Today's post concludes the series

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Small Boy 

Norman Maccaig

He picked up a pebble

and threw it into the sea.

And another, and another.

He couldn’t stop.

He wasn’t trying to fill the sea.

He wasn’t trying to empty the beach.

He was just throwing away,

nothing else but.

Like a kitten playing

he was practicing for the future

when there’ll be so many things

he’ll want to throw away

if only his fingers will unclench

and let them go.

-o0o-

Now I Become Myself

May Sarton 

Now I become myself. It's taken

Time, many years and places;

I have been dissolved and shaken,

Worn other people's faces,

Run madly, as if Time were there,

Terribly old, crying a warning,

"Hurry, you will be dead before - "

(What? Before you reach the morning?

Or the end of the poem is clear?

Or love safe in the walled city?)

Now to stand still, to be here,

Feel my own weight and density!

The black shadow on the paper

Is my hand; the shadow of a word

As thought shapes the shaper

Falls heavy on the page, is heard.

All fuses now, falls into place

From wish to action, word to silence,

My work, my love, my time, my face

Gathered into one intense

Gesture of growing like a plant.

As slowly as the ripening fruit

Fertile, detached, and always spent,

Falls but does not exhaust the root,

So all the poem is, can give,

Grows in me to become the song,

Made so and rooted by love.

Now there is time and Time is young.

O, in this single hour I live

All of myself and do not move.

I, the pursued, who madly ran,

Stand still, stand still, and stop the sun!

-o0o-

In The Queue In The Waitrose Café, I Meet My Love

Liz Lefroy

The man next to me in the queue is gorgeous.

It starts with him telling me I’ve dropped my pen,

and I pick it up, though it’s not mine.

I’m almost sure he knew that anyway,

so we talk about pens and dropping things.

I ask for a cappuccino, and we’re on to poetry.

As the milk is frothed he says for him

it’s about what rhymes with daffodils.

I tell him about my rhyming dictionary.

He says, So you’re a clever girl then!

I smile, say, No, then, Yes, to chocolate.

We laugh as I hand over a five pound note.

If I were fifty years younger, I’d fall in love with you.

He says this as I hold out my hand for change -

all this in minutes, and I already love him.

He’s eighty-five, but I won’t believe it.

He looks at me from the corner of his eye,

gives a nod of knowing, asks for two cups of tea,

hooks his stick over his arm to pay.

I say, Lovely to meet you, walk to a table

past a woman who is smaller than him,

creased into a chair and wearing pink socks.

I look up at them from time to time.

I see their silence.  It’s just been a long time.

It’s been a long, long time. 

-o0o-

After the Sea-Ship

 Walt Whitman 

After the Sea-Ship - after the whistling winds;  

After the white-grey sails, taut to their spars and ropes,  

Below, a myriad, myriad waves, hastening, lifting up their necks, 

Tending in ceaseless flow toward the track of the ship:  

Waves of the ocean, bubbling and gurgling, blithely prying,          

Waves, undulating waves - liquid, uneven, emulous waves,  

Toward that whirling current, laughing and buoyant, with curves,

Where the great Vessel, sailing and tacking, displaced the surface;  

Larger and smaller waves, in the spread of the ocean, yearnfully flowing;  

The wake of the Sea-Ship, after she passes - flashing and frolicsome, under the sun,   

A motley procession, with many a fleck of foam, and many fragments,  

Following the stately and rapid Ship - in the wake following.

-o0o-

The new series of
My Choice My Delight
began today
mychoicemydelight.blogspot.com

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Tomorrow

Dennis O'Driscoll

I

                       

Tomorrow I will start to be happy.

The morning will light up like a celebratory cigar.

Sunbeams sprawling on the lawn will set

dew sparkling like a cut-glass tumbler of champagne.

Today will end the worst phase of my life.

I will put my shapeless days behind me,

fencing off the past, as a golden rind

of sand parts slipshod sea from solid land.

It is tomorrow I want to look back on, not today.

Tomorrow I start to be happy; today is almost yesterday.

II

 Australia, how wise you are to get the day

over and done with first, out of the way.

You have eaten the fruit of knowledge, while

we are dithering about which main course to choose.

How liberated you must feel, how free from doubt:

the rise and fall of stocks, today’s closing prices

are revealed to you before our bidding has begun.

Australia, you can gather in your accident statistics

like a harvest while our roads still have hours to kill.

When we are in the dark, you have sagely seen the light.

III

Cagily, presumptuously, I dare to write 2018.

A date without character or tone. 2018.

A year without interest rates or mean daily temperature.

Its hit songs have yet to be written, its new-year

babies yet to be induced, its truces to be signed.

Much too far off for prophecy, though one hazards

a tentative guess - a so-so year most likely,

vague in retrospect, fizzling out with the usual

end-of-season sales; everything slashed:

your last chance to salvage something of its style.

-o0o-

The Guest House

Jalaluddin Rumi

Translated by Coleman Barks

This being human is a guest house.

Every morning a new arrival.

A joy, a depression, a meanness, 

some momentary awareness comes 

as an unexpected visitor.

Welcome and entertain them all!

Even if they’re a crowd of sorrows,

who violently sweep your house

empty of its furniture,

still, treat each guest honourably.

He may be clearing you out

for some new delight.

The dark thought, the shame, the malice,

meet them at the door laughing,

and invite them in.

Be grateful for whoever comes,

because each has been sent

as a guide from beyond.

-o0o-

The Seven Ages of Man

William Skakespeare

from As You Like It  Act2 SceneVII

All the world's a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse's arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress' eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon's mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

-o0o-