Here is a poem that I read for my American Literature class in Britain.  It was my favorite one of the Plath poems we did, and it was one of only two we didn’t get to discuss in class (bother).   That last stanza gives me shivers every time I read it.

Black Rook in Rainy Weather
by Sylvia Plath

On the stiff twig up there
Hunches a wet black rook
Arranging and rearranging its feathers in the rain.
I do not expect a miracle
Or an accident

To set the sight on fire
In my eye, nor seek
Any more in the desultory weather some design,
But let spotted leaves fall as they fall,
Without ceremony, or portent.

Although, I admit, I desire,
Occasionally, some backtalk
From the mute sky, I can’t honestly complain:
A certain minor light may still
Lean incandescent

Out of kitchen table or chair
As if a celestial burning took
Possession of the most obtuse objects now and then—
Thus hallowing an interval
Otherwise inconsequent

By bestowing largesse, honor,
One might say love. At any rate, I now walk
Wary (for it could happen
Even in this dull, ruinous landscape); skeptical,
Yet politic; ignorant

Of whatever angel may choose to flare
Suddenly at my elbow. I only know that a rook
Ordering its black feathers can so shine
As to seize my senses, haul
My eyelids up, and grant

A brief respite from fear
Of total neutrality. With luck,
Trekking stubborn through this season
Of fatigue, I shall
Patch together a content

Of sorts. Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.

This second one is a poem that I discovered the other day by doing this thing I do where I make the Poetry Foundation website (discovered absolutely by accident and oh, how I love it) pull up random poems for me.   I like a lot of Cavafy’s poems, but “The City” might be my favorite because it is beautifully universal.  Emerson says something quite like it when he’s writing about traveling (“Your giant is with you wherever you go”), which I have never forgotten; and Greensleeves is about this too really, and then there is an Avett Brothers song that I sing in my car that says “So when you run make sure you run / To something and not away from” – and as a girl about to run to something (not away from), I feel it is important for me to bear all this in mind.

The City
by C.P. Cavafy; translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

Reading it again just now, that traveling thing may not be exactly what the poet intended.  But that’s what it means, to me, right now, and I like the poem regardless, so there you go.

Here is one last poem, a short one (I’ve linked to it before but not posted it) by June Jordan, whom I love.

July 4, 1974
by June Jordan

At least it helps me to think about my son
a Leo/born to us
(Aries and Cancer) some
sixteen years ago
in St. John’s Hospital next to the Long Island
Railroad tracks
Atlantic Avenue/Brooklyn
New York

at dawn

which facts
do not really prepare you
(do they)

for him

angry
serious
and running through the darkness with his own

becoming light

Okay.  I have hereby done my duty by National Poetry Month.  I will also just add that the Poetry Foundation has a massive archive of poems by poets you know and poets you have never heard of.  It’s a brilliant resource with an archive organized in about ten different ways, so you can always find what you’re after.  Visit it!

P.S. I know I said I was done, but I really like this poem by Ezra Pound.  If you are tired of poetry you can skip it.  It is funny and charms me.

The Bath Tub
by Ezra Pound

As a bathtub lined with white porcelain,
When the hot water gives out or goes tepid,
So is the slow cooling of our chivalrous passion,
O my much praised but-not-altogether-satisfactory lady.

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From Soldier:

What was ugly?  It seemed to mean the wrong family and no friends and other ducks refusing to play with you and making fun of however you didn’t look exactly like them.

And I had never heard about ugly before.  And ugly frightened me.  I was afraid and then I became positive that I might be ugly.

Why did the Ugly Duckling lose its mother?
How could a duck turn into a swan?
Why would that be a happy ending for a duck?
The Ugly Duckling was depicted as a black baby duck.
The swan was white.
How did the black baby duck turn white?
Why was that a happy ending?

I thought I understood that story,
and I didn’t believe it,
and I kept reading it to myself,
over and over.

Here are some poems by June Jordan that I like a lot at the Poetry Foundation website.  And I read loads more in my two books of her poetry, and I really want to read more of her poems but they are checked out.  And I want to read all her essays.  I love her.  I totally love her.  She was all about confronting social injustice.  I love her.  Here are some bits of poems I copied into my commonplace book last night.

From “Lebanon Lebanon”:

As usual
I have to ask
where’s Jesus
when you need him

The miracle of water into wine’s
just fine
but what about
a miracle of blood
delivering a river
we can drink

From “Message to Belfast”:

I am afraid to fall
asleep
but I am proud
to stand before the morning
breaks
awake with no one near
and with my conscience clear
for once
I am completely where
I ought to be

In the city
of Belfast
I have lost and found myself
at home

I am excited to finish her memoir and read her essays and y’all, seriously, she writes beautifully.  I cannot recommend her work highly enough or in glowing enough terms.  I have reviews to catch up on – Peter and Max, Clara Callen, The Icarus Girl – but instead of writing those, I have been falling in love with June Jordan.

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