Category: Literature

Are you a centrist?

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Not everyone who is protesting is a leftist. Many are simply appalled at the first acts of an out-of-control ego maniac. I think if my mother-law were alive she’d say, “That man swats house flys with a sledge hammer.”

If you are a centrist, I urge you to let your voice be heard, to balance the right wing view that we’re all liberal Commies (or whatever they call us). In any case, and still in the hope of providing some respite, a poem by Danusha Lameris:

Small Kindnesses

I’ve been thinking about the way, when you walk
down a crowded aisle, people pull in their legs
to let you by. Or how strangers still say “bless you”
when someone sneezes, a leftover
from the Bubonic plague. “Don’t die,” we are saying.
And sometimes, when you spill lemons
from your grocery bag, someone else will help you
pick them up. Mostly, we don’t want to harm each other. Continue reading “Are you a centrist?” →

Activism and perspective

Posted on by Meryl in Events, Literature, Poetry

It was great to participate in the Women’s March this past weekend, and I am planning to follow through with Indivisible, going to my senators’ local district offices on Resist Trump Tuesday. If you want to know more about this, check out www.moveon.org/indivisible.

Here are my grandson and daughter-in-law who also marched in Oakland.

But it’s also good to keep it all in perspective. In this I am helped by this little gem by Sara Teasdale:

 There Will Come Small Rains

There will come soft rain and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire,
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree,
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

Continue reading “Activism and perspective” →

James Richardson

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

From a new book, a gift from a friend:interglacial

Little Answer

Light swaying
and straightening, like reeds. It has been
everywhere. The waves
sidling up the shore are strung with it.
If I bend I will spill
a great blaze.

Gulls, the cry
of nights  hung out to whiten.  Sand,
what of the sun has slowed. Wind,
what has already happened
remembering us. There is no such thing
as solitude, though we
are what comes of it.

from Reservations, selected in Interglacial

Poem mystery

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I came across this poem in a book of essays on poetry and read it first, without knowing who wrote it. I was very surprised by the author. Can any of you poets out there guess?

Next Day

Moving from Cheer to Joy, from Joy to All
I take a box
And add it to my wild rice, my Cornish game hens.
The slacked or shorted, basketed, identical
Food-gathering flocks
Are selves I overlook. Wisdom, said William James,

Is learning what to overlook. And I am wise
If that is wisdom.
Yet somehow, as I buy All from these shelves
And the boy takes it to my station wagon,
What I’ve become
Troubles me even if I shut my eyes.

When I was young and miserable and pretty
And poor, I’d wish
What all girls wish: to have a husband,
A house and children. Now that I’m old, my wish
Is womanish:
That the boy putting groceries in my car

See me. It bewilders me he doesn’t see me.
For so many years
I was good enough to eat: the world looked at me
And its mouth watered. How often they have undressed me,
The eyes of strangers!
And, holding their flesh within my flesh, their vile

Imaginings within my imagining,
I too have taken
The chance of life. Now the boy pats my dog
And we start home. Now I am good.
The last mistaken,
Ecstatic, accidental bliss, the blind

Happiness that, bursting, leaves upon the palm
Some soap and water—
It was so long ago, back in some Gay
Twenties, Nineties, I don’t know . . . Today I miss
My lovely daughter
Away at school, my sons away at school,

My husband away at work—I wish for them.
The dog, the maid,
And I go through the sure unvarying days
At home in them. As I look at my life,
I am afraid
Only that it will change, as I am changing:

I am afraid, this morning, of my face.
It looks at me
From the rear-view mirror, with the eyes I hate,
The smile I hate. Its plain, lined look
Of gray discovery
Repeats to me: “You’re old.” That’s all, I’m old.

And yet I’m afraid, as I was at the funeral
I went to yesterday.
My friend’s cold made-up face, granite among its flowers,
Her undressed, operated-on, dressed body
Were my face and body.
As I think of her and I hear her telling me

How young I seem; I am exceptional;
I think of all I have.
But really no one is exceptional,
No one has anything, I’m anybody,
I stand beside my grave
Confused with my life, that is commonplace and solitary.

Author provided later this week

 

 

from The Pigeon Tunnel

Posted on by Meryl in Prose, Uncategorized

Larry is reading The Pigeon Tunnel, a collection of memories by John le Carre. Over breakfast yesterday he read this excerpt to me about the transition from the Soviet Union to Russia, which made me laugh out loud:

…in 1993, criminalized capitalism had seized hold of the failed state like a frenzy and turned it into the Wild East. I was keen to take a look at that new, windy Russia, too. It therefore happened that my two trips straddled the greatest social upheaval in Russian history since the Bolshevik Revolution. And uniquely–if you set aside a coup or two, a few thousand victims of contract killings, gang shootouts, political assassinations, extortion and torture–the transition was, by Russian standard, bloodless.

Monday poem

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

dunnI don’t know why I haven’t posted anything by Stephen Dunn before. He’s a wonderful poet. You might think of this if you happen to be at a tedious holiday party:

Don’t Do That

It was bring-your-own if you wanted anything
hard, so I brought Johnnie Walker Red
along with some resentment I’d held in
for a few weeks, which was not helped
by the sight of little nameless things
pierced with toothpicks on the tables,
or by talk that promised to be nothing
if not small. But I’d consented to come,
and I knew in what part of the house
their animals would be sequestered,
whose company I loved. What else can I say, Continue reading “Monday poem” →

More art, more women

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

Monday in NY, a little rainy but not terribly cold. I am going to see the Agnes Martin exhibit today at the Guggenheim, a museum I have enjoyed since I was a teenager first coming to the city on my own.

I am thinking about all the foremothers, today, the poets, authors, artists who blazed a trail with their creativity, despite the contempt they often encountered. Like Amy Lowell, who was often derided, but wrote, wrote, wrote.

lowellLacquer Prints (by Messenger)

One night
When there was a clear moon,
I sat down
To write a poem
About maple trees.
But the dazzle of moonlight
In the ink
Blinded me,
Continue reading “More art, more women” →

Resuming…

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

I have been too dispirited for my normal blog posts, but life goes on, inexorably.  Here is a poem about this particular time:

limeMediation in an Election Year, 2016

When the house she and her husband
built by hand went up in flames
just after they finished
the intricate panes of the central rose window,
Margaret Sanger, sixth of eleven
children, gave up on things material
and devoted herself to what we call
(because of her) birth control. Antique
methods: the pessary,
a little boric acid, the douche,
imported from Europe. She was jailed
just for saying the words, the idea
“un-American.”

xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxWhat is it to be
“American”? Is it sitting among lime trees
at the garden table of a house borrowed
from a wealthy friend
who summers at Martha’s Vineyard? Continue reading “Resuming…” →

Pinsky

Posted on by Meryl in Poetry

PinskyI took Robert Pinsky’s new book of poems with me on a trip this weekend, but when I came back, I opened his Selected Poems to this, which has the flavor of the cantor in the Jewish service, the singing, incantatory lines that I love:

Biography

Stone wheel that sharpens the blade that mows the grain.
Wheel of the sunflower turning, wheel that turns
The spiral press that squeezes the oil expressed
From grain or olives. Particles turned to mud
On the potter’s wheel that whirls to form the vessel
That holds the oil that drips to cool the blade. Continue reading “Pinsky” →