Sonnet – Fourteen Lines

What Brothers Us In Each

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 Willow Tree Is Woolly

The old faiths light their candles all about,
But burly Truth comes by and puts them out.
Lizette Woodworth Reese

Mid-March

By Lizette Woodworth Reese (1856 – 1935)

It is too early for white boughs, too late
For snows. From out the hedge the wind lets fall
A few last flakes, ragged and delicate.
Down the stripped roads the maples start their small,
Soft, ’wildering fires. Stained are the meadow stalks
A rich and deepening red. The willow tree
Is woolly. In deserted garden-walks
The lean bush crouching hints old royalty,
Feels some June stir in the sharp air and knows
Soon ’twill leap up and show the world a rose.

The days go out with shouting; nights are loud;
Wild, warring shapes the wood lifts in the cold;
The moon’s a sword of keen, barbaric gold,
Plunged to the hilt into a pitch black cloud.

A Song

By Lizette Woodworth Reese

Oh, Love, he went a-straying,

A long time ago!

I missed him in the Maying,

When blossoms were of snow;

So back I came by the old sweet way;

And for I loved him so, wept that he came not with me,

A long time ago!

Wide open stood my chamber door,

And one stepped forth to greet;

Gray Grief, strange Grief, who turned me sore

With words he spake so sweet.

I gave him meat; I gave him drink;

(And listened for Love’s feet.)

How many years? I cannot think;

In truth, I do not know—

Ah, long time ago!

Oh, love, he came not back again,

Although I kept me fair;

And each white May, in field and lane,

I waited for him there!

Yea, he forgot; but Grief stayed on,

And in Love’s empty chair

Doth sit and tell of days long gone—

’Tis more than I can bear!

A Better Time Than Ours

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.

We Deceive Time

The American soul has been stored under the stairs
In a box with the mittens and scarves
For the longest time. We couldn’t think where we had put it.
Reed Whittemore

Three Sonnets to Time

III

by Reed Whittemore

Again and again, we deceive time. We sleep, we meander
As if it were nothing to us when we’d come, or be, through
Or where, in the limitless world, our ship would founder,
Or do what whatever ships in metaphor do.

We wear all the bright fashions, read soft books
And lie in the sun in Nassau with our hides.
We build our castles and line our secretest nooks
With the addresses where passion or drink resides.

And though time is never deceived – it is we, with our slippers on,
Who are caught by surprise when our light verse yawns its last
yawn –
To the last hour we must strive to keep not looking drawn
From lamenting in secret, mumbling dirges at dawn.

It is a game, but a very solemn one, this that we play
With art, drama and rhetoric as we decay.

Thoughts of a California Desert

by Reed Whittemore

Under palm trees, oranges, olives and pears
The indolent desert slouches, half an eye closed
And half an eye out for men of affairs whose cares
Keep them from keeping their gaudy gaudy gardens hosed.

Slouches and yawns, that clown. Leaves in disdain
Gaseous dragon their nauseous knights to nettle.
Flips his tail coyly, rolls over, says he would fain
Die a dry death. Haw! browning a petal.

Has it too good, too good. It vastly diverted
Watching his merchants and bankers stumble out doors.
Parries their blows, says he loves, loves to be squirted
As at him they fiercely empty their reservoirs.

Sleeps a great deal, drinks deep, drinks deep and makes hay,
Thinking he’ll swallow the bankers and all one day.

I Forgot To Change The Hour

I would write poems even if no else read them.
Margaret Hasse

Day After Daylight Savings

By Margaret Hasse

Blue numbers on my bedside clock

tell I forgot to change the hour.

This sets routines on haywire.

Like a domestic goat staked

to its circle of earth,

I don’t do well untethered.

I have no hunger for early dinner,

become confused by the sound

of children who seem out

too late for a school night.

They’ve found an extra helping

of daylight to romp on new grass

and can’t contain themselves,

strip off jackets, scatter

like a rag of ponies.

Whatever time says,

their joy insists

on springing forward.

