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Poetry Month, Part 2: “And did you get what/You wanted from this life, even so?/I did./And what did you want?/To call myself beloved, to feel myself/Beloved on this earth.”
By
Published: Apr 20, 2021
Category:
Poetry
Was it only a week ago that I posted Part 1 of the Poetry Month special? So much happened. And one dominant event: the trial of Derek Chauvin. Watching that video again and again: brutal. And the verdict: a swirl of emotions, mostly great sadness. Thirteen words jumped out; for me, it’s the deepest line of the week. Poetry, if you will: “It’s not what I should have done. It’s what he should have done.” There’s video here.
Maggie Smith
In 2015 Maggie Smith sat in a Starbucks in Bexley, Ohio, and wrote a poem on a legal pad. A reader published it on Facebook, a musician shared it on Twitter, celebrities endorsed it. The assassination of British politician Jo Cox produced more readers, and after the election of Donald Trump, it was, with Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise” and W.H. Auden’s “September 1, 1939,” the mostly widely read poem on the planet — it would be called “the poem of 2016.”
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
Mary Oliver
It’s almost impossible to be unfamiliar with her most famous line: “Tell me, what is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?” Do you know this:
Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less
kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle
in the haystack
of light.
Gretl Claggett
Gretl Claggett went on to make a film of this poem. Like all her films, it won awards.
When women laugh at jokes they don’t find funny
and men tell stories only half-true, I recall how,
at his house, my parents and their friends welcomed in the weekends.
How they’d sit by the fireplace wishing
the flame’s ribbons could tie up life’s loose ends. How they’d never
see him lead me from the room and up the stairs,
martini in hand. Olives bobbing like bloodshot eyes. After, cleanup:
a monogrammed handkerchief, the quick zip of pants, he’d slip
a silver dollar into my pocket — Good girl.
Randall Jarrell
You read “The Death of the Ball Turret Gunner” in high school.
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 the 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.
I prefer so many others, but especially these lines, for his wife:
Be, as you have been, my happiness;
Let me sleep beside you, each night, like a spoon;
When, starting from my sleep, I groan to you,
May your “I love you” send me back to sleep.
At morning bring me, grayer for its mirroring,
The heavens’ sun perfected in your eyes.
Raymond Carver
No poet was easier to read. Few were as direct. And in his last book, “A New Path to the Waterfall,” almost all “poetic” devices are replaced by blunt confessions.
And did you get what/You wanted from this life, even so?/I did./And what did you want?/To call myself beloved, to feel myself/Beloved on this earth.
Rumi
Rumi’s story-poems are riddles you can solve. Whatever it cost him to write is hidden. His point is: Here is honey. Taste. Eat.
No matter how fast you run,
your shadow more than keeps up.
Sometimes it’s in front.
Only full, overhead sun diminishes your shadow.
But that shadow has been serving you!
What hurts you, blesses you.
Darkness is your candle.
Your boundaries are your quest.
He saw the Nobel Prize as encouragement to do better — among friends, he spoke of it as “the N-word.” He never forget where he came from.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Under my window, a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground
My father, digging. I look down
Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.
The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
By God, the old man could handle a spade.&
Just like his old man.
My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner’s bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.
The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
Sharon Olds (here and here)
Parents, lovers/husbands, children. Sharon Olds deals with the big topics. At least, the big topics if you have parents, husbands/lovers and kids. And she deals with them so directly, so bluntly, that it may come as a surprise to those who do not know her writing that if you heard her read you might think these are letters, not poems.
I could not tell I had jumped off that bus,
that bus in motion, with my child in my arms,
because I did not know it. I believed my own story:
I had fallen, or the bus had started up
when I had one foot in the air.
I would not remember the tightening of my jaw,
the irk that I’d missed my stop, the step out
into the air, the clear child
gazing about her in the air as I plunged
to one knee on the street, scraped it, twisted it,
the bus skidding to a stop, the driver
jumping out, my daughter laughing
Do it again.
I have never done it
again, I have been very careful.
I have kept an eye on that nice young mother
who lightly leapt
off the moving vehicle
onto the stopped street, her life
in her hands, her life’s life in her hands.
Stanley Kunitz
Stanley Kunitz was 95 when he was named Poet Laureate for the second time. His career was more of a marathon than a sprint. W.H. Auden got it exactly: “It’s strange, but give him time. A hundred years or so. He’s a patient man. He won’t mind waiting.”
Peace! Peace!
To be rocked by the Infinite!
As if it didn’t matter
which way was home;
as if he didn’t know
he loved the earth so much
he wanted to stay forever.
Wislawa Szymborska
This is how she began her Nobel acceptance speech: “They say that the first sentence of any speech is always the hardest. Well, that one’s behind me.”
My nonarrival in the city of N.
took place on the dot.
You’d been alerted
in my unmailed letter.
You were able not to be there
at the agreed-upon time.
The train pulled up at platform 3.
A lot of people got out.
My absence joined the throng
as it made its way toward the exit.
Several women rushed
to take my place
in all that rush.
