Spring Poems

 

                                    (Photo by Reimar/Shutterstock)

Spring Poems

by Dawn Pisturino

~

April Showers

I looked into the heavens

And saw the face of God.

He was a kindly gentleman

And not too very loud.

He wore a watch upon his vest

Which gave the time of day.

He looked at it: "The time has come,"

Was all he had to say.

And soon a gentle rainfall

Came from the April sky.

It kissed my wondering up-turned face

And poked me in the eye.

But then a very curious thing

Did happen at my feet.

A tiny flower sprouted up,

All blooming and complete.

It opened up its tiny leaves,

Embracing fast the rain,

And if I ever doubted God -

I never did again.

~November 25, 1985~

Spring

Spring! The vigor of new life soars in my veins!

I am free and alive and wonderful,

Free as the silly sparrow twittering in the tree-top,

Too gaily alive.

Alive as the new-sprung fountain of youth in the riverbed,

Which knows not that it is bound by grassy banks,

But runs down the waterway in a mad race for the finish.

And, wonderful as the tiny petals of a flower,

First opening up to the Father Sun

Like a virgin bride in the marriage bed.

Sun gives new life to the blood,

And blood gives new life to the body,

And the body gives new life to the soul,

Ad infinitum, ad infinitum, ad infinitum.

But every Spring plays its part as a new beginning,

And we never tire of the encore.

~1987~

Robin Red-Breast

When Robin Red-breast comes to town,

All the children dance around,

Clapping hands and stamping feet,

Happy with their little treat!

~February 2, 1987~

Dawn Pisturino

Copyright 1985-1987 Dawn Pisturino. All Rights Reserved.

Poems by Wallace Stevens

 

What is Divinity

What is divinity if it can come

Only in silent shadows and in dreams?

Shall she not find in comforts of the sun,

In pungent fruit and bright, green wings, or else

In any balm or beauty of the earth,

Things to be cherished like the thought of heaven?

Divinity must live within herself:

Passions of rain, or moods in falling snow;

Grievings in loneliness, or unsubdued

Elations when the forest blooms; gusty

Emotions on wet roads on autumn nights;

All pleasures and all pains, remembering

The bough of summer and the winter branch,

These are the measures destined for her soul.

Depression Before Spring

The cock crows

But no queen rises.

The hair of my blonde

Is dazzling,

As the spittle of cows

Threading the wind.

Ho! Ho!

But ki-ki-ri-ki

Brings no rou-cou,

No rou-cou-cou.

But no queen comes

In slipper green.

BIO: Wallace Stevens (1879-1955) was a modern American poet who worked as a lawyer and businessman. As a young man, he became friends with Greenwich Village poets William Carlos Williams, Marianne Moore, and E.E. Cummings. His first poem was published by Harriet Monroe in Poetry in 1914. His first collection of poems, Harmonium, was published in 1923. Steven's poetry was considered very modern and original for its time. In 1935, after a drinking binge, he got into an argument with poet, Robert Frost. A year later, Ernest Hemingway punched him out down in Key West, Florida. In 1955, not long before his death, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his Collected Works. He still has a large following of fans.

HAPPY EASTER!

Poems from Irish Poet Francis Ledwidge

 

Ireland

I called you by sweet names by wood and linn,

You answered not because my voice was new,

And you were listening for the hounds of Finn

And the long hosts of Lugh.

And so, I came unto a windy height

And cried my sorrow, but you heard no wind,

For you were listening to small ships in flight,

And the wail on hills behind.

And then I left you, wandering the war

Armed with will, from distant goal to goal,

To find you at the last free as of yore,

Or die to save your soul.

And then you called to us from far and near

To bring your crown from out the deeps of time,

It is my grief your voice I couldn't hear

In such a distant clime.

A Fairy Hunt

Who would hear the fairy horn

Calling all the hounds of Finn

Must be in a lark's nest born

When the moon is very thin.

I who have the gift can hear

Hounds and horn and tally ho,

And the tongue of Bran as clear

As Christmas bells across the snow.

And beside my secret place

Hurries by the fairy fox,

With the moonrise on his face,

Up and down the mossy rocks.

Then the music of a horn

And the flash of scarlet men,

Thick as poppies in the corn

All across the dusky glen.

Oh! the mad delight of chase!

Oh! the shouting and the cheer!

Many an owl doth leave his place

In the dusty tree to hear.