Most years when we spring forward, it feels like spring is on the other side of that time jump. I awake with a shorter day but with a spring mindset and a spring anticipation. Not this year. I am mired in an atmospheric river of winter, it just keeps snowing. Minneapolis streets are so compressed by ever encroaching piles of snow that we are down to single lanes of traffic on side streets. If there is a spring waiting as we set our clocks forward, I sure hope it sticks its head out of its burrow soon, our hearts are spring sick and looking for the great white north to turn green. We maybe carnivores in feeding our bellies but our souls are vegetarian, we need green and living things to fulfill us. Nearly March 15 and not a muddy dog in sight. But give it two weeks. The polish of spring grainy snow on paws will turn into the grime of snow melt. Plenty of time for brown to become the theme on the way to green.

Maybe we should start a movement and just always set our clocks back? Decide to never spring forward, instead always relive an hour of our lives twice a year, collectively grab time and pull it back. I think that’s the grief of daylight savings time. We lose time constantly, Delta steals it with endless flight delays, colleagues put you through repetitive meetings, our world is constantly taking us away from what’s important. We suffer those loses because we must. But to have an hour stolen that just doesn’t exist one day a year, seems like a self inflicted psychological wound that we can do without. Let’s either protest by always moving back, or just doing away with this silliness forever. Copernicus would be proud. Let’s leave the heavens to heaven and live on earth beset by days of 24 hours in length, give or take a wobble of the axis.

Sonnet 12

By William Shakespeare

When I do count the clock that tells the time,

And see the brave day sunk in hideous night;

When I behold the violet past prime,

And sable curls all silver’d o’er with white;

When lofty trees I see barren of leaves

Which erst from heat did canopy the herd,

And summer’s green all girded up in sheaves

Borne on the bier with white and bristly beard,

Then of thy beauty do I question make,

That thou among the wastes of time must go,

Since sweets and beauties do themselves forsake

And die as fast as they see others grow;

And nothing ‘gainst Time’s scythe can make defence

Save breed, to brave him when he takes thee hence.

I Never See You

“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.

Grief And Time Are Tideless Golden Seas

Life was created in the valleys. It blew up onto the hills on the old terrors, the old lusts, the old despairs. That’s why you must walk up the hills so you can ride down.
William Faulkner

Gray The Day

By William Faulkner (1897 – 1962)

Gray the day, all the year is cold,
Across the empty land the swallows’ cry
Marks the southflown spring. Naught is bowled
Save winter, in the sky.

O sorry earth, when this bleak bitter sleep
Stirs and turns and time once more is green,
In empty path and lane and grass will creep
With none to tread it clean.

April and May and June, and all the dearth
Of heart to green it for, to hurt and wake;
What good is budding, gray November earth?
No need to break your sleep for greening’s sake.

The hushed plaint of wind in stricken trees
Shivers the grass in path and lane
And Grief and Time are tideless golden seas—
Hush, hush! He’s home again.

To A Co-Ed

by William Faulkner

The dawn herself could not more beauty wear
Than you ‘mid other women crowned in grace,
Nor have the sages known a fairer face
Than yours, gold-shadowed by your bright sweet hair.
Than you does Venus seem less heavenly fair;
The twilit hidden stillness of your eyes,
And throat, a singing bridge of still replies,
A slender bridge, yet all dreams hover there.

I could have turned unmoved from Helen’s brow,
Who found no beauty in their Beatrice;
Their Thais seemed less lovely then as now,
Though some had bartered Athens for her kiss.
For down Time’s arras, faint and fair and far,
Your face still beckons like a lonely star.

When I Was A Child

The poetry of a people comes from the deep recesses of the unconscious, the irrational and the collective body of our ancestral memories
Margaret Walker

Childhood

By Margaret Walker (1915 – 1998)

When I was a child I knew red miners

dressed raggedly and wearing carbide lamps.

I saw them come down red hills to their camps

dyed with red dust from old Ishkooda mines.

Night after night I met them on the roads,

or on the streets in town I caught their glance;

the swing of dinner buckets in their hands,

and grumbling undermining all their words.

I also lived in low cotton country

where moonlight hovered over ripe haystacks,

or stumps of trees, and croppers’ rotting shacks

with famine, terror, flood, and plague near by;

where sentiment and hatred still held sway

and only bitter land was washed away.

Harlem Wine

by Countee Cullen (1903 – 1946)

This is not water running here,
These thick rebellious streams
That hurtle flesh and bone past fear
Down alleyways of dreams

This is a wine that must flow on
Not caring how or where
So it has ways to flow upon
Where song is in the air.

