Parturition

I am the centre
Of a circle of pain
Exceeding its boundaries in every direction

The business of the bland sun
Has no affair with me
In my congested cosmos of agony
From which there is no escape
On infinitely prolonged nerve-vibrations
Or in contraction
To the pinpoint nucleus of being

Locate an irritation              without
It is                                              within
                                                       Within
It is without
The sensitized area
Is identical                with the extensity
Of intension

I am the false quantity
In the harmony of physiological potentiality
To which
Gaining self-control
I should be consonant
In time

Pain is no stronger than the resisting force
Pain calls up in me
The struggle is equal

The open window is full of a voice
A fashionable portrait painter
Running upstairs to a woman’s apartment
Sings
          “All the girls are tid’ly did’ly
          All the girls are nice
          Whether they wear their hair in curls
          Or —”
At the back of the thoughts to which I permit crystallization
The conception                        Brute
Why?
         The irresponsibility of the male
Leaves woman her superior Inferiority.
He is running upstairs

I am climbing a distorted mountain of agony
Incidentally with the exhaustion of control
I reach the summit
And gradually subside into anticipation of

Repose
Which never comes.
For another mountain is growing up
Which goaded by the unavoidable
I must traverse
Traversing myself

Something in the delirium of night hours
Confuses while intensifying sensibility
Blurring spatial contours
So aiding elusion of the circumscribed
That the gurgling of a crucified wild beast
Comes from so far away
And the foam on the stretched muscles of a mouth
Is no part of myself
There is a climax in sensibility
When pain surpassing itself
Becomes exotic
And the ego succeeds in unifying the positive and negative poles of sensation
Uniting the opposing and resisting forces
In lascivious revelation

Relaxation
Negation of myself as a unit
Vacuum interlude
I should have been emptied of life
Giving life

For consciousness in crises            races
Through the subliminal deposits of evolutionary processes

Have I not
Somewhere
Scrutinized
A dead white feathered moth
Laying eggs?
A moment
Being realization
Can
Vitalized by cosmic initiation
Furnish an adequate apology
For the objective
Agglomeration of activities
Of a life
LIFE
A leap with nature
Into the essence
Of unpredicted Maternity
Against my thigh
Tough of infinitesimal motion
Scarcely perceptible
Undulation
Warmth              moisture
Stir of incipient life
Precipitating into me

The contents of the universe
Mother I am
Identical
     With infinite Maternity
     Indivisible
     Acutely
     I am absorbed
     Into
The was—is—ever—shall—be
Of cosmic reproductivity

Rises from the subconscious
Impression of a cat
With blind kittens
Among her legs
Same undulating life-stir
I am that cat

Rises from the sub-conscious
Impression of small animal carcass
Covered with blue bottles
—Epicurean—
And through the insects
Waves that same undulation of living
Death
Life
I am knowing
All about


     Unfolding


The next morning
Each woman-of-the-people
Tiptoeing the red pile of the carpet
Doing hushed service
Each woman-of-the-people
Wearing a halo
A ludicrous little halo
Of which she is sublimely unaware

I once heard in a church
—Man and woman God made them—
                                                         Thank God.

-- Mina Loy (1882-1966), radical British painter and Futurist poet, written in 1914.

Image: Motherhood, by Dorothea Tanning (surrealist), oil on canvas, 1947

The Cricket in the Sump

He falls abruptly silent when we fling
A basket down or bang the dryer shut,
But soon takes up again where he left off.
Swept by a rainstorm through a narrow trough
Clotted with cobwebs into Lord knows what
Impenetrable murk, he’s undeterred—
You’d think his dauntless solo was a chorus,
This rusty sump, a field or forest spring.
And there is something wondrous and absurd
About the way he does as he is bidden
By instinct, with his gift for staying hidden
While making sure unseen is plainly heard.

All afternoon his tremolo ascends
Clear to the second story, where a girl
Who also has learned blithely to ignore us
Sings to herself behind her bedroom door.
Maybe she moves to her invented score
With a conductor’s flourish, or pretends
She’s a Spanish dancer, lost in stamp and whirl
And waving fan—notes floating, as she plays,
Through the open window where the willow sways
And shimmers, humming to another string.
There is no story where the story ends.
What does a singer live for but to sing?

