STILL I RISE

Maya Angelou

You may write me down in history 

With your bitter, twisted lies, 

You may trod me in the very dirt 

But still, like dust, I'll rise. 

Does my sassiness upset you? 

Why are you beset with gloom? 

'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells 

Pumping in my living room. 

Just like moons and like suns, 

With the certainty of tides, 

Just like hopes springing high, 

Still I'll rise. 

Did you want to see me broken? 

Bowed head and lowered eyes? 

Shoulders falling down like teardrops. 

Weakened by my soulful cries. 

Does my haughtiness offend you? 

Don't you take it awful hard 

'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines 

Diggin' in my own back yard. 

You may shoot me with your words, 

You may cut me with your eyes, 

You may kill me with your hatefulness, 

But still, like air, I'll rise. 

Does my sexiness upset you? 

Does it come as a surprise 

That I dance like I've got diamonds 

At the meeting of my thighs? 

Out of the huts of history's shame 

I rise 

Up from a past that's rooted in pain 

I rise 

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, 

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. 

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear 

I rise 

Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear 

I rise 

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, 

I am the dream and the hope of the slave. 

I rise 

I rise 

I rise.

Maya Angelou

born on the 4th April 1928

MONEY

Royal Bank Building, Toronto, Canada

courtesy Wikimedia Commons

I was led into captivity by the bitch business

Not in love but in what seemed a physical necessity

And now i cannot even watch the spring

The itch for subsistence having become responsibility.

Money the she-devil comes to us under many veils

Tactful at first, calling herself beauty

Tear away this disguise, she proposes paternal solicitude

Assuming the dishonest face of duty.

Suddenly you are in bed with a screeching tear-sheet

This is money at last without her night-dress

Clutching you against her fallen udders and sharp bones

In an unscrupulous and deserved embrace.

C.H. Sisson

1914-2003

SPRING from The Life of Love

Come, my beloved; let us walk amidst the knolls,
For the snow is water, and Life is alive from its
Slumber and is roaming the hills and valleys.
Let us follow the footprints of Spring into the
Distant fields, and mount the hilltops to draw
Inspiration high above the cool green plains.


Dawn of Spring has unfolded her winter-kept garment
And placed it on the peach and citrus trees; and
They appear as brides in the ceremonial custom of
the Night of Kedre.


The sprigs of grapevine embrace each other like
Sweethearts, and the brooks burst out in dance
Between the rocks, repeating the song of joy;
And the flowers bud suddenly from the heart of
Nature, like foam from the rich heart of the sea.


Come, my beloved; let us drink the last of Winter's
Tears from the cupped lilies, and soothe our spirits
With the shower of notes from the birds, and wander
In exhilaration through the intoxicating breeze.


Let us sit by that rock, where violets hide; let us
Pursue their exchange of the sweetness of kisses.


Khalil Gibran
1883-1931


translated by Anthony Rizcallah Ferris

NOT LOVE PERHAPS

This is not Love perhaps - Love that lays down
Its life, that many waters cannot quench, nor the floods drown -
But something written in lighter ink, said in a lower tone;
Something perhaps especially your own;
A need at times to be together and talk -
And then the finding we can walk
More firmly through dark narrow places
And meet more easily nightmare faces;
A need to reach out sometimes hand to hand -
And then find Earth less like an alien land;
A need for alliance to defeat
The whisperers at the corner of the street;
A need for inns on roads, islands in seas, halts for discoveries to be shared,
Maps checked and notes compared;
A need at times of each for each
Direct as the need of throat and tongue for speech.

A.S.J. Tessimond
1902-1962

TO HELL WITH COMMONSENSE

More kicks than pence

We get from commonsense

Above its door is writ

All hope abandon. It

Is a bank will refuse a post

Dated cheque of the Holy Ghost.

Therefore I say to hell

With all reasonable

Poems in particular

We want no secular

Wisdom plodded together

By concerned fools. Gather

No moss you rolling stones

Nothing thought out atones

For no flight

In the light.

