Poem of the Day

Sonnet 91

by William Shakespeare

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their body's force;
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill;
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure;
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments' cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men's pride I boast:
      Wretched in this alone, that thou mayst take
      All this away, and me most wretched make.

"Sonnet 91" by William Shakespeare. Public domain.

Happy Birthday Robert Frost

image lifted from here

Acquainted with the Night

by Robert Frost

I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain – and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.
I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.

I have stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,

But not to call me back or say good-bye;
And further still at an unearthly height,
A luminary clock against the sky

Proclaimed the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.

"Acquainted with the Night" by Robert Frost, from The Poetry of Robert Frost. © Holt Rinehart Winston, 1969.

It's the birthday of Robert Frost, (books by this author) born in San Francisco (1874). He cultivated the image of a rural New England poet with a pleasant disposition, but Frost's personal life was full of tragedy and he suffered from dark depressions.

He graduated from high school at the top of his class but dropped out of Dartmouth after a semester and tried to convince his high school co-valedictorian, Elinor White, to marry him immediately. She refused and insisted on finishing college first. They did marry after she graduated, and it was a union that would be filled with losses and feelings of alienation. Their first son died from cholera at age three; Frost blamed himself for not calling a doctor earlier and believed that God was punishing him for it. His health declined, and his wife became depressed. In 1907, they had a daughter who died three days after birth, and a few years later Elinor had a miscarriage. Within a couple years, his sister Jeanie died in a mental hospital, and his daughter Marjorie, of whom he was extremely fond, was hospitalized with tuberculosis. Marjorie died a slow death after getting married and giving birth, and a few years later, Frost's wife died from heart failure. His adult son, Carol, had become increasingly distraught, and Frost went to visit him and to talk him out of suicide. Thinking the crisis had passed, he returned home, and shortly afterward his son shot himself. He also had to commit his daughter Irma to a mental hospital.

His behavior became erratic at times and worried people. He asked the wife of a colleague to marry him and she refused, though did agree to work for him as a secretary and tour manager. President John F. Kennedy would later say of Frost that his "sense of the human tragedy fortified him against self-deception and easy consolation" and that his poetry had a "tide that lifts all spirits." Even during periods of deep depression, he drew large crowds to his immensely popular poetry readings, which he preferred to call poetry "sayings."

He said: "A poem begins with a lump in the throat; a homesickness or a love-sickness. It is a reaching out toward expression, an effort to find fulfillment. A complete poem is one where an emotion has found its thought and the thought has found the word."

And, "A poem begins in delight and ends in wisdom."

And, "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."

And, "In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on."

text lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

Notes from the Delivery Room

by Linda Pastan

Strapped down,
victim in an old comic book,
I have been here before,
this place where pain winces
off the walls
like too bright light.
Bear down a doctor says,
foreman to sweating laborer,
but this work, this forcing
of one life from another
is something that I signed for
at a moment when I would have signed anything.
Babies should grow in fields;
common as beets or turnips
they should be picked and held
root end up, soil spilling
from between their toes—
and how much easier it would be later,
returning them to earth.
Bear up ... bear down ... the audience
grows restive, and I'm a new magician
who can't produce the rabbit
from my swollen hat.
She's crowning, someone says,
but there is no one royal here,
just me, quite barefoot,
greeting my barefoot child.

"Notes from the Delivery Room" by Linda Pastan, from Carnival Evening: New and Selected Poems 1968-1998. © W. W. Norton & Company, 1999.

lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

I woke up this morning and these two guys were asleep at my feet. My precious little boys, I love them so.

exactly right

by Charles Bukowski

the strays keep arriving: now we have 5
cats and they are smart, spontaneous, self-
absorbed, naturally poised and awesomely
beautiful.

one of the finest things about cats is
that when you're feeling down, very down,
if you just look at the cat at rest,
at the way they sit or lie and wait,
it's a grand lesson in preserving
and
if you watch 5 cats at once that's 5
times better.

no matter the extra demands they make
no matter the heavy sacks of food
no matter the dozens of cans of tuna
from the supermarket: it's all just fuel for their
amazing dignity and their
affirmation of a vital
live
we humans can
only envy and
admire from
afar.

"exactly right" by Charles Bukowski, from The Night Torn with Mad Footsteps: New Poems. © Black Sparrow Press, 2001.

Lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

For anyone who ever worked in a coffee shop, or stood in line beside someone talking on a Bluetooth and holding up one finger to suggest to the Barrista that he should wait to take the order... This is why at the bakery we have serve yourself straight up coffee independent of the espresso machine, and why Starbucks should have 2 lines, one marked PITA and one marked Cup Of Coffee.



