What, should we get rid of our ignorance, the very substance of our lives, merely in order to understand one another?
R. P. Blackmur
Struggle-Bread
by R. P. Blackmur (1904 – 1965)
My friend, what brothers us in each? – I take, most mine out of the wordling worlds we bled, not life, but what is takeable, the dead. I say the dead. Things cannot sleep nor wake, nor grow nor lessen, upleap nor ever slack, which have been changed between two selves. I said the dead – what’s not but was. This struggle-bread, the pressed wafer of knowledge, this I break.
I eat the past, the matter we have been, and so eat god, a fast; devour my part in you. Yet you’re untouched. You say that’s so of me? – my dead selves only you draw in your often eye and seldom smile? Live heart, we lag – we are ahead of all we know.
There are days this long winter, when it is difficult to be surprised. Then comes along a March sunny day, the sparkle of snow-diamonds bedazzle contrasted by the denim blue of long shadows, that blue that only exists in spring-snow right before it melts, and I am awestruck by the simplicity of white. I had the same feeling reading R. P. Blackmur’s poem Struggle-Bread. How could I have missed this poem, these long years? Where had it been hiding? Blackmur published sparingly his own poetry, but commented elegantly as a critic on others work. I wonder what held Blackmur back from sharing more; modesty?
My Dog My Wife and Most Myself
by R. P. Blackmur
Because the elm-tree buds are red in sunlight, yellow-brown in shade, I think not of a living thing — my dog my wife and most myself — but that I think of it as dead.
Because the harrowed land is black and the wet wales ashine like flesh in sunlight, dull blue steel in shade. this much I do expect, and hate, I shall be fertile so when dead– fertile and indiscriminate.
The painful warrior famous for fight, After a thousand victories, once foil’d, Is from the books of honor razed quite, And all the rest forgot for which he toil’d.
William Shakespeare
West London
by Matthew Arnold
Crouch’d on the pavement close by Belgrave Square A tramp I saw, ill, moody, and tongue-tied; A babe was in her arms, and at her side A girl; their clothes were rags, their feet were bare. Some labouring men, whose work lay somewhere there, Pass’d opposite; she touch’d her girl, who hied Across, and begg’d and came back satisfied. The rich she had let pass with frozen stare.
Thought I: Above her state this spirit towers; She will not ask of aliens, but of friends, Of sharers in a common human fate. She turns from that cold succour, which attends The unknown little from the unknowing great, And points us to a better time than ours.
Romeo and Juliet
Excerpt from the prologue
by William Shakespeare
Two households, both alike in dignity In fair Verona, where we lay our scene From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.
From forth the fatal loins of these two foes A pair of star-crossed lovers take their life; Whose misadventured piteous overthrows Doth with their death bury their parents` strife.
The fearful passage of their death-marked love And the continuance of their parents` rage, Which, but their children’s` end, naught could remove, Is now the two hours traffic of our stage; The which if you with patient ears attend, What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.
“If the condition of grief is nearly universal, its transactions are exquisitely personal.”
Meghan O’Rourke, The Long Goodbye
Troy
by Meghan O’Rourke
We had a drink and got in bed. That’s when the boat in my mouth set sail, my fingers drifting in the shallows of your buzz cut. And in the sound of your eye a skiff coasted—boarding it I found all the bric-a-brac of your attic gloom, the knives from that other island trip, the poison suckleroot lifted from God-knows-where. O, all your ill-begotten loot—and yes, somewhere, the words you never actually spoke, the woven rope tethering me to this rotting joint. Touch me, and the boat and the city burn like whiskey going down the throat. Or so it goes, our love-wheedling myth, excessively baroque.
Ever
by Meghan O’Rourke
Never, never, never, never, never. —King Lear
Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.” They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing. Never? Never ever again to see you? An error, I aver. You’re never nothing, because nothing’s not a thing. I know death is absolute, forever, the guillotine—gutting—never to which we never say goodbye. But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever” and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after. I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver: You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something. Will I ever really get never? You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.
Silence is a sounding thing, To one who listens hungrily.
Gwendolyn Bennett
Sonnet 1
by Gwendolyn Bennett (1902 – 1981)
He came in silvern armour, trimmed with black— A lover come from legends long ago— With silver spurs and silken plumes a-blow, And flashing sword caught fast and buckled back In a carven sheath of Tamarack. He came with footsteps beautifully slow, And spoke in voice meticulously low. He came and Romance followed in his track…
I did not ask his name—I thought him Love; I did not care to see his hidden face. All life seemed born in my intaken breath; All thought seemed flown like some forgotten dove. He bent to kiss and raised his visor’s lace… All eager-lipped I kissed the mouth of Death.
To a Dark Girl (1927)
by Gwendolyn Bennett
I love you for your brownness, And the rounded darkness of your breast, I love you for the breaking sadness in your voice And shadows where your wayward eyelids rest. Something of old forgotten queens Lurks in the lithe abandon of your walk And something of the shackled slave Sobs in the rhythm of your talk. Oh, little brown girl, born for sorrow’s mate, Keep all you have of queenliness, Forgetting that you once were slave, And let your full lips laugh at Fate!
