Wanting Sumptuous Heavens, Poem by Robert Bly

12 / 1 / 2013

Poem of the Day: Wanting Sumptuous Heavens BY ROBERT BLY No one grumbles among the oyster clans, And lobsters play their bone guitars all summer. Only we, with our opposable thumbs, want Heaven to be, and God to come, again. There is no end to our grumbling; we want Comfortable earth and sumptuous Heaven. But the heron standing on one leg in the bog Drinks his dark rum all day, and is content. Robert Bly, "Wanting Sumptuous Heavens"" from The New Yorker, November 5, 2007. Reprinted by permission of the author. Source: The New Yorker (Unpublished Collection, 2007) ROBERT BLY Biography  More poems by this author

"Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia", Poem by Irene McKinney

Poem of the Day: Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia BY IRENE MCKINNEY Maybe because I was married and felt secure and dead at once, I listened to my father's urgings about "the future" and bought this double plot on the hillside with a view of the bare white church, the old elms, and the creek below. I plan now to use both plots, luxuriantly spreading out in the middle of a big double bed. —But no, finally, my burial has nothing to do with marriage, this lying here in these same bones will be as real as anything I can imagine for who I'll be then, as real as anything undergone, going back and forth to "the world" out there, and here to this one spot on earth I really know. Once I came in fast and low in a little plane and when I looked down at the church, the trees I've felt with my hands, the neighbors' houses and the family farm, and I saw how tiny what I loved or knew was, it was like my children going on with their plans and griefs at a distance and nothing I could do about it. But I wanted to reach down and pat it, while letting it know I wouldn't interfere for the world, the world being everything this isn't, this unknown buried in the known. Irene McKinney, "Visiting My Gravesite: Talbott Churchyard, West Virginia" from Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004. Copyright © 2009 by Irene McKinney. Reprinted by permission of Red Hen Press. Source: Unthinkable: Selected Poems 1976-2004 (Red Hen Press, 2009)

To An Athlete Dying Young

Poem of the Day: To an Athlete Dying Young
BY A. E. HOUSMAN
The time you won your town the race
We chaired you through the market-place;
Man and boy stood cheering by,
And home we brought you shoulder-high.

Today, the road all runners come,
Shoulder-high we bring you home,
And set you at your threshold down,
Townsman of a stiller town.

Smart lad, to slip betimes away
From fields where glory does not stay,
And early though the laurel grows
It withers quicker than the rose.

Eyes the shady night has shut
Cannot see the record cut,
And silence sounds no worse than cheers
After earth has stopped the ears.

Now you will not swell the rout
Of lads that wore their honours out,
Runners whom renown outran
And the name died before the man.

So set, before its echoes fade,
The fleet foot on the sill of shade,
And hold to the low lintel up
The still-defended challenge-cup.

And round that early-laurelled head
Will flock to gaze the strengthless dead,
And find unwithered on its curls
The garland briefer than a girl’s.

Source: The Norton Anthology of Poetry Third Edition (1983)