The Poetry Playground

Crows in a Strong Wind

Off go the crows from the roof.
The crows can’t hold on.
They might as well
Be perched on an oil slick.

Such an awkward dance,
These gentlemen
In their spottled-black coats.
Such a tipsy dance,

As if they didn’t know where they were.
Such a humorous dance,
As they try to set things right,
As the wind reduces them.

Such a sorrowful dance.
How embarrassing is love
When it goes wrong

In front of everyone.

~ Cornelius Eady

(Cornelius Eady was born in Rochester, NY and attended Monroe Community College and Empire State College. He has taught at many fine institutions including Sarah Lawrence College and Notre Dame).

Imported Days

some days, like birthdays, are imported
from france, honolulu and bangkok.
you stretch them out by minutes
and enjoy every piece
while buildings bury themselves in the ground.
you row in and out of a mailman,
a cosmic mailman
from the african or indian market of birthdays.
the sky of this has a hole in the middle,
it pours feasts!
never again beyond into the banal

~ Andrei Cordescu

Tilly

He travels after a winter sun,
Urging the cattle along a cold red road,
Calling to them, a voice they know,
He drives his beasts above Cabra.

The voice tells them home is warm.
They moo and make brute music with their hoofs.
He drives them with a flowering branch before him,
Smoke pluming their foreheads.

Boor, bond of the herd,
Tonight stretch full by the fire!
I bleed by the black stream
For my torn bough!

~ James Joyce (Dublin, 1904)

August, 1968

The Ogre does what ogres can,
Deeds quite impossible for Man,
But one prize is beyond his reach,
The Ogre cannot master Speech:
About a subjugated plain,
Among its desperate and slain,
The Ogre stalks with hands on hips,
While drivel gushes from his lips.

~ W. H. Auden

A Day

I’ll tell you how the sun rose, –
A ribbon at a time.
The steeples swam in amethyst,
The news like squirrels ran.

The hills untied their bonnets,
The bobolinks begun.
Then I said softly to myself,
“That must be the sun!”

But how he set, I know not.
There seemed a purple stile
Which little yellow boys and girls
Were climbing all the while

Till when they reached the other side
A dominie in gray
Put gently up the evening bars
and led the flock away.

~ Emily Dickinson

Classic Ballroom Dances

Grandmothers who wring the necks
Of chickens; old nuns
With names like Theresa, Marianne,
Who pull schoolboys by the ear;

The intricate steps of pickpockets
Working the crowd of the curious
At the scene of an accident; the slow shuffle
of the evangelist with a sandwich-board;

The hesitation of the early morning customer
Peeking through the window-grille
Of a pawnshop; the weave of a little kid
Who is walking to school with eyes closed;

And the ancient lovers, cheek to cheek,
On the dancefloor of the Union Hall,
Where they also hold charity raffles
On rainy Monday nights of an eternal November.

~ Charles Simic

The Forecast for Night

Showers, though their rhythms may be
Interrupted by wind and gusts
Will not cease in the dark hours
They should continue until first light.

Going to sleep one imagines a dance
With interruptions, a shouldering
A standing to one side, a sweeping
Together and deeper into different arms.

~ Elizabeth Smither

Full Moon

She was wearing the coral taffeta trousers
Someone had brought her from Ispahan,
And the little gold coat with pomegranate blossoms,
And the coral-hafted feather fan;
But she ran down a Kentish lane in the moonlight,
And skipped in the pool of the moon as she ran.

She cared not a rap for all the big planets,
For Betelguese or Aldebaran,
And all the big planets cared nothing for her,
That small impertinent charlatan;
But she climbed on a Kentish stile in the moonlight,
And laughed at the sky through the sticks of her fan.

~ Victoria Sackville-West