national poetry month, day twenty-eight: w. s. merwin

A Calling

My father is telling me the story of Samuel
not for the first time and yet he is not quite repeating
nor rehearsing nor insisting he goes on telling me
in the empty green church smelling of carpet and late dust
where he calls to mind words of the prophets to mumble in a remote language
and the prophets are quoting the Lord who is someone they know
who has been talking to them my father tells what the Lord
said to them and Samuel listened and heard someone calling someone
and Samuel answered Here I am and my father is saying
that is the answer that should be given he is telling me
that someone is calling and that is the right answer
he is telling me a story he wants me to believe
telling me the right answer and the way in which it was spoken
in that story he wants to believe in which someone is calling

Merwin, W. S. "A Calling". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 441.

national poetry month, day twenty-seven: stanley kunitz

Touch Me

Summer is late, my heart.
Words plucked out of the air
some forty years ago
when I was wild with love
and torn almost in two
scatter like leaves this night
of whistling wind and rain.
It is my heart that's late,
it is my song that's flown.
Outdoors all afternoon
under a gunmetal sky
staking my garden down,
I kneeled to the crickets trilling
underfoot as if about
to burst from their crusty shells;
and like a child again
marveled to hear so clear
and brave a music pour
from such a small machine.
What makes the engine go?
Desire, desire, desire.
The longing for the dance
stirs in the buried life.
One season only,
                     and it's done.
So let the battered old willow
thrash against the windowpanes
and the house timbers creak.
Darling, do you remember
the man you married? Touch me,
remind me who I am.

Kunitz, Stanley "Touch Me" The Best of the Best American Poetry: 25th Anniversary Edition. Pinsky, Robert, ed. New York: Scribner Poetry, 2013. 134-5.

national poetry month, day twenty-six: marvin bell

Marco Polo

1.

He was heroic, fugitive, in love with the machinery
of the sea, and every song he sang was of the sea.

His smile was golden, and a skeleton's grimace
in the earth, for every smile ends up in a grimace.

In his famous hands, a chisel could whistle,
and in hands such as his, an insect might sing.

He whose chances rode the foaming oceans
toward ivory-hued dresses of a new substance.

This, among ashes, a scrawny angel may sing,
from a naked belly, of a delicate emptiness.

2.

When Marco Polo set his compass for gold
and ivory, and his dictionary for Chinese,

when Marco Polo set his chisel for a smooth bow
(to stir the waves to foam) and a stern like ice,

when Marco Polo fixed his stare on silky dresses
and the porcelain look of China, and when he had

sailed his scrawny machine to a fugitive corner
of the globe, and the faces of his crew were ashen,

and even the rigging grimaced like a skeleton, why
then Marco Polo landed, and the caged insects sang!

3.

With a chisel, he found his gold. And ivory, and ashes.
With a borrowed dictionary, he talked and he sang. 

With machinery, foam. With machinery, the fugitive.
With machinery, a grimace. With machinery, insects.

With machinery, a skeleton. With scrawny rigging,
a belly of ashes in a fugitive skeleton. With a chisel,

the gold for engines to carry the burnished dresses
to England, though he himself sang mainly of the gold.

He was the Marco Polo of tea and gunpowder,
devoured by the Oriental machinery of the silkworm.

Bell, Marvin. "Marco Polo". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 43-4.

national poetry month, day twenty-five: czeslaw milosz

Report

O Most High, you willed to create me a poet and now it is time for me to present a report.

My heart is full of gratitude though I got acquainted with the miseries of that profession.

By practicing it, we learn too much about the bizarre nature of man.

 

Who, every hour, every day and every year is possessed by self-delusion.

A self-delusion when building sandcastles, collecting postage stamps, admiring oneself in a mirror.

Assigning oneself first place in sport, power, love, and the getting of money.

All the while on the very border, on the fragile border beyond which there is a province of mumblings and wails.

For in every one of us a mad rabbit thrashes and a wolf pack howls, so that we are afraid it will be heard by others.

Out of self-delusion comes poetry and poetry confesses to its flaw.

Though only by remembering poems once written is their author able to see the whole shame of it.

And yet he cannot bear another poet nearby, if he suspects him of being better than himself and envies him every scrap of praise.

Ready not only to kill him but smash him and obliterate him from the surface of the earth.

So that he remains alone, magnanimous and kind toward his subjects, who chase after their small self-delusions.

How does it happen then that such low beginnings lead to the splendor of the word?

I gathered books of poets from various countries, now I sit reading them and am astonished.

It is sweet to think that I was a companion in an expedition that never ceases, though centuries pass away.

An expedition not in search of the golden fleece of a perfect form but as necessary as love.

Under the compulsion of the desire for the essence of the oak, of the mountain peak, of the wasp and of the flower of nasturtium.
 

So that they last, and confirm our hymnic song against death.

And our tender thought about all who lived, strived, and never succeeded in naming.

For to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.

Fraternally, we help each other, forgetting our grievances, translating each other into other tongues, members, indeed, of a wandering crew.

How then could I not be grateful, if early I was called and the incomprehensible contradiction has not diminished my wonder?

At every sunrise I renounce the doubts of night and greet the new day of a most precious delusion.

Milosz, Czeslaw. "Report". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 460-1.

national poetry month, day twenty-four: edward hirsch

Tristan Tzara

There is no such thing as a dada lecture
a manifesto is addressed to the whole world
I am opposed to every system except one
love is irrational and you are the reason

a manifesto is addressed to the whole world
but bells ring out for no reason at all
love is irrational and you are the reason
I am a bridge harboring your darkness

but bells ring out for no reason at all
you are a fresh wind assaulted by sails
I am a bridge harboring your darkness
let's not lash ourselves to the flagpoles

you are a fresh wind assaulted by sails
I am a wound that sprays your salt
let's not lash ourselves to the flagpoles
let's not swim to the music of sailors

I am a wound that sprays your salt
ambassadors of sentiment hate our chorus
let's not swim to the music of sailors
we cast our anchors into the distance

ambassadors of sentiment hate our chorus
they can't pollute our smokiest feelings
we cast our anchors into the distance
we sail our boats for the netherworld

they can't pollute our smokiest feelings
each of us has a thousand virginities
we sail our boats for the netherworld
I'm giving you all my nothingness

each of us has a thousand virginities
we still consider ourselves charming
I'm giving you all my nothingness
I have doubted everything but this

we still consider ourselves charming
there is no such thing as a dada lecture
I have doubted everything but this
I am opposed to every system except one

Hirsch, Edward. "Tristan Tzara". The Body Electric: America's Best Poetry from The American Poetry Review. Berg, Stephen, David Bonanno and Arthur Vogelsang, Eds. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2000. 260-1.