Poems- Not your own.

[Sundae]

Distances

Swifts turn in the heights of the air;
higher still turn the invisible stars.
When day withdraws to the ends of the earth
their fires shine on a dark expanse of sand.

We live in a world of motion and distance.
The heart flies from tree to bird,
from bird to distant star,
from star to love; and love grows
in the quiet house, turning and working,
servant of thought, a lamp held in one hand.

Phillippe Jaccottet
(translated from the French by Derek Mahon)

[Gravdigr]

The Oven Bird

by Robert Frost

There is a singer everyone has heard,
Loud, a mid-summer and a mid-wood bird,
Who makes the solid tree trunks sound again.
He says that leaves are old and that for flowers
Mid-summer is to spring as one to ten.
He says the early petal-fall is past
When pear and cherry bloom went down in showers
On sunny days a moment overcast;
And comes that other fall we name the fall.
He says the highway dust is over all.
The bird would cease and be as other birds
But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

[glatt]

I have a hard time understanding that poem. And at first I wondered WTF? But then I saw your post in the other thread.

I still can't follow the poem, but now I understand why you posted it.

[infinite monkey]

Well, ya see, Frost got a little confused when he stopped by the woods on that snowy evening when he took the road less traveled. I think I know, and that has made all the difference.

[glatt]

Upon further reflection, I think it's about the passage of the seasons and abruptly switches to a bird coming to realize, to its great embarrassment, that it can't carry a tune.

But that he knows in singing not to sing.
The question that he frames in all but words
Is what to make of a diminished thing.

See, it was singing and then got all self conscious, so it stopped. And now it wonders what to do now that it realizes its singing sucks.

[infinite monkey]

Originally Posted by glatt

Upon further reflection, I think it's about the passage of the seasons and abruptly switches to a bird coming to realize, to its great embarrassment, that it can't carry a tune.



See, it was singing and then got all self conscious, so it stopped. And now it wonders what to do now that it realizes its singing sucks.

And, being a bird and all...what the heck else it is supposed to do? So he applied for a job as 'poet muse.'

[Gravdigr]

Uncle.

[infinite monkey]

Originally Posted by Gravdigr

Uncle.

Aunt.

Oh, thought this was word ass. Sorry. It was brilliant though, wasn't it?

[glatt]

Uncle

I hope it didn't seem like I was being critical of you, Gravdigr. I was taking a shot at Frost, but mostly it was from my own feelings of inadequacy at not being able to do this poetry stuff well. You know, tearing somebody else down so I can feel better about myself. Even if it is a dead guy who doesn't know I'm doing it. And I didn't even really feel that bad in the first place, so it was completely unnecessary.

I don't get that poem, but I think that says more about me than it does about Frost. Or you.

Thanks for teaching me a little about the oven bird.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Poetry is obfuscated communication.

[infinite monkey]

Um yeah...it was just joking around. it didn't occur to me for a second that grav might take it as an insult...because that seems far to go and grav has a great sense of jokery. Saying uncle just seemed a 'haha mudderpluckers, ya got me.'

And anyway, I like Frost. so, that was fun. Sigh. I'm starting to hate that oven bird. Damn you ovenbird, damn you to hell.

[Gravdigr]

Originally Posted by infinite monkey

Saying uncle just seemed a 'haha mudderpluckers, ya got me.'

That's pretty much all it was. No offenses.

[glatt]

This one, I understand.

My Grandparents’ Generation
by Faith Shearin


They are taking so many things with them:
their sewing machines and fine china,

their ability to fold a newspaper
with one hand and swat a fly.

They are taking their rotary telephones,
and fat televisions, and knitting needles,

their cast iron frying pans, and Tupperware.
They are packing away the picnics

and perambulators, the wagons
and church socials. They are wrapped in

lipstick and big band music, dressed
in recipes. Buried with them: bathtubs

with feet, front porches, dogs without leashes.
These are the people who raised me

and now I am left behind in
a world without paper letters,

a place where the phone
has grown as eager as a weed.

I am going to miss their attics,
their ordinary coffee, their chicken

fried in lard. I would give anything
to be ten again, up late with them

in that cottage by the river, buying
Marvin Gardens and passing go,

collecting two hundred dollars.

[Gravdigr]

I liked that.^^ 'Sall true, too.

*************************************************



from Get Fuzzy

[Carruthers]

This morning I heard the screaming of Swifts as I was walking down the High Street.
Turning around I caught a brief glimpse of about eight of the birds just before they flew out of sight around an old building.
They are the first I've seen this year and are always last to arrive from their wintering grounds in sub-Saharan Africa, Swallows and House Martins arriving before them.
Sadly they are the first to leave and suddenly, one day in late August, they are gone.

Swifts - Ted Hughes

Fifteenth of May. Cherry blossom. The swifts
Materialize at the tip of a long scream
Of needle. ‘Look! They’re back! Look!’ And they’re gone
On a steep

Controlled scream of skid
Round the house-end and away under the cherries. Gone.
Suddenly flickering in sky summit, three or four together,
Gnat-whisp frail, and hover-searching, and listening

For air-chills – are they too early? With a bowing
Power-thrust to left, then to right, then a flicker they
Tilt into a slide, a tremble for balance,
Then a lashing down disappearance

Behind elms.
They’ve made it again,
Which means the globe’s still working, the Creation’s
Still waking refreshed, our summer’s
Still all to come --
And here they are, here they are again
Erupting across yard stones
Shrapnel-scatter terror. Frog-gapers,
Speedway goggles, international mobsters --

A bolas of three or four wire screams
Jockeying across each other
On their switchback wheel of death.
They swat past, hard-fletched

Veer on the hard air, toss up over the roof,
And are gone again. Their mole-dark labouring,
Their lunatic limber scramming frenzy
And their whirling blades

Sparkle out into blue --
Not ours any more.
Rats ransacked their nests so now they shun us.
Round luckier houses now
They crowd their evening dirt-track meetings,

Racing their discords, screaming as if speed-burned,
Head-height, clipping the doorway
With their leaden velocity and their butterfly lightness,
Their too much power, their arrow-thwack into the eaves.

Every year a first-fling, nearly flying
Misfit flopped in our yard,
Groggily somersaulting to get airborne.
He bat-crawled on his tiny useless feet, tangling his flails

Like a broken toy, and shrieking thinly
Till I tossed him up — then suddenly he flowed away under
His bowed shoulders of enormous swimming power,
Slid away along levels wobbling

On the fine wire they have reduced life to,
And crashed among the raspberries.
Then followed fiery hospital hours
In a kitchen. The moustached goblin savage

Nested in a scarf. The bright blank
Blind, like an angel, to my meat-crumbs and flies.
Then eyelids resting. Wasted clingers curled.
The inevitable balsa death.
Finally burial
For the husk
Of my little Apollo --

The charred scream
Folded in its huge power.