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


What is the Beautiful?

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.