Poems 38 and 39  (Pandemic Day 48)

I Like Pets

Once I hid a baby mouse

In the pocket of a blouse.

Mother found him, had a fit,

Told me to get rid of it.

Once I found a slimy slug,

Put him on the bathroom rug.

Mother found him, had a fit,

Told me to get rid of it.

Once I had a frog named Scamper,

Pet him in the laundry hamper.

Mother found him, had a fit,

Told me to get rid of it.

Once I caught a lovely bat,

Hid him in an old straw hat.

Mother found him, had a fit,

Told me to get rid of it.

Now I have a grassy snake,

Hidden in a box marked Cake

Mother's sure to have a fit,

She will scream, "Get rid of it!"

Hooray for Chocolate

Chocolate pudding,

Chocolate candy,

Chocolate drink, I think, is dandy.

Chocolate fudge,

And doughnuts too,

Covered with thick chocolate goo.

Chocolate cookies,

Chocolate cake, 

In a cone I always take

Chocolate,

Or chocolate chip,

Or chocolate-covered dairy dip.

Boy, oh boy! It would be nice

If only there were

Chocolate rice,

Chocolate spinach, stew and fish...

Chocolate in every dish!

Lucia and James L. Hymes, Jr., Hooray for Chocolate, Young People Press, 1972.

The upheaval of our lives right now is enough to give us all fits, regardless of the presence of mice, slugs frogs, bats or snakes.  Thank goodness for chocolate!  I wshl I could share some with you all!

When it's safe to travel again, a chocolate pilgrimage might be a good idea! 

Ode to the Artichoke

Poem 37 (Pandemic Day 47)

Ode to the Artichoke

The tender-hearted
artichoke
got dressed as a warrior,

erect, built
a little cupola,
stood
impermeable
under
its scales,
around it
the crazy vegetables
bristled,
grew
astonishing tendrils,
cattails, bulbs,
in the subsoil
slept the carrot
with its red whiskers,
the grapevine
dried the runners
through which it carries the wine,
the cabbage
devoted itself
to trying on skirts,
oregano
to perfuming the world,
and the gentle
artichoke
stood there in the garden,
dressed as a warrior,
burnished
like a pomegranate,
proud,
and one day
along with the others
in large willow
baskets, it traveled
to the market
to realize its dream:
the army.
Amid the rows
never was it so military
as at the fair,
men
among the vegetables
with their white shirts
were
marshals
of the artichokes,
the tight ranks,
the voices of command,
and the detonation
of a falling crate,
but
then
comes
Maria
with her basket,
picks an artichoke,
isn't afraid of it,
examines it, holds it
to the light as if it were an egg,
buys it,
mixes it up
in her bag
with a pair of shoes,
with a head of cabbage and a
bottle of vinegar
until
entering the kitchen
she submerges it in a pot.
Thus ends
in peace
the career
of the armored vegetable
which is called artichoke,
then
scale by scale
we undress
its delight
and we eat
the peaceful flesh
of its green heart.

Pablo Neruda, Full Woman, Fleshly Apple, Hot Moon, Translated by Stephen Mitchell, Harper, 1997

There is a poem for everything...if you can't find one, then you need to write it yourself.  However, I'd check in with Neruda first.

Consider this upcoming event...The Universe in Verse

April 25, 2020
4:30 PM EST

click the link to participate

Sparks

Poem 36 (Pandemic Day 44)

Sparks

When I was eight

I lit a coal stove every morning

staring at the sparks jump and 

dance out of flames

as I fanned them with a palm leaf

Mother said they were fairies in exile

turned into diamonds

She knit a crown

to adorn my childhood

When I was eight

I went fishing in a flooded stream

I floated on water

pebbles were my pillows

I looked up at the milky clouds

spreading across the sky

Father said they were angels in exile

turned into waterfalls

He folded a boat 

to bear away my childhood

Wang Ping, Of Flesh & Spirit,Coffee House Press, 1998.

Let's compare most people's experience of reading books of poetry with the experience of going into the water at the lake or the ocean.  I believe that would fall into the category of "dipping their toes in from the dock" or "wading in up to their ankles so they don't get their jeans wet" and not, "let's plunge right in and stay all day."  

Poetry expects a lot from its readers and reading a book of poetry from cover to cover in a single sitting is not our typical approach.  You might feel differently when you pick up Of Flesh & Spirit.   I tend to think of mysteries or thrillers as "intriguing" "compelling" "page-turners"  but I felt that about Wang Ping's poetry.  I couldn't just dip in and pick up a poem.  I needed to know the whole story she was telling of her amazing life told through both poems and anecdotal stories interspersed.  

Wang Ping was born in China in 1957,  just before Mao instituted the "Great Leap Forward" which brought on the deadliest famine in history.  She grew up on a small island in the East China Sea and largely self-taught,  went on to earn degrees including a Ph.D from NY University.  She wrote this book while teaching at Macalester College in St. Paul. Besides poetry, she has written novels and short stories, translates and is a photographer and performance artist.  Her latest book is My Name is Immigrant.

Great Uncle Norvell Fast is Dead

Poem 35 (Pandemic Day 43)

Great Uncle Norvell Fast is Dead

When death won out, Norvell was about 80.

He'd been married a long time to great aunt Kate.

At every family party, after the whiskey

Kate would say that her marriage succeeded

because, each morning, Norvell

would sit on the toilet first, to warm

the seat for her, for great aunt Kate.

Every year, we'd laugh, even though

we thought it was pretty strange.  Every year,

Norvell would notd, sip his drink, and say, 

"I defy anybody to tell me different

It's every small gesture of love 

that matters.  And besides

Kate deserves a warm place to wait

for the everyday coming up of light."

But now Kate, already older than she wants

to be, must also deal with the unbroken chill

of waking.  With the long cool night.

On the same day that Norvell Fast died

so, too, did a friend of mine.  Out west

where the land is supposed to expand,

my friend stared into his thirtieth year,

into the sun he saw buried in the mountains,

and he decided that the next step

was too much, was enough.

So he cut himself away from his legs,

away until blood told him all he thought

he needed to know.  He forgot

two children.  A woman who loved

him.  Forgot about a country 

that would've waited for him.

At some point, memory fails many of us.

Maybe it even failed Norvell Fast.

But I doubt it.  Even in death's face

I expect Norvell refused to claw

at the earth.  More likely, he reached

for a drink, said, "I'm still good looking,

I'm still putting my arms around a remarkable

woman who will never stop calling out my name,

I'm riding the edges of the sky, and

I defy, I defy, I defy."

John Reinhard, Burning the Prairie, New Rivers Press, 1988. (winner of 1987 Minnesota Voices Project)

John was my teacher at the Loft.  He was wise and astute and helped me give a shape and a voice to some nebulous thoughts and emotions through poetry.  That was a special gift.  His books of poetry, as fellow poet Jim Harrison wrote for the back cover..."give us something we knew but never thought of before."  

Uncle Norvell is the kind of old man that you could pass by on any street and never give him a second glance.  Reinhard's poem dresses him up as a gentle hero, the romantic lead in a love story.  Maybe we'll look at the next old man we see and consider the possibilities for heroism that lie just beneath the surface. Perhaps we'll consider it in ourselves.

To His Coy Mistress

Poem 34 (Pandemic Day 42)

To His Coy Mistress

by Andrew Marvell

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down, and think which way

Griselda, 1910 by Maxfield Parrish
The model was Susan Lewin, Parrish's lifelong
companion and model. It remain a
mystery if she was more than that.

To walk, and pass our long love’s day.
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the flood,
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires and more slow;
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine eyes, and on thy forehead gaze;
Two hundred to adore each breast,
But thirty thousand to the rest;
An age at least to every part,
And the last age should show your heart.
For, lady, you deserve this state,
Nor would I love at lower rate.

But at my back I always hear
Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;
And yonder all before us lie
Deserts of vast eternity.
Thy beauty shall no more be found;
Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound
My echoing song; then worms shall try
That long-preserved virginity,
And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.

Now therefore, while the youthful hue
Sits on thy skin like morning dew,
And while thy willing soul transpires
At every pore with instant fires,

Now let us sport us while we may,
And now, like amorous birds of prey,
Rather at once our time devour
Than languish in his slow-chapped power.
Let us roll all our strength and all
Our sweetness up into one ball,
And tear our pleasures with rough strife
Through the iron gates of life:
Thus, though we cannot make our sun
Stand still, yet we will make him run.

