Poetry

[vinteuil]

There was a Boy; ye knew him well, ye cliffs
And islands of Winander! many a time,
At evening, when the earliest stars began
To move along the edges of the hills,
Rising or setting, would he stand alone,
Beneath the trees, or by the glimmering lake;
And there, with fingers interwoven, both hands
Pressed closely palm to palm and to his mouth
Uplifted, he, as through an instrument,
Blew mimic hootings to the silent owls
That they might answer him.—And they would shout
Across the watery vale, and shout again,
Responsive to his call,—with quivering peals,
And long halloos, and screams, and echoes loud
Redoubled and redoubled; concourse wild
Of jocund din! And, when there came a pause
Of silence such as baffled his best skill:
Then, sometimes, in that silence, while he hung
Listening, a gentle shock of mild surprise
Has carried far into his heart the voice
Of mountain-torrents; or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into his mind
With all its solemn imagery, its rocks,
Its woods, and that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake.

... or, for those of an HIPP persuasion, here is the original manuscript version:

There was a boy ye knew him well, ye rocks
And islands of Winander & ye green
Peninsulas of Esthwaite many a time
When the stars began
To move along the edges of the hills
Rising or setting would he stand alone
Beneath the trees or by the glimmering lakes
And through his fingers woven in one close knot
Blow mimic hootings to the silent owls
And bid them answer him. And they would shout
Across the wat'ry vale & shout again
Responsive to my call with tremulous sobs
And long halloos & screams & echoes loud
Redoubled & redoubled a wild scene
Of mirth & jocund din. And when it chanced
That pauses of deep silence mocked my skill
Then, often, in that silence while I hung
Listening a sudden shock of mild surprize
Would carry far into my heart the voice
Of mountain torrents: or the visible scene
Would enter unawares into my mind
With all its solemn imagery its rocks
Its woods & that uncertain heaven received
Into the bosom of the steady lake . . .





.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Terrific contributions - I knew neither the Sassoon (intellectually sharp and venomously incisive - no doubt too "left-wing academic" for some right-wing anti-academic minds. perhaps?) nor the Wyatt (in fact, his They flee from me who sometime did me seek is the only poem of his I do: wasn't he a cousin of Anne Boleyn and one of those executed for his "treacherous" incestuous relationship with her?). I'm more at home with The Prelude, and I'm glad Wordsworth has made an appearance.

Any more for any more?

[edashtav]

Music's duel

Richard Crashaw's extended poem "Music's Duel": the duel's between a lutenist and a nightingale is a tour de force. In the BBC's "high-minded" days it, too, staged a duel with Beatrice Harrison playing 'cello to a backing choir of the birds in her county garden.

