Poetry in the Time of Plague

Doctor Wearing a Plague Mask

A Litany in Time of Plague

Adieu, farewell earth's bliss!

This world uncertain is:

Fond are life's lustful joys,

Death proves them all but toys.

None from his darts can fly;

I am sick, I must die --

Lord, have mercy on us!

Rich men, trust not in wealth,

Gold cannot buy you health;

Physic himself must fade;

All things to end are made;

The plague full swift goes by;

I am sick, I must die --

Lord, have mercy on us!

Thomas Nash (1567-1601)

The Triumph of Death (excerpt)

London now smokes with vapours that arise

From his foul sweat, himself he so bestirs:

'Cast out your dead!' the carcass-carrier cries,

Which by heaps in groundless graves inters.

Now like to bees in summer's heat from hives,

Out fly the citizens, some here, some there;

Some all alone, and others with their wives:

With wives and children some fly, all for fear!

Here stands a watch, with guard of partisans,

To stop their passages, or to and fro,

As if they were not men, nor Christians,

But fiends or monsters, murdering as they go . . .

John Davies, (1569-1626)

The Plague

' Listen, the last stroke of death's noon has struck --

The plague is come,' a gnashing Madman said,

And laid him down straightway upon his bed.

His writhed hands did at the linen pluck;

Then all is over. With a careless chuck

Among his fellows he is cast. How sped

His spirit matters little: many dead

Make men hard-hearted. -- 'Place him on the truck.

Go forth into the burial ground and find

Room at so much a pitiful for so many.

One thing is to be done; one thing is clear:

Keep thou back from the hot unwholesome wind,

That it infect not thee.' Say, is there any

Who mourneth for the multitude dead here?

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

Biographies:

Thomas Nash was an Elizabethan playwright and poet. In 1594, he wrote The Terrors of the Night; Or a Discourse of Apparitions in which he discounts belief in the supernatural as superstition. His literary friends included Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson.

John Davies was an English poet who lived in London during the plague. He became a favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, who encouraged his legal career. As a lawyer and politician, he served in the House of Commons. Later, he became Attorney General for Ireland.

Christina Rossetti was an English poet who wrote romantic, religious, and children's poems. She suffered greatly from depression and poor health. She was highly praised by Hopkins, Swinburne, and Tennyson for her work. Politically, she opposed slavery, cruelty to animals, and under-age prostitution. After her death from cancer, she was buried in Highgate Cemetery.

Arabic Poetry by Mahmoud Darwish

Mahmoud Darwish

Passport

They did not recognize me in the shadows
That suck away my color in this Passport
And to them my wound was an exhibit
For a tourist who loves to collect photographs
They did not recognize me,
Ah . . . Don't leave
The palm of my hand without the sun
Because the trees recognize me
Don't leave me pale like the moon!

All the birds that followed my palm
To the door of the distant airport
All the wheat fields
All the prisons
All the white tombstones
All the barbed boundaries
All the waving handkerchiefs
All the eyes
were with me,
But they dropped them from my passport

Stripped of my name and identity?
On soil I nourished with my own hands?
Today Job cried out
Filling the sky:
Don't make an example of me again!
Oh, gentlemen, Prophets,
Don't ask the trees for their names
Don't ask the valleys who their mother is
From my forehead bursts the sward of light
And from my hand springs the water of the river
All the hearts of the people are my identity
So take away my passport!

Under Seige

Here on the slopes of hills, facing the dusk and the cannon of time
Close to the gardens of broken shadows,
We do what prisoners do,
And what the jobless do:
We cultivate hope.

A country preparing for dawn. We grow less intelligent
For we closely watch the hour of victory:
No night in our night lit up by the shelling
Our enemies are watchful and light the light for us
In the darkness of cellars.

Here there is no "I".
Here Adam remembers the dust of clay.

On the verge of death, he says:
I have no trace left to lose:
Free I am so close to my liberty. My future lies in my own hand.
Soon I shall penetrate my life,
I shall be born free and parentless,
And as my name I shall choose azure letters . . .

You who stand in the doorway, come in,
Drink Arabic coffee with us
And you will sense that you are men like us
You who stand in the doorways of houses
Come out of our morningtimes,
We shall feel reassured to be
Men like you!

When the planes disappear, the white, white doves
Fly off and wash the cheeks of heaven
With unbound wings taking radiance back again, taking possession
Of the ether and of play. Higher, higher still, the white, white doves
Fly off. Ah, if only the sky
Were real [a man passing between two bombs said to me].

Cypresses behind the soldiers, minarets protecting
The sky from collapse. Behind the hedge of steel
Soldiers piss -- under the watchful eye of a tank --
And the autumnal day ends its golden wandering in
A street as wide as a church after Sunday mass . . .

[To a killer] If you had contemplated the victim's face
And thought it through, you would have remembered your mother in the
Gas chamber, you would have been freed from the reason for the rifle
And you would have changed your mind: this is not the way
to find one's identity again.

