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5316. Macnas - 10/1/2004 8:29:46 AM Now, I'm not a big fan of Heaney, but as he's been mentioned in the Cafe and I can't recall seeing his work here before, I'll post my favourite of his.
Harvest Bow.
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
An auction notice on an outhouse wall--
You with a harvest bow in your lapel,
Me with the fishing rod, already homesick
For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick
Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes
Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes
Nothing: that original townland
Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.
The end of art is peace
Could be the motto of this frail device
That I have pinned up on our deal dresser--
Like a drawn snare
Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn
Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.
5317. Ulgine Barrows - 10/1/2004 9:12:13 AM Well, don't I just love that phrase......
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
It's super! 5318. alistairconnor - 10/1/2004 9:30:15 AM That whole first verse, a universal image of autumn, stands alone very well.
It sounds well in my mind, but it looks well on the page too : It goes beyond alliteration : the repeated w's : twist knowable throwaway straw : hypnotic plaiting pattern.
The rest is rest is more local, cultural, personal: harder work. 5319. Macnas - 10/1/2004 9:47:20 AM I suppose that's why I like it, and probably why I prefer Irish poetry more than any other.
In the above poem, he is very close in style and content to Paddy Kavanagh. 5320. Macnas - 10/1/2004 9:48:48 AM This last is my other favourite, for similar reasons.
Personal Helicon
As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.
One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.
A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.
Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.
Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
5321. alistairconnor - 10/1/2004 10:12:51 AM There are universal reasons for liking Irish poetry above other English language traditions. The shape of the language, the music of it, and the manner of telling a tale (tired clichés!).
So much poetry in English is abrupt or stuffy. 5322. NuPlanetOne - 10/2/2004 5:10:45 AM \
Alistaire/
There is no doubting the innate charm of English in the throat of the Irish. And as a son of Claire Ellen Mc******, I sat many times at the foot of my maternal grandmother and marveled at the tales she would spin and embellish from her childhood in County Cork. But I can’t wholeheartedly agree that the poets on the bigger island were any less gifted or musical or in violation of cliché-ism as the poets on the smaller isle. Stuffy and abrupt sounds more like the stereotype than the fair due deserving of their use of the English language. That being said, I feel the place the vernacular English we simple poets attempt to twist into verse here in the colonies, is on par with any English I’ve heard spoken or scribbled anywhere. That is, if I may mildly disagree.
5323. Bill Russell - 10/2/2004 11:39:47 AM I pledge allegiance
to the United States of
Halliburton, Inc.
.........................................................
What Roves the hallways
of the Bush America?
Some say it's treason.
.............................................................
YOU ARE EITHER WITH
deficit rich guy tax breaks
US, OR AGAINST US.
.........................................................
Please watch what you say.
Patriots don't criticize
The Republicans.
........................................................
New attacks each day.
Over one hundred more dead.
Mission Accomplished?
..........................................................
There should be limits
To freedom, he said. And now,
We see he meant it.
5324. Bill Russell - 10/3/2004 1:28:12 PM The above is haiku of course. 5325. arkymalarky - 10/3/2004 5:59:08 PM Thought so. I like it. 5326. Ulgine Barrows - 10/9/2004 6:45:33 AM I don't know where my soul is, I don't know where my home is
-Nelly Furtado
5327. angel-five - 10/9/2004 4:09:19 PM Still partly asleep
with the concrete balcony
sucking warmth from my bare feet.
Rich latte lips
wrap around my cigarette.
Traffic sussurus
roars out on the asphalt reef.
A bathrobe haiku
seldom obeys many rules.
So stop counting beats. 5328. angel-five - 10/9/2004 4:26:26 PM Sprawled on a futon
Unfolded human laundry
still wrinkled from sleep.
Steel beasts honking
Poisonous idiot geese.
I need a chain gun.
Goddamned fucking cars
will not be fucking quiet.
My phone keeps beeping.
Can't you damn people
sleep in on a Saturday?
This world needs a gag.
Pundits rattling
their bone boxes on TV
Soporific sheep.
Where are my CDs?
Woman moves everything places
and doesn't tell me.
Good thing I love her.
Bathrobe Haiku finds nature
in some strange places
5329. marjoribanks - 10/9/2004 5:10:20 PM Nice, Res, very evocative and pure. 5330. RickNelson - 10/12/2004 4:16:18 PM I used to connect to Saturday morning sleep. It's a waste of good day to me now.