MUSIC'S DUEL
Richard Crashaw

NOW westward Sol had spent the richest beams
Of noon's high glory, when, hard by the streams
Of Tiber, on the scene of a green plat,
Under protection of an oak, there sat
A sweet lute's master : in whose gentle airs
He lost the day's heat, and his own hot cares.
Close in the covert of the leaves there stood
A nightingale, come from the neighbouring wood :—
The sweet inhabitant of each glad tree,
Their muse, their Syren, harmless Syren she,—
There stood she list'ning, and did entertain
The music's soft report, and mould the same
In her own murmurs, that what ever mood
His curious fingers lent, her voice made good.
The man preceived his rival, and her art ;
Disposed to give the light-foot lady sport,
Awakes his lute, and 'gainst the fight to come
Informs it, in a sweet præludium
Of closer strains ; and ere the war begin
He slightly skirmishes on every string,
Charged with a flying touch ; and staightway she
Carves out her dainty voice as readily
Into a thousand sweet distinguish'd tones :
And reckons up in soft divisions
Quick volumes of wild notes, to let him know
By that shrill taste she could do something too.
His nimble hand's instinct then taught each string
A cap'ring cheerfulness ; and made them sing
To their own dance ; now negligently rash
He throws his arm, and with a long-drawn dash
Blends all together, then distinctly trips
From this to that, then, quick returning, skips
And snatches this again, and pauses there.
She measures every measure, everywhere
Meets art with art ; sometimes, as if in doubt—
Not perfect yet, and fearing to be out—
Trails her plain ditty in one long-spun note
Through the sleek passage of her open throat :
A clear unwrinkled song ; then doth she point it
With tender accents, and severely joint it
By short diminutives, that, being rear'd
In controverting warbles evenly shared,
With her sweet self she wrangles ; he, amazed
That from so small a channel should be raised
The torrent of a voice, whose melody
Could melt into such sweet variety,
Strains higher yet, that tickled with rare art
The tattling strings—each breathing in his part—
Most kindly do fall out ; the grumbling base
In surly groans disdains the treble's grace ;
The high-perch'd treble chirps at this, and chides
Until his finger—moderator—hides
And closes the sweet quarrel, rousing all,
Hoarse, shrill, at once : as when the trumpets call
Hot Mars to th' harvest of death's field, and woo
Men's hearts into their hands ; this lesson, too,
She gives him back, her supple breast thrills out
Sharp airs, and staggers in a warbling doubt
Of dallying sweetness, hovers o'er her skill,
And folds in waved notes, with a trembling bill,
The pliant series of her slippery song ;
Then starts she suddenly into a throng
Of short thick sobs, whose thundring volleys float
And roll themselves over her lubric throat
In panting murmurs, 'still'd out of her breast,
That ever-bubbling spring, the sugar'd nest
Of her delicious soul, that there does lie
Bathing in streams of liquid melody,—
Music's best seed-plot ; when in ripen'd airs
A golden-headed harvest fairly rears
His honey-dropping tops, plough'd by her breath,
Which there reciprocally laboureth.
In that sweet soil it seems a holy quire
Founded to th' name of great Apollo's lyre ;
Whose silver roof rings with the sprightly notes
Of sweet-lipp'd angel-imps, that swill their throats
In cream of morning Helicon ; and then
Prefer soft anthems to the ears of men,
To woo them from their beds, still murmuring
That men can sleep while they their matins sing ;—
Most divine service ! whose so early lay
Prevents the eyelids of the blushing day.
There might you hear her kindle her soft voice
In the close murmur of a sparkling noise,
And lay the ground-work of her hopeful song ;
Still keeping in the forward stream so long,
Till a sweet whirlwind, striving to get out,
Heaves her soft bosom, wanders round about,
And makes a pretty earthquake in her breast ;
Till the fledged notes at length forsake their nest,
Fluttering in wanton shoals, and to the sky,
Wing'd with their own wild echos, pratt'ling fly.
She opes the floodgate, and lets loose a tide
Of streaming sweetness, which in state doth ride
On the waved back of every swelling strain,
Rising and falling in a pompous train ;
And while she thus discharges a shrill peal
Of flashing airs, she qualifies their zeal
With the cool epode of a graver note ;
Thus high, thus low, as if her silver throat
Would reach the brazen voice of war's hoarse bird ;
Her little soul is ravish'd : and so pour'd
Into loose ecstasies, that she is placed
Above herself—music's enthusiast !
Shame now and anger mixed a double stain
In the musician's face ; yet once again,
Mistress, I come. Now reach a strain, my lute,
Above her mock, or be for ever mute ;
Or tune a song of victory to me,
Or to thyself sing thine own obsequy !
So said, his hands sprightly as fire he flings,
And with a quivering coyness tastes the strings :
The sweet-lipp'd sisters, musically frighted,
Singing their fears, are fearfully delighted :
Trembling as when Apollo's golden hairs
Are fann'd and frizzled in the wanton airs
Of his own breath, which, married to his lyre,
Doth tune the spheres, and make heaven's self look higher ;
From this to that, from that to this, he flies,
Feels music's pulse in all her arteries ;
Caught in a net which there Apollo spreads,
His fingers struggle with the vocal threads,
Following those little rills, he sinks into
A sea of Helicon : his hand does go
Those parts of sweetness which with nectar drop,
Softer than that which pants in Hebe's cup :
The humourous strings expound his learnèd touch
By various glosses ; now they seem to grutch,
And murmur in a buzzing din, then gingle
In shrill-tongued accents, striving to be single ;
Every smooth turn, every delicious stroke,
Gives life to some new grace : thus doth he invoke
Sweetness by all her names ; thus, bravely thus—
Fraught with a fury so harmonious—
The lute's light Genius now does proudly rise,
Heaved on the surges of swoll'n rhapsodies,
Whose flourish, meteor-like, doth curl the air
With flash of high-born fancies ; here and there
Dancing in lofty measures, and anon
Creeps on the soft touch of a tender tone,
Whose trembling murmurs, melting in wild airs
Runs to and fro, complaining his sweet cares ;
Because those precious mysteries that dwell
In music's ravish'd soul he dare not tell,
But whisper to the world : thus do they vary
Each string his note, as if they meant to carry
Their master's blest soul, snatch'd out at his ears
By a strong ecstacy, through all the spheres
Of music's heaven ; and seat it there on high
In th' empyræum of pure harmony.
At length—after so long, so loud a strife
Of all the strings, still breathing the best life
Of blest variety, attending on
His fingers' fairest revolution,
In many a sweet rise, many as sweet a fall—
A full-mouth'd diapason swallows all.
This done, he lists what she would say to this ;
And she, although her breath's late exercise
Had dealt too roughly with her tender throat,
Yet summons all her sweet powers for a note.
Alas, in vain ! for while, sweet soul, she tries
To measure all those wild diversities
Of chatt'ring strings, by the small size of one
Poor simple voice, raised in a natural tone,
She fails ; and failing, grieves ; and grieving, dies ;—
She dies, and leaves her life the victor's prize,
Falling upon his lute. O, fit to have—
That lived so sweetly—dead, so sweet a grave

