Tag Archives: irony

A brace of Dorothy Parker poems

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Dorothy Parker is, of course, famous for witticisms, short, incisive, and very quotable. One of my favorites is, “If you want to know what God thinks of money, just look at the people he gave it to.”  But she was a fine poet as well, and along with her better-known light-hearted efforts were some very dark verses, so I’ve included two poems about love, one from each variety.  I’ll let you decide which is the more serious.

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Oh, life is a glorious cycle of song,
A medley of extemporanea;
And love is a thing that can never go wrong;
And I am Marie of Roumania

August

When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart;

Summer, do your worst!
Light your tinsel moon, and call on
Your performing stars to fall on
Headlong through your paper sky;
Nevermore shall I be cursed
By a flushed and amorous slattern,
With her dusty laces’ pattern
Trailing, as she straggles by.

Review: Short breve with an extra shot

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Just the right amount of insouciance
With earthy overtones, and ripe plump honey
Cocoa orchid cloves, with a clean finish.

Echoes of Bedouin twig fires
A trace of Sheba at the margins
And – I’m quite certain – a hint
Of wild goat on the Ethiopian highlands,
Of pomegranates shared willfully
In the caressing, endless night

Of tribal justice,
Of Bantu, Arab, and Chinese
Exchanging wisdom and profit,
Prophets, peace be upon them,
Be damned, at the trading table,
Of long years of captivity and release,

And captivity again, burning like hunger,
Shining like anger.
Of God and injustice, all blind
To the anguish of the children
He claimed as his own.

Perfect tender bitterness
Exchanged for the bitterness
of slaves on the sugar plantation,
Of generations’ riven ancestry
Evolved into the pathos of poverty.

Then, floating like some cup-bound cloud
Above the serene acidity,
Rich, billows of silky cream,
With traces of Swiss mountainside,

Or the Dells of Wisconsin,
Ancestral hunting grounds
Usurped for pasture,
Where the descendants of wild oxen
Empty their swollen udders,
Raw as a farmer’s neck in autumn.

Precision

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The precise forces of living
Hinge on a paper-thin reality
Behind which lurk the illusions
We work so hard to uncover

The precise moment of discontinuity
Comes when we discover
That a lifetime of regrets
Is only a simple misunderstanding

The precise inclination of a heart
Determines the difference
Between love
And death

Insignificance

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I read great poets, great beacons,
Their eyes so keen,
Their voices clear as sunlight
With a winter slant, harsh,
But welcome all the same.

Personally,
I’ve grown used to irrelevance,
Come to prefer it.
My history of judgment
Is spotty, at best
My place in the grand confusion
Of existence
Is in the chorus,
Oblivious,
One small voice
Bleating among many,
One fading light
In the great kaleidoscope,
Whispering, more than declaiming,
Twinkling, more than illuminating.

But it’s me, inaudible at times,
Barely discernable,
Me

Poetic Lineages: The Wild Swans at Coole, by William Butler Yeats

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A very good poet might make you despair and give up writing for envy, but a great poet will inspire you to write more and greater poems. So, this by Yeats:

The trees are in their autumn beauty,
The woodland paths are dry,
Under the October twilight the water
Mirrors a still sky;
Upon the brimming water among the stones
Are nine and fifty swans.

The nineteenth Autumn has come upon me
Since I first made my count;
I saw, before I had well finished,
All suddenly mount
And scatter wheeling in great broken rings
Upon their clamorous wings.

I have looked upon those brilliant creatures,
And now my heart is sore.
All’s changed since I, hearing at twilight,
The first time on this shore,
The bell-beat of their wings above my head,
Trod with a lighter tread.

Unwearied still, lover by lover,
They paddle in the cold,
Companionable streams or climb the air;
Their hearts have not grown old;
Passion or conquest, wander where they will,
Attend upon them still.

But now they drift on the still water
Mysterious, beautiful;
Among what rushes will they build,
By what lake’s edge or pool
Delight men’s eyes, when I awake some day
To find they have flown away?

*Poetic lineages, in which I post great poems from the past, will now be a regular feature of this blog, roughly bi-monthly. Most of the poets I choose will be sufficiently dead to be in the public domain, but some will not. I hope I won’t be stepping on copyright considerations by featuring them!