Fairies

Maiden-poet, come with me

To the heaped up cairn of Maeve,

And there we'll dance a fairy dance

Upon a fairy's grave.

In and out among the trees,

Filling all the night with sound,

The morning, strung upon her star,

Shall chase us round and round.

What are we but fairies too,

Living but in dreams alone,

Or, at the most, but children still,

Innocent and overgrown?

~Francis Ledwidge~

BIO: Francis Ledwidge was born in 1887 to a poor laboring family in Northern Ireland. In spite of their poverty, his mother encouraged him to stay in school until age thirteen. He loved to read Longfellow, Tennyson, Shakespeare, Shelley, and Keats, and finally began writing his own poetry. He become well-known in his local area and earned the support of Lord Dunsany, 18th Baron Dunsany. Ledwidge became a regular contributor to the Drogheda Independent newspaper. He enlisted in World War I in 1914 with Lord Dunsany as his captain. His first poetry collection was released in 1916 while still in the military. Instead of writing about the war, he wrote about his beloved Ireland. He died in Belgium in July 1917. Lord Dunsany compiled a collection of his works and published The Complete Poems of Francis Ledwidge in 1919.

HAPPY ST. PATRICK'S DAY!

Morning Song - Poetry by Sylvia Plath

 

Morning Song

Love set you going like a fat gold watch,

The midwife slapped your foot soles, and your bald cry

Took its place among the elements.

Our voices echo, magnifying your arrival. New statue.

In a drafty museum, your nakedness

Shadows our safety. We stand round blankly as walls.

I'm no more your mother

Than the cloud that distils a mirror to reflect its own slow

Effacement at the wind's hand.

All night your moth-breath

Flickers among the flat pink roses. I wake to listen:

A far sea moves in my ear.

One cry, and I stumble from bed, cow-heavy and floral

In my Victorian nightgown.

Your mouth opens clean as a cat's. The window square

Whitens and swallows its dull stars. And now you try

Your handful of notes;

The clear vowels rise like balloons.

~ Sylvia Plath ~

The Night Dances

A smile fell in the grass.

Irretrievable!

And how will your night dances

Lose themselves. In mathematics?

Such pure leaps and spirals --

Surely they travel

The world forever, I shall not entirely

Sit emptied of beauties, the gift

Of your small breath, the drenched grass

Smell of your sleeps, lilies, lilies.

Their flesh bears no relation.

Cold folds of ego, the calla,

And the tiger, embellishing itself --

Spots, and a spread of hot petals.

The comets

Have such a space to cross,

Such coldness, forgetfulness.

So your gestures flake off --

Warm and human, then their pink light

Bleeding and peeling

Through the black amnesias of heaven.

Why am I given

These lamps, these planets

Falling like blessings, like flakes

Six-sided, white

On my eyes, my lips, my hair

Touching and melting.

Nowhere.

~Sylvia Plath ~

BIO: Born in Massachusetts in 1932, Sylvia Plath suffered deeply from depression, which she wrote about in her celebrated book, The Bell Jar. Her poetry collections include The Colossus, Crossing the Water, Winter Trees, and The Collected Poems, for which she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. She was married to poet Ted Hughes and committed suicide by gas inhalation in London in 1963.

Black Earth

 

                                    (Nasa Earth Observatory)

Black Earth

by Marianne Moore

Openly, yes,

       With the naturalness

       Of the hippopotamus or the alligator

When it climbs out on the bank to experience the

Sun, I do these

Things which I do, which please

       No one but myself. Now I breathe and now I am sub-

       Merged; the blemishes stand up and shout when the object

In view was a

Renaissance; shall I say

       The contrary? The sediment of the river which

       Encrusts my joints, makes me very gray but I am used

To it, it may

Remain there; do away

       With it and I am myself done away  with, for the

       Patina of circumstance can but enrich what was

There to begin

With. This elephant skin

       Which I inhabit, fibered over like the shell of

       The coco-nut, this piece of black glass through which no light

Can filter -- cut

Into checkers by rut

       Upon rut of unpreventable experience --

       It is a manual for the peanut-tongued and the

Hairy toed. Black

But beautiful, my back

       Is full of the history of power. Of power? What

       Is powerful and what is not? My soul shall never

Be cut into

By a wooden spear; through-

       Out childhood to the present time, the unity of

       Life and death has been expressed by the circumference

Described by my

Trunk; nevertheless, I

       Perceive feats of strength to be inexplicable after

       All; and I am on my guard; external poise, it

Has its centre

Well nurtured -- we know

       Where--in pride, it spiritual poise, it has its centre where?

