Prologue

Chris Neale

Prologue

This day winding down now
At God speeded summer's end
In the torrent salmon sun,
In my seashaken house
On a breakneck of rocks
Tangled with chirrup and fruit,
Froth, flute, fin, and quill
At a wood's dancing hoof,
By scummed, starfish sands
With their fishwife cross
Gulls, pipers, cockles, and snails,
Out there, crow black, men
Tackled with clouds, who kneel
To the sunset nets,
Geese nearly in heaven, boys
Stabbing, and herons, and shells
That speak seven seas,
Eternal waters away
From the cities of nine
Days' night whose towers will catch
In the religious wind
Like stalks of tall, dry straw,
At poor peace I sing
To you strangers (though song
Is a burning and crested act,
The fire of birds in
The world's turning wood,
For my swan, splay sounds),
Out of these seathumbed leaves
That will fly and fall
Like leaves of trees and as soon
Crumble and undie
Into the dogdayed night.
Seaward the salmon, sucked sun slips,
And the dumb swans drub blue
My dabbed bay's dusk, as I hack
This rumpus of shapes
For you to know
How I, a spinning man,
Glory also this star, bird
Roared, sea born, man torn, blood blest.
Hark: I trumpet the place,
From fish to jumping hill! Look:
I build my bellowing ark
To the best of my love
As the flood begins,
Out of the fountainhead
Of fear, rage red, manalive,
Molten and mountainous to stream
Over the wound asleep
Sheep white hollow farms


To Wales in my arms.
Hoo, there, in castle keep,
You king singsong owls, who moonbeam
The flickering runs and dive
The dingle furred deer dead!
Huloo, on plumbed bryns,
O my ruffled ring dove
in the hooting, nearly dark
With Welsh and reverent rook,
Coo rooing the woods' praise,
who moons her blue notes from her nest
Down to the curlew herd!
Ho, hullaballoing clan
Agape, with woe
In your beaks, on the gabbing capes!
Heigh, on horseback hill, jack
Whisking hare! who
Hears, there, this fox light, my flood ship's
Clangour as I hew and smite
(A clash of anvils for my
Hubbub and fiddle, this tune
On a tongued puffball)
But animals thick as thieves
On God's rough tumbling grounds
(Hail to His beasthood!).
Beasts who sleep good and thin,
Hist, in hogsback woods! The haystacked
Hollow farms in a throng
Of waters cluck and cling,
And barnroofs cockcrow war!
O kingdom of neighbors finned
Felled and quilled, flash to my patch
Work ark and the moonshine
Drinking Noah of the bay,
With pelt, and scale, and fleece:
Only the drowned deep bells
Of sheep and churches noise
Poor peace as the sun sets
And dark shoals every holy field.
We will ride out alone, and then,
Under the stars of Wales,
Cry, Multitudes of arks! Across
The water lidded lands,
Manned with their loves they'll move
Like wooden islands, hill to hill.
Huloo, my prowed dove with a flute!
Ahoy, old, sea-legged fox,
Tom tit and Dai mouse!
My ark sings in the sun
At God speeded summer's end
And the flood flowers now. 

Dylan Thomas 

Convoluted, roping, twisting words - 

Dylan, you draw us in.

Seashaken house, starfish sands, men tackled with clouds, cities of nine day's night. 

 You live in a myth-world, a deeper-than-surface, marrow-life.

You dip in and out of this place, showing us what is there, bringing as much of it back to us

as words will carry. 

Your net of words has caught for us flashes of otherwise unimagined beauty.

Is this true? Is this place really where we live?

Is the poem an Ark to carry us there?

Is it enough to envision it?

I want to walk in the holy fields.

Sledding in Wichita

Claudette Castonguay

Sledding in Wichita

 

As cars pass, laboring through the slush,

a boy, bundled against the stiff wind

in his snow suit, gloves, and scarf,

leans on his upright toboggan,

waiting his turn atop

the snow-packed overpass—

the highest point in town.

First one car exits, and then another,

each creeping down the icy ramp.

The brown grass pokes through

the two grooves carved in the short hill.

As the second car fishtails to a stop at the bottom,

brake lights glowing on the dirty snow,

the boy’s turn comes.

His trip to the bottom is swift—

only a second or two—

and he bails out just before the curb.

