I Eat Poetry

Prophecy

You see no beauty in the parched parade,
The quivering, heat-glazed highways mile on mile,
The fields where beauty holds a debt unpaid,
The gray, drab barracks in monotonous, grim file.

You take no joy when dust wraiths dimly curl
Above the winding column crawling on far hills.
You see but short beyond the present whirl
Of circumstance, your little wrongs and petty ills.

But when it all has passed and you have lost
The swinging rhythmic cadence of the marching feet,
Then you will reck as paltry small the cost,
And memory will purge the bitter from the sweet.

by Robert Penn Warren

From Blossoms

From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

By Li-Young Lee

The Laboratory - Ancien Régime

I.
Now that I, tying thy glass mask tightly,
May gaze thro' these faint smokes curling whitely,
As thou pliest thy trade in this devil's-smithy—-
Which is the poison to poison her, prithee?

II.
He is with her, and they know that I know
Where they are, what they do: they believe my tears flow
While they laugh, laugh at me, at me fled to the drear
Empty church, to pray God in, for them!—-I am here.

III
Grind away, moisten and mash up thy paste,
Pound at thy powder,—-I am not in haste!
Better sit thus, and observe thy strange things,
Than go where men wait me and dance at the King's.

IV
That in the mortar—-you call it a gum?
Ah, the brave tree whence such gold oozings come!
And yonder soft phial, the exquisite blue,
Sure to taste sweetly,—-is that poison too?

V
Had I but all of them, thee and thy treasures,
What a wild crowd of invisible pleasures!
To carry pure death in an earring, a casket,
A signet, a fan-mount, a filigree basket!

VI
Soon, at the King's, a mere lozenge to give,
And Pauline should have just thirty minutes to live!
But to light a pastile, and Elise, with her head
And her breast and her arms and her hands, should drop dead!

VII
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By Robert Browning

Do Something

If the world seems cool to you,
    Kindle fires to warm it!
Let their comfort hide from you
    Winters that deform it.
Hearts as frozen as your own
    To that radiance gather;
You will soon forget to moan,
    “Ah! The cheerless weather!”
If the world’s “a vale of tears,”
    Smile till rainbows span it;
Breathe the love that life endears—
    Clear from clouds to fan it.
Of your gladness lend a gleam
    Unto souls that shiver;
Show them how dark sorrow’s stream
    Blends with hope’s bright river.

by Lucy Larcom
published in 1885, in The Humbler Poets: A Collection of Newspaper and Periodical Verse, 1870 to 1885

Cross-post from war_poetry:

Howl Under a Blue Light Filtered Moon
(Dedicated to Allen Ginsberg)

I saw the best minds of my generation scrolling themselves to death,
starved for meaning, lit by the blue glow of a thousand screens,
dragged through the feed at 3 A.M. looking for something real.

Angels of burnout, prophets of anxiety,
wired into coffee and code and self-diagnosis,
naked in their rooms, refreshing the apocalypse for updates.

Who texted their prayers into the void and got an emoji in return,
who built their gods out of hashtags and dopamine,
who confessed their sins to algorithms that sold them better ones.

Who wandered suburbia in eternal leases,
tethered to Wi-Fi, dreaming of the open road but afraid of gas prices,
who howled under fluorescent lights of office towers
as their dreams were formatted into PowerPoints.

Who made love to ghosts through pixelated glass,
mouths pressed to screens, hearts buffering,
and cried out for human touch in the language of memes.

Who believed in justice and were met with comment sections,
who marched, livestreamed, and bled for change
while billionaires built rockets to leave them behind.

Who raged against the machine
only to find the machine was polite,
efficient,
and offered a free trial.

Who searched for beauty and found filters,
who searched for truth and found ads,
who searched for God and found Wi-Fi signal
two bars, unstable, but better than nothing.

Who traded their time for content,
their thoughts for engagement,
their solitude for a sense of being seen.

Who sat in therapy learning to breathe again
after years of holding their breath online.

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By Elden Locke

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Cross-post from war_poetry:

Bare Minimum

The bills hit harder when the house goes quiet,
when the kids are asleep and you can’t deny it.
spread them out like wounds on the table,
You do the math again, pretend you’re able.

