Poem of the day

I'll do this for October, we'll see how it plays. teddys suggested it; I'm not sur how well it will go with gamblers and math heads, but I think it should be given some thought. Good poetry is really hard. There is a lot of discipline involved, a lot of consideration of form, and rhythm and sound. Good poetry is like good math, except that it has the advantage of surprise and originality.

If you like the poem, say so. If someone has something to add, that would be good, too. I'm not much of a poetry reader myself, this will be a journey of learning through searching and sharing. Most of these will be "first reads" for me.

First one. This is a translation. I picked it for a few reasons. First, I think the translation is beautiful, it must be heartbreaking in Spanish. Second, the poet, Pablo Neruda, is a favorite of my daughter; she visited his home last year, it is a museum in Chile.



If You Forget Me


I want you to know
one thing.

You know how this is:
if I look
at the crystal moon, at the red branch
of the slow autumn at my window,
if I touch
near the fire
the impalpable ash
or the wrinkled body of the log,
everything carries me to you,
as if everything that exists,
aromas, light, metals,
were little boats
that sail
toward those isles of yours that wait for me.

Well, now,
if little by little you stop loving me
I shall stop loving you little by little.

If suddenly
you forget me
do not look for me,
for I shall already have forgotten you.

If you think it long and mad,
the wind of banners
that passes through my life,
and you decide
to leave me at the shore
of the heart where I have roots,
remember
that on that day,
at that hour,
I shall lift my arms
and my roots will set off
to seek another land.

But
if each day,
each hour,
you feel that you are destined for me
with implacable sweetness,
if each day a flower
climbs up to your lips to seek me,
ah my love, ah my own,
in me all that fire is repeated,
in me nothing is extinguished or forgotten,
my love feeds on your love, beloved,
and as long as you live it will be in your arms
without leaving mine.


And, in its native language,


SI TÚ ME OLVIDAS QUIERO

que sepas una cosa.

Tú sabes cómo es esto:
si miro
la luna de cristal, la rama roja
del lento otoño en mi ventana,
si toco
junto al fuego
la impalpable ceniza
o el arrugado cuerpo de la leña,
todo me lleva a ti,
como si todo lo que existe,
aromas, luz, metales,
fueran pequeños barcos que navegan
hacia las islas tuyas que me aguardan.

Ahora bien,
si poco a poco dejas de quererme
dejaré de quererte poco a poco.

Si de pronto
me olvidas
no me busques,
que ya te habré olvidado.

Si consideras largo y loco
el viento de banderas
que pasa por mi vida
y te decides
a dejarme a la orilla
del corazón en que tengo raíces,
piensa
que en ese día,
a esa hora
levantaré los brazos
y saldrán mis raíces
a buscar otra tierra.

Pero
si cada día,
cada hora
sientes que a mí estás destinada
con dulzura implacable.
Si cada día sube
una flor a tus labios a buscarme,
ay amor mío, ay mía,
en mí todo ese fuego se repite,
en mí nada se apaga ni se olvida,
mi amor se nutre de tu amor, amada,
y mientras vivas estará en tus brazos
sin salir de los míos.

October Haiku

The crunching footfalls
Underneath, rustling gold leaves
Lovely in decay.

Dulce et Decorum Est

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, –
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

There once was a man from Nantucket
You think I might even consider putting
the rest of that limerick
in this thread and not
fully expect to be given a timeout by the mods?!!

Thank you very much Mosca for sharing some powerful poems, I love it. Please keep it up. Thanks.

The sun's heat
Of an October
Day. Winter Beckons

I was raised by my grandma, who taught me this nursery rhyme when I was a toddler in the mid-1960's. I've never seen it in print anywhere, and a quick google search just now turned up nothing. Makes me wonder if she's the one who wrote it. I know it's missing some other stanzas, but I can only remember this much:

Rain, rain, come today,
in my garden you can play.

All the flowers are in their places,
You can wash their petal faces.

Give a drink to all the trees,
make some splashy puddles please.

Rain rain upon the lawn,
'cause duckie's got his raincoat on.

I especially enjoyed your first poem, Mosca. If you'll excuse the imposition, I should like to post a poem of my own. I wrote it quite some time ago:

The smoke curls around my mouth,
Indistinquishable;
Smoke, fog, my icy breath,
Intermingling, blending.

One last drag,
My cigarette hits the ground;
Exploding,
A sparkler on the Fourth of July.

Wind, frost and naked trees,
A weeping willow that;
Sheds not a tear,
Uncaring.

Tracks from a child's sled,
The blizzard has not yet covered;
Discouragement,
As my uncaring step breaks the clean lines.

Two miles later,
"Now Entering City Limits";
A cheap restaurant,
The early morning crowd files in.

