Poetry is everywhere.
Despite standardised education’s best efforts to squeeze out all the joy from this enterprise by reducing entire universes of thought and feeling to rhyme schemes and test scores, the love of poetry survives in everyone.
Even you, dear reader, who might not have read anything but newspaper headlines and Facebook statuses in many moons, are a poetry lover, by the simple virtue of being human, and thus susceptible to all blows that flesh and blood is heir to.
There is poetry in childhood remembrance and in adult responsibilities, in the wonder of discovery and the tedium of routine, in loss and recovery, in mutually fulfilling love and in endless, unrequited yearning.
And thus, as Americans mark their 20th National Poetry Month, we jump on the bandwagon to celebrate the universally shared love of words and wordsmiths.
Moonlight
Some lines from Trakl come to me: moonlight;
His sister plays the sonata once again.
It is as short of hope, as clear with pain.
I listen to the road outside. Despite
Years, despite years, tears blur my steadied sight
Like a bad joke irrelevant words arouse.
Through pylons, as before, the moon tonight
Sears with a fire new time and loves won’t douse.
I see some things are much the same. If you
Knocked at my door some year I could not say,
Most things have lost their power to hurt. A few
Exceptions, moonlight, a quintet or two,
May cause these fits to re-occur, but now
I know there is not much that I can do.
I know that they will pass, somehow, somehow.
At any rate I’ve come to recognise
It’s I who built this cairn, stone by stone –
The first time that you spoke to me by phone,
Walks, Wordsworth, woodpeckers, Colombian highs,
The last time that I looked into your eyes:
A derelict memorial on a plain,
Its architect must in time realize
His plan to see beyond his work again.
And as for you, my love of many years,
Who are so fine, quiet and unobsessed,
I wish you what you have already, rest
Of spirit. To you memory appears
Too little worth analysis or tears.
In my heart too I will it not to last,
Nor do I wish that when the moonlight sears
It should inveigle you into the past.
Fragment 36
I know not what to do—
My mind is reft.
Is song’s gift best?
Is love’s gift loveliest?
I know not what to do,
Now sleep has pressed
Weight on your eyelids.
Shall I break your rest,
Devouring, eager?
Is love’s gift best?
Nay, song’s the loveliest.
Yet, were you lost,
What rapture could I take from song?
What song were left?
I know not what to do:
To turn and slake
The rage that burns,
With my breath burn
And trouble your cool breath
So shall I turn and take
Snow in my arms,
(Is love’s gift best?)
Yet flake on flake
Of snow were comfortless,
Did you lie wondering,
Wakened yet unawake...
...I know not what to do.
Will the sound break,
Rending the night
With rift on rift of rose
And scattered light?
Will the sound break at last
As the wave hesitant,
Or will the whole night pass
And I lie listening awake?
Sometimes With One I Love
Sometimes with one I love I fill myself with rage for fear I effuse unreturn’d love,
But now I think there is no unreturn’d love, the pay is certain one way or another
(I loved a certain person ardently and my love was not return’d,
Yet out of that I have written these songs).
Freedom
At times, as I watch,
it seems as though my country’s body
floats down somewhere on the river.
Left alone, I grow into
a half-disembodied bamboo,
its lower part sunk
into itself on the bank.
Here, old widows and dying men
cherish their freedom,
bowing time after time in obstinate prayers.
While children scream
with this desire for freedom
to transform the world
without even laying hands on it.
In my blindness, at times I fear
I’d wander back to either of them.
In order for me not to lose face,
it is necessary for me to be alone.
Not to meet the woman and her child
in that remote village in the hills
who never had even a little rice
for their one daily meal these fifty years.
And not to see the uncaught, bloodied light
of sunsets cling to the tall white columns
of Parliament House.
In the new temple man has built nearby,
the priest is the one who knows freedom,
while God hides in the dark like an alien.
And each day I keep looking for the light
shadows find excuses to keep.
Trying to find the only freedom I know,
the freedom of the body when it’s alone.
The freedom of the silent shale, the moonless coal,
the beds of streams of the sleeping god.
I keep the ashes away,
try not to wear them on my forehead.
Silence
My father used to say,
“Superior people never make long visits,
have to be shown Longfellow’s grave
nor the glass flowers at Harvard.
Self reliant like the cat –
that takes its prey to privacy,
the mouse’s limp tail hanging like a shoelace from its mouth –
they sometimes enjoy solitude,
and can be robbed of speech
by speech which has delighted them.
The deepest feeling always shows itself in silence;
not in silence, but restraint.”
Nor was he insincere in saying, “‘Make my house your inn’.”
Inns are not residences.
Minority
I don’t fit
like a clumsily translated poem,
like food cooked in milk of coconut
where you expected ghee or cream
the unexpected aftertaste
of cardamom or neem…
And so I scratch, scratch
through the night, at this
growing scab of black on white.
Everyone has the right
to infiltrate a piece of paper.
A page doesn’t fight back…
Ash Wednesday
...Because I know that time is always time
And place is always and only place
And what is actual is actual only for one time
And only for one place
I rejoice that things are as they are and
I renounce the blessed face
And renounce the voice
Because I cannot hope to turn again
Consequently I rejoice, having to construct something
Upon which to rejoice
And pray to God to have mercy upon us
And pray that I may forget
These matters that with myself I too much discuss
Too much explain
Because I do not hope to turn again
Let these words answer
For what is done, not to be done again
May the judgement not be too heavy upon us...
(At The Quint, we are answerable only to our audience. Play an active role in shaping our journalism by becoming a member. Because the truth is worth it.)