Forest History

I.

Beneath the vans of doom did men pass in.
Heroic who came out; for round them hung
A wavering phantom's red volcano tongue,
With league-long lizard tail and fishy fin:

II.

Old Earth's original Dragon; there retired
To his last fastness; overthrown by few.
Him a laborious thrust of roadway slew.
Then man to play devorant straight was fired.

III.

More intimate became the forest fear
While pillared darkness hatched malicious life
At either elbow, wolf or gnome or knife
And wary slid the glance from ear to ear.

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poem by George Meredith
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The Growth of Sym

Now Sym was a Glug; and 'tis mentioned so
That the tale reads perfectly plain as we go.
In his veins ran blood of that stupid race
Of docile folk, who inhabit the place
Called Gosh, sad Gosh, where the tall trees sigh
With a strange, significant sort of cry
When the gloaming creeps and the wind is high.

When the deep shades creep and the wind is high
The trees bow low as the gods ride by:
Gods of the gloaming, who ride on the breeze,
Stooping to heaften the birds and the trees.
But each dull Glug sits down by his door,
And mutters, ' 'Tis windy!' and nothing more,
Like the long-dead Glugs in the days of yore.

When Sym was born there was much to-do,
And his parents thought him a joy to view;
But folk not prejudiced saw the Glug,
As his nurse remarked, 'In the cut of his mug.'

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poem by Clarence Michael James Stanislaus Dennis
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Night In State Street

Art thou he?—
The seer and sage, the hero and lover—yea,
The man of men, then away from the haughty
day
Come with me!

Ho—ho! to the night—
The spangled night that would the noon outstare.
Her skirts are fringed with light,
She is girdled and crowned with gems of fire that flare.
The city is dizzy with the thrill of her—
Her shining eyes and shadowy floating hair;
And curious winds her nebulous garments blur,
Blowing her moon-white limbs and bosom bare.

She beckons me—
Down the deep street she goes to keep her tryst.
Come—come—oh follow! oh see

The many-windowed walls uprear so high

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poem by Harriet Monroe
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The Rain

Roxette - the rain
I was raised the northern way and my
Father had a northern name, I did my
Crying out in the pouring rain. and a
Season turned into another one, I found
A heart bright like the morning sun. he
Touched my lips, so softly, with his fingertips.
But I kept the rain falling down on me
All the time, all the time. I kept the rain
Falling down on me all the time, all the time.
And some things in life wont ever
Change, theres a smell of a rusty chain
And of love disappearing like an aeroplane.
Ive kept the rain falling down on me
All the time, all the time. Ive kept the rain
Falling down on me all the time, all the time,
All the time.
White lion - broken heart
Here I stand, all alone
Trying to fight the pain from a broken heart

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song performed by Roxette
Added by Lucian Velea
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The Circus

I remember when I wrote The Circus
I was living in Paris, or rather we were living in Paris
Janice, Frank was alive, the Whitney Museum
Was still on 8th Street, or was it still something else?
Fernand Léger lived in our building
Well it wasn’t really our building it was the building we lived in
Next to a Grand Guignol troupe who made a lot of noise
So that one day I yelled through a hole in the wall
Of our apartment I don’t know why there was a hole there
Shut up! And the voice came back to me saying something
I don’t know what. Once I saw Léger walk out of the building
I think. Stanley Kunitz came to dinner. I wrote The Circus
In two tries, the first getting most of the first stanza;
That fall I also wrote an opera libretto called Louisa or Matilda.
Jean-Claude came to dinner. He said (about “cocktail sauce”)
It should be good on something but not on these (oysters).
By that time I think I had already written The Circus
When I came back, having been annoyed to have to go
I forget what I went there about
You were back in the apartment what a dump actually we liked it

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poem by Kenneth Koch
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A Bronzeville Mother Loiters in Mississippi. Meanwhile, a Mississippi Mother burns bacon

From the first it had been like a
Ballad. It had the beat inevitable. It had the blood.
A wildness cut up, and tied in little bunches,
Like the four-line stanzas of the ballads she had never quite
understood--the ballads they had set her to, in school.

Herself: the milk-white maid, the "maid mild"
Of the ballad. Pursued
By the Dark Villain. Rescued by the Fine Prince.
The Happiness-Ever-After.
That was worth anything.
It was good to be a "maid mild."
That made the breath go fast.

