2 poems

here are two poems

the first I wrote for 80 works:


A Fall Reflection on Ash Wednesday

the grasses are dry
as are the leaves of trees,
the air, the sky, the soul.
the whole earth is thirsty

and moving towards an ending.
there is a quiet taste of blood, warm
and red like aged wine; of cruel wind,
the fury of winter storms.

crickets sing on these
september days and the sound is
a sour-sweet lament, a remembrance
of abundance before emptiness.

the wakeful knowledge of death
is a hard weight to carry, and untidy,
causing multitudes of grasses to throw
their progeny to the wind,

at the mercy of exposure, drought,
the ploughman. what martyrdom causes
these dully realized deaths – and is it
strange they are seen reverently –

oh lord in this hour of weakness
teach me. hold up a mirror,
remind me of mortality
and ashes on bald foreheads;

these living breathing speaking
bags of dirt. amen. show me the knifewound
of my frailty; the grass is dying.
i am dry, some candled flame blown out.




the second is a poem from a turkish poet named Nazim Hikmet. He served 13 years as a political prisoner in turkey and spent the last 13 years of his life in exile.
disclaimer: I didn't find this on my own; Meg read it to me one day when we were sitting on the grass outside.
disclaimer 2: The formatting isn't exactly right - not all the lines start up against the left margin in the real poem but I can't get it right on my blog. In any case, it's still beautiful.

I

Living is no laughing matter:
you must live with great seriousness
like a squirrel, for example -
I mean, without looking for something beyond and above living.
I mean living must be your whole life.
Living is no laughing matter:
you must take it so seriously,
so much so and to such a degree
that, for example, your hands tied behind your back,
your back to the wall,
or else in a labroatory
in your white coat and safety glasses,
you can die for people -
even for people whose faces you've never seen,
even though you know living
is the most real, the most beautiful thing.
I mean, you must take living so seriously
that even at seventy, for example, you'll plant olive trees -
and not for your children, either,
but because although you fear death you don't believe it,
because living, I mean, weighs heavier.

II

Lets say we're seriously ill, need surgery -
which is to say we might not get up
from the white table.
Even though it's impossible not to feel sad
about going a little too soon,
we'll still laugh at the jokes being told,
we'll look out the window to see if it's raining,
or still wait anxiously
for the latest newscast...
Let's say we're at the front -
for something worth fighting for, say.
There, in the first offensive, on that very day,
we might fall on our face, dead.
We'll know this with a curious anger,
but we'll still worry ourselves to death
about the outcome of the war, which could last years.
Let's say we're in prison
and close to fifty,
and we have eighteen more years, say,
before the iron doors will open.
We'll still live with the outside,
with its people and animals, struggle and wind -
I mean with the outside beyond the walls.
I mean, however and wherever we are,
we must live as if we will never die.

III

This earth will grow cold,
a star among stars
and one of the smallest,
a gilded mote on blue velvet -
I mean this, our great earth.
This earth will grow cold one day,
not like a block of ice
or a dead cloud even
but like an empty walnut it will roll along
in pitch-black space ...
You must grieve for this right now
- you have to feel this sorrow now -
for the world must be loved this much
if you're going to say "I lived" ...

February 1948