three poems...

[bronze_ribbons]

...because at least three people on my flist posted a "post a poem when you see this post" post yesterday...

Countee Cullen's "Song" is one of my favorite of favorites from high school. I'll be reading it aloud this coming Sunday at church (I'm working on a sermon titled "Ambisexuality"):

Song
Countee Cullen

Some for a little while do love, and some for long,
And some rare few forever and for aye.
Some for the measure of a poet's song,
And some for the ribbon's width of a summer's day.
Some upon a golden crucifix do swear,
And some in blood do plight a fickle troth.
Some struck divinely mad may only stare
And out of silence weave an iron oath.

So many ways love has, none may appear
The bitter best, and none the sweetest worst.
Strange fruit the hungry have been known to bear
And brackish water slakes an utter thirst.
It is a rare and tantalizing fruit
Our hands reach for, but nothing absolute.

The entry for September 20 in one of my favorite anthologies, Foster and Guthrie's A Year In Poetry, is Charley George's "Death and the Poet":

Death and the Poet
Charley George

september 18, 1830, sainte-beuve insulted his editor, pierre dubois. dubois slapped sainte-beuve and a duel was arranged for monday morning the 20th.

in a steady rain, sainte-beuve and his seconds took a carriage to the wooded suburb of romainville to meet dubois. stepping down from the carriage, sainte-beuve refused to hand over his silk umbrella. he did not mind getting killed, he told his seconds, but dreaded getting wet. at a distance of twenty paces, the umbrella'd sainte-beuve and exposed dubois fired at each other four times. neither being hit, they agreed to quit.

This last one -- C.H. Sisson's "A Letter to John Donne" -- is also in the Foster-Guthrie anthology. It's not unlike "The Hound of Heaven", in that it's not a poem with which I have much in common -- and yet, like the Thompson, it slays me with its gorgeous ferocity:

A Letter to John Donne
C.H. Sisson

On 27 July 1617, Donne preached at the parish chruch at Sevenoaks, of which he was rector, and was entertained at Knole, then the country residence of Richard Sackville, third earl of Dorset.

I understand you well enough, John Donne
First, that you were a man of ability
Eaten by lust and by the love of God
Then, that you crossed the Sevenoaks High Street
As rector of Saint Nicholas:
I am of that parish.

To be a man of ability is not much
You may see them on the Sevenoaks platform any day
Eager men with despatch cases
Whom ambition drives as they drive the machine
Whom the certainty of meticulous operation
Pleasures as a morbid sex a heart of stone.

That you could have spent your time in the corruption of courts
As these in that of cities, gives you no place among us:
Ability is not even the game of a fool
But the click of a computer operating in a waste
Your cleverness is dismissed from this suit
Bring out your genitals and your theology.

What makes you familiar is this dual obsession;
Lust is not what the rutting stag knows
It is to take Eve's apple and to lose
The stag's paradisal look:
The love of God comes readily
To those who have most need.

You brought body and soul to this church
Walking there through the park alive with deer
But now what animal has climbed into your pulpit?
One whose pretension is that the fear
Of God has heated him into a spirit
An evaporated man no physical ill can hurt.

Well might you hesitate at the Latin gate
Seeing such apes denying the church of God:
I am grateful particularly that you were not a saint
But extravagant whether in bed or in your shroud.
You would understand that in the presence of folly
I am not sanctified but angry.

Come down and speak to the men of ability
On the Sevenoaks platform and tell them
That at your Saint Nicholas the faith
Is not exclusive in the fools it chooses
That the vain, the ambitious and the highly sexed
Are the natural prey of the incarnate Christ.

Comments

[sienamystic.livejournal.com]

The last poem makes me very uncomfortable, which is probably a sign that it's doing its job very well.

[kassrachel.livejournal.com]

That sounds like a sermon I'd love to read.

Also, these poems are terrific.