Four Poems by Sara Teasdale

From FLAME AND SHADOW, by Sara Teasdale.
The Macmillan Company, New York, 1920.

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THERE WILL COME SOFT RAINS (War Time),
by Sara Teasdale.

There will come soft rains 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.

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DRIFTWOOD,
by Sara Teasdale.

My forefathers gave me
My spirit's shaken flame,
The shape of hands, the beat of heart,
The letters of my name.

But it was my lovers,
And not my sleeping sires,
Who gave the flame its changeful
And iridescent fires;

As the driftwood burning
Learned its jewelled blaze
From the sea's blue splendor
Of colored nights and days.

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AUGUST MOONRISE,
by Sara Teasdale.

The sun was gone, and the moon was coming
Over the blue Connecticut hills;
The west was rosy, the east was flushed,
And over my head the swallows rushed
This way and that, with changeful wills.
I heard them twitter and watched them dart
Now together and now apart
Like dark petals blown from a tree;
The maples stamped against the west
Were black and stately and full of rest,
And the hazy orange moon grew up
And slowly changed to yellow gold
While the hills were darkened, fold on fold
To a deeper blue than a flower could hold.
Down the hill I went, and then
I forgot the ways of men,
For night-scents, heady, and damp and cool
Wakened ecstasy in me
On the brink of a shining pool.

O Beauty, out of many a cup
You have made me drunk and wild
Ever since I was a child,
But when have I been sure as now
That no bitterness can bend
And no sorrow wholly bow
One who loves you to the end?
And though I must give my breath
And my laughter all to death,
And my eyes through which joy came,
And my heart, a wavering flame;
If all must leave me and go back
Along a blind and fearful track
So that you can make anew,
Fusing with intenser fire,
Something nearer your desire;
If my soul must go alone
Through a cold infinity,
Or even if it vanish, too,
Beauty, I have worshipped you.

Let this single hour atone
For the theft of all of me.

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THE STORM,
by Sara Teasdale.

I thought of you when I was wakened
By a wind that made me glad and afraid
Of the rushing, pouring sound of the sea
That the great trees made.

One thought in my mind went over and over
While the darkness shook and the leaves were thinned --
I thought it was you who had come to find me,
You were the wind.

Four Poems by Edwin Markham

From THE MAN WITH THE HOE, AND OTHER POEMS, by Edwin Markham.
Doubleday & McClure Company, New York, 1899.

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THE WHARF OF DREAMS,
by Edwin Markham.

Strange wares are handled on the wharves of sleep:
Shadows of shadows pass, and many a light
Flashes a signal fire across the night;
Barges depart whose voiceless steersmen keep
Their way without a star upon the deep;
And from lost ships, homing with ghostly crews,
Come cries of incommunicable news,
While cargoes pile the piers, a moon-white heap --

Budgets of dream-dust, merchandise of song,
Wreckage of hope and packs of ancient wrong,
Nepenthes gathered from a secret strand,
Fardels of heartache, burdens of old sins,
Luggage sent down from dim ancestral inns,
And bales of fantasy from No-Man's Land.

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AFTER READING SHAKESPERE,
by Edwin Markham.

Blithe fancy lightly builds with airy hands
Or on the edges of the darkness peers,
Breathless and frightened at the Voice she hears:
Imagination (lo! the sky expands)
Travels the blue arch and Cimmerian sands,--
Homeless on earth, the pilgrim of the spheres,
The rush of light before the hurrying years,
The Voice that cries in unfamiliar lands.

Men weigh the moons that flood with eerie light
The dusky vales of Saturn -- wood and stream;
But who shall follow on the awful sweep
Of Neptune through the dim and dreadful deep?
Onward he wanders in the unknown night,
And we are shadows moving in a dream.

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THE LAST FURROW,
by Edwin Markham.

The Spirit of Earth, with still restoring hands,
'Mid ruin moves, in glimmering chasm gropes,
And mosses mantle and the bright flower opes;
But Death the Ploughman wanders in all lands,
And to the last of Earth his furrow stands.
The grave is never hidden; fearful hopes
Follow the dead upon the fading slopes,
And there wild memories meet upon the sands.

When willows fling their banners to the plain,
When rumor of winds and sound of sudden showers
Disturb the dream of winter -- all in vain
The grasses hurry to the graves, the flowers
Toss their wild torches on their windy towers;
Yet are the bleak graves lonely in the rain.

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A LOOK INTO THE GULF,
by Edwin Markham.

