"Autobiographies of great nations are written in three manuscripts – a book of deeds, a book of words, and a book of art. Of the three, I would choose the latter as truest testimony." - Sir Kenneth Smith, Great Civilisations

"I must write each day without fail, not so much for the success of the work, as in order not to get out of my routine." - Leo Tolstoy

I have never believed that one should wait until one is inspired because I think the pleasures of not writing are so great that if you ever start indulging them you will never write again. - John Updike

"The life of every man is a diary in which he means to write one story, and writes another; and his humblest hour is when he compares the volume as it is with what he vowed to make it." - J.M. Barrie, Peter Pan

Poetry is the shadow cast by our streetlight imaginations." - Lawrence Ferlinghetti


[Note - If any article requires updating or correction please notate this in the comment section. Thank you. - res]


Friday, April 13, 2012

R.E. Slater - School Days (a poem)


Patterson Reunion, Kent County, Michigan, c.1950's. [Photo: R.E. Slater]




School Days
by R.E. Slater


“Walking, I am listening to a deeper way.
Suddenly, all my ancestors are behind me.
Be still, they say. Watch and listen.
You are the result of the love of thousands.”

- Linda Hogan (b.1947),
North American writer


1 Back in my day (somewhere in those middle school years),
2 I greased my long blonde hair thick with Vaseline Oil,
3 finely combing it, this way or that, in dark, straight lines,
4 laying it flat around my head – not like I do now,
5 using a rough hair brush and giving it a quick “one-two!” –
6 but with a fine-toothed comb like dad’s (we had several),
7 just like how mom had taught me when I was young,
8 coo'ing in my ear her love and hopes and dreams, making
9 me beautiful (as only she could do) in her own special way.

10 When finished shaving I'd splash hot aftershave lotion on my face,
11 (using the one named Old Spice with the sailing boats on it),
12 just like dad did when I watched him in the early waking mornings,
13 as we  jostled each other for the mirror within our small bathroom –
14 him, hurrying to get ready for work (he had too many jobs I thought),
15 and me, getting ready for school, in morning's black dark; he’d have
16 hot, black coffee perking by the time my brother and I started
17 a breakfast of sunnyside eggs (or scrambled), toast and hot cereal,
18 as we stuffed paper sacks full (we we’re grown now and didn't use
19 tin lunchbuckets holding a fragile glass thermos of hot soup within).
20 Then stand in the living room watching for the school bus, but
21 briefly glimpsed below our hill from a large picture window that
22 looked down upon a five-lane thoroughfare invading our farms,
23 listening for the bus’ old screechy brakes – then quickly hurry out –
24 racing, slipping, sliding, down the driveway’s black tarred hill,
25 hoping it waited for us as we ran, but if it didn’t, well, no matter,
26 we’d catch it on t’other side – crossing all five sleepy lanes under
27 mom’s worried eye as the bus laboriously turned around, returning
28 to the school district it just had left (we had no close neighbors).

29 To our secret delight dad drove the school bus when we were younger,
30 he was business-like, watching in all directions, while we stepped up
31 into the cold dark of the empty bus listening to the blowing heaters
32 vainly trying to warm its cavernous chamber; later, dad was promoted
33 to day shift, and drove the city police car we rode in (when not on call),
34 or rode with him on parade days leading out the volunteer columns;
35 and when allowed, we’d ride the red fire trucks dad drove, then cleaned,
36 coming home, worn and tired from all-night fires, winter or summer,
37 to plow or disc early morning fields, tilling spring grains into dry soils
38 for grandpa next door - too old to farm and proud of his warrior son.

39 Climbing up, I lugged my saxophone band case - and my brother,
40 his trombone case - each of us placing our large instruments upright
41 into the hard, green plastic seats like an old friend seated beside us,
42 doing our homework, slouched, bouncing along, for the next hour
43 (the new school district was a long ways off for us country kids),
44 picking up odd-looking kids I maybe would talk to, or ignore,
45 (if she was pretty!) wishing I knew how to talk to pretty girls
46 and be cool, in my aftershave lotion and finely combed hair,
47 dressed-up for school, still adjusting to my new surroundings.

