My friends without shields walk on the target It is late the windows are breaking My friends without shoes leave What they love Grief moves among them as a fire among Its bells My friends without clocks turn On the dial they turn They part My friends with names like gloves set out Bare handed as they have lived And nobody knows them It is they that lay the wreaths at the milestones it is their Cups that are found at the wells And are then chained up My friends without feet sit by the wall Nodding to the lame orchestra Brotherhood it says on the decorations My friend without eyes sits in the rain smiling With a nest of salt in his hand My friends without fathers or houses hear Doors opening in the darkness Whose halls announce Behold the smoke has come home My friends and I have in common The present a wax bell in a wax belfry This message telling of Metals this Hunger for the sake of hunger this owl in the heart And these hands one For asking one for applause My friends with nothing leave it behind In a box My friends without keys go out from the jails it is night They take the same road they miss Each other they invent the same banner in the dark They ask their way only of sentries too proud to breathe At dawn the stars on their flag will vanish The water will turn up their footprints and the day will rise Like a monument to my Friends the forgotten
From The Moving Target, by W. S. Merwin, published by Atheneum. Copyright © 1963 by W. S. Merwin. Used with permission.
In the first version, Persephone is taken from her mother and the goddess of the earth punishes the earth—this is consistent with what we know of human behavior, that human beings take profound satisfaction in doing harm, particularly unconscious harm: we may call this negative creation. Persephone's initial sojourn in hell continues to be pawed over by scholars who dispute the sensations of the virgin: did she cooperate in her rape, or was she drugged, violated against her will, as happens so often now to modern girls. As is well known, the return of the beloved does not correct the loss of the beloved: Persephone returns home stained with red juice like a character in Hawthorne— I am not certain I will keep this word: is earth "home" to Persephone? Is she at home, conceivably, in the bed of the god? Is she at home nowhere? Is she a born wanderer, in other words an existential replica of her own mother, less hamstrung by ideas of causality? You are allowed to like no one, you know. The characters are not people. They are aspects of a dilemma or conflict. Three parts: just as the soul is divided, ego, superego, id. Likewise the three levels of the known world, a kind of diagram that separates heaven from earth from hell. You must ask yourself: where is it snowing? White of forgetfulness, of desecration— It is snowing on earth; the cold wind says Persephone is having sex in hell. Unlike the rest of us, she doesn't know what winter is, only that she is what causes it. She is lying in the bed of Hades. What is in her mind? Is she afraid? Has something blotted out the idea of mind? She does know the earth is run by mothers, this much is certain. She also knows she is not what is called a girl any longer. Regarding incarceration, she believes she has been a prisoner since she has been a daughter. The terrible reunions in store for her will take up the rest of her life. When the passion for expiation is chronic, fierce, you do not choose the way you live. You do not live; you are not allowed to die. You drift between earth and death which seem, finally, strangely alike. Scholars tell us that there is no point in knowing what you want when the forces contending over you could kill you. White of forgetfulness, white of safety— They say there is a rift in the human soul which was not constructed to belong entirely to life. Earth asks us to deny this rift, a threat disguised as suggestion— as we have seen in the tale of Persephone which should be read as an argument between the mother and the lover— the daughter is just meat. When death confronts her, she has never seen the meadow without the daisies. Suddenly she is no longer singing her maidenly songs about her mother's beauty and fecundity. Where the rift is, the break is. Song of the earth, song of the mythic vision of eternal life— My soul shattered with the strain of trying to belong to earth— What will you do, when it is your turn in the field with the god?
"Persephone the Wanderer" from Averno by Louise Glück. Copyright © 2006 by Louise Glück. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.
I always thought death would be like traveling in a car, moving through the desert, the earth a little darker than sky at the horizon, that your life would settle like the end of a day and you would think of everyone you ever met, that you would be the invisible passenger, quiet in the car, moving through the night, forever, with the beautiful thought of home.
Copyright © 2011 by Carl Adamshick. Used with permission of the author.
we who are your closest friends feel the time has come to tell you that every Thursday we have been meeting as a group to devise ways to keep you in perpetual uncertainty frustration discontent and torture by neither loving you as much as you want nor cutting you adrift your analyst is in on it plus your boyfriend and your ex-husband and we have pledged to disappoint you as long as you need us in announcing our association we realize we have placed in your hands a possible antidote against uncertainty indeed against ourselves but since our Thursday nights have brought us to a community of purpose rare in itself with you as the natural center we feel hopeful you will continue to make unreasonable demands for affection if not as a consequence of your disastrous personality then for the good of the collective
From At the End of the Day: Selected Poems and an Introductory Essay, copyright © 2009 by Phillip Lopate. Used by permission of Marsh Hawk Press.