I looked one night, and there Semiramis,
With all her mourning doves about her head,
Sat rocking on an ancient road of Hell,
Withered and eyeless, chanting to the moon
Snatches of song they sang to her of old
Upon the lighted roofs of Nineveh.
And then her voice rang out with rattling laugh:
"The bugles! they are crying back again --
Bugles that broke the nights of Babylon,
And then went crying on through Nineveh.
. . . . . . .
Stand back, ye trembling messengers of ill!
Women, let go my hair: I am the Queen,
A whirlwind and a blaze of swords to quell
Insurgent cities. Let the iron tread
Of armies shake the earth. Look, lofty towers:
Assyria goes by upon the wind!"
And so she babbles by the ancient road,
While cities turned to dust upon the Earth
Rise through her whirling brain to live again --
Babbles all night, and when her voice is dead
Her weary lips beat on without a sound.

Four Poems by Robert Gittings

From COLLECTED POEMS, by Robert Gittings.
Heinemann, London, 1976.

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CAT,
by Robert Gittings.

My old cat stretches out his arm,
To say, 'I and You'.
He thinks the future threatens harm;
I feel it too.
The flexing paw to reassure
Myself and creature
Asserts, in feline comfiture,
Our frail, shared nature.

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FAIRY TALE,
by Robert Gittings.

If by white magic I could snatch a wand
To catch three choices from a fairy tale,
I would not, like the first two brothers, fail
Greedily: but as the fortunate third I'd stand,
Simple, blue-eyed, and Scandinavian blond,
To ask the obvious: that no evil assail
My darling: that she sleep: that she wake well
To find whoever she then loves best at hand.
If that one should be I, I'd stay till death.
If not, and knowing Not might be the word,
Take my luck, knapsacked on my travelling back,
Happy to carry a quarter-century's breath,
In which to memorize all I ever heard
From you, of you, about you, and for your sake.

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SPARROW,
by Robert Gittings.

I pulled the sparrow's nest ravelling down with the ivy
That clawed my wall; less than half-made; he'll build
Another, I thought. But look, this little fury
With a beak attacks my window. Day and night
He hammers protest; he's cracked a pane. The life
Within a life, how it squanders itself at a wrong,
Even if the world never knew the wrong was done,
Or even, half-guilty, covered its face and turned.

So this small fledged prehistoric, tapping its flint
At a heartless glazed-in god, reminds me of
The limitless rages that we have learnt to still: --
Outwardly: but they shudder within; they take on
The heart-valves and the very pulse; they rule
How we live, dictate how we suddenly die.

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KEEPING WATCH,
by Robert Gittings.

My father's gunmetal watch has gone with me
To hospital. When as a houseman he walked
The wards of the London or the Middlesex
He carried this watch. No bleeper kept in touch
The silver doctor as they called him then --
His fine and flaxen hair that I inherit
Just as I do this watch -- though not his fine
Conscience and skill he carried all his life.
The watch is sound as well: a splintered face,
But telling true. I hear it tick along
My own left side, twin reassurance as
It once lay smooth and warm in his cupped hand,
Steadily taking the pulse or timing thermometer.
I put my own hand on it, till the last minute
They take me down for surgery. It will still
Be going when they bring me back, I know,
The silver doctor's standby, keeping watch.

Blazzird: A Noun for April

Our word for today is:

BLAZZIRD.

This Arabic noun depicts the howling, gusting impact of an April snowstorm, along with its attendant rampaging hordes of mutated polar bears, and its gory incursions of savage Arctic werewolves.

Idiomatic examples of BLAZZIRD within a sentence:

"My herds of wildebeest have been crushed beneath advancing glacier juggernauts of this accursed BLAZZIRD."

"I have already noted 527 somatic abnormalities in the passing throng of hideous Arctic monsters, and this within a mere few minutes of the newly-arrived devastations wrought by this maelstromic BLAZZIRD."

"The local shops have all run out of cake frosting and salted crackers, and in consequence, no force of human will nor of nature shall preserve us from the depredations of this BLAZZIRD."

BLAZZIRD. A graceful noun. A relevant noun. Use it with confidence!

As the Biden administration, France, Germany, and the UK scoff at the International Court of Justice....

Nowadays I am consumed by seething anger, by an almost paralyzing rage, and the only idea that allows me to sit back and to breathe is the realization that so much of the world feels exactly as I do.

My absolute hatred for the dishonesty, hypocrisy, spineless cowardice and parasitical complicity of our Western politicians, our Western corporate media, our Western institutions, is echoed and reflected by the testimony online from people all over the world that they, too, are appalled; they, too, can see, with a non-tribal clarity, that the West has lost whatever moral authority or gravitas it might once have had; that they, too, can recognize the evil of proxy wars, of endless bombings, of genocide.

As the West falls apart from its own internal contradictions, I have to wonder if this might not be for the best. Perhaps our time has come and gone; perhaps we are no longer of any use to the planet and its peoples. Yet I maintain, and believe to my core, that so much of what the Western world created, that so many of its ideals and aspirations, were fundamentally good, and remain beautiful. I can only hope that whoever follows us will respect the best of what we did, and forgive us for the worst.