[hedgehog]

I like this renga because it is of the now, for its ephemeral nature and gentle flow of images.


Getting Used To Darkness


Brief blue scatterings

lighten the limbo

at the end of the year

*

cold gates clunking

mark the way in

*

the open water

receives sun, breeze

and a lone swan

*
getting used to darkness

I know you are there

*

how even the body relaxes

when you enter a house

full of good people

*

Emma watched the pull

to text back many times

*

fear’s sour taste –

not having

not being enough

*

we sit with the impossibility

of nothing

*

these walls built from stone

out of the fields

they now enclose

*

two gardeners

on their hands and knees

*

the bleached tree guards

stake out a promise

of soft glade and birdsong

*

crossed fingers behind your back

won’t do it

*
spines on cacti

fine and scarlet

beneath dim light

*

grant me a spider’s skill

her slow spun wheel

*

he listened

with complete attention

to the difficult guest

*

geese graze tight-in

amongst the Cheviot ewes

*

dark clouds

arced glow

rippling at the shore

*

a rumour of snowdrops

instead of first snow

*

the young oak

have yet to learn

to shed their leaf

*

two hundred kilos of salt

awaiting the weather.



A genius loci/parami renga
on 29th December, 2013.


Participants:

Ajahn Abhinando, John Bower, Chandra Candiani, Linda France, Geoff Jackson, Linda Kent, Eileen Ridley, Tim Rubidge, Christine Taylor

[johncorrigan]

Many years ago on the Pilgrimage around the Island of Iona we stopped at the Machair gates on the stormy day and one of our number read this poem. He did not know who wrote it but I managed to get a copy from him which I keep to this day and read when I am on the West Coast of that wonderful place. It was years later reading the wonderful RS Thomas that I discovered the poem was by him.


pilgrimages

There is an island there is no going
to but in a small boat, the way
the saints went, travelling the gallery
of the frightened faces of
the long-drowned, munching the gravel
of its beaches. So I have gone
up the salt lane to the building
with the stone altar, and the candles
gone out, and kneeled and lifted
my eyes to the furious gargoyle
of the owl that is like a god
gone small and resentful. There
is no body in the stained window
of the sky now. Am I too late?
Were they too late also, those
first pilgrims? He is such a fast
God, always before us, and
leaving as we arrive.

There are those here
not given to prayer, whose office
is the blank sea that they say daily.
What they listen to is not
hymns, but the slow chemistry of the soil,
that turns saints' bones into dust,
dust to an irritant of the nostril.

There is no time on this island.
The swinging pendulum of the tide
has no clock; the events
are dateless. These people are not
late or soon; they are just
here, with only the one question
to ask, which life answers
by being in them. It is I
who ask. Was the pilgrimage
I made to come to my own
self, to learn that, in times
like these, and for one like me,
God will never be plain and
out there, but dark rather, and
inexplicable, as though he were in here?

"Pilgrimages" by R. S. Thomas

[Padraig]

From Ten Glosses

8 Moling's Gloss (from the Irish)

Among my elders, I know better
And frown on any carry-on;
Among the brat-pack on the batter
I'm taken for a younger man.

