Granny

Granny’s come to our house,
And ho! my lawzy-daisy!
All the childern round the place
Is ist a-runnin’ crazy!
Fetched a cake fer little Jake,
And fetched a pie fer Nanny,
And fetched a pear fer all the pack
That runs to kiss their Granny!

Lucy Ellen’s in her lap,
And Wade and Silas Walker
Both’s a-ridin’ on her foot,
And ’Pollos on the rocker;
And Marthy’s twins, from Aunt Marinn’s,
And little Orphant Annie,
All’s a-eatin’ gingerbread
And giggle-un at Granny!

Tells us all the fairy tales
Ever thought er wundered—
And ’bundance o’ other stories—
Bet she knows a hunderd!—
Bob’s the one fer “Whittington,”
And "Golden Locks" fer Fanny!
Hear ’em laugh and clap their hands,
Listenin’ at Granny!

“Jack the Giant-Killer” ’s good;
And “Bean-Stalk” ’s another!—
So’s the one of “Cinderell’”
And her old godmother;—
That-un’s best of all the rest—
Bestest one of any,—
Where the mices scampers home
Like we runs to Granny!

Granny’s come to our house,
Ho! my lawzy-daisy!
All the childern round the place
Is ist a-runnin’ crazy!
Fetched a cake fer little Jake,
And fetched a pie fer Nanny,
And fetched a pear fer all the pack
That runs to kiss their Granny!


— James Whitcomb Riley

The Courtin'

God makes sech nights, all white an' still
Fur 'z you can look or listen,
Moonshine an' snow on field an' hill,
All silence an' all glisten.

Zekle crep' up quite unbeknown
An' peeked in thru' the winder,
An' there sot Huldy all alone,
'Ith no one nigh to hender.

A fireplace filled the room's one side
With half a cord o' wood in—
There warn't no stoves (tell comfort died)
To bake ye to a puddin'.

The wa'nut logs shot sparkles out
Towards the pootiest, bless her,
An' leetle flames danced all about
The chiny on the dresser.

Agin the chimbley crook-necks hung,
An' in amongst 'em rusted
The ole queen's arm thet gran'ther Young
Fetched back from Concord busted.

The very room, coz she was in,
Seemed warm from floor to ceilin',
An' she looked full ez rosy agin
Ez the apples she was peelin'.

'Twas kin' o' kingdom-come to look
On seek a blessed cretur,
A dogrose blushin' to a brook
Ain't modester nor sweeter.

He was six foot o' man, A 1,
Clean grit an' human natur';
None couldn't quicker pitch a ton
Nor dror a furrer straighter.

He'd sparked it with full twenty gals,
He'd squired 'em, danced 'em, druv 'em,
Fust this one, an' then thet, by spells—
All is, he couldn't love 'em.

But long o' her his veins 'ould run
All crinkly like curled maple,
The side she breshed felt full o' sun
Ez a south slope in Ap'il.

She thought no v'ice hed sech a swing
Ez hisn in the choir;
My! when he made Ole Hunderd ring,
She knowed the Lord was nigher.

An' she'd blush scarlit, right in prayer,
When her new meetin'-bunnet
Felt somehow thru' its crown a pair
O' blue eyes sot upun it.

Thet night, I tell ye, she looked some!
She seemed to 've gut a new soul,
For she felt sartin-sure he'd come,
Down to her very shoe-sole.

She heered a foot, an' knowed it tu;
A-raspin' on the scraper,—
All ways to once her feelin's flew
Like sparks in burnt-up paper.

He kin' o' l'itered on the mat,
Some doubtfle o' the sekle,
His heart kep' goin' pity-pat,
But hern went pity Zekle.

An' yit she gin her cheer a jerk
Ez though she wished him furder,
An' on her apples kep' to work,
Parin' away like murder.

'you want to see my Pa, I s'pose?'
'Wal…no…I come dasignin''—
'To see my Ma? She's sprinklin' clo'es
Agin to-morrer's i'nin'.'

To say why gals acts so or so,
Or don't, 'ould be presumin';
Mebby to mean yes an' say no
Comes nateral to women.

He stood a spell on one foot fust,
Then stood a spell on t'other,
An' on which one he felt the wust
He couldn't ha' told ye nuther.

Says he, 'I'd better call agin;'
Says she, 'Think likely, Mister;'
Thet last word pricked him like a pin,
An'… Wal, he up an' kist her.

When Ma bimeby upon 'em slips,
Huldy sot pale ez ashes,
All kin' o' smily roun' the lips
An' teary roun' the lashes.

For she was jes' the quiet kind
Whose naturs never vary,
Like streams that keep a summer mind
Snowhid in Jenooary.

