Category: Not My Poetry

To the Old Gods

Old gods and goddesses who have lived so long
Through time and never found eternity,
Fettered by wasting wood and hollowing hill,

You should have fled our ever-dying song,
The mound, the well, and the green trysting tree.
They have forgotten, yet you linger still.

Goddess of caverned breast and channeled brow, 
And cheeks slow hollowed by millennial tears,
Forests of autumns fading in your eyes, 

Eternity matvels at your counted years
And kingdoms lost in time, and wonders how 
There could be thoughts so bountiful and wise 

As yours beneath the ever-breaking bough, 
And vast compassion curving like the skies.

- Edwin Muir (Scottish poet, 1887-1959)

All Watched Over By Machines Of Loving Grace

I like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.

I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.

I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal
brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.

- Richard Brautigan (American poet, 1935-1984)

Full Moon, West Coast

Blotched with its unattainable mountains
this was that yellow half-wheel rolled above Bald Hill,
diminishing cirque climbed to its apogee of night,
unsluicing sheeted silver on the world.
It rose persimmon-colored from the sea,
and hued like pumpkin as it fired the trees,
suffused and swollen, lanterning the dusk;
now less than evening size,
processes all blue midnight and looks down,
pouring from zenith on the blank-faced stones.

Leaving no wrinkle on the planet's face
at loss of what its winds and waves absorb
and grind and blow to nothingness
here are the furious struggles all brought down:
slow drown of clashing towers of jangled bells
and bodies that were wasted sacks of blood
subsiding to the lit and level floor,
their heroes cried to silence.
Here is negation of both word and deed,
of goodness and of evil in men's hearts,
a pool wherein the heaviest stone may fall
and write its weight of nothing in the glass.

- Eric Wilson Barker (American poet, 1905-1973)

TO SPEAK OF NOTHING
It is a serious thing, nothing.
The notion confounds the mind
As wind confounds the sea.
A woman fixes words to a miracle,
A man describes himself to God.
The syllables amount to something,
But they are nothing to speak of.

– M. Scott Momaday (American poet, b. 1934)

Chartres

I do not wonder, stones,
You have withstood so long
The strong wind and the snows.

Were you not built to bear
The winter and the wind
That blows on the hill here?

But you have borne so long
Our eyes, our mortal eyes,
And are not worn -

– Archibald MacLeish (American poet, 1892-1982)

A Portrait in Greys

Will it never be possible
to separate you from your greyness?
Must you be always sinking backward
into your grey-brown landscapes—and trees
always in the distance, always against a grey sky?

                          Must I be always
moving counter to you? Is there no place
where we can be at peace together
and the motion of our drawing apart
be altogether taken up?
                         I see myself
standing upon your shoulders touching
a grey, broken sky -
but you, weighted down with me,
yet gripping my ankles, - move
                               laboriously on,
where it is level and undisturbed by colors.

– William Carlos Williams (American poet, 1883-1963)