48 By now morning light had come as we entered the school campus,
49 revealing old-and-new buses dutifully lining-up behind each other,
50 disgorging acne-faced kids racing in excited - or shuffling out, bored
51 and disinterested under small talk and sighs - crowding into narrow
52 hallways alive with the echoes of steel lockers banging shut; there
53 saying “hi” to new friends racing to class (buses were always late),
54 and answering “Here!” to untested teachers taking daily attendance;
55 then methodically writing down spelling words on Friday’s pop quiz,
56 held in first hour English under the bright glare of buzzing lights,
57 making all nights day and each day the same in their echoing nights.

58 Lighting days once wet and young set amidst dewy pastures cloved,
59 glistening at the waking dawn hung upon rusted barbed wire strands,
60 grasped by a child's willing hands to climb its swaying, rotted fences,
61 or squeeze along lifted lines past the studied gazes of pastured bulls,
62 harem’d in the foggy mists of fallowing fields holding but lonely paths,
63 twining through the empty hollows and thorny brush soaking my
64 trouser legs and canvas'd tops of worn Red Ball Jets; ever watching
65 great, great grandpa's one-roomed country school looming ahead,
66 feeling the dull weight of a lunch bucket in my hand embracing 
67 youth and sky, sun and field, wind or rain; incarnate fellowships
68 to each succeeding day bourne of life and love, pain and unknowing.

69 Remembering the many lives of ancient lifetimes lived long ago,
70 of grandparents and grandcousins, great uncles and great aunts,
71 speak as living legends of forgotten stories unbound in modern books,
72 too little to understand an old inheritance’s ancient past dimming, then
73 lost, gravestone by gravestone, death by death, breathing last airs, till
74 none were left, and all was gone, and none could tell what once was heard,
75 in the warming springs of risen dawns, or on red harvest moons hung
76 roundish and wise in dusky sublimity over chilled and frosted hillsides,
77 silently spelling winter’s coming pall upon all browning fields left dying;
78 felt in sunset’s autumn glow and plow, fall hunt and reap; each breathing
79 distant lores of muscular shadows held on a school day’s start, enfolding
80 like liquid flowing membranes over dis-separate journeys melding close.

81 Enfolding being and becoming, entangling each day onto the next,
82 melding each life like the falling rain into the pores of open souls,
83 blending, slaking, thirsty for the dry grounds of our empty being,
84 singularly outpoured, soaking in every experience, and all tales of
85 uncharted days indetermined, roaming everywhere and nowhere,
86 bending backwards, forwards, forthwards, sidewards, timewards,
87 knowing no past but having every past, no future but every future,
88 each determining the other binding all present presents as one,
89 incarnate fellowships to time and being, to immemorable memory
90 of life lived inscrutably on the edges of what was once and now is.

        

R.E. Slater
April 13, 2012 (Friday the 13th)
revised May 7 (Erica’s BD); Oct 13, 2012;
July 13, 2014; Dec 11, 2017


@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved



"Upon a starry heavens, silent the stars pass by and I with them..."   -R.E. Slater




My daughter and her friends, Lake Michigan Shoreline | Photo by R.E. Slater



Friday, April 6, 2012

Easter Poems and Poetry by Famous Poets



Easter Morning by A. R. Ammons

Easter Zunday by Ingeborg Bachmann

The Easter Flower by Claude McKay

Easter Week by Charles Kingsley

Easter Morning by Amy Clampitt

Easter Hymn by Alec Derwent Hope

Easter by Katharine Tynan

An Eastern Ballad by Allen Ginsberg

Easter, 1916 by William Butler Yeats

Easter Day by Oscar Wilde

Easter by Edmund Spenser

Easter Wings by George Herbert

Easter Song by George Herbert

Easter by George Herbert


Easter Communion by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Eastern River by Peter Huchel

