4 posts tagged “poetry”
In honor of strawberry season, here's a poem I always liked from Genevieve Taggard. I remember it from one of my favorite kids' poetry anthologies, Reflections on a Gift of Watermelon Pickle.
Millions of Strawberries
Marcia and I went over the curve,
Eating our way down
Jewels of strawberries we didn't deserve,
Eating our way down
Till our hands were sticky, and our lips painted.
And over us the hot day fainted,
And we saw snakes,
And got scratched,
And a lust overcame us for the red unmatched
Small buds of berries,
Till we lay down -
Eating our way down -
And rolled in the berries like two little dogs,
Rolled
In the late gold.
And gnats hummed,
And it was cold,
And home we went, home without a berry,
Painted red and brown,
Eating our way down.
I found this haunting video on YouTube awhile ago. The video is a montage; the audio is Plath herself.
I'm a few days late for the Vox question about favorite poems, but I've been reading a bit of Mary Oliver lately. Her entry on the Academy of American Poets site quotes a reviewer: "She is a poet of wisdom and generosity whose vision allows us to look intimately at a world not of our making."
The first Oliver poem I ran across was Wild Geese. That seems to be everyone's favorite, and I dare not be like everyone else, so here is another one.
Peonies
This morning the green fists of the peonies are getting ready
to break my heart
as the sun rises,
as the sun strokes them with his old, buttery fingers
and they open ---
pools of lace,
white and pink ---
and all day the black ants climb over them,
boring their deep and mysterious holes
into the curls,
craving the sweet sap,
taking it away
to their dark, underground cities ---
and all day
under the shifty wind,
as in a dance to the great wedding,
the flowers bend their bright bodies,
and tip their fragrance to the air,
and rise,
their red stems holding
all that dampness and recklessness
gladly and lightly,
and there it is again ---
beauty the brave, the exemplary,
blazing open.
Do you love this world?
Do you cherish your humble and silky life?
Do you adore the green grass, with its terror beneath?
Do you also hurry, half-dressed and barefoot, into the garden,
and softly,
and exclaiming of their dearness,
fill your arms with the white and pink flowers,
with their honeyed heaviness, their lush trembling,
their eagerness
to be wild and perfect for a moment, before they are
nothing, forever?
While watching some sitcom last night, I was reminded of the time that poet Adrienne Rich accidentally locked herself in my bathroom.
She taught in the English department at my college, and was hosting Olga Broumas for a poetry reading on campus. I don't know how we finagled this, but my Feminist Collective Household, otherwise known as The House I Rented with Five Other Girls, got the honor of having Olga and Adrienne over for dinner. Our bathroom had a trick door that sometimes locked people in, and that's what it did to Adrienne. Naturally, one's first impulse is not to scream for help, so she had spent some minutes playing with the doorknob until one of my housemates heard the pathetic jiggling and let her out.
This incident may explain why she only gave me a B in the one class I had the nerve to take with her.
So, are you impressed? Adrienne Rich locked herself in my bathroom!
