Bettina May

To The Rose Upon The Rood Of Time - Poem of the Day

2009-09-11T10:24:02Z

Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days!
Come near me, while I sing the ancient ways:
Cuchulain battling with the bitter tide;
The Druid, grey, wood-nurtured, quiet-eyed,
Who cast round Fergus dreams, and ruin untold;
And thine own sadness, where of stars, grown old
In dancing silver-sandalled on the sea,
Sing in their high and lonely melody.
Come near, that no more blinded hy man's fate,
I find under the boughs of love and hate,
In all poor foolish things that live a day,
Eternal beauty wandering on her way.

Come near, come near, come near - Ah, leave me still
A little space for the rose-breath to fill!
Lest I no more bear common things that crave;
The weak worm hiding down in its small cave,
The field-mouse running by me in the grass,
And heavy mortal hopes that toil and pass;
But seek alone to hear the strange things said
By God to the bright hearts of those long dead,
And learn to chaunt a tongue men do not know.
Come near; I would, before my time to go,
Sing of old Eire and the ancient ways:
Red Rose, proud Rose, sad Rose of all my days.

Meditation XVII - Poem of the Day

2008-10-23T18:29:54Z

No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main. If a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if promontorywere, as well as if a manor of thy friend's or of thine own were. Any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

From Meditation XVII, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions

Link to complete text

View With a Grain of Sand - Poem of the Day

2008-10-06T00:17:01Z

We call it a grain of sand,
but it calls itself neither grain nor sand.
It does just fine, without a name,
whether general, particular,
permanent, passing,
incorrect, or apt.

Our glance, our touch means nothing to it.
It doesn't feel itself seen and touched.
And that it fell on the windowsill
is only our experience, not its.
For it, it is not different from falling on anything else
with no assurance that it has finished falling
or that it is falling still.

The window has a wonderful view of a lake,
but the view doesn't view itself.
It exists in this world
colorless, shapeless,
soundless, odorless, and painless.

The lake's floor exists floorlessly,
and its shore exists shorelessly.
The water feels itself neither wet nor dry
and its waves to themselves are neither singular nor plural.
They splash deaf to their own noise
on pebbles neither large nor small.

And all this beheath a sky by nature skyless
in which the sun sets without setting at all
and hides without hiding behind an unminding cloud.
The wind ruffles it, its only reason being
that it blows.

A second passes.
A second second.
A third.
But they're three seconds only for us.

Time has passed like courier with urgent news.
But that's just our simile.
The character is inverted, his hasts is make believe,
his news inhuman.