Easter Week by Joyce Kilmer

Easter by Joyce Kilmer

Easter Zunday by William Barnes



Seamus Heaney - Glanmore Sonnets

Glanmore Sonnets
By Seamus Heaney b. 1939

For Ann Saddlemyer,
our heartiest welcomer




I

Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.
Now the good life could be to cross a field
And art a paradigm of earth new from the lathe
Of ploughs. My lea is deeply tilled.
Old ploughsocks gorge the subsoil of each sense
And I am quickened with a redolence
Of farmland as a dark unblown rose.
Wait then...Breasting the mist, in sowers’ aprons,
My ghosts come striding into their spring stations.
The dream grain whirls like freakish Easter snows.


II

Sensings, mountings from the hiding places,
Words entering almost the sense of touch
Ferreting themselves out of their dark hutch—
‘These things are not secrets but mysteries,’
Oisin Kelly told me years ago
In Belfast, hankering after stone
That connived with the chisel, as if the grain
Remembered what the mallet tapped to know.
Then I landed in the hedge-school of Glanmore
And from the backs of ditches hoped to raise
A voice caught back off slug-horn and slow chanter
That might continue, hold, dispel, appease:
Vowels ploughed into other, opened ground,
Each verse returning like the plough turned round.


III

This evening the cuckoo and the corncrake
(So much, too much) consorted at twilight.
It was all crepuscular and iambic.
Out on the field a baby rabbit
Took his bearings, and I knew the deer
(I’ve seen them too from the window of the house,
Like connoisseurs, inquisitive of air)
Were careful under larch and May-green spruce.
I had said earlier, ‘I won’t relapse
From this strange loneliness I’ve brought us to.
Dorothy and William—’ She interrupts:
‘You’re not going to compare us two...?’
Outside a rustling and twig-combing breeze
Refreshes and relents. Is cadences.


IV

I used to lie with an ear to the line
For that way, they said, there should come a sound
Escaping ahead, an iron tune
Of flange and piston pitched along the ground,
But I never heard that. Always, instead,
Struck couplings and shuntings two miles away
Lifted over the woods. The head
Of a horse swirled back from a gate, a grey
Turnover of haunch and mane, and I’d look
Up to the cutting where she’d soon appear.
Two fields back, in the house, small ripples shook
Silently across our drinking water
(As they are shaking now across my heart)
And vanished into where they seemed to start.


V

Soft corrugations in the boortree’s trunk,
Its green young shoots, its rods like freckled solder:
It was our bower as children, a greenish, dank
And snapping memory as I get older.
And elderberry I have learned to call it.
I love its blooms like saucers brimmed with meal,
Its berries a swart caviar of shot,
A buoyant spawn, a light bruised out of purple.
Elderberry? It is shires dreaming wine.
Boortree is bower tree, where I played ‘touching tongues’
And felt another’s texture quick on mine.
So, etymologist of roots and graftings,
I fall back to my tree-house and would crouch
Where small buds shoot and flourish in the hush.


VI

He lived there in the unsayable lights.
He saw the fuchsia in a drizzling noon,
The elderflower at dusk like a risen moon
And green fields greying on the windswept heights.
‘I will break through,’ he said, ‘what I glazed over
With perfect mist and peaceful absences’—
Sudden and sure as the man who dared the ice
And raced his bike across the Moyola River.
A man we never saw. But in that winter
Of nineteen forty-seven, when the snow
Kept the country bright as a studio,
In a cold where things might crystallize or founder, 
His story quickened us, a wild white goose
Heard after dark above the drifted house.