-- Catherine Tuffariello (1963- ), American poet and professor at Valparaiso University.

Be Thou My Well

Be thou the well by which I lie and rest;

Be thou my tree of life, my garden ground; 

Be thou my home, my fire, my chamber blest, 

My book of wisdom, loved of all the best; 

Oh, be my friend, each day still newer found, 

As the eternal days and nights go round! 

Nay, nay—thou art my God, in whom all loves are bound!

--George MacDonald (1824-1905), Scots poet, preacher, fairy tale writer, and editor, influence on JRR Tolkien and CS Lewis; from A Book of Strife in the Form of the Diary of an Old Soul (1880

Image: St. Patrick's Holy Well, Marlfield Clonmell Ireland

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

In Memory of My Dear Grandchild Anne Bradstreet Who Deceased June 20, 1669, Being Three Years and Seven Months Old

With troubled heart and trembling hand I write,

The heavens have changed to sorrow my delight.
How oft with disappointment have I met,
When I on fading things my hopes have set.
Experience might ‘fore this have made me wise,
To value things according to their price.
Was ever stable joy yet found below?
Or perfect bliss without mixture of woe?
I knew she was but as a withering flower,
That’s here today, perhaps gone in an hour;
Like as a bubble, or the brittle glass,
Or like a shadow turning as it was.
More fool then I to look on that was lent
As if mine own, when thus impermanent.
Farewell dear child, thou ne’er shall come to me,
But yet a little while, and I shall go to thee;
Mean time my throbbing heart’s cheered up with this:
Thou with thy Saviour art in endless bliss.

-- Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), British born American Puritan poet; first woman poet to gain acclaim in the New World and New England. She emigrated to America in 1630 with her father and her husband aboard the Arbella and settled in Ipswich, MA. She bore eight children between 1632-1655. From her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.

This elegy, one of several she wrote during the catastrophic year of 1669, was written when her namesake grandchild died, and is remarkable for its bitterness indirectly aimed at God, and is representative of her struggle with accepting the Puritan belief that death was merely the passage to eternal joy in Heaven.

Due to the eventual longer lifespans of Puritans in the new World as compared to Europe once the colonies were established, it was said that "New England invented grandparents."

You can find excellent commentary on this poem by Janice Miller Porter here.

Psalm on Sifnos

One does not want,
O Lord, to heap
Up by still waters
Of words a cairn
But hopes to attend
A small covert
Of tamarisk
Whose leaves salty
Yet feathery
Will shed light over
A thickened plot.

One wants at last
To cede the field
To tamarisk
And mastic tree,
To olive and stone,
Stones in the fruit,
Seed in the stones.

--Stephen Yenser (1941- ), Kansas-born American poet, editor, critic, and professor emeritus at UCLA, winner of both the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets and the Bernard F. Prize for Poetry from the Paris Review.

Sifnos is a Greek island in the Cyclades known for its pottery and as the birthplace and inspiration for poets.

The Blessed Virgin Mary Compared to a Window

Because my will is simple as a window
And knows no pride of original birth,
It is my life to die, like glass, by light:
Slain in the strong rays of the bridegroom sun.

Because my love is simple as a window
And knows no shame of original dust,
I longed all night, (when I was visible) for dawn my death:
When I would marry day, my Holy Spirit:
And die by transsubstantiation into light.

For light, my lover, steals my life in secret.
I vanish into day, and leave no shadow
But the geometry of my cross,
Whose frame and structure are the strength
By which I die, but only to the earth,
And am uplifted to the sky my life. 

When I became the substance of my lover,
(Being obedient, sinless glass)
I love all things that need my lover's life,
And live to give my newborn Morning to your quiet rooms,
-Your rooms, that would be tombs,
Or vaults of night, and death, and terror,
Fill with the clarity of living Heaven,
Shine with the rays of God's Jerusalem:
O shine, bright Sions! 