The blood clost roun' her heart felt glued
Too tight for all expressin',
Tell mother see how metters stood,
And gin 'em both her blessin'.

Then her red come back like the tide
Down to the Bay o' Fundy,
An' all I know is they was cried
In meetin' come nex' Sunday.


--James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), New England Romantic and comic poet, abolitionist, critic, satirist, editor, and diplomat. My little brother, who passed away today, used to recite this poem when we were teens, having learned it in speech class.

Ode to the Midwest

The country I come from
Is called the Midwest
—Bob Dylan


I want to be doused
in cheese

& fried. I want
to wander

the aisles, my heart's
supermarket stocked high

as cholesterol. I want to die
wearing a sweatsuit—

I want to live
forever in a Christmas sweater,

a teddy bear nursing
off the front. I want to write

a check in the express lane.
I want to scrape

my driveway clean

myself, early, before
anyone's awake—

that'll put em to shame—
I want to see what the sun

sees before it tells
the snow to go. I want to be

the only black person I know.

I want to throw
out my back & not

complain about it.
I wanta drive

two blocks. Why walk—

I want love, n stuff—

I want to cut
my sutures myself.

I want to jog
down to the river

& make it my bed—

I want to walk
its muddy banks

& make me a withdrawal.

I tried jumping in,
found it frozen—

I'll go home, I guess,
to my rooms where the moon

changes & shines
like television.

--Kevin Young (1970- ), Nebraska-born African American poet, author, and poetry editor at the New Yorker

A Hymn to Friendship

Somehow we manage it: to like our friends,

to tolerate not only their little ways
but their huge neuroses, their monumental oddness:
"Oh, well," we smile, "it's one of his funny days."

Families, of course, are traditionally awful:
embarrassing parents, ghastly brothers, mad aunts
provide a useful training-ground to prepare us
for the pseudo-relations we acquire by chance.

Why them, though? Why not the woman in the library
(grey hair, big mouth) who reminds us so of J?
Or the one on Budgen's delicatessen counter
(shy smile, big nose) who strongly resembles K?

—Just as the stout, untidy gent on the train
reading the Mail on Sunday through pebble specs
could, with somewhat sparser hair and a change
of reading-matter, be our good friend X.

True, he isn't; they aren't; but why does it matter?
Wouldn't they do as well as the friends we made
in the casual past, by being at school with them,
or living nextdoor, or learning the same trade?

Well, no, they wouldn't. Imagine sharing a tent
with one of these look-alikes, and finding she snored:
no go. Or listening for days on end while she dithered
about her appalling marriage: we'd be bored.

Do we feel at all inclined to lend them money?
Or travel across a continent to stay
for a weekend with them? Or see them through an abortion,
a divorce, a gruelling court-case? No way.

Let one of these imposters desert his wife
for a twenty-year-old, then rave all night about
her sensitivity and her gleaming thighs,
while guzzling all our whiskey: we'd boot him out.

And as for us, could we ring them up at midnight
when our man walked out on us, or our roof fell in?
Would they offer to pay our fare across the Atlantic
to visit them? The chances are pretty thin.

Would they forgive us not admiring their novel,
or saying we couldn't really take to their child,
or confessing that years ago we went to bed
with their husband? No, they wouldn't: they'd go wild.

Some things kindly strangers will put up with,
but we need to know exactly what they are:
it's OK to break a glass, if we replace it,
but we mustn't let our kids be sick in their car.

Safer to stick with people who remember
how we ourselves, when we and they were nineteen,
threw up towards the end of a student party
on ethyl alcohol punch and methedrine.

In some ways we've improved since them. In others
(we glance at the heavy jowls and thinning hair,
hoping we're slightly better preserved than they are)
at least it's a deterioration we share.

It can't be true to say that we chose our friends,
or surely we'd have gone for a different lot,
while they, confronted with us, might well have decided
that since it was up to them they'd rather not.

But something keeps us hooked, now we're together,
a link we're not so daft as to disparage—
nearly as strong as blood-relationship
and far more permanent, thank God, than marriage.

--Fleur Adcock (1934- ), New Zealand-born poet, lecturer, librarian, translator, and commentator, from Poems 1960-2000.

A Love Poem for Daylight Saving Time

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
For the first time since November 6
I slept the night through.

I know some are sad,
but spring's 'round the bend,
and then here comes summer--
here's your coffee, my friend.

Like the widow who danced
when she found her lost coin,
I'll try not to rub your face in it
if you've been kicked in the... loins.

Joy comes in the morning
when the sun sets at seven
so please join my rejoicing
and go to bed by eleven!