At a certain point all writing is political, whether the writer realizes it or not, because it positions itself a certain angle. It stands, whether it likes it or not, in relation to its time.
Sean O’Brien
At the Solstice
by Sean O’Brien
We say Next time we’ll go away, But then the winter happens, like a secret
We’ve to keep yet never understand As daylight turns to cinema once more:
A lustrous darkness deep in ice-age cold, And the print in need of restoration
Starting to consume itself With snowfall where no snow is falling now.
Or could it be a cloud of sparrows, dancing In the bare hedge that this gale of light
Is seeking to uproot? Let it be sparrows, then, Still dancing in the blazing hedge,
Their tender fury and their fall, Because it snows, because it burns.
For the past couple of years I am in a race with the start of winter and the on-set of cold weather, a rush to see how many outdoor projects I can finish. This year I discovered, late in the fall, the solution for a problem that had been vexing me all summer, just as the number of days above freezing were dwindling. I had ordered screens for the windows I had installed a year ago back in May, and the brand name company who made them apparently has decided to stop making screens, because my order was never completed. Then in late November, I realized there were stock storm windows available at my local building supply store that would fit my windows, with just a minor clever tweak at instillation. After buying one to prove my theory correct, we bought three more and got them in last weekend. Now I am tempted to try and get two more on the second story of the north side of the house, where the wind blows, this coming Sunday, but it means making many trips up and down a ladder in the cold. The question I ponder – is it worth it?
Increasingly, that seems to be a question I ask myself about a lot of things that pull at me lately, wanting my attention and time? Is it worth it? I think the answer is yes, but it’s going to be miserable, or at best uncomfortable, like many of the other things I contemplate that very same question. Life is not made up of a series of tasks that are pleasant. Someone has to muck out the stalls, clean the cat pan, suffer through another boring TEAMs meeting on the very same topic as the previous week by the inept project lead who can’t seem to take notes or make decisions. Life is a slog these days more often than not. How does one wax the sleds so that life pulls a little easier or even glides ever so slightly downhill once again?
One of the blessings of Fourteen Lines, is that I have come to appreciate poets that I had glossed over years before. Robert Frost is one such poet. The deeper I read Frost the more I enjoy his perspective. Maybe I am finally catching up to him. I have read this poem a few winters, considering it. But it wasn’t until this week that several lines jumped off the page and grabbed me. I appreciate Frost extending a literary hand and pulling me closer. For those of us that experience an actual winter, it can become a time, to come in out of the cold and ponder the stores in our cellar.
A light he was to no one but himself Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, A quiet light, and then not even that.
An Old Man’s Winter Night
by Robert Frost
All out of doors looked darkly in at him Through the thin frost, almost in separate stars, That gathers on the pane in empty rooms. What kept his eyes from giving back the gaze Was the lamp tilted near them in his hand. What kept him from remembering what it was That brought him to that creaking room was age. He stood with barrels round him—at a loss. And having scared the cellar under him In clomping there, he scared it once again In clomping off;—and scared the outer night, Which has its sounds, familiar, like the roar Of trees and crack of branches, common things, But nothing so like beating on a box. A light he was to no one but himself Where now he sat, concerned with he knew what, A quiet light, and then not even that. He consigned to the moon,—such as she was, So late-arising,—to the broken moon As better than the sun in any case For such a charge, his snow upon the roof, His icicles along the wall to keep; And slept. The log that shifted with a jolt Once in the stove, disturbed him and he shifted, And eased his heavy breathing, but still slept. One aged man—one man—can’t fill a house, A farm, a countryside, or if he can, It’s thus he does it of a winter night.
“What would the world be, once bereft Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left, O let them be left, wildness and wet; Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”
Gerard Manley Hopkins
God’s Grandeur
by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 – 1899)
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.
Hopkins, for all his precise literary religious fervor, is complicated in his contradictions. He uses exquisite rhyme and structure to construct his poetic hymns. His goal was to promote Christianity through his art. In his own words;
“What are works of art for? to educate, to be standards. To produce is of little use unless what we produce is known, is widely known, the wider known the better, for it is by being known that it works, it influences, it does its duty, it does good. We must try, then, to be known, aim at it, take means to it. And this without puffing in the process or pride in the success.”
Well, let’s not go too far Mr. Hopkins in your humbleness. You also said, “What I do is me, for that I came,” which is a clever way to say, I am what I write or I write because I am, either way there is a certain amount of credit being taken. I have never met a writer who put their work out into the public eye that didn’t take a little pride in its success. If Hopkins’ was writing today he would have thousands of likes on his blog. My point is genius can rarely get out of the way of its own recognition.
It’s okay to not seek recognition, it is another to ignore it. I am in the camp both approaches are acceptable to an artist, but the latter can get one in bind if they pick and choose what awards they acknowledge during their career. Writers willing to be adored only by fans worthy of their adoration rarely age well, the vintage goes off as dust settles, something just not quite right as the flavor goes off.
