A Summer Garden, poem by Louise Glück

A SUMMER GARDEN (Excerpt)
by Louise Glück

Several weeks ago I discovered a photograph of my mother
sitting in the sun, her face flushed as with achievement or triumph.
The sun was shining. The dogs
were sleeping at her feet where time was also sleeping,
calm and unmoving as in all photographs.

I wiped the dust from my mother’s face.
Indeed, dust covered everything; it seemed to me the persistent
haze of nostalgia that protects all relics of childhood.
In the background, an assortment of park furniture, trees and shrubbery.

The sun moved lower in the sky, the shadows lengthened and darkened.
The more dust I removed, the more these shadows grew.
Summer arrived. The children
leaned over the rose border, their shadows
merging with the shadows of the roses.

A word came into my head, referring
to this shifting and changing, these erasures
that were now obvious—

it appeared, and as quickly vanished.
Was it blindness or darkness, peril, confusion?

Summer arrived, then autumn. The leaves turning,
the children bright spots in a mash of bronze and sienna . . .

MORE: To read “A Summer Garden” by Louise Glück in its entirety, visit poetryfoundation.org.

PHOTO: Vintage photograph of a woman with a dog, available at ebay.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Louise Glück was appointed Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2003, after serving as a Special Bicentennial Consultant three years prior in 2000. She is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently, Poems 1962-2012 (2012), A Village Life: Poems (2009), Averno (2006), The Seven Ages (2001), and Vita Nova (1999), winner of Boston Book Review’s Bingham Poetry Prize and The New Yorker‘s Book Award in Poetry. In 2004, Sarabande Books released her six-part poem “October” as a chapbook. Her other books include Meadowlands (1996), The Wild Iris (Ecco Press, 1992) — winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Poetry Society of America’s William Carlos Williams Award — Ararat (1990), for which she received the Library of Congress’s Rebekah Johnson Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and The Triumph of Achilles (1985), which received the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Boston Globe Literary Press Award, and the Poetry Society of America’s Melville Kane Award. In 2008, Glück was selected to receive the Wallace Stevens Award for mastery in the art of poetry. Her most recent collection, Poems 1962-2012, was awarded the 2013 Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She is a writer-in-residence at Yale University.

The May Queen, poem by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

THE MAY QUEEN (Excerpt)
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson

You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear;
To-morrow ’ll be the happiest time of all the glad new-year,—
Of all the glad new-year, mother, the maddest, merriest day;
For I ’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I ’m to be Queen o’ the May.

There ’s many a black, black eye, they say, but none so bright as mine;
There ’s Margaret and Mary, there ’s Kate and Caroline;
But none so fair as little Alice in all the land, they say:
So I ’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I ’m to be Queen o’ the May.

I sleep so sound all night, mother, that I shall never wake,
If you do not call me loud when the day begins to break;
But I must gather knots of flowers and buds, and garlands gay;
For I ’m to be Queen o’ the May, mother, I ’m to be Queen o’ the May.

MORE: Read “The May Queen” by Alfred, Lord Tennyson in its entirety at bartleby.com.

PHOTO: “For I’m to be queen of the May, Mother, I’m to be Queen of the May” by Julia Margaret Cameron (1875, J. Paul Getty Museum).  To learn more about the May Queen traditions, visit wikipedia.org.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892) was Poet Laureate of Great Britain and Ireland during much of Queen Victoria’s reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. His most famous composition is “The Charge of the Light Brigade” (1854), written about a battle during the Crimean War. The poem includes the often-quoted line: “Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do and die.”

Tell Me a Story, poem by Robert Penn Warren

TELL ME A STORY
by Robert Penn Warren

Long ago, in Kentucky, I, a boy, stood
By a dirt road, in first dark, and heard
The great geese hoot northward.

I could not see them, there being no moon
And the stars sparse. I heard them.

I did not know what was happening in my heart.

It was the season before the elderberry blooms,
Therefore they were going north.

The sound was passing northward.

SOURCE: “Tell Me a Story” appears in The Collected Poems of Robert Penn Warren (1998), available at Amazon.com.

IMAGE: “Northbound,” watercolor by R. Kyllo. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:  Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989) — a poet-novelist-essayist-editor-critic — is the only person to win a Pulitzer Prize for both fiction and poetry, and considered the most decorated American author of all time. He received the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for his novel All the King’s Men and the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1958 and 1979. From 1944-1945, Warren served as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. His other honors and awards include Presidential Medal of Freedom (1980), MacArthur Fellowship (1981), designation as first U.S. Poet Laureate (1986), and National Medal of Arts (1987).

Refugio’s Hair, poem by Alberto Rios

REFUGIO’S HAIR
by Alberto Rios

In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera–The Land of the Lime–
And her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bareback, and sit there
As he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrín
And he placed the child in her arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse’s rear leg.
The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full toward the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the álamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.

PAINTING: “Woman Combing Her Hair” by Edgar Degas (1894).