A Terrible Beauty

                             April is the cruelest month…
                             -- T. S. ELIOT

If you happen to miss this year’s
Cruelest Month Competition,
it began with all twelve contestants
taking the stage together
in the order of the calendar year,
each dressed in outfits
that saying of their personalities—
March windblown and wet with rain,
October resplendent in red and orange.

Many wondered why April, a perennial loser,
would even bother to show up,
always smiling, daffodils
embroidered on her bodice.
Some blamed it on a poem she'd read somewhere.

Others followed her early elimination—
August with zinc slathered on her nose,
December looking like the Mother of God.
It must be said that no one was surprised
when the tuxedoed man with a microphone
finally announced this year's winner,
the same as every year since its beginning.

Even though she'd shivered
during the swimsuit part
and stumbled when asked
how she planned to change the world,
February was the obvious choice.
I mean the Super Bowl's over by then
and spring's a mile away.
What could be crueler? As one guy put it.
And that was about it, except for the coronation.

There she stood, the only month on the stage,
crying a few chilly tears,
a thin smile frozen on her lips.
Then she bent her knees a little
So as to be less tall,
and some official placed on her head
her latest dripping, silvery crown of ice.

-- Billy Collins (1941- ), American poet, former poet laureate of the US, and teacher

Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape

The first of the undecoded messages read: "Popeye sits in thunder, 

Unthought of. From that shoebox of an apartment, 

From livid curtain's hue, a tangram emerges: a country." 

Meanwhile the Sea Hag was relaxing on a green couch: "How pleasant 

To spend one's vacation en la casa de Popeye," she scratched 

Her cleft chin's solitary hair. She remembered spinach 

 And was going to ask Wimpy if he had bought any spinach. 

"M'love," he intercepted, "the plains are decked out in thunder 

Today, and it shall be as you wish." He scratched 

The part of his head under his hat. The apartment 

Seemed to grow smaller. "But what if no pleasant 

Inspiration plunge us now to the stars? For this is my country." 

Suddenly they remembered how it was cheaper in the country. 

Wimpy was thoughtfully cutting open a number 2 can of spinach 

When the door opened and Swee'pea crept in. "How pleasant!" 

But Swee'pea looked morose. A note was pinned to his bib. "Thunder 

And tears are unavailing," it read. "Henceforth shall Popeye's apartment 

Be but remembered space, toxic or salubrious, whole or scratched."

 

Olive came hurtling through the window; its geraniums scratched 

Her long thigh. "I have news!" she gasped. "Popeye, forced as you know to flee the country 

One musty gusty evening, by the schemes of his wizened, duplicate father, jealous of the apartment 

And all that it contains, myself and spinach 

In particular, heaves bolts of loving thunder 

At his own astonished becoming, rupturing the pleasant 

Arpeggio of our years. No more shall pleasant 

Rays of the sun refresh your sense of growing old, nor the scratched 

Tree-trunks and mossy foliage, only immaculate darkness and thunder." 

She grabbed Swee'pea. "I'm taking the brat to the country." 

"But you can't do that—he hasn't even finished his spinach," 

Urged the Sea Hag, looking fearfully around at the apartment. 

But Olive was already out of earshot. Now the apartment 

Succumbed to a strange new hush. "Actually it's quite pleasant 

Here," thought the Sea Hag. "If this is all we need fear from spinach 

Then I don't mind so much. Perhaps we could invite Alice the Goon over"—she scratched 

One dug pensively—"but Wimpy is such a country 

Bumpkin, always burping like that." Minute at first, the thunder 

 Soon filled the apartment. It was domestic thunder, 

The color of spinach. Popeye chuckled and scratched 

His balls: it sure was pleasant to spend a day in the country.

--John Ashbery (1927-2017), New York-born poet, poet laureate of New York State 2001-2003, critic, professor, and playwright

(even with insects)

Even with insects-- 
some can sing,
some can't.

--Kobayashi Issa (1763-1828), Japanese poet and haiku master

Just because...

