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Like it or not Mila, this is for you, my Bad Ass Gal

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A lovely twist in the tail of this ….

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Sunny War – Age of a Man

Speaks for itself (smiley face)

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A famous Auden anecdote came from the time he was a teacher
of English to foreign students in the 1930’s when a Japanese
student translated the phrase “out of sight, out of mind” to
“invisible, insane” – Auden moved to the USA in 1939 and this
poem was written in 1941 but not published until December 2021
in the New York Review of Books.

W.H. Auden
a poem

We get the Dialectic fairly well,
How streams descending turn to trees that climb,
That what we are not we shall be in time,
Why some unlikes attract, all likes repel.
But is it up to creatures or their fate
To give the signal when to change a state?

Granted that we might possibly be great
And even be expected to get well
How can we know it is required by fate
As truths are forced on poets by a rhyme?
Ought we to rush upon our lives pell-mell?
Things have to happen at the proper time

And no two lives are keeping the same time,
As we grow old our years accelerate,
The pace of processes inside each cell
Alters profoundly when we feel unwell,
The motions of our protoplasmic slime
Can modify our whole idea of fate.

Nothing is unconditional but fate.
To grumble at it is a waste of time,
To fight it, the unpardonable crime.
Our hopes and fears must not grow out of date,
No region can include itself as well,
To judge our sentence is to live in hell.

Suppose it should turn out, though, that our bell
Has been in fact already rung by fate?
A calm demeanor is all very well
Provided we were listening at the time.
We have a shrewd suspicion we are late,
Our look of rapt attention just a mime,

That we have really come to like our grime,
And do not care, so far as one can tell,
For whom or for how long we are to wait.
Whatever we obey becomes our fate,
What snares the pretty little birds is time,
That what we are, we only are too well.

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Dandy Warhols – Bohemian Like You

I’m getting wise and
I’m feeling so bohemian like you
It’s you that I want, so please
Just a casual, casual easy thing
Is it? It is for me

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I saw the tuft of cat hair on the fence and knew you’d been here
liking the way you fill the air which is also full of the sound of
loud bear noises in the east .. Thinking of my good friend Mila
and all the people of Ukraine

It’s a choon you’ll hate but you can jiggle your bits to it …..

(someone’s been fooling around in the Night glitch)

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A Cold Spring
Elizabeth Bishop

A cold spring:
the violet was flawed on the lawn.
For two weeks or more the trees hesitated;
the little leaves waited,
carefully indicating their characteristics.
Finally a grave green dust
settled over your big and aimless hills.
One day, in a chill white blast of sunshine,
on the side of one a calf was born.
The mother stopped lowing
and took a long time eating the after-birth,
a wretched flag,
but the calf got up promptly
and seemed inclined to feel gay.

The next day
was much warmer.
Greenish-white dogwood infiltrated the wood,
each petal burned, apparently, by a cigarette-butt;
and the blurred redbud stood
beside it, motionless, but almost more
like movement than any placeable color.
Four deer practiced leaping over your fences.
The infant oak-leaves swung through the sober oak.
Song-sparrows were wound up for the summer,
and in the maple the complementary cardinal
cracked a whip, and the sleeper awoke,
stretching miles of green limbs from the south.
In his cap the lilacs whitened,
then one day they fell like snow.
Now, in the evening,
a new moon comes.
The hills grow softer. Tufts of long grass show

where each cow-flop lies.
The bull-frogs are sounding,
slack strings plucked by heavy thumbs.
Beneath the light, against your white front door,
the smallest moths, like Chinese fans,
flatten themselves, silver and silver-gilt
over pale yellow, orange, or gray.
Now, from the thick grass, the fireflies
begin to rise:
up, then down, then up again:
lit on the ascending flight,
drifting simultaneously to the same height,
–exactly like the bubbles in champagne.
–Later on they rise much higher.
And your shadowy pastures will be able to offer
these particular glowing tributes
every evening now throughout the summer.

