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

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

Dream Song 123: Daples my floor the eastern sun, my house faces north by John Berryman

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 (/ˈʃeɪməs ˈhiːni/; 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.

Bio 1 - Seamus Heaney: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/seamus-heaney

Bio 2 - Seamus Heaney: http://www.gale.cengage.com/free_resources/poets/bio/heaney_s.htm

Review 1 - by Kevin Curran:

http://shakespearessonnets.posterous.com/glanmore-sonnets

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:

http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307/25484733?uid=2129&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=56001508983

R.E. Slater - A Prayer (a poem)

Meet me along the primrose'd paths...

A Prayer
by R.E. Slater


Meet me along the primrose'd paths
And there abide till days long passed
Be Thou my heart and will's own muse
Forgiven amongst the morning dews.

Stay'd by prayer tho' dark night enclose
Entwine'd by grace we together arose
O'er misty lands of earthy delights
Or outer isles of nethering dawns.

Where ’ere is sung Thy abiding love
Bowed grave upon thorny hillock brakes -
“O Lord, Thou art our need and thrall”
“In giving Thyself hast Thou given all.”

May we do no less each Paschal day
Giving all to Thee our help and stay.


- R.E. Slater
March 28, 2012

@copyright R.E. Slater Publications
all rights reserved

The Poetry of Passion, Hope, and Renewal (Jonathan and Charlotte / Choi Sung Bong)

Jonathan and Charlotte
First Audition


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcQwYps_tVc

The Prayer

I pray you’ll be our eyes
And watch us where we go
And help us to be wise
In times when we don’t know

Let this be our prayer
As we go our way
Lead us to a place
Guide us with your grace
To a place where we’ll be safe
La luce che to dai

I pray we’ll find your light
Nel cuore restero
And hold it in our hearts
A ricordarchi che
When stars go out each night
L’eterna stella sei
Nella mia preghiera
Let this be our prayer
Quanta fede c’e
When shadows fill our day
Lead us to a place
Guide us with your grace

Give us faith so we’ll be safe.
Sognamo un mondo senza piu violenza

Un mondo di giustizia e di speranza
Ognuno dia la mano al suo vicino
Simbolo di pace e di fraternita

La forza che ci dai
We ask that life be kind
E’il desiderio che
And watch us from above
Ognuno trovi amore
We hope each soul will find
Intorno e dentro a se
Another soul to love

Let this be our prayer
Let this be our prayer
Just like every child
Just like every child

Needs to find a place,
Guide us with your grace
Give us faith so we’ll be safe
E la fede che
Hai acceso in noi
Sento che ci salvera

Jonathan and Charlotte Semi Final [hd]

Britain's got talent 2012




Jonathan and Charlotte - [hd] Full Final
Britain's got talent 2012




J&C Official Website - 

http://www.jonathancharlotte.com/


Wikipedia Biography -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonathan_and_Charlotte


Mirror Update -
http://www.mirror.co.uk/tv/tv-news/britains-talent-tenor-jonathan-reveals-3126796


Jonathan's Acute Depression -
http://www.whatsontv.co.uk/britains-got-talent/news/jonathan-charlotte-withdraw-from-royal-concert-because-of-acute-depression


* * * * * * * * *


Homeless Boy Steals The Talent Show
First Audition

Korea's Got Talent - Choi Sung Bong
Semi-Final

Korea's Got Talent - Choi Sung Bong

Third and Final Round

Wikipedia Biography -

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Choi_Sung-bong


Artist Update -
http://iamkoream.com/september-issue-opera-singer-choi-sung-bong-more-than-korean-susan-boyle/


* * * * * * * * *


Related to background music in video above
Music by Composer  Ennio Morricone: The Mission [film]

The Mission: Love, Penance, Forgiveness, Restoration
http://relevancy22.blogspot.com/2011/10/mission-love-penance-forgiveness.html

C.S. Lewis - A Grief Observed Quotes

Wikipedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Grief_Observed

A Grief Observed is a collection of C. S. Lewis's reflections on the experience of bereavement following the death of his wife, Joy Gresham, in 1960. The book was first published in 1961 under the pseudonym N.W. Clerk as Lewis wished to avoid identification as the author. Though republished in 1963 after his death under his own name, the text still refers to his wife as “H” (her first name, which she rarely used, was Helen).^[1]

The book is compiled from the four notebooks which Lewis used to vent and explore his grief. He illustrates the everyday trials of his life without Joy and explores fundamental questions of faith and theodicy. Lewis’s step-son (Joy’s son) Douglas Gresham points out in his 1994 introduction that the indefinite article 'a' in the title makes it clear that Lewis's grief is not the quintessential grief experience at the loss of a loved one, but one individual's perspective among countless others. The book helped inspire a 1985 television movie Shadowlands, as well as a 1993 film of the same name.