Her bacon burned. She
Hastened to hide it in the step-on can, and
Drew more strips from the meat case. The eggs and sour-milk biscuits
Did well. She set out a jar

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poem by Gwendolyn Brooks
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So Crazy At Times I'm Exiled From My Solitude

So crazy at times I'm exiled from my solitude.
I disguise my madness as the excruciating discipline
of beading the stars into a lifemask I can wear
like a constellation of fireflies that never arises
the same sign twice. Among all these myriads of me,
not one with an identity I can isolate monadically
and say, see, I'm indefensibly this mystically specific human.
I have an ontological address, and these are my doors,
my stairs, my floors and windows, my local habitation
and a name as the bard suggests. Whatever my magnitude
I've got a place on the starmap. I'm grounded like a garden
in being. The hummingbird thrums sacred syllables
into the ears of the hollyhocks, aum mani padme aum,
the jewel in the lotus, and the crow caws like a black mass,
but even when I walk through the cemetery
up on Drummond Road, looking for a gravestone
with the future of my name on it to prove that I existed once
to suffer the same dissolution as everyone else,
none of the voices I hear like starlings in the elms
are my own. And altogether the dead echo: not here, not here.

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poem by Patrick White
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The Splendid Shilling

-- -- Sing, Heavenly Muse,
Things unattempted yet in Prose or Rhime,
A Shilling, Breeches, and Chimera's Dire.

Happy the Man, who void of Cares and Strife,
In Silken, or in Leathern Purse retains
A Splendid Shilling: He nor hears with Pain
New Oysters cry'd, nor sighs for chearful Ale;
But with his Friends, when nightly Mists arise,
To Juniper's, Magpye, or Town-Hall repairs:
Where, mindful of the Nymph, whose wanton Eye
Transfix'd his Soul, and kindled Amorous Flames,
Chloe, or Phillis; he each Circling Glass
Wisheth her Health, and Joy, and equal Love.
Mean while he smoaks, and laughs at merry Tale,
Or Pun ambiguous, or Conundrum quaint.
But I, whom griping Penury surrounds,
And Hunger, sure Attendant upon Want,
With scanty Offals, and small acid Tiff

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poem by John Arthur Phillips
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Zone

At last you're tired of this elderly world

Shepherdess O Eiffel Tower this morning the bridges are bleating

You're fed up living with antiquity

Even the automobiles are antiques
Religion alone remains entirely new religion
Remains as simple as an airport hangar

In all Europe only you O Christianism are not old
The most modem European Pope Pius X it's you
The windows watch and shame has sealed
The confessionals against you this morning
Flyers catalogs hoardings sing aloud
Here's poetry this morning and for prose you're reading the tabloids
Disposable paperbacks filled with crimes and police
Biographies of great men a thousand various titles

I saw a pretty street this morning I forgot the name

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poem by Guillaume Apollinaire
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Tarafa

The tent lines these of Kháula in stone--stricken Tháhmadi.
See where the fire has touched them, dyed dark as the hands of her.
'Twas here thy friends consoled thee that day with thee comforting,
cried; Not of grief, thou faint--heart! Men die not thus easily.
Ay, here the howdahs passed thee at day--dawn, how royally!
stood for the Dédi pastures: a white fleet they seemed to thee,
Ships tall--rigged from Adáuli--of Yámin the build of them--
wandering wide the night through, to meet at the sunrising.
Thus climbed they the long wave--lines, their prows set how loftily!
ploughing the drifted ridges, sand heaped by the sandseers.

Alas for the dark--lipped one, the maid of the topazes,
hardly yet grown a woman, sweet fruit--picking loiterer!
A girl, a fawn still fawnless, which browses the thorn--bushes,
close to the doe--herd feeding, aloof in the long valleys.
I see her mouth--slit smiling, her teeth,--nay, a camomile
white on the white sand blooming and moist with the night--showers.
Sun--steeped it is, pure argent, white all but the lips of her,
these are too darkly painted to shrink from the sunburning.
The face of her how joyous, the day's robe enfolding her,

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poem by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt
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Massacre in Nanjing

On a clear winter day you can see from Tokyo
The snow-capped volcanic cone of Mount Fuji.
Towering to a height of 3,776 meters on Honshu Island,
About 100 kilometers south-west from the capital,
The majestic mountain is a staunch symbol
Of the Land of the Rising Sun.

During the Sino-Japanese War of 1937-1945,
Hirohito's armies invaded China, carrying along
A fascist banner of samurai honor and pride.
The Japanese Imperial troops
Advanced with brutal force,
Committing dreadful atrocities
Against prisoners and civilians.
They reinterpreted bushido virtues and believed
That their war crimes elevated the splendor and glory
Of Mount Fuji to new heights.

