Poetry 2 – Poems for Class - Universitas...

Poetry 2 – Poems for Class

1

Merry-Go-Round

By Langston Hughes

Where is the Jim Crow section

On this merry-go-round,

Mister, cause I want to ride?

Down South where I come from

White and colored 5

Can't sit side by side.

Down South on the train

There's a Jim Crow car.

On the bus we're put in the back—

But there ain't no back 10

To a merry-go-round!

Where's the horse

For a kid that's black?


2

Lonely Hearts

by Wendy Cope

Can someone make my simple wish come true? Male biker seeks female for touring fun. Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Gay vegetarian whose friends are few, I'm into music, Shakespeare and the sun. 5 Can someone make my simple wish come true?

Executive in search of something new— Perhaps bisexual woman, arty, young. Do you live in North London? Is it you?

Successful, straight and solvent? I am too— 10 Attractive Jewish lady with a son. Can someone make my simple wish come true?

I'm Libran, inexperienced and blue— Need slim, non-smoker, under twenty-one. Do you live in North London? Is it you? 15

Please write (with photo) to Box 152. Who knows where it may lead once we've begun? Can someone make my simple wish come true? Do you live in North London? Is it you?


3

Similar Cases

By Charlotte Perkins Stetson Gilman

There was once a little animal, No bigger than a fox, And on five toes he scampered Over Tertiary rocks. They called him Eohippus, 5 And they called him very small, And they thought him of no value When they thought of him at all; For the lumpish old Dinoceras And Coryphodon so slow 10 Were the heavy aristocracy In days of long ago. Said the little Eohippus, 'I am going to be a horse! And on my middle finger-nails 15 To run my earthly course! I'm going to have a flowing tail! I'm going to have a mane! I'm going to stand fourteen hands high On the psychozoic plain!' 20 The Coryphodon was horrified, The Dinoceras was shocked; And they chased young Eohippus, But he skipped away and mocked. And they laughed enormous laughter, 25 And they groaned enormous groans, And they bade young Eohippus Go view his father's bones. Said they, 'You always were as small And mean as now we see, 30 And that's conclusive evidence That you're always going to be. What! Be a great, tall, handsome beast,


4

With hoofs to gallop on? Why! You'd have to change your nature!' 35 Said the Loxolophodon. They considered him disposed of, And retired with gait serene; That was the way they argued In 'the early Eocene.' 40 There was once an Anthropoidal Ape, Far smarter than the rest, And everything that they could do He always did the best; So they naturally disliked him, 45 And they gave him shoulders cool, And when they had to mention him They said he was a fool. Cried this pretentious Ape one day, 'I'm going to be a Man! 50 And stand upright, and hunt, and fight, And conquer all I can! I'm going to cut down forest trees, To make my houses higher! I'm going to kill the Mastodon! 55 I'm going to make a fire!' Loud screamed the Anthropoidal Apes With laughter wild and gay; They tried to catch that boastful one, But he always got away. 60 So they yelled at him in chorus, Which he minded not a whit; And they pelted him with cocoanuts, Which didn't seem to hit. And then they gave him reasons 65 Which they thought of much avail, To prove how his preposterous Attempt was sure to fail. Said the sages, 'In the first place, The thing cannot be done! 70 And, second, if it could be, It would not be any fun! And, third, and most conclusive, And admitting no reply,


5

You would have to change your nature! 75 We should like to see you try!' They chuckled then triumphantly, These lean and hairy shapes, For these things passed as arguments With the Anthropoidal Apes. 80 There was once a Neolithic Man, An enterprising wight, Who made his chopping implements Unusually bright. Unusually clever he, 85 Unusually brave, And he drew delightful Mammoths On the borders of his cave. To his Neolithic neighbors, Who were startled and surprised, 90 Said he, 'My friends, in course of time, We shall be civilized! We are going to live in cities! We are going to fight in wars! We are going to eat three times a day 95 Without the natural cause! We are going to turn life upside down About a thing called gold! We are going to want the earth, and take As much as we can hold! 100 We are going to wear great piles of stuff Outside our proper skins! We are going to have diseases! And Accomplishments!! And Sins!!!' Then they all rose up in fury 105 Against their boastful friend, For prehistoric patience Cometh quickly to an end. Said one, 'This is chimerical! Utopian! Absurd!' 110 Said another, 'What a stupid life! Too dull, upon my word!' Cried all, 'Before such things can come, You idiotic child,


6

You must alter Human Nature!' 115 And they all sat back and smiled. Thought they, 'An answer to that last It will be hard to find!' It was a clinching argument To the Neolithic Mind! 120


7

What Were They Like? (questions and answers) By Denise Levertov 1) Did the people of Viet Nam use lanterns of stone? 2) Did they hold ceremonies to reverence the opening of buds? 3) Were they inclined to rippling laughter? 5 4) Did they use bone and ivory, jade and silver, for ornament? 5) Had they an epic poem? 6) Did they distinguish between speech and singing? 1) Sir, their light hearts turned to stone. 10 It is not remembered whether in gardens stone lanterns illumined pleasant ways. 2) Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom, but after the children were killed there were no more buds. 15 3) Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth. 4) A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy. All the bones were charred. 5) It is not remembered. Remember, most were peasants; their life 20 was in rice and bamboo. When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies and the water-buffalo stepped surely along terraces, maybe fathers told their sons old tales. When bombs smashed the mirrors 25 there was time only to scream. 6) There is an echo yet, it is said, of their speech which was like a song. It is reported their singing resembled the flight of moths in moonlight. 30 Who can say? It is silent now.


