Band-Aids

I have a Band-Aid on my finger,

One on my knee, and one on my nose,

One on my heel, and two on my shoulder,

Three on my elbow, and nine on my toes.

Two on my wrist, and one on my ankle,

One on my chin, and one on my thigh,

Four on my belly, and five on my bottom,

One on my forehead, and one on my eye.

One on my neck, and in case I might need ‘em

I have a box full of thirty-five more.

But oh! I do think it’s sort of a pity

I don’t have a cut or a sore!

He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven

Had I the heaven's embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,

I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams

When You Are Old

When you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

Wild Geese

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

The Fugitive Poets of Fenway Park

The Chilean secret police
searched everywhere
for the poet Neruda: in the dark shafts
of mines, in the boxcars of railroad yards,
in the sewers of Santiago.
The government intended to confiscate his mouth
and extract the poems one by one like bad teeth.
But the mines and boxcars and sewers were empty.

I know where he was. Neruda was at Fenway Park,
burly and bearded in a flat black cap, hidden
in the kaleidoscope of the bleachers.
He sat quietly, chomping a hot dog
when Ted Williams walked to the crest of the diamond,
slender as my father remembers him,
squinting at the pitcher, bat swaying in a memory of trees.

The stroke was a pendulum of long muscle and wood,
Ted's face tilted up, the home run
zooming into the right field grandstand.
Then the crowd stood together, cheering
for this blasphemer of newsprint, the heretic
who would not tip his cap as he toed home plate
or grin like a war hero at the sportswriters
surrounding his locker for a quote.

The fugitive poet could not keep silent,
standing on his seat to declaim the ode
erupted in crowd-bewildering Spanish from his mouth:

Praise Ted Williams, raising his sword
cut from the ash tree, the ball
a white planet glowing in the atmosphere
of the right field grandstand!

Praise the Wall rising
like a great green wave
from the green sea of the outfield!

Praise the hot dog, pink meat,
pork snouts, sawdust, mouse feces,
human hair, plugging our intestines,
yet baptized joyfully with mustard!

Praise the wobbling drunk, seasick beer
in hand, staring at the number on his ticket,
demanding my seat!

Everyone gawked at the man standing
on his seat, bellowing poetry in Spanish.
Anonymous no longer,
Neruda saw the Chilean secret police
as they scrambled through the bleachers,
pointing and shouting, so the poet
jumped a guardrail to disappear
through a Fenway tunnel,
the black cap flying from his head
and spinning into center field.

This is true. I was there at Fenway
on August 7, 1948, even if I was born
exactly nine years later
when my father
almost named me Theodore.

-- Martin Espada [Connie Breece]

When You Are Old

WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face among a crowd of stars.

-- William Butler Yeats [Elizabeth]

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.

-- Billy Collins [Fred Elliott-Hart]

Mossbawn Sunlight

1. Sunlight

There was a sunlit absence.
The helmeted pump in the yard
heated its iron,
water honeyed

in the slung bucket
and the sun stood
like a griddle cooling
against the wall

of each long afternoon.
So, her hands scuffled
over the bakeboard,
the reddening stove

sent its plaque of heat
against her where she stood
in a floury apron
by the window.

Now she dusts the board
with a goose's wing,
now sits, broad-lapped,
with whitened nails

and measling shins:
here is a space
again, the scone rising
to the tick of two clocks.

And here is love
like a tinsmith's scoop
sunk past its gleam
in the meal-bin.

-- Seamus Heaney [Liam O'Connor]

The Ides of March, 2008

Wouldn't it take a certain arrogance or pride to hold a party on the Ides of March?
Or, for that matter, to attend one?
Are we too busy to heed the signs? To unaware of portentous omens? Too lacking in simple humanity?
If this were a Greek tragedy, the gods would certainly punish such hubris:

-- there'd be salmonella in the artichoke dip
-- the keg would run flat, or worse, dry
-- Jerry's falsetto during "Danny Boy" would shatter our windshields
-- the stage, at the end of Act V, would be littered with corpses

But, then again, the Irish have been beating the odds for centuries.
They majored in tragedy, minored in hard knocks.
And a wiser poet than I once said, "I'd walk a longish road, through drear, hard rain, and fog, for a well-pulled pint."
Who am I, a New York Jew, to argue?
Was it Yeats? Or maybe Brendan Behan?
Either way, it was another scribe - a Brit - who coined for us "the Ides of March."
I first read it in 10th grade English class of Mr. Wills,
Who, if the second-floor bathroom stall was accurate, eats pills.
In Act 1, Scene 2 of Julius Caesar, a Soothsayer, yes, a soothsayer, (Rome was lousy with them in those days) cries, "Beware the Ides of March!"

