The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner

The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner
By: Randall Jarrell

From my mother's sleep I fell into the State,
And I hunched in its belly till my wet fur froze.
Six miles from earth, loosed from its dream of life,
I woke to black flak and the nightmare fighters.
When I died they washed me out of the turret with a hose.

Dreams

"DREAMS"
by Langston Hughes

Hold onto dreams
For if dreams die
Life is like a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.

Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

Three-With the Moon and His Shadow

Three-With the Moon and His Shadow
By: Li Po


With a jar of wine I sit by the flowering trees.
I drink alone, and where are my friends?
Ah, the moon above looks down on me;
I call and lift my cup to his brightness.
And see, there goes my shadow before me.
Ho! We're a party of three, I say,-
Though the poor moon can't drink,
And my shadow but dances around me,
We're all friends tonight,
The drinker, the moon and the shadow.
Let our revelry be meet for the spring time!

I sing, the wild moon wanders the sky.
I dance, my shadow goes tumbling about.
While we're awake, let us join in carousal;
Only sweet drunkenness shall ever part us.
Let us pledge a friendship no mortals know,
And often hail each other at evening
Far across the vast and vaporous space.

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart

Exposed on the cliffs of the heart


Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Look, how tiny down there,
look: the last village of words and, higher,
(but how tiny) still one last
farmhouse of feeling. Can you see it?
Exposed on the cliffs of the heart. Stoneground
under your hands. Even here, though,
something can bloom; on a silent cliff-edge
an unknowing plant blooms, singing, into the air.
But the one who knows? Ah, he began to know
and is quiet now, exposed on the cliffs of the heart.
While, with their full awareness,
many sure-footed mountain animals pass
or linger. And the great sheltered bird flies, slowly
circling, around the peak's pure denial. - But
without a shelter, here on the cliffs of the heart...

By: Rainer Maria Rilke

When I Am With You

When I Am With You
By Robert Bly


When I am with you, two notes of the sarod
Carry me into a place where I am not.
All the farms have disappeared into air.

Those wooden fence posts I loved as a boy-
I can see my father's face through their wood,
And through his face the sky as threshing ends.

It is such a blessing to hear that we will die.
Ten thousand barks become a hundred thousand;
I knew this friendship with myself couldn't last forever.

Touch the sarod's string once more, so that the finger
That touched my skin a moment ago
Can become a lightning bolt that closes the door.

Now I know why I keep hinting at the word you-
The sound of you carries me over the border.
We disappear the same way a baby is born.

Some foolish boy with my name has been trying
To peer all afternoon between the thick boards
Of the fence. Tell that boy it isn't time.

Porch Swing in September

Porch Swing in September
by Ted Kooser


The porch swing hangs fixed in a morning sun
that bleaches its gray slats, its flowered cushion
whose flowers have faded, like those of summer,
and a small brown spider has hung out her web
on a line between porch post and chain
so that no one may swing without breaking it.
She is saying it’s time that the swinging were done with,
time that the creaking and pinging and popping
that sang through the ceiling were past,
time now for the soft vibrations of moths,
the wasp tapping each board for an entrance,
the cool dewdrops to brush from her work
every morning, one world at a time.

The Trial of a Man

The Trial of a Man
By: Sylvia Plath


The ordinary milkman brought that dawn
Of destiny, delivered to the door
In square hermetic bottles, while the sun
Ruled decree of doomsday on the floor.

The morning paper clocked the headline hour
You drank your coffee lke original sin,
And at the jet-plane anger of God's roar
Got up to let the suave blue policeman in.

Impaled upon a stern angelic stare
You were condemned to serve the legal limit
And burn to death within your neon hell.

Now, disciplined in the strict ancestral chair,
You sit, solemn-eyed, about to vomit,
The future an electrode in your skull.

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A Noiseless Patient Spider
By: Walt Whitman
From: Leaves of Grass



A Noiseless, patient spider,
I mark’d, where, on a little promontory, it stood, isolated;
Mark’d how, to explore the vacant, vast surrounding,
It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself;
Ever unreeling them—ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you, O my Soul, where you stand,
Surrounded, surrounded, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,—seeking the spheres, to connect them;
Till the bridge you will need, be form’d—till the ductile anchor hold;
Till the gossamer thread you fling, catch somewhere, O my Soul.

Personal Helicon

Personal Helicon
By Seamus Heaney

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Listen to Personal Helicon:
http://www.ibiblio.org/ipa/audio/heaney/personal_helicon.mp3

Passer Mortuus Est

As it is April, which is poetry month and the month in which I was born, I thought it fitting to start a blog dedicated to my favorite poems and poets. I thought it would be interesting to get others perspectives on these works too. I have recently been reading the works of Edna St. Vincent Millay, who was introduced to me by my oldest daughter and who I have now found quite interesting to read and so to dedicate the site I share Passer Mortuus Est.

Passer Mortuus Est

Death devours all lovely things:
Lesbia with her sparrow
Shares the darkness - presently
Every bed is narrow.

Unremembered as old rain
Dries the sheer libation;
And the little petulant hand
Is an annotation.

After all, my erstwhile dear,
My no longer cherished,
Need we say it was not love,
Just because it perished?

-Edna St. Vincent Millay