8

Heaven

By Cathy Song

He thinks when we die we’ll go to China.

Think of it—a Chinese heaven

where, except for his blond hair,

the part that belongs to his father,

everyone will look like him. 5

China, that blue flower on the map,

bluer than the sea

his hand must span like a bridge

to reach it.

An octave away. 10

I’ve never seen it.

It’s as if I can’t sing that far.

But look—

on the map, this black dot.

Here is where we live, 15

on the pancake plains

just east of the Rockies,

on the other side of the clouds.

A mile above the sea,

the air is so thin, you can starve on it. 20


9

No bamboo trees

but the alpine equivalent,

reedy aspen with light, fluttering leaves.

Did a boy in Guangzhou dream of this

as his last stop? 25

I’ve heard the trains at night

whistling past our yards,

what we’ve come to own,

the broken fences, the whiny dog, the rattletrap cars.

It’s still the wild west, 30

mean and grubby,

the shootouts and fistfights in the back alley.

With my son the dreamer

and my daughter, who is too young to walk,

I’ve sat in this spot 35

and wondered why here?

Why in this short life,

this town, this creek they call a river?

He had never planned to stay,

the boy who helped to build 40

the railroads for a dollar a day.


10

He had always meant to go back.

When did he finally know

that each mile of track led him further away,

that he would die in his sleep, 45

dispossessed,

having seen Gold Mountain,

the icy wind tunneling through it,

these landlocked, makeshift ghost towns?

It must be in the blood, 50

this notion of returning.

It skipped two generations, lay fallow,

the garden an unmarked grave.

On a spring sweater day

it’s as if we remember him. 55

I call to the children.

We can see the mountains

shimmering blue above the air.

If you look really hard

says my son the dreamer, 60

leaning out from the laundry’s rigging,

the work shirts fluttering like sails,

you can see all the way to heaven.


11

The Gift

By Li-Young Lee

To pull the metal splinter from my palm

my father recited a story in a low voice.

I watched his lovely face and not the blade.

Before the story ended, he’d removed

the iron sliver I thought I’d die from. 5

I can’t remember the tale,

but hear his voice still, a well

of dark water, a prayer.

And I recall his hands,

two measures of tenderness 10

he laid against my face,

the flames of discipline

he raised above my head.

Had you entered that afternoon

you would have thought you saw a man 15

planting something in a boy’s palm,

a silver tear, a tiny flame.

Had you followed that boy


12

you would have arrived here,

where I bend over my wife’s right hand. 20

Look how I shave her thumbnail down

so carefully she feels no pain.

Watch as I lift the splinter out.

I was seven when my father

took my hand like this, 25

and I did not hold that shard

between my fingers and think,

Metal that will bury me,

christen it Little Assassin,

Ore Going Deep for My Heart. 30

And I did not lift up my wound and cry,

Death visited here!

I did what a child does

when he’s given something to keep.

I kissed my father. 35


13

Heritage

by Linda Hogan

From my mother, the antique mirror

where I watch my face take on her lines.

She left me the smell of baking bread

to warm fine hairs in my nostrils,

she left the large white breasts that weigh down 5

my body.

From my father I take his brown eyes,

the plague of locusts that leveled our crops,

they flew in formation like buzzards.

From my uncle the whittled wood 10

that rattles like bones

and is white

and smells like all our old houses

that are no longer there. He was the man

who sang old chants to me, the words 15

my father was told not to remember.

From my grandfather who never spoke

I learned to fear silence.

I learned to kill a snake

when you’re begging for rain. 20

And grandmother, blue-eyed woman

whose skin was brown,

she used snuff.

When her coffee can full of black saliva

spilled on me 25

it was like the brown cloud of grasshoppers

that leveled her fields.


14

It was the brown stain

that covered my white shirt,

my whiteness a shame. 30

That sweet black liquid like the food

she chewed up and spit into my father’s mouth

when he was an infant.

It was the brown earth of Oklahoma

stained with oil. 35

She said tobacco would purge your body of poisons.

It has more medicine than stones and knives

against your enemies.

That tobacco is the dark night that covers me.

She said it is wise to eat the flesh of deer 40

so you will be swift and travel over many miles.

