Task 1

1.  Which one of Amy Miles's favorite poems (from the week 6 module) did you most enjoy?  Why?  (Please include the title of the poem and at least 3-4 sentences to explain why you enjoyed the poem.  Please be specific.

2.  Which one of Monique's favorite poems (from the week 6 module) did you most enjoy?  Why?  (Please include the title of the poem and at least 3-4 sentences to explain why you enjoyed the poem.  Please be specific.

3.  Include 4 of your favorite poems.  Simply include the author, title, and a link to the poem (you'll reflect on them in this week's weekly writing – in this journal, you are just identifying the poems; and as a gentle reminder, 2 of the poems you share can be from poems you discovered in this class in any module. But you need to share at least 2 poems that are not in this course).

Amy Miles' Favorite Poems

Pablo Neruda, "To the foot from its child" (translated from Alistair Reid)

Here's a link to  this version.  (Links to an external site.)

The child’s foot is not yet aware that it’s a foot,

and would like to be a butterfly or an apple.

 

But in time, stones and bits of glass,

streets, ladders,

and the paths in the rough earth

go on teaching the foot that it cannot fly,

cannot be a fruit bulging on the branch.

Then, the child’s foot

is defeated, falls

in the battle,

is a prisoner

condemned to live in a shoe.

 

Bit by bit, in that dark,

it grows to know the world in its own way,

out of touch with its fellows, enclosed,

feeling out life like a blind man.

 

These soft nails

of quartz, bunched together,

grow hard, and change themselves

into opaque substance, had as horn,

and the tiny, petaled toes of the child

grow bunched and out of trim,

take on the form of eyeless reptiles

with triangular heads, like worms.

Later, they grow callused

and are covered

with the faint volcanoes of death,

a coarsening hard to accept.

 

But this blind thing walks

without respite, never stopping

for hour after hour,

the one foot, the other,

now the man’s,

now the woman’s,

up above,

down below.

through fields, mines,

markets, ministries,

backward,

far afield, inward,

forward, this foot toils in its show,

scarcely taking time to bare itself in love or sleep;

it walks, they walk,

until the whole man chooses to stop.

 

And then it descended

underground, unaware,

for there, everything, everything was dark.

It never knew it had ceased to be  foot

of if they were burying it so that it could fly

or so that it could become

an apple.

 

-translated by Alastair Reid-

"Riveted" seems to capture what I–and many others I know–were starting to understand and accept in the surreal autumn days of 2020.

"Riveted" (Links to an external site.)  by Robyn Sarah

It is possible that things will not get better than they are now, or have been known to be. It is possible that we are past the middle now. It is possible that we have crossed the great water without knowing it, and stand now on the other side. Yes: I think that we have crossed it. Now we are being given tickets, and they are not tickets to the show we had been thinking of, but to a different show, clearly inferior.

Check again: it is our own name on the envelope. The tickets are to that other show.

It is possible that we will walk out of the darkened hall without waiting for the last act: people do. Some people do. But it is probable that we will stay seated in our narrow seats all through the tedious denouement to the unsurprising end- riveted, as it were; spellbound by our own imperfect lives because they are lives, and because they are ours.

“Riveted” by Robyn Sarah, from  A Day’s Grace  (Links to an external site.) . © The Porcupine’s Quill.

 

Here's a recital (rather than reading) of it.  I couldn't find a reading online, but I'm intrigued by this performance of this poem:

The Blossom" by Eavan Boland

A May morning. Light starting in the sky. I have come here after a long night.

The blossom on the apple tree is still in shadow, its petals half white and filled with water at the core, in which the secrecy and freshness of dawn are stored even in the dark.

How much longer will I see girlhood in my daughter?

In other seasons, I knew every leaf on this tree. Now I stand here almost without seeing them

and so lost in grief I hardly notice what is happening as the light increases and the blossom speaks

and turns to me with blond hair and my eyebrows and says-

Imagine if I stayed here even for the sake of your love. What would happen to the summer? To the fruit?

Then holds out a dawn-soaked hand to me whose fingers I counted at birth years ago

and touches mine for the last time

and falls to earth.

—

Here's me reading the poem (I actually just sent this recording to a friend whose daughter just left for college):

"The Simple Truth" (Links to an external site.)  by Phil Levine

I bought a dollar and a half's worth of small red potatoes, took them home, boiled them in their jackets and ate them for dinner with a little butter and salt. Then I walked through the dried fields on the edge of town. In middle June the light hung on in the dark furrows at my feet, and in the mountain oaks overhead the birds were gathering for the night, the jays and mockers squawking back and forth, the finches still darting into the dusty light. The woman who sold me the potatoes was from Poland; she was someone out of my childhood in a pink spangled sweater and sunglasses praising the perfection of all her fruits and vegetables at the road-side stand and urging me to taste even the pale, raw sweet corn trucked all the way, she swore, from New Jersey. "Eat, eat" she said, "Even if you don't I'll say you did." Some things you know all your life. They are so simple and true they must be said without elegance, meter and rhyme, they must be laid on the table beside the salt shaker, the glass of water, the absence of light gathering in the shadows of picture frames, they must be naked and alone, they must stand for themselves. My friend Henri and I arrived at this together in 1965 before I went away, before he began to kill himself, and the two of us to betray our love. Can you taste what I'm saying? It is onions or potatoes, a pinch of simple salt, the wealth of melting butter, it is obvious, it stays in the back of your throat like a truth you never uttered because the time was always wrong, it stays there for the rest of your life, unspoken, made of that dirt we call earth, the metal we call salt, in a form we have no words for, and you live on it.

 

Monique's favorite poems

"Raw with Love" by Charles Bukowski

little dark girl with kind eyes when it comes time to use the knife I won't flinch and I won't blame you, as I drive along the shore alone as the palms wave, the ugly heavy palms, as the living does not arrive as the dead do not leave, I won't blame you, instead I will remember the kisses our lips raw with love and how you gave me everything you had and how I offered you what was left of me, and I will remember your small room the feel of you the light in the window your records your books our morning coffee our noons our nights our bodies spilled together sleeping the tiny flowing currents immediate and forever your leg my leg your arm my arm your smile and the warmth of you who made me laugh again. little dark girl with kind eyes you have no knife. the knife is mine and I won't use it yet.

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What Was Told, That (Links to an external site.)

Jalal al-Din Rumi (Links to an external site.)  - 1207-1273

What was said to the rose that made it open was said

to me here in my chest.

What was told the cypress that made it strong and straight, what was

whispered the jasmine so it is what it is, whatever made sugarcane sweet, whatever

was said to the inhabitants of the town of Chigil in Turkestan that makes them

so handsome, whatever lets the pomegranate flower blush like a human face, that is

being said to me now. I blush. Whatever put eloquence in language, that's happening here.

The great warehouse doors open; I fill with gratitude, chewing a piece of sugarcane,

in love with the one to whom every that belongs!

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Task 2

Your task and goal in this week's writing is to explain why you chose the four poems you did.

You'll need to include four paragraphs (one for each poem).  Each paragraph will need to do the following:

1.  Name the poem and poet (with a hyperlink to the poem) and why you like the poem.

2.  Provide textual examples from the poem to support the reason you like the poem.

3.  Explain the examples you included.  What do they mean?  How/why do they impact you?  Be specific and real. 

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