Parrish & Poetry: A Gift of Words and Art, Compiled and edited by Laurence S. and Judy goffman Cutler, Pomegranate Art Books, 1995.  [Paintings by Maxfield Parrish (1870-1966) accompanied by classic poems, many were favorites of the artist]

I read this poem for the first time in my Survey of English Literature in college.  It was pretty racy stuff I thought, to be coming out of the 17th century...seduction of a virgin...but couched in such lyrical couplets.  I enjoyed the sly humor; the lavish praise of her beauty and concern for her virtue which quickly changed to, "but we really don't have time for that."  Here was carpe diem at work again.  We could wait, perhaps, but the worms will get us....the grave is not a place for love or lust.  

It came to me that there was some consistency through time in the workings of men and women.  Just the previous weekend I'd had a similar request, but without the couplets.

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam trans. by E. FitzGerald

Poems 29-33  (Pandemic Day 41)

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

XII

A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,

A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread__and Thou

    Beside me singing in the Wilderness--

Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow!

XIII

Some for the Glories of This World and some

Sigh for the Prophet's Paradise to come;

   Ah, take the Cash, and let the Credit go,

Nor heed the rumble of a distant Drum!

XXIII

And we, that now make merry in the Room

They left, and Summer dresses in new bloom,

    Ourselves must we beneath the Couch of Earth

Descend--ourselves to make a Couch---for whom?

XXIV

Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend;

    Dust into Dust, and under Dust to lie,

Sans Wine, sans Song, sans Singer, and--sans End!


XCVI
Yet Ah, that Spring should vanish with the Rose!
That Youth's sweet-scented Manuscript should close!
    The Nightingale that in the Branches sang,
Ah, whence, and whither flown again, who knows!.

Edward FitzGerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Grosset and Dunlap, no date

My copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is pocket-sized and quite old and worn; because I was a bookseller for a long time, the provenance of many of my books is unknown, but I probably picked it up on "bag day" at some big book sale.

That's not romantic, but I can imagine a much more idyllic beginning for it.  Grosset and Dunlap began as book reprinters or rebinders in 1898.  I would guess from the style and condition that this was an early 20th century printing that some earnest but less than wealthy young man bought to woo his sweetheart on a picnic..."A loaf of bread, a jug of wine and thou".  That's the catch line of this classic, but what's it all about? 

Omar Khayyam (1048-1133) was a noted Persian mathematician, astronomer, philosopher and poet. "The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam" (a ruba'i is a four line quatrain specifically Persian, a rubaiyat is a collection of ruba'i) is not a narrative poem but a collection of epigrams or special insights. You could sum up the philosophy espoused in the poem as a directive to "Carpe Diem" or "Seize the Day" accompanied by the virtues of drinking wine. There are regular references to wine, jugs, urns, cups, bowls and grapes.

With that going for it, no wonder  it has become one of the most widely known poems in the world, republished virtually every year from 1879 (the year of FitzGerald's fourth edition) to the present day, and translated into over eighty different languages.

FitzGerald described his work as "transmogrification". To a large extent, the Rubaiyat can be considered original poetry by FitzGerald loosely based on Omar's quatrains rather than a "translation" in the narrow sense. Some critics maintain that the poetic quality of FitzGerald's finished product exceeded that of Khayyám's original quatrains. In other words, Khayyám supplied the lumber, and FitzGerald built the house. 

The concept of "carpe diem" might call to mind the scene in the 1989 movie, Dead Poets Society, where Robin Williams as a teacher at a boys' prep school inspired his students through poetry.  I hadn't seen the movie in the theater, but when it came on television, I was enthralled.  During a commercial break I rushed to my bookshelf and pulled out my old college text, Norton's Anthology of English Literature, Volume 1. (a modest 1,986 page book).  I turned to Robert Herrick's "To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time."  There, next to the famous line, "Gather ye rosebuds while ye may, Old time is still a-flying" I had written--Carpe Diem--use time while you can.

Just like that, my 19-year old self had time-traveled 25 years into the future to give me a message, more pertinent than when I'd first penned it, --"seize the day"!  Omar has come down from my neglected poetry shelf  to reinforce it again.

"Ah, make the most of what we yet may spend,

Before we too into the Dust descend..."

Read the poem which is in the public domain

A study guide to the poem