Rain Towards Morning

The great light cage has broken up in the air,
freeing, I think, about a million birds
whose wild ascending shadows will not be back,
and all the wires come falling down.
No cage no frightening birds; the rain
is brightening now. The face is pale
that tried there puzzle of their prison
and solved is with an unexpected kiss,
who freckled unsuspected hands alit.

--Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), American poet and Pulitzer Prize winner.

Vespers (End of August Heat)

End of August. Heat
like a tent over
John's garden. And some things
have the nerve to be getting started,

clusters of tomatoes, stands

of late lilies-- optimism

of the great stalks-- imperial

gold and silver: but why

start anything

so close to the end?

Tomatoes that will never ripen, lilies

winter will kill, that won't

come back in spring. Or

are you thinking

I spend too much time

looking ahead, like

an old woman wearing

sweaters in summer;

are you saying I can

flourish, having

no hope

of enduring? Blaze of the red cheek, glory

pf the open throat, white.

spotted with crimson.

-- Louise Gluck, (1943- ), American poet, and teacher, US Poet Laureate 2003,  awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature for 2020. Poem from The Wild Iris, 1992.

Let Them Not Say

Let them not say: we did not see it.
We saw. 

Let them not say: we did not hear it.
We heard. 

Let them not say: they did not taste it.
We ate, we trembled. 

Let them not say: it was not spoken, not written.
We spoke,
we witnessed with voices and hands. 

Let them not say: they did nothing.
We did not-enough. 

Let them say, as they must say something: 

A kerosene beauty.
It burned. 

Let them say we warmed ourselves by it,
read by its light, praised,
and it burned.

--Jane Hirshfield (1953- ), American poet, from Ledger (2020)

I Find No Peace

I find no peace, and all my war is done.
I fear and hope. I burn and freeze like ice.
I fly above the wind, yet can I not arise;
And nought I have, and all the world I seize on.
That loseth nor locketh holdeth me in prison
And holdeth me not—yet can I scape no wise—
Nor letteth me live nor die at my device,
And yet of death it giveth me occasion.
Without eyen I see, and without tongue I plain.
I desire to perish, and yet I ask health.
I love another, and thus I hate myself.
I feed me in sorrow and laugh in all my pain;
Likewise displeaseth me both life and death,
And my delight is causer of this strife.

-- Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-1542), pioneering Elizabethan poet

Photo from Al-Jazeera of residents of Afghanistan fleeing before the Taliban onslaught upon the US withdrawal, August, 2021

Mater Misericordiae

We'll say the calendar made us feel
at home when your parents ask

how we like the latest doctor. Hanging

on the lobby's wall above Peoples

and Cosmos, Mary held her arms open

in a gesture of welcome with a rosary

resting on her girlish, upturned wrists.

You pointed her out when they took you

for that day's blood draw and set

of unanswered questions. You knew

I'd like the mundane transgression

of Mary presiding over the secular

saeculorum of the place. Although

I've never loved the doves and roses,

the cherubs pinching the hem

of her blue robe, she kept my mind off

the results, the pills, the commercials

for antidepressants circling every half hour

on the closed circuit. After you vanished

into the back, I lifted the calendar from

its nail and thumbed through the other Marys:

a stylish Guadalupe radiating needles

for October, Michaelangelo's marble

framed in the corpse of Christ for March,

and a small woman marveling at her own

miraculous infant in December. Seeing her

going through it too, month after month

praising and lamenting no matter what

went on in the boxes beneath her,

helped for a minute. When I hung her back,

I noticed she'd been stuck in May

this whole summer. I flipped ahead

to August. Titian's assumption.

The mother of God drifts out of sight

in surprise, with the terrified apostles below.

--Joshua Jones, from Image magazine, no 107, pp. 79-80.

Image: Titian, Assumption of the Virgin, 1516-1518, altarpiece panel painting

I So Liked Spring

I so liked Spring last year
Because you were here; –
The thrushes too –
Because it was these you so liked to hear –
I so liked you.

