Monday, August 27, 2012

Why Shackleton's Stories are Being Retold in Book and Film

We are all wondering the same things
in this darkened room, the ship not enduring
after all, the men enduring despite:
How do the trials of our lives compare?

What would Shackleton have done
when the baby didn't stop crying. What
would he have done if his credit cards
were all denied or his girlfriend
slept with his brother or if he was downsized?

And would we have survived, too, if
given a chance? Kept peace and sanity
and most of our toes? Kept hope
when cell phone, wristwatch, and film advance failed and
borealis was the only electric thing within range?

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by Elizabeth Bradfield, 2010

Monday, August 20, 2012

Sea Grasses

They feed no flocks. Bread
flailed from their meagre kernels
would starve out even an anchorite
if any tried
to force these idle flats to a spiritual purpose.
At Stonington, at Seabright,
they stand, not waiting,
only swaying a little in the wind,
as though to be a fact
among other facts -
to reflect their one particular
shade of pale yellowish green,
along with clouds and whatever occasional bird
happens to fly over,
into a transient pool
that the tide will shortly come back for -
in some sense, if not ours, should be enough.

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by Katha Pollitt, 1981

Monday, August 13, 2012

from "Street Songs"

                       VI

             THE GLAZIER

The pure sun - throwing off
Too much brightness to measure -
Dazzled, contrives to doff
Its shirt on the back of the glazier.



                     VIII

THE OLD-CLOTHES WOMAN

The piercing eye with which you see
What they contain essentially
Separates my rags from me
And naked I go as a deity.



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by Stephane Mallarme, 1889

Monday, August 6, 2012

A Map of the Western Part of the County of Essex in England

Something forgotten for twenty years: though my fathers
and mothers came from Cordova and Vitepsk and Caernavon,
and though I am a citizen of the United States and less a
stranger here than anywhere else, perhaps,
I am Essex-born;
Cranbrook Wash called me into its dark tunnel,
the little streams of Valentines heard my resolves,
Roding held my head above water when I thought it was
drowning me; in Hainault only a haze of thin trees
stood between the red doubledecker buses and the boar-hunt,
the spirit of merciful Phillipa glimmered there.
Pergo Park knew me, and Clavering, and Havering-atte-Bower,
Stanford Rivers lost me in osier beds, Stapleford Abbots
sent me safe home on the dark road after Simeon-quiet evensong,
Wainstead drew me over and over into its basic poetry,
in its serpentine lake I saw bass-viols among the golden dead leaves,
through its trees the ghost of a great house. In
Ilford Road I saw the multitudes passing pale under the
light of flaring sundown, seven kings
in somber starry robes gathered at Seven Kings
the place of law
where my birth and marriage are recorded
and the death of my father. Woodford Wells
where an old house was called The Naked Beauty (a white
statue forlorn in its garden)
saw the meeting and parting of two sisters,
(forgotten? and further away
the hill before Thaxted? where peace befell us? not once
but many times?).
All the Ivans dreaming of their villages
all the Marias dreaming of their walled cities,
picking up fragments of New World slowly,
not knowing how to put them together nor how to join
image with image, now I know how it was with you, an old map
made long before I was born shows ancient
rights of way where I walked when I was ten burning with desire
for the world's great splendors, a child who traced voyages
indelibly all over the atlas, who now in a far country
remembers the first river, the first
field, bricks and lumber dumped in it ready for building,
that new smell, and remembers
the walls of the garden, the first light.

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by Denise Levertov, 1986