Your Punishment in Hell

by Gary Leising

Someone will douse a cobra in gasoline,
light the sucker, and shove it headfirst
down your throat. It'll speed straight
through your esophagus, unfurl
its hood to fill your stomach
then begin to strike and strike and strike
and strike and strike: fangs pierce
your stomach, venom pours in,
the little burn of incipient ulcers
grows quick, paralysis sets in.
Your lungs stop before your brain,
before your hand, which lifts
to your mouth the plastic-lidded
paper cup holding the caramel
macchiato cappuccino with a double
shot of espresso and frothed soy milk
topped with two shakes of cinnamon
and no, NO (yes, you said no twice)
sugar that was made for you
slowly, while I, already running late,
waited behind you for a simple,
already-made black coffee.
You will lose all motion before
that drink reaches your mouth,
but you recover and the drink,
strangely, has vanished, and barrista
and cobra-douser-slash-lighter do it all again
and again. I know this because,
for my angry impatience,
I am behind you in line in hell
forever, the pot of black coffee
behind the counter steaming,
turning, I know, bitter.

"Your Punishment in Hell" by Gary Leising from Fastened to a Dying Animal. © Pudding House Press, 2010.
Lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

Perhaps the World Ends Here

by Joy Harjo

The world begins at a kitchen table. No matter what,
we must eat to live.
The gifts of earth are brought and prepared, set on the
table so it has been since creation, and it will go on.
We chase chickens or dogs away from it. Babies teethe
at the corners. They scrape their knees under it.
It is here that children are given instructions on what
it means to be human. We make men at it,
we make women.
At this table we gossip, recall enemies and the ghosts
of lovers.
Our dreams drink coffee with us as they put their arms
around our children. They laugh with us at our poor
falling-down selves and as we put ourselves back
together once again at the table.
This table has been a house in the rain, an umbrella
in the sun.
Wars have begun and ended at this table. It is a place
to hide in the shadow of terror. A place to celebrate
the terrible victory.
We have given birth on this table, and have prepared
our parents for burial here.
At this table we sing with joy, with sorrow.
We pray of suffering and remorse.
We give thanks.
Perhaps the world will end at the kitchen table,
while we are laughing and crying,
eating of the last sweet bite.

"Perhaps the World Ends Here" by Joy Harjo, from Reinventing the Enemy's Language. © W.W. Norton and Co., 1998.

lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

Just to Feel Human

by James Tate

A single apple grew on our tree, which
was some kind of miracle because it was a
pear tree. We walked around it scratching
our heads. "You want to eat it?" I asked
my wife. "I'd die first," she replied. We
went back into the house. I stood by the
kitchen window and stared at it. I thought
of Adam and Eve, but I didn't believe in Adam
and Eve. My wife said, "If you don't stop
staring at that stupid apple I'm going to go
out there and eat it." "So go," I said, "but
take your clothes off first, go naked." She
looked at me as if I were insane, and then
she started to undress, and so did I.

"Just to Feel Human" by James Tate, from Memoir of the Hawk. © The Ecco Press, 2001

lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

Starfish

by Eleanor Lerman

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night
the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

Life lets you take the dog for a walk down to the
pond, where whole generations of biological
processes are boiling beneath the mud. Reeds
speak to you of the natural world: they whisper,
they sing. And herons pass by. Are you old
enough to appreciate the moment? Too old?
There is movement beneath the water, but it
may be nothing. There may be nothing going on.

And then life suggests that you remember the
years you ran around, the years you developed
a shocking lifestyle, advocated careless abandon,
owned a chilly heart. Upon reflection, you are
genuinely surprised to find how quiet you have
become. And then life lets you go home to think
about all this. Which you do, for quite a long time.

Later, you wake up beside your old love, the one
who never had any conditions, the one who waited
you out. This is life's way of letting you know that
you are lucky. (It won't give you smart or brave,
so you'll have to settle for lucky.) Because you
stopped when you should have started again.

So life lets you have a sandwich, and pie for your
late night dessert. (Pie for the dog, as well.) And
then life sends you back to bed, to dreamland,
while outside, the starfish drift through the channel,
with smiles on their starry faces as they head
out to deep water, to the far and boundless sea.

"Starfish" by Eleanor Lerman, from Our Post-Soviet History Unfolds. © Sarabande Books, 2005.