Excerpts from A Grief Observed

by C.S. Lewis

note: H. referred to Lewis' wife, "Helen Joy Davidman"

I

At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want the others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.
*
There are moments, most unexpectedly, when something inside me tries to assure me that I don't really mind so much, not so very much, after all. Love is not the whole of a man's life. I was happy before I ever met H. I've plenty of what are called "resources." People get over these things. Come, I shan't do so badly. One is ashamed to listen to this voice but it seems for a little to be making out a good case. Then comes a sudden job of red-hot memory and all this "commonsense" vanishes like an ant in the mouth of a furnace.
*
Meanwhile, where is God? This is one of the most disquieting symptoms. When you are happy, so happy that you have no sense of needing Him, so happy that you are tempted to feel His claims upon you as an interruption, if you remember yourself and turn to Him with gratitude and praise, you will be--or so it feels--welcomed with open arms. But go to Him when your need is desperate, when all other help is vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face, and a sound of bolting and double bolting on the inside. After that, silence. You may as well turn away. The longer you wait, the more emphatic the silence will become.
*
I once read the sentence "I lay awake all night with toothache, thinking about toothache and about lying awake." That's true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery's shadow or reflection: the fact that you don't merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.
*

II

Oh God, God, why did you take such trouble to force this creature out of its shell if it is now doomed to crawl back--to be sucked back--into it?
*
You never know how much you really believe anything until its truth or falsehood becomes a matter of life and death to you.
*
Talk to me about the truth of religion and I'll listen gladly. Talk to me about the duty of religion and I'll listen submissively. But don't come talking to me about the consolations of religion or I shall suspect that you don't understand.
*
You could say we are fallen and depraved. We are so depraved that our ideas of goodness count for nothing; or worse than nothing--the very fact that we think something good is presumptive evidence that it is really bad. Now God has in fact--our worse fears are true--all the characteristics we regard as bad: unreasonableness, vanity, vindictiveness, injustice, cruelty. But all these blacks (as they seem to us) are really whites. It's only our depravity makes them look black to us.
*
And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.
*

III

You can't see anything properly while your eyes are blurred with tears. you can't, in most things, get what you want if you want it too desperately: anyway, you can't get the best out of it.
*
The time when there is nothing at all in your soul except a cry for help may be just the time when God can't give it: you are like the drowning man who can't be helped because he clutches and grabs. Perhaps your own reiterated cries deafen you to the voice you hoped to hear.
*
On the other hand, "Knock and it shall be opened." But does knocking mean hammering and kicking the door like a maniac? And there's also "To him that hath shall be given." After all, you must have a capacity to receive, or even omnipotence can't give. Perhaps your own passion temporarily destroys the capacity.
*

