Poem of the Week - Another of the Happiness Poems

This is my favorite poem of the week.  I subscribe to an email and get a daily poem from Poets.org.  It's a really nice thing to find a new (or old) poem waiting for me in my inbox every day.

Another of the Happiness Poems

 by Peter Cooley

It’s not that we’re not dying.
Everything is dying.
We hear these rumors of the planet’s end
none of us will be around to watch.

It’s not that we’re not ugly.
We’re ugly.
Look at your feet, now that your shoes are off.
You could be a duck,

no, duck-billed platypus,
your feet distraction from your ugly nose.
It’s not that we’re not traveling,
we’re traveling.

But it’s not the broadback Mediterranean
carrying us against the world’s current.
It’s the imagined sea, imagined street,
the winged breakers, the waters we confuse with sky

willingly, so someone out there asks
are you flying or swimming?
That someone envies mortal happiness
like everyone on the other side, the dead

who stand in watch, who would give up their bliss,
their low tide eternity rippleless
for one day back here, alive again with us.
They know the sea and sky I’m walking on

or swimming, flying, they know it’s none of these,
this dancing-standing-still, this turning, turning,
these constant transformations of the wind
I can bring down by singing to myself,

the newborn mornings, these continuals—

About This Poem

“I’m weary of the poet-prophets who proclaim what we already know: that we have made a mess of planet earth. I am enough of a romantic to believe that imagination, conceiving of our present and future situation in image and metaphor, may be our first step toward the possibility of change in rethinking national policies.”
—Peter Cooley

I Am Poem found on the kitchen counter

I found this on the kitchen counter tonight. It had been there a week or so along with some of my son's drawings.  I think it was a school assignment from last year that I liked so much that I stuck away only to have it resurface, slightly worse for the wear, under the bowl of oranges. What I can't get into this blog post is the little  trademark symbols after the names "Portal Gun","Assassin's Creed" and "Hidden Blades".   That is just the icing on the cake for me.

Here goes:

I am poem,  James

I am a  snawsome guy who likes creepy pastas
I wonder if we will find intelligent life.
I hear the droning of grass on an ant hill
I see a bird swimming
I want a Portal Gun
I am a snasome guy who likes creepy pastas

I pretend to jump from  buildings into haystacks
I feel Assassin's Creed is awesome
I touch leaves
I worry I won't earn any money
I cry about the fact that Connor died.
I am a snawsome guy who likes creepy pastas.

I understand Assassin's Creed isn't real
I say Hidden Blades are cool.
I dream of Mexican wrestlers punching demons
I try to be better at chores
I hope Hidden Blades will  become real.

poem of the week - Umbrage

UMBRAGE

Taken, given:

friendships riven.                

From shadow or shade,

it instantly puts paid

to hard-won clarities

and causes us to freeze

up with unearned righteousness;

it makes us less.

How much better to combat it.

We should take umbrage at it.

-Ben Downing    

Thank you to Irene Vukovich - I hope you send us poems from the freelance world. 

poem of the week - Truth

TRUTH


Came varnished,
prepackaged, required
scissors to break the seal.
Worn raw from use, reuse
it put up splinters.
I sanded it, wiped it
clear with turpentine.
Liked the look of it
newborn. Thought about
polyurethane, two coats
at least-varnish is old hat.
Rethought the climate:
cutting, quick to punish.
Went out for more varnish.

Maxine Kumin
New Yorker 03/12/12 issue.

Thanks Irene

Poem of the week - Waiting for the Barbarians

Fall is here and so Irene has shared another cool poem - "Waiting for the Barbarians" by Constantine P. Cavafy

-What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
-Why isn't anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What's the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they'll do the legislating.
-Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city's main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor's waiting to receive their leader.
He's even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
-Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
-Why don't our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they're bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
-Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people's faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men who have just returned from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what's going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.

THE TOOTH FAIRY By Andrew Hudgins, from “Shut Up, You’re Fine”

Each time another tooth falls out,
I yearn to learn the truth
About what kind of crazy thief
Swaps cash for my old tooth.

I’d like to catch her by surprise
When she flies near my bed.
If I could hold her in my hands,
I’d squeeze her tiny head
Between my finger and my thumb
And ask her just one time
Why Jason Farber gets a buck.
I only get a dime.

Poem of the week - Atlas by Kay Ryan

I know you have been wondering what poem Irene would share with us today.

Well here it is:

Extreme exertion
isolates a person
from help,
discovered Atlas.
Once a certain
shoulder-to-burden
ratio collapses,
there is so little
others can do:
they can’t
lend a hand
with Brazil
and not stand
on Peru.