Poem of the Day

Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length by Robert Frost Oh, stormy stormy world, The days you were not swirled Around with mist and cloud, Or wrapped as in a shroud, And the sun's brilliant ball Was not in part or all Obscured from mortal view— Were days so very few I can but wonder whence I get the lasting sense Of so much warmth and light. If my mistrust is right It may be altogether From one day's perfect weather, When starting clear at dawn, The day swept clearly on To finish clear at eve. I verily believe My fair impression may Be all from that one day No shadow crossed but ours As through its blazing flowers We went from house to wood For change of solitude. "Happiness Makes Up in Height for What It Lacks in Length" by Robert Frost, Collected Poems. © Henry Holt and Company, LLC, 1969

Poem of the Day

Shopping

by Faith Shearin

My husband and I stood together in the new mall
which was clean and white and full of possibility.
We were poor so we liked to walk through the stores
since this was like walking through our dreams.
In one we admired coffee makers, blue pottery
bowls, toaster ovens as big as televisions. In another,

we eased into a leather couch and imagined
cocktails in a room overlooking the sea. When we
sniffed scented candles we saw our future faces,
softly lit, over a dinner of pasta and wine. When
we touched thick bathrobes we saw midnight

swims and bathtubs so vast they might be
mistaken for lakes. My husband's glasses hurt
his face and his shoes were full of holes.
There was a space in our living room where
a couch should have been. We longed for

fancy shower curtains, flannel sheets,
shiny silverware, expensive winter coats.
Sometimes, at night, we sat up and made lists.
We pressed our heads together and wrote
our wants all over torn notebook pages.
Nearly everyone we loved was alive and we

were in love but we liked wanting. Nothing
was ever as nice when we brought it home.
The objects in stores looked best in stores.
The stores were possible futures and, young
and poor, we went shopping. It was nice
then: we didn't know we already had everything.

"Shopping" by Faith Shearin, from The Owl Question. © Utah State University Press, 2002.
Lifted from The Writer's Almanac

This poem literally brought me to tears today, as I checked my mail after the routine Monday shopping trip to Big Lots and Aldi's. The part about his glasses hurting his face, I can remember Keith wearing broken glasses like that, when we were younger. We still have a lot of things with holes in them. :) I am supremely lucky that no matter how much money we have (or don't have), how many things we want, or need, or think we need, I never lose sight of how rich I am. Nobody could ever buy the kind of love that lives and grows in the shabby house on Edgehill Street.

Poem of the Day

Ground Waters

by Alison Apotheker

Yesterday, in snow's rare visit to this city,
my son and I raised his first snowman.
As we rolled the white boulders of its body
my pregnant belly nudged up against them like kin.

By evening, its body leaned to the left so impossibly
I kept checking the window for its collapse.
In the morning, even more so, the body straining
groundward as if to grasp the carrot nose
that had fallen and lay now half-covered in slush.

My son, who hasn't yet been around the block
with gravity, suspects nothing. I remember
last summer when he skinned his shin on the sidewalk.
I watched his eyes register the body's betrayal.
Yet he seems not to notice the snowman's state,
the degree of recline, how little it would take
to return it to an idea of itself.

All over the neighborhood,
snowmen assume such inspired angles,
splayed skywards as if in appeal to their place of origin,
kneeling for their own beheadings,
canted in prayer, tipsy
with the song of their own slow-going.

The relief obvious in their frozen hulking masses
to rejoin the fluid grace of ground waters.
The truth is: before I became a mother,
I knew the body's longing to be lost.
An untrustworthy lover bound
to forsake us, I'd rather do the leaving
than be left.

But now, as we walk home in the dusk,
my two-year old riding my hip,
patting my cheeks with his mittened hands,
I never want to leave this earth.
Inside the baby tumbles and reels,
already knowing where the body will take us,
that we have no choice but to follow its lead.

"Ground Waters" by Alison Apotheker, from Slim Margin. © Word Press, 2008.

Poem of the Day

Owls

by W.D. Snodgrass

— for Camille

Wait; the great horned owls
Calling from the wood's edge; listen.
There: the dark male, low
And booming, tremoring the whole valley.
There: the female, resolving, answering
High and clear, restoring silence.
The chilly woods draw in
Their breath, slow, waiting, and now both
Sound out together, close to harmony.

These are the year's worst nights.
Ice glazed on the top boughs,
Old snow deep on the ground,
Snow in the red-tailed hawks'
Nests they take for their own.
Nothing crosses the crusted ground.
No squirrels, no rabbits, the mice gone,
No crow has young yet they can steal.
These nights the iron air clangs
Like the gates of a cell block, blank
And black as the inside of your chest.