10 A Norman Simile

To be marvellously yourself like the river water
Gerald of Wales says runs in Arklow harbour
Even at high tide when you'd expect salt water

S.H. Electric Light 2001

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

JohnC - RST is amongst my very favourite poets; I think he may have been writing about Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli) which he could see evry day when he was vicar at St Hwywn's Church in Aberdaron - probably the most beautiful church location imaginable. The church itself is lovely, too, and has a small corner devoted to its former vicar and his work (including Pilgrimages on display) - I've been to all Thomas' churches, but Eglwys Fach near Machynlleth (the one whose interior Thomas and his artist wife painted completely black!) has never yet been open when I've been there: 'tho' there's a prominent plaque outside the door letting everyone know that RST vicared there. I'm bound to come back to RST on this Thread, but for now, I'll let your choice make its resonance.

EDIT: cross-posted with Padraig's glorious post, making it look as if I was ignoring or even snubbing it, which is certainly not the case.

[johncorrigan]

JohnC - RST is amongst my very favourite poets; I think he may have been writing about Bardsey Island (Ynys Enlli) which he could see evry day when he was vicar at St Hwywn's Church in Aberdaron - probably the most beautiful church location imaginable. The church itself is lovely, too, and has a small corner devoted to its former vicar and his work (including Pilgrimages on display) - I've been to all Thomas' churches, but Eglwys Fach near Machynlleth (the one whose interior Thomas and his artist wife painted completely black!) has never yet been open when I've been there: 'tho' there's a prominent plaque outside the door letting everyone know that RST vicared there. I'm bound to come back to RST on this Thread, but for now, I'll let your choice make its resonance.

Thank you for this ferney. I'm ashamed to say that my knowledge of the geography of Wales is very restricted. I threw a googly at your information on Aberdaron and Bardsey/Enlli and found its history very interesting. This may be the inspiration for me and Mrs C to travel south for a change rather than north and west. Did he also write 'The Island' about Bardsey, do you know? I was stunned by this poem - an evocation of the mean God, who cannot be found easily, demands so much giving little in return, not the God with convenient packaging who can be lifted from a supermarket shelf. I've just gone and found my R.S. Thomas LP which has him standing with what I now assume to be Bardsey/Enlli in the background. I love to hear that far away voice reading his wonderful poems. Thanks again.
P.S. Just found the front cover

http://sbkw.net/images/vor/rs_thomas.jpg

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Did he also write 'The Island' about Bardsey, do you know?

Probably - it comes from the 1972 collection H'm (a wonderful title - expressing the poet's characteristic scepticism about "pat" answers concerning the divine - the "supermarket shelf" aspect but also atheist/materialist oversimplifications - whilst also alluding to "Him") when he'd been at Aberdaron for four years - but there are so many "Holy Islands" (Bardsey, Iona, Caldey, Lindesfarne ... ) to which it is equally applicable.

I love the LP cover (a pleasant change to see a photo of RST not in "mad Bard" mode ("These photographers hang around for hours waiting for me to look odd, and then they print the ones where I look like a loony!") - I have the later collection (on three Cassette tapes) of RST reading a significant section of his output. Wonderful voice.

[johncorrigan]

- but there are so many "Holy Islands" (Bardsey, Iona, Caldey, Lindesfarne ... ) to which it is equally applicable.

I think that is what drew me to 'Pilgrimages' in the first place - it seems to talk of so many places, for me on the West Coast of Scotland in particular - no romance here - this is a hard God - 'always before us, and leaving as we arrive'.

I love the LP cover (a pleasant change to see a photo of RST not in "mad Bard" mode ("These photographers hang around for hours waiting for me to look odd, and then they print the ones where I look like a loony!") - I have the later collection (on three Cassette tapes) of RST reading a significant section of his output. Wonderful voice.

Yes indeed ferney - as I trawled through the images of RST looking for the LP cover I realised that most had tried to capture the grouch. Yet he writes with such love, such observation. He beautifies the way of life without romanticising it. When reading the material about Bardsley I came upon this tribute he wrote about one of his former parishioners.

http://www.bardsey.org/english/the_island/wilevans.pdf

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

Lovely memoir from RST, JohnC - the more I read of his relationships with people (well, at least with some people) the more I believe that the public persona he presented was armour, protecting himself from his shyness. And the media loved it: a symbiotic relationship that kept the private man private. A wicked sense of humour, too, by all accounts - one of the self-appointed custodians of society in Eglwys Fach once tried to impress the vicar by telling him "My great-grandfather fell at Waterloo, I'll have you know!", to which the poet replied "Oh, I'm so sorry. Which platform was it?")


