Catching Ducks

Ozymandias

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: "Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear --
'My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!'
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."

Labels: poetry

Since we were talking about this poem the other day.... "The Second Coming":


Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

Labels: poetry

A while ago, Richard Cohen wrote a haiku poem for each WNBA team. Here's Seattle's:


Remove the heart, the
body still beats. Finds itself.
When rejoined, beware.

Labels: poetry, Seattle Storm

I've been going through old keepsakes today, and I found a postcard Soto sent me. All he wrote on it (aside from my name and address, of course), was this poem:


Five thousand lightyears from Earth
We will go a-sailing
Never mind the galactic struggle --
Just keep a-bailing

Floating on the salty lagoon
The stars twinkle like fish
The solar winds are picking up
Raise the sail and make a wish

Labels: family, poetry

This week, a poem by Anne Sexton called "I Remember":


By the first of August
the invisible beetles began
to snore and the grass was
as tough as hemp and was
no color -- no more than
the sand was a color and
we had worn our bare feet
bare since the twentieth
of June and there were times
we forgot to wind up our
alarm clock and some nights
we took our gin warm and neat
from old jelly glasses while
the sun blew out of sight
like a red picture hat and
one day I tied my hair back
with a ribbon and you said
that I looked almost like
a purtian lady and what
I remember best is that
the door your room was
the door to mine.

Labels: poetry

This is a fragment of a poem by Sappho. I've seen several translations, but my favorite was translated by one of my college professors, Sheila Colwell.



The moon has set and
the Pleiades are gone; it is
midnight, time passes,
and I sleep alone.

Labels: poetry