SOURCE: “Refugio’s Hair” appears in Alberto Rios‘s collection The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon Press, 2002), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Alberto Alvaro Ríos was born in Nogales, Arizona, in 1952. He received a BA from the University of Arizona in 1974 and an MFA in Creative Writing from the same institution in 1979. His poetry collections include Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press, 2009); The Theater of Night (2007); The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (2002), nominated for the National Book Award; Teodora Luna’s Two Kisses (1990); The Lime Orchard Woman (1988); Five Indiscretions (1985); and Whispering to Fool the Wind (1982), winner of the 1981 Walt Whitman Award. He has been honored with numerous awards, including six Pushcart Prizes, the Arizona Governor’s Arts Award, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Since 1994, he has served as Regents Professor of English at Arizona State University, where he has taught since 1982. In 2013, Ríos was named the inaugural state poet laureate of Arizona.

American Smooth, poem by Rita Dove

AMERICAN SMOOTH
by Rita Dove

We were dancing—it must have
been a foxtrot or a waltz,
something romantic but
requiring restraint,
rise and fall, precise
execution as we moved
into the next song without
stopping, two chests heaving
above a seven-league
stride—such perfect agony,
one learns to smile through,
ecstatic mimicry
being the sine qua non
of American Smooth.
And because I was distracted
by the effort of
keeping my frame
(the leftward lean, head turned
just enough to gaze out
past your ear and always
smiling, smiling),
I didn’t notice
how still you’d become until
we had done it
(for two measures?
four?)—achieved flight,
that swift and serene
magnificence,
before the earth
remembered who we were
and brought us down.

SOURCE: “American Smooth” appears in Rita Dove’s collection American Smooth (W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 2004), available at Amazon.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Rita Dove made her formal literary debut in 1980 with the poetry collection The Yellow House on the Corner, In works like the verse-novel Thomas and Beulah (1986), which won the Pulitzer Prize, On the Bus with Rosa Parks (1999), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Sonata Mulattica (2009), Dove treats historical events with a personal touch. In addition to poetry, Dove has published works of fiction, including the short story collection Fifth Sunday (1990) and the novel Through the Ivory Gate (1992). Her play The Darker Face of the Earth (1996) was produced at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. Dove is also an acclaimed lyricist, and has written lyrics for composers ranging from Tania León to John Williams. Dove was named US Poet Laureate in 1993, the youngest poet ever elected to the position. Dove has continued to play an important role in the reception of American poetry through her work as editor of the Penguin Anthology of 20th Century American Poetry (2011). She is currently Commonwealth Professor of English at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville.

Iowa City: Early April, poem by Robert Hass

IOWA CITY: EARLY APRIL (Excerpt)
by Robert Hass

This morning a cat—bright orange—pawing at the one patch of new grass in the sand-and tanbark-colored leaves.

And last night the sapphire of the raccoon’s eyes in the beam of the flashlight.
He was climbing a tree beside the house, trying to get onto the porch, I think, for a wad of oatmeal
Simmered in cider from the bottom of the pan we’d left out for the birds…

All this life going on about my life, or living a life about all this life going on,
Being a creature, whatever my drama of the moment, at the edge of the raccoon’s world—
He froze in my flashlight beam and looked down, no affect, just looked,
The ringtail curled and flared to make him look bigger and not to be messed with—
I was thinking he couldn’t know how charming his comic-book robber’s mask was to me,
That his experience of his being and mine of his and his of mine were things entirely apart,
Though there were between us, probably, energies of shrewd and respectful tact, based on curiosity and fear—
I knew about his talons whatever he knew about me—
And as for my experience of myself, it comes and goes, I’m not sure it’s any one thing, as my experience of these creatures is not,
And I know I am often too far from it or too near, glad to be rid of it which is why it was such a happiness,
The bright orange of the cat, and the first pool of green grass-leaves in early April, and the birdsong—that orange and that green not colors you’d set next to one another in the human scheme.

And the crows’ calls, even before you open your eyes, at sunup.

SOURCE: “Iowa City: Early April” appears in Robert Hass‘s collection Sun Under Wood: New Poems (HarperCollins, 1996), available at Amazon.com.

MORE: Read “Iowa City: Early April” in its entirety at poetryfoundation.org.

IMAGE: “Dancing in the Moonlight” by Kym Backland. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Robert Hass’s first collection, Field Guide (1973), won the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award and established him as an important American poet. Hass confirmed his ability with Praise (1979), his second volume of poems, which won the William Carlos Williams Award. In 1984, Hass published Twentieth Century Pleasures: Prose on Poetry, a collection of previously published essays and reviews. The book was well received and won many awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award. His third collection of poetry, Human Wishes (1989), experimented with longer lines and prose paragraphs. 
Hass paid tribute to some of his non-Western mentors in The Essential Haiku: Versions of Basho, Buson, and Issa (1994), translations of short works by the most famous masters of the short Japanese poem. In 1996, Hass published another collection of poems, Sun Under Wood, which won theNational Book Critics Circle Award. From 1995 to 1997, Hass served as U.S. Poet Laureate and poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. Hass’s first book post-laureate, Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 (2007) won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. In the mid-1990s, Hass co-founded the River of Words organization, which provides tools for teaching ecoliteracy to young students through multidisciplinary, interactive curricula. Hass was Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets from 2001-2007. He teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in California with his wife, the poet Brenda Hillman.