He says it three times before exiting stage right, and we all know that bad luck runs in threes, like the number of leaves on the much more common, unlucky clover.

Caesar, stubborn as an Irish mule, pays no heed.
But there are, to be sure, other signs.
Looking out on a violent storm, here is Casca, a conspirator, talking to Cicero, a Senator, in Act 1, Scene 3:

"Are not you moved, when all the sway of earth
Shakes like a thing unfirm? O Cicero,
I have seen tempests, when the scolding winds
Have rived the knotty oaks, and I have seen
The ambitious ocean swell and rage and foam,
To be exalted with the threatening clouds:
But never till to-night, never till now,
Did I go through a tempest dropping fire.
Either there is a civil strife in heaven,
Or else the world, too saucy with the gods,
Incenses them to send destruction."

And, if that's not enough, here's the dream of Calpurnia (wife of Caesar) from Act II, Scene 2:

"Caesar, I never stood on ceremonies,
Yet now they fright me. There is one within,
Besides the things that we have heard and seen,
Recounts most horrid sights seen by the watch.
A lioness hath whelped in the streets;
And graves have yawn'd, and yielded up their dead;
Fierce fiery warriors fought upon the clouds,
In ranks and squadrons and right form of war,
Which drizzled blood upon the Capitol;
The noise of battle hurtled in the air,
Horses did neigh, and dying men did groan,
And ghosts did shriek and squeal about the streets.
O Caesar! these things are beyond all use,
And I do fear them."

So the heavens are raining fire and blood; ghosts and the undead are strolling about; Lions are whelping in the town square,

And what does Caesar do?

Ignores it all. He might just as well have gone to a St. Patrick's Day party for all he cared.

"Cowards die many times before their deaths;
The valiant never taste of death but once," he smugly answers his spouse.

"Of all the wonders that I yet have heard.
It seems to me most strange that men should fear;
Seeing that death, a necessary end,
Will come when it will come."

You can say that again. He gets it in the back nine times at the start of Act III.
Always, as my Calpurnia would say, listen to the woman.
But here I stand, despite the Soothsayer's prophesy, on the Ides of March.
What's a Roman with an omen to do?
I could cite my father, a voluntary poet in his own right, when he heard me practicing Marc Antony's soliloquy for Mr. Wills' class:

Quoth he: "He who drinks beer, Shakespeare."

-- Steve Hodin

Rocket to Space

NASA built a rocket to space
And everyone wanted to go
So they had a very big race
To see who would run round Mexico
Who won but a simple millipede with many many legs
And they decided to let him go, despite the others' pleas and begs
He shot past Mars
Quickly passing our stars
Now he sends postcards from Zigzagabaroon
Telling NASA "Hope to see you soon!"

-- Matthew Rappe

Magdalen Walks

THE little white clouds are racing over the sky,
And the fields are strewn with the gold of the flower of March,
The daffodil breaks under foot, and the tasselled larch
Sways and swings as the thrush goes hurrying by.

A delicate odour is borne on the wings of the morning breeze, 5
The odour of leaves, and of grass, and of newly up-turned earth,
The birds are singing for joy of the Spring’s glad birth,
Hopping from branch to branch on the rocking trees.

And all the woods are alive with the murmur and sound of Spring,
And the rosebud breaks into pink on the climbing briar, 10
And the crocus-bed is a quivering moon of fire
Girdled round with the belt of an amethyst ring.

And the plane to the pine-tree is whispering some tale of love
Till it rustles with laughter and tosses its mantle of green,
And the gloom of the wych-elm’s hollow is lit with the iris sheen 15
Of the burnished rainbow throat and the silver breast of a dove.

See! the lark starts up from his bed in the meadow there,
Breaking the gossamer threads and the nets of dew,
And flashing a-down the river, a flame of blue!
The kingfisher flies like an arrow, and wounds the air. 20

-- Oscar Wilde [Becky Miller]

O Captain, My Captain!

1

O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart! 5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

2

O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills; 10
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck, 15
You’ve fallen cold and dead.

3

My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won; 20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.


-- Walt Whitman

Portrait With Still-Life

I find no reason to distract my father who is yelling at the empty prescription

bottle. After he returned from the war, which he didn't find to his liking, he

operated a drill press without distinction for nearly fifty years. He raised a

family that was barely passable. He strode forth only when the weather fit

his shoes. He stood in the backyard and painted all the landscapes that

passed through his head, "like tulip petals on their way to a farter version of

heaven." He learned to read when he was a very young child, but found this

was an impediment later in his life. He was not my father, but a kitchen

appliance in need of repairs.

-- John Yau [Jan Reitsma]