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-

Be Drunk 

Charles Baudilaire

You have to be always drunk. That's all there is to it - it's the 

only way. So as not to feel the horrible burden of time that breaks 

your back and bends you to the earth, you have to be continually 

drunk.

But on what? Wine, poetry or virtue, as you wish. But be 

drunk.

And if sometimes, on the steps of a palace or the green grass of 

a ditch, in the mournful solitude of your room, you wake again, 

drunkenness already diminishing or gone, ask the wind, the wave, 

the star, the bird, the clock, everything that is flying, everything 

that is groaning, everything that is rolling, everything that is 

singing, everything that is speaking. . . ask what time it is and 

wind, wave, star, bird, clock will answer you:

"It is time to be 

drunk! So as not to be the martyred slaves of time, be drunk, be

continually drunk! On wine, on poetry or on virtue as you wish."

-o0o-

A new series of My Choice My Delight begins on Tuesday 12th June and then will be updated every Friday and Tuesday
mychoicemydelight.blogspot.com

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After Three Years

Paul Verlaine

Translation from French by A.S. Kline

Opening the narrow rickety gate,

I went for a walk in the little garden,

All lit up by that gentle morning sun,

Starring each flower with watery light.

Nothing was changed. Again: the humble arbour

With wild vines and chairs made of rattan…

The fountain as ever in its silvery pattern,

And the old aspen with its eternal murmur.

The roses as then still trembled, and as then

The tall proud lilies rocked in the wind.

I knew every lark there, coming and going.

I found the Veleda statue standing yet,

At the end of the avenue its plaster flaking,

– Weathered, among bland scents of mignonette.

-o0o-

Love after Love

Derek Walcott

The time will come 

when, with elation 

you will greet yourself arriving 

at your own door, in your own mirror 

and each will smile at the other's welcome, 

and say, sit here. Eat. 

You will love again the stranger who was your self. 

Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart 

to itself, to the stranger who has loved you 

all your life, whom you ignored 

for another, who knows you by heart. 

Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, 

the photographs, the desperate notes, 

peel your own image from the mirror. 

Sit. Feast on your life.

-o0o-

The Word

Tony Hoagland

Down near the bottom

of the crossed-out list

of things you have to do today,

between “green thread”

and “broccoli” you find

that you have penciled “sunlight.”

Resting on the page, the word

is as beautiful, it touches you

as if you had a friend

and sunlight were a present

he had sent you from some place distant

as this morning -  to cheer you up,

and to remind you that,

among your duties, pleasure

is a thing,

that also needs accomplishing

Do you remember?

that time and light are kinds

of love, and love

is no less practical

than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tyre?

Tomorrow you may be utterly

without a clue

but today you get a telegram,

from the heart in exile

proclaiming that the kingdom

still exists,

the king and queen alive,

still speaking to their children,

– to any one among them

who can find the time,

to sit out in the sun and listen.

-o0o-

 A Journey

Edward Field

When he got up that morning everything was different:

He enjoyed the bright spring day

But he did not realize it exactly, he just enjoyed it.

And walking down the street to the railroad station

Past magnolia trees with dying flowers like old socks 

It was a long time since he had breathed so simply.

Tears filled his eyes and it felt good

But he held them back

Because men didn't walk around crying in that town.

Waiting on the platform at the station

The fear came over him of something terrible about to happen:

The train was late and he recited the alphabet to keep hold.

And in its time it came screeching in

And as it went on making its usual stops,

People coming and going, telephone poles passing,

He hid his head behind a newspaper

No longer able to hold back the sobs, and willed his eyes

To follow the rational weavings of the seat fabric.

He didn't do anything violent as he had imagined.

He cried for a long time, but when he finally quieted down

A place in him that had been closed like a fist was open,

And at the end of the ride he stood up and got off that train:

And through the streets and in all the places he lived in later on

He walked, himself at last, a man among men,

With such radiance that everyone looked up and wondered.

-o0o-

The Quality of Mercy

[Portia's speech in The Merchant of Venice]

William Shakespeare

The quality of mercy is not strained.

It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven

Upon the place beneath. It is twice blessed:

It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.

'Tis mightiest in the mightiest. It becomes

The thronèd monarch better than his crown.

His scepter shows the force of temporal power,

The attribute to awe and majesty

Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings,

But mercy is above this sceptered sway.

It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings.

It is an attribute to God himself.

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s

When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew, Though justice be thy plea, consider this -

That in the course of justice none of us

Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much

To mitigate the justice of thy plea,

Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice

Must needs give sentence 'gainst the merchant there.

-o0o-

Warning

Jenny Joseph

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn't go, and doesn't suit me.

And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves

And satin sandals, and say we've no money for butter.

I shall sit down on the pavement when I'm tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings

And make up for the sobriety of my youth.

I shall go out in my slippers in the rain

And pick flowers in other people's gardens

And learn to spit.

You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat

And eat three pounds of sausages at a go

Or only bread and pickle for a week

And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.

But now we must have clothes that keep us dry

And pay our rent and not swear in the street

And set a good example for the children.

We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.

But maybe I ought to practice a little now?

So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised

When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.

-o0o-

You and Your Whole Race

Langston  Hughes

You and your whole race.

Look down upon the town in which you live

And be ashamed.

Look down upon white folks   

And upon yourselves   

And be ashamed

That such supine poverty exists there,

That such stupid ignorance breeds children there

Behind such humble shelters of despair—

That you yourselves have not the sense to care

Nor the manhood to stand up and say

I dare you to come one step nearer, evil world,

With your hands of greed seeking to touch my throat, I dare you to come one step nearer me:

When you can say that

 you will be free!

-o0o-

What's Left

(for Peter Hennessy)

Kerry Hardie

I used to wait for the flowers,

my pleasure reposed on them.

Now I like plants before they get to the blossom.

Leafy ones - foxgloves, comfrey, delphiniums - 

fleshy tiers of strong leaves pushing up

into air grown daily lighter and more sheened

with bright dust like the eyeshadow

that tall young woman in the bookshop wears,

its shimmer and crumble on her white lids.

The washing sways on the line, the sparrows pull

at the heaps of drying weeds that I’ve left around.

Perhaps this is middle age. Untidy, unfinished,

knowing there’ll never be time now to finish,

liking the plants - their strong lives -

not caring about flowers, sitting in weeds

to write things down, look at things,

watching the sway of shirts on the line,

the cloth filtering light.

I know more or less

how to live through my life now.

But I want to know how to live what’s left 

with my eyes open and my hands open;

I want to stand at the door in the rain

listening, sniffing, gaping.

Fearful and joyous,

like an idiot before God.

-o0o-