So it went — one gorgeous day lost after another While we sat like captives ...

Spring in the Classroom

Elbows on dry books, we dreamed
past Miss Willow Bangs, and lessons, and windows,
To catch all day glimpses and guesses of the greening woodlot,
Its secrets and increases,
Its hidden nests and kind.
And what warmed in us was no book-learning,
But the old mud blood murmuring,
Loosening like petals from bone sleep.
So spring surrounded the classroom, and we suffered to be kept indoors,
Droned through lessons, carved when we could with jackknives
Our pulsing initials into the desks, and grew
Angry to be held so, without pity and beyond reason,
By Miss Willow Bangs, her eyes two stones behind glass,
Her legs thick, her heart
In love with pencils and arithmetic.

So it went — one gorgeous day lost after another
While we sat like captives and breathed the chalky air
And the leaves thickened and birds called
From the edge of the world — till it grew easy to hate,
To plot mutiny, even murder. Oh, we had her in chains,
We had her hanged and cold, in our longing to be gone!
And then one day, Miss Willow Bangs, we saw you
As we ran wild in our three o'clock escape
Past the abandoned swings; you were leaning
All furry and blooming against the old brick wall
In the Art Teacher's arms.

by Mary Oliver

photo provided by me

For the Children by Gary Snyder

For the Children

The rising hills, the slopes,
of statistics
lie before us.
the steep climb
of everything, going up,
up, as we all
go down.

In the next century
or the one beyond that,
they say,
are valleys, pastures,
we can meet there in peace
if we make it.

To climb these coming crests
one word to you, to
you and your children:

stay together
learn the flowers
go light

Gary Snyder

photo, of Sarah and her sisters, provided by me.

poem by John Lavan

 

Slowly

I decided to tell you

slowly

when my Dad

walked up the beach

in baggy shorts and sandals

on his last ever holiday

he was fascinated by pebbles, shells,

people passing in bright shirts

and he smiled in the sun

taking all the time

in the world to

walk and look:

slowly

I decided to tell you.

 photo by Urban Expressions http://www.facebook.com/photo.php?pid=5172466&id=213577705557

it will probably be a fish,

The Art Of Drowning

I wonder how it all got started, this business
about seeing your life flash before your eyes
while you drown, as if panic, or the act of submergence,
could startle time into such compression, crushing
decades in the vice of your desperate, final seconds.

After falling off a steamship or being swept away
in a rush of floodwaters, wouldn't you hope
for a more leisurely review, an invisible hand
turning the pages of an album of photographs-
you up on a pony or blowing out candles in a conic hat.

How about a short animated film, a slide presentation?
Your life expressed in an essay, or in one model photograph?
Wouldn't any form be better than this sudden flash?
Your whole existence going off in your face
in an eyebrow-singeing explosion of biography-
nothing like the three large volumes you envisioned.

Survivors would have us believe in a brilliance
here, some bolt of truth forking across the water,
an ultimate Light before all the lights go out,
dawning on you with all its megalithic tonnage.
But if something does flash before your eyes
as you go under, it will probably be a fish,

a quick blur of curved silver darting away,
having nothing to do with your life or your death.
The tide will take you, or the lake will accept it all
as you sink toward the weedy disarray of the bottom,
leaving behind what you have already forgotten,
the surface, now overrun with the high travel of clouds.
Billy Collins

 

http://alicedraws.blogspot.com/search?updated-max=2009-12-07T12%3A46%3A00Z&max-results=10

...they are always standing in a semicircle/with their arms folded, ...

Man in Space by Billy Collins

All you have to do is listen to the way a man
sometimes talks to his wife at a tableof people
and notice how intent he is on making his point
even though her lower lip is beginning to quiver,

and you will know why the women in science
fiction movies who inhabit a planet of their own
are not pictured making a salad or reading a magazine
when the men from earth arrive in their rocket,

why they are always standing in a semicircle
with their arms folded, their bare legs set apart,
their breasts protected by hard metal disks.

http://www.facebook.com/home.php?#!/photo.php?pid=4991788&id=213577705557&fbid=361454235557

time will drop its sail like a clipper in a lagoon

Song of the Current at Cape Horn

Come ride the fish-bright
   swells of my flesh
and lay-by in my limbs,
   greener than a glade.
Run aground, sailor,
   in my dark, tussocked eyes
swing round your mizzen,
   shipwreck in my thighs.

Only, come to my harbor.
   Sweet is the port air.
Time will drop its sail
   like a clipper in a lagoon.

There's a berth in my hips
   as wide as the moon,
a ribcage roomier than the sea,
   and here, awash
between outcry and the deep blue,
   my plunging heart
will fathom life from you.

   Diane Ackerman

http://www.wainscoat.com/south-america/cape-horn5.jpg

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

photo provided by Urban Expressions - http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=203776&id=213577705557#!/photo.php?pid=4991785&id=213577705557