Saturday Evening in the Village

Jules Breton, "The Shepherd’s Star"

Saturday Evening in the Village

The young girl now comes back from the open fields,

About the set of sun,

Bearing her swathe of grass, and in her hand

A bunch of roses and of violets,

As is her custom, for

Tomorrow's holiday,

To make more beautiful her breast and hair.

And the old woman sits

Upon the steps among her neighbors, spinning.

Turning herself to where the day goes down,

And telling tales of how she, in better times,

Decked herself out against the holiday,

And graceful still, and fresh,

Would dance the evening through among the rest,

Who were companions of her lovely prime.

Darkens the air, the sky

Takes on a deeper blue, and shadows fall

Cast by the roofs and hills

Beneath the whiteness of the rising moon.

And now the bell proclaims

The holy day's approach,

And at that sound, it seems,

Each heart is cheered once more.

The small boys shouting in troops

About the village square

Go leaping hither and thither

And make a cheerful noise;

Meanwhile the laborer goes whistling home,

Back to his frugal meal,

And thinks about the coming day of rest.

When every other light is out,

All other sound is mute, 

Hark to the hammer knocking, and the saw -

The carpenter is up,

Working by lamplight in his shuttered shop,

And labors on, in haste

To get all finished before morning comes.

This is the best-loved day of all the week,

Most full of hope and joy;

The morrow will bring back

Sadness and tedium, and each with his thought

Returns once more to find his usual labor.

You little playful boy,

Even this your flowering time

Is like a day filled up with grace and joy -

A clear, calm day that comes

As a precursor to life's festival.

Be happy, little boy;

A joyful time is this.

More I'd not tell you, but if your holiday

Seems somewhat tardy yet, let that not grieve you.

Giacomo Leopardi (translated by John Heath-Stubbs)

I love how this poem slips from person to person - the young woman hopeful, the old woman reminiscent, the small boys playing, the labourer looking forward to rest, the carpenter working through the night - all these an overview of every stage in life - until at last Leopardi addresses the young boy with all of it still ahead of him. And its not just the changing seasons of life, but the gradual movement of time, from early evening to night and straight on through to the next day. The tiredness after a long week of work blending into a day of rest. It reminds me of Ecclesiastes 3 - "A time for everything, and everything in its time..." Lovely. And somehow wistful. There is hopeful expectation, memories of better times, and a warning not to be impatient for more. Something about this poem wraps its fingers around my heart.

I Carried With Me Poems

Leonid Osipovich Pasternak

I Carried With Me Poems

I carried with me poems, poems which spewed out of

  everything; I saw poems hanging from the clotheslines,

  hanging from the streetlamps: I saw poems glowing in

  the bushes, pushing out of the earth as tulips do;

I felt poems breathe in the dark March night like ghosts

  which squared and breathed through the air;

I felt poems brushing the tops of chimneys, brushing by in

  the dark; I felt poems being born in the city, Venuses

  breaking through a shattered sea of mirrors; I felt all the poets of the city straining,

  isolated poets, knowing none of the others, straining;

I felt that some gazed into the March night, looking, and

  finding; 

and others were running down steep streets, seeking,

  and seeking to embrace;

and others stood in empty bookstores turning over pages

  of fellow poets whom they loved but didn't know;

and some pondered over coffee growing cold, in harshly lit

  cafeterias, and gazed at the reflections of the eaters in the

  wall-to-wall mirrors;

some dwelt on what it was to grow old;

some dwelt on love;

some had gone out of time;

some, going out of time, looked back into time, and started;

I felt all of their lives and existences, all with poems at

  their center;

I knew none of these poets;

but I felt these intimations augured well, for me, and for

  poetry;

and my steps grew big, giant steps, I bounded down Parker

  Street;

a tall, taciturn, fast-walking poet's accomplice.

Gail Dusenbery 

I like that line - " I carried with me poems." I have, I do. And yes, there is this line of connection with the poets themselves as well, Are there poems being written and sweated over right now? Poems that I will read and love and carry with me? 

 

February

Charles W. Smith, "Wash Day in Jackson Ward"

February

I have so loved black boughs against the sky

I half regret the coming of the spring

With soft leaves blurring that austerity...

Oh wintry Truth! What changes will Love bring?

Nora B. Cunningham

It's so true. Having once adjusted to the minimal, having steeled oneself to the bleak, all the green buds creeping out of the corners are like an ambush to the senses. Unsettling, unnerving, disarming. It is hard to let go of what's familiar.

