poem

On the Commitment of a Poet, Eighteen Years Old
for Barbara

If we had known the depths of your quiet,
Or looked at eyes as often as at words,
We might have quelled the silent slow riot
Behind your eyes' cage full of fallen birds.
We did not hear the keen of crumpled wing,
That sudden low departure. Only you
Could see the Sparrows' last great try to cling
To air that was no longer clear nor blue.

And now you hold your song in muted stead,
In sterile room of tall blank walls of white,
Where no one comes or goes, but some are led.
You move as moved but sing in us at night.
We say your words, the razored edge is gone:
We say the words, we cannot sing the song.

© Bill Boydstun

texas poetry

dylan and griffith

poem from Peter Ludwin

The poem I found on the Internet and posted a few days ago was an early version of a now published poem:

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868
-Peter Ludwin

What really got us in the end--
we women who didn't make it,
who withered and blew away in the open--
was the wind. Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors, a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In our letters it shrieks hysteria from sod huts,
vomits women prematurely undone by loneliness,
boils up off the horizon to suck dry
their desire as it flattened the stubborn grasses.
Not convinced?? Scan the photographs,
grainy and sepia-toned, like old leather.
Study our bony forms in plain black dresses,
our mouths drawn tight as a saddle cinch,
accusation leaking from rudderless eyes, betrayed.

I tried. Lord knows I tried.
Survived the locusts and even snakes
that fell from the ceiling at night,
slithering between us in bed.
I dreamed of water, chiffon, the smell
of dead leaves banked against a rotting log.
I heard opera, carriage wheels on cobblestone.
Cried and beat my fists raw into those earthen walls.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Cheyenne,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,

not even a purpose one could name.

© Peter Ludwin

Notes From A Sodbuster's Wife, Kansas, 1868 is reprinted here with the permission of its author. The poem originally appeared in South Dakota Review and can be found in Peter's just published collection, A Guest in All Your Houses.

The book is available from Word Walker Press or, in a few weeks, from Amazon.

Peter Ludwin’s poems have appeared in numerous journals, most prominently The Antietam Review, Chaminade Literary Review, Coal City Review, Illya's Honey, Karumu, Hurricane Review, Lullwater Review, Midwest Quarterly, Permafrost, Raven Chronicles, Lake Effect, Small Pond Magazine of Literature, South Carolina Review, South Dakota Review and Whiskey Island Magazine.

my offering for St. Patrick's day

Brown Penny
-William Butler Yeats

I whispered, 'I am too young,'
And then, 'I am old enough';
Wherefore I threw a penny
To find out if I might love.
'Go and love, go and love, young man,
If the lady be young and fair.'
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
I am looped in the loops of her hair.

O love is the crooked thing,
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it,
For he would be thinking of love
Till the stars had run away
And the shadows eaten the moon.
Ah, penny, brown penny, brown penny,
One cannot begin it too soon.

Lucky Irishman that I am, I love my wife (and she-of-the-clover loves me).

Update: here's something found online at MEaning of WB YEats Brown penny

Yeats is one of the most important English language poets of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and yet he is not typical of the period. Most poets in the language were moving toward free verse, but Yeats took a very traditionalist view of how poetry ought to be learned. The tradition of the ancient Irish was that to be a bard, a singer of verse, one had first to master all of the verse forms known to bards, and go into the wild places, living from hand to mouth, exposed to elements, to truly feel nature and to compose from one's feelings.

Yeats grew up in a wildly beautiful part of the Island, in County Mayo, and rambled there and in County Sligo. At one time, as a young man, he did ramble about the countryside in all weather, composing verse aloud as he sat beneath the dripping bush.

Brown Penny is not the work of the young Yeats, however--he wrote it in middle age. But as he grew older, he wrote more austere, more sparse verse, and became even more dedicated to verse form and traditional rhyming. In that respect, he moved farther from the poets of his generation.

Brown Penny is about love, and the welter of emotions which it engenders in the young man's heart. Joy, dismay, fear, wonder, doubt--and he has woven all of those into this brief poem. The old penny of the United Kingdom was a large brown coin, and had symbolic meaning to the common folk. One of those meanings was love, that love was something priceless, to which no mere material value could be attached. Although not understood today, that symbolism survives in the expression "a penny for your thoughts," which originally was used to indicate to the person spoken to that deep emotion motivated the question.

Brown Penny should be viewed as a song more than a poem, and a whirling dance of a song at that. Imagine the poet so immersed in his love and the conflicting emotional responses to which it gives rise, whirling in a dance, a reel, in which he is "looped" in the hair of his lover, both literally and fiburatively, and wrapped ever more securely in the emotions which have gripped him. If you can, sing the poem to yourself, and think of the twirling Irish dance known as the reel. It is quite a marvelous work of poetry, and very much in the ancient Irish spirit of acheiving freedom within the bounds of form.

That seems pretty much to the point.

mining for gold

A poem found on the Internet, a poem written by a former army buddy, room-mate, friend, and confidant:

GREAT PLAINS, A FRAME OF REFERENCE

What really got them in the end—
those women who didn’t make it,
who withered and blew away
in the open—was the wind.
Space, yes, and distance,
too, from neighbors,
a piano back in Boston.

But above all, the wind.

In pained letters
you hear it
shriek hysteria from sod huts,
unutterable loneliness that boiled
up off the horizon
and sucked dry their desire
as it flattened the stubborn grasses.

You turn then to photographs
that confirm
the contents of the letters:
bony wives in plain black dresses,
prematurely undone, adrift,
betrayal like accusation
leaking from rudderless eyes.

The wind. Even as it scoured
the skin it flayed the soul,
that raked, pitted shell.
And how like the Indians,
appearing, disappearing,
no fixed location,
not event a purpose one could name.

The Cheyenne, at home
with the wind from birth,
had no pianos.

© 2005 Peter Ludwin

The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

a recommendation . . .

Iddybud Journal.

A Feature Documentary by Simon El Habre

Semaan is a farmer leading a quiet life, in the small village of Aïn El Halazoun, in the Lebanese mountains. He wakes up at the crack of dawn, tends to his cows and other animals and prepares the produce he will sell at the market

During the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), Aïn el Halazoun was completely destroyed and eventually deserted. Its original inhabitants, all from the El Habre family, regularly go back to the village to visit their houses and cultivate their plots of land, but they always leave before sunset.

By observing life in a quasi ghost village, the film reflects upon collective and individual memory, in a country whose inhabitants seem unwilling to learn from their past, even while on the brink of a new civil war.