The Waking - Poem of the Day

2008-10-04T17:50:55Z

What just just happened between the lovers,
who lie now in love-sleep under the owls' calls,
call, answer, back and forth, and so on,
until one, calling faster, overtakes the other
and the two whoo together in one
shimmering harmonic -- is called "lovemaking."
Lovers who come exalted to their trysts,
who approach from opposite directions
along a path by the sea, through the pines,
meet, embrace, go up from the sea,
lie crushed into each other under
the sky half golden, half deep-blueing
the moon and stars into shining, know
they don't "make" love, but are earth-creatures
who live and -- here maybe no other word will do --
fuck one another forever if possible across the stars.
An ancient word, formed perhaps before
the sacred and profane had split apart,
when the tongue was like the flame of the heart
in the mouth, and lighted each word
as it was spoken, to remind it
to remember, as when flamingos
change feeding places on a marsh,
and there is a moment, after the first to fly
puts its head into the water in the new place
and before in the old place the last to fly
lifts out its head to see the rest have flown,
when, scattered with pink bodies, the sky
is one vast remembering. They still hear,
in sleep, the steady crushing and uncrushing
of bedsprings; they imagine a sonata in which
violins' lines draw the writhing and shiftings.
They lie with heads touching, thinking
themselves back across the blackness.
When dawn touches the bed their bodies re-form,
heaps of golden matter sieved
out of the night. The bed, caressed threadbare,
worn almost away, is now more than ever
the place where such light as humans
shine with seeps up into us. The eyelids,
which love the eyes and lie on them to sleep,
open. This is a bed. That is a fireplace.
That is last morning's breakfast tray
which nobody has yet bothered to take away.
This face, too alive with feeling to survive past
the world in which it is said, "Ni vous
san moi, ni moi san vous," so unguarded
this day might be breaking in the Middle Ages,
in the illusion fateful randomness chooses
to beam into existence, now, on this pillow.
In a ray of sun the lovers see motes cross,
mingle, collide, lose their way, in this puff
of ecstatic dust. Tears overfill their eyes,
wet their faces, drain quickly away
into their smiles. One leg hangs off the bed.
He is still inside her. His big toe
sticks into the pot of strawberry jam. "Oh migod!"
They kiss while laughing and hit teeth
and remember they are bones and laugh
naturally again. The feeling, perhaps
it is only a feeling, perhaps mostly due
to living only in the overlapping lifetimes
of dying things, that time starts up,
comes over them. They get up, put on clothes,
go out. They are not in the street yet,
however, but for a few minutes longer,
still in their elsewhere, beside a river,
with their arms around each other, in the aura
earth has when it remembers its former beauty.
An ambulance sirens a bandage-stiffened
body towards St. Vincent's. A police car
running red lights parodies
in high pitch the owls of paradise. The lovers
enter the ordinary day the ordinary world
providentially provides. Their pockets ring.
Good. For now askers and beggarmen
come up to them needing change for breakfast.

Epilogue - Poem of the Day

2008-10-02T05:28:49Z

Those blessed structures, plot and rhyme--
why are they no hope to me now
I want to make
something imagines, not recalled?
I hear the noise of my own voice:
The painter's vision is not a lens,
it trembles to caress the light.
But sometimes everytihng I write
with the threadbare art of my eye
seems a snapshot,
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,
heightened from life,
yet paralyzed by fact.
All's misalliance.
Yet why not say what happened?
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
stealing like a tide across a map
to his girl solid with yearning.
We are past facts,
warned by that to give
each figure in the photograph
his living name.

Directive - Poem of the Day

2008-09-24T18:11:42Z

Back out of all this now too much for us,
Back in a time made simple by the loss
Of detail, burned, dissolved, and broken off
Like graveyard marble sculpture in the weather,
There is a house that is no more a house
Upon a farm that is no more a farm
And in a town that is no more a town.
The road there, if you'll let a guide direct you
Who only has at heart your getting lost,
May seem as if it should have been a quarry -
Great monolithic knees the former town
Long since gave up pretense of keeping covered.
And there's a story in a book about it:
Besides the wear of iron wagon wheels
The ledges show lines ruled southeast-northwest,
The chisel work of an enormous Glacier
That braced his feet against the Arctic Pole.
You must not mind a certain coolness from him
Still said to haunt this side of Panther Mountain.
Nor need you mind the serial ordeal
Of being watched from forty cellar holes
As if by eye pairs out of forty firkins.
As for the woods' excitement over you
That sends light rustle rushes to their leaves,
Charge that to upstart inexperience.
Where were they all not twenty years ago?
They think too much of having shaded out
A few old pecker-fretted apple trees.
Make yourself up a cheering song of how
Someone's road home from work this once was,
Who may be just ahead of you on foot
Or creaking with a buggy load of grain.
The height of the adventure is the height
Of country where two village cultures faded
Into each other. Both of them are lost.
And if you're lost enough to find yourself
By now, pull in your ladder road behind you
And put a sign up CLOSED to all but me.
Then make yourself at home. The only field
Now left's no bigger than a harness gall.
First there's the children's house of make-believe,
Some shattered dishes underneath a pine,
The playthings in the playhouse of the children.
Weep for what little things could make them glad.
Then for the house that is no more a house,
But only a belilaced cellar hole,
Now slowly closing like a dent in dough.
This was no playhouse but a house in earnest.
Your destination and your destiny's
A brook that was the water of the house,
Cold as a spring as yet so near its source,
Too lofty and original to rage.
(We know the valley streams that when aroused
Will leave their tatters hung on barb and thorn.)
I have kept hidden in the instep arch
Of an old cedar at the waterside
A broken drinking goblet like the Grail
Under a spell so the wrong ones can't find it,
So can't get saved, as Saint Mark says they mustn't.
(I stole the goblet from the children's playhouse.)
Here are your waters and your watering place.
Drink and be whole again beyond confusion.