Articles published in November and December 1937
In the Tokyo Nichi Nichi Shimbun reported the exploits

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poem by Paul Hartal
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The Break Away

Your daisies have come
on the day of my divorce:
the courtroom a cement box,
a gas chamber for the infectious Jew in me
and a perhaps land, a possibly promised land
for the Jew in me,
but still a betrayal room for the till-death-do-us—
and yet a death, as in the unlocking of scissors
that makes the now separate parts useless,
even to cut each other up as we did yearly
under the crayoned-in sun.
The courtroom keeps squashing our lives as they break
into two cans ready for recycling,
flattened tin humans
and a tin law,
even for my twenty-five years of hanging on
by my teeth as I once saw at Ringling Brothers.
The gray room:
Judge, lawyer, witness
and me and invisible Skeezix,

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poem by Anne Sexton
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No Secret: The Rwandan Genocide

A remote source of the Nile,
the Kagera River originates in Burundi.
On its way to Lake Victoria it flows
into a steep gorge along the natural border
between Rwanda and Tanzania.
Before entering the ravine,
the river cascades in a small waterfall
that swells in the rainy season.

As the Kagera sweeps down from
the highlands it carries within its currents
vast clusters of uprooted trees embedded
in gigantic dollops of elephant grass.
In the spring and summer of 1994
it was still much the same.
However, this time also thousands
of human corpses floated on the river.

Rwanda and Burundi
are two tiny African countries,

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poem by Paul Hartal
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Waiting For A Thunderstorm

Waiting for a thunderstorm
just me and the moon
and these deserted streets with their heritage lamps
and tungsten suns
swarming with frenzied insects
like the brain of the occasional crackhead
who's made a hoody of the night
and pulls it down tighter as he passes
wondering whether he should have asked me for a cigarette.
Lines from sad songs like lingering smoke
from distant fires
curl through my head
like the ghosts of roads I once walked
then break off like old shoelaces.
O and the faces
like blossoms from a tree
hidden deep in the night
suddenly crossing the moon
like birds with messages and destinations
not meant for me anymore.

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poem by Patrick White
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Trying To Put Some Distance

Trying to put some distance between myself and my past
is like trying to stale-mate a cloud with a mountain
by resorting to the last hope of all experienced liars,
objectivity. Third person singular pronouns,
he, she, it. Shipping containers from alien places
stacked neatly on the dock
like coffins and cord wood
you can talk and write about as if
you weren't buried in anyone of them
and none of the stowaways
and none of the illegal immigrants
and none of the corpses
were anymore related to you
than Cantonese graffiti from Seattle that rode the rails
all the way to Jakarta like one long sentence
about something you dreamed last night in your sleep.
Somebody's else's views in somebody elses' language.
You can stand on one side of the tracks
in the red glare of the most serious-minded lights
at the road block with the crossed swords

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poem by Patrick White
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Seasonal Cycle - Chapter 06 - Spring

"Oh, dear, with the just unfolded tender leaflets of Mango trees as his incisive arrows, and with shining strings of honeybees as his bowstring, the assailant named Vasanta came very nigh, to afflict the hearts of those that are fully engaged in affairs of lovemaking...

"Oh, dear, in Vasanta, Spring, trees are with flowers and waters are with lotuses, hence the breezes are agreeably fragrant with the fragrance of those flowers, thereby the eventides are comfortable and even the daytimes are pleasant with those fragrant breezes, thereby the women are with concupiscence, thus everything is highly pleasing...

"This Spring season endows prosperity to waters of swimming pools, and to moonshine, for their water or shine is pleasurable, and even to mango trees, as their flowers are just flowered, more so, to the bejewelled girdle strings of women, for their wearing is neither cumbersome nor irksome in this season, thus it endows prosperity to womenfolk of age, as they enjoy in wearing them, thus they too, become enjoyable, these days...

"These days the flirtatious women are adorning their roundish behinds with silk cloths that are dyed with Kusumbha flower's reddish dye, and their bosomy busts with thin silks that are dyed with ocherish and reddish colours, for thinness and silkiness are agreeable in this thinnish ambience...

"The womenfolk of age are now decorating their temples with just unfolded new whitish flowers of Karnikara, and with new and reddish Ashoka flowers and with whitish jasmines flowers in their blackish hair-locks that are swaying, thus unfolded is the beauty of these women, with the flourishing resplendence of these newly unfolded flowers...

"The bosoms of women with burly rumps, whose hearts are now flurried by the Love-god, are now sharing pearly pendants that are wetted with white sandal-paste that is bedaubed on their busts, and their biceps with circlets of bicep-lets, and their hiplines with the strings of cinctures, that are till recently unbearably coldish to touch... thus, the touch of season is romantic...

