Poet Lois P. Jones, whose “Milonga for a Blind Man” I reprinted here earlier this month, was inspired by my “Mu!” post to send me this Rilke poem. In the spirit of hermeneutic indeterminacy that we pride ourselves on here at Reiter’s Block, I’m sharing both of the translations that she found. The first, which I like better, is courtesy of The Old Bill blog (I’ve queried him for its source), and the second is from the Anita Barrows and Joanna Macy translation of Rilke’s Book of Hours: Love Poems to God (Riverhead Books, New York).
from The Book of Pilgrimage
(version one)
All will come into its strength again;
the seas will rage, the field will be undivided,
the trees will tower and the walls will be small,
and in the valleys, nomads and farmers as strong and varied
as the land itself.
No churches to encircle God as though
he were a fugitive, and then bewail him
as if he were a captured, wounded creature.
Houses will welcome all who knock,
a sense of boundless sacrifice will prevail
in all actions, and in you and me.
No more waiting for the Beyond, no longing for it,
no belittling, even of death,
we shall long for what belongs to us,
learn the earth,
serve its ends,
and feel its hands about us like a friend’s.
****
from The Book of Pilgrimage
(version two)
All will come into its strength;
the fields undivided, the waters undammed,
the trees towering and the walls built low.
And in the valleys, people as strong
and varied as the land.
And no churches where God
is imprisoned and lamented
like a trapped and wounded animal.
The houses welcoming all who knock
a sense of boundless offering
in all relations, and in you and me.
No yearing for an afterlife, no looking beyond,
no belittling of death,
but only longing for what belongs to us,
and serving earth, lest we remain unused.
Category Archives: Great Poems Online
Ellen LaFleche: “Truth in the Booth”
Northampton Poet Laureate Leslea Newman organized an Inauguration Day poetry reading this past Tuesday, which you can read about on the MassLive website. My friend Ellen LaFleche has given me permission to reprint her poem from the event, in which she revisits an episode in America’s civil rights history that deserves greater public awareness.
Truth in the Booth
I:
Inauguration, 1913:
Eight Thousand Women Disrupt the Festivities by Demanding the Right to Suffrage
The women who wanted to vote
picketed Woodrow’s big
white house. Woodrow and his Senators
said no, and no again,
though every day on horseback
Woodrow politely tipped his hat
at that gaggle of girls who wanted to vote.
The women marched. Year after year
they picketed,
thick skirts scraping the dirt,
corsets pressing their ribs like murdering fingers.
Until a world war loomed.
Woodrow had a dead arch-duke on his hands.
Soldiers choking on mustard gas.
He lost patience with the women
who wanted to vote.
Woodrow sent them to prison.
The women were manacled at the ankles,
hands bound behind their backs like a procession of witches.
You know the story:
rats, the damp, the dungeon blackness.
Each woman alone in her cell.
Putrid food, water scummy with typhus.
One of the women began to knock. Alice Paul.
The knocking spread, cell wall to cell wall,
fists scraping against brick,
women raising their voices with their fists.
The women went on strike.
For weeks they starved.
Their hips sank. Their tongues rumbled with hunger
in their skulls.
Then, the forced feeding. The tube down the throat.
The warden poured in nutrients until the women choked.
They gagged like the mustard-gassed soldiers.
Still they knocked,
hands fisted, bloody knuckles
insisting on justice.
The women knocked. They starved.
They knocked. They knocked and they knocked
and they knocked.
Still, Woodrow and his Senators said no to the vote.
Women who wanted to vote
started a fire in a cremation urn,
a kind of perpetual White House flame.
When Woodrow gave a speech,
the women burned his words to ash.
The women starved. They knocked. They burned
Woodrow’s words. They knocked and they knocked
and they knocked.
Until seven years after Inauguration,
Woodrow and his Senators
said yes to suffrage.
II:
Election Day, 2008.
I speak my truth in the booth.
One woman, one vote for Obama.
This vote is for the women who hungered,
for the women who burned Woodrow’s words,
for the women who suffered for suffrage.
This vote for Barack
is for the women who starved themselves,
for the women who knocked and knocked and knocked.
Lois P. Jones: “Milonga for a Blind Man”
The always-pleasing literary e-zine The Rose and Thorn has just released its Winter issue, which includes cover art by Gustav Klimt and fine poetry and prose by Jason Mccall, Linda Leschak, Michael T. Smith and many others. Lois P. Jones has given me permission to reprint her wonderful poem from the issue below. A milonga is a style of South American dance.
Milonga for a Blind Man
Time is both loss and memory.
—Jorge Luis Borges
In the middle of the night
a man takes a key
from his pocket.
In the middle of the night
he climbs to the top of the stairs.