A Quiet Normal Life - Poem of the Day

2008-09-21T17:53:07Z

HIs place, as he sat and as he thought, was not
In anything that he constructed, so frail,
So barely lit, so shadowed over and naught,

As, for example, a world in which, like snow,
He became an inhabitant, obedient
To gallant notions on the part of cold.

It was here. This was the setting and the time
Of year. Here in his house and in his room,
In his chair, the most tranquil thought grew peaked

And the oldest and warmest heart was cut
By gallent notions on the part of night-
Both late and alone, above the crickets' chortds,

Babbling, each one, the uniqueness of its sound.
There was no fury in transcendent forms.
But his actual candle blazed with artifice.

from When One Has Lived a Long Time Alone - Poem of the Day

2008-09-19T06:39:00Z

When one has lived a long time alone,
one wants to live again among men and women,
to return to that place where one's ties with the human
broke, where the disquiet of death and now also
of history glimmers in firelight on faces,
where the gaze of the new baby looks past the gaze
of the great granny, and where lovers speak,
on lips blowsy with kissing, that language
the same in each mouth, and like birds at daybreak
blether the song that is both earth's and heaven's,
until the son has risen, and they stand
in the daylight of being made one: kingdom come,
when one has lived a long time alone.

This is the last stanza of a much longer poem. I will post it in it's entirety when I get the full text.

Wild Geese - Poem of the Day

2008-09-09T03:02:17Z

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

Recommended by Bill Baren

Man with a Hoe - Poem of the Day

2008-08-15T22:26:41Z

Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes,
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Who loosened and let down this brutal jaw?
Whose was the hand that slanted back this brow?
Whose breath blew out the light within this brain?

Is this the Thing the Lord God made and gave
To have dominion over sea and land;
To trace the stars and search the heavens for power;
To feel the passion of Eternity?
Is this the dream He dreamed who shaped the suns
And markt their ways upon the ancient deep?
Down all the caverns of Hell to their last gulf
There is no shape more terrible than this--
More tongued with censure of the world's blind greed--
More filled with signs and portents for the soul--
More packt with danger to the universe.

What gulfs between him and the seraphim!
Slave of the wheel of labor, what to him
Are Plato and the swing of Pleiades?
What the long reaches of the peaks of song,
The rife of dawn, the reddening of the rose?
Through this dread shape the suffering ages look;
Time's tragedy is in that aching stoop;
Through this dread shape humanity betrayed,
Plundered, profaned and disinherited,
Cries protest to the Powers that made the world,
A protest that is also prophecy.

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
Is this the handiwork you give to God,
This monstrous thing distorted and soul-quencht?
How will you ever straighten up this shape;
Touch it again with immortality;
Give back the upward looking and the light;
Rebuild in it the music and the dream;
Make right the immemorial infamies,
Perfidlous wrongs, Immedicable woes?

O masters, lords and rulers in all lands,
How will the future reckon with this Man?
How answer his brute question in that hour
When whirlwinds of rebellion shake all shores?
How will it be with kingdoms and with kings--
With those who shaped him to the thing he is--
When this dumb Terror shall rise to judge the world,
After the silence of the centuries?

They Flee From Me - Poem of the Day

2008-08-15T18:00:15Z

They flee from me that sometime did me seek

With naked foot, stalking in my chamber.

I have seen them gentle, tame, and meek,

That now are wild and do not remember

That sometime they put themself in danger

To take bread at my hand; and now they range,

Busily seeking with a continual change.