The numbers don’t bend, they don’t break, they don’t care,
They just sit there cold like a truth that isn’t fair.
And you whisper, “Maybe if I just cut more…”
But there’s nothing left you haven’t cut before.

Water used to mean something clean, something pure,
now it’s something you measure, something unsure.
You watch the faucet like it’s bleeding you dry,
every drop is another quiet goodbye.

You tell yourself, “It’s just water, it’s fine,”
But your chest tightens every single time.

Your gas light is glowing like a warning you feel,
not on the dash, but something real.
You calculate distance in fear and in doubt,
How far can you go before you’re tapped out?

You grip the wheel like it might understand,
like it might carry more than it actually can.
But machines don’t care if you make it to the bank.
They just stop when there’s nothing left in the tank.

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By Elden Locke

Paul Robeson was born on this day, April 9, in 1898. Gwendolyn Brooks wrote a poem about him and it's one of my favorites.

Paul Robeson

That time
we all heard it,
cool and clear,
cutting across the hot grit of the day.
The major Voice.
The adult Voice
forgoing Rolling River,
forgoing tearful tale of bale and barge
and other symptoms of an old despond.
Warning, in music-words
devout and large,
that we are each other’s
harvest:
we are each other's
business:
we are each other's
magnitude and bond.

by Gwendolyn Brooks

The Home-Coming of the Eurydice

[Lost, with her crew of three hundred boys, on the last day of her voyage, March 23, 1876. She foundered off Portsmouth, from which town many of the boys came.]</i>

Up with the royals that top the white spread of her!
Press her and dress her, and drive through the foam;
The Island's to port, and the mainland ahead of her,
Hey for the Warner and Hayling and Home!

"Bo'sun, O Bo'sun, just look at the green of it!
Look at the red cattle down by the hedge!
Look at the farmsteading—all that is seen of it,
One little gable end over the edge!"

"Lord! the tongues of them clattering, clattering,
All growing wild at a peep of the Wight;
Aye, sir, aye, it has set them all chattering,
Thinking of home and their mothers to-night."

Spread the topgallants — oh, lay them out lustily!
What though it darken o'er Netherby Combe?
'Tis but the valley wind, puffing so gustily—
On for the Warner and Hayling and Home!

"Bo'sun, O Bo'sun, just see the long slope of it!
Culver is there, with the cliff and the light.
Tell us, oh tell us, now is there a hope of it?
Shall we have leave for our homes for to-night?"

"Tut, the clack of them! Steadily! Steadily!
Aye, as you say, sir, they're little ones still;
One long reach should open it readily,
Round by St. Helens and under the hill.

"The Spit and the Nab are the gates of the promise,
Their mothers to them—and to us it's our wives.
I've sailed forty years, and—By God it's upon us!
Down royals, Down top'sles, down, down, for your lives!"

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By Arthur Conan Doyle

Ides of March

Of glory be you fearful, O my Soul.
And if you are unable to defeat
your ambitions, then hesitantly, guardedly
pursue them. And the further you proceed,
the more searching, the more attentive must you be.

And when at last you reach your apogee—a Caesar;
and cut the figure of one who’s much renowned,
then take heed more than ever as you go out on the street,
a man of power, conspicuous with your retinue,
when someone approaches you out of the crowd,
a certain Artemidorus, bringing a letter,
and hurriedly says “Read this right away,
it’s something important that concerns you,”
don’t fail to stop; don’t fail to put off
all talk and business; don’t fail to
brush off all and sundry who salute and fawn
(you can see them later); let even
the Senate wait, and find out at once
the weighty contents of Artemidorus’s letter.

by Constantine Cavafy
translated from the Greek by Daniel Mendelsohn
published in C.P. Cavafy: Complete Poems, Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012

Translator's note concerning the poem:
Ides of March
Julius Caesar was assassinated on the Ides (the 15th) of March in 44 B.C. As Caesar made his way that morning to the Senate, where he hoped to hear himself declared king of Rome, a Greek scholar called Artemidorus tried to place a letter into his hand warning him of the plot to kill him, but was rebuffed. This poem, like “Theodotus,” uses Caesar’s career as a vehicle for pondering the vagaries of fortune.