"The golden lotuses like faces of flirtatious women are tattooed with erasable foliage tattoos with black Kasturi lines, and in those designs sweat-drops are now percolating, with them those faces are delightfully beautified as gem-studded jewellery, interspersed with pearls...

"Now the limbs of womenfolk are flustered by the Love-god, thus they are panting for their need-fulfilment, hence they are now loosening the fastenings of their undergarments, since spring fever makes them sultrily fervent, thus they are enamoured of their lovers, who are tarrying at their nearby...

"The Love-god is making the limbs of sybaritic women as thinnish, palish and lethargic, and tending to yawn time and again, and with these syndromes the bodies of women are becoming restless in the spring fever, with an air of enchantment...

"Now the Love-god is diversely apparent in women, who are jaded out by hard drinks, for their eyes are fluttery, their cheeks are whitely, their bosoms are stony, their waists are slimly, and their behinds are sturdy... thus these features are the evidences for their seasonal infatuation with Him...

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poem by Kalidasa
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The Meeting

The elder folks shook hands at last,
Down seat by seat the signal passed.
To simple ways like ours unused,
Half solemnized and half amused,
With long-drawn breath and shrug, my guest
His sense of glad relief expressed.
Outside, the hills lay warm in sun;
The cattle in the meadow-run
Stood half-leg deep; a single bird
The green repose above us stirred.
'What part or lot have you,' he said,
'In these dull rites of drowsy-head?
Is silence worship? Seek it where
It soothes with dreams the summer air,
Not in this close and rude-benched hall,
But where soft lights and shadows fall,
And all the slow, sleep-walking hours
Glide soundless over grass and flowers!
From time and place and form apart,
Its holy ground the human heart,

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poem by John Greenleaf Whittier
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The Woman

Go sleep, my sweetie—rest—rest!
Oh soft little hand on mother's breast!
Oh soft little lips—the din's mos' gone-
Over and done, my dearie one!

What do I think, my brother? Look at me!
You make me laugh, sitting there solemneyed,
Full of opinions, theories!—asking me—
Look—with my baby at my breast—to tell you,
Blessed big uncle!—what I think—heaven help me!—
Of this and that. How could you think, I wonder,
If baby lips were tugging at your flesh,
Draining your life to flower the world?
Dear brother,
It's beautiful, that masculine pride of yours,
That runs the universe—oh yes, I know,
And longs to run it well. You travel, observe,
Experiment, make laws and governments,
Build strange machines and masterfully summon
The elemental powers to do your work—

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poem by Harriet Monroe
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Trash Bag

1 bag cement mold
10 inch leather titleist golf bag
2006 kia rio side air bags
1900 s tapestry bag
1,000 face value silver bag buyers
100ft x 200ft plastic bag
16 flow-through infuser bags order e-mail
2001 accura air bags
1966 chevy pickup air bags
1st responder bag subdued
40 catchers equipment bag
10 dolars chanell bags for sale
$20,000 beanie bag
2 004 ben hogan golf bag
100 cotton childrens sleeping bags
2 mil designer bags
12 ounce bean bag
20 pound bag rabbit food
35 bag dirt james teen wendy
10 inch screen laptop bags

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poem by Rwetewrt Erwtwer
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Tomlinson

Now Tomlinson gave up the ghost in his house in Berkeley Square,
And a Spirit came to his bedside and gripped him by the hair --
A Spirit gripped him by the hair and carried him far away,
Till he heard as the roar of a rain-fed ford the roar of the Milky Way:
Till he heard the roar of the Milky Way die down and drone and cease,
And they came to the Gate within the Wall where Peter holds the keys.
"Stand up, stand up now, Tomlinson, and answer loud and high
The good that ye did for the sake of men or ever ye came to die --
The good that ye did for the sake of men in little earth so lone!"
And the naked soul of Tomlinson grew white as a rain-washed bone.
"O I have a friend on earth," he said, "that was my priest and guide,
And well would he answer all for me if he were by my side."
-- "For that ye strove in neighbour-love it shall be written fair,
But now ye wait at Heaven's Gate and not in Berkeley Square:
Though we called your friend from his bed this night,
he could not speak for you,
For the race is run by one and one and never by two and two."
Then Tomlinson looked up and down, and little gain was there,
For the naked stars grinned overhead, and he saw that his soul was bare:
The Wind that blows between the worlds, it cut him like a knife,

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poem by Rudyard Kipling
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