Some Poems

I always think I don't want to go away from home, but being away does have the advantage that you can read, undisturbed by the necessity to do your normal, time-consuming chores.

I've discovered this again over the last few days, which I've spent in Yorkshire. We've been walking, but when not walking I haven't had to hoover or hang out the washing. And as a result I've been able to read.

As well as various books, I've had time to read some poetry and, thanks to the Twitter account called @CarolineBirdUK, I've come across two poems I particularly love.

The first is by Jane Kenyon who, although I ought to have, I had not heard of until now. It is called Happiness and I think it is beautiful and seems especially appropriate, with its echoes of the Parable of the Prodigal Son, which was the gospel reading at Mass only recently:

Happiness by Jane Kenyon

There’s just no accounting for happiness,
or the way it turns up like a prodigal
who comes back to the dust at your feet
having squandered a fortune far away.

And how can you not forgive?
You make a feast in honor of what
was lost, and take from its place the finest
garment, which you saved for an occasion
you could not imagine, and you weep night and day
to know that you were not abandoned,
that happiness saved its most extreme form
for you alone.

No, happiness is the uncle you never
knew about, who flies a single-engine plane
onto the grassy landing strip, hitchhikes
into town, and inquires at every door
until he finds you asleep midafternoon
as you so often are during the unmerciful
hours of your despair.

It comes to the monk in his cell.
It comes to the woman sweeping the street
with a birch broom, to the child
whose mother has passed out from drink.
It comes to the lover, to the dog chewing
a sock, to the pusher, to the basketmaker,
and to the clerk stacking cans of carrots
in the night.
                    It even comes to the boulder
in the perpetual shade of pine barrens,
to rain falling on the open sea,
to the wineglass, weary of holding wine.

I suppose the last three lines are debatable, but never mind.

The second poem is by a poet that almost everyone, including me, has already heard of - Sylvia Plath. It is, apparently, part of her most famous collection, Ariel. I'm ashamed to admit that, although I thought I'd read that book, I somehow completely overlooked this poem until now.

Curriculum-setters may be a little to blame for my oversight, (although mostly me, I admit). Their emphasis, when I was at school, was always on those poems that suggest Plath's unsettled mental state and ambivalence (to put it mildly) towards her father, the ones that match the disturbing tone of her novel The Bell Jar, a book I do not want to ever read again.

This poem, by contrast, is full of an observant pleasure in existence - or so it seems to me:

Balloons by Sylvia Plath

Since Christmas they have lived with us,
Guileless and clear,
Oval soul-animals,
Taking up half the space,
Moving and rubbing on the silk

Invisible air drifts,
Giving a shriek and pop
When attacked, then scooting to rest, barely trembling.
Yellow cathead, blue fish---
Such queer moons we live with

 Instead of dead furniture!
Straw mats, white walls
And these traveling
Globes of thin air, red, green,
Delighting

The heart like wishes or free
Peacocks blessing
Old ground with a feather
Beaten in starry metals.
Your small

Brother is making
His balloon squeak like a cat.
Seeming to see
A funny pink world he might eat on the other side of it,
He bites,

Then sits
Back, fat jug
Contemplating a world clear as water.
A red
Shred in his little fist.

I love that "fat jug", somehow so apt, conjuring up the figure of a small toddler.

I have also, after a long time without the opportunity, had the chance to visit again Stephen Pentz's beautiful blog, First Known When Lost.

The most recent post there has as its theme the slow autumnal realisation of one's own mortality and includes this exquisite poem, which Pentz identifies as a waka. It was, he explains, written by Sami Mansei (early 8th century), translated by Steven Carter, and published in Steven Carter, Traditional Japanese Poetry: An Anthology, (Stanford University Press 1991), page 51:

Our life in this world --

to what shall I compare it?
It is like a boat
         rowing out at break of day,
leaving not a trace behind.