Choose Something Like A Star, Robert Frost

Choose Something Like a Star

by Robert Frost

O Star (the fairest one in sight),
We grant your loftiness the right
To some obscurity of cloud—
It will not do to say of night,
Since dark is what brings out your light.
Some mystery becomes the proud.
But to be wholly taciturn
In your reserve is not allowed.
Say something to us we can learn
By heart and when alone repeat.
Say something! And it says, 'I burn.'
But say with what degree of heat.
Talk Fahrenheit, talk Centigrade.
Use language we can comprehend.
Tell us what elements you blend.
It gives us strangely little aid,
But does tell something in the end.
And steadfast as Keats' Eremite,
Not even stooping from its sphere,
It asks a little of us here.
It asks of us a certain height,
So when at times the mob is swayed
To carry praise or blame too far,
We may choose something like a star
To stay our minds on and be staid.

"Choose Something Like a Star" by Robert Frost, from Collected Poems, Prose & Plays. © The Library of America, 1995

Taking a Shower Wth Daniel Ellsberg, Philip Dacey

Cumberland Poetry Review, 2004

           TAKING A SHOWER WITH DANIEL ELLSBERG 

By Philip Dacey

I think history has walked into the shower room 

where I'm cooling under a steady spray after racquetball 

when Daniel Ellsberg enters naked 

and asks me if he can borrow some shampoo. 

I know I'll never get back the green ribbon 

he presses onto his palm but that's okay, 

it isn't every day I get to watch, while pretending 

not to, a supporting actor in the great American drama 

lathering his woolly head until I soon begin 

to confuse him with America itself and think 

I'm watching my country working its way down 

to soaping its genitals and asshole. 

It does not matter I heard him speak 

last night at this prairie college where he'd come 

to instruct the corn, to teach it to grow, 

and that I tasselled and tasselled-- 

I am not prepared for this, unless I have been 

preparing for it all my life, as fresh from a swim 

in waters most likely shallower than he's been used to 

he seems to have stripped off with his clothes 

his merely personal self, as well as his public mask, 

to reveal the vulnerable and aging body 

of a nation whose struggle became his own, 

a nation defenseless against itself. 

Maybe it's all just soap in my eyes but 

his fatty and falling dugs seem to me 

those of an old mother of many children, 

whose fighting among themselves weighs upon her, 

and his bony legs down which water pours 

are the weak pillars of democracy, hairy 

with freedoms that protect even 

the enemies of freedom, so that I think 

if Whitman heard America singing I see her 

showering, her varied body parts I see, 

including a gut like a portmanteau of classified documents, 

about to unclassify themselves forever. 

But now I've dropped my bar of soap, which skids 

across the floor to Ellsberg, or Columbia , 

who scoops it up and hands it back to me 

like Liberty passing the torch and suggesting 

I clean up my act.  I want to ask about a patriot's 

oscillation between pain and pride, but I can only say 

thanks and attack my waxy ears--the citizen as listener-- 

as the all-American androgyne stands still 

under the showerhead, eyes closed in what I assume's 

a dream of washing a war right out of that hair 

till it's squeaky peaceful.  Meanwhile, I can't rub off 

a question: does our history leave us naked, revealing us 

to ourselves, a self we scrub and scrub in vain 

to sanitize, or do we dress ourselves after the shower 

in the history we tell the world and each other 

to make our nakedness more presentable? 

By now the steam is so bad I swear I see 

the ghost of Lyndon Johnson writhing in it like a dog 

he picked up by his ears and the Pentagon papers fallen 

where the draining water returns them to pulp. 

Suddenly I notice the shower room is a long tunnel 

at one end of which there is light, but I 

have had enough of light and move toward the dark end, 

leaving Ellsberg fishing, blinded momentarily, for his towel.

Willow Springs, 1998

 

The Answer, Sara Teasdale

The Answer

Sara Teasdale

When I go back to earth

And all my joyous body

Puts off the red and white

That once had been so proud,

If men should pass above

With false and feeble pity,

My dust will find a voice

To answer them aloud:

“Be still, I am content,

Take back your poor compassion,

Joy was a flame in me

Too steady to destroy;

Lithe as a bending reed

Loving the storm that sways her—

I found more joy in sorrow

Than you could find in joy.”

How The Trees On Summer Nights, Barbara Crooker

How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River

by Barbara Crooker

how you can never reach it, no matter how hard you try,
walking as fast as you can, but getting nowhere,
arms and legs pumping, sweat drizzling in rivulets;
each year, a little slower, more creaks and aches, less breath.
Ah, but these soft nights, air like a warm bath, the dusky wings
of bats careening crazily overhead, and you'd think the road
goes on forever. Apollinaire wrote, "What isn't given to love
is so much wasted," and I wonder what I haven't given yet.
A thin comma moon rises orange, a skinny slice of melon,
so delicious I could drown in its sweetness. Or eat the whole
thing, down to the rind. Always, this hunger for more.

"How the Trees on Summer Nights Turn into a Dark River," by Barbara Crooker from More.

A Word For Joy, Franz Wright

A Word For Joy

 

I am happy among children's eyes

I am very worried and happy

among the crazy and the hopeless

they recognize me, right away

I'm home

And there is nowhere I would rather be

alive or dead

than in this world

Inside this skull I hold and ponder

unending space expanding if I understand correctly

at an accelerating rate, meanwhile

housing perpetual births and disappearances of its numberless

deafening nuclear furnaces unheard,

I consider the voices, identically soundless, in every

mind, behind each face I pass

and as I've been instructed each morning

on rising I obliterate the print of my body

and am glad (the wind is blowing, it is written, adore

the wind)

and am speechlessly grateful and glad and afraid

I don't mind saying that I am scared

to death of God: I am

afraid and blind and ignorant and naked and

I'll take it!

I have been happy here

among all the suffering eyes: why they were brought here

and exactly what it was they were expected

to take a good close look at,

I can't grasp it, but I am so very glad.

 

~ Franz Wright ~

 

(God's Silence)

No Problem, Kevin McCaffrey

No Problem

by Kevin McCaffrey

The problem is there is no problem and
the problem solvers have nothing to do
so they start creating problems out
of thin air, out of nothing. Then the problem
is not to see that there are big problems
everywhere and it is woe unto
him or her who cannot see or who will
not acknowledge the problems—they become
part of the problem, a big part of it,
their apathy or obstinacy holding
progress back until they are educated
to the fact that, one, there are big problems,
and, two, if you are not part of solving
them then you represent the problem
the problem solvers have been talking about
all along. So you see now how it is:
there is no problem worse than no problem.

"No Problem" by Kevin McCaffrey from Laughing Cult. © Four Winds Press, 2014

Nelly Sachs

But perhaps God needs the longing, wherever else shall it dwell,

Which with kisses and tears and sighs fills mysterious spaces of air -

And perhaps is invisible soil from which roots of stars grow and swell -

And the radiant voice across fields of parting which calls to reunion there?

O my beloved, perhaps in the sky of longing worlds have been born of our love -

Just as our breathing, in and out, builds a cradle for life and death?

We are grains of sand, dark with farewell, lost in births' secret treasure trove,

Around us already perhaps future moons, suns, and stars blaze in a fiery wreath.

 

~ Nelly Sachs ~

 

(Translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead, in

A Book of Women Poets from Antiquity to Now,

 ed. by Aliki and Willis Barnstone)