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The Contrary Muse

Naomi Replansky

1918 –

2023

Poet (kneels stiffly):

I beg you, Muse, come down, come down and redeem me!

You used to arrive any time, you would come for no reason.

Now, though the sweat of death stood on my forehead,

No song would be shaken.

Muse:

I pay no heed to prayers or to reproaches.

I bless those who burn, but they must not burn only for me.

Turn your passion elsewhere. Then, when least you remember

My touch, I may touch you.

Copyright © 1994 by Naomi Replansky. “The Contrary Muse” originally appeared in The Dangerous World: New and Selected Poems, 1934-1994 (Another Chicago Press, 1994). Reprinted by permission of the author. All rights reserved.

Naomi Replansky was born in the Bronx on May 23, 1918. The daughter of Russian-Jewish immigrants, she began writing poems at a young age. By her mid-teens, she was publishing poems in literary journals and anthologies. Replansky studied history at Hunter College but did not finish her degree, opting instead to go to work. During the 1940s and 1950s, she worked in a factory in New York City and as a translator in Los Angeles. In the latter decade, she earned a bachelor’s degree in geography from the University of California, Los Angeles.

About Naomi Replansky

Themes

Ambition

Creation

Writing

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About Not Writing

Tongue-tied, I stand before

Myself as inquisitor.

I loved to mark time

With a beat, with rhyme.

Time marked me with its thumb,

Slowed down the pendulum.

Slowed it down, or stopped:

Words were lopped, words dropped—

No use to devise

Reasons or alibis.

Now, strangely, I draw breath

Well past my ninetieth.

What’s begun is almost done,

Still I must brood upon

The much tha

Naomi Replansky

2018

Catalogue

My blurring eyes, my deafened ears—

O careless sadism of the years!

Sun-loving and sun-ravaged skin—

One-sided love has done you in.

My teeth—less said, less missed!—my heart—

My runaway, my telltale heart—

Heart whose misfirings can defeat

The pulse of this iambic beat!

(While hypochondria detects

Whatever ill it hears of next.)

In couplets that are not heroic

I try to say, in accents stoic:

Naomi Replansky

2018

An Inheritance

Five dollars, four dollars, three dollars, two,

One, and none, and what do we do?”

This is the worry that never got said

But ran so often in my mother's head

And showed so plain in my father's frown

That to us kids it drifted down.

It drifted down like soot, like snow,

In the dream-tossed Bronx, in the long ago.

I shook it off with a shake of the head.

I bounced my ball, I ate warm bread,

I skated down the steepest hill.

Naomi Replansky

2018

Poems

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The Contrary Muse

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