IV

Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.
*
Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.
*
I ought to have said [about H.] "But also like a garden. Like a nest of gardens, wall within wall, hedge within hedge, more secret, more full of fragrant and fertile life, the further you entered."
*
My idea of God is not a divine idea. It has to be shattered time after time.
*
Not my idea of God, but God. Not my idea of H., but H. Yes, and also not my idea of my neighbor, but my neighbor. For don't we often make this mistake as regards people who are still alive--who are with us in the same room? Talking and acting not to the man himself but to the picture--almost the precis--we've made of Him in our own minds? And he has to depart from it pretty widely before we even notice the fact. In real life--that's one way it differs from novels--his words and acts are, if we observe closely, hardly ever quite "in character," that is in what we call his character. There's always a card in his hand we didn't know about.
*
But then of course I know perfectly well that He can't be used as a road. If you're approaching Him not as the goal but as a road, not as the end but as a means, you're not really approaching Him at all.
*
When I lay these questions before God I get no answer. But a rather special sort of "No answer." It is not the locked door. It is more like a silent, certainly not uncompassionate, gaze. As though He shook His head not in refusal but waiving the question. Like, "Peace, child; you don't understand."
*
Can a mortal ask questions which God finds unanswerable? Quite easily, I should think. All nonsense questions are unanswerable.
*
For this is one of the miracles of love; it gives--to both, but perhaps especially to the woman--a power of seeing through its own enchantments and yet not being disenchanted.
*
Sometimes, Lord, one is tempted to say that if you wanted us to behave like the lilies of the field you might have given us an organization more like theirs. But that, I suppose, is just your grand experiment. Or no; not an experiment, for you have no need to find things out. Rather your grand enterprise. To make an organism which is also a spirit; to make that terrible oxymoron, a "spiritual animal." To take a poor primate, a beast with nerve-ending all over it, a creature with a stomach that wants to be filled, a breeding animal that wants its mate, and say, "Now get on with it. Become a god."

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

Related Poetry

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

A poem by Petrina Barson

from her book "Now We Are Four"

The Facts of Life

1

In the early days
I felt I wore you
like some logo
on my face.
Amazed only
when the woman at the eggs
could not read your absence
from the creases and
undulations there.
My traitor face -
bland as an egg carton -
did not scream at her.
I wanted to tell her -
standing there reading labels -
of all the things
I was discovering
that I had lost -
each moment cracking open
to find you gone:
only four places at the table;
only three pink sugared biscuits
left in the fridge (you helped
to roll them before boredom
eased you back to Lara
jumping on the sofa);
only two children
in the rear vision mirror;
only one direction
that this blessed life drags us -
heels banging on the road.

2
It's half your little life
since I helped you onto the see-saw
and we tipped laughter
into each others' faces.
Two birthdays gone:
imagination
some failed artist
totally lacking the repertoire
to sketch you at five.
And memory no better:
a three-toothed old lady
driving her trolley full of papers
into the wind.
For you are fading:
this precious pain
that is my ice bridge to you
melting in the grimy flow
of circumstance.
Now I bump into it -
one fact among others -
as the river pulls me
to its own end
gaily ignorant of rocks
and plates of ice
hurling me down rapids -
a bony glissando -
then rolling me over
and showing me
(the bright sky).

John McCrae - In Flanders Fields

John McCrae, May 1915



In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep, though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery.

Inspiration for ‘In Flanders Fields’

by John McCrae

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields-inspiration.htm

During the early days of the Second Battle of Ypres a young Canadian artillery officer, Lieutenant Alexis Helmer, was killed on 2^nd May, 1915 in the gun positions near Ypres. An exploding German artillery shell landed near him. He was serving in the same Canadian artillery unit as a friend of his, the Canadian military doctor and artillery commander Major John McCrae.

As the brigade doctor, John McCrae was asked to conduct the burial service for Alexis because the chaplain had been called away somewhere else on duty that evening. It is believed that later that evening, after the burial, John began the draft for his now famous poem “In Flanders Fields”.

It is thought that doctor John McCrae (30th November 1872 — 28th January 1918) began the draft for his famous poem ‘In Flanders Fields’ on the evening of the 2nd May, 1915 in the second week of fighting during the Second Battle of Ypres.

• One account says that he was seen writing the poem sitting on the rearstep of an ambulance the next day while looking at Helmer's grave and the vivid red poppies that were springing up amongst the graves in the burial ground.

• Another account says that McCrae was so upset after Helmer's burial that he wrote the poem in twenty minutes in an attempt to compose himself.
• A third account by his commanding officer, Lieutenant Colonel Morrison, states that John told him he drafted the poem partly to pass the time between the arrival of two groups of wounded at the first aid post and partly to experiment with different variations of the poem's metre.

John McCrae, was serving as a Major and a military doctor and was second in command of the 1st Brigade Canadian Field Artillery. The field guns of his brigade’s batteries were in position on the west bank of the Ypres-Yser canal, about two kilometres to the north of Ypres. The brigade had arrived there in the early hours of 23^rd April.

