A(nother) Great Poetry Event! (a little something for the off-season)

Young People’s Open Mic
Students from grades 6 to 12

Saturday, October 19
7– 9pm
Sign-ups begin at 6:30pm
Poems in all languages welcome.
Family Friendly –Please make sure content and language is for all ages
At the Roslindale Branch Library
4246 Washington Street, Roslindale, MA

Light refreshments served
Sponsored by the Friends of Roslindale Branch Library
Street parking available
Questions? Contact roslindalelibraryfriends@gmail.com

Untitled/For MF

Untitled/For MF

Each time
you answer
I am grateful
in a way
that make poets
cringe--
trite
over-the-top
metaphors
and hail marys
and whatever
jews and buddhists say
in thanks
when a miracle
has occurred.

Maybe
you really do know
what it is like
to shadow box…

to tiptoe
amongst
land mines
laid down so long ago
that the parties no longer
remember the war

yet each soft step
is one
toward freedom.

And so I tread
first with a quiet prayer
and now,
as you have taught me,
with a breath.

--Nancy Marks

Thanks, Ed - a poem wrapped in art.

Time for Poetry & Stout

When the winter sheds its scaly skin
And slinks up to the hilltop once again
We gather sticks and horns with it to clout
Then it is the time for poetry and stout

And as the warming sun the snow does slice
And the slithering season recedes with melting ice
And manic love begins to stretch and sprout
Then it is the time for poetry and stout

And when the children with their drums and packs
Parade along yale terrace to and back
As a rite of spring, establishing the serpentine route
Then it is the time for poetry and stout

So look not for invitations to partake
But gather up your poems to kill the snake
And herald glorious spring with whisper, song or shout
For now it is the time for poetry and stout

-- Michael O'Connor

My Heart's In The Highlands

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

Farewell to the mountains high covered with snow;
Farewell to the straths and green valleys below;
Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.

My heart's in the Highlands, my heart is not here;
My heart's in the Highlands a-chasing the deer;
A-chasing the wild-deer, and following the roe,
My heart's in the Highlands wherever I go.

-- Robert Burns

Joel and Shaw

Maggie + Katie

On the Beach at Night

N the beach at night,
Stands a child with her father,
Watching the east, the autumn sky.

Up through the darkness,
While ravening clouds, the burial clouds, in black masses spreading,
Lower sullen and fast athwart and down the sky,
Amid a transparent clear belt of ether yet left in the east,
Ascends large and calm the lord-star Jupiter,
And nigh at hand, only a very little above,
Swim the delicate sisters the Pleiades.

From the beach the child holding the hand of her father,
Those burial-clouds that lower victorious soon to devour all,
Watching, silently weeps.

Weep not, child,
Weep not, my darling,
With these kisses let me remove your tears,
The ravening clouds shall not long be victorious,
They shall not long possess the sky, they devour the stars only in apparition,
Jupiter shall emerge, be patient, watch again another night, the Pleiades shall emerge,
They are immortal, all those stars both silvery and golden shall shine out again,
The great stars and the little ones shall shine out again, they endure,
The vast immortal suns and the long-enduring pensive moons shall again shine.

Then dearest child mournest thou only for Jupiter?
Considerest thou alone the burial of the stars?

Something there is,
(With my lips soothing thee, adding I whisper,
I give thee the first suggestion, the problem and indirection,)
Something there is more immortal even than the stars,
(Many the burials, many the days and nights, passing away,)
Something that shall endure longer even than lustrous Jupiter
Longer than sun or any revolving satellite,
Or the radiant sisters the Pleiades.

-- Walt Whitman

Save-the-date! March 16th is the 13th annual. Please be there!

Those Winter Sundays

Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?


-- Robert Hayden