The Lanyard

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly
off the blue walls of this room
bouncing from typewriter to piano
from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,
I found myself in the 'L' section of the dictionary
where my eyes fell upon the word, Lanyard.
No cookie nibbled by a French novelist
could send one more suddenly into the past.
A past where I sat at a workbench
at a camp by a deep Adirondack lake
learning how to braid thin plastic strips into a lanyard.
A gift for my mother.
I had never seen anyone use a lanyard.
Or wear one, if that's what you did with them.
But that did not keep me from crossing strand over strand
again and again until I had made a boxy, red and white   
    lanyard for my mother.
She gave me life and milk from her breasts,
and I gave her a lanyard
She nursed me in many a sick room,
lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,
set cold facecloths on my forehead
then led me out into the airy light
and taught me to walk and swim and I in turn presented her 
    with a lanyard.
'Here are thousands of meals' she said,
'and here is clothing and a good education.'
'And here is your lanyard,' I replied,
'which I made with a little help from a counselor.'
'Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,
strong legs, bones and teeth and two clear eyes to read the 
    world.' she whispered.
'And here,' I said, 'is the lanyard I made at camp.'
'And here,' I wish to say to her now,
'is a smaller gift. Not the archaic truth,
that you can never repay your mother,
but the rueful admission that when she took the two-toned 
    lanyard from my hands,
I was as sure as a boy could be
that this useless worthless thing I wove out of boredom
would be enough to make us even.'

--Billy Collins (1941- ), US poet laureate 2001-2003

Killing the Plants

That year I discovered the virtues
of plants as companions they don't
argue, they don't ask for much,
they don't stay out until 3:00 A.M., then
lie to you about where they've been...

I can't summon the ambition
to repot this grape ivy, or this sad
old cactus, or even to move them out
onto the porch for the summer,
where their lives would certainly
improve. I give them
a grudging dash of water-- that's all
they get. I wonder if they suspect

that like Hamlet I rehearse murder
all hours of the day and night,
considering the town dump
and compost pile as possible graves...
The truth is that if I permit them
to live, they will go on giving
alms to the poor: sweet air, miraculous
flowers, the example of persistence.

--Jane Kenyon (1947-1995) American poet and translator, from Collected Poems (2005)

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

--Billy Collins (1941- ), US poet laureate 2001-2003

Another Reason Why I Don't Keep a Gun in the House

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
He is barking the same high, rhythmic bark
that he barks every time they leave the house.
They must switch him on on their way out.

The neighbors' dog will not stop barking.
I close all the windows in the house
and put on a Beethoven symphony full blast
but I can still hear him muffled under the music,
barking, barking, barking,

and now I can see him sitting in the orchestra,
his head raised confidently as if Beethoven
had included a part for barking dog.

When the record finally ends he is still barking,
sitting there in the oboe section barking,
his eyes fixed on the conductor who is
entreating him with his baton

while the other musicians listen in respectful
silence to the famous barking dog solo,
that endless coda that first established
Beethoven as an innovative genius.

--Billy Collins (1941- ), poet laureate of the US 2001-2003

Dharma

The way the dog trots out the front door
every morning
without a hat or an umbrella,
without any money
or the keys to her doghouse
never fails to fill the saucer of my heart
with milky admiration.

Who provides a finer example
of a life without encumbrance-
Thoreau in his curtainless hut
with a single plate, a single spoon?
Gandhi with his staff and his holy diapers?

Off she goes into the material world
with nothing but her brown coat
and her modest blue collar,
following only her wet nose,
the twin portals of her steady breathing,
followed only by the plume of her tail.

If only she did not shove the cat aside
every morning
and eat all his food
what a model of self-containment she
would be,
what a paragon of earthly detachment.
If only she were not so eager
for a rub behind the ears,
so acrobatic in her welcomes,
if only I were not her god.

--Billy Collins (1941- ), US poet laureate 2001-2003



Photo: My friends' dog Pumpkin, summer 2017, who can play ball for hours. Detachment, my eye.

This is Why We Can't Have Nice Things (September 1)

September’s grasshopper launches himself
from his covert in some thatch
faded tattered percussive wings
rasping out his flight.

Chickadees swoop in
at the bird feeder outside my window
one at a time, with metronomic precision
seize a seed like Labor Day-frenzied shoppers,
then swoop off to let the next one in
exactly not like Labor Day-frenzied shoppers.

A few hours ago
I congratulated myself
sighing out my satisfaction
on the crisp coolness of the day
although I certainly had no hand in it.

And now glittering on the grass I see
six yellow leaves
that have already smirked the news
that autumn approaches.

Damn.

--L. B. S., September 1, 2017

Stopping by Starbucks on Summer Mornings doing Interim Youth Missioner Work

My bloodshot eyes have a red glow.
I think I know the antidote.
There is a Starbucks over here
And so to caffeinate I go.

My Mini seems to know to steer
Itself to a space standing near
The door held open by a gent
Who blearily tries to fake good cheer.

The barista looks up to make
"The usual?" she asks, and starts to shake
The Refresher that I will keep
Imbibing from 'til my lunch break.

This drink is lovely, slightly sweet,
But I have meetings still to keep
In which I must not fall asleep,
In which I must not fall asleep.

--L. B. S., July 25, 2017

(https://www.facebook.com/lesliebarnes.scoopmire/posts/10209754336994755)