Sea Canes

Half my friends are dead.

I will make you new ones, said earth.
No, give me them back, as they were, instead,
with faults and all, I cried.

Tonight I can snatch their talk
from the faint surf's drone
through the canes, but I cannot walk

on the moonlit leaves of ocean
down that white road alone,
or float with the dreaming motion

of owls leaving earth's load.
O earth, the number of friends you keep
exceeds those left to be loved.

The sea canes by the cliff flash green and silver;
they were the seraph lances of my faith,
but out of what is lost grows something stronger

that has the rational radiance of stone,
enduring moonlight, further than despair,
strong as the wind, that through dividing canes

brings those we love before us, as they were,
with faults and all, not nobler, just there.

~ Derek Walcott, born in 1930, Caribbean poet, playwright, and watercolorist, and winner of the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature

The Need of Being Versed in Country Things

The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.

The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.

No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum up on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.

The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.

Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.

For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.


-- Robert Frost (1874-1963), American poet and teacher

The Armadillo

For Robert Lowell

This is the time of year
when almost every night
the frail, illegal fire balloons appear.
Climbing the mountain height,

rising toward a saint
still honored in these parts,
the paper chambers flush and fill with light
that comes and goes, like hearts.

Once up against the sky it's hard
to tell them from the stars—
planets, that is—the tinted ones:
Venus going down, or Mars,

or the pale green one. With a wind,
they flare and falter, wobble and toss;
but if it's still they steer between
the kite sticks of the Southern Cross,

receding, dwindling, solemnly
and steadily forsaking us,
or, in the downdraft from a peak,
suddenly turning dangerous.

Last night another big one fell.
It splattered like an egg of fire
against the cliff behind the house.
The flame ran down. We saw the pair

of owls who nest there flying up
and up, their whirling black-and-white
stained bright pink underneath, until
they shrieked up out of sight.

The ancient owls' nest must have burned.
Hastily, all alone,
a glistening armadillo left the scene,
rose-flecked, head down, tail down,

and then a baby rabbit jumped out,
short-eared, to our surprise.
So soft!—a handful of intangible ash
with fixed, ignited eyes.

Too pretty, dreamlike mimicry!
O falling fire and piercing cry
and panic, and a weak mailed fist
clenched ignorant against the sky!

--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet and friend of poet Robert Lowell, from Collected Poems, 1927-1979

Lantern balloons are illegal in 29 states, and are often launched at the lunar new year in Asian cultures

First they came

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist

Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist

Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist

Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew

Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

-- Martin Niemoeller (1892-1984), German theologian and Lutheran pastor

Narcissus Lullaby

If someone anywhere right now

is imagining me,
saying my name thoughtfully,

with her pink tongue touching
the smooth ceiling of her mouth
softly to pronounce the T,

like the first brush stroke
in a figurative landscape painting of
He-Who-Is-the-Subject-of-This-Poem,

--then I can relax a moment
in the matter of remembering myself,
I can close my eyes and let

the whole factory of identity go
drifting in the dark
like a big brick warehouse full of anxious secrets

in an unsafe neighborhood
gone quiet at the end of day,
yet guarded and protected and caressed

by the softly conscious flashlight
of my imaginary friend's
imagination.

--Tony Hoagland (1953-2018), American poet and teacher

The Little Dog's Rhapsody in the Night

He puts his cheek against mine

and makes small, expressive sounds.
And when I’m awake, or awake enough

he turns upside down, his four paws
     in the air
and his eyes dark and fervent.

“Tell me you love me,” he says.

“Tell me again.”

Could there be a sweeter arrangement? Over and over
he gets to ask.
I get to tell.

--Mary Oliver (1935-2019), American poet,  from Dog Songs

Image: Brodie joins our family, Jan. 11, 2021

Sonnet CXVII-- How like a winter hath my absence been

How like a winter hath my absence been
From thee, the pleasure of the fleeting year!
What freezings have I felt, what dark days seen!
What old December's bareness everywhere!
And yet this time remov'd was summer's time,
The teeming autumn, big with rich increase,
Bearing the wanton burthen of the prime,
Like widow'd wombs after their lords' decease:
Yet this abundant issue seem'd to me
But hope of orphans and unfather'd fruit;
For summer and his pleasures wait on thee,
And thou away, the very birds are mute;
     Or if they sing, 'tis with so dull a cheer
     That leaves look pale, dreading the winter's near.

--William Shakespeare (1564-1616) greatest English dramatist, poet, and actor

Sabbath Poem I (1986)-- A Timbered Choir

Slowly, slowly, they return

To the small woodland let alone:
Great trees, outspreading and upright,
Apostles of the living light.

Patient as stars, they build in air
Tier after tier a timbered choir,
Stout beams upholding weightless grace
Of song, a blessing on this place.

They stand in waiting all around,
Uprisings of their native ground,
Downcomings of the distant light;
They are the advent they await.

Receiving sun and giving shade,
Their life’s a benefaction made,
And is a benediction said
Over the living and the dead.

In fall their bright and leaves, released,
Fly down the wind, and we are pleased
To walk on radiance, amazed.
O light come down to earth, be praised!