Now, the great owls take
The air, the male's calls take
Depth on and resonance, they take
A rough nest, take their mate
And, opening out long wings, take
Flight, unguided and apart, to caliper
The blind synapse their voices cross
Over the dead white fields,
The dead black woods, where they take
Soundings on nothing fast, take
Soundings on each other, each alone.

"Owls" by W.D. Snodgrass, from Selected Poems: 1957-1987. © Soho Press, 1987.

lifted from The Writer's Almanac

image lifted from here

Poem of the Day

The First Artichoke

by Diane Lockward

Though everyone said no one could grow
artichokes in New Jersey, my father
planted the seeds and they grew one magnificent
artichoke, late-season, long after the squash,
tomatoes, and zucchini.

It was the derelict in my father's garden,
little Buddha of a vegetable, pinecone gone awry.
It was as strange as a bony-plated armadillo.

My mother prepared the artichoke as if preparing
a miracle. She snipped the bronzy winter-kissed tips
mashed breadcrumbs, oregano, parmesan, garlic,
and lemon, stuffed the mush between the leaves,
baked, then placed the artichoke on the table.
This, she said, was food we could eat with our fingers.

When I hesitated, my father spoke of beautiful Cynara,
who'd loved her mother more than she'd loved Zeus.
In anger, the god transformed her
into an artichoke. And in 1949 Marilyn Monroe
had been crowned California's first Artichoke Queen.

I peeled off a leaf like my father did,
dipped it in melted butter, and with my teeth
scraped and sucked the nut-flavored slimy stuff.
We piled up the inedible parts, skeletons
of leaves and purple prickles.

Piece by piece, the artichoke came apart,
the way we would in 1959, the year the flowerbuds
of the artichokes in my father's garden bloomed
without him, their blossoms seven inches wide
and violet-blue as bruises.

But first we had that miracle on our table.
We peeled and peeled, a vegetable striptease,
and worked our way deeper and deeper,
down to the small filet of delectable heart.

"The First Artichoke" by Diane Lockward, from What Feeds Us. Wind Publications, 2006.

Image copyright Matthew Wallenstein
Text lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Happy Birthday e. e. cummings

i like my body

by E. E. Cummings

i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which I will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh...And eyes big love-crumbs,

and possibly i like the thrill
of under me you quite so new

"i like my body" by e.e. cummings from Complete Poems 1904-1962. © Liveright Publishing, 1991.

It's the birthday of E.E. Cummings, (books by this author) born Edward Estlin Cummings in Cambridge, Massachusetts (1894), who wrote nearly 3,000 poems, a couple of autobiographical novels, and several essays and plays.

He majored in classics at Harvard, gave a controversial graduation speech on modern art, worked for a mail-order bookseller, got bored, and volunteered along with his college writer friend John Dos Passos for an ambulance corps serving in France during World War I. It was 1917, and partly to entertain themselves and gauge the censors' reaction, he and co-worker William Slater Brown wrote provocative letters espousing anti-war views and professing not to hate those enemy Germans. The French censors intercepted the letters, and Cummings and Brown were imprisoned at a military detention camp on suspicion of espionage for more than three months. His experiences as a prisoner in France formed the basis for his novel The Enormous Room (1922).

The 1920s proved to be a productive period for Cummings. He published the poetry collections Tulips and Chimneys in 1923 and XLI Poems in 1925. In 1926, he got a job as a traveling correspondent for Vanity Fair magazine. In the afternoons, he painted — he was an accomplished artist who for 30 years displayed his paintings and drawings in New York City shows — and in the evenings he wrote. It was a schedule that he would keep up for the rest of his life. But that same year, his beloved parents got in a horrific car accident. His father died and his mother was badly injured. Later Cummings described it: "A locomotive cut the car in half, killing my father instantly. When two brakemen jumped from the halted train, they saw a woman standing — dazed but erect — beside a mangled machine; with blood spouting (as the older said to me) out of her head." He wrote:
my father moved through dooms of love
through sames of am through haves of give,
singing each morning out of each night
my father moved through depths of height

. . . .

In his verse, Cummings tended to substitute verbs for nouns, he used patently eccentric punctuation, and he disregarded norms of capitalization. But despite unconventional style, he wrote about traditional themes, stuff like love and nature.

E.E. Cummings wrote, "Since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you."