An inoperative smokestack,
A closed down factory;
Littered,
The ground with unused time cards.

The remains of a trash fire,
A dead man frozen in time;
Desolate,
He no longer saw reason to keep himself warm.

Graffiti at a bus stop,
A chalk outline;
Deaf and Mute,
As a church bell rings somewhere in the distance.

Hey Bob, curious to know, are those your originals?

Okay, so it's an oldie; we all know it, but it fits this forum so well I think about it often:

If


If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too:
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,
Or being hated don't give way to hating,
And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream---and not make dreams your master;
If you can think---and not make thoughts your aim,
If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster
And treat those two impostors just the same:.
If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken
Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,
Or watch the things you gave your life to, broken,
And stoop and build'em up with worn-out tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings
And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,
And lose, and start again at your beginnings,
And never breathe a word about your loss:
If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew
To serve your turn long after they are gone,
And so hold on when there is nothing in you
Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on!"

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much:
If you can fill the unforgiving minute
With sixty seconds' worth of distance run,
Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,
And---which is more---you'll be a Man, my son!


Rudyard Kipling

Tractor


The tractor stands frozen - an agony
To think of. All night
Snow packed its open entrails. Now a head-pincering gale,
A spill of molten ice, smoking snow,
Pours into its steel.
At white heat of numbness it stands
In the aimed hosing of ground-level fieriness.

It defied flesh and won't start.
Hands are like wounds already
Inside armour gloves, and feet are unbelievable
As if the toe-nails were all just torn off.
I stare at it in hatred. Beyond it
The copse hisses - capitulates miserably
In the fleeing, failing light. Starlings,
A dirtier sleetier snow, blow smokily, unendingly, over
Towards plantations Eastward.
All the time the tractor is sinking
Through the degrees, deepening
Into its hell of ice.

The starting lever
Cracks its action, like a snapping knuckle.
The battery is alive - but like a lamb
Trying to nudge its solid-frozen mother -
While the seat claims my buttock-bones, bites
With the space-cold of earth, which it has joined
In one solid lump.

I squirt commercial sure-fire
Down the black throat - it just coughs.
It ridicules me - a trap of iron stupidity
I've stepped into. I drive the battery
As if I were hammering and hammering
The frozen arrangement to pieces with a hammer
And it jabbers laughing pain-crying mockingly
Into happy life.

And stands
Shuddering itself full of heat, seeming to enlarge slowly
Like a demon demonstrating
A more-than-usually-complete materialization -
Suddenly it jerks from its solidarity
With the concrete, and lurches towards a stanchion
Bursting with superhuman well-being and abandon
Shouting Where Where?

Worse iron is waiting. Power-lift kneels
Levers awake imprisoned deadweight,
Shackle-pins bedded in cast-iron cow-shit.
The blind and vibrating condemned obedience
Of iron to the cruelty of iron,
Wheels screeched out of their night-locks -

Fingers
Among the tormented
Tonnage and burning of iron

Eyes
Weeping in the wind of chloroform

And the tractor, streaming with sweat,
Raging and trembling and rejoicing.


--Ted Hughes

Quote: s2dbaker

There once was a man from Nantucket

Who shot all his wad in ah, never mind.

"I would rather be ashes than dust,
I would rather my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze,
Than it should be stifled in dry rot.
I would rather be a superb meteor,
With every atom of me in magnificent glow,
Than a sleepy and permanent planet."
Jack London

As Homer Simpson said when Lisa reminded him of his promise to help her write a haiku:

Why did I do that?
It sounds so dull and boring.
What was I thinking?

And the classic:

Haiku are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator

I can take credit for neither of these.

THE FLEA.
by John Donne


MARK but this flea, and mark in this,
How little that which thou deniest me is ;
It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,
And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.
Thou know'st that this cannot be said
A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead ;
Yet this enjoys before it woo,
And pamper'd swells with one blood made of two ;
And this, alas ! is more than we would do.

O stay, three lives in one flea spare,
Where we almost, yea, more than married are.
This flea is you and I, and this
Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.
Though parents grudge, and you, we're met,
And cloister'd in these living walls of jet.
Though use make you apt to kill me,
Let not to that self-murder added be,
And sacrilege, three sins in killing three.

Cruel and sudden, hast thou since
Purpled thy nail in blood of innocence?
Wherein could this flea guilty be,
Except in that drop which it suck'd from thee?
Yet thou triumph'st, and say'st that thou
Find'st not thyself nor me the weaker now.
'Tis true ; then learn how false fears be ;
Just so much honour, when thou yield'st to me,
Will waste, as this flea's death took life from
thee.

I was away at a training seminar, got some catching up to do. Here are math poems.



A Mathematical Problem

This is now--this was erst,
Proposition the first--and Problem the first.