Stay yet, my friends, a moment stay— Stay till the good old year, So long companion of our way, Shakes hands, and leaves us here. Oh stay, oh stay, One little hour, and then away. The year, whose hopes were high and strong, Has now no hopes to wake; Yet one hour more of jest and song For his familiar sake. Oh stay, oh stay, One mirthful hour, and then away. The kindly year, his liberal hands Have lavished all his store. And shall we turn from where he stands, Because he gives no more? Oh stay, oh stay, One grateful hour, and then away. Days brightly came and calmly went, While yet he was our guest; How cheerfully the week was spent! How sweet the seventh day’s rest! Oh stay, oh stay, One golden hour, and then away. Dear friends were with us, some who sleep Beneath the coffin-lid: What pleasant memories we keep Of all they said and did! Oh stay, oh stay, One tender hour, and then away. Even while we sing, he smiles his last, And leaves our sphere behind. The good old year is with the past; Oh be the new as kind! Oh stay, oh stay, One parting strain, and then away.
This poem is in the public domain.
Soon the electrical wires will grow heavy under the snow. I am thinking of fire of the possibility of fire & then moving Across America in a car with a powder blue dashboard, Moving to country music & the heart Is torn a little more because the song says the truth. Because in the thirty-six things that can happen To people, men & women, women & women, Men & men, in all these things the soul is bound To be broken somewhere along the line, That clove-scented, air-colored wanderer blushing With no memory, no inkling & then proceeds Across America In the sap green of the tropics, Toward the cadmium of a bitter sunrise to a new age, At the white impossible ice hour, starving, Past the electric blue of the rivers melting down, Above the nude, snuff, terra cotta, maybe fire, Over the tiny fragile mound of finger bones Of an Indian who died standing up, Through the heliotrope of a song about the sunset, To live the thirty-six things & never comes home.
From A Hunger by Lucie Brock-Broido, published by Alfred A. Knopf. Copyright © 1988 by Lucie Brock-Broido. Reprinted by permission of the publisher and author. All rights reserved.
Angel and muse escape with violin and compass; the duende wounds. —Federico García Lorca I didn't expect to escape. I've stepped out of planes into Madrid and Bangkok, Prague and Seoul, each time a solo in a world that was, if not cruel, supremely indifferent to the fact of my breath. I loved where I could, did not imagine my mouth without light, fish at home in my bluest wells. I went in a stalk of pure wanting that knows there's no getting, and collected tiny lemons of joy when they ripened in reach of a window in Vence where I happened also on tangles of grapes fallen and trodden on the road to the sea. I plucked green stones from Spanish sand, wore the white hibiscus for a day behind my ear where it softened with rot in a pattern of etch. In Andalusia the wine is new and ruby, breath and aroma the tools of being in places where days are paid out like so many queens on obsolete coins. Now, not suddenly, but after long balance of what there is against what might or might never be, the never-was has dared to love me back. So it was death all along who stood in the ferry with his dirty blonde hair and bright nylon pack, but I never imagined he'd be so young as he slung the pack, leapt to the shore and never looked back for me. That's why my flesh loves me today. There are salt and heat and a body of bread, new if not endless, and a rumor if not news of the future. It dies as it lived, the idea of duende, a proximity, a song we don't necessarily need in a land of snow and icy green lakes where the weather's a tomb and the lover's strong thigh is white and marvelous as marble, a throne on which I suppose I could sit and grow handsomely old.
Copyright © 2007 by Leslie Adrienne Miller. Reprinted from The Resurrection Trade with the permission of Graywolf Press, Saint Paul, Minnesota.
You see this dog. It was but yesterday
I mused, forgetful of his presence here,
Till thought on thought drew downward tear on tear;
When from the pillow, where wet-cheeked I lay,
A head as hairy as Faunus, thrust its way
Right sudden against my face,—two golden-clear
Large eyes astonished mine,—a drooping ear
Did flap me on either cheek, to dry the spray!
I started first, as some Arcadian
Amazed by goatly god in twilight grove:
But as my bearded vision closelier ran
My tears off, I knew Flush, and rose above
Surprise and sadness; thanking the true Pan,
Who, by low creatures, leads to heights of love.
This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on June 23, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive.