Langston Hughes

Before the month is gone, the great Langston Hughes.

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Daybreak in Alabama When I get to be a composer I'm gonna write me some music about Daybreak in Alabama And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist And falling out of heaven like soft dew. I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it And the scent of pine needles And the smell of red clay after rain And long red necks And poppy colored faces And big brown arms And the field daisy eyes Of black and white black white black people And I'm gonna put white hands And black hands and brown and yellow hands And red clay earth hands in it Touching everybody with kind fingers And touching each other natural as dew In that dawn of music when I Get to be a composer And write about daybreak In Alabama.

e.e. cummings and Stephen Sondheim

[as freedom is a breakfastfood]
By E. E. Cummings 1894–1962

as freedom is a breakfastfood

or truth can live with right and wrong

or molehills are from mountains made

—long enough and just so long

will being pay the rent of seem

and genius please the talentgang

and water most encourage flame

as hatracks into peachtrees grow

or hopes dance best on bald men’s hair

and every finger is a toe

and any courage is a fear

—long enough and just so long

will the impure think all things pure

and hornets wail by children stung

or as the seeing are the blind

and robins never welcome spring

nor flatfolk prove their world is round

nor dingsters die at break of dong

and common’s rare and millstones float

—long enough and just so long

tomorrow will not be too late

worms are the words but joy’s the voice

down shall go which and up come who

breasts will be breasts thighs will be thighs

deeds cannot dream what dreams can do

—time is a tree(this life one leaf)

but love is the sky and i am for you

just so long and long enough

GREEN FINCH AND LINNET BIRD
By Stephen Sondgeim

Green finch and linnet bird,
Nightingale, blackbird,
How is it you sing?
How can you jubilate,
Sitting in cages,
Never taking wing?

Outside the sky waits,
Beckoning, beckoning,
Just beyond the bars,
How can you remain,
Staring at the rain,
Maddened by the stars?
How is it you sing
Anything?
How is it you sing?

Green finch and linnet bird,
Nightingale, blackbird,
How is it you sing?
Whence comes this melody
constantly flowing?
Is it rejoicing or merely halloing?
Are you discussing
Or fussing
Or simply dreaming?
Are you crowing?
Are you screaming?

Ringdove and robinet,
Is it for wages,
Singing to be sold?
Have you decided it’s
Safer in cages,
Singing when you’re told?

My cage has many rooms,
Damask and dark.
Nothing there sings,
Not even my lark.
Larks never will, you know,
When they’re captive.
Teach me to be more adaptive.

Green finch and linnet bird,
Nightingale, blackbird,
Teach me how to sing.
If I cannot fly,
Let me sing.

To me, both poems speak of freedom although I am not sure of the cummings poem. The Sondheim poem seems to address the artist. Of course when addressing a work, it is in the eye of the reader. I chose these two poems because freedom has been much on my mind.

Freedom is a complex issue. Veterans have bumper stickers that state that "freedom isn't free, veterans pay for it." I believe that is true. On an individual basis, if you want to be free you have to pay for it too and no price is too dear. The foe of freedom is fear. If fear overwhelmed the desire to be free, then you will be forever in the cage even if the gate is unlocked.

Sondheim speaks of relative freedom. If he can't have total freedom or freedom to fly, then he insists on relative freedom, he must have freedom to sing from his cage. I know I want total freedom and someday I might not be able to have it. I can have it now. No price is too great for it. I remember listening to a man who lived in Russia under Soviet rule. He was making a good living as a scientist but he came to the USA where he earned less money. A journalist asked if he thought that was a good trade. He said without freedom, money wasn't worth it.

Fear is a strong emotion and it keeps people in chains long after the chains have been unlocked. It keeps people with their abusers and many people who escaped prisons and concentration camps all report being held in unlocked cells of fear. It takes a lot of treatment and love from family and friends for them to walk outside those cells.

As I wrote, freedom is a complex issue or at least for me. I have one foot outside my cell door and am trying to leave my prison and conquering the fear is the biggest barrier. We all have to be knights of the round table in seeking the Holy Grail. The Grail is what sets each of us free and it is different for each of us.

Belle Randall

Cast Off

By Belle Randall

If thy own hand . . . offend thee
—Matthew 18:8

Self-hatred? No, no dear: that seems inflated—

chagrin: the shame you feel when friends withdraw

for reasons they leave tactfully unstated,

leaving you to guess at your faux pas

From all you did and didn’t say for ages,

as in some vast congressional report,

your sin, at last, is lost among the pages;

a snow of detail cuts inquiry short.

In downtown windows where late sunlight glares,

you see yourself, as if you’d never met.

Who is this rumpled lookalike who wears

a blouse like yours, the armpits dark with sweat?

