poem for the day: Where my books go by W.B. Yeats

poem for the day: The Tide Rises, The Tide Falls by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

poem for the day: Invictus by William Ernest Henley

 

poem for the day: No, I'm Not Afraid by Irina Ratushinskaya

 

 

No, I'm not afraid:  after a year

Of breathing these prison nights

I will survive into the sadness

To name which is escape.

 

The cockerel will weep freedom for me

And here - knee-deep in more -

My gardens shed their water

And the northern air blows in draughts.

 

And how am I to carry to an alien planet

What are almost tears, as though towards home ...

It isn't true, I am afraid, my darling!

But make it look as though you haven't noticed.

 

 

On March 4th 1983, her 29th birthday, Irina was sentenced to seven years in the Soviet

'strict regime' labour camp at Barashevo where she was frequently beaten, starved, frozen, force-fed and kept in solitary confinement.  Her crime was the 'manufacture and dissemination' of her poetry, coupled with 'anti-Soviet agitation and propaganda'.  She was released from prison on October 9th 1986, and on December 18th 1986 she was allowed to leave the Soviet Union for Britain, accompanied by her husband, the human rights activist Igor Gerashchenko.

poem for the day: I would not be a bird by Frank Prewett

I would not be a bird
When wind is in the trees;
I would not be a starling
For all his melodies.

As I went past the orchard
The sun had almost set,
And all aloft the elm tree
A thousand starlings met.

Every tongue was dry,
They whistled kling and gee,
They looked up at the sky
And they looked down at me.

Now strong be starling heart
And ready every wing,
For dark night to shelter
Drives hedger, priest and king.

I would not be a starling,
I would not be a bird,
As they all rose together
And their wings drummed and whirred.

poem for the day: Accidents of Birth by William Meredith

 

Spared by a car - or airplane-crash or

cured of malignancy, people look

around with new eyes at a newly

praiseworthy world, blinking eyes like these.

 

For I've been brought back again from the

fine silt, the mud where our atoms lie

down for long naps.  And I've also been

pardoned miraculously for years

by the lava of chance which runs down

the world's gullies, silting us back.

Here I am, brought back, set up, not yet

happened away.

 

          But it's not this random

life only, throwing its sensual

astonishments upside down on

the bloody membranes behind my eyeballs,

not just me being here again, old

needer, looking for someone to need,

but you, up from the clay yourself,

as luck would have it, and inching

over the same little segment of earth-ball,

in the same little eon, to

meet in a room, alive in our skins,

and the whole galaxy gaping there

and the centuries whining like gnats -

you, to teach me to see it, to see

it with you, and to offer somebody

uncomprehending, impudent thanks.

 

 

 

Connecticut-based poet - two of whose key themes have been loneliness and the threat of death was born January 9th 1919.

 

 

poem for the day: by Edward Lucie Smith

'Your father's gone,' my bald headmaster said.
His shiny dome and brown tobacco jar
Splintered at once in tears.  It wasn't grief.
I cried for knowledge which was bittered
Than any grief.  For there and then I knew
That grief has uses - that a father dead
Could bind the bully's fist a week or two;
And then I cried for shame, then for relief.

I was a month past ten when I learnt this:
I still remember how the noice was stilled
In school-assembly when my grief came in.
Some goldfish in a bowl quietly sculled
Around their shining prison on its shelf.
They were indifferent.  All other eyes
Were turned towards me.  Somewhere in myself
Pride, like a goldfish, flashed a sudden fin.


Edward Lucie-Smith comments:  "This is set in Jamaica, where I was brought up, during World War II.  I was at a boys' prep school, where I was badly bullied.  My father worked for the old colonial government, and died rather rapidly of lung cancer in 1943.  I never saw him during his illness, and was in fact only rather remotely aware that something was wrong.  In any case I had been largely brought up by servants before being sent to boarding school:  I wasn't close to my parents and today have very few memories of my father as a result.  The poem is essentially about the difference between what one is supposed to feel and what one actually does feel,  when faced with some sort of 'shaping' event.  I think I wrote the poem itself sometime in the 1950s, and it reflects my then interest in strict verse forms."