Your Sunday Poem

The world has lost another voice.  Nobel Prize winner, Irish poet Seamus Heany died a few days ago at age 74.  It's a tremendous loss but there remains his lovely work.  In remembrance, from his collection, "Open Ground, Selected Poems 1966-1996."

Postscript

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore,
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly.  You are neither here nor there,
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.

Your Sunday Poem

I recently bought a most extraordinary poetry anthology, "The Rattle Bag," edited by Seamus Heany and Ted Hughes.  (Available in paperback, so head down to your local bookstore and order it.)  Both of these men are well known poets and, according to the introduction, "This anthology massed itself like a cairn.  . . . [the poems] were picked up one by one and left in situ without much initial thought being given to the stuff already in the pile or the position that they might occupy in the final shape."  In short, the anthology started rather as a kind of day book.  And when it came time to actually edit this vast collection of poetry from all over the place and time, it was decided to simply arrange it in alphabetical order (by title or first line) which "allows the contents to discover themselves as we ourselves gradually discovered them -- each poem full of its singular appeal, transmitting its own signals, taking its chances in a big,voluble world."

Which makes reading this collection an activity full of surprise.  Like this amazing poem by Miroslav Holub (translated from Czech by Jarmila Milner) (The term "jade" is listed in the glossary as "horse.")

Bullfight 

Someone runs about,
someone scents the wind,
someone stomps the ground, but it's hard.

Red flags flutter
and on his old upholstered jade the picador
with infirm lance
scores the first wound.

Red blood spurts between the shoulder-blades.

Chest about to split,
tongue stuck out to the roots.
Hooves stamp of their own accord.

Three pairs of the bandoleros in the back.
And a matador is drawing his sword
over the railing.

And then someone (blood-spattered, all in)
stops and shouts:
Let's go, quit it,
let's go, quit it,
let's go over across the river and into the trees,
let's go across the river and into the trees,
let's leave the red rags behind,
let's go some other place,

thus he shouts,
or wheezes,
or whispers,

and the barriers roar and
no one understands because
everyone feels the same about it,

the black-and-red bull is going to fall
and be dragged away,
and be dragged away,
and be dragged away,

without grasping the way of the world,
without having grasped the way of the world,
before he has grasped the way of the world.

Your Sunday Poem

In medieval times, paper being expensively next to non-existent, the great holy books were written on more permanent velum and gloriously illuminated by monks.  One of the best of these works is the magnificent "Book of Kells." And, since paper was virtually non-existent, the good monks would often make personal secular comments in the margins of the great books, often snippets of poems, droll observations about the follies and naughty doings of their fellow scribes.  If you track down a CD by Samuel Barber, "Hermit Songs" you'll hear many of these snippets/poems set to music, including a lovely poem to Pangur, a scribe-monk's beloved white cat.

This poem is by Seamus Heaney from "Opened Ground; Selected Poems 1966-1996" 

The Scribes  

I never warmed to them.
If they were excellent they were petulant
and jaggy as the holly tree
they rendered down for ink.
And if I never belonged among them,
they could never deny me my place.

In the hush of the scriptorium
a black pearl kept gathering in them
like the old dry glut inside their quills.
In the margin of texts of praise
they scratched and clawed.
They snarled if the day was dark
or too much chalk had made the vellum bland
or too little left it oily.

Under the rumps of lettering
they herded myopic angers.
Resentment seeded in the uncurling
fernheads of their capitals.

Now and again I started up
miles away and saw in my absence
the sloped cursive of each back and felt them
perfect themselves against me page by page.

Let them remember this not inconsiderable
contribution to their jealous art.