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Archive for the ‘Poems’ Category

Not really funny but . . .

Posted in Charles Simic, What the Gypsies, tagged , , , , , , , on November 9, 2018| 4 Comments »

poem is next to fountain soda

 

What the Gypsies told My Grandmother While She Was Still a Young Girl

by Charles Simic

 

War, illness and famine will make you their favourite grandchild.

You’ll be like a blind person watching a silent movie.

You’ll chop onions and pieces of your heart

into the same hot skillet.

Your children will sleep in a suitcase tied with a rope.

Your husband will kiss your breasts every night

as if they were two gravestones.

 

 

Already the crows are grooming themselves

for you and your people.

Your oldest son will lie with flies on his lips

without smiling or lifting his hand.

You’ll envy every ant you meet in your life

and every roadside weed.

Your body and soul will sit on separate stoops

chewing the same piece of gum.

 

 

Little cutie, are you for sale? the devil will say.

The undertaker will buy a toy for your grandson.

Your mind will be a hornet’s nest even on your

deathbed.

You will pray to God but God will hang a sign

that He’s not to be disturbed.

Question no further, that’s all I know.

 

 

A gypsy curse seems old world, from another time. But go down the rabbit hole of Twitter or online commentary to newspaper editorials and you’ll quickly realize the curse is alive and well. Poet Charles Simic is just loads funnier and more clever than any modern-day digital gypsy.

 

But maybe you don’t think this poem is funny. Maybe that first line is too real for half the world’s population. Maybe you’re so overwhelmed with the divisiveness of one side spewing hatred on the other side that you don’t see the humor in lines like these—

 

your husband will kiss your breasts every night

as if they were gravestones.

 

Sue me, I do (and I say that as someone who actually has two gravestones on my chest, having had a bilateral mastectomy and reconstruction years ago). There’s something to be said for exaggerating ugliness and fears till they become ridiculous. It’s what fairy tales do, the real ones, the old un-rewritten ones, the scary, violent, disturbing ones that allow children to work out the dark edges of their subconscious. (I’m not going to get into the whole psychology of it, but link here for an old review of Bruno Bettelheim’s Uses of Enchantment, summarized so well by John Updike.)

 

Curses of course are standard fare in fairy tales and ghost stories and as old as Adam and Eve. Maybe inventing curses or giving credence to them is how we try to exercise control over horrific realities. Maybe curses are necessary foils to bring out the beauty of blessings. Or maybe curses are just expressions of creativity, fun exercises of the imagination, the way my mother used to put us to bed. She would stand half in, half out of the door and say in a low growly voice, “May your bed be as hard as nails” and “May snakes crawl out from under your bed” and other things about insects crawling over our faces. We loved it and begged her to keep going and never lost a moment’s sleep over those snakes.

 

That was another time, I guess, a time when kids didn’t have to worry about getting shot up at school.

 

I didn’t want to leave “What the Gypsies etc.” in a spot where someone might take it to heart, so I left the poem at the airport for a bored passenger to read instead of a screen.

 

doesn’t Simic look like a Bond villain?

Here’s Simic’s biography from a previous post. It strikes me now that the facts of his life go a long way towards explaining his twisted sensibility.

 

 

Charles Simic was born in Yugoslavia in 1938.  During WWII, his family was evacuated from place to place to escape bombing.  “My travel agents were Hitler and Stalin,” he jokes.  His father left to find work in Italy and was imprisoned instead.  After the war Simic and his mother and brother were briefly imprisoned by Communist authorities.  Eventually they were able to leave Yugoslavia for Paris, then New York, where the family was reunited with Simic’s father after ten years. Simic took night classes in Chicago and then moved to New York where he worked a number of odd jobs.  He served in the army in the early sixties, and arriving back in New York, earned a degree from New York University.

