marie_a

Bach's B Minor Mass
Robert Bly

The Walgravian ancestors step inside Trinity Church.
The tenors, the horns, the sopranos, the altos
Say: "Do not be troubled. Death will come."

The old basses reach into their long coats
And give bits of old bread to the poor, saying,
"Eat, eat, in the shadow of Jethro's garden."

The German words remind us of the old promise
That the orphans will be fed. The oboes say,
"Oh, that promise is too wonderful for us!"

Don't worry about death. The tidal wave that
Wipes out whole cities is merely the wood thrush
Lifting her wings to catch the morning sun.

We know that God gobbles up the Faithful.
The Harvesters on the sea floor are feeding
All of those ruined by the depth of the sea.

Things go on and on. Even after their tree
Has splintered and fallen in the night, once
Dawn has come, the birds can do nothing but sing.

The Burning of Paper Instead of Children
Adrienne Rich

I was in danger of verbalizing my moral impulses out of existence. --Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore

1.
My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state of
violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and
twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in
the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week,
and has forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The
burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me,
memories of Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the
idea of burning a book."

Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Durer's Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman

the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d'Arc, so blue
I think, It is her color

and they take the book away
because I dream of her too often
love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn

2. To imagine a time of silence
or few words
a time of chemistry and music

the hollows above your buttocks
traced by my hand
or, hair is like flesh, you said

an age of long silence

relief

from this tongue this slab of limestone
or reinforced concrete
fanatics and traders
dumped on this coast wildgreen clayred
that breathed once
in signals of smoke
sweep of the wind

knowledge of the oppressor
this is the oppressor's language

yet I need it to talk to you

3.
People suffer highly in poverty and it takes dignity and intelligence
to overcome this suffering. Some of the suffering are: a child did not
had dinner last night: a child steal because he did not have money to
buy it: to hear a mother say she do not have money to buy food for her
children and to see a child without cloth it will make tears in your
eyes.

(the fracture of order
the repair of speech
to overcome this suffering)

4. We lie under the sheet
after making love, speaking
of loneliness
relieved in a book
relived in a book
so on that page
the clot and fissure
of it appears
words of a man
in pain
a naked word
entering the clot
a hand grasping
through bars:

deliverance

What happens between us
has happened for centuries
we know it from literature

still it happens

sexual jealousy
outflung hand
beating bed

dryness of mouth
after panting

there are books that describe all this
and they are useless

You walk into the woods behind a house
there in that country
you find a temple
built eighteen hundred years ago
you enter without knowing
what it is you enter

so it is with us

no one knows what may happen
though the books tell everything

burn the texts said Artaud

5.
I am composing on the typewriter late at night, thinking of today. How
well we all spoke. A language is a map of our failures. Frederick
Douglass wrote an English purer than Milton's. People suffer highly in
poverty. There are methods but we do not use them. Joan, who could not
read, spoke some peasant form of French. Some of the suffering are: it
is hard to tell the truth; this is America; I cannot touch you now. In
America we have only the present tense. I am in danger. You are in
danger. The burning of a book arouses no sensation in me. I know it
hurts to burn. There are flames of napalm in Catonsville, Maryland. I
know it hurts to burn. The typewriter is overheated, my mouth is
burning. I cannot touch you and this is the oppressor's language.

They Had Torn Off My Face at the Office
Ted Kooser

They had torn off my face at the office.
The night that I finally noticed
that it was not growing back, I decided
to slit my wrists. Nothing ran out;
I was empty. Both of my hands fell off
shortly thereafter. Now at my job
they allow me to type with the stumps.
It pleases them to have helped me,
and I gain in speed and confidence.

Report on Human Beings
Michael Goldman

You know about desks and noses,
proteins, mortgages, orchestras,
nationalities, contraceptives;
you have our ruins and records,
but they won't tell you
what we were like.

We were distinguished
by our intrest in scenery;
we could look at things for hours
without using or breaking them--
and there was a touch of desperation, not to be found
in any other animal,
in the looks of love we directed
at our children.

We were treacherous of course.
Like anything here--
winds, dogs, the sun--
we could turn against you unexpectedly,
we could let you down.
But what was remarkable about us
and which you will not believe
is that we alone,
with the exception of a few pets
who probably learned it from us,
when betrayed
were frequently surprised.

We were one of a million species
who continually cried out
or silently wept with pain.
I am proud that we alone resented
taking part in the chorus.

Yes, some of us
like to cause pain.
Yes, most of us
sometimes
liked to cause pain,
but I am proud that most of us
were ashamed
afterward.

Our love of poetry would have amused you;
we were so proud of language
we thought we invented it
(and thus failed to notice
the speech of the animals,
the birds' repeated warnings,
the whispered intelligence
of mutant cells).

We did invent boredom,
a fruitful state.
It hid the size of our desires.
We were spared many murders,
many religions
because we could say, "I am bored."
A kind of clarity
came when we said it
and we could go to Paris or the movies,
give useful parties, master languages,
rather than sink our teeth in our lover's throat
and shake till things felt right again.

Out of the same pulsing world
you know,
out of gases, whorls,
fronds, feelers, jellies,
we devised hard edges,
strings of infinite tension stretched
to guide us.
The mind's pure snowflake
was our map.
Lines, angles, outlines
not to be found in rocks or seas
or living matter
or in the holes of space,
how strange these shapes must look to you,
at odds with everything,
uncanny, broken from the flow,
I think they must be for you
what we called art.