For More Information

On John McCrae -

http://www.greatwar.co.uk/poems/john-mccrae-in-flanders-fields-inspiration.htm

Wikipedia -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Flanders_Fields

On World War I -

The GreatWar of 1914-1918

Major John McCrae, second in command of the
1st Brigade  Canadian Field Artillery during the
Second Battle  of Ypres in April and May 1915.

Courtesy of Bee MacGuire
Obtained From TheMcCrae Museum of The Guelph Museum

In Flanders Fields

Made for the folks who serve and served

In Flanders Field

Paschendale: The Great War

W.H. Auden - Night Mail

W.H. Auden, 1907-1973

45661 Vernon in an early British Railways livery (photo by T. Lewis, courtesy of Mark A. Hoofe)

This is the Night Mail crossing the border,
Bringing the cheque and the postal order,
Letters for the rich, letters for the poor,
The shop at the corner and the girl next door.
Pulling up Beattock, a steady climb:
The gradient's against her, but she's on time.
Past cotton-grass and moorland boulder
Shovelling white steam over her shoulder,
Snorting noisily as she passes
Silent miles of wind-bent grasses.

Birds turn their heads as she approaches,
Stare from the bushes at her blank-faced coaches.
Sheep-dogs cannot turn her course;
They slumber on with paws across.
In the farm she passes no one wakes,
But a jug in the bedroom gently shakes.

Dawn freshens, the climb is done.
Down towards Glasgow she descends
Towards the steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes,
Towards the fields of apparatus, the furnaces
Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen.
All Scotland waits for her:
In the dark glens, beside the pale-green sea lochs
Men long for news.

Letters of thanks, letters from banks,
Letters of joy from the girl and the boy,
Receipted bills and invitations
To inspect new stock or visit relations,
And applications for situations
And timid lovers' declarations
And gossip, gossip from all the nations,
News circumstantial, news financial,
Letters with holiday snaps to enlarge in,
Letters with faces scrawled in the margin,
Letters from uncles, cousins, and aunts,
Letters to Scotland from the South of France,
Letters of condolence to Highlands and Lowlands
Notes from overseas to Hebrides
Written on paper of every hue,
The pink, the violet, the white and the blue,
The chatty, the catty, the boring, adoring,
The cold and official and the heart's outpouring,
Clever, stupid, short and long,
The typed and the printed and the spelt all wrong.

Thousands are still asleep

Dreaming of terrifying monsters,

Or of friendly tea beside the band at Cranston's or Crawford's:

Asleep in working Glasgow, asleep in well-set Edinburgh,

Asleep in granite Aberdeen,

They continue their dreams,

And shall wake soon and long for letters,

And none will hear the postman's knock

Without a quickening of the heart,

For who can bear to feel himself forgotten?

Wikipedia

Night Mail is a 1936 documentary film about a London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS) mail train from London to Scotland, produced by the GPO Film Unit. A poem by English poet W. H. Auden was written for it, used in the closing few minutes, as was music by Benjamin Britten. The two men also collaborated on a documentary on the line from London to Portsmouth, The Way to the Sea, also in 1936. The film was directed by Harry Watt and Basil Wright, and narrated by John Grierson and Stuart Legg. The Brazilian filmmaker Alberto Cavalcanti was sound director. It starred Royal Scot 6115 Scots Guardsman.

As recited in the film, the poem's rhythm imitates the train's wheels as they clatter over track sections, beginning slowly but picking up speed so that by the time the penultimate verse the narrator is at a breathless pace. As the train slows toward its destination the final verse is more sedate. The opening lines are "This is the Night Mail crossing the border / Bringing the cheque and the postal order". The copyright on the film has expired after 50 years, however some sources assert that the W.H. Auden poem however remains copyright as a written piece. The musical score was first published in 2002.

Such is the status of the film, it was used as inspiration for a British Rail advertisement of the 1980s, the "concerto ad".

Night Mail - (1936) - Part 1

Night Mail - (1936) - Part 2

Night Mail - (1936) - Part 3

Robert Louis Stevenson - From a Railway Carriage

Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850-1894

Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in a battle
All through the meadows the horses and cattle:
All of the sights of the hill and the plain
Fly as thick as driving rain;
And ever again, in the wink of an eye,
Painted stations whistle by.
Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,
All by himself and gathering brambles;
Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;
And here is the green for stringing the daisies!
Here is a cart runaway in the road
Lumping along with man and load;
And here is a mill, and there is a river:
Each a glimpse and gone forever!