From his balcony he remembers daylight,
the crumbled cement and the cracks
on the tavern below. The way the sky spoke
to him, the last one with anything to say.
And the opening of the flowers
when they would open for him.
Pink or coral, her lips staining
his with a memory – a breath
and a daydream of pampas and hibiscus.
His shirt buttoned down to the waist
and the white skin of a butterfly.
In the middle of the night
he remembers a snow heart
and the red walls of morning
where he walked the streets
in search of distance. Someone
has counted his days
before he was born. And this blindness
that followed plucked out his eyes
to sleep. It always comes to this –
edges fading from the familiar,
a city vague and celestial. He has lost
count of all his endings.
William “Wild Bill” Taylor: “Evil as a hop, skip and a jump”
Taking apart the body that brought me here,
the fourth trip behind the moon,
where stars multiply in the dead of winter
for those looking for meaning and signs
from an indifferent astrologer,
mother remarked that when they knocked
on our door,
the young men were the most handsome of men,
blond,
polite, muscular and smiling.
little children were playing in the streets
a hop, skip, and a jump from God’s thumb nail.
and when the nice SS men finally came
to take me away,
I was hiding in the freezer with the sausage,
and the chicken,
and that corpse that brought me to the moon.
Alegria Imperial: “Plea for a Poem”
Alegria included this poem in a comment below a recent post here, and I thought it was so beautiful that I wanted to make a separate post out of it. Enjoy, and happy holidays to all.
Plea for a poem
write me a poem
words to breathe in
even if only whispers
as shouts have turned
the air into a
hail storm
write me some rain
my heart crackles
in the drought longing
for words drenched in
thought to sip
in the dark
i yearn for verses
snipped from flame tips
words that dance
the fire of fallen angels
saved from their march
on dying coals
write me a song
cadenced in sunsets
tympanis of words
rising off the hum
of meanings
drums have flattened
give me back
poems shredded spirits
birth in caves midnights
cleansed poems howling wolves
hankering for stars
divine
Book Notes: The Glass Violin
Australian poet P.S. Cottier truly does see the universe in a grain of sand–as well as in a tram ticket, a Caesarian scar, the names of Australian military operations, a shabby bear in the Soviet zoo, a wren visiting a dead friend’s garden, and myriad other small details of modern life that she turns into windows on the human condition, in verses both whimsical and profound. Her new collection The Glass Violin (Ginninderra Press, 2008) contains all this and more.
One of the pleasures of reading poetry is finding that someone else has experienced and expressed a precise emotion that you thought was peculiar to you. When Cottier writes, in a poem titled “Forlorn”, “The abandonment of teabags is absolute,” I feel less silly about my pangs of guilt for turning those neat, dry, nearly immortal little packets into wet lumps of trash. Elsewhere, in “Cutting on Laminex”, she reflects on how the scratches on a cutting board outlast the meals prepared there, which segues into awareness of the marks that time has left on her: “I can’t recall the accidents, the sharp slice/which scarified, but skin scratches speak/of that open cut, some day, grave of mine.” She has kindly given me permission to reprint a poem from this book below.
Rock
I didn’t want this, not at all.
The rock rolled back,
groaning, rasping,
birthing brightness.
It was meant to
make them free.
But a single breath,
in and out,
a teasing pause,
then they crucified others;
those who walked outside
their straitened view of me.
Labyrinthine irony,
to fill the sarcophagus
in my name.
Those chaotic echoes
darkening on deafness,
I hear them still.
I’d asked them to put down stones
and not to pound down sinners.
To understand, or at least,
not to irrevocably judge.
But when they built their church
on rock, of rock,
flesh was pushed aside,
Golgotha glorified.
A mortar and pestle,
hope ground against granite.
Sometimes when I watch, I wish
that boulder had not budged.
When my flesh was tortured
and my mother’s tears fell,
I believed
it would erode
the rocks in human minds.
But I hadn’t counted on their
thoughts like drowning pebbles,
sinking in a hard skull cave
just beneath the skin.
Love sealed within forever,
not knowing light.
The third day never comes.
Poems by Conway: “The Miracle” and Others
Advent is traditionally a time of quiet reflection and repentance, when we anticipate not only the birth of Christ but the Second Coming when God will bring justice and peace to the whole world. In America, where images of traditional families dominate the airwaves from Halloween until January, it can also be a sad time for those who are separated from their families by incarceration, war, abuse or estrangement. Advent gives us permission to mourn as well as rejoice, as in these new poems by my prison pen pal “Conway”, which he sent inside a beautiful Christmas card.
The Miracle
Drones!