-- Wendell Berry, American  poet, farmer, and essayist, from A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

The Baptism of Jesus (First Sunday after Epiphany)

Beginning here we glimpse the Three-in-one;
The river runs, the clouds are torn apart,
The Father speaks, the Sprit and the Son
Reveal to us the single loving heart
That beats behind the being of all things
And calls and keeps and kindles us to light.
The dove descends, the spirit soars and sings
‘You are belovèd, you are my delight!’

In that quick light and life, as water spills
And streams around the Man like quickening rain,
The voice that made the universe reveals
The God in Man who makes it new again.
He calls us too, to step into that river
To die and rise and live and love forever.

--The Rev. Malcolm Guite (1954- ), Anglican priest, poet, musician, and theologian, from his blog.

1 January 1965

The Wise Men will unlearn your name.
Above your head no star will flame.
One weary sound will be the same—
the hoarse roar of the gale.
The shadows fall from your tired eyes
as your lone bedside candle dies,
for here the calendar breeds nights
till stores of candles fail.

What prompts this melancholy key?
A long familiar melody.
It sounds again. So let it be.
Let it sound from this night.
Let it sound in my hour of death—
as gratefulness of eyes and lips
for that which sometimes makes us lift
our gaze to the far sky.

You glare in silence at the wall.
Your stocking gapes: no gifts at all.
It's clear that you are now too old
to trust in good Saint Nick;
that it's too late for miracles.
—But suddenly, lifting your eyes
to heaven's light, you realize:
your life is a sheer gift.

-- Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996), Russian Jewish poet, dissident, exile, and teacher, from Nativity Poems, 2001 (posthumous)

Waiting for the Revolution

If love is ‘the bright foreigner’,* then here’s
    not Amour himself but still
a follower afire, his wings a blend
    of peacock and rainbow, the pearled cope
blooming to crimson on its ground of gold,
    his hair a downspill from the lock
of a coronet badged with jewels, the fingered sceptre
    a rod of crystal, and the smile
something they practise in another country.

This is not wasted on the woman who,
    her hands come up from the shell of a robe
which seems to have been steeped in ocean when
    darkness and light were still contending,
gazes now from the blaze of being at
    van Eyck, the Duke of Burgundy,
a Tsar made out of ice and marble, or
    whoever gives the alms of an hour
in minute-hungry fuming Washington.

Outside, a beat or two of an angel’s wings
    away on the Capitol is Freedom,
one of the later products of the Bronze
    Age, equipped with shield and sword,
a wreath for some earthly use or other, plumes,
    an eagle-crested helmet. She eyes
the status quo from her eminence and murmurs,
    ‘The past is prologue’, a Delphic saying
which she construes as ‘blessed are those in possession’.

I have been in and out of the world worlds,
    amphibious and double-hearted,
and still am. The shimmer of July
    speaks now for a perpetual
immobility, bronzing the will. The pavement
    beneath woman and angel shows
Goliath down and done with, Samson at grips
    with a sheltering enslaving place:
and for some want of the white bird of esprit

that plunges goldrayed into the woman’s mind,
    I’m in the middle. They say that she
has her consent to the revolution printed
    upside down for easier reading
in heaven. It may be so, but I’m guessing that
    the words in their reversal figure
a world swung round upon its axis, the all-
    clear given to those in quest
of the bright foreigner who lightens angels.

--Peter Steele (1939-2012) Australian Jesuit and poet.

Posted on the day armed right-wing supremacists attacked the US Capitol during an insurrection fomented by President Trump.

Van Eyck's painting is in the National Gallery in Washington DC, not far from the US capitol, topped by a statue depicting Victorious Freedom.

*"Love is the bright foreigner, the foreign self." from a journal entry in 1849 by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The Embankment

(The fantasia of a fallen gentleman on a cold, bitter night.)

Once, in finesse of fiddles found I ecstasy,
In the flash of gold heels on the hard pavement.
Now see I
That warmth’s the very stuff of poesy.
Oh, God, make small
The old star-eaten blanket of the sky,
That I may fold it round me and in comfort lie.

-- T. E. Hulme (1883-1917), English Imagist poet

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader learned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.


-- Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American lawyer, businessman, and poet

Sabbath Poem I (1985)

Not again in this flesh will I see
the old trees stand here as they did,
weighty creatures made of light, delight
of their making straight in them and well,
whatever blight our blindness was or made,
however thought or act might fail.

The burden of absence grows, and I pay
daily the grief I owe to love
for women and men, days and trees
I will not know again. Pray
for the world's light thus borne away.
Pray for the little songs that wake and move.

For comfort as these lights depart,
recall again the angels of the thicket,
columbine aerial in the whelming tangle,
song drifting down, light rain, day
returning in song, the lordly Art
piercing out its humble way.

Though blindness may yet detonate in light,
running all, after all the years, great right
subsumed at last in paltry wrong,
what do we know? Still
the Presence that we come into with song
is here, shaping the seasons of His wild will.


-- Wendell Berry, American poet, farmer, agrarian, and essayist, from A Timbered Choir: the Sabbath Poems 1979-1997

Burning the Old Year

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

--Naomi Shihab Nye (1952- ), Ferguson-born Palestinian-American poet, from Words Under the Words: Selected Poems, 1995