Photo of Robert Hass by Margaretta Mitchell

The Beautiful Changes, poem by Richard Wilbur

THE BEAUTIFUL CHANGES
by Richard Wilbur

One wading a Fall meadow finds on all sides   
The Queen Anne’s Lace lying like lilies
On water; it glides
So from the walker, it turns
Dry grass to a lake, as the slightest shade of you   
Valleys my mind in fabulous blue Lucernes.
 
The beautiful changes as a forest is changed   
By a chameleon’s tuning his skin to it;   
As a mantis, arranged
On a green leaf, grows
Into it, makes the leaf leafier, and proves   
Any greenness is deeper than anyone knows.
 
Your hands hold roses always in a way that says   
They are not only yours; the beautiful changes   
In such kind ways,   
Wishing ever to sunder
Things and things’ selves for a second finding, to lose   
For a moment all that it touches back to wonder.

Photo: “Queen Anne’s Lace” by Amy Tyler, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

“The Beautiful Changes” appears Richard Wilbur’s Collected Poems 1943-2004 (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004).

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Richard Purdy Wilbur (born March 1, 1921) is an American poet and literary translator. He was appointed the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 1987, and twice received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, in 1957 and 1989. (Read more at wikipedia.org)

Morning, poem by Billy Collins

MORNING
Poem by Billy Collins

Why do we bother with the rest of of the day,
the swale of the afternoon,
the sudden dip into evening,
then night with his notorious perfumes,
his many-pointed stars?
This is the best –
throwing off the light covers,
feet on the cold floor,
and buzzing around the house on espresso – 
maybe a splash of water on the face,
a palmful of vitamins –
but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,
dictionary and atlas open on the rug,
the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,
a cello on the radio,
and, if necessary, the windows – 
trees fifty, a hundred years old
out there,
heavy clouds on the way
and the lawn steaming like a horse
in the early morning.

*****
Billy Collins served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003.

Illustration: “Blue Ridge Mountains,” watercolor by Ginette Callaway, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. Prints available at fineartamerica.com.

Woman on Twenty-Second Eating Berries, Poem by Stanley Plumly

WOMAN ON TWENTY-SECOND EATING BERRIES

by Stanley Plumly

She’s not angry exactly but all business,
eating them right off the tree, with confidence,
the kind that lets her spit out the bad ones
clear of the sidewalk into the street. It’s
sunny, though who can tell what she’s tasting,
rowan or one of the serviceberries–
the animal at work, so everybody,
save the traffic, keeps a distance. She’s picking
clean what the birds have left, and even,
in her hurry, a few dark leaves. In the air
the dusting of exhaust that still turns pennies
green, the way the cloudy surfaces
of things obscure their differences,
like the mock orange or the apple rose that
cracks the paving stone, rooted in the plaza.
No one will say your name, and when you come to
the door no one will know you, a parable
of the afterlife on earth. Poor grapes, poor crabs,
wild black cherry trees, on which some forty-six
or so species of birds have fed, some boy’s dead
weight or the tragic summer lightning killing
the seed, how boyish now that hunger
to bring those branches down to scale,
to eat of that which otherwise was waste,
how natural this woman eating berries, how alone. 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Stanley Plumly was born in Barnesville, Ohio, in 1939, and grew up in the lumber and farming regions of Virginia and Ohio. He received his B.A. in 1962 from Wilmington College, and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Ohio University. His work has been honored with the Delmore Schwartz Memorial Award and nominations for the National Book Critics Circle Award, the William Carlos Williams Award, and the Academy of Amerian Poets’ Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize. He has written nine books of poetry, including Old Heart (2008); Now That My Father Lies Down Beside Me: New and Selected Poems, 1970-2000(2000); The Marriage in the Trees (1997); Boy on the Step (1989); Summer Celestial (1983); Out-of-the-Body Travel (1977); Giraffe (1974); How the Plains Indians Got Horses (1973); and In the Outer Dark (1970). His work also includes Argument and Song: Sources and Silences in Poetry (2003), a collection of essays, and Posthumous Keats: A Personal Biography (2008). A Distinguished University Professor and Professor of English at the University of Maryland, Plumly has served as poet laureate of the State of Maryland since 2009. 

###

Silver Birch Press is honored to feature poetry by Stanley Plumly in the Silver Birch Press SUMMER ANTHOLOGY, a collection of poetry and prose from authors around the world — available June 1, 2013. 

Photo: “Cherries or Berries?” by Janiceeey

Morning, Poem by Billy Collins

MORNING

Poem by Billy Collins

Why do we bother with the rest of of the day,

the swale of the afternoon,

the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,

his many-pointed stars?

This is the best —

throwing off the light covers,

feet on the cold floor,

and buzzing around the house on espresso — 

maybe a splash of water on the face,

a palmful of vitamins —

but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,

the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,

a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows — 

trees fifty, a hundred years old

out there,

heavy clouds on the way

and the lawn steaming like a horse

in the early morning.

*****

Billy Collins served as U.S. Poet Laureate from 2001-2003.

*****

Photo: Holly Garner-Jackson, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED