Deep in the Quiet Wood by James Weldon Johnson

Deep in the Quiet Wood

Are you bowed down in heart?

Do you but hear the clashing discord and the din of life?

Then come away, come to the peaceful wood.

Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,

From out the palpitating solitude

Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains?

They are above, around, within you, everywhere.

Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.

They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.

Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale

Until, responsive to the tonic chord,

It touches the diapason of God’s grand cathedral organ,

Filling earth for you with heavenly peace

And holy harmonies.

James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993), 52.

My City by James Weldon Johnson

My City

When I come down to sleep death’s endless night,

The threshold of the unknown dark to cross,

What to me then will be the keenest loss,

When this bright world blurs on my fading sight?

Will it be that no more I shall see the trees

Or smell the flowers or hear the singing birds

Or watch the flashing streams or patient herds?

No. I am sure it will be none of these.

But, ah! Manhattan’s sights and sounds, her smells,

Her crowds, her throbbing force, the thrill that comes

From being of her part, her subtle spells,

Her shining towers, her avenues, her slums—

Oh God! the stark, unutterable pity,

To be dead, and never again behold my city.

James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993), 37.

Life by James Weldon Johnson

Life

Out of the infinite sea of eternity

To climb, and for an instant stand

Upon an island speck of time.

From an impassible peace of the darkness

To wake, and blink at the garish light

Through one short space of fretfulness.

James Weldon Johnson, Saint Peter Relates an Incident (New York, London, Victoria, Toronto, Auckland: Penguin Books, 1993), 39.

Give Me a Red Breast and a Song by Theodore Best

Give Me a Red Breast and a Song

I have sung down branches

to their sticky booby-traps.

Near things with bald wings

felt serenaded.

I have sung by the roundabout

in the middle of the night.

The lamplight was lamplight.

Nobody told me.

I have sung in gardens at hoses.

I have noted the cold of the flat black grass.

They say I am a territorial beast.

I have eaten from a fat-ball

hanging on a cherry tree.

Through those squares of hard air

what was watching?

I have eaten the beetle

crawling on my lookout.

A green spot’s appeared there –

shiny, like a beetle.

I have eaten a white knotted worm.

I have learnt not to turn from the whisker-claw.

They say I am a territorial beast.

Sometimes things look at me

like we belong together.

Show me a red breast

not a soft beak.

Others throw sticks at me

or screech like the whisker-claw.

All this is usable

for a nest in the wind.

I have harried green rubber in flowerbeds.

I have wrestled the edges of silver.

They say I am a territorial beast.

Though I fear the wind stopping

and a death in the dead grass,

breast upward, head downward,

neck awry,

I know only this:

that my voice is as big

as the one bush it’s filled.

One song,

and all manner of life sees a nesting place.

UEA Creative Writing Anthology 2010: Poetry (Norwich: Egg Box Publishing, 2010), 10-1.

Socrates by Jack Spicer

Socrates

Because they accused me of poems

That did not disturb the young

They gave me a pair of glasses

Filled with tincture of hemlock.

Because the young accused me

Of Piles, horseradish, and bad dreams

They gave me three days

To burn down the city. What dialogues

(If they had let me)

Could I have held with both of my enemies.

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 179.

A Book of Music by Jack Spicer

A Book of Music

Coming to an end, the lovers

Are exhausted like two swimmers. Where

Did it end? There is no telling. No love is

Like an ocean with the dizzy procession of the waves’ boundaries

From which two can emerge exhausted, no long goodbye

Like death.

Coming at an end. Rather, I would say, like a length

Of coiled rope

Which does not disguise in the final twists of its lengths

Its endings.

But, you will say, we loved

And some parts of us loved

And the rest of us will remain

Two persons. Yes,

Poetry ends like a rope.

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 178.

Thing Language by Jack Spicer

THING LANGUAGE

This ocean, humiliating in its disguises

Tougher than anything.

No one listens to poetry. The ocean

Does not mean to be listened to. A drop

Or crash of water. It means

Nothing.

It

Is bread and butter

Pepper and salt. The death

That young men hope for. Aimlessly

It pounds the shore. White and aimless signals. No

One listens to poetry.

Jack Spicer, my vocabulary did this to me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer, ed. by Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2008), 373.

The Garden of Exquisite Silence by Kristin Dimitrova

The Garden of Exquisite Silence

The white statues arch their necks,

keeping their empty marble gazes

bolted.

It is closed,

this door to the sculptor’s hand

when the stone still

scraped the dust off its face.

Behind each statue’s forehead

there is a message.

If you look for an answer,

you break the head.

If you keep the head safe,

you do not get anywhere.

If you break the hand,

you may still not get an answer.

Decide faster.

Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 74.

The Architectress by Kristin Dimitrova

The Architectress

The architectress carries blueprints.

Only the slab is poured. The walls

are transparent and rise from everywhere

strictly according to layout.

The architectress has spread the blueprints

on the nonexistent windowsill,

leafs through them for mistakes,

then leans and looks through a window

no less transparent.

The architectress (technically)

doesn't exist.

Which makes the house good enough

and practically finished.

Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 28.

The Three Lady Beggars at the Book Premiere by Kristin Dimitrova

The Three Lady Beggars at the Book Premiere

We all know each other, more or less.

                 We listen to the reading author

                 with attention.

No one knows the three

                 grey old women

                 in the audience.

When we hear the long awaited ‘help yourself, please’

                 the three grey ladies

                 hurry to the buffet.

We turn our heads away from them.

                 Their rotten smell reminds us

                 of our exit-fee.

They advance without noticing us.

                 Beggars regard the others not as people

                 but as territory.

The three have no place among us.

                 We talk of literature,

                 we will not fill our stomachs with the cheese rolls

                 and we step back squeamishly

                 from the reeking gash into a world

                 that gapes at our cheese rolls,

                 and has neither read, nor heard of literature.

We search for meaning. We came here

                 to treat people to books;

                 part of the meaning came –

to claim our cheese rolls.

Kristin Dimitrova, My Life in Squares (Middlesbrough: Smokestack Books, 2010), 16.

Tree by Udo Degener

l  e  a  f

l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f b i r d l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f l e a f l e a f

l e a f l e a f

l  e  a  f

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

w o o d

s  a  w

w o o d

w o o d

wortBILD: Visuelle Poesie in der DDR, Guillermo Deisler and Jörg Kowalski, eds. (Halle, Leipzig: Mitteldeutscher Verlag, 1990), 54. My translation.

The Twist in the River by Katherine Pierpoint

The Twist in the River

At the clear, beer-coloured and bubbleshot twist in the river –

Every stone a speckled egg spawned in that deep lap,

Every pockmarked, pitted pebble a planet, blindly seeing through its own evolution –

The shallows, and the tall air, are filled with sound and light.

This part of the river expects to be seen, for it has drawn you there,

And the trees, selfless, introduce the sky into your love for the water.

If this place were a person, it would be making up a paper hat while humming –

Entirely self-contained, absorbed yet radiant –

A family moment, appearing normal until years later in retrospect,

When its depth are fully felt, beyond blunt experience.

Underwater, the light thickens slightly but never sets

And the river runs through its own fingers, careless.

Katherine Pierpoint, Truffle Beds (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 1.

Osmosis by Katherine Pierpoint

Osmosis

The water is to swimmer as a kiss

Placed on a closed but moving eye.

And swimmer is to water

As a ghost to a claiming room.

The swimmer – suspended, flickering –

Parts the soft walls in the thickened realm

Of an element not entirely owned;

A bladder of heavy air,

Embodied; and yet boneless.

Katherine Pierpoint, Truffle Beds (London: Faber and Faber, 1995), 47.