She told me how our tribe has always followed a stick

that pointed west

that pointed east.

From my family I have learned the secrets 45

of never having a home.


15

I am the People, the Mob

by Carl Sandburg

I am the people—the mob—the crowd—the mass. Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me? I am the workingman, the inventor, the maker of the world's food and clothes. I am the audience that witnesses history. The Napoleons come from me 5 and the Lincolns. They die. And then I send forth more Napoleons and Lincolns. I am the seed ground. I am a prairie that will stand for much plowing. Terrible storms pass over me. I forget. The best of me is sucked out and wasted. I forget. Everything but Death comes to me and makes 10 me work and give up what I have. And I forget. Sometimes I growl, shake myself and spatter a few red drops for history to remember. Then—I forget. When I, the People, learn to remember, when I, the People, use the lessons of yesterday and no longer forget who robbed me last year, 15 who played me for a fool—then there will be no speaker in all the world say the name: "The People," with any fleck of a sneer in his voice or any far-off smile of derision. The mob—the crowd—the mass—will arrive then.


16

Storm Warnings

By Adrienne Rich

The glass has been falling all the afternoon, And knowing better than the instrument What winds are walking overhead, what zone Of grey unrest is moving across the land, I leave the book upon a pillowed chair 5 And walk from window to closed window, watching Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting, How with a single purpose time has traveled 10 By secret currents of the undiscerned Into this polar realm. Weather abroad And weather in the heart alike come on Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change 15 Lies all the mastery of elements Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter. Time in the hand is not control of time, Nor shattered fragments of an instrument A proof against the wind; the wind will rise, 20 We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black And set a match to candles sheathed in glass Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine Of weather through the unsealed aperture. 25 This is our sole defense against the season; These are the things we have learned to do Who live in troubled regions.


17

The Dangling Conversation

By Paul Simon

It’s a still-life watercolor Of a now late afternoon As the sun shines through the curtain lace And shadows wash the room And we sit and drink our coffee 5 Couched in our indifference Like shells upon the shore You can hear the ocean roar In the dangling conversation And the superficial sighs 10 The borders of our lives

And you read your Emily Dickinson And I my Robert Frost And we note our places with bookmarkers That measure what we’ve lost 15 Like a poem poorly written We are verses out of rhythm Couplets out of rhyme In syncopated time And the dangling conversation 20 And the superficial sighs Are the borders of our lives

Yes,we speak of thing that matter With words that must be said “Can analysis be worthwhile?” 25 “Is the theatre really dead?” And how the room is softly faded And I only kiss your shadow I cannot feel your hand You’re a stranger now unto me 30 Lost in the dangling conversation And the superficial sighs In the borders of our lives


18

The Young Dead Soldiers Do Not Speak

By Archibald MacLeish

The young dead soldiers do not speak.

Nevertheless, they are heard in the still houses:

who has not heard them?

They have a silence that speaks for them at night

and when the clock counts. 5

They say: We were young. We have died.

Remember us.

They say: We have done what we could

but until it is finished it is not done.

They say: We have given our lives but until it is finished 10

no one can know what our lives gave.

They say: Our deaths are not ours: they are yours,

they will mean what you make them.

They say: Whether our lives and our deaths were for

peace and a new hope or for nothing we cannot say, 15

it is you who must say this.

We leave you our deaths. Give them their meaning.

We were young, they say. We have died; remember us.


19

Still I Rise By Maya Angelou You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? 5 Why are you beset with gloom? 'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, 10 Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops. 15 Weakened by my soulful cries. Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard 'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin' in my own back yard. 20 You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I'll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? 25 Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history's shame I rise 30 Up from a past that's rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear 35 I rise Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear I rise


20

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. 40 I rise I rise I rise.


21

Invictus By William Ernest 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 5 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, 10 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: 15 I am the captain of my soul.


22

Myth

By Muriel Rukeyser Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, 'I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother?' 'You gave the wrong answer,' said the Sphinx. 'But that was what 5 made everything possible,' said Oedipus. 'No,' she said. 'When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about woman.' 'When you say Man,' said Oedipus, 'you include women 10 too. Everyone knows that.' She said, 'That's what you think.'


23

Her Kind

By Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch,

haunting the black air, braver at night;

dreaming evil, I have done my hitch

over the plain houses, light by light:

lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. 5

A woman like that is not a woman, quite.

I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods,

filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,

closets, silks, innumerable goods; 10

fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves:

whining, rearranging the disaligned.

A woman like that is misunderstood.


I have ridden in your cart, driver, 15

waved my nude arms at villages going by,

learning the last bright routes, survivor

where your flames still bite my thigh

and my ribs crack where your wheels wind.

A woman like that is not ashamed to die. 20



24

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, 5

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 10

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, 15

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— 20

I know why the caged bird sings!

Poetry 2 – Poems for Class - Universitas...

Documents

Transcript of Poetry 2 – Poems for Class - Universitas...