–
–
First published 1953 with a dedication to Jane Dewey, Maryland
and a quote:-

Nothing is so beautiful as Spring – Hopkins (GM)

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Love the bass .. will have to play some Stanley Clarke or Marcus Miller sometime
meanwhile dithering about putting Maggie Rose here as it sounds initially like
many things that have gone before, but it has power all it’s own

Maggie Rose – For Your Consideration

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Another Dylan cover, Tangled Up In Blue also 1975
by KT Tunstall

She lit a burner on the stove and offered me a pipe
“I thought you’d never say hello, ” she said
“You look like the silent type”
Then she opened up a book of poems
And handed it to me
Written by an Italian poet
From the thirteenth century
And every one of them words rang true
And glowed like burning coal
Pouring off of every page
Like it was written in my soul from me to you
Tangled up in blue

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Patti Smith – Because The Night

Have I doubt when I’m alone
Love is a ring, the telephone
Love is an angel disguised as lust
Here in our bed until the morning comes

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Bird-Witted
Marianne Moore

With innocent wide penguin eyes, three
large fledgling mockingbirds below
the pussy-willow tree,
stand in a row,
wings touching, feebly solemn,
till they see
their no longer larger
mother bringing
something which will partially
feed one of them.

Toward the high-keyed intermittent squeak
of broken carriage springs, made by
the three similar, meek-
coated bird’s-eye
freckled forms she comes; and when
from the beak
of one, the still living
beetle has dropped
out, she picks it up and puts
it in again.

Standing in the shade till they have dressed
their thickly filamented, pale
pussy-willow-surfaced
coats, they spread tail
and wings, showing one by one,
the modest
white stripe lengthwise on the
tail and crosswise
underneath the wing, and the
accordion

is closed again. What delightful note
with rapid unexpected flute
sounds leaping from the throat
of the astute
grown bird, comes back to one from
the remote
unenergetic sun
lit air before
the brood was here ? How harsh
the bird’s voice has become.

A piebald cat observing them,
is slowly creeping toward the trim
trio on the tree stem.
Unused to him
the three make room-uneasy
new problem.
A dangling foot that missed
its grasp, is raised
and finds the twig on which it
planned to perch. The

parent darting down, nerved by what chills
the blood, and by hope rewarded –
of toil-since nothing fills
squeaking unfed
mouths, wages deadly combat,
and half kills
with bayonet beak and
cruel wings, the
intellectual cautious-
ly creeping cat.
.
.
.
First published 1936
The precise indenting of the 2nd, 4th, 7th & 8th lines
of each stanza cannot be shown because the forum
does not allow it, yet.

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I’ve wanted to sneak this on for a while now
as it keeps playing getting deeper under my skin

“When we were in love, if we were
When we were in love
You were a dove
And I rose above you and preyed”

It’s a cock-eyed Valentines

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She’s a poet with a guitar and beautiful voice, and no
I had not heard Two Strangers before – am going to add one more
to the Tivel collection ….

Midnight on a Monday

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Hip-Hop Ghazal
by Patricia Smith

Gotta love us brown girls, munching on fat, swinging blue hips,
decked out in shells and splashes, Lawdie, bringing them woo hips.

As the jukebox teases, watch my sistas throat the heartbreak,
inhaling bassline, cracking backbone and singing thru hips.

Like something boneless, we glide silent, seeping ‘tween floorboards,
wrapping around the hims, and ooh wee, clinging like glue hips.

Engines grinding, rotating, smokin’, gotta pull back some.
Natural minds are lost at the mere sight of ringing true hips.

Gotta love us girls, just struttin’ down Manhattan streets
killing the menfolk with a dose of that stinging view. Hips.

Crying ’bout getting old—Patricia, you need to get up off
what God gave you. Say a prayer and start slinging. Cue hips.

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I Wanna Be A Dawg – say no more

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