Your eighth grade diary still makes you cringe

saved—for what?—that you might now despise

pages time has lent a jaundiced tinge

pouring forth their daisy-dotted i’s?

Some second-guesser in you finds untrue

the echo of your own voice in your ears,

and wants to ask which one most sickens you:

the voice that whines with neediness and fears,

Or one no doubts can ever undermine,

that speaks before a general assembly,

proclaiming loudly what to do with thine

own hand (or his, or mine), should it offend thee?

Source: Poetry (September 2009).

I am sure we have all been in situations in which a friend or even a set of friends turn against you and you are at a loss as to why this has happened. I think the above poem captures this awkward and terrifying moment or memory well. Sometimes, we find out the reason, and it is not just or it is based on a lie that is told by someone we thought was our friend. It can be based on a shared confidence that someone we trusted with our lives who decided to bare all for unknown reasons. Ah, yes. I have been there. After all these years I can remember with as much puzzlement as I had in those years. In some memories I have began to re-frame them with new insight and with that new information in understanding what had happened. It still hurts though.

It helps to read Randall's poem though. To have our pain and sorrow in someone's else's words, to have them echoed in someone's else pain but portrayed so well in a poet's ability to express it and with that talent and know how some detachment for it means nobility and the knowledge it has happened to someone else and someone as sensitive as this poet.

There are many reasons for the existence of poets and in this month of poetry this is one function I like to reflect on. Poets give us validity of feeling, of existence and of purpose. Reading of our pain and what we go through in their words makes things a bit better to bear and the tears are less because we feel more dignified. Yes, we say to ourselves, that was how it was. That was how I felt. Yes, this poet knows and can feel and say what it was to be me on that summer day when my friends turned against me. It felt like I hated me as they must have hated me too. Thank you poets of the world.

Poets become our representatives, our attorneys, our knights and with their swords they go out and create for each of us a sense of value in the courts of society and culture. We are not such bad people when the poets speak for us as they often do and they even speak for those who's voices have been silent forever by cruel tyrants and gods. They are the true equalizers as long as their voices cannot be silenced and few have been. They have been shot, hung, poisoned, gassed but their poems still speak loud and clear. We, as a human race, have much to be grateful for to this group of human beings. Thank you again.

Delmore Schwartz

POEM

Narcissus

Delmore Schwartz (1913-1966)

THE MIND IS AN ANCIENT AND FAMOUS CAPITAL

The mind is a city like London,

Smoky and populous: it is a capital

Like Rome, ruined and eternal,

Marked by the monuments which no one

Now remembers. For the mind, like Rome, contains

Catacombs, aqueducts, amphitheatres, palaces,

Churches and equestrian statues, fallen, broken or soiled.

The mind possesses and is possessed by all the ruins

Of every haunted, hunted generation’s celebration.

“Call us what you will: we are made such by love.”

We are such studs as dreams are made on, and

Our little lives are ruled by the gods, by Pan,

Piping of all, seeking to grasp or grasping

All of the grapes; and by the bow-and-arrow god,

Cupid, piercing the heart through, suddenly and forever.

Dusk we are, to dusk returning, after the burbing,

After the gold fall, the fallen ash, the bronze,

Scattered and rotten, after the white null statues which

Are winter, sleep, and nothingness: when

Will the houselights of the universe

Light up and blaze?

For it is not the sea

Which murmurs in a shell,

And it is not only heart, at harp o’clock,

It is the dread terror of the uncontrollable

Horses of the apocalypse, running in wild dread

Toward Arcturus—and returning as suddenly ...

THE FEAR AND DREAD OF THE MIND OF THE OTHERS

—The others were the despots of despair—

The river’s freshness sailed from unknown sources—

... They snickered giggled, laughed aloud at last,

They mocked and marveled at the statue which was

A caricature, as strained and stiff, and yet

A statue of self-love!—since self-love was

To them, truly my true love, how, then, was I a stillness of nervousness

So nervous a caricature: did they suppose

Self-love was unrequited, or betrayed?

They thought I had fallen in love with my own face,

And this belief became the night-like obstacle

To understanding all my unbroken suffering,

My studious self-regard, the pain of hope,

The torment of possibility:

How then could I have expected them to see me

As I saw myself, within my gaze, or see

That being thus seemed as a toad, a frog, a wen, a mole.

Knowing their certainty that I was only

A monument, a monster who had fallen in love

With himself alone, how could I have

Told them what was in me, within my heart, trembling and passionate

Within the labyrinth and caves of my mind, which is

Like every mind partly or wholly hidden from itself?

