We present this work in honor of the poet’s 100th birthday.
Tatamkhulu Afrika South African 1920 – 2002
Small bird in a bush:
cars in the street rush
past it like the Gadarene swine,
line upon line.
Soft feathers fluff
in a lean wind, rough
as a rasp in the leaves’ green,
brooming the earth clean.
Cognisant of none
save the strengthening sun,
the blood of its dawn
still red on the hill,
it sings and it sings,
repetitive rings
and showers of sound
seeming profound
to the shallows in me,
but, in reality,
only a bird’s things:
sex and seed, rain on the wings,
consciousness of warmth and light,
withdrawal of the night,
the wind’s suddenness,
or its silences.
All this I know,
and no less know
its innocence, my prescience,
and which the better sense,
and which the finer face,
and which the saving grace:
self-seeking orison
or this simple hymnal to the sun?
Don’t stop me. I’m dreaming.
We’ve been through centuries of injustice.
Centuries of loneliness.
Not now—don’t stop me.
Now here forever and everywhere.
I’m dreaming of freedom.
Gorgeous unique anyone,
let’s restore harmony to the universe.
Let’s play. Knowledge is joy.
It’s not mandatory schoolwork—
I dream because I love you.
Big dreams of the sky, of
workers with their own factories
who contribute to the
global chocolate industry.
I dream because I KNOW and CAN.
Banks give birth to “robbers,”
prisons to “terrorists,”
loneliness to “misfits,”
products to “needs,”
borders to armies.
Ownership gives birth to all of it.
Violence gives birth to violence.
Don’t ask. Don’t stop me.
It’s on us now to make justice
the ultimate act.
Let’s make a poem from life.
Let’s make life an action.
That’s my dream and I can I can I can
I LOVE YOU
Don’t stop my dreaming. Live.
I open my hands
to love to solidarity
to freedom.
24/7, from the very beginning,
I stand for ANARCHY.
We present this work in honor of the 25th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Gwen Harwood Australian 1920 – 1995
So hungry-sensitive that he
craves day and night the pap of praise,
he’ll ease his gripes or fingerpaint
in heartsblood on a public page.
The ordinary world must be
altered to circumvent his rage.
He’ll tell, with stylish Angst of course,
the inmost secrets of our bed.
Words are far worse than drugs; there is
no hope of surfeit or remorse.
The world lies wide, and warm. No kiss,
no child, no prayer will keep him here.
I’ll wash the floors. He’ll watch the stars.
I’ll salt his life with common sense.
He’ll suck my sap and vigour down
the crude mouth of his private hell.
Visions have no equivalents.
He’ll die of drink and candy bars.
We present this work in honor of the 20th anniversary of the poet’s death.
Gwendolyn Brooks American 1917 – 2000
Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.
It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.
It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.
It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.
Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.
Now Sam McGee was from Tennessee, where the cotton blooms and blows.
Why he left his home in the South to roam ‘round the Pole, God only knows.
He was always cold, but the land of gold seemed to hold him like a spell;
Though he’d often say in his homely way that he’d “sooner live in hell”.
On a Christmas Day we were mushing our way over the Dawson trail.
Talk of your cold! through the parka’s fold it stabbed like a driven nail.
If our eyes we’d close, then the lashes froze till sometimes we couldn’t see;
It wasn’t much fun, but the only one to whimper was Sam McGee.
And that very night, as we lay packed tight in our robes beneath the snow,
And the dogs were fed, and the stars o’erhead were dancing heel and toe,
He turned to me, and “Cap,” says he, “I’ll cash in this trip, I guess;
And if I do, I’m asking that you won’t refuse my last request.”
Well, he seemed so low that I couldn’t say no; then he says with a sort of moan:
“It’s the cursed cold, and it’s got right hold till I’m chilled clean through to the bone.
Yet ‘tain’t being dead — it’s my awful dread of the icy grave that pains;
So I want you to swear that, foul or fair, you’ll cremate my last remains.”
