[lit-ideas] Re: APRIL POEMS (3rd)
- From: "Mirembe Nantongo" <nantongo@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 5 Apr 2005 18:41:07 +0100
I enjoyed this and have been thinking about unexpected Spring poems - as in
Spring poems from people you don't expect them from. Here is one, from Yvor
Winters of all people - he who is all clanging iron and steely cold things
and gritted teeth and (how, in a poet?) insistence on reason and
rationality. This one appears in children's Anthologies of Literature and is
indeed by Yvor Winters himself. Perhaps he was sleepwalking, or something:
APRIL
The little goat
crops
new grass lying down
leaps up eight inches
into air and
lands on four feet.
Not a tremor -
solid in the
spring and serious
he walks away.
-Yvor Winters
<><><><>
Regards, MN
----- Original Message -----
From: "Ursula Stange" <Ursula@xxxxxxxxxx>
To: <lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
Sent: Sunday, April 03, 2005 3:23 PM
Subject: [lit-ideas] Re: APRIL POEMS (3rd)
> THE BOYS ACROSS THE STREET ARE DRIVING MY YOUNG DAUGHTER MAD
>
> The boys across the street are driving my young
> daughter mad.
> The boys are only seventeen,
> My daughter one year less,
> And all that these boys do is jump up in the sky
> and
> beautifully
> finesse
> a basketball into a hoop;
> But take forever coming down,
> Their long legs brown and cleaving on the air
> As if it were a rare warm summer water.
> The boys across the street are maddening my daughter.
> And all they do is ride by on their shining bikes,
> Ashout with insults, trading lumps,
> Oblivious of the way they tread their pedals
> Churning Time with long tan legs
> And easing upthrust seats with downthrust orchard
> rumps;
> Their faces neither glad nor sad, but calm;
> The boys across the street toss back their hair and
> Heedless
> Drive my daughter mad.
> They jog around the block and loosen up their knees.
> They wrestle like a summer breeze upon the lawn.
> Oh, how I wish they would not wrestle sweating
> on the green
> All groans,
> Until my daughter moans and goes to stand beneath
> her shower,
> So her own cries are all she hears,
> And feels but her own tears mixed with the water.
> Thus it has been all summer with these boys and my
> mad daughter.
>
> Great God, what must I do?
> Steal their fine bikes, deflate their basketballs?
> Their tennis shoes, their skin-tight swimming togs,
> Their svelte gymnasium suits sink deep in bogs?
> Then, wall up all our windows?
> To what use?
> The boys would still laugh all awrestle
> On that lawn.
> Our shower would run all night into the dawn.
> How can I raise my daughter as a Saint,
> When some small part of me grows faint
> Remembering a girl long years ago who by the hour
> Jumped rope
> Jumped rope
> Jumped rope
> And sent me weeping to the shower.
> Ray Bradbury
>
>
>
> I've loved this poem for years and it says SPRING in capital letters and
> we need to hear that here as it snowed overnight and the wind is
> whistling and the rafters are rattling and the garbage can lids are
> sailing along the street and the telephone lines are swaying and humming
> and no birds sing.
>
> Ursula
> in North Bay
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