Because I die by brightness and the Holy Spirit,
The sun rejoices in your jail, my kneeling Christian,
(Where even now you weep and grin
To learn, from my simplicity, the strength of faith). 

Therefore do not be troubled at the judgements of the thunder,
Stay still and pray, still stay, my other son,
And do not fear the armies and black ramparts
Of the advancing and retreating rains:
I'll let no lightning kill your room's white order. 

Although it is the day's last hour,
Look with no fear:
For the torn storm lets in, at the world's rim,
Three streaming rays as straight as Jacob's ladder:

And you shall see the sun, my Son, my Substance,
Come to convince the world of the day's end, and of the night,
Smile to the lovers of the day in smiles of blood;
For though my love, He'll be their Brother,
My light - the Lamb of their Apocalypse.

-- Thomas Merton (1915-1968), American Trappist monk and priest, memoirist, writer, and contemplative

The Feast of St. Mary the Virgin is August 15,

Before the Birth of One of Her Children

All things within this fading world hath end,
Adversity doth still our joyes attend;
No ties so strong, no friends so dear and sweet,
But with death’s parting blow is sure to meet.
The sentence past is most irrevocable,
A common thing, yet oh inevitable.
How soon, my Dear, death may my steps attend,
How soon’t may be thy Lot to lose thy friend,
We are both ignorant, yet love bids me
These farewell lines to recommend to thee,
That when that knot’s untied that made us one,
I may seem thine, who in effect am none.
And if I see not half my dayes that’s due,
What nature would, God grant to yours and you;
The many faults that well you know I have
Let be interr’d in my oblivious grave;
If any worth or virtue were in me,
Let that live freshly in thy memory
And when thou feel’st no grief, as I no harms,
Yet love thy dead, who long lay in thine arms.
And when thy loss shall be repaid with gains
Look to my little babes, my dear remains.
And if thou love thyself, or loved’st me,
These o protect from step Dames injury.
And if chance to thine eyes shall bring this verse,
With some sad sighs honour my absent Herse;
And kiss this paper for thy loves dear sake,
Who with salt tears this last Farewel did take.

-- Anne Bradstreet (1612-1672), British born American Puritan poet; first woman poet to gain acclaim in the New World and New England. She emigrated to America in 1630 with her father and her husband aboard the Arbella and settled in Ipswich, MA. She bore eight children between 1632-1655. From her book The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.

Psalms

lord
pray
pray loudly against the noise of the human hand
which seeks to drown you out
and appear on quiet soles
so that we might understand your footsteps
exert yourself
in order to recognize our prayers
even when they appear in a different garment
because no prayer ever looses itself from the source of the one praying

•

lord
take up the speech
by which i pray to you
grant me the gestures
which have grown within me in your absence
so that i might remain true to my uneducable nature
and take your weakness upon me

•

lord
you should always wander and never let yourself
settle down
because there are no longer any dwelling places
only footsteps
be loud and penetrating
sympathize with me and my stirrings
lead me
all the way to your bread
so that my word might wake

•

lord
stay by me
even if i nourish myself from ashes and salt
be still and listen to that name
which i lend to you
because i want to distinguish you from the idols
grant me patience to endure those who are vain
with their empty words
and the converts
who are zealous to confirm their opposite
and grant
that my waiting be full of revolt


•


lord
when you arrive
we will be light
bread and water
the table is set and the door opened
come and take your place among us
free me of the belief
that you are only faithful from a distance
and speak with me
in the unharried language of animals
who from far off lie in wait for us
with their unadulterated hunger

-- SAID (full name: Said Mirhadi, 1946-2021), Iranian-born German poet who lived in exile in Germany from 1965, fleeing first the dictatorship of the Shah, and later the dictatorship of the Ayatollahs. For his family's safety, he wrote only under his first name during his lifetime. These selections are from his book Psalms. 

This translation is by Mark S. Burrows.

His obituary and details of his life can be found here: https://en.qantara.de/content/obituary-iranian-german-poet-said-shout-your-names 

The Pool

Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you—banded one?

-- H. D. (1886-1961), Hilda Doolittle, memoirist, novelist, essayist, and modernist poet written as she expected her first child in 1915.