 

Simic has taught at the University of New Hampshire for nearly forty years.  He was named the Poet Laureate of the United States in 2007, won the Pulitzer Prize, and received a MacArthur Genius Grant, and remains one of our most popular American poets with readers and critics alike.  Quite a feat for a poet who didn’t speak English till he was fifteen.

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Cavafy at the wedding

Posted in C. P. Cavafy, Song of the Heart, tagged , , , , , , , , , on August 23, 2018| 3 Comments »

poem is leaning against veil on bench

 

Song of the Heart

by Cavafy

 

With you, I think, all that is pleasant smiles on me,

in the mirror of your eyes there is reflected joy.

Stay, my light, and still I have not told you even half

of all that presses down upon my heart so amorous,

that rushes to my lips with just a single look from you.

If you wish it, do not speak to me, or say enchanting

words of love and adoration. ‘Tis enough that you’re nearby,

that I tell you that I want you, that I’m near you, that the morning

dew that you breathe in, I breathe in, too; and if you find

that these too are excessive, ‘tis enough I merely see you!

 

 

A few hours before the bride donned this stunning dress, I snuck into her room with “Song of the Heart.” Then I worried. First that somehow the ink from my green Poem Elf stamp would stain the veil, and second that the bride might view the gesture as creepy, her prurient aunt trying to stoke the marital fires with a poem equal parts smoldering and romantic. I was like those old ladies at bridal showers of yore, holding up peignoir sets and lacy teddies, exclaiming to all with a laugh and a knowing wink, “Oh, won’t he enjoy these!” Forgive us old aunties. We love young love.

 

Anyway I needn’t have worried. The bride loved the poem and thought it “a perfect match” for her own perfect match. Indeed it was, even though she and her husband are private people not given to public displays, a couple whose emotions are less likely to be announced than unmasked by flushing cheeks and small grins.

 

But they couldn’t hold back on their wedding day, the glow, the big smiles, the “reflected joy” in the mirror of their eyes, the affectionate touching whenever the other was near. This overflowing of love from a couple who have known each other since their teenage years was a living, breathing exhibition of Cavafy’s words.

 

What I love about this love poem is that side-by-side with the passion—all that breathing and feelings pressing down and words rushing to the lips—is a courtliness. The lover is sweetly considerate of the beloved. The speaker says he’ll speak if you wish it, and if you find these too are excessive, he’ll back off. So polite for a passionate outpouring. This is no gather ye rosebuds while ye may seduction. This lover says, it’s enough to just breathe the same air as you.

 

I can only imagine how beautiful this poem is in the original Greek.

 

There’s a postscript to “Cavafy at the wedding.” After the reception, those die-hard celebrators among us carried on at a bar, and there I met a young man on his way to Ireland to get his masters in literature. We talked about his very particular literary taste—Shelly but not Eliot, a little Yeats but not all—and I showed him the picture on my phone of the Cavafy poem. He knew Cavafy and had read the poem before. I was impressed. No doubt the pretty young woman next to him was impressed as well. He expanded the screen to highlight a particular line. “Right there,” he said, pointing. “That’s it.” I wish I could remember which line it was that was it.

 

But which line doesn’t matter. What matters is the reach, over a hundred years later and thousands and thousands of miles away, of one poet’s words on strangers in a bar late one night, on lovers on their honeymoon, on who knows who else who reads this poem right here and now and remembers a beloved, and feels the beam of passion, the glow of love, who matches Cavafy’s song of the heart with his own.

 

Us old aunties. We’re hopeless romantics.

 

I’ve written about Cavafy before and will re-print his biography here. (Link here for the full post with another great Cavafy poem.)

 

Constantine Petrou Cavafy is Greece’s most highly esteemed modern poet even though he lived only briefly in Greece. He was born in 1863 in Egypt to Greek parents, the youngest of nine children.  After the death of his father, the family fell into poverty and moved to England. There he spent most of his childhood. More financial distress pulled the family to Greece, then back to Egypt, where Cavafy worked as a journalist and as a stockbroker. But the bulk of his professional life was spent at a government agency.

