When he would not return to fine garments and good food, to his houses and his people, Loingseachan told him, “Your father is dead.” “I’m sorry to hear it,” he said. “Your mother is dead,” said the lad. “All pity for me has gone out of the world.” “Your sister, too, is dead.” “The mild sun rests on every ditch,” he said; “a sister loves even though not loved.” “Suibhne, your daughter is dead.” “And an only daughter is the needle of the heart.” “And Suibhne, your little boy, who used to call you “Daddy”—he is dead.” “Aye,” said Suibhne, “that’s the drop that brings a man to the ground.” He fell out of the yew tree; Loingseachan closed his arms around him and placed him in manacles.—AFTER THE MIDDLE-IRISH ROMANCE, THE MADNESS OF SUIBHNE
I always wonder what they think the niggers are doing while they, the pink and alabaster pragmatists, are containing Russia and defining and re-defining and re-aligning China,
Of all the rides since the birth of time, Told in story or sung in rhyme, — On Apuleius’s Golden Ass, Or one-eyed Calender’s horse of brass, Witch astride of a human back, Islam’s prophet on Al-Borák, — The strangest ride that ever was sped Was Ireson’s, out from Marblehead!
They got me into the Sunday-school In Spoon River And tried to get me to drop Confucius for Jesus. I could have been no worse off If I had tried to get them to drop Jesus for Confucius. For, without any warning, as if it were a prank, And sneaking up behind me, Harry Wiley, The minister's son, caved my ribs into my lungs, With a blow of his fist. Now I shall never sleep with my ancestors in Pekin, And no children shall worship at my grave.
To turn a stone with its white squirming underneath, to pry the disc from the sun’s eclipse—white heat coiling in the blinded eye: to these malign necessities we come from the dim time of dinosaurs who crawled like breathing lava
She has been condemned to death by hanging. A man may escape this death by becoming the hangman, a woman by marrying the hangman. But at the present time there is no hangman; thus there is no escape. There is only a death, indefinitely postponed. This is not fantasy, it is history.
*
To live in prison is to live without mirrors. To live without mirrors is to live without the self. She is living selflessly, she finds a hole in the stone wall and on the other side of the wall, a voice. The voice comes through darkness and has no face. This voice becomes her mirror.
“Turn back!” was all she snapped out as she passed in a red dress that caught sunrays through mist. I saw her lurch upwind, kick off spiked heels, climb out to the edge of a knife-sharp rockpile,
and, arms outstretched, lead the sea’s tympani, lure the din, guiding the steamy waves to shore. Will the Almighty answer me? she sang out to the ocean’s rising octaves,
Swift as a spirit hastening to his task Of glory & of good, the Sun sprang forth Rejoicing in his splendour, & the mask Of darkness fell from the awakened Earth. The smokeless altars of the mountain snows Flamed above crimson clouds, & at the birth Of light, the Ocean's orison arose To which the birds tempered their matin lay,
Out of burlap sacks, out of bearing butter, Out of black bean and wet slate bread, Out of the acids of rage, the candor of tar, Out of creosote, gasoline, drive shafts, wooden dollies, They Lion grow. Out of the gray hills Of industrial barns, out of rain, out of bus ride, West Virginia to Kiss My Ass, out of buried aunties,
To the Memory of the Household It Describes This Poem is Dedicated by the Author
“As the Spirits of Darkness be stronger in the dark, so Good Spirits, which be Angels of Light, are augmented not only by the Divine light of the Sun, but also by our common Wood Fire: and as the Celestial Fire drives away dark spirits, so also this our Fire of Wood doth the same.” —Cor. Agrippa, Occult Philosophy, Book I.ch. v.
“Announced by all the trumpets of the sky, Arrives the snow, and, driving o’er the fields, Seems nowhere to alight: the whited air Hides hills and woods, the river and the heaven, And veils the farm-house at the garden’s end. The sled and traveller stopped, the courier’s feet Delayed, all friends shut out, the housemates sit Around the radiant fireplace, enclosed In a tumultuous privacy of Storm.” EMERSON, The Snow Storm. The sun that brief December day Rose cheerless over hills of gray, And, darkly circled, gave at noon A sadder light than waning moon.
“Breadth. Circle. Desert. Monarch. Month. Wisdom. (for which there are No rhymes)” was just the title, and I only read that far.
That was because I felt like some old agent-of-the-Czar When a new plotter swims within the scope of his exertions, And I was scared this hothead would start hedging his assertions Before I had him dead-to-rights. (A Chekan’s or a SMERSHian’s Lot, you know, is not an happy one.) He might retract.
Human reason is beautiful and invincible. No bars, no barbed wire, no pulping of books, No sentence of banishment can prevail against it. It establishes the universal ideas in language, And guides our hand so we write Truth and Justice With capital letters, lie and oppression with small. It puts what should be above things as they are, Is an enemy of despair and a friend of hope.
Fingers: Cramped, you are hardly anything but fidgets. We, active, differentiate the digits: Whilst you are merely little toe and big (Or, in the nursery, some futile pig) Through vital use as pincers there has come Distinction of the finger and the thumb; Lacking a knuckle you have sadly missed
‘’Tis no sin for a man to labour in his vocation.’ -Falstaff ‘The night cometh, when no man can work.’
What though the beauty I love and serve be cheap, Ought you to take me for a beast or fool? All things a man could wish are in her keep; For her I turn swashbuckler in love’s school. When folk drop in, I take my pot and stool
His mother stepped about her kitchen, complaining in a low voice; all day his father sat stooped at a sewing machine. When he went to high school Webber was in his class. Webber lived in a neighborhood where the houses are set in lawns with trees beside the gutters. The boys who live there, after school, take their skates and hockey sticks and play in the streets until nightfall.
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