Thanked be fortune it hath been otherwise

Twenty times better; but once in special,

In thin array after a pleasant guise,

When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,

And she me caught in her arms long and small;

Therewithall sweetly did me kiss

And softly said, "Dear heart, how like you this?"

It was no dream: I lay broad waking.

But all is turned thorough my gentleness

Into a strange fashion of forsaking;

And I have leave to go of her goodness,

And she also, to use newfangleness.

But since that I so kindly am served

I would fain know what she hath deserved.

Baroque Comment - Poem of the Day

2008-08-13T05:15:05Z

From loud sound and still chance;
From mindless earth, wet with a dead million leaves;
From the forest, the empty desert, the tearing beasts,
The kelp-disordered beaches;
Coincident with the lie, anger, lust, oppression, and death in many forms;

Ornamental structures, continents apart, separated by seas;
Fitted marble, swung bells; fruit in garlands as well as on the branch;
The flower at last in bronze, stretched backward, or curled within;
Stone in various shapes: beyond the pyramid, the contrived arch and the buttress;
The named constellations;
Crown and vesture; palm and laurel chosen as noble and enduring;
Speech proud in sound; death considered sacrifice;
Mask, weapon, urn; the ordered strings;
Fountains, foreheads under weather-bleached hair;
The wreath, the oar, the tool,
The prow;
The turned eyes and the opened mouth of love.

On First Looking into Chapman's Homer - Poem of the Day

2008-08-08T08:28:56Z

Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
    And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
    Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
    That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne,
    Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Til I eard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
    When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
    He stared at the Pacific -- and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise --
    Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

]]> This is an old favorite of mine. I still remember the first time I read it, and experienced exactly the same emotions that Keats describes when reading Homer.

Evaluation of an Unwritten Poem - Poem of the Day

2008-08-05T22:07:15Z

In the poem's opening words
the authoress asserts that while the Earth is small,
the sky is excessively large and
in it there are, I quote, "too many stars for our own good."

In her depiction of the sky, one detects a certain helplessness,
the authoress is lost in a terrifying expanse,
she is startled by the planets' lifelessness,
and within her mind (which can only be called imprecise)
a question soon arises:
whether we are, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone.

In spite of all the laws of probability!
And today's universally accepted assumptions!
In the face of the irrefutable evidence that may fall into human hands any day now!
That's poetry for you.

Meanwhile, our Lady Bard retums to Earth,
a planet, so she claims, which "makes its rounds without eyewitnesses,"
the only "science fiction that our cosmos can afford."
The despair of a Pascal (1623-1662, note mine)
is, the authoress implies, unrivaled
on any, say, Andromeda or Cassiopeia.
Our solitary existence exacerbates our sense of obligation,
and raises the inevitable question, How are we to live et cetera,
since "we can't avoid the void."
"'My God,' man calls out to Himself,
'have mercy on me, I beseech thee, show. me the way

The authoress is distressed by the thought of life squandered so freely,
as if our supplies were boundless.
She is likewise worried by wars, which are, in her perverse opinion,
always lost on both sides,
and by the "authoritorture" (sic!) of some people by others.
Her moralistic intentions glimmer throughout the poem.
They might shine brighter beneath a less naive pen.

Not under this one, alas. Her fundamentally unpersuasive thesis
(that we may well be, in the end, alone
under the sun, all suns that ever shone)
combined with her lackadaisical style (a mixture
of lofty rheton'c and ordinary speech)
forces the question: Whom might this piece convince?
The answer can only be: No one. Q. E. D.

God's World - Poem of the Day

2008-08-04T22:32:30Z

O world, I cannot hold thee close enough!
Thy winds, thy wide grey skies!
Thy mists that roll and rise!
Thy woods this autumn day, that ache and sag
And all but cry with colour! That gaunt crag
To crush! To lift the lean of that black bluff!
World, World, I cannot get thee close enough!

Long have I known a glory in it all,
But never knew I this;
Here such a passion is
As stretcheth me apart, -- Lord, I do fear
Thou'st made the world too beautiful this year;
My soul is all but out of me, -- let fall
No burning leaf; prithee, let no bird call.