This year’s a different thing, –
I’ll not think of you.
But I’ll like the Spring because it is simply Spring
As the thrushes do.

-- Charlotte Mew (1869-1928), British lyric poet

Sonnet XLII -- "What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why"

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

--Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950), Pulitzer-prize awarded American poet

Coat

Sometimes I have wanted
to throw you off
like a heavy coat.
Sometimes I have said
you would not let me
breathe or move.
But now that I am free
to choose light clothes
or none at all
I feel the cold
and all the time I think
how warm it used to be.

--Vicky Feaver (1943- ), English poet and professor

Magdalene-- The Seven Devils

“Mary, called Magdalene, from whom seven devils had been cast out”
                                                                                          --Luke 8:2.



The first was that I was very busy.

The second—I was different from you: whatever happened to you could
not happen to me, not like that.

The third—I worried.

The fourth—envy, disguised as compassion.

The fifth was that I refused to consider the quality of life of the aphid,
The aphid disgusted me. But I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
The mosquito too—its face. And the ant—its bifurcated body.

Ok the first was that I was so busy.

The second that I might make the wrong choice,
because I had decided to take that plane that day,
that flight, before noon, so as to arrive early
and, I shouldn’t have wanted that.
The third was that if I walked past the certain place on the street
the house would blow up.

The fourth was that I was made of guts and blood with a thin layer
of skin lightly thrown over the whole thing.

The fifth was that the dead seemed more alive to me than the living

The sixth—if I touched my right arm I had to touch my left arm, and if I
touched the left arm a little harder than I’d first touched the right then I had
to retouch the left and then touch the right again so it would be even.

The seventh—I knew I was breathing the expelled breath of everything that
was alive, and I couldn’t stand it.
I wanted a sieve, a mask, a, I hate this word—cheesecloth—
to breath through that would trap it—whatever was inside everyone else that
entered me when I breathed in.

No. That was the first one.

The second was that I was so busy. I had no time. How had this happened?
How had our lives gotten like this?

The third was that I couldn’t eat food if I really saw it—distinct, separate
from me in a bowl or on a plate.

Ok. The first was that. I could never get to the end of the list.
The second was that the laundry was never finally done.

The third was that no one knew me, although they thought they did.
And that if people thought of me as little as I thought of them then what was
love?

The fourth was I didn’t belong to anyone. I wouldn’t allow myself to belong
to anyone.

The fifth was that I knew none of us could ever know what we didn’t know.

The sixth was that I projected onto others what I myself was feeling.

The seventh was the way my mother looked when she was dying,
the sound she made—her mouth wrenched to the right and cupped open
so as to take in as much air… the gurgling sound, so loud
we had to speak louder to hear each other over it.

And that I couldn’t stop hearing it—years later—grocery shopping, crossing the street—

No, not the sound—it was her body’s hunger
finally evident—what our mother had hidden all her life.

For months I dreamt of knucklebones and roots,
the slabs of sidewalk pushed up like crooked teeth by what grew underneath.

The underneath. That was the first devil. It was always with me
And that I didn’t think you—if I told you—would understand any of this—

--Marie Howe (1960- ) American poet and Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets, 2008. Today is the Feast Day of Mary Magdalene, the Apostle to the Apostles.

Final Soliloquy of the Interior Paramour

Light the first light of evening, as in a room
In which we rest and, for small reason, think
The world imagined is the ultimate good.

This is, therefore, the intensest rendezvous.
It is in that thought that we collect ourselves,
Out of all the indifferences, into one thing:

Within a single thing, a single shawl
Wrapped tightly round us, since we are poor, a warmth,
A light, a power, the miraculous influence.

Here, now, we forget each other and ourselves.
We feel the obscurity of an order, a whole,
A knowledge, that which arranged the rendezvous.

Within its vital boundary, in the mind.
We say God and the imagination are one...
How high that highest candle lights the dark.

Out of this same light, out of the central mind,
We make a dwelling in the evening air,
In which being there together is enough.

--Wallace Stevens (1879-1955), American poet and business executive