Dawn Chorus

BY SASHA DUGDALE

From:

Every morning since the time changed

I have woken to the dawn chorus

And even before it sounded, I dreamed of it

Loud, unbelievably loud, shameless, raucous
.
And once I rose and twitched the curtains apart

Expecting the birds to be pressing in fright

Against the pane like passengers

But the garden was empty and it was night
.
Not a slither of light at the horizon

Still the birds were bawling through the mists

Terrible, invisible

A million small evangelists
.
How they sing: as if each had pecked up a smoldering coal

Their throats singed and swollen with song

In dissonance as befits the dark world

Where only travelers and the sleepless belong

This Is The First Thing

Philip Larkin

From:

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.

.
Watch Philip Larkin, Monitor, Down Cemetery Road

“March the Ninth Twenty Twenty”

A  poem inspired by the Italian quarantine 
By Mariangela Gualtieri trans. by Lucy Rand and Clarissa Botsford
.
I’m telling you this
we needed to stop.
We knew. We all felt it
that it was too furious,
our frenzy. Being inside of things.
Outside of our selves.
Squeeze every hour – make it yield.
.
We needed to stop
and we couldn’t.
We needed to do it together.
Slow down the race.
But we couldn’t.
There was no human force
that could hold us back.
.
And since this
was for all of us a tacit wish
like an unconscious will –
perhaps our species has obeyed
loosened the bonds that protect
our seed. Opened
the innermost cracks
and let it in.
Perhaps this is why there was a leap
in the species – from the bat to us.
Something in us wanted to be opened.
Perhaps, I don’t know.
.
Now we are at home.
.
It is extraordinary what is happening.
And there is gold, I believe, in this strange time.
Perhaps there are gifts.
Nuggets of gold for us. If we help one another.
There is a very strong call
of the species now and as a species
we must each see ourselves. A common fate
holds us here. We knew it. But not well enough.
Either all of us, or no one.
.
The earth is powerful. Truly alive
I feel it thinking a thought
that we do not know.
And with what’s happening now? Let us consider
whether the earth is not what’s moving.
Whether the law that rules
the entire universe, whether what’s happening, I wonder,
isn’t the full expression of that law
that governs us too – just like
every star – every particle of the cosmos.
.
Whether the dark matter was this
being bound together in an ardor
for life, with the sweep of death that comes
to rebalance every species.
Keep it within its dimensions, in its place,
going in the right direction. It is not us
who made heaven.
.
An imposing voice, without words
tells us to stay home now, like children
who are in trouble and don’t know why,
and won’t get kisses, won’t be hugged.
Each within a suspension
that takes us back, perhaps to the slowness
of ancient ancestors, of mothers.
.
Look more at the sky,
daub a dead man ochre. Bake bread
for the first time. Look intently at a face. Sing
a child softly to sleep. For the first time
hold someone else’s hand tight
feel the strength of the agreement. That we are together.
A single organism. The whole species
we carry within us. We are saving it inside us.
.
To that grasp of a palm
in another person’s palm
to that simple act that we are now forbidden –
we will return with expanded awareness.
We’ll be here, more attentive, I think. Our hand
will be more delicate in the doing of life.
Now that we know how sad it is
to stand one meter apart.
.
Read also: The Fever Room: Epidemics and Social Distancing in “Bleak House” and “Jane Eyre” and The New Silences of Rome Under Quarantine
.
Consider yourself lucky not to be isolating with W.H. Auden, incorrigibly messy roommate. | The Paris Review.

The Days to Come

Medora C. Addison

“The Days to Come” originally appeared in
Dreams and A Sword (Yale University Press, 1922)

Now shall I store my soul with silent beauty, 
     Beauty of drifting clouds and mountain heights, 
Beauty of sun-splashed hills and shadowed forests, 
     Beauty of dawn and dusk and star-swept nights. 
.
Now shall I fill my heart with quiet music, 
    Song of the wind across the pine-clad hill, 
Song of the rain and, fairer than all music, 
    Call of the thrush when twilight woods are still. 
.
So shall the days to come be filled with beauty, 
     Bright with the promise caught from eastern skies; 
So shall I see the stars when night is darkest, 
     Still hear the thrush’s song when music dies.

Alone

Maya Angelou

From:

Lying, thinking
Last night
How to find my soul a home
Where water is not thirsty
And bread loaf is not stone
I came up with one thing
And I don’t believe I’m wrong
That nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
.
There are some millionaires
With money they can’t use
Their wives run round like banshees
Their children sing the blues
They’ve got expensive doctors
To cure their hearts of stone.
But nobody
No, nobody
Can make it out here alone.
.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.
.
Now if you listen closely
I’ll tell you what I know
Storm clouds are gathering
The wind is gonna blow
The race of man is suffering
And I can hear the moan,
‘Cause nobody,
But nobody
Can make it out here alone.
.
Alone, all alone
Nobody, but nobody
Can make it out here alone.

POETRY AND PROTEST: 6 POETS WHO ARE LITERARY ACTIVISTS

by Thea Voutiritsas

From civil rights to women’s liberation to Black Lives Matter, poetry has been a way to rail against complacency and oppression. These six poets—brave enough to share personal experiences, unpopular points of view, and lesser-known narratives—have shed light on the marginalized experience and ultimately defined poetic activism as we know it today.

Read the complete article

Read also Poems of Protest, Resistance, and Empowerment: Why poetry is necessary and sought after during crises.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

Ada Limón

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Jasmine

From (1997):
by Jane Hirshfield

Almost the twenty-first century” —

how quickly the thought will grow dated,

even quaint.

 

Our hopes, our future,

will pass like the hopes and futures of others.

 

And all our anxieties and terrors,

nights of sleeplessness,

griefs,

will appear then as they truly are —

 

Stumbling, delirious bees in the tea scent of jasmine.