 

Cavafy was never famous in his lifetime and didn’t seem interested in pursuing recognition. He printed his poems in pamphlets which he distributed to his friends. His lack of interest in publication may have been because some of his poems dealt frankly with his homosexuality and erotic themes. He died at age seventy in 1933.

 

 

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The encouragement of saddles and buttonholes

Posted in Always Begin Where You Are, Famous, Naomi Shihab Nye, Thomas Hornsby Ferril, tagged , , , , , on July 10, 2018| 6 Comments »

A few days ago I placed two poems of encouragement in a pretty park in northern Michigan. I was thinking about the cave rescue of the Thai boys’ soccer team (just underway as I posted), but I was also thinking about all the dis’s in the world—the disheartened, the dispirited, the discouraged, the distracted—anyone in need of a boost, a push, a shot in the arm, a pep talk.

 

I myself am a lover of pep talks. Especially the poetry-style pep talks below.

 

poem is on sign, below the “O” of Information

 

Always Begin Where You Are

by Thomas Hornsby Ferril

 

Always begin right where you are

And work out from here:

If adrift, feel the feel of the oar in the oarlock first,

If saddling a horse let your right knee slug

The belly of the horse like an uppercut,

Then cinch his suck,

Then mount and ride away

To any dream deserving the sensible world.

 

The change from the title to the first line (“begin where you are” to “begin right where you are”) is encouragement itself. No need to position yourself, prepare or wait for the best time. Begin right where you are. In modern parlance, Just Do It.

 

But there’s a caveat. In poet Thomas Hornsby Ferril’s world you can’t just do any old dream that comes into your head. The images of rowing a boat and saddling a horse point towards pursuit of a realistic dream, a dream “deserving of the sensible world.” The Debbie Downer in me just loves that line. (I suspect I am not the only  Debbie Downer who loves a good pep talk.)

 

Ferril’s horse terminology was unfamiliar to me, so I looked it up. Cinch his suck, I discovered, has to do with tightening the saddle on a horse. Horses suck in air when the saddle is first put on, and once they run around and exhale, the saddle is too loose and has to be tightened.

 

Thomas Hornsby Ferril (1986-1988) was born in Denver and lived out his very long life there, eventually becoming poet laureate of his home state. His poems can be found in the Colorado capitol building, poem fragments engraved under each of eight murals in the rotunda.

 

Ferril published six volumes of poetry and a collection of essays. He worked as publicity director for the Great Western Sugar Company for forty years, and he and his wife published the Rocky Mountain Herald for over thirty years. His daughter Anne was an artist and illustrator.

 

Carl Sandburg was a friend of Ferril’s and frequent visitor to his house (now an historic landmark). Sandburg said Ferril’s poems were “terrifically and beautifully American.” Even so, Ferril was not well known outside of the Rocky Mountain region in his lifetime, and sadly that still seems the case today.

 

 

poem is on middle post of pavilion

 

Famous

by Naomi Shihab Nye

 

The river is famous to the fish.

 

The loud voice is famous to silence,

which knew it would inherit the earth

before anybody said so.

 

The cat sleeping on the fence is famous to the birds

watching him from the birdhouse.

 

The tear is famous, briefly, to the cheek.

 

The idea you carry close to your bosom

is famous to your bosom.

 

The boot is famous to the earth,

more famous than the dress shoe,

which is famous only to floors.

 

The bent photograph is famous to the one who carries it

and not at all famous to the one who is pictured.

 

I want to be famous to shuffling men

who smile while crossing streets,

sticky children in grocery lines,

famous as the one who smiled back.

 

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,

but because it never forgot what it could do.

 

Shihab Nye’s poem “Famous” is the antidote to fame, at least our current cultural obsession with it. At the risk of sounding like an old lady crabbing about Those Young People, it seems to me that too many young people seek fame as the only way to validate their lives. All you have to do is post a viral video on Instagram and ta-dah, you’re famous! But of course it isn’t so easy for most, and that creates a situation ripe for discouragement, what with all that anxiety about one’s place in the world and confusion about one’s purpose in life.

 

Maybe these lines could be handed out with every diploma:

 

I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,  

or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,  

but because it never forgot what it could do.

 

Reminds me of what the nuns used to tell us in grade school, that we each had a special talent and we were to use that talent to give honor and glory to God. Even if our only talent was sweeping a floor, we were to sweep the floor the very best we could. In doing even a lowly task well, we would achieve something good and holy.

 

Naomi Shihab Nye, a favorite of mine, has been featured more than once at Poem Elf. I’ll re-post her bio from previous posts.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in 1952 in St. Louis and identifies as an Arab-American. Her father was a Palestinian refugee and her mother American. During high school she lived for some time with her grandmother in Jerusalem and in San Antonio.

She’s written several books of poetry, children’s books, songs and novels. She has traveled for the U.S. Information Agency on goodwill tours. Her anthology for teens, The Space Between Our Footsteps, is a beautiful collection of paintings and poems from the Middle East. After 9/11, she spoke out against terrorism and against prejudice, and in 2002 she published a book of new and old poems she had written about the Middle East.

In 2009, PeacebyPeace named her a Peace Hero. I didn’t know such a thing existed, but it’s a wonderful appellation and something we can all aspire to be.

She’s won multiple literary awards, including four Pushcart Prizes. She lives in San Antonio with her photographer husband and son.

You can hear her read here, a “found” poem. Her voice surprised me. I had expected a voice soft and gentle like her face, but she sounds more like your best pal in high school talking too loud the morning after you got drunk together. Gravelly and fun.

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Literal literature litter

Posted in Paul Laurence Dunbar, Sympathy, tagged , , , , , , , on June 8, 2018| 2 Comments »

Sympathy

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

 

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

I know what the caged bird feels!

 

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;

For he must fly back to his perch and cling

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars

And they pulse again with a keener sting—

I know why he beats his wing!

 

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

I know why the caged bird sings!

 

Okay it’s a little literal, putting a poem with the famous line “I know why the caged bird sings” on a cage of birds. I could have left it somewhere that highlights the metaphorical nature of “Sympathy,” say in a book about slavery or taped to a Confederate statue (hard to come by in Michigan), but I yam what I yam, as Popeye would say. Not particularly subtle.

 

This is a poem I thought I was familiar with, probably because the first line of the third stanza is the title of the more famous Maya Angelou autobiography. But reading it, I realized that if in fact I had the poem before I hadn’t felt it. It’s brutal, that bird beating its wings against the bars of its cage till it bleeds. The lovely pastoral vision of the first stanza makes it all the more painful.

 

I’ve always assumed “Sympathy” was about slavery. But I came across this explanation from the Library of Congress website from Dunbar’s wife Alice. (Dunbar worked at the Library of Congress for a time, a job that contributed to his poor health.):

 

 

The iron grating of the book stacks in the Library of Congress suggested to him the bars of the bird’s cage. June and July days are hot. All out of doors called and the trees of the shaded streets of Washington were tantalizingly suggestive of his beloved streams and fields. The torrid sun poured its rays down into the courtyard of the library and heated the iron grilling of the book stacks until they were like prison bars in more senses than one. The dry dust of the dry books (ironic incongruity!–a poet shut up with medical works), rasped sharply in his hot throat, and he understood how the bird felt when it beats its wings against its cage.

 

Of course it would be reductive to say the poem is about working in a dusty basement. Cages are everywhere. Some cages people put themselves in (alcoholism, for example, which Dunbar suffered from), and some cages people are forced into (enslavement, sorry Kanye). Dunbar was familiar with both and the powerful poem speaks to all.

 

Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872-1906) was born in Dayton, Ohio, the child of former slaves. His mother taught him to read when he was four and always encouraged his education. His parents separated when he was a toddler, and his father, who had escaped enslavement before the end of the Civil War and fled to Massachusetts to fight for the Union, died when Dunbar was twelve.

 

Dunbar was the only black student in an all-white high school. It’s amazing to me that in late 19thcentury America such a student could be class president, editor of the class paper and class poet, but he was. He wanted to go to college but had to work to support the family. Prevented from finding a job in the legal or newspaper world because of bigotry, he took a job as an elevator operator (another cage). During this time he self-published his first collection of poems and sold copies for a dollar to people riding on his elevator.

 

Orville Wright was a high school classmate and friend. He and his brother owned a publishing plant and published a black newspaper featuring Dunbar’s poems. Dunbar was also friends with Frederick Douglas and Booker T. Washington.

 

When he was 26 he married schoolteacher and poet Alice Moore. The marriage was unhappy and they would separate after four years. As newlyweds they moved to Washington, D.C. where Dunbar worked for the Library of Congress. When he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, they moved to Colorado for his health. To soothe his coughing fits doctors encouraged him to drink whiskey, which contributed to his alcoholism which in turn hastened his death at the early age of 33.

 

In addition to eleven volumes of poetry, Dunbar wrote novels, essays, short stories, plays and lyrics, notably for the musical comedy “Dahomey,” the first all-black Broadway production. He collaborated with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Anglo-African composer of “Deep River” fame. You can hear one of their pieces here.

 

Dunbar has a genius for constructing memorable phrases. His poem “We Wear the Mask” gives me shivers. Listen here to a punk version. (And if you think I was being literal, check these two jokers out.)

 

Another phrase of his co-opted in popular culture is the “Who Dat” cheer for the New Orleans Saints, originally from his lyrics to the song “Who Dat Chicken in Dis Crowd?” If you want to hear something from the NFL that’s not divisive, Aaron Neville’s mix of the Who Dat cheer with “Saints Go Marching In” accompanied by Saints players is positively infectious.

 

Finally, link here for a lovely Christmas Carol using his poem “Ring Out Ye Bells.”

 

 

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The Shithole Beautification Project

Posted in Bladder Song, Molly Peacock, Nathan Leonard, Smell, tagged , , , , , , on January 15, 2018| 4 Comments »

I left a few poems in shitholes. Real, actual shitholes.

 

At Macy’s. Lip-imprinted toilet paper my own

 

Bladder Song

by Nathan Leonard

 

On a piece of toilet paper

Afloat in the unflushed piss,

The fully printed lips of a woman.

 

Nathan, cheer up! The sewer

Sends you a big red kiss.

Ah, nothing’s wasted, if it’s human.

 

And in a Starbuck’s bathroom—

Smell

by Molly Peacock

 

The smoky smell of menses—Ma always

left the bathroom door open—smote the hall

the way the elephant-house smell dazed

the crowd in the vestibule at the zoo, all

holding their noses yet pushing toward it.

The warm smell of kept blood and the tinny

smell of fresh blood would make any child quit

playing and wander in toward the skinny

feet, bulldog calves, and doe moose flanks planted

on either side of the porcelain bowl

below the blurry mons. The oxblood napkin landed

in the wastecan. The wise eyes of elephants roll

above their flanks, bellies and rag-tear ears

in a permeable enormity of smell’s

majesty and pungency; and benignity. Years

of months roll away what each month tells:

God, what animals we are, huge of haunch

bloody and wise in the stench of bosk.

 

I’ve always appreciated bathroom humor and bathroom stories. Yes, it’s juvenile, but maybe there’s more to it. Maybe what’s at the bottom of my fascination is this, from the penultimate line of Molly Peacock’s “Smell”—

 

God, what animals we are

 

I could go on, I could discuss how shitting is a unifying act, how everyone throughout human history from the beginning of time to now, from the powerful to the lowly, regardless of class, race, religion, sexual orientation, and occupation has to shit on a regular basis, has to see it and smell it and understand that it came from inside the body, how it belongs to each of us.