The siege is a waiting period
Waiting on the tilted ladder in the middle of the storm.

Alone, we are alone as far down as the sediment
Were it not for the visits of the rainbows.

We have brothers behind this expanse.
Excellent brothers. They love us. They watch us and weep.
Then, in secret, they tell each other:
"Ah! if this siege had been declared . . ." They do not finish their sentence:
"Don't abandon us, don't leave us."

Our losses: between two and eight martyrs each day.
And ten wounded.
And twenty homes.
And fifty olive trees . . .
Added to this the structural flaw that

Will arrive at the poem, the play, and the unfinished canvas.

A woman told the cloud: cover my beloved
For my clothing is drenched with his blood.

If you are not rain, my love
Be tree
Sated with fertility, be tree
If you are not tree, my love
Be stone
Saturated with humidity, be stone
If you are not stone, my love
Be moon
In the dream of the beloved woman, be moon
[So spoke a woman
to her son at his funeral]

Oh watchmen! Are you not weary
Of lying in wait for the light in our salt
And of the incandescence of the rose in our wound
Are you not weary, oh watchmen?

A little of this absolute and blue infinity
Would be enough
To lighten the burden of these times
And to cleanse the mire of this place.

It is up to the soul to come down from its mount
And on its silken feet walk
By my side, hand in hand, like two longtime
Friends who share the ancient bread
And the antique glass of wine
May we walk this road together
And then our days will take different directions:
I, beyond nature, which in turn
Will choose to squat on a high-up rock.

On my rubble the shadow grows green,
And the wolf is dozing on the skin of my goat
He dreams as I do, as the angel does
That life is here . . . not over there.

In the state of siege, time becomes space
Transfixed in its eternity
In the state of siege, space becomes time
That has missed its yesterday and its tomorrow.

The martyr encircles me every time I live a new day
And questions me: Where were you? Take every word
You have given me back to the dictionaries
And relieve the sleepers from the echo's buzz.

Translated by Marjolijn De Jager

BIO:  Mahmoud Darwish (1941-2008) was born in Western Galilee. He fled with his family to Lebanon after foreign forces destroyed his village. A year later, the family moved to Acre, Israel.

In 1970, Darwish traveled to the U.S.S.R. to study at the Lomonosov Moscow State University. A year later, he moved to Egypt and then back to Lebanon. He joined the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1973 and was banned from returning to Israel.

Darwish makes frequent references in his poetry to the ideal of HOMELAND. A member of the Israeli Communist Party, he later wrote a manifesto of independence for the PLO Executive Committee. He resigned from the committee in 1993.

Darwish was critical of both Israel and the Palestinian leadership, but he believed that a Middle East Peace Treaty was a realistic objective. After Hamas imposed a strict Islamic social code, Darwish objected to the further erosion of freedom for the Palestinian people.

Always feeling like a man in exile, he died of a heart attack in Houston, Texas. Darwish was buried in Ramallah near the Palace of Culture, on a hill overlooking Jerusalem. He has been called the National Poet of Palestine and received numerous awards during his lifetime.

How Easter Eggs Get Their Colors and Other Poems

How Easter Eggs Get Their Colors

At Halloween we had more treats
than we had trick-or-treaters
and at least one of us
living in this house
is not much of a candy eater

We had some red and green
M&Ms left over after
this Christmas season
there is some ribbon candy
left here as well for that
very same reason

Those Valentine hearts
I wrote about
Pink, Yellow, Orange
and other assorted pastel
will likely get leftover
past their prime as well

Though Spring is not
quite yet here
in the mornings we
have noticed
A Bunny lurking near

He seems rather hungry
seeking yummies for his tummy
and though you may think it funny
we have decided leftover candy
when ground up might be dandy
to feed to that very hungry bunny

That way he will have
exactly what he needs to make
each colored Easter egg.

Do you think for a minute
I am the kind of person
who would pull your leg?

Mary Havran

On Easter Day

The silver trumpets rang across the Dome:
The people knelt upon the ground with awe:
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,
And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,
Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head:
In splendor and in light the Pope passed home.
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
To One who wandered by a lonely sea,
And sought in vain for any place to rest:
"Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest,
I, only I, must wander wearily,
And bruise My feet, and drink wine salt with tears."

Oscar Wilde

The Easter Flower

Far from this foreign Easter damp and chilly
My soul steals to a pear-shaped plot of ground,
Where gleamed the lilac-tinted Easter lily
Soft-scented in the air for yards around;

Alone, without a hint of guardian leaf!
Just like a fragile bell of silver rime,
It burst the tomb for freedom sweet and brief
In the young pregnant year at Eastertime;

And many thought it was a sacred sign,
And some called it the resurrection flower;
And I, a pagan, worshiped at its shrine,
Yielding my heart unto its perfumed power.

Claude McKay

HAVE A HAPPY AND BLESSED EASTER!