A pal’s last need is a thing to heed, so I swore I would not fail;
And we started on at the streak of dawn; but God! he looked ghastly pale.
He crouched on the sleigh, and he raved all day of his home in Tennessee;
And before nightfall a corpse was all that was left of Sam McGee.
There wasn’t a breath in that land of death, and I hurried, horror-driven,
With a corpse half hid that I couldn’t get rid, because of a promise given;
It was lashed to the sleigh, and it seemed to say:
“You may tax your brawn and brains,
But you promised true, and it’s up to you to cremate those last remains.”
Now a promise made is a debt unpaid, and the trail has its own stern code.
In the days to come, though my lips were dumb, in my heart how I cursed that load.
In the long, long night, by the lone firelight, while the huskies, round in a ring,
Howled out their woes to the homeless snows — O God! how I loathed the thing.
And every day that quiet clay seemed to heavy and heavier grow;
And on I went, though the dogs were spent and the grub was getting low;
The trail was bad, and I felt half mad, but I swore I would not give in;
And I’d often sing to the hateful thing, and it hearkened with a grin.
Till I came to the marge of Lake Lebarge, and a derelict there lay;
It was jammed in the ice, but I saw in a trice it was called the “Alice May”.
And I looked at it, and I thought a bit, and I looked at my frozen chum;
Then “Here,” said I, with a sudden cry, “is my cre-ma-tor-eum.”
Some planks I tore from the cabin floor, and I lit the boiler fire;
Some coal I found that was lying around, and I heaped the fuel higher;
The flames just soared, and the furnace roared — such a blaze you seldom see;
And I burrowed a hole in the glowing coal, and I stuffed in Sam McGee.
Then I made a hike, for I didn’t like to hear him sizzle so;
And the heavens scowled, and the huskies howled, and the wind began to blow.
It was icy cold, but the hot sweat rolled down my cheeks, and I don’t know why;
And the greasy smoke in an inky cloak went streaking down the sky.
I do not know how long in the snow I wrestled with grisly fear;
But the stars came out and they danced about ere again I ventured near;
I was sick with dread, but I bravely said: “I’ll just take a peep inside.
I guess he’s cooked, and it’s time I looked”;… then the door I opened wide.
And there sat Sam, looking cool and calm, in the heart of the furnace roar;
And he wore a smile you could see a mile, and he said: “Please close that door.
It’s fine in here, but I greatly fear you’ll let in the cold and storm —
Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it’s the first time I’ve been warm.”
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.
Dead rivers.
Naked glaze.
At the heavenly threshing-floor-
Cloud stack.
Drunken whirlwind is dancing,
Whimper old dog.
From the sunny disc
Yawning coldly
To the earth – the prophet…
In broken mirror-
A broken light of face.
The winter is lighting up it’s cigar
At he porch.
The color blood – ashy black…
The death has sent
It’s messenger to the hut.
Pain – is the death of will-
Testing
The patience of the wise man.
At last Confuzio, has matured,
Beginning from the end.
With you on the plain,
with you in the sleeping dawn,
with you through the thicket
of some lost forest.
Where would you have me go.
With you to the sea, to the wind,
to the highest mountain,
in the most solitary place;
or to the sterile sands
of the remotest desert.
Sometimes as an antidote
To fear of death,
I eat the stars.
Those nights, lying on my back,
I suck them from the quenching dark
Til they are all, all inside me,
Pepper hot and sharp.
Sometimes, instead, I stir myself
Into a universe still young,
Still warm as blood:
No outer space, just space,
The light of all the not yet stars
Drifting like a bright mist,
And all of us, and everything
Already there
But unconstrained by form.
And sometime it’s enough
To lie down here on earth
Beside our long ancestral bones:
To walk across the cobble fields
Of our discarded skulls,
Each like a treasure, like a chrysalis,
Thinking: whatever left these husks
Flew off on bright wings.
Poets Corner 