Let them wear out nerve and bone

Those who would have it that way

But in the end nothing that they

Have achieved will be in the shake up

In the final Wake Up

And I have a feeling

That through the hole in reason’s ceiling

We can fly to knowledge

Without ever going to college.

Patrick Kavanagh

1905-1967

Patrick Kavanagh did not go to college. He was born in the parish of Inniskeen, attended Kednaminsha National School till the age of 12, and carried on his father's trade of cobbler and small farmer on the "stony grey soil of Monaghan". At the age of 35 he left for Dublin ("the worst mistake I made in my life") where he published a long poem, "The Great Hunger", about Ireland and the harsh realities of peasant life ("locked in a stable with pigs and cows forever"), a poem that was subversive enough to gain him the attention of the police. In 1953 he developed lung cancer, but lived for another 14 years. He was awarded a pension once he was declared incurable ("like a prize each year until I die"). He married Katharine Moloney in the year of his death.

MAPPA MUNDI

Mappa Mundi - Hereford Cathedral

I

In the land of mutual rivers,
it is all a conversation: one flows uphill, one flows down.
Each ends in a bottomless lake which feed the other
and the boatmen who sail up, down, round and round
never age, growing half a day older, half a day younger
every time . . . . as long as they never step on land.


II

In the land of always autumn
people build their houses out of fallen leaves
and smoke, stitched together with spiders' webs.
At night they glow like parchment lanterns and the voices
inside cluster to a sigh. Tell us a story, any story, except
hush, please, not the one about the wind.


III

In the land where nothing happens twice
there are always new people to meet;
you just look in the mirror. Echoes learn to improvise.
So it's said . . . . we've sent some of the old
to investigate, but we haven't heard yet. When we
catch up with them, we might not know.


IV

In the land of sounds you can see
we watch the radio, read each other's lips, dread
those audible nightfalls. We pick through the gloom
with one-word candles home . . . however . . . only . . . soon
while pairs of lovers hold each other, speechless,
under the 0 of a full black moon.


V

In the land of hot moonlight
the bathing beaches come alive at midnight.
You can tell the famous and rich by their silvery tans
which glow ever so slightly in the dark
so at all the best parties there's a moment when the lights go out
and you, only you, seem to vanish completely.


VI

In the land of migratory words
we glance up, come the season, at telegraph wires
of syllables in edgy silhouette against a moving sky
like code, unscrambling. Any day now they'll fall into place
and be uttered. Then the mute months. The streets
without names. The telephone that only burrs.



Philip Gross
1952

FORGETFULNESS

photo: unknown

The name of the author is the first to go
followed obediently by the title, the plot,
the heartbreaking conclusion, the entire novel
which suddenly becomes one you have never read,
never even heard of,

as if, one by one, the memories you used to harbor
decided to retire to the southern hemisphere of the brain,
to a little fishing village where there are no phones.

Long ago you kissed the names of the nine Muses goodbye
and watched the quadratic equation pack its bag,
and even now as you memorize the order of the planets,

something else is slipping away, a state flower perhaps,
the address of an uncle, the capital of Paraguay.

Whatever it is you are struggling to remember,
it is not poised on the tip of your tongue,
not even lurking in some obscure corner of your spleen.

It has floated away down a dark mythological river
whose name begins with an L as far as you can recall,
well on your own way to oblivion where you will join those
who have even forgotten how to swim and how to ride a bicycle.

No wonder you rise in the middle of the night
to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war.
No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted
out of a love poem that you used to know by heart.



Billy Collins
1941




Billy Collins has commented: " This seems to be a poem that anyone over 30 has an immediate grasp of, and anyone over 40 or 50 has an extreme fondness for . . . . It begins by describing what one author called 'literary amnesia' which is the realisation that you have forgotten everything you've ever read. It is the kind of feeling that the mind is a small unfurnished apartment."