VII

Dogger, Rockall, Malin, Irish Sea:
Green, swift upsurges, North Atlantic flux
Conjured by that strong gale-warning voice,
Collapse into a sibilant penumbra.
Midnight and closedown. Sirens of the tundra,
Of eel-road, seal-road, keel-road, whale-road, raise
Their wind-compounded keen behind the baize
And drive the trawlers to the lee of Wicklow.
L’Etoile, Le Guillemot, La Belle Hélène
Nursed their bright names this morning in the bay
That toiled like mortar. It was marvellous
And actual, I said out loud, ‘A haven,’
The word deepening, clearing, like the sky
Elsewhere on Minches, Cromarty, The Faroes.


VIII

Thunderlight on the split logs: big raindrops
At body heat and lush with omen
Spattering dark on the hatchet iron.
This morning when a magpie with jerky steps
Inspected a horse asleep beside the wood
I thought of dew on armour and carrion.
What would I meet, blood-boltered, on the road?
How deep into the woodpile sat the toad?
What welters through this dark hush on the crops?
Do you remember that pension in Les Landes
Where the old one rocked and rocked and rocked
A mongol in her lap, to little songs?
Come to me quick, I am upstairs shaking.
My all of you birchwood in lightning.


IX

Outside the kitchen window a black rat
Sways on the briar like infected fruit:
‘It looked me through, it stared me out, I’m not
Imagining things. Go you out to it.’
Did we come to the wilderness for this?
We have our burnished bay tree at the gate,
Classical, hung with the reek of silage
From the next farm, tart-leafed as inwit.
Blood on a pitchfork, blood on chaff and hay,
Rats speared in the sweat and dust of threshing—
What is my apology for poetry?
The empty briar is swishing
When I come down, and beyond, inside, your face
Haunts like a new moon glimpsed through tangled glass.


X

I dreamt we slept in a moss in Donegal
On turf banks under blankets, with our faces
Exposed all night in a wetting drizzle,
Pallid as the dripping sapling birches.
Lorenzo and Jessica in a cold climate.
Diarmuid and Grainne waiting to be found.
Darkly asperged and censed, we were laid out
Like breathing effigies on a raised ground.
And in that dream I dreamt—how like you this?—
Our first night years ago in that hotel
When you came with your deliberate kiss
To raise us towards the lovely and painful
Covenants of flesh; our separateness;
The respite in our dewy dreaming faces.




Seamus Heaney, “Glanmore Sonnets” from Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996. Copyright © 1998 by Seamus Heaney. Used by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC, www.fsgbooks.com. All rights reserved. Caution: Users are warned that this work is protected under copyright laws and downloading is strictly prohibited. The right to reproduce or transfer the work via any medium must be secured with Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

Source: Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996 (Farrar Straus and Giroux, 1998)

Wikipedia Bio - Seamus Heaney (/ˈʃməs ˈhni/; born 13 April 1939) is an Irish poet, playwright, translator, lecturer and recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature. Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, he now resides in Dublin. Robert Lowell called him "the most important Irish poet since Yeats" and many others, including the academic John Sutherland, have echoed the sentiment that he is "the greatest poet of our age". As well as the Nobel Prize in Literature, Heaney has received the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize (1968), the E. M. Forster Award (1975), the Golden Wreath of Poetry (2001), T. S. Eliot Prize (2006) and two Whitbread Prizes (1996 and 1999). He has been a member of Aosdána since its foundation and has been Saoi since 1997. He was both the Harvard and the Oxford Professor of Poetry and was made a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres in 1996. Heaney's personal papers are held by the National Library of Ireland.




Review 1 - by Kevin Curran:

Seamus Heaney's poetry has been my bedtime reading of late. If you get a moment, treat yourself to his Glanmore Sonnets. These poems are part of a collection (Field Work [1979]) generally seen as marking a turn in his career away from politics (see North [1975]) towards the life of the mind. Heaney ascribed the move to an inner call to "get back inside my own head." Yet if this is so, the Glanmore Sonnets are also lavishly invested in outward experience--in objects, materials, textures, sounds; in the sensual, and at times repulsive, interplay of animal, vegetable, and mineral life. They are poems which are above all alert, compulsively aware of the environments in which they were conceived.

Review 2 - The Sonnet Mirror: