NEAR AND FAR
POEMS BY MARY OLIVER
in the family of things.
POEMS OF CARL SANDBURG
A FATHER TO HIS SON
A father sees his son nearing manhood.
What shall he tell that son?
'Life is hard; be steel; be a rock.'
And this might stand him for the storms
and serve him for humdrum monotony
and guide him among sudden betrayals
and tighten him for slack moments.
'Life is a soft loam; be gentle; go easy.'
And this too might serve him.
Brutes have been gentled where lashes failed.
The growth of a frail flower in a path up
has sometimes shattered and split a rock.
A tough will counts. So does desire.
So does a rich soft wanting.
Without rich wanting nothing arrives.
Tell him too much money has killed men
and left them dead years before burial:
the quest of lucre beyond a few easy needs
has twisted good enough men
sometimes into dry thwarted worms.
Tell him time as a stuff can be wasted.
Tell him to be a fool every so often
and to have no shame over having been a fool
yet learning something out of every folly
hoping to repeat none of the cheap follies
thus arriving at intimate understanding
of a world numbering many fools.
Tell him to be alone often and get at himself
and above all tell himself no lies about himself
whatever the white lies and protective fronts
he may use against other people.
Tell him solitude is creative if he is strong
and the final decisions are made in silent rooms.
Tell him to be different from other people
if it comes natural and easy being different.
Let him have lazy days seeking his deeper motives.
Let him seek deep for where he is born natural.
Then he may understand Shakespeare
and the Wright brothers, Pasteur, Pavlov,
Michael Faraday and free imaginations
Bringing changes into a world resenting change.
He will be lonely enough
to have time for the work
he knows as his own.
The People Yes
The people will live on.
The learning and blundering people will live on.
They will be tricked and sold and again sold and go back to the
nourishing earth for rootholds,
The people so peculiar in renewal and comeback, You can't
laugh off their capacity to take it.
The mammoth rests between his cyclonic dramas. The people so
often sleepy, weary, enigmatic,is a vast huddle with many units
saying: "I earn my living. I make enough to get by and it takes
all my time. If I had more time I could do more for myself and
maybe for others.
I could read and study and talk things over and find out about
things. but it takes time. I wish I had the time. The people is a
tragic and comic two-faced hero and hoodlum, phantom and
gorilla twisting to moan with a gargoyle mouth:
"They buy me and they sell me...it's a game...
sometime I'll break loose..."
Once having marched over the margins of animal necessity,
Over the grim line of sheer subsistence
Then man cameTo the deeper rituals of his bones,
to the lights lighter than any bones,
To the time for thinking things over,
To the dance, the song, the story,
Or the hours given over to dreaming,
And once having so marched they find,
Between the finite limitations of the five senses and the endless
yearnings of man for the beyond
the people hold to the humdrum
bidding of work and food
while yet reaching out still when it comes their way
for lights beyond this prison of the five senses,
for keepsakes lasting beyond any hunger or death.
This reaching is alive-
The panderers and liars have violated and smutted it.
Yet this reaching is alive yet for lights and keepsakes.
The people know the salt of the sea and the strength of the winds
lashing the corners of the earth.
The people take to the earth
as a tomb of rest and a cradle of hope.
For who else speaks for the Family of Man but the earth.
They are in tune and step with constellations of universal law.
The people is a polychrome, a spectrum and a prism
held in a moving monolith,
a console organ of changing themes,
a clavilux voice of color poems ,
wherein the sea offers fog and the fog moves off in rain and the
labrador sunset shortens to a nocturne of clear stars
serene over the shot spray of northern lights.
The steel mill sky is alive.
The fire breaks white and zigzag
shot on a gun-metal gloaming.
Man is a long time coming.
Man will yet win.
Brother will yet line up with brother:
This old earth is an anvil that sill laughs
at many broken hammers.
There are still men who can't be bought.
The fireborn are at home in fire.
The stars make no noise,
You can't hinder this wind from blowing.
Time is a great teacher.
Who can live without hope?
Yet the people march on-
In the darkness with a great bundle of grief In the night,
and overhead with just a shovel of stars for keepsakes
the people still march on:
asking
"Where to? what's next?"
Kenneth Patchen
The narrowing line.
Walking on the burning ground.
The ledges of stone.
Owl fish wading near the horizon.
Unrest in the outer districts.
Pause.
And begin again.
Needles through the eye.
Bodies cracked open like nuts.
Must have a place.
Dog has a place.
Pause.
And begin again.
Tents in the sultry weather.
Rifles hate holds.
Who is right?
Was Christ?
Is it wrong to love all men?
Pause.
And begin again.
The murder contagion of power
But sometimes the small whip hits back-
Caesar this is my life,
And dispite you, I think it is good to live.
Pause.
And begin again.
Perhaps the shapes will open.
Will flying fly?
Will singing have a song?
Will the shapes of evil fall?
Will the lives of men grow clean?
Will the power be for good?
Will the power of man find its sun?
Will the power of man flame as a sun?
Will the power of man turn against death?
Who is right?
Is war?
Pause.
And begin again.
It's a narrow line
Walking on the beautiful ground
Sometimes A ledge of fire.
It would take little to be free.
That no man hate another man,
Because he is black;
Because he is yellow;
Because he is white;
Or because he is English;
Or German;
Or woman;
Or man man
Or poor man;
Because we are everyman.
Pause.
And begin again.
It would take little to be free.
That no man live at the expense of another.
Because no man can own what belongs to everyman.
Because no man can own what all were meant to use.
Because no man can lie when all are betrayed.
Because no man can hate when all are hated.
And begin again.
I know that the shapes will open.
Flying will fly, and singing will sing.
Because the only power of man is in good.
And all evil shall eventually fail.
Because evil does not work.
Because the white man and the black man.
The Englishman and the German,
Are not real things.
They are only pictures of things.
Their true shapes, like the shapes of the tree
And the flower, have no lives in names or signs
we give them;
They are their own lives,
and what is of the real is in them,
Is what the real is,
And shall have life and lives always.
Pause.
And lets begin again
I believe in the truth.
I believe that every good thought I have,
All men, women and children shall have.
I believe that what is best in me,
Shall be found in every man's heart.
I believe that only the feminine beautiful
Shall survive on the earth.
I believe that the perfect shape of everything
Has been prepared to open in the short far off.
And, that if we do not fit our own now
Is of little consequence.
I believe that we are going into a small darkness now;
A hundred years may pass before the light
Shines over the world of all men again …
And I am already blinded by its splendor.
Pause.
And now...... begin again.
by Kenneth Patchen
Kenneth Rexroth
A Sword In A Cloud Of Light
Your hand in mine,
we walk out
To watch the Christmas Eve crowds
On Fillmore Street,
the Negro district.
The night is thick with
Frost. The people hurry, wreathed
In their smoky breaths. Before
The shop windows the children
Jump up and down with spangled
Eyes. Santa Clauses ring bells.
Cars stall and honk. Street cars clang.
Loud speakers on the lampposts
Sing carols, on juke boxes
In the bars Louis Armstrong
Plays White Christmas. In the joints
The girls strip and grind and bump
To Jingle Bells. Overhead
The neon signs scribble and
Erase and scribble again
Messages of avarice,
Joy, fear, hygiene, and the proud
Names of the upper classes.
The moon beams like a pudding.
We stop at the main corner
And look up, diagonally
at the rising moon,
And the solemn, orderly
Vast winter constellations.
You say, " Daddy, there's Orion!"
The most beautiful object
Either of us will ever
Know in the world or in life
Stands in the moonlit empty
Heavens, over the swarming
Men, women, and children, black
And white, joyous and greedy,
Evil and good, buyer and
Seller, master and victim,
Like some to immense theorem,
Which, if once solved, would forever
Solve the mystery and pain
Under the bells and spangles.
And there he is, the man of the
Night Before Christmas, spread out
On the sky like a true god
In whom it would only be
Necessary to believe
A little.
I am fifty
And you are five. It would do
No good to say this and it
May do no good to write it.
Believe in Orion. Believe
In the night, the moon, the crowded
Earth. Believe in Christmas and
Birthdays and Easter rabbits.
Believe in all those fugitive
Compounds of nature, all doomed
To waste away and go out in the name of progress.
Always be true to these things.
They are all there is. Never
Give up this Nature
religion of the earth
For the blood-drenched civilized
Abstractions of the rascals
Who live by killing you and me.