The words for what is in my heart and in my mind

Do not exist. But I must seek and search to find

Amid the vines and orchards of the vivid world of day

Approximate images, imaginary parallels

For what is my heart and dark within my mind:

Comparisons and mere metaphors: for all

Of them are substitutes, both counterfeit and vague:

They are, at most, deceptive resemblances,

False in their very likeness, like the sons

Who are alike and kin and more unlike and false

Because they seem the father’s very self: but each one is

—Although begotten by the same forbears—himself,

The unique self, each one is unique, like every other one,

And everything, older or younger, nevertheless

A passionate nonesuch who has before has been.

Do you hear, do you see? Do you understand me now, and how

The words for what is my heart do not exist?

THE RIVER WAS THE EMBLEM OF ALL BEAUTY: ALL

...

The river was the abundant belly of beauty itself

The river was the dream space where I walked,

The river was itself and yet it was—flowing and freshening—

A self anew, another self, or self renewed

At every tick of eternity, and by each glint of light

Mounting or sparkling, descending to shade and black

—Had I but told them my heart, told how it was

Taunted at noon and pacified at dusk, at starfall midnight

Strong in hope once more, ever in eagerness

Jumping like joy, would they have heard? How could they?

How, when what they knew was, like the grass,

Simple and certain, known through the truth of touch, another form and fountain of falsehood’s fecundity—

Gazing upon their faces as they gazed

Could they have seen my faces as whores who are

Holy and deified as priestesses of hope

—the sacred virgins of futurity—

Promising dear divinity precisely because

They were disfigured ducks who might become

And be, and ever beloved, white swans, noble and beautiful.

Could they have seen how my faces were

Bonfires of worship and vigil, blazes of adoration and hope

—Surely they would have laughed again, renewed their scorn,

Giggled and snickered, cruel. Surely have said

This is the puerile mania of the obsessed,

The living logic of the lunatic:

I was the statue of their merriment,

Dead and a death, Pharoah and monster forsaken and lost.

...

My faces were my apes: my apes became

Performers in the Sundays of their parks,

Buffoons or clowns in the farce or comedy

When they took pleasure in knowing that they were not like me.

...

I waited like obsession in solitude:

The sun’s white terror tore and roared at me,

The moonlight, almond white, at night,

Whether awake or sleeping, arrested me

And sang, softly, haunted, unlike the sun

But as the sun. Withheld from me or took away

Despair or peace, making me once more

With thought of what had never been before——

Delmore Schwartz, “Narcissus” from Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge. Copyright © 1967 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.

Source: Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1967)

I used to go to the art museum in San Diego as a teenager and find a painting that had layers of meaning in it and sit on on the benches that was scattered throughout and just stare at it discovering the different things that were contained in it. Not every painting had it, of course.

The same would go for books and poems. the above poem definitely has many suggestions that one can discover for oneself that I am not going to attempt to put here. Poetry, great poetry must be tasted and relished, by the individual and all of us have different tastes. But it must be said there is so much in the above poem by Delmore Schwartz at least for me.

"They thought I had fallen in love with my own face"

Just that one line from the poem above flooded my mind with my own sense of its implication within the whole poem. The name of the poem is "Narcissus" and of course the line ties in with that. Is the poet a narcissist if he or she believes in their own poetry? In the muse that guides the pen over the paper? If the poet thumbs the nose at the non-poet who criticizes the work, is the poet necessarily a self-centered egotist? Personally, I don't think so.

This poem is an excellent defense of the poet, the writer and the artist who has developed a strong enough skin to withstand the arrows from bows of those who cannot create or see the magic of the world that exist. Poets are the seers and the gifted ones who can help the rest of us see what is there we cannot perceive, feel or comprehend. They are the guides on the trails of beauty and with their talents and skills we can almost catch a glimpse of the shimmering wonder they can penetrate into but we cannot without their help. Thank you Delmore Schwartz, where ever you are, for being that guide. You paid dearly for that vision.

I hear My World by Geneva Lorrain

From my window...

I hear
a owl somewhere
a woodpecker nearby
Canada geese honking as
they are fly over head

From my bed...

I hear
the clock's second hand ticking
the furnace kicking on and off
the small fridge humming, singing
the pages of my book turn
the pen move across a journal

The laptop on my lap...

I hear the beeping of it being turned on
the click of the change of programs
Twitter, Facebook, news, Google

I hear my world

The Apple Tree by GENEVA LORRAIN

The Apple Tree

echo of Eden
time long past
where we did not belong.
who is keeping a record
of all this?
do they even understand
you and me?

God waltzes in, beard unfrocked
except He didn't.
There was no apple tree there
It's in my garden
heavy with fruit.

Geneva Lorrain

The Lake
by GENEVA LORRAIN


There is comfort
in low fog
that hugs
the mountain sides.

There is peace
among the ripples
of the lake
that spread out on the water.

There is mystery
in the starless skies,
rain that is falling
on fertile ground.

And I fall asleep...