It’s not much, but it’s sledding in Wichita.

Casey Pycior

 

 

The unusually beneficent state of Snow we have been living in has brought back memories of hill-hunting and the joy of even the very briefest speed-gathering velocities of sledding in urban settings where every bump and lump of landscape becomes a possibility for fun and danger - especially in an otherwise flat environment.

 

 It's not much, but it's also everything.

 

We Wear the Mask

Jean Cocteau

We Wear the Mask

We wear the mask that grins and lies, 

It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— 

This debt we pay to human guile; 

With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, 

And mouth with myriad subtleties. 

Why should the world be over-wise, 

In counting all our tears and sighs? 

Nay, let them only see us, while 

       We wear the mask. 

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries 

To thee from tortured souls arise. 

We sing, but oh the clay is vile 

Beneath our feet, and long the mile; 

But let the world dream otherwise, 

       We wear the mask!

 

Paul Lawrence Dunbar  

A little irony considering the circumstances.

the beautiful changes

Morna Rhys

The Beautiful Changes

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides

The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies

On water; it glides

So from the walker, it turns

Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you

Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.

The beautiful changes as a forest is changed

By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;

As a mantis, arranged

On a green leaf, grows

Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves

Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.

Your hands hold roses always in a way that says

They are not only yours; the beautiful changes

In such kind ways,

Wishing ever to sunder

Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose

For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Richard Wilbur

“The beautiful changes”.  Such an intertwining of meaning! (Like the twisting of many threads into one.) Is it saying that changes are beautiful, or that that change is what makes for beauty, or that beauty changes us - or all of those things in turn? I don't grasp this poem fully or even half-ly, but I like it. (For one thing, Queen Anne's Lace is my favourite flower, and walking through a field of them, as I can in this poem, is something I want to do a lot of.) It's the line, "The beautiful changes as a forest is changed/By a chameleon's tuning his skin to it." that makes me pause. Is Wilbur saying that Beauty changes the person (or animal or thing or whatever) who has contact with it? And that if I (a kind of chameleon, yes,  mantis? well, maybe) spend time in the forest (or any beautiful place like it) long enough to become "in tune" with it, not only does it change me, but I change it, "deepen" it, as it were? Is that what he means? And then, "Your hands hold roses always in a way that says they are not only yours." And what is "a second finding"? It sounds like an offering, the way the roses are held, a sharing, or a transferring. And this mention of how the beautiful "sunder(s)/Things and thing's selves for a second finding" - could that be saying that there is a kind of merging that happens with us and the beautiful? A joining and deepening of both otherwise separate things? (This is straining my brain a bit.) 

This is what I take from it, right or wrong:
The lovely image of walking through a field of Queen Ann's Lace and the flowers swaying and moving as I pass.
Your hands full of roses. And the idea that touching or holding or being within beauty changes me. And the crazy thought that I add to it, too, that this wonder I feel is a kind of sharing between myself and Beauty. 
And, of course, that poetry is beautiful, and changes me.

Yes

Susan Ashworth.

Yes

It could happen any time, tornado,
earthquake, Armageddon. It could happen.
Or sunshine, love, salvation.

It could you know. That's why we wake
and look out – no guarantees
in this life.

But some bonuses, like morning,
like right now, like noon,
like evening.

– William Stafford

The third poem with “yes”. Like the “let” poems, I thought I'd put together a few different sides. “Let” was a fascinating word to see in poetry, so loaded with meaning. “Yes” is too. As a way of approaching the world, in welcome, openness, receptivity, in anticipation of possibilities. Also, the idea of life itself being affirmative, having a positive conclusion, of there being a sense of sustained order underlying everything. William Stafford’s poem feels similar to Jane Kenyon’s "Otherwise" in its awareness of change, that circumstances could be quite different tomorrow, or in a minute, and that this should be an incentive for us to pay attention to what is good, to what is going well, to the "little" things like the beauty of the time of day, the way the light falls, the sounds of people and the hum of activity around us, the whole scope of the earth in it's movement. I like how "yes" is used only once, in the title. It feels like a breath of thanks, as if the speaker took a break from his work, sat down with a cuppa, looked out the window and thought "This is a good moment. Yes. It could have been different."