Create unprecedented tones
conjure tracings of a murmur
(WHILE SITTING IN SOLITUDE)
Our breath turns into sounds
as again I start these movements
straining for
an accurate use of words…
While air drifts along
with its light, solitary steps
untouchable noise
dissolving the silence
into spelled words
manipulated,
These fixed, yet faded fingers
pointing at nothing
but gestured dreams
of an empty street
a diffused vacant voice
more fragile; Than
Threads of Glass
Eluding a Hurricane…
This song, even now
flees from a distant tongue
obsolete,
in a stalled unforgiveness
unsung…
The only contact allowed here
are shadows crossing paths
stretching to know each other
They revel in the Sun’s light
off a wall, from left to right
indifferent to any bickering
speaking only their own language
a noiseless echo of everything
following, watching from behind
it belongs to man, bird and stone
unaffected by the wind even.
Strange, that no one thinks
to challenge that, that
belongs to no one, yet everyone
reaching for the horizon…
****
Everything is only for a day
Everything, is only for a day.
Both that which Remembers, and that
which is remembered.
As we observe this Holy Day
in reference to one’s perception, for
this series is not a mere enumeration–
of disjointed things.
Time is like a river–
made up of events which happen
and a violent stream; for
as soon as a thing has been seen,
it is carried away too.
Altogether the interval is small.
Let the part of your soul
which leads and governs–
be undisturbed, by
The movements in the flesh.
We Remember our Dead.
When they were born, when
They passed.
Either as beings of promise
or;
Beings of Achievement…
“The Door Miser” and Other New Poems by Conway
My pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life under California’s “three-strikes” law for receiving stolen goods, has sent me an abundance of exciting new poems this month, some of which I share below. He has also been writing dark-humored stories about prison life, which I have encouraged him to submit to the PEN Prison Writers contest. If my readers know of other publication opportunities for incarcerated writers, please leave me a comment below.
The Door Miser
Sleeping ice
walked the pregnant rain
with mud.
Lighting barbed steeples
dragged shattered guitar strings
while a Horn bled my breath…
Clay eyes, blunt lips
growling voices
that died
howling like the wind
in search of Ozone…
Chase this dim-witted drunkenness
overcome by the ages
locked inside an hourglass
when a spider webs knots
yanked the darkness out
from under freeform footsteps…
Breaking down again
in the voice of bruises.
But they never belched
like: an Orphans sin
in the way-layed wilderness
or a maniac on the freeway
speeding through stopped traffic
at Rush hour…
This interminable Toilet of
a sacred food stop
right between you and I
inside this Homeless broken sky, or
doomed door of denial…
Glass days visions
just offer an Iron failure
while tears lonely language
can only desire
the world…
Think hard about testing
a terrified dictation.
Arresting these wheels
for too many years
as even the moon
considers my prison
while shivering…
When the Door miser
crawls up my spine
again, to suck on
my nerves…
****
Poker After Dark
The Blood & Tears of life
fell, into the ashes burned
when remains of my father
were turned to mud in a day
fell, into the ashes burned
when remains of my father
were turned to mud in a day
Kabashed his world into an ashtray
then washed that mother fucker away
lost, corroding through the pain
bereft and rusting in the rain
on the wrong side of right
from six feet under this grass
left to wonderful blunders
while sucked inside a riptide
the absence of fear
in here, does not prove courage
or discourage the deer
caught in the headlights
when a deck is shuffled
those cards are dealt, but
it’s how you play the cut
or gamble on, a “Supposed” losing hand…
****
Gag Order
How do I make my tongue tell it?
Choking in this bitter dungeon
now, can you smell it?
Desperately desiring to describe
a moment to share
gagging like a dog in a fight
(mouth full of hair)
Boundaries eternal, are forced inward
further in strife
constricting our death
out of breath for life
Screaming the whispers
below this cold sweat
Spilling those empty jars of regret
saving that craving, of nothing
Forever…
New Poems by Conway: “Chill” and “Meditation Room”
My pen pal “Conway”, who is serving 25-to-life in California for receiving stolen goods, returns this month with two striking new poems. He writes that “Meditation Room” was composed during a recent stretch in solitary confinement.
Chill
Prisoners of lost sands
swing upon a string
of pearls becoming strands.
Remnants of time;
Like: Cheap laundry,
strung up on the line;
Tethered
to chafe in the weather…
The Sun has blinked
His suspicious eye
once again–
darkness falls on all…
That heavy piss-stained kiss
was unable to fend off
the wind’s bite
and its whistle, cold embrace,
greedy fingers
frostier than jealousy…
While mountains drift away
from these windblown years
our sandbottles treasure
contains an epic measure…
In this moment
that last breath
or, first draft inhaled
when time accelled
before you and I laughed
then a cry expelled…
In this noiseless silence
that could wake concrete
the quiet was complete
it would take only a whisper
to break this spell;
But me
I’d like to yell…
****
Meditation Room
-Yoga 101-
There’s no place like–
Ohmmmmm…
Here, in the meditation Rooms
we are on our–
Ohnnnnn…
Relax, set aside your thoughts for a moment
adjust to the surrounding sounds.
