Archives for posts with tag: Ohio writers

Pastoral as Complaint, poem by Bruce Weigl

February 17, 2014 //

PASTORAL AS COMPLAINT
by Bruce Weigl

The robin is so quarrelsome. He barks to no one in the trees;
he fluffs his body twice its size and rattles in the leaves.
He doesn’t know or won’t accept the nest is empty now,
the eggs a tatter on the ground. The storm was quick,
we didn’t see it come; no sound above the hum

a summer morning makes when god is in his place
and we are free of tragedies that pile up along the way.
The robin is so quarrelsome;
he thinks his life is gone just like the nest,
but he’s like the rest of us, it’s only just begun.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Bruce Weigl served in Vietnam in 1967 and 1968 and was awarded a Bronze Star. His first full-length collection of poems was published in 1979. He has received two Pushcart Prizes, a Patterson Poetry Prize, and a Yaddo Foundation Fellowship. Weigl was awarded the Bread Loaf Fellowship in Poetry in 1981 and a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1988. He was also nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 for Song of Napalm.

Tags Authors, Books, Bruce Weigl, environment, Midwest, Midwestern writers, Musings, nature, Ohio authors, Ohio writers, Poem, Poems, Poet, poetry, poets, Reading, robin, Writers, Writing

Categories Nature, Poetry

Folktale, poem by Bruce Weigl

September 5, 2013 //

FOLKTALE
Poem by Bruce Weigl

Nineteen fifty-seven: you
            remember the fins,
don’t you,
            on the baby-
blue-and-white Bel Air?
            Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts,
beyond the
            many-colored rabbits
penned for the evening
            by the tap-tap

of the old man’s cane, you can see
            another man
through the muslin iof time
            throw his baby
high into the air. Women

            scream from the porch, laughing.
Oh, the night is thick with blossoms
            from the blue plum tree,
and this man is full of liquor
            and of his own young life,

so he throws his baby boy
            high into the sky
as it is taken by evening
            Irrevocably away from them
so that it seemed
            that I would not come down.

NOTE: “Folktales” appears in The Unraveling Strangeness (2002), a poetry collection by Bruce Weigl. (Available at Amazon.com.) Critic Denise Levertov called Weigl “one of the best poets now writing in America.”

Tags 1957, 1958 Bel Air, Authors, automobile, Books, Bruce Weigl, cars, family stories, Literature, Midwestern authors, nostalgia, Ohio authors, Ohio writers, Poem, Poet, poetry, Reading, vintage cars, Writers, Writing

Categories Poetry

Folktale, Poem by Bruce Weigl

September 19, 2012 //

FOLKTALE

Poem by Bruce Weigl

Nineteen fifty-seven: you

remember the fins,

don’t you,

on the baby-

blue-and-white Bel Air?

Beyond the pigeon coop of ghosts,

beyond the

many-colored rabbits

penned for the evening

by the tap-tap

of the old man’s cane, you can see

another man

through the muslin iof time

throw his baby

high into the air. Women

scream from the porch, laughing.

Oh, the night is thick with blossoms

from the blue plum tree,

and this man is full of liquor

and of his own young life,

so he throws his baby boy

high into the sky

as it is taken by evening

Irrevocably away from them

so that it seemed

that I would not come down.

NOTE: “Folktales” is found in The Unraveling Strangeness (2002), a poetry collection by Bruce Weigl. (Available at Amazon.com.) Critic Denise Levertov called Weigl “one of the best poets now writing in America.”