 

But I’ll end there. Enjoy the poems.

 

Nathan Leonard (1924-2007) was born in California, served in the army and went to UC Berkley on the GI Bill. He earned a PhD in 1961 and taught rhetoric until he retired in his 70’s.

 

I had never heard of Leonard, but he seems to have been a big deal in the literary world. He won many awards including the Guggenheim and was widely published in magazines like the New Yorker, Harpers and The Atlantic. I was interested to learn that he collaborated with Polish writer Czeslaw Milosz and that he translated Polish poets Anna Swir and Aleksander Wat—“Bladder Song” has an Eastern European sensibility to my mind, that touch of dark humor and that effect of speaking from the heart without being maudlin.

 

Relevant to the poem I’ve posted, Poetry Foundation quotes Leonard as follows:

 

“Every poet has one or two compulsive themes. One of mine is how to make things fit together that don’t but should; the other is getting down far enough below a surface to see if something is still worth praising. Over the years and without self-consciously trying, I have moved closer and closer to the human voice in my verse. But I have also tried to keep a quality in it—for lack of a better word I call it eloquence—that makes it more than conversation. My hope is to be clear, true, and good listening.”

 

Leonard and his wife Carol had three children. He died of complications of Alzheimer’s.

 

Poet, biographer, essayist, fiction writer, memoirist, and performer, Molly Peacock is one of those artists whose creativity can’t be contained in any one pursuit.

 

She was born in Buffalo, New York in 1947 to a working class family. Her father was an alcoholic and her home life was turbulent. Early influences include her mother, an avid reader; her grandmother, a farmer, who sent her poems in the mail cut out from the newspaper; and an encouraging seventh grade teacher. The first in her family to go to college, Peacock graduated from SUNY at Binghamton and earned her Masters degree at Johns Hopkins. She taught for eleven years in a Quaker middle school before becoming a full-time poet.

 

She has served as poet-in-residence at many universities, published eight books of poetry, won numerous awards, wrote and performed a one-woman off-Broadway show, and was president of the Poetry Society of America. Her longtime interest in making poetry accessible to a wider audience led her to start the Best Canadian Poetry series, write a book on how to read poetry and start a poetry circle (that’s actually the title of the book), and co-create the Poetry in Motion project, which places poems in subways and buses.

 

Peacock lives in Toronto with her husband, a James Joyce scholar and her one-time high school boyfriend. She returns to New York to teach a seminar at the 92nd Y. She also works with aspiring poets and memoirist apprentice-style, one-on-one, and is known as a generous teacher.

 

 

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Unafraid in 2018

Posted in Invictus, William Ernest Henley, tagged , , , , , , , , , on January 2, 2018| 3 Comments »

 

Invictus

by William Earnest Henley

 

Out of the night that covers me,

Black as the pit from pole to pole,

I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.

 

In the fell clutch of circumstance

I have not winced nor cried aloud.

Under the bludgeonings of chance

My head is bloody, but unbowed.

 

Beyond this place of wrath and tears

Looms but the Horror of the shade,

And yet the menace of the years

Finds and shall find me unafraid.

 

It matters not how strait the gate,

How charged with punishments the scroll,

I am the master of my fate,

I am the captain of my soul.

 

 

“Invictus” is one of those poems that’s familiar even if you’ve never read it. Maybe you’ve heard of the title (which inspired, among other things, a movie about Nelson Mandela, a men’s fragrance, a CrossFit workout, and Prince Harry’s sporting competition for wounded veterans). Certain phrases from the poem have wide circulation—master of my fate, captain of my soul, bloody but unbowed, clutch of circumstance—and whole lines have shown up everywhere from a Winston Churchill speech to a scene from Casablanca to a Lana Del Ray song. You probably even know the poet without knowing the poet (more on that later). So it’s good to see the whole of “Invictus” and understand why it’s had such broad appeal over centuries and continents.