America by Tony Hoagland

Another poem introduced to me by Irene:

Then one of the students with blue hair and a tongue stud
Says that America is for him a maximum-security prison

Whose walls are made of RadioShacks and Burger Kings, and MTV episodes
Where you can’t tell the show from the commercials,

And as I consider how to express how full of shit I think he is,
He says that even when he’s driving to the mall in his Isuzu

Trooper with a gang of his friends, letting rap music pour over them
Like a boiling Jacuzzi full of ballpeen hammers, even then he feels

Buried alive, captured and suffocated in the folds
Of the thick satin quilt of America

And I wonder if this is a legitimate category of pain,
or whether he is just spin doctoring a better grade,

And then I remember that when I stabbed my father in the dream last night,
It was not blood but money

That gushed out of him, bright green hundred-dollar bills
Spilling from his wounds, and—this is the weird part—,

He gasped “Thank god—those Ben Franklins were
Clogging up my heart—

And so I perish happily,
Freed from that which kept me from my liberty”—

Which was when I knew it was a dream, since my dad
Would never speak in rhymed couplets,

And I look at the student with his acne and cell phone and phony ghetto clothes
And I think, “I am asleep in America too,

And I don’t know how to wake myself either,”
And I remember what Marx said near the end of his life:

“I was listening to the cries of the past,
When I should have been listening to the cries of the future.”

But how could he have imagined 100 channels of 24-hour cable
Or what kind of nightmare it might be

When each day you watch rivers of bright merchandise run past you
And you are floating in your pleasure boat upon this river

Even while others are drowning underneath you
And you see their faces twisting in the surface of the waters

And yet it seems to be your own hand
Which turns the volume higher?

Poem - Giving Up Smoking by Wendy Cope

There's not a Shakespeare sonnet
Or a Beethoven quartet
That's easier to like than you
Or harder to forget.

You think that sounds extravagant?
I haven't finished yet—
I like you more than I would like
To have a cigarette.

poem of the week - Litany by Billy Collins

I really like this one.  Thanks again to Irene who gives us our weekly spoonful of poetry:

You are the bread and the knife,
the crystal goblet and the wine.
You are the dew on the morning grass
and the burning wheel of the sun.
You are the white apron of the baker
and the marsh birds suddenly in flight.


However, you are not the wind in the orchard,
the plums on the counter,
or the house of cards.
And you are certainly not the pine-scented air.
There is just no way you are the pine-scented air.


It is possible that you are the fish under the bridge,
maybe even the pigeon on the general's head,
but you are not even close
to being the field of cornflowers at dusk.


And a quick look in the mirror will show
that you are neither the boots in the corner
nor the boat asleep in its boathouse.
It might interest you to know,
speaking of the plentiful imagery of the world,
that I am the sound of rain on the roof.


I also happen to be the shooting star,
the evening paper blowing down an alley,
and the basket of chestnuts on the kitchen table.
I am also the moon in the trees
and the blind woman's tea cup.


But don't worry, I am not the bread and the knife.
You are still the bread and the knife.
You will always be the bread and the knife,
not to mention the crystal goblet and—somehow—the wine.

Poem - Not Waving but Drowning by Stevie Smith

Always upbeat, or I mean never upbeat, Irene has shared another poem:

Nobody heard him, the dead man,
But still he lay moaning:
I was much further out than you thought
And not waving but drowning.

Poor chap, he always loved larking
And now he's dead
It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,
They said.

Oh, no no no, it was too cold always
(Still the dead one lay moaning)
I was much too far out all my life
And not waving but drowning.

Stevie Smith

poem of the week - Resume by Dorthy Parker

My friend Irene likes to send me a new poem every week - I'm passing it on..

Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren't lawful;
Nooses give;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.

Dorothy Parker

poem of the week- Icarus by Edward Field

Only the feathers floating around the hat

Showed that anything more spectacular had occurred

Than the usual drowning. The police preferred to ignore

The confusing aspects of the case,

And the witnesses ran off to a gang war.

So the report filed and forgotten in the archives read simply

“Drowned,” but it was wrong: Icarus

Had swum away, coming at last to the city

Where he rented a house and tended the garden.


“That nice Mr. Hicks” the neighbors called,

Never dreaming that the gray, respectable suit

Concealed arms that had controlled huge wings

Nor that those sad, defeated eyes had once

Compelled the sun. And had he told them

They would have answered with a shocked,

uncomprehending stare.

No, he could not disturb their neat front yards;

Yet all his books insisted that this was a horrible mistake:

What was he doing aging in a suburb?

Can the genius of the hero fall

To the middling stature of the merely talented?


And nightly Icarus probes his wound

And daily in his workshop, curtains carefully drawn,

Constructs small wings and tries to fly

To the lighting fixture on the ceiling:

Fails every time and hates himself for trying.

He had thought himself a hero, had acted heroically,

And dreamt of his fall, the tragic fall of the hero;

But now rides commuter trains,


Serves on various committees,

And wishes he had drowned.






Icarus by Edward Field, b. 1924