I agree with marj.
I've worked on this latest and I'm sorta Ok with it. The end or it's line work aren't exactly what I want. It's the idea of working wood and it's smooth sensual properties I entertain. Yeah, that's it.
Sensual:
I fashion something with my hands.
Say, the finest balusters in a mansion.
And the finial at the landing turns;
are orb top acorns fuller than
A large breast. Morning Glory vine carvings …
actually
Someone’s attention would
not be enough. I know the thought,
to make more, and perhaps elaborate
works I entertain. Day or night
my hands labor, to seek a sensuous
curve of wood…
I consume my imagination. 5331. angel-five - 10/12/2004 6:22:35 PM alpha, omega
your mother's a beta
and she's got a better
beard than your dad
delta, zeta
your sister was made to
prop up a street light
and bob on my knob
gamma, theta,
there's just no way that
I'm not gonna beat up
your republican cousin
phi psi rho eta
fraternity hazing
let's bong some vodka
and pass out on the lawn. 5332. NuPlanetOne - 10/14/2004 8:32:57 PM My New England Bones
You know the sound. It’s not the whoosh
and folding of the leaves that billow with
the wind. That move in a big way from
just a whisper of a breath of air and wave
happily and all together. No. It is the
rattling sound. The noise of cooler air
bristling through branches. It is like
a new being. A different animal. As if
each leave now had a shrunken meaner face
that could no longer murmur or smile
But grudgingly held on and scraped a sound
into the passing breeze until it excited
a vengeful gust to sweep it off and allow
it to drift onto the surface to wait out the
coming winter. You know the look now
After the whole mass of individual leaves had
screamed an alarm in dazzling color telling
every breathing thing that the end was near
That the cycle, that the sun, that the angle
of warmth would now turn away and bring
more darkness and cold and force all to
shelter and wait. So the look now is gray
And brown and half naked and starved
And the sounds are sharper and shrill and
the shadows stark and two-dimensional
Until mostly you don’t hear the trees at all
For the wind becomes a whistling thing
Without the happy smiling leaves to deflect it
It speeds on through howling in delight
The new master and mover of the universe
Where a cacophony of crickets once
held on to the night in a rhythmic chatter,
the random gusts now whiz and hiss and whistle
Like an opus for a dastard woodwind
..cont
5333. NuPlanetOne - 10/14/2004 8:33:25 PM It’s a dread I suppose. You know the feeling
That voice that says follow those bird formations
Heed the splashes of gold and orange and red
That tell your eyes to tell your skin to coarsen
That warn of shorter days and colder nights
Oh yes, it does not chill all at once
The early autumn can be a bath of sunshine
Idyllic afternoons with a sun so bright with
glistening noise that the surreal beauty of the
leaves cause one to stop transfixed in awe
and admiration and allows one to absorb
the warning, yet marvel with the moment
Thankful for the harvest but ever wary
Knowing that as October begins quietly,
there crouching behind the veil of color,
is the hoary beast that welcomes the North Wind
You know how quick that wind can come
And with it, you know how abrupt the season
can go, how in an instant, the sun glows silent.
….cont
5334. NuPlanetOne - 10/14/2004 8:33:44 PM And yet, you do not know, really, why you love it
Why the sounds and ticking down of the season
are as much of you, are as a part of your soul
as living itself. You remember that somewhere
hidden deep inside is that winter hermit that
needs that reclusive spot by a warm hearth
That place to reflect and hibernate and rest
in ignorance of that world outside. You long
to bundle up and wander into the cold. You love
the feeling of getting back into the warmth. You
love the battle with the fierce chill and flying snow
That with time you adjust and a normalcy settles in.
And as leaves scuttle across the hardened road,
and squirrels scamper as night comes quickly,
you wonder if your new England bones will
again weather the season. For it seems they must
You wonder if it is a sadness or a quiet promise
that the first few flakes will deliver as they blanket
your outside world. Will the cold and dark and
fire lit nights, the slushy treks and icicled panes
be worth the wait. Be worth the incomparable
hope and rebirth of feeling that will come again in spring
You know that feeling. And you long for it.
As all about you, the trees go bare.
5335. Ulgine Barrows - 10/15/2004 4:32:00 AM That makes me think about spring, it does, that last line.
Funny how some people die thinking they won't reach spring
And others are too stubborn, not to
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