a hopelessly near perfect sonnet

you've never written a perfect sonnet
nor a quatrain which made any good sense
your diction is spare your concepts too dense
would you know verse if you stepped upon it?

verse requires' a dancer's lithe light skill
and makes fools of those who want to try it
it's senseless for sure, who can deny it
he toys with vain odds who there casts his will

in the way of poignant verse...something else
might suffice ...leave poems to word fools
those who regard breath and mind as tools
to waylay the pain of man's chosen hells

what with smart phones and infinite info
no telling where the benighted might go






      jh






.....thanks to Curtis Faville for inspiration












...

of matters porcine

              Saint Francis and the Sow









The bud
stands for all things,
even for those things that don’t flower,
for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;
though sometimes it is necessary
to reteach a thing its loveliness,
to put a hand on its brow
of the flower
and retell it in words and in touch
it is lovely
until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing;
as Saint Francis
put his hand on the creased forehead
of the sow, and told her in words and in touch


blessings of earth on the sow, and the sow
began remembering all down her thick length,
from the earthen snout all the way
through the fodder and slops to the spiritual curl of the tail,
from the hard spininess spiked out from the spine
down through the great broken heart
to the sheer blue milken dreaminess spurting and shuddering
from the fourteen teats into the fourteen mouths sucking and
blowing beneath them:
the long, perfect loveliness of sow.







       Galway Kinnell           + ten twentynine twenty fourteen














.....

plumage

"Hope" is the thing with feathers—
That perches in the soul—
And sings the tune without the words—
And never stops—at all—

And sweetest—in the Gale—is heard—
And sore must be the storm—
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm—

I've heard it in the chilliest land—
And on the strangest Sea—
Yet, never, in Extremity,
It asked a crumb—of Me.












        Emily Dickinson - the bardess of Amherst












....

Hippopotamus

The big-bellied hippopotamus

Inhabits the jungles of Java,

Where in the depths of each lair, cuss

More monsters than haunt the dreamer.

 

The boa uncoils and hisses,

The tiger gives out its roars,

The angry buffalo whistles;

He grazes at peace or snores.

 

He fears nor kris nor assegai,

He gazes at man, with no cares at all,

And smiles at the sepoy’s musket-ball,

That merely rebounds from his hide.

 

I’m like the hippopotamus;

Clothed with my convictions’ weight,

Strong armour none can penetrate,

I tread, secure, the wilderness.

                                     Theophile Gautier

 

                                          tr.. A.S.  Kline

......

...and all of natural things

A NAP BY THE KICKAPOO




What a face
on that barred owl
dead beside the road --

Rolled it over to see.
Round, jolly, cowled. Lightly
concentrically ringed.

The calm cosmonautical
with the simian fey.
Fox sparrows
sing. "We hated to be apart.

Even for five minutes."
The dreams come down --
Extra! Extra! --

from the cedared hills
across scant pasture
and April brambles

to the leaky
treehouse on the knoll
beyond the stream.






                   Merrill  Gilfillan












....

The Solitary Reaper

Behold her, single in the field,
Yon solitary Highland Lass!
Reaping and singing by herself;
Stop here, or gently pass!
Alone she cuts and binds the grain,
And sings a melancholy strain;
O listen! for the Vale profound
Is overflowing with the sound.


     No Nightingale did ever chaunt
More welcome notes to weary bands
Of travellers in some shady haunt,
Among Arabian sands:
A voice so thrilling ne'er was heard
In spring-time from the Cuckoo-bird,
Breaking the silence of the seas
Among the farthest Hebrides.


     Will no one tell me what she sings?--
Perhaps the plaintive numbers flow
For old, unhappy, far-off things,
And battles long ago:
Or is it some more humble lay,
Familiar matter of to-day?
Some natural sorrow, loss, or pain,
That has been, and may be again?


     Whate'er the theme, the Maiden sang
As if her song could have no ending;
I saw her singing at her work,
And o'er the sickle bending;--
I listened, motionless and still;
And, as I mounted up the hill,
The music in my heart I bore,
Long after it was heard no more. 






















                               William Wordsworth  
























........                       

   

     Carmel Point

I watched a sea anemone
The colour of green jade
Shadowed under water.

I saw a daring crab,
Unafraid and young
Touch the velvet petals
Of the princess underwater.
Softly she took him in,
Softly she sighed and closed.
The little crab was hushed and still -
Never would he swim again
Under crevice, under weed,
Under green and coloured water.

Softly she opened -
That princess of rare jade.
Softly she gave him back
Sucked of all his pearly flesh
Sucked of all his salty blood.

I ran away to tell my dad,
"let's go home,"    I said,
"I am sorry to be born,
I am afraid of many things."

      -Margaret Phyllis McSweeney




























       ----this poem  was   recited at the most recent  circle of song