I.
On a given finite Line
Which must no way incline;
To describe an equi--
--lateral Tri--
--A, N, G, L, E.
Now let A. B.
Be the given line
Which must no way incline;
The great Mathematician
Makes this Requisition,
That we describe an Equi--
--lateral Tri--
--angle on it:
Aid us, Reason--aid us, Wit!

II.
From the centre A. at the distance A. B.
Describe the circle B. C. D.
At the distance B. A. from B. the centre
The round A. C. E. to describe boldly venture.
(Third Postulate see.)
And from the point C.
In which the circles make a pother
Cutting and slashing one another,
Bid the straight lines a journeying go,
C. A., C. B. those lines will show.
To the points, which by A. B. are reckon'd,
And postulate the second
For Authority ye know.
A. B. C.
Triumphant shall be
An Equilateral Triangle,
Not Peter Pindar carp, not Zoilus can wrangle.

III.
Because the point A. is the centre
Of the circular B. C. D.
And because the point B. is the centre
Of the circular A. C. E.
A. C. to A. B. and B. C. to B. A.
Harmoniously equal for ever must stay;
Then C. A. and B. C.
Both extend the kind hand
To the basis, A. B.
Unambitiously join'd in Equality's Band.
But to the same powers, when two powers are equal,
My mind forbodes the sequel;
My mind does some celestial impulse teach,
And equalises each to each.
Thus C. A. with B. C. strikes the same sure alliance,
That C. A. and B. C. had with A. B. before;
And in mutual affiance,
None attempting to soar
Above another,
The unanimous three
C. A. and B. C. and A. B.
All are equal, each to his brother,
Preserving the balance of power so true:
Ah! the like would the proud Autocratorix do!
At taxes impending not Britain would tremble,
Nor Prussia struggle her fear to dissemble;
Nor the Mah'met-sprung Wight,
The great Mussulman
Would stain his Divan
With Urine the soft-flowing daughter of Fright.

IV.
But rein your stallion in, too daring Nine!
Should Empires bloat the scientific line?
Or with dishevell'd hair all madly do ye run
For transport that your task is done?
For done it is--the cause is tried!
And Proposition, gentle Maid,
Who soothly ask'd stern Demonstration's aid,
Has prov'd her right, and A. B. C.
Of Angles three
Is shown to be of equal side;
And now our weary steed to rest in fine,
'Tis rais'd upon A. B. the straight, the given line.


Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Pi

The secret relationship
of line and circle, progress
and return, is always known,
transcendental and yet
a commonplace. And though
the connection is written
it cannot be written out
in full, never perfect, but
is exact and constant, is
eternal and everyday
as orbits of electrons,
chemical rings, noted here
in one brief sign as gateway
to completed turns and
the distance inside circles,
both compact and infinte.


Robert Morgan

I. Asparagus X Plus Y
[An Arithmetic and Poetic Error]




First Poem: "987"

.

123-45
615-43
21-11-1
0-12-12
34-5-56
012-345
6-5432-1
0

.

Second Poem: "123"

.

1
12
123
1-32
1-21
1-10
2
21
21-31
2131
21-31-231
121
1

.

Third Poem: "645"

.

6
3-3
5-5-5
546
654
456
123-123
987-987
12-34-56-78-9
8765432
1
12
123
456
46
5
4
6

.

.

Idea Behind Asparagus: All art is predominantly formal, and the more formal the art form, the more likely that it will be emotionally moving. Music, of course, is the obvious example of this. Of all the art forms it is the most purely formal, the most abstract, and yet it is the most emotional in effect, at least for most people. Mathematics also is a field which, for the initiated, offers extremely subtle but exquisite emotional pleasures. It would seem, thus, that by removing the concrete image form a poem and replacing it with the atom of mathematical abstraction (ie. the number), one might be able to create very emotional musical/mathematical "poems". The poems would naturally be predominately aural and best appreciated when heard read aloud. (In reading Asparagus one should enunciate each number clearly, pause for the "-" the same way one would in reading a telephone number, and give the line-breaks their natural due.) Of course this is naïve and doesn't work. But thinking about exactly why it doesn't work is very fruitful. Also, it should be noted that some of the poems generated this way (or "number sequences" if the term "poem" offends anyone's sensibility) do offer considerable intellectual (if not emotional) stimulation. The three poems of Asparagus do have a logic, both a mathematical logic and an aesthetic logic; the numbers are not by any means random. This suggests that something constructed like the pieces of Asparagus is really a form of purer-than-pure mathematics: a work raising the supposedly pure mathematics of numerical sequence to the truly pure (ie. useless) level of abstract art. However this garden could easily be overworked. Asparagus is best in spring, most tender and delectable.



Ken Stange

I recently won an International award for the world's shortest poem

FLEAS


Adam

Had'em