This Old Bank Of Sand is a weekly poem feed. Add your email address to the Follow by Email link on the right and you will receive one poem a week (usually on Monday morning). If you have suggestions for poems or poets, or any other suggestions, please use the comments facility at the bottom of each poem (public), or email them to thisoldbankofsand@gmail.com (private). To leave a public comment, click on the word comments which you can find just below each poem.

Sunday, April 29, 2012

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.

Monday, April 23, 2012

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.

Sunday, April 15, 2012

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.

Sunday, April 8, 2012

The Necklace by Osip Mandelstam translated from the Russian by Christian Wiman

Take, from my palms, for joy, for ease,
A little honey, a little sun,
That we may obey Persephone's bees.
You can't untie a boat unmoored.
Fur-shod shadows can't be heard,
Nor terror, in this life, mastered.
Love, what's left for us, and of us, is this
Living remnant, loving revenant, brief kiss
Like a bee flying completed dying hiveless
To find in the forest's heart a home,
Night's never-ending hum,
Thriving on meadowsweet, mint, and time.
Take, for all that is good, for all that is gone,
That it may lie rough and real against your collarbone,
This string of bees, that once turned honey into sun.
(NOVEMBER 1920)


If you enjoyed last week's poem - Galway by Chris Jones - you can find out more about Chris Jones at http://www.chris-jones.org.uk.


Sunday, April 1, 2012

Galway by Chris Jones


Leaving Galway we drove out west
on roads like little twisters for the tongue,
stalling at junctions where we had to guess,
until, inevitably, I guessed wrong –
stopped dead, in rain, at the end of Europe,
the rock-pool farms of low walls and cold fish.
We had a map, a bar of chocolate,
and Hartnett's Farewell to English
to guard against the sky's upturned suitcase,
and you to drive me back to coral beach,
where creatures have a billion years of grace,
the light of shrunken suns within our reach.
Returning to the spartan, hostel room
we hung our clothes up, made it home.