Reading Heaney's "Nerthus"

for S. Ben-Tov

Afternoon sun of Ohio's August
daubs the classroom with early rust.

Eight of us bristle, apprenticed
to nail the world to its sentence.

Poet's poet, our teacher hands us
a copy each of Heaney's 'Nerthus'.

A chill creeps in me as she reads.
From Heaney-soil, that concrete dark,

an unseen ash-fork staked in bog:
my first portents of winter north.

*

We have all heard the name
but not Heaney's Great Chain of Verbs.

We stall. And do not fathom
the quiet mesh of kesh and loaning

that lull and push of middle-voice
that verb say

the long-grained never static
of the poem's non-finite aesthetic
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© 2005, Rustum Kozain
From: This Carting Life
Publisher: Kwela/Snailpress, Cape Town, 2005
ISBN: 9780795701986
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Rustum Kozain

(Photo by Blackboy Photography)

Mr. Jackson

Silences fill the air. The silence
of a jobless face. That of wings
as a bird flies off with a darner
in its beak, and in the mind's eye
the darner flees. Things that are silent
require colour, to feel and be seen
again; the sound an artist sees
with her hands. On this tarred road
that feeds the city of Gary, Indiana,
only burnt out cars remain from the riot
and freedoms (we were fighting for),
a silence that holds the street,
with an afro and the white teeth of dissidence
or innocence, depending from which side
you look. A woman hurries home
with the colours of a hoopoe in a bag. Red
and dark-green stalks sticking in the heat.
Sacks of potatoes and carrots at our feet.
We dance, never knowing what it is they seek
who, every time we gather, come
to disperse us, the grand silence
being, of course, the first time any
body was able to walk backwards.
----------

Happy birthday, Michael Jackson!

Michael Jackson

Stone

Go inside a stone
That would be my way.
Let somebody else become a dove
Or gnash with a tiger’s tooth.
I am happy to be a stone.

From the outside the stone is a riddle:
No one knows how to answer it.
Yet within, it must be cool and quiet
Even though a cow steps on it full weight,
Even though a child throws it in a river;
The stone sinks, slow, unperturbed
To the river bottom
Where the fishes come to knock on it
And listen.

I have seen sparks fly out
When two stones are rubbed,
So perhaps it is not dark inside after all;
Perhaps there is a moon shining
From somewhere, as though behind a hill—
Just enough light to make out
The strange writings, the star-charts
On the inner walls.
~Charles Simic

1. Amazon page: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Charles-Simic/e/B000AQ6PE4
2. Wikipedia page: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Simic
3. Poetry Foundation page: http://tinyurl.com/o9cmxlg
4. Poetry dot org page: http://www.poets.org/poet.php/prmPID/27
5. New and Selected Poems: http://tinyurl.com/ns3v9zo

Charles Simic

High Horses

Way up there, so high and well fed
they seem to be gods
or at least ridden by gods,
the high horses walk—so well bred

little disturbs them. Sedately,
they show off their steps,
canter right, canter left ... perhaps
a brief trot, the perfect lifting of one knee

after another, and then
that exquisite gallop, that arrogance
of the totally convinced,
that disdain.... Then down

off the high horses
come their riders at last,
little men of the past,
clad in bright silken colors.

Dick Allen
Present Vanishing
Sarabande Books

Copyright ©2008 by Dick Allen
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

Dick Allen

Woman

she wanted to be a blade
of grass amid the fields
but he wouldn't agree
to be the dandelion

she wanted to be a robin singing
through the leaves
but he refused to be
her tree

she spun herself into a web
and looking for a place to rest
turned to him
but he stood straight
declining to be her corner

she tried to be a book
but he wouldn't read

she turned herself into a bulb
but he wouldn't let her grow

she decided to become
a woman
and though he still refused
to be a man
she decided it was all
right
© Nikki Giovanni

Link to this poem:

<a href="http://poefrika.blogspot.com/2007/03/woman-by-nikki-giovanni.html">Woman</a>

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Technorati Tags: nikki giovanni, woman, american poetry, black poetry

Nikki Giovanni books at Amazon

More about this poem and/or the poet:

1. iTunes (poems by Nikki Giovanni)
2. The Poetry Foundation page
3. Ohioana Authors
4. NPR
5. Daily Kos

Nikki Giovanni

Along the Path

Daffodils, the native and the not,
sway in tune with your name;

narcissus psuedonarcissus,
the sign says;

you resist the urging
to reach down beside the trail;

their petals know you,
and that is enough.
© Phil Rice

Phil Rice

Roses and Revolutions

Musing on roses and revolutions,
I saw night close down on the earth like a great dark wing,
and the lighted cities were like tapers in the night,
and I heard the lamentations of a million hearts
regretting life and crying for the grave,
and I saw the Negro lying in the swamp with his face blown off,
and in the northern cities with his manhood maligned and felt the writhing
of his viscera like that of the hare hunted down or the bear at bay,
and I saw men working and taking no joy in their work
and embracing the hard-eyed whore with joyless excitement
and lying with wives and virgins in impotence.

And as I groped in darkness
and felt the pain of millions,
gradually, like day driving night across the continent,
I saw dawn upon them like the sun a vision
of a time when all men walk proudly through the earth
and the bombs and missiles lie at the bottom of the ocean
like the bones of dinosaurs buried under the shale of eras,
and men strive with each other not for power or the accumulation of paper
but in joy create for others the house, the poem, the game of athletic beauty.

Then washed in the brightness of this vision,
I saw how in its radiance would grow and be nourished and suddenly
burst into terrible and splendid bloom
the blood-red flower of revolution.
© Dudley Randall
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Other poems on this blog by Dudley Randall:
1. http://tinyurl.com/qahzlae
2. http://tinyurl.com/894skc5

Dudley Randall