 

As for me, the appeal is limited. I don’t love this poem, but I can’t help but feel roused after reading it. It’s a veritable shot of adrenaline to those on their last legs. Which is actually where the poem came from. From someone on his last leg.

 

At age twelve poet William Earnest Henley (1849-1903) had a leg amputated because of tuberculosis of the bone. In his early twenties doctors wanted to amputate his other leg. But Henley sought out the famous surgeon Joseph Lister (pioneer in preventative medicine, eponym of Listerine) who used antiseptic techniques to save Henley’s remaining limb. While recovering in the hospital for three years, Henley wrote “Invictus,” Latin for “unconquered.”

 

Henley was a magazine editor, critic, playwright and poet. He’s often called the Samuel Johnson of the Victorian era, so striking his influence. The circle of writers he published and befriended included Robert Louise Stevenson, Rudyard Kipling, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, H.G. Wells and W.B. Yeats.

 

A tall, muscular man with a red bushy beard and big personality, Henley was surprisingly agile on his wooden leg and cane. And here’s how you might know him: he was the inspiration for the most famous pirate of all time, Long John Silver from Treasure Island. Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Henley, “I will now make a confession: It was the sight of your maimed strength and masterfulness that begot Long John Silver … the idea of the maimed man, ruling and dreaded by the sound, was entirely taken from you.” …

 

His only child, Margaret Emma, lives on in literature as well. She used to call J.M. Barrie her “fwendy-wendy,” and so the character of Wendy in Peter Pan was born. Margaret Emma died of meningitis at age five.

 

Henley died of complications of tuberculosis at age fifty-three.

 

I left “Invictus” in a co-working site in Detroit. No one took it down for a few days and as far as I know it’s still there. Maybe the poem will inspire confidence in a beleaguered entrepreneur wandering the halls.

 

And for you readers, I hope as much.

 

Be it personal, political, or meteorological, whatever place of wrath and tears you’ve lived through this past year, whatever bludgeoning of chance you’ve faced, here you are, in 2018, unconquered, invictus.

 

Happy New Year.

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Morning surprises

Posted in Breakfast, Ljubomir Simovic, tagged , , , , , , , on December 14, 2017| 1 Comment »

poem is on bottom post

 

Breakfast

by Ljubomir Simovic

 

Didn’t I say last night it will snow?

 

What else would there be but snow?

I no longer wait for the rustle of wings,

or some dove to make my heart leap

and shine its light on me.

 

Snow has hatched in every den and lair

putting out every fire.

The snow: our key and lock.

I woke in my bed as if in another world,

as if in a drift of snow.

The three hills were all white.

 

I put on my cold boots, made a fire,

cut three rashers of bacon into the skillet

by the window where’s starting to snow again.

The bacon sizzles. I break an egg.

In the room the shadows of jackdaws fly to and fro

 

I rejoice because of the egg.

 

 

Last night I took a walk in the snow. The empty streets of my subdivision were quiet and lit with Christmas lights. All is calm all is bright, I sang in my head. Like Simovic I felt “as if in another world.” At least six inches had already collected, and snow was still coming down in blusters when I reached my friend’s house to leave this poem on her side porch. I hoped she’d wake up today to find it, although I don’t have a lot of confidence in the stickiness of scotch tape under snowy conditions.

 

This poem captures so well the surprise of waking up to snow. How is it that Eastern Europeans can speak so openly from the heart without sounding mawkish and overly-sentimental? I love that quality in poetry.

 

I’m sure it’s an even better poem in the original Serbian.

 

Ljubomir Simovic was born in Serbia in 1935. He seems to be a writer-of-all-trades, a poet, a playwright, a television writer and short story writer. That’s as much as I can find out about him because all the info I found wasn’t written in English.

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