 

Very Like a Whale

Staffan Wirén

Very Like a Whale

One thing that literature would be greatly the better for
Would be a more restricted employment by the authors of simile and
metaphor.
Authors of all races, be they Greeks, Romans, Teutons or Celts,
Can't seem just to say that anything is the thing it is but have to
go out of their way to say that it is like something else.
What does it mean when we are told
That that Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold?
In the first place, George Gordon Byron had enough experience
To know that it probably wasn't just one Assyrian, it was a lot of
Assyrians.
However, as too many arguments are apt to induce apoplexy and
thus hinder longevity.
We'll let it pass as one Assyrian for the sake of brevity.
Now then, this particular Assyrian, the one whose cohorts were
gleaming in purple and gold,
Just what does the poet mean when he says he came down like a
wold on the fold?
In heaven and earth more than is dreamed of in our philosophy
there are great many things.
But I don't imagine that among them there is a wolf with purple
and gold cohorts or purple and gold anythings.
No, no, Lord Byron, before I'll believe that this Assyrian was
actually like a wolf I must have some kind of proof;
Did he run on all fours and did he have a hairy tail and a big red
mouth and big white teeth and did he say Woof Woof?
Frankly I think it is very unlikely, and all you were entitled to say,
at the very most,
Was that the Assyrian cohorts came down like a lot of Assyrian
cohorts about to destroy the Hebrew host.
But that wasn't fancy enough for Lord Byron, oh dear me no, he
had to invent a lot of figures of speech and then interpolate them,
With the result that whenever you mention Old Testament soldiers
to people they say Oh yes, they're the ones that a lot of
wolves dressed up in gold and purple ate them.
That's the kind of thing that's being done all the time by poets,
from Homer to Tennyson;
They're always comparing ladies to lilies and veal to venison,
And they always say things like that the snow is a white blanket
after a winter storm.
Oh it is, is it, all right then, you sleep under a six-inch blanket of
snow and I'll sleep under a half-inch blanket of unpoetical
blanket material and we'll see which one keeps warm,
And after that maybe you'll begin to comprehend dimly
What I mean by too much metaphor and simile. 

Ogden Nash


I don't think I can add anything to that.



 

Lemon

Trisha Hardwick, "Lemons on Silver"

Lemon

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it-
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet. 

Pablo Neruda

Neruda! Oh Neruda. You are the alchemist.  Proof that words are alive. Every line ignites the senses. "We open the halves of a miracle.." "The gold of the universe wells to your touch..." 

Nor Is It Written

Kenne Gregoire

Nor Is It Written

Nor is it written that you may not grieve.
There is no rule of joy; long may you dwell
Not smiling yet in that last pain,
On that last supper of the heart.
It is not written that you must take joy
Because not thus again shall you sit down
To ply the mingled banquet
Which the deep larder of illusion shed
Like myth in time grown not astonishing.
Lean to the cloth awhile, and yet awhile,
And even may your eyes caress
Proudly the used abundance.
It is not written in what heart
You may not pass from magic plenty
Into the straitened nowadays.
To each is given secrecy of heart,
To make himself what heart he please
In stirring up from that fond table
To sit him down at this sharp meal.
It shall not here be asked of him
‘What thinks your heart?’
Long may you sorely to yourself upbraid
This truth unwild, this only-bread.
It is not counted what large passions
Your heart in ancient private keeps alive.
To each is given what defeat he will.

Laura Riding

The thing about this poem is its refusal to sugar-coat life. It does me a lot of good, somehow. Naming the bad, looking at it for what it is - a "sharp meal" at the banquet of life. I love that image too, of the circumstances as a meal, as food, a banquet. It implies so many things. That there will be different kinds of meals at different times, that sometimes it will not be good, it will be burnt, or off, or meager, or, in turn, that it might be a feast, abundant, something to savour. The hope at the center of the poem is that you may eat crow for a long time, and you don't have to say its turkey - but in spite of its bad taste, it is feeding you, you are being nourished, and it will change.


 

Sonnet

Concetta Flore

Sonnet

Think, love, how when a starry night of frost

Is ended, and the small, pale winter sun

Shines on the garden trellis, ice-embossed,

And the stiff frozen flower-stalks, every one;

And turns their fine embroideries of ice

Into a loosening silver, skein by skein,

Warming cold leaves and stones, till, in a trice,

The garden smiles, and breathes, and lives again,

And further think, how the poor frozen snail

Creeps out with trembling horn to feel that heat,

And thaws the snowy mildew from his mail,

And stretches with all his length from his retreat:

Will he not praise, with all his heart, the sun?

Then think, at last, I too am such a one.

Conrad Aiken 

"Fine embroideries of ice..." 
"The garden smiles, and breathes, and lives again..."
Just beautiful. The smallest sign of hope, of Spring, lifts our hearts.