So it can woo an artful flute
With loose elastic lips
Its measurements of joy compute
With blithe, ecstatic hips

Born To Surprise

On Being Brought From Africa to America

‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,

Taught my benighted soul to understand

That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:

Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.

Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

“Their colour is a diabolic die.”

Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,

May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train.

Phillis Wheatley

Something Like A Sonnet for Phillis Miracle Wheatley

by June Jordan

Girl from the realm of birds florid and fleet
flying full feather in far or near weather
Who fell to a dollar lust coffled like meat
Captured by avarice and hate spit together
Trembling asthmatic alone on the slave block
built by a savagery travelling by carriage
viewed like a species of flaw in the livestock
A child without safety of mother or marriage
Chosen by whimsy but born to surprise
They taught you to read but you learned how to write
Begging the universe into your eyes:
They dressed you in light but you dreamed
with the night.
From Africa singing of justice and grace,
Your early verse sweetens the fame of our Race.

His Excellency General Washington (Excerpt)

Phillis Wheatley – (1753-1784)

. .The Goddess comes, she moves divinely fair,
Olive and laurel binds Her golden hair:
Wherever shines this native of the skies,
Unnumber’d charms and recent graces rise.

Muse! Bow propitious while my pen relates
How pour her armies through a thousand gates,
As when Eolus heaven’s fair face deforms,
Enwrapp’d in tempest and a night of storms;
Astonish’d ocean feels the wild uproar,
The refluent surges beat the sounding shore;
Or think as leaves in Autumn’s golden reign,
Such, and so many, moves the warrior’s train.
In bright array they seek the work of war,
Where high unfurl’d the ensign waves in air.
Shall I to Washington their praise recite?
Enough thou know’st them in the fields of fight.
Thee, first in peace and honors—we demand
The grace and glory of thy martial band.
Fam’d for thy valour, for thy virtues more,
Hear every tongue thy guardian aid implore!

You Were Honey and Yes to Us

Do not desire to fit in. Desire to oblige yourselves to lead.
Gwendolyn Brooks

Children of the Poor

by Gwendolyn Brooks

People who have no children can be hard:

Attain a mail of ice and insolence:

Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense

Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.

And when wide world is bitten and bewarred

They perish purely, waving their spirits hence

Without a trace of grace or of offense

To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.

While through a throttling dark we others hear

The little lifting helplessness, the queer

Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous

Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.

And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of

The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.

And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?

Mites, come invade most frugal vestibules

Spectered with crusts of penitents’ renewals

And all hysterics arrogant for a day.

Instruct yourselves here is no devil to pay.

Children, confine your lights in jellied rules;

Resemble graves; be metaphysical mules.

Learn Lord will not distort nor leave the fray.

Behind the scurryings of your neat motif

I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm

If that should frighten you: sew up belief

If that should tear: turn, singularly calm

At forehead and at fingers rather wise,

Holding the bandage ready for your eyes.

Gwendolyn Brooks: American In The Wintertime

by Haki R. Madhubuti

in this moment of orangutans, wolves, and scavengers,

of high heat redesigning the north & south poles

and the wanderings of new tribes in limousines,

with the confirmations of liars, thieves, and get-over artists,

in the wilderness of pennsylvania avenue,

standing rock, misspelled executive orders

on yellow paper with crooked signatures.

where are the kind language makers among us?

at a time of extreme climate damage,

deciphering fake news, alternative truths, and me-ism

you saw the twenty-first century and left us

not on your own accord or permission.

you have fought and fought most of the twentieth century

creating an army of poets who learned

and loved language and stories

of complicated rivers, seas, and oceans.

where is the kind green nourishment of kale and wheatgrass?

you thought, wrote, and lived poetry,

knew that terror is also language based

on denial, first-ism, and rich cowards.

you were honey and yes to us,

never ran from Black as in bones, Africa,

blood and questioning yesterdays and tomorrows.

we never saw you dance but you had rhythm,

you were a warrior before the war,

creating earth language, uncommon signs and melodies,

and did not sing the songs of career slaves.

keenly aware of tubman, douglass, wells-barnett, du bois,

and the oversized consciousness and commitment of never-quit people

religiously taking note of the bloodlust enemies of kindness

we hear your last words:

america

if you see me as your enemy

you have no

friends.