       My ears are sensitized to more than the sound of

The wind. I see

And I hear, unlike the

       Wandlike body of which one hears so much, which was made

       To see and not to see; to hear and not to hear,

That tree trunk without

Roots, accustomed to shout

       Its own thoughts to itself like a shell, maintained intact

       By who knows what strange pressure of the atmosphere; that

Spiritual

Brother to the coral

       Plant, absorbed into which, the equable sapphire light

       Becomes a nebulous green. The I of each is to

The I of each,

A kind of fretful speech

       Which sets a limit on itself; the elephant is?

       Black earth preceded by a tendril? It is to that

Phenomenon

The above formation,

       Translucent like the atmosphere--a cortex merely--

       That on which darts cannot strike decisively the first

Time, a substance

Needful as an instance

       Of the indestructability of matter; it

       Has looked at the electricity and at the earth-

Quake and is still

Here; the name means thick. Will

       Depth be depth, thick skin be thick, to one who can see no

       Beautiful element of unreason under it?

BIO: With Bachelor degrees in biology and histology, Marianne Moore often used nature to convey profound observations about life. She was born in 1887, worked as the Editor of Dial

from 1925 - 1929, and created her best work in the 1930s and 1940s. Her Collected Poems (1951) earned her the Pulitzer Prize in poetry and a National Book Award. In 1953, she won the Bollingen Prize. The Complete Poems of Marianne Moore appeared in 1967. Before her death in 1972, she was given an honorary doctorate from Harvard University.

Love Poems from the Bard

Sonnet XVIII

Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate:

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer's lease shall hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,

And often is his gold complexion dimm'd;

And every fair from fair sometimes declines,

By chance or nature's changing course untrimm'd;

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,

Nor lose possession of that fair thou owest;

Nor shall Death brag thou wander'st in his shade,

When in eternal lines to time thou grow'st:

       So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,

       So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

Sonnet CXVI

Let me not to the marriage of true minds

Admit impediments. Love is not love

Which alters when it alteration finds,

Or bends with the remover to remove:

O, no! it is an ever-fixed mark,

That looks on tempests and is never shaken;

It is the star to every wandering bark,

Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.

Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks

Within his bending sickle's compass come;

Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,

But bears it out even to the edge of doom.

       If this be error and upon me proved,

       I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

~ William Shakespeare ~

BIO: The question is not whether William Shakespeare lived, but whether he actually wrote the plays and other compositions he is known for. Records show that he was baptized on April 26, 1564 at Holy Trinity Church in Stratford-upon-Avon, England. During his lifetime, he belonged to the King's Men theatrical group and helped to establish the Globe Theatre in London. His 37 plays are still performed today. He is known for some of the finest sonnets ever written. While some people believe Christopher Marlowe or Francis Bacon secretly wrote Shakespeare's works, the consensus seems to be that William Shakespeare created his own body of works. He died in 1616 and was buried at Trinity Church.

 

Poems About Books

 

There is no Frigate like a Book

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –

 

~ Emily Dickinson ~

 

The Land of Story-Books

 

These are the hills, these are the woods,
These are my starry solitudes;
And there the river by whose brink
The roaring lions come to drink.

I see the others far away
As if in firelit camp they lay,
And I, like to an Indian scout,
Around their party prowled about.

So, when my nurse comes in for me,
Home I return across the sea,
And go to bed with backward looks
At my dear land of Story-books.

~ Robert Louis Stevenson ~

When You are Old

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,

Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled

And paced upon the mountains overhead

And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

 

~ W.B. Yeats ~

Good Books

Good books are friendly things to own.
If you are busy they will wait.
They will not call you on the phone
Or wake you if the hour is late.
They stand together row by row,
Upon the low shelf or the high.
But if you're lonesome this you know:
You have a friend or two nearby.

The fellowship of books is real.
They're never noisy when you're still.
They won't disturb you at your meal.
They'll comfort you when you are ill.
The lonesome hours they'll always share.
When slighted they will not complain.
And though for them you've ceased to care
Your constant friends they'll still remain.

Good books your faults will never see
Or tell about them round the town.
If you would have their company
You merely have to take them down.
They'll help you pass the time away,
They'll counsel give if that you need.
He has true friends for night and day
Who has a few good books to read.

 

~ Edgar Albert Guest ~