Limerick by William Cosmo Monkhouse (1840-1901)

There was a young lady from Niger,

Who smiled as she rode on a tiger;

They came back from the ride

With the lady inside,

And the smile on the face of the tiger.

 

 

William Cosmo Monkhouse (1840-1901)

Daybreak in Alabama by Langston Hughes

When I get to be a composer
I'm gonna write me some music about
Daybreak in Alabama
And I'm gonna put the purtiest songs in it
Rising out of the ground like a swamp mist
And falling out of heaven like soft dew.
I'm gonna put some tall tall trees in it
And the scent of pine needles
And the smell of red clay after rain
And long red necks
And poppy colored faces
And big brown arms
And the field daisy eyes
Of black and white black white black people
And I'm gonna put white hands
And black hands and brown and yellow hands
And red clay earth hands in it
Touching everybody with kind fingers
And touching each other natural as dew
In that dawn of music when I
Get to be a composer
And write about daybreak
In Alabama. 

Langston Hughes (1 February 1902 – 22 May 1967 / Missouri)

  

Lorine Niedecker

In moonlight lies
          the river passing—
it's not quiet
          and it's not laughing.
I'm not young
          and I'm not free
but I've a house of my own
          by a willow tree.

 -*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-


What horror to awake at night
and in the dimness see the light.
          Time is white
          mosquitoes bite
I've spent my life on nothing.
The thought that stings. How are you, Nothing,
sitting around with Something's wife.
          Buzz and burn
          is all I learn
I've spent my life on nothing.
I've pillowed and padded, pale and puffing
lifting household stuffing—
          carpets, dishes
          benches, fishes
I've spent my life in nothing.


Poems by Lorine Niedecker  are from the book "Lorine Niedecker: Collected Works" edited by Jenny Penberthy, published by the University of California Press, 2002 used with permission by the University of California Press.

For Mac de Jack Spicer

For Mac

A dead starfish on a beach
He has five branches
Representing the five senses
Representing the jokes we did not tell each other
Call the earth flat
Call other people human
But let this creature lie
Flat upon our senses
Like a love
Prefigured in the sea
That died.
And went to water
All the oceans
Of emotion. All the oceans of emotion
are full of such ffish
Why
Is this dead one of such importance?

Jack Spicer

à découvrir ... http://remue.net/spip.php?article1604

The raspberry room by Karin Gottshall

It was solid hedge, loops of bramble and thorny   

as it had to be with its berries thick as bumblebees.   

It drew blood just to get there, but I was queen   

of that place, at ten, though the berries shook like fists   

in the wind, daring anyone to come in.  I was trying   

so hard to love this world—real rooms too big and full   

of worry to comfortably inhabit—but believing I was born

to live in that cloistered green bower: the raspberry patch   

in the back acre of my grandparents’ orchard.  I was cross-   

stitched and beaded by its fat, dollmaker’s needles.  The effort   

of sliding under the heavy, spiked tangles that tore   

my clothes and smeared me with juice was rewarded   

with space, wholly mine, a kind of room out of   

the crush of the bushes with a canopy of raspberry   

dagger-leaves and a syrup of sun and birdsong.   

Hours would pass in the loud buzz of it, blood   

made it mine—the adventure of that red sting singing   

down my calves, the place the scratches brought me to:   

just space enough for a girl to lie down.

 

 By Karin Gottshall

 

   

Poem copyright © 2007 by Karin Gottshall. Reprinted from “Crocus,” by Karin Gottshall, published by Fordham University Press, 2007, with permission of the author and publisher. First printed in “Black Warrior Review.”

le terrier de l'enfance (pas toutes les enfances certes) ...  ce qui est écrit laisse deviner ce qui est ressenti et l'espace créatif où l'enfance se projette. Mijo

To fortune by Robert Herrick

TUMBLE me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, smiling yet ;
Tear me to tatters, yet I'll be
Patient in my necessity.
Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
Me, as a fear'd infection ;
Yet, scare-crow-like, I'll walk as one
Neglecting thy derision.

---

Source:
Herrick, Robert. Works of Robert Herrick. vol II.
Alfred Pollard, ed.
London, Lawrence & Bullen, 1891. 41.

Howard Nemerov

Because You Asked About The Line Between Prose And Poetry

Sparrows were feeding in a freezing drizzle
That while you watched turned into pieces of snow
Riding a gradient invisible
From silver aslant to random, white, and slow.

There came a moment that you couldn't tell.
And then they clearly flew instead of fell.

A crazed Girl (William Butler YEATS)

THAT crazed girl improvising her music.
Her poetry, dancing upon the shore,

Her soul in division from itself
Climbing, falling She knew not where,
Hiding amid the cargo of a steamship,
Her knee-cap broken, that girl I declare
A beautiful lofty thing, or a thing
Heroically lost, heroically found.

No matter what disaster occurred
She stood in desperate music wound,
Wound, wound, and she made in her triumph
Where the bales and the baskets lay
No common intelligible sound
But sang, 'O sea-starved, hungry sea.'

William Butler Yeats

A Cloud in Trousers by Vladimir Mayakovsky

translated from the Russian by Andrey Kneller

Prologue

Your thought,
Fantasizing on a sodden brain,
Like a bloated lackey on a greasy couch sprawling, --
With my heart’s bloody tatters, I’ll mock it again.
Until I’m contempt, I’ll be ruthless and galling.

There’s no grandfatherly fondness in me,
There are no gray hairs in my soul!
Shaking the world with my voice and grinning,
I pass you by, -- handsome,
Twentytwoyearold.

Gentle souls!
You play your love on the violin. 
The crude ones play it on the drums violently.
But can you turn yourselves inside out, like me
And become just two lips entirely?
 
Come and learn--
You, decorous bureaucrats of angelic leagues! 
Step out of those cambric drawing-rooms
 
And you, who can leaf your lips
Like a cook turns the pages of her recipe books.
 
If you wish--
I’ll rage on raw meat like a vandal
Or change into hues that the sunrise arouses,
If you wish--
I can be irreproachably gentle,
Not a man -- but a cloud in trousers.
 
I refuse to believe in Nice1 blossoming!
I will glorify you regardless, --
Men, crumpled like bed-sheets in hospitals,
And women, battered like overused proverbs.