Poems- Not your own.

[Big Sarge]

I'm posting this poem a couple of days early (July 4th you know). Please listen to all of it and you might be surprised to hear parts for the first time.

[Big Sarge]

Oh, just so you know: Independence was declared on July 2, 1776!!!!!!!!!!

[Carruthers]

A few days ago, BBC Radio 4 broadcasted a programme entitled 'O Say Can You See?'. The subject matter doesn't require any explanation of course, but I thought that it might still be of interest to US Dwellars.

The on demand service, aka iPlayer, isn't always available to listeners beyond these shores for obscure copyright reasons, but you should still be able to listen to the broadcast repeat on Saturday 5th July at 1500 UK/1000 Eastern.

Here's the blurb:

The author and critic Erica Wagner, a New Yorker by birth, explores America's relationship with its national anthem.

The Star-Spangled Banner is embedded in American national identity and yet it only became the official national anthem in 1931. Erica returns to its origins, almost exactly two centuries ago at the Battle of Baltimore in 1814, a decisive moment in the Second War of American Independence, to find out how Francis Scott Key came to write these lyrics about the American flag. She speaks to the acclaimed American poet Mary Jo Salter about the merit of the lyrics, and to the musicologist David Hildebrand about how the music changed over time to become the anthem we know today.

Central to the appeal of The Star-Spangled Banner is the reverence - what some term the religiosity - which the United States has for its flag. Through insights from Annin Flagmakers, the oldest surviving flagmaking company founded in 1847, and Marc Leepson, author of biographies of both Francis Scott Key and the American flag, Erica unpicks this unique relationship - something she is always aware of whenever she returns to the United States - and examines the positive and negative responses to the anthem.

With music by Whitney Houston, Beyonce Knowles and, of course, Jimi Hendrix.

Producer: Philippa Geering
A Unique production for BBC Radio 4.

Last but not least, the link: O Say Can You See?

[Big Sarge]

Many of us have deep reverence for that flag because it is the banner we fought under and our friends died under.

True story: When Tull was killed and they got his body back to Camp Hit, I ran upstairs and got his flag off the wall. We put the flag over his body (in the body bag) until the body and wounded were flown out. We sent that flag to his mother. I met her the next year. She cried and thanked us. That flag is almost a religious icon to her.

So yes, if you fight for something it is precious to you. If you sit on your ass at home and discuss the merits of war, it is probably a piece of cloth.

[DanaC]

Originally Posted by Big Sarge

So yes, if you fight for something it is precious to you. If you sit on your ass at home and discuss the merits of war, it is probably a piece of cloth.

Except it isn't is it? Just a piece of cloth for those who've never fought. There seems a general reverence in the US for the flag which is unusual (to my mind).

[Gravdigr]

Yep, we're kinda proud of that ragged old flag:



I'm almost certain that Johnny Cash wrote that poem.

[Sundae]

Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse.

Fleur Adcock

[Carruthers]

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!


Scottish Prayer.

[infinite monkey]

Originally Posted by Sundae

Things

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public.
There are worse things than these miniature betrayals,
committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things
than not being able to sleep for thinking about them.
It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in
and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse.

Fleur Adcock

I love this!

[Carruthers]

This is one of my favourite poems.
It was written for 'Night Mail', a 22 minute documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the General Post Office (GPO) in 1936.

NIGHT MAIL

by W H Auden

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Thro' sparse counties she rampages,
Her driver's eye upon the gauges.
Panting up past lonely farms
Fed by the fireman's restless arms.
Striding forward along the rails
Thro' southern uplands with northern mails.
Winding up the valley to the watershed,
Thro' the heather and the weather and the dawn overhead.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.
Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheepdogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.
Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.
Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.
Thousands are still asleep
Dreaming of terrifying monsters,
Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:
Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,
Asleep in granite Aberdeen,
They continue their dreams,
And shall wake soon and long for letters,
And none will hear the postman's knock
Without a quickening of the heart,
For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?



This video is the last four minutes of the original film when the poem was recited.
Technical quality leaves something to be desired, but it was made nearly eighty years ago so some allowance has to be made.




This is the complete film. (22 mins)





The poem was adapted for a 1988 British Rail corporate video narrated by Sir Tom Courtnay.

NB There is a remastered version on YouTube which can't be linked to external websites. Try it first. LINK

[xoxoxoBruce]

On Election Day

I hear democracy weep, on election day.
The streets are filled with brokered promise, on election day.
The miscreant’s vote the same as saint’s, on election day.
The dead unleash their fury, on election day.
My brother crushed in sorrow, on election day.
The sister does her washing, on election day.
Slowly, I approach the voices dark, on election day.
The men prepare for dying, on election day.
The morning hush defends its brood, on election day.
So still, so kindly faltering, on election day.
On election day, the cats take tea with the marmoset.
On election day, the mother refuses her milk.
On election day, the frogs croak so fiercely you would think that Mars had fallen into Earth.
On election day, the iron man meets her frozen gasp.
The air is putrid, red, interpolating, quixotic, torpid, vulnerable, on election day.
Your eyes slide, on election day.
Still the mourners mourn, the weepers wept, the children sleep alone in bed, on election day.
No doubt a comet came to see me, fiery and irreconciled, torrid, strummed, on election day.
On election day, the trespass of the fatuous alarm and ignominious aspiration fells the golden leap to girdled crest.
The tyrant becomes prince, on election day.
Neither friend nor foe, fear nor fate, on election day.
The liar lies with the lamb, on election day.
The last shall be the first and first sent to the back of the line, on election day.
The beggar made a king, on election day.
“Let him who is without my poems be assassinated!” on election day.
Let he who has not sinned, let him sin, on election day.
The ghosts wear suits, on election day.
On election day, sulfur smells like beer.
On election day, the minister quakes in fear.
On election day, the Pole and the Jew dance the foxtrot.
On election day, the shoe does not fit the foot, the bullet misfires in its pistol, the hungry waiter reels before steadying himself on facts.
The grid does not gird the fiddler, on election day.
Galoshes and tears, on election day.
The sperm cannot find the egg, on election day.
The drum beat becomes bird song, on election day.
I feel like a nightmare is ending but can’t wake up, on election day.
—Charles Bernstein

[Sundae]

For both the Limes. It's not Arran, but even without the title I thought of you and your clan.

Orkney/ This Life
It is big sky and its changes,
the sea all round and the waters within.
It is the way sea and sky
work off each other constantly,
like people meeting in Alfred Street,
each face coming away with a hint
of the other's face pressed in it.
It is the way a week long gale
ends and folks emerge to hear
a single bird cry way high up.

It is the way you lean to me
and the way I lean to you, as if
we are each other's prevailing;
how we connect along our shores,
the way we are tidal islands
joined for hours then inaccessible,
I'll go for that, and smile when I
pick sand off myself in the shower.
The way I am an inland loch to you
when a clatter of white whoops and rises...

It is the way Scotland looks to the South,
the way we enter friends' houses
to leave what we came with, or flick
the kettle's switch and wait.
This is where I want to live,
close to where the heart gives out,
ruined, perfected, an empty arch against the sky
where birds fly through instead of prayers
while in Hoy Sound the ferry's engines thrum
this life this life this life.

Andrew Greg

[limey]

Thank you, Sundae. That's glorious!


Sent by thought transference

[Sundae]

If you had seen me pecking it out, letter by letter on this tiny phone...
I swear, I must value you above rubies.

[limey]

Love you, too, sis!


Sent by thought transference