The interesting question is why do some why do poets like Hopkins continue to inspire for hundred’s of years after their deaths, while thousands of other writers, some with equal gifts, are discarded by and large to obscurity relatively quickly? I think it may have something to do with luck and inspiration, but in reality I have no idea….
Justus quidem tu es, Domine
by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Thou art indeed just, Lord, if I contend With thee; but, sir, so what I plead is just. Why do sinners’ ways prosper? and why must Disappointment all I endeavour end? Wert thou my enemy, O thou my friend, How wouldst thou worse, I wonder, than thou dost Defeat, thwart me? Oh, the sots and thralls of lust Do in spare hours more thrive than I that spend, Sir, life upon thy cause. See, banks and brakes Now, leavèd how thick! lacèd they are again With fretty chervil, look, and fresh wind shakes Them; birds build – but not I build; no, but strain, Time’s eunuch, and not breed one work that wakes. Mine, O thou lord of life, send my roots rain.
A recipe has no soul, soul food comes from the heart.
Anonymous
New York Sonnets
by Stacie Cassarino
ii. The months have not left us, living apart from city to treeline, how do we speak tenderly or not speak at all, the heart has many winters, the earth cannot keep us still. In my dreams I touched you every- where with my lips, and lost my feet in snow fields, and told you a story of safety on Snake Mountain. Now, you seem far, you know where words fail to sound, you know we choose wrong, sometimes, and look away. The mind paces in its beautiful error. We belong near to each other, like this, our faces assigned to see again. My love, the air grows around us, the body wakes, come here
I enjoy my kitchen. It is impractical, generally cold, no work space to speak of and by most cooks standards uninviting. It’s not about what it isn’t, its about what it is. It is painted a sparkling bright tangerine, a color I most appreciate at 5:30 am throughout the winter when it is dark for the hour I sip my coffee while reading and writing. It is like my own personal sunrise. I have hung a vintage chandelier that is my favorite light fixture in the history of lighting over the small antique round oak table. It is truly one of a kind, a work of art, from the earliest onset of electric lighting when it still was something magical and to be constructed with elegance. It has a peacock theme in brass in its simple infrastructure, but I pretend they are blue herons, which in summer I can see from my kitchen window some mornings.
I am never alone in the kitchen. There is always at least one of the two dogs or the cat keeping me company, demanding my attention after their breakfasts are served. They each have their own way of not taking no for an answer. A nudge from a nose on my elbow timed perfectly to make me loose my train of thought, one of them leaning into my leg while I type, a slow stroll across my keyboard or a sly soft claw in my thigh, all of these done with genuine humor and a smile upon on their furry faces. They don’t approve of my poetry addiction and consider it impolite that I insist on my indulgence most mornings until each has had sufficient pets.
I wonder if we could measure in the history of poetry, what percentage of poems have been written in the kitchen? At least what percentage of good poems or great poems have been written in the kitchen? I am guessing it tops the list of all places one can possibly imagine to write. The kitchen is where most of creation has been created. Food has always been an important way lovers connect, the courting process can begin with something as simple as a bowl of soup or a cup of tea. A man or woman knows the earliest onset of intimacy often begins by being invited into the others kitchen, particularly a messy kitchen. Sex is messy. So is cooking. So are relationships. If one can’t deal with a bit of a mess and clean up afterwards, then you are likely going to wind up eating that bowl of soup alone.
This looks like a December day, it looks like we’ve come to the end of the way.
Willie Nelson
A Calendar of Sonnets – December
by Helen Hunt Jackson
The lakes of ice gleam bluer than the lakes Of water ‘neath the summer sunshine gleamed: Far fairer than when placidly it streamed, The brook its frozen architecture makes, And under bridges white its swift way takes. Snow comes and goes as messenger who dreamed Might linger on the road; or one who deemed His message hostile gently for their sakes Who listened might reveal it by degrees. We gird against the cold of winter wind Our loins now with mighty bands of sleep, In longest, darkest nights take rest and ease, And every shortening day, as shadows creep O’er the brief noontide, fresh surprises find.
Here it is, December already. We mutually survived a month of war poetry, easier to stomach than the real news coming out of Ukraine. Let’s pray the madness ends soon and freedom and autonomy return to Ukraine and we can go back to loathing American democracies two year run up to the next presidential election….
I am beginning my annual process of beginning to create gifts for Christmas. It takes me about a month of weekends to keep the projects moving forward. I am keeping it simple this year; a smaller number of hand bound poetry chap books, an electronic playlist of my favorite new songs for the year and peanut brittle for the unfortunate. Peanut brittle has become in my mind my very own version of Santa putting coal in your stocking, with in my case dental jeopardy your holiday wish. Just writing it gives me the willies. I think 2022 is the year to put a fork in the holiday tradition of peanut brittle and transition to caramel corn instead. Or better yet, a mixture of toffee pop-corn dyed bright red and caramel corn dyed a muddy green.
Fourteen Lines 