Coming back to Hedgehog's #19 - I've read this a few times now, finding it compulsively haunting: gentle and evocative, the syntax and signifiers running in parallel (and so never quite "meeting"), so that "meaning" shimmers in and out of focus - a bit Feldmanesque in its combination of the eerie and the beguiling.


Completely different in tone is this comic masterpiece by e e cummings - imagine a (very) drunk white man at the time of the Vietnam War talking aloud at anyone who happens to be near him:

ygUDuh

yguDuh
ydoan
yunnuhstan
ydoan o
yunnuhstand dem
yguduh ged
yunnuhstan dem doidee
yguduh ged riduh
ydoan o nudn

LISN bud LISN

dem
gud
am
lidl yelluh bas
tuds weer goin
duhSIVILEYEzum

[aeolium]

Many thanks to ferney for starting this thread and to all its contributors. My two offerings are I fear perhaps too well known but anyway:

1) The Battle of Brunanburh, the Old English poem from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. It's too long to quote here, and in any case I can't help feeling that any translation somehow emasculates the verse (if that's not too strong a word). But here is imo a good reading in the original language (with a scrolling translation) that brings out the tonal colours and alliteration:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfaEGU45lKA

2) Written almost exactly a thousand years after that Anglo-Saxon battle was Yeats' panegyric to the regenerative power of art in the face of destruction and catastrophe, Lapis Lazuli, one of the most wonderful of lyric poems and one of those texts which appear so "right" in every syllable and cadence that it creates the illusion that its author heard it complete. And the poem only came about because Yeats received a birthday gift of a carved lapis lazuli stone from Harry Clifton (take a bow that man):

I have heard that hysterical women say
They are sick of the palette and fiddle-bow,
Of poets that are always gay,
For everybody knows or else should know
That if nothing drastic is done
Aeroplane and Zeppelin will come out,
Pitch like King Billy bomb-balls in
Until the town lie beaten flat.

All perform their tragic play,
There struts Hamlet, there is Lear,
That's Ophelia, that Cordelia;
Yet they, should the last scene be there,
The great stage curtain about to drop,
If worthy their prominent part in the play,
Do not break up their lines to weep.
They know that Hamlet and Lear are gay;
Gaiety transfiguring all that dread.
All men have aimed at, found and lost;
Black out; Heaven blazing into the head:
Tragedy wrought to its uttermost.
Though Hamlet rambles and Lear rages,
And all the drop-scenes drop at once
Upon a hundred thousand stages,
It cannot grow by an inch or an ounce.

On their own feet they came, or on shipboard,
Camel-back, horse-back, ass-back, mule-back,
Old civilisations put to the sword.
Then they and their wisdom went to rack:
No handiwork of Callimachus,
Who handled marble as if it were bronze,
Made draperies that seemed to rise
When sea-wind swept the corner, stands:
His long lamp-chimney shaped like the stem
Of a slender palm, stood but a day;
All things fall and are built again,
And those that build them again are gay.

Two Chinamen, behind them a third,
Are carved in lapis lazuli,
Over them flies a long-legged bird,
A symbol of longevity;
The third, doubtless a serving-man,
Carries a musical instrument.

Every discoloration of the stone,
Every accidental crack or dent,
Seems a water-course or an avalanche,
Or lofty slope where it still snows
Though doubtless plum or cherry-branch
Sweetens the little half-way house
Those Chinamen climb towards, and I
Delight to imagine them seated there;
There, on the mountain and the sky,
On all the tragic scene they stare.
One asks for mournful melodies;
Accomplished fingers begin to play.
Their eyes mid many wrinkles, their eyes,
Their ancient, glittering eyes, are gay.

Sadly I know of no recording of this poem by Yeats himself, but here are recordings of him reading three other poems in that inimitable voice:

http://www.poetryarchive.org/poetryarchive/singlePoet.do?poetId=1688

[mangerton]

Lovely memoir from RST, JohnC - the more I read of his relationships with people (well, at least with some people) the more I believe that the public persona he presented was armour, protecting himself from his shyness. And the media loved it: a symbiotic relationship that kept the private man private. A wicked sense of humour, too, by all accounts - one of the self-appointed custodians of society in Eglwys Fach once tried to impress the vicar by telling him "My great-grandfather fell at Waterloo, I'll have you know!", to which the poet replied "Oh, I'm so sorry. Which platform was it?")