What was most wonderful about us
was our kindness,
but of this it is impossible to speak.
Only someone who knows our cruelty,
who knows the fears we always lived with,
fear of inside and outside, smooth and rough,
soft and hard, wet and dry, touch and no touch,
only someone who understands the great palace we built
on the axis of time
out of our fear and cruelty and called history,
only those who have lived in the anger
of a great modern city,
who saw the traffic in the morning
and the police at night
can know how heartbreaking
our kindness was.

Let me put it this way.
One of us said, "I think
our life is not as good
as the mind warrants,"
another, "It is hard
to be alone and alive at the same time."
To understand these statements
you would have to be human.

Our destruction as a species
was accidental.
Characteristically
we blamed it on ourselves,
which neither the eagle
nor the dinosaur would do.

Look closely around you,
study our instruments,
scan the night sky.
We were alien.
Nothing in the universe
resembles us.

Dangerous to Know, Even After Death
Patricia Brody

"Mad, bad, and dangerous to know"
— Lady Caroline Lamb's journal entry, on first meeting Lord Byron, 1812

Oh! was it in woman's nature to hear him, and not to cherish every word? It was Glenarvon – that spirit of evil whom she beheld; her soul trembled within, and felt its danger.
— Glenarvon, Lady Caroline Lamb, London, 1816



I've been chilling with these dead people,
not just reading their letters and poems
but going to their balls.

I've been under their clothes
in their skins
sticking to dampened petticoats

and floaty muslin.
I'm at Devonshire House;
Lady Someone is my mother.

At Brocket I'm running through the trees,
a lordly satyr at my heels, his lip
curled, his brow furred, skin agleam,

his hair black as the moors, of course.
"I know not," I say in some confusion,
"but this I believe; the hand of heaven never

impressed on man a countenance
so beautiful . . ." Oh if it falls on me —
"What, is it even so? — Heaven defend us!"

There are parties and morning calls,
dances from Allemagne and Spain
swirling the halls. These most nervous affairs!

Fly me, says the mad corsair.
Deep-drugged in the night
I creep from bed, Lord M. stretched

senseless beside me.
Down through Georgiana's garden
I fall, down to the white hawthorn

as the mist rises from wet petals
and opium swells in syrupy drafts,
I swoon: For God's sake, sherry!

(Sips from Spain revive me.)
And the susurrous leaves will
waken the heat in my reborn thighs.

Over the moonstones I leap, snapping twigs.
Grass clings to my winged soles.
"Do you know what I've done?" sneers he.

"I've heard but I know it is false," I breathe.
"No, I've done what they say," he boasts.
How can I not cry out?

He reaches to crush me into his coat,
his thigh strums through my gown,
I drink his sighs in the moonlight —

broken gasps — Greek and natural;
we are so gone, we are so pale,
and his maimed foot throbs in the soil.

the boys i mean are not refined
e e cummings

The boys i mean are not refined
They go with girls who buck and bite
They do not give a fuck for luck
They hump them thirteen times a night

One hangs a hat upon her tit
One carves a cross on her behind
They do not give a shit for wit
The boys i mean are not refined

They come with girls who bite and buck
Who cannot read and cannot write
Who laugh like they would fall apart
And masturbate with dynamite

The boys i mean are not refined
They cannot chat of that and this
They do not give a fart for art
They kill like you would take a piss

They speak whatever's on their mind
They do whatever's in their pants
The boys i mean are not refined
They shake the mountains when they dance

Somebody's Song
Dorothy Parker

This is what I vow;
He shall have my heart to keep,
Sweetly will we stir and sleep,
All the years, as now.
Swift the measured sands may run;
Love like this is never done;
He and I are welded one:
This is what I vow.

This is what I pray:
Keep him by me tenderly;
Keep him sweet in pride of me,
Ever and a day;
Keep me from the old distress;
Let me, for our happiness,
Be the one to love the less:
This is what I pray.

This is what I know:
Lovers' oaths are thin as rain;
Love's a harbinger of pain-
Would it were not so!
Ever is my heart a-thirst,
Ever is my love accurst;
He is neither last nor first:
This is what I know.

Parable for a Certain Virgin
Dorothy Parker

Oh, ponder, friend, the porcupine;
Refresh your recollection,
And sit a moment, to define
His means of self-protection.

How truly fortified is he!
Where is the beast his double
In forethought of emergency
And readiness for trouble?

Recall his figure, and his shade-
How deftly planned and clearly
For slithering through the dappled glade
Unseen, or pretty nearly.

Yet should an alien eye discern
His presence in the woodland,
How little has he left to learn
Of self-defense! My good land!

For he can run, as swift as sound,
To where his goose may hang high-
Or thrust his head against the ground
And tunnel half to Shanghai;

Or he can climb the dizziest bough-
Unhesitant, mechanic-
And, resting, dash from off his brow
The bitter beads of panic;

Or should pursuers press him hot,
One scarcely needs to mention
His quick and cruel barbs, that got
Shakespearean attention;

Or driven to his final ditch,
To his extremest thicket,
He'll fight with claws and molars (which
Is not considered cricket).

How amply armored, he, to fend
The fear of chase that haunts him!
How well prepared our little friend!-
And who the devil wants him?

We Real Cool
Gwendolyn Brooks


THE POOL PLAYERS.
SEVEN AT THE GOLDEN SHOVEL.

We real cool. We
Left school. We

Lurk late. We
Strike straight. We

Sing sin. We
Thin gin. We

Jazz June. We
Die soon.

The Old Woman
Joseph Campbell


AS a white candle
In a holy place,
So is the beauty
Of an aged face.

As the spent radiance
Of the winter sun,
So is a woman
With her travail done,

Her brood gone from her,
And her thoughts as still
As the waters
Under a ruined mill.