Notes

This poem is similar in many ways to Auden's http://reslater.blogspot.com/2012/01/wh-auden-night-mail.html


Commentary

http://thereaderonline.co.uk/2010/08/16/featured-poem-from-a-railway-carriage-by-robert-louis-stevenson/

by Lisa

August 16, 2010

When looking for inspiration for a piece of writing, I often take time to ponder what specific occurrences inspired the verse of the greatest poets. Of course there are those significant, overwhelming things that none of us can get away from; ever flowing reservoirs that can be dipped into time and time again and still provide something to get the ink flowing – the ‘big’ issues such as life, death, love, loss. Then there are the altogether simpler things, the tiny fragments of beauty and wonder that can be magnified by a selection of words; the first ray of sun after rainfall, a flower bursting into bloom…all perfectly poetic. Though in theory nothing should be strictly out of bounds – or at least, almost nothing – there are some things that it’s hard to muster much excitement for, scribble about enthusiastically or give an air of elegance to. One such subject is surely public transport; as practical and undoubtedly necessary as it is, even the most accomplished of bards would struggle when faced with points of inspiration such as delays, jams and replacement services.

Yet the very topic is gearing up a range of writers, with the most famous network of public transport in the country – the London Underground – at the centre of a major poetic project which aims to collect 270 odes, each correlating to an individual station in the network. It does sound like an interesting idea, and I’m thinking that The Tube is an exception to the rule; there is something about it that sparks the senses, be it the sheer variety of stations and passengers; bright-eyed and bushy tailed tourists alongside suited and booted (and slightly bored) businessmen and women. The zigzagging of lines meaning if you so wish, you could embark on a mini adventure into the unknown. And also the very fact that actually being underground gives a slight eerie edge to proceedings. The few times I’ve joined the hoards while in the capital have certainly been eventful, thanks to train doors literally closing on me with the rush to get on board and a fellow passenger deciding to use my shoulder as an alternative to a pillow. Back home, as I’m a slave to bus timetables (which are seldom correct) the predominant emotions evoked are frustration, annoyance and impatience, prone to far too many near misses, drivers who seem to be more interested in skipping as many stops as possible and revving engines that seem to taunt as you watch hope ride away into the distance… (that’s more ridiculously exaggerated drama than the makings of a poetic masterpiece).

A different, perhaps more conventionally poetic train journey is detailed in Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem, taken from his A Child’s Garden of Verses – not, funnily enough, Songs of Travel and Other Verses, even though it would be fitting there. The connection to childhood is evoked as it is reminiscent of ‘old-fashioned’ over-ground train journeys complete with all their numerous sights glimpsed as you go chugging by, the verse’s rhythm echoing the pace of the vehicle along with the scenes jostling for the passenger’s attention. It has been suggested that there is something about trains that appeals to poets above all other modes of transport. Whether this is true, who can say? They’re certain more rhythmic than a bumpy old bus.

Robert Louis Stevenson

From a Railway Carriage

W.H. Auden

Night Mail

Wilfred Owen - The Send Off

Wilfred Owen, 1893-1918



Down the close, darkening lanes they sang their way
To the siding-shed,
And lined the train with faces grimly gay.
Their breasts were stuck all white with wreath and spray
As men's are, dead.
Dull porters watched them, and a casual tramp
Stood staring hard,
Sorry to miss them from the upland camp.
Then, unmoved, signals nodded, and a lamp
Winked to the guard.
So secretly, like wrongs hushed-up, they went.
They were not ours:
We never heard to which front these were sent.
Nor there if they yet mock what women meant
Who gave them flowers.
Shall they return to beatings of great bells
In wild trainloads?
A few, a few, too few for drums and yells,
May creep back, silent, to still village wells
Up half-known roads.

Some railways journeys were both sickening and mind-numbingly frightening in equal measure. One thinks of those trains of death approaching the watchtower gateway at Auschwitz. Here Owen, possibly the greatest first world war poet, drives home the experience of the ordinary soldier travelling to incomprehensible horror. - Peter Ashley