Text lifted from The Writer's Almanac
Photo lifted from here

Poem(s) of the Day

Anniversary

by Jason Whitmarsh

She says he isn't as funny as he used to be. About fifty percent as
funny, maybe less. He thinks, but doesn't say, no, it's you, you're
depressed, you don't find anyone funny anymore. She thinks, but
doesn't say, I've always been depressed. I've never found anyone
funny—except you, once.

"Anniversary" by Jason Whitmarsh, from Tomorrow's Living Room. Utah State University Press, 2009.

Apology

by Jason Whitmarsh

That last love poem I gave you, I want to apologize for that. It was
crudely put and several of the metaphors leaned too heavily on sea
life. I love you so much more than that. The best pan of the poem
was the beginning, and that had nothing to do with you, or me,
or how much either of us loves each other. It was just a line from
another, better poem. Most of the poem sounds defensive, like I've
been accused of not loving you, or you of not loving me. Not that
I think I don't love you, or you me. I don't. Still, one could read a
poem by someone else and it'd seem more authentic—you'd be more
likely to think that poem was dedicated to you, I mean, than to think
mine was. One could even argue, too, that by studiously avoiding
your name or any identifying traits, I was making this poem fit for
more than one person, like women in general, or a second wife, or
your very attractive sister.

"Apology" by Jason Whitmarsh, from Tomorrow's Living Room. © Utah State University Press.


Lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

Nonsense Song

by W. H. Auden

My love is like a red red rose
Or concerts for the blind,
She's like a mutton-chop before
And a rifle-range behind.

Her hair is like a looking-glass,
Her brow is like a bog,
Her eyes are like a flock of sheep
Seen through a London fog.

Her nose is like an Irish jig,
Her mouth is like a 'bus,
Her chin is like a bowl of soup
Shared between all of us.

Her form divine is like a map
Of the United States,
Her foot is like a motor-car
Without its number-plates.

No steeple-jack shall part us now
Nor fireman in a frock;
True love could sink a Channel boat
Or knit a baby's sock.

"Nonsense Song" by W.H. Auden, from As I Walked Out One Evening. © Vintage Books, 1995.

Lifted from The Writer's Almanac

Poem of the Day

A Friend’s Umbrella

by Lawrence Raab

Ralph Waldo Emerson, toward the end
of his life, found the names
of familiar objects escaping him.
He wanted to say something about a window,
or a table, or a book on a table.

But the word wasn't there,
although other words could still suggest
the shape of what he meant.
Then someone, his wife perhaps,

would understand: "Yes, window! I'm sorry,
is there a draft?" He'd nod.
She'd rise. Once a friend dropped by
to visit, shook out his umbrella
in the hall, remarked upon the rain.

Later the word umbrella
vanished and became
the thing that strangers take away.

Paper, pen, table, book:
was it possible for a man to think
without them? To know
that he was thinking? We remember
that we forget, he'd written once,
before he started to forget.

Three times he was told
that Longfellow had died.

Without the past, the present
lay around him like the sea.
Or like a ship, becalmed,
upon the sea. He smiled

to think he was the captain then,
gazing off into whiteness,
waiting for the wind to rise.

"A Friend's Umbrella" by Lawrence Raab, from The History of Forgetting. © the Penguin Group, 2009.

Lifted from The Writer's Almanac


Delia and I had a nice visit at Grandma's House yesterday. The nurses were all happy to see me and Delia - we came just at shift change time so we got to see several ladies we hadn't seen in a while. Grandma was in a pretty good mood and we talked to her for a while about our upcoming trip to the beach. She seemed happy to see me, but she couldn't remember if I was her granddaughter or her niece. So we straightened that out. :)

Dad was quiet as usual. Mom says he could talk if he tried, and sometimes I do hear him make sounds so maybe she's right. Still, I have a very hard time making any sense of what he's trying to communicate, and it frustrates us both. He started drawing letters on his palm with his index finger, but I couldn't follow that either. Eventually we struck upon the idea of using Scrabble tiles, and we spread them out on the table and he spelled a few words. It was almost fun, like a game, but there is always this underlying frustration and for me, just below the surface, a nebulous horror. I am working on it, damn me, I am trying to get over it. Some days it is easier than others. I think it would help if we could find a better way to communicate. Ryan suggested a board like we used to play with when we were kids, with a plastic sheet over a slick white surface, you wrote on it with a stylus, and where the plastic sheet stuck to the board, your drawing appeared. Then to erase you just lift the plastic sheet and smooth it down again for a clean writing surface. If anyone knows what that toy is called, or where to find one, let me know.