The breeze flows over your body
at an abnormal velocity, all day
all night, it whispers, with the same exacting force.
Let this sound comfort your mind
it will not change–
it is there to fill your Lungs desire.
Now, tune into the jingling bell notes
of brass keys, chains on hips
as they Rhythmically flow into your vibrating eardrums
then calmly fade away (isn’t this serene)
Think warm happy thoughts, as
the cold Concrete walls, caress
your sense of claustrophobia.
No need to panic, it will do no-good
you’re not imagining this paranoia
you are Dead-locked inside, from the outside.
There is No-way
that you can open the thick solid steel doors.
Even in your wildest of dreams.
So, maintain my fellow prisoners;
Embrace your incarceration.
Enjoy the solitude of this tomb
inside your Meditation Room.
Ohmmmmm…
Prisoners of lost sands
swing upon a string
of pearls becoming strands.
Remnants of time;
Like: Cheap laundry,
strung up on the line;
Tethered
to chafe in the weather…
The Sun has blinked
His suspicious eye
once again–
darkness falls on all…
That heavy piss-stained kiss
was unable to fend off
the wind’s bite
and its whistle, cold embrace,
greedy fingers
frostier than jealousy…
While mountains drift away
from these windblown years
our sandbottles treasure
contains an epic measure…
In this moment
that last breath
or, first draft inhaled
when time accelled
before you and I laughed
then a cry expelled…
In this noiseless silence
that could wake concrete
the quiet was complete
it would take only a whisper
to break this spell;
But me
I’d like to yell…
****
Meditation Room
-Yoga 101-
There’s no place like–
Ohmmmmm…
Here, in the meditation Rooms
we are on our–
Ohnnnnn…
Relax, set aside your thoughts for a moment
adjust to the surrounding sounds.
The breeze flows over your body
at an abnormal velocity, all day
all night, it whispers, with the same exacting force.
Let this sound comfort your mind
it will not change–
it is there to fill your Lungs desire.
Now, tune into the jingling bell notes
of brass keys, chains on hips
as they Rhythmically flow into your vibrating eardrums
then calmly fade away (isn’t this serene)
Think warm happy thoughts, as
the cold Concrete walls, caress
your sense of claustrophobia.
No need to panic, it will do no-good
you’re not imagining this paranoia
you are Dead-locked inside, from the outside.
There is No-way
that you can open the thick solid steel doors.
Even in your wildest of dreams.
So, maintain my fellow prisoners;
Embrace your incarceration.
Enjoy the solitude of this tomb
inside your Meditation Room.
Ohmmmmm…
Stuart Kestenbaum: “Prayer for the Dead”
The column below is reprinted by permission from American Life in Poetry, a project of the Poetry Foundation.
American Life in Poetry: Column 181
BY TED KOOSER, U.S. POET LAUREATE, 2004-2006
Stuart Kestenbaum, the author of this week’s poem, lost his brother Howard in the destruction of the twin towers of the World Trade Center. We thought it appropriate to commemorate the events of September 11, 2001, by sharing this poem. The poet is the director of the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine.
Prayer for the Dead
The light snow started late last night and continued
all night long while I slept and could hear it occasionally
enter my sleep, where I dreamed my brother
was alive again and possessing the beauty of youth, aware
that he would be leaving again shortly and that is the lesson
of the snow falling and of the seeds of death that are in everything
that is born: we are here for a moment
of a story that is longer than all of us and few of us
remember, the wind is blowing out of someplace
we don’t know, and each moment contains rhythms
within rhythms, and if you discover some old piece
of your own writing, or an old photograph,
you may not remember that it was you and even if it was once you,
it’s not you now, not this moment that the synapses fire
and your hands move to cover your face in a gesture
of grief and remembrance.
American Life in Poetry is made possible by The Poetry Foundation (www.poetryfoundation.org), publisher of Poetry magazine. It is also supported by the Department of English at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Poem copyright (c) 2007 by Stuart Kestenbaum. Reprinted from “Prayers & Run-on Sentences,” Deerbook Editions, 2007, by permission of Stuart Kestenbaum. Introduction copyright (c) 2008 by The Poetry Foundation. The introduction’s author, Ted Kooser, served as United States Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress from 2004-2006. We do not accept unsolicited manuscripts.