgut, O my fuddled scholars! They are not mice. Not cats. Not remotely. Soft-eyed, wet- and sharp-snouted, prehensile-tailed, marsupialine, these are the  possums  – the ringtails – of my  ovata  bush. Across Wallace’s Line, westward night-lumbering, they cross mountain passes, the sinking isthmi, skirt treeless sands, thread belts of forest mast by mast, shrink past the yellow eyes of cunning hunters, breathe silently in the roof-tree dark of trading dhows, junks, proas, triremes. And fetch up here in Brendan’s Fair Isle, cosy and secre...

 Although British by nationality,. Mervyn Peake was born in China and was strongly influenced by Chinese poets and artists. His name often appears in lists of the best Chinese poets. THE COLT Arabia is in your eye That stares defiance; And in your brandished mane, and in Your arrogant stance. You arch your throat; all Barbary Is there; your raised Forefoot descends like lightning and England is bruised.

The Unknown Citizen   He was found by the Bureau of Statistics to be One against whom there was no official complaint, And all the reports on his conduct agree That, in the modern sense of an old-fashioned word, he was a saint, For in everything he did he served the Greater Community. Except for the War till the day he retired He worked in a factory and never got fired, But satisfied his employers, Fudge Motors Inc. Yet he wasn't a scab or odd in his views, For his Union reports that he paid his dues, (Our report on his Union shows it was sound) And our Social Psychology workers found That he was popular with his mates and liked a drink. The Press are convinced that he bought a paper every day And that his reactions to advertisements were normal in every way. Policies taken out in his name prove that he was fully insured, And his Health-card shows he was once in hospital but left it cured. Both Producers Research and High-Grade Living declare He was fully sensible to the advantages...

  Rising Late Birds are calling in courtyard trees and sunlight’s bright in the eaves, but I’m old, my laziness perfected, and now it’s cold I rise even later. It’s my nature: quilts thick or thin, pillows high or low. They suit me: spirit at peace, body safe and warm How many can savor such things? Once I’ve slept enough, I just sit looking up, no thoughts anywhere- as if our senses had never opened and our limbs were long forgotten. I think back to someone up early in Ch’ang-an, clothes frost-stained. He and I, each whole and sufficient- who can say which is nothing now?

 Sometimes Sometimes things don't go, after all, from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don't fail, sometimes a man aims high, and all goes well. A people sometimes will step back from war; elect an honest man, decide they care enough, that they can't leave some stranger poor. Some men become what they were born for.

Tortoise Under the mottled shell of the old tortoise Beats the heart of a young dancer. She dreams of twirling on table tops, Turning cartwheels, Kicking up her heels at the Carnival Ball. "Oh, who will kiss my cold and wrinkled lips, and set my dreaming spirit free?"

For the times ahead when we will be as if at either end of the long bench where distance kept is love’s measure and death dances the space between when words alone are not enough and queued memories reach out to touch let longing be a store of nut and seed that grows each day in strange hibernation readying for its end - the sharing of the feast.               Jim Carruth