Coming back to Hedgehog's #19 - I've read this a few times now, finding it compulsively haunting: gentle and evocative, the syntax and signifiers running in parallel (and so never quite "meeting"), so that "meaning" shimmers in and out of focus - a bit Feldmanesque in its combination of the eerie and the beguiling.


Completely different in tone is this comic masterpiece by e e cummings - imagine a (very) drunk white man at the time of the Vietnam War talking aloud at anyone who happens to be near him:

ygUDuh

Goodness! I haven't seen that since my school days.

Not from the classroom; one of my housemates had it pinned on his study wall, together with this:

Sometime During Eternity . . .
BY LAWRENCE FERLINGHETTI


Sometime during eternity
some guys show up
and one of them
who shows up real late
is a kind of carpenter
from some square-type place
like Galilee
and he starts wailing
and claiming he is hip
to who made heaven
and earth
and that the cat
who really laid it on us
is his Dad

And moreover
he adds
It’s all writ down
on some scroll-type parchments
which some henchmen
leave lying around the Dead Sea somewheres
a long time ago
and which you won’t even find
for a coupla thousand years or so
or at least for
nineteen hundred and fortyseven
of them
to be exact
and even then
nobody really believes them
or me
for that matter
You’re hot
they tell him
And they cool him

They stretch him on the Tree to cool

And everybody after that
is always making models
of this Tree
with Him hung up
and always crooning His name
and calling Him to come down
and sit in
on their combo
as if he is the king cat
who’s got to blow
or they can’t quite make it

Only he don’t come down
from His Tree
Him just hang there
on His Tree
looking real Petered out
and real cool
and also
according to a roundup
of late world news
from the usual unreliable sources
real dead

[Tevot]

Yes Mangerton - the Cummings and Ferlinghetti featured in a poetry anthology we had at school in the early 1980s. For the life of me I can't remember the title of it. But anyway. Here are two more poems. The first by Ferlinghetti and the second by Robert Lowell.

The World Is a Beautiful Place



The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind happiness
not always being
so very much fun
if you don't mind a touch of hell
now and then
just when everything is fine
because even in heaven
they don't sing
all the time

The world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't mind some people dying
all the time
or maybe only starving
some of the time
which isn't half bad
if it isn't you

Oh the world is a beautiful place
to be born into
if you don't much mind
a few dead minds
in the higher places
or a bomb or two
now and then
in your upturned faces
or such other improprieties
as our Name Brand society
is prey to
with its men of distinction
and its men of extinction
and its priests
and other patrolmen

and its various segregations
and congressional investigations
and other constipations
that our fool flesh
is heir to

Yes the world is the best place of all
for a lot of such things as
making the fun scene
and making the love scene
and making the sad scene
and singing low songs and having inspirations
and walking around
looking at everything
and smelling flowers
and goosing statues
and even thinking
and kissing people and
making babies and wearing pants
and waving hats and
dancing
and going swimming in rivers
on picnics
in the middle of the summer
and just generally
'living it up'
Yes
but then right in the middle of it
comes the smiling

mortician


------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

For the Union Dead



Relinquunt Ommia Servare Rem Publicam.

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now. Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back. I often sign still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile. One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common. Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
a girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half of the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now. He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die-
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic

The stone statutes of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year-
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns…

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his 'niggers.'

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statutes for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the 'Rock of Ages'
that survived the blast. Space is nearer.
when I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessed break.

The Aquarium is gone. Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

[johncorrigan]

Thanks Tevot - I had never read these poems - I was interested to read in Wikipedia about the inscription by Charles W. Eliot on the rear of the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial:

'The White Officers taking life and honor in their hands cast in their lot with men of a despised race unproven in war and risked death as inciters of servile insurrection if taken prisoners besides encountering all the common perils of camp march and battle. The Black rank and file volunteered when disaster clouded the Union Cause. Served without pay for eighteen months till given that of white troops. Faced threatened enslavement if captured. Were brave in action. Patient under heavy and dangerous labors. And cheerful amid hardships and privations. Together they gave to the Nation and the World undying proof that Americans of African descent possess the pride, courage and devotion of the patriot soldier. One hundred and eighty thousand such Americans enlisted under the Union Flag in MDCCCLXIII-MDCCCLXV.'

I was left wondering if it is still the case that as Lowell says 'Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.'