Late Fragment – Raymond Carver

Late Fragment

And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.

Raymond Carver


This is the fourth and final poem from our guest editor.  He writes:  Raymond carver died relatively young of lung cancer. This very short poem says what was very important to him in his life – not wealth, or fame not even health, but to be beloved. I am extremely fortunate that I love and am beloved.

Song – William Wordsworth

Song

She dwelt among the untrodden ways
Beside the springs of Dove,
A Maid whom there were none to praise
And very few to love.
A Violet by a mossy stone
Half-hidden from the Eye!
- Fair, as a star when only one
Is shining in the sky!
She lived  unknown, and few could know
When Lucy ceased to be;
But she is in her Grave, and Oh!
The difference to me.

William Wordsworth


Our guest editor writes:  This poem is very simple but very powerful. It was especially important to me after the death of a much beloved member of our family. She may not have been very important to many people, may not even have been really noticed,  but when she was not there anymore – Oh! The difference to my wife and me.

Sonnet 29 – William Shakespeare

I must include something by William Shakespeare in my choice. This sonnet I find particularly moving. Sometimes, when I am feeling low, the last five lines become especially true and important.

Sonnet 29

When in disgrace with fortune and men's eyes,
I all alone beweep my outcast state,
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries,
And look upon myself and curse my fate,
wishing me like to one more rich in hope,
Featured like him, like him with friends possessed,
Desiring this man's art, and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy contented least;
Yet in these thoughts myself almost despising,
Haply I think on thee, and then my state,
Like to the lark at break of day arising
From sullen earth sings hymns at heaven's gate;
For thy sweet love remembered such wealth brings,
That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

 William Shakespeare

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer – John Keats

From time to time we have a guest editor.  The next four weeks’ poems are from our second guest editor, who has chosen to remain anonymous.  He writes:

 “I have enjoyed reading poems for years and have gained a lot from many of them. The poems I have chosen, which appear over the next four weeks, are very dear to me and express some of my important feelings perfectly.

 This is the first poem I really remember reading and the first, of very few, I have memorised. Particularly important to me are the last six lines. There have been a few occasions in my life when I felt I have seen a new planet and there have been two ‘Cortez moments’ when a really awesome, wonderful event has occurred."

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travelled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific - and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise -
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

 John Keats

Cut by Sylvia Plath For Susan O'Neill Roe

What a thrill--

My thumb instead of an onion,

The top quite gone

Except for a sort of a hinge

Of skin,

A flap like a hat,

Dead white.

Then that red plush.

Little pilgrim,

The Indian's axed your scalp.

Your turkey wattle

Carpet rolls

Straight from the heart.

I step on it,

Clutching my bottle

Of pink fizz.

A celebration, this is.

Out of a gap

A million soldiers run,

Redcoats, every one.

Whose side are they on?

O my

Homunculus, I am ill.

I have taken a pill to kill

The thin

Papery feeling.

Saboteur,

Kamikaze man –

The stain on your

Gauze Ku Klux Klan

Babushka

Darkens and tarnishes and when

The balled

Pulp of your heart

Confronts its small

Mill of silence

 How you jump --

Trepanned veteran,

Dirty girl,

Thumb stump.

Take the I Out by Sharon Olds

But I love the I, steel I-beam

that my father sold. They poured the pig iron

into the mold, and it fed out slowly,

a bending jelly in the bath, and it hardened,

Bessemer, blister, crucible, alloy, and he

marketed it, and bought bourbon, and Cream

of Wheat, its curl of butter right

in the middle of its forehead, he paid for our dresses

with his metal sweat, sweet in the morning

and sour in the evening. I love the I,

frail between its flitches, its hard ground

and hard sky, it soars between them

like the soul that rushes, back and forth,

between the mother and father. What if they had loved each other,

how would it have felt to be the strut

joining the floor and roof of the truss?

I have seen, on his shirt-cardboard, years

in her desk, the night they made me, the penciled

slope of her temperature rising, and on

the peak of the hill, first soldier to reach

the crest, the Roman numeral I--

I, I, I, I,

girders of identity, head on,

embedded in the poem. I love the I

for its premise of existence--our I--when I was

born, part gelid, I lay with you

on the cooling table, we were all there, a

forest of felled iron. The I is a pine,

resinous, flammable root to crown,

which throws its cones as far as it can in a fire.

For more Sharon Olds, go to  http://www.sharonolds.net.

A Week Later by Sharon Olds

A week later, I said to a friend: I don't

think I could ever write about it.

Maybe in a year I could write something.

There is something in me maybe someday

to be written; now it is folded, and folded,

and folded, like a note in school. And in my dream

someone was playing jacks, and in the air there was a

huge, thrown, tilted jack

on fire. And when I woke up, I found myself

counting the days since I had last seen

my husband-only two years, and some weeks,

and hours. We had signed the papers and come down to the

ground floor of the Chrysler Building,

the intact beauty of its lobby around us

like a king's tomb, on the ceiling the little

painted plane, in the mural, flying. And it

entered my strictured heart, this morning,

slightly, shyly as if warily,

untamed, a greater sense of the sweetness

and plenty of his ongoing life,

unknown to me, unseen by me,

unheard, untouched-but known, seen,

heard, touched. And it came to me,

for moments at a time, moment after moment,

to be glad for him that he is with the one

he feels was meant for him. And I thought of my

mother, minutes from her death, eighty-five

years from her birth, the almost warbler

bones of her shoulder under my hand, the

eggshell skull, as she lay in some peace

in the clean sheets, and I could tell her the best

of my poor, partial love, I could sing her

out with it, I saw the luck

and luxury of that hour.