Summer Eden Poetry Center

Saturday, February 7, 2015

For My People

FOR MY PEOPLE

Margaret Walker

For my people everywhere singing their slave songs

repeatedly; their dirges and their ditties and their blues

and jubilees, praying their prayers nightly to an

unknown god, bending their knees humbly to an

unseen power;

For my people lending their strength to the years, to the

gone years and the now years and the maybe years,

washing ironing cooking scrubbing sewing mending

hoeing plowing digging planting pruning patching

dragging along never gaining never reaping never

knowing and never understanding;

For my playmates in the clay and dust and sand of Alabama

backyards playing baptizing and preaching and doctor

and jail and soldier and school and mama and cooking

and playhouse and concert and store and hair and

Miss Choomby and company;

For the cramped bewildered years we went to school to learn

to know the reasons why and the answers to and the

people who and the places where and the days when, in

memory of the bitter hours when we discovered we

were black and poor and small and different and nobody

cared and nobody wondered and nobody understood;

For the boys and girls who grew in spite of these things to

be man and woman, to laugh and dance and sing and

play and drink their wine and religion and success, to

marry their playmates and bear children and then die

of consumption and anemia and lynching;

For my people thronging 47th Street in Chicago and Lenox

Avenue in New York and Rampart Street in New

Orleans, lost disinherited dispossessed and happy

people filling the cabarets and taverns and other

people's pockets and needing bread and shoes and milk and

land and money and something -- something all our own;

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

For my people blundering and griping and floundering in

the dark of churches and schools and clubs

and societies, associations and councils and committees and

conventions, distressed and disturbed and deceived and

devoured by money-hungry glory-craving leeches,

preyed on by facile force of state and fad and novelty, by

false prophet and holy believer;

For my people standing trying to fashion a better way

from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born. Let a

bloody peace be written in the sky. Let a second

generation full of courage issue forth; let a people

loving freedom come to growth. Let a beauty full of

healing and a strength of final clenching be the pulsing

in our spirits and our blood. Let the martial songs

be written, let the dirges disappear. Let a race of men now

rise and take control.

This poem originally appeared in the November 1937 issue of Poetry Magazine.

Sunday, January 25, 2015

German Love Poems

WITHOUT YOU

by Hermann Hesse

My pillow gazes upon me at night

Empty as a gravestone;

I never thought it would be so bitter

To be alone,

Not to lie down asleep in your hair.

I lie alone in a silent house,

The hanging lamp darkened,

And gently stretch out my hands

To gather in yours,

And softly press my warm mouth

Toward you, and kiss myself, exhausted and weak--

Then suddenly I'm awake

And all around me the cold night grows still.

The star in the window shines clearly--

Where is your blonde hair,

Where your sweet mouth?

Now I drink pain in every delight

And poison in every wine;

I never knew it would be so better

To be alone,

Alone, without you.

LOVE'S DISTRESS

by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Who will hear me? Whom shall I lament to?
Who would pity me that heard my sorrows?
Ah, the lip that erst so many raptures
Used to taste, and used to give responsive,
Now is cloven, and it pains me sorely;
And it is not thus severely wounded
By my mistress having caught me fiercely,
And then gently bitten me, intending
To secure her friend more firmly to her:
No, my tender lip is crack'd thus, only
By the winds, o'er rime and frost proceeding,
Pointed, sharp, unloving, having met me.
Now the noble grape's bright juice commingled
With the bee's sweet juice, upon the fire
Of my hearth, shall ease me of my torment.
Ah, what use will all this be, if with it
Love adds not a drop of his own balsam?

LOVE SONG

by Rainer Maria Rilke

How can I keep my soul in me, so that
it doesn't touch your soul? How can I raise
it high enough, past you, to other things?
I would like to shelter it, among remote
lost objects, in some dark and silent place
that doesn't resonate when your depths resound.
Yet everything that touches us, me and you,
takes us together like a violin's bow,
which draws one voice out of two separate strings.
Upon what instrument are we two spanned?
And what musician holds us in his hand?
Oh, sweetest song.

Thursday, January 15, 2015

In an English Country Garden

In an English Country Garden

(Traditional)

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow
In an English country garden?
We'll tell you now of some that we know.
Those we miss you'll surely pardon.
Daffodils, heart's ease and flox,
Meadowsweet and lady smocks,
Gentian, lupine and tall hollihocks,
Roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, blue forget-me-nots
In an English country garden.

How many insects come here and go
In an English country garden?
We'll tell you now of some that we know.
Those we miss you'll surely pardon.
Fireflies, moths, gnats and bees,
Spiders climbing in the trees,
Butterflies drift in the gentle breeze,
There are snakes, ants that sting,
And other creeping things,
In an English country garden.

How many songbirds fly to and fro
In an English country garden?
We'll tell you now of some that we know.
Those we miss you'll surely pardon.
Bobolink, cuckoo and quail,
Tanager and cardinal,
Bluebird, lark, thrush and nightingale,
There is joy in the spring
When the birds begin to sing
In an English country garden.

How many kinds of sweet flowers grow
In an English country garden?
We'll tell you now of some that we know.
Those we miss you'll surely pardon.
Daffodils, heart's ease and flox,
Meadowsweet and lady smocks,
Gentain, lupine and tall hollihocks,
Roses, foxgloves, snowdrops, blue forget-me-nots
In an English country garden.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Yuletide Joy

THE OXEN

by Thomas Hardy

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.

"Now they are all on their knees,"

An elder said as we sat in a flock

By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where

They dwelt in their strawy pen,

Nor did it occur to one of us there

To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave

In these years! Yet, I feel,

If someone said on Christmas Eve,

"Come; see the oxen kneel!

"In the lonely barton by yonder coomb

Our childhood used to know."

I should go with him in the gloom,

Hoping it might be so.

CHRISTMAS SONG

(Traditional)

The trees are all bare not a leaf to be seen

And the meadows their beauty have lost.

Now winter has come and 'tis cold for man and beast,

And the streams they are,

And the streams they are all fast bound down with frost.

'Twas down in the farmyard where the oxen feed on straw,

They send forth their breath like steam.

Sweet Betsy the milkmaid now quickly she must go,

For flakes of ice she finds,

For flakes of ice she finds a-floating on her cream.

'Tis now all the small birds to the barn-door fly for food

And gently they rest on the spray.

A-down the plantation the hares do search for food,

And lift their footsteps sure,

Lift their footsteps sure for fear they do betray.

Now Christmas is come and our song is almost done

For we soon shall have the turn of the year.

So fill up your glasses and let your health go round,

For I wish you all,

For I wish you all a joyful New Year.

THE YULE DAYS

(Traditional)

The king sent his lady on the first Yule day,

A papingo-aye;