a poem by gad hollander

Fugato (Coda)

I made a song and placed it far, near God,

a doublewind, a song of love;

I made it out of breath, it gasped for touch.

I made it in the empty mind, a thought

of smoke, of limb and skull, of memory;

I placed it far, a poem for the pure one.

I taught my song the algebra of praise,

it sang the praise of God, it sang in a space

confined to song, far, near God.

A doublewind, a song of love,

children pranced according to its rhythm,

and all the summers heard it, the summers of smoke.

I made it in my mind, and the empty sky

soon filled, and the far places heard it;

it gasped for God, I made it out of breath.

A song, a thought, a memory of song;

I made it once, and twice, and always.

I made a song and placed it far;

it sang the praise of God, in a space confined

to breath it sang. I made my song

in the empty mind, God claimed it as his own;

the song of love,

the doublewind.

Hollander, Gad. "Fugato (Coda)" Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York: Avon Books,1980.

a poem by mani lieb

Psalmodist

Let shrieking steel and gray stone be set

For green grass; the clash of hammer and tongs

And the rush of wheels - birdsong;

Grating of saws - the summer cricket; the pious poet -

The merchant. And as in earliest and early days

The grass will shoot its stalk through the rock

In rhythm with the cricket; and over the clanging shock

Of steel - the bird's song will range far and away.

So too the poet: pious, from market noises,

From business bustling and the wheels' clatter

He will move apart with parchment, ink and feather

To the holiness of the word, which in its commonness

Is strong - to stitch prayers for the world: to knit

The heart to God, to unbind the sorrow on silent lips.

Lieb, Mani. "Psalmodist" Voices Within the Ark: The Modern Jewish Poets. New York: Avon Books, 1980.

a poem by robert hass

Churchyard

Somerset Maugham said a professional was someone who could do his best work when he didn't particularly feel like it. There was a picture of him in the paper, a face lined deeply and morally like Auden's, an old embittered tortoise, the corners of the mouth turned down resolutely to express the idea that everything in life is small change. And what he said when he died: I'm all through, the clever young men don't write essays about me. In the fleshly world, the red tulip in the garden sunlight is almost touched by shadow and begins to close up. Someone asked me yesterday: are deer monogamous? I thought of something I had read. When deer in the British Isles were forced to live in the open because of heavy foresting, it stunted them. The red deer who lived in the Scottish highlands a thousand years ago were a third larger than the present animal. This morning, walking into the village to pick up the car, I thought of a roof where I have slept in the summer in New York, pigeons in the early morning sailing up Fifth Avenue and silence in which you imagine the empty canyons the light hasn't reached yet. I was standing on the high street in Shelford, outside the fussy little tea shop, and I thought a poem with the quick, lice-ridden pigeons in it might end: this is a dawn song in Manhattan. I hurried home to write it and, as I passed the churchyard, school was letting out. Luke was walking towards me smiling. He thought I had come to meet him. That was when I remembered the car, when he was walking toward me through the spring flowers and the eighteenth-century gravestones, his arms full of school drawings he hoped not to drop in the mud.

Hass, Robert. "Churchyard" Human Wishes. Ecco Press, 1989.

a poem by robert hilles

Dream

A boy made an appointment with God and waited for him in a church. After a few hours he knew that God wasn't coming and he learned for the first time that a god must never reveal himself even to the faithful. At first, the boy was hurt by this and stopped reading his Bible and stopped going to church. He began to have strange dreams at night of walking through the bush with a pack of wolves. In his one hand he carried the tail of a deer and in the other a rifle. Even though he walked on two feet and carried a rifle he knew that he was a wolf and that the leader of the pack was his father. In a clearing they found a vast lake and on the far shore stood an enormous moose. As he aimed his rifle his father spoke in his wolf voice saying: "You cannot shoot that moose because he is all that is left of a once powerful God. Instead you must climb onto his back and whisper into his ear the cries your mother made when you were born. Then he will recognize that you are his grandson." The boy did not listen to his father and shot the moose instead in an instant the lake was filled with blood. The wolves all fled and he was left to drown in the blood. Sometimes he wakes before he pulls the trigger other times he wakes as he tries to swim in all that blood. Each time he wakes he knows that God is trying to tell him something with that dream but he is too simple to really understand. Instead he goes back to church knowing that later a different dream will come.

Hilles, Robert. "Dream" Cantos From a Small Room. Don Mills, Ontario: Wolsac and Wynn Publishers, Inc., 1993.

another poem by stephanie bolster

Many Have Written Poems About Blackberries

But few have gotten at the multiplicity of them, how each berry

composes itself of many notes, spherical,

swollen, fragile as a world. A blackberry is the colour of a painful

bruise on the upper arm, some internal organ

as yet unnamed. It is shaped to fit

the tip of the tongue, to be a thimble, a dunce cap

for a small mouse. Sometimes it is home to a secret green worm

seeking safety and the power of surprise. Sometimes it plunks

into a river and takes on water.

Fishes nibble it.

The bushes themselves ramble like a grandmother's sentences,

giving birth to their own sharpness. Picking the berries

must be a tactful conversation

of gloved hands. Otherwise your fingers will bleed

the berries' purple tongue; otherwise thorns

will pierce your own blank skin. Best to be on the safe side,

the outside of the bush. Inside might lurk

nests of yellowjackets; rabid bats; other,

larger hands on the same search.

The flavour is its own reward, like kissing the whole world

at once, rivers, willows, bugs and all, until your swollen

lips tingle. It's like waking up

to discover the language you used to speak

is gibberish, and you have never really

loved. But this does not matter because you have

married this fruit, mellifluous, brutal, and ripe.

Bolster, Stephanie. "Many Have Written Poems About Blackberries" Two Bowls of Milk. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart Inc., 1999.