Poem: Long Live the Weeds

Long live the weeds that overwhelm
My narrow vegetable realm !—
The bitter rock, the barren soil
That force the son of man to toil;
All things unholy, marked by curse,
The ugly of the universe.
The rough, the wicked, and the wild
That keep the spirit undefiled.
With these I match my little wit
And earn the right to stand or sit.
Hope, look, create, or drink and die:
These shape the creature that is I.

                        Theodore Roethke 

What it means to be free

One of the meanings of human existence –
    The source of human freedom –
        Is never to accept anything as
            Definitive, untouchable, obvious, or immobile.

                    Michel Foucault, 1980 interview UC Berkeley

 

 

 

 

 

Poem: Requiem for the Croppies

The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley... 

No kitchens on the run, no striking camp...
We moved quick and sudden in our own country.
The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.
A people hardly marching... on the hike...
We found new tactics happening each day:
We'd cut through reins and rider with the pike
And stampede cattle into infantry,
Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.
Until... on Vinegar Hill... the final conclave.
Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.
The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.
They buried us without shroud or coffin
And in August... the barley grew up out of our grave.

                                    Seamus Heaney

Pyre in County Antrim ready to become a bonfire on the evening of July 11

Elvis has left the building

Who in Ireland could have too much respect for organized religion?
    We've seen it tear our country in two.
        My mother was a Protestant. My father was a Catholic.
            And I learned that religion is often the enemy of God, actually.

Religion is the artifice,
    you know, the building, after God has left it sometimes,
            like Elvis has left the building.

You hold onto religion,
    you know, rules, regulations, traditions.

I think what God is interested in is people's hearts,
        and that's hard enough.

                                        Bono, Larry King interview, 2002 

Poem: The Botticellian Trees

The alphabet of
the trees

is fading in the
song of the leaves

the crossing
bars of the thin

letters that spelled
winter

and the cold
have been illumined

with
pointed green

by the rain and sun
the strict simple

principles of
straight branches

are being modified
by pinched out

ifs of color, devout
conditions

the smiles of love

. . . . . . . .

until the stript
sentences

move as a woman’s
limbs under cloth

and praise from secrecy
quick with desire

love’s ascendancy
in summer–

In summer the song
sings itself

above the muffled words–

            William Carlos Williams 

 

 

 

 

 

Thinking and acting

I would say
    act like a man of thought
        and think like a man of action.

Henri Bergson, 1937 Speech at the Descartes Conference in Paris