Those Who Do Not Dance, a poem by Gabriela Mistral.

Post 601 - Gabriela Mistral was born in Vicuña, Chile, in 1889, but was raised in the small Andean village of Montegrande, where she attended the Primary school taught by her older sister, Emelina Molina. In December 22, 1914, Mistral was awarded first prize in a national literary contest Juegos Florales in Santiago, with the work Sonetos de la Muerte (Sonnets of Death). She had been using the pen name Gabriela Mistral since June 1908 for much of her writing. After winning the Juegos Florales she infrequently used her given name of Lucila Godoy for her publications. She formed her pseudonym from the two of her favorite poets, Gabriele D'Annunzio and Frédéric Mistral or, as another story has it, from a composite of the Archangel Gabriel and the Mistral wind of Provence. She taught elementary and secondary school for many years until her poetry made her famous. She played an important role in the educational systems of Mexico and Chile, was active in cultural committees of the League of Nations, and was Chilean consul in Naples, Madrid, and Lisbon. She held honorary degrees from the Universities of Florence and Guatemala and was an honorary member of various cultural societies in Chile as well as in the United States, Spain, and Cuba. She taught Spanish literature in the United States at Columbia University, Middlebury College, Vassar College, and at the University of Puerto Rico.
In her later years, poor health slowed her traveling and during the last years of her life she made her home in Roslyn, New York; in early January of 1957 she transferred to Hempstead, New York, where she died from pancreatic cancer on January 10, 1957, aged 67. Her remains were returned to Chile nine days later. The Chilean government declared three days of national mourning, and hundreds of thousands of Chileans came to pay her their respects.


Those Who Do Not Dance by Gabriela Mistral.


A crippled child
Said, “How shall I dance?”
Let your heart dance
We said.

Then the invalid said:
“How shall I sing?”
Let your heart sing
We said

Then spoke the poor dead thistle,
But I, how shall I dance?”
Let your heart fly to the wind
We said.

Then God spoke from above
“How shall I descend from the blue?”
Come dance for us here in the light
We said.

All the valley is dancing
Together under the sun,
And the heart of him who joins us not
Is turned to dust, to dust.

Father’s Day, a poem by James Tate.

Post 600 - Six hundred entries, another minor milestone achieved. Someone emailed me today and asked me if I liked my work. The answer was yes, very much, especially since I stopped working for a living. James Tate would understand this. In a 1998 interview, he pointed to one unifying element in his work: “My characters usually are — or, I’d say most often, I don’t want to generalize too much — but most often they’re ... trying to find some kind of life.” Today, I feel I have more freedom to explore and find the more satisfying aspects of life. I like writing and exploring poetry better than anything I've found so far.

Father’s Day by James Tate.

My daughter has lived overseas for a number
of years now. She married into royalty, and they
won't let her communicate with any of her family or
friends. She lives on birdseed and a few sips
of water. She dreams of me constantly. Her husband,
the Prince, whips her when he catches her dreaming.
Fierce guard dogs won't let her out of their sight.
I hired a detective, but he was killed trying to
rescue her. I have written hundreds of letters
to the State Department. They have written back
saying that they are aware of the situation. I
never saw her dance. I was always at some
convention. I never saw her sing. I was always
working late. I called her My Princess, to make
up for my shortcomings, and she never forgave me.
Birdseed was her middle name.

Meditations on Saint Patrick, a poem by John Cotter.

Post 599 - When my kids first went away to college, I used to send them a poem a week, reflecting on life at home and sharing some thoughts about appropriate behavior when living away from home for the first time. Here is a composition that I sent off in 1991. Since we're rapidly coming up on Saint Patrick's day, there's no time like the present to send it out again.

Meditations on Saint Patrick by John Cotter.

Saint Patrick was a normal guy
A bit like me and you,
And he ended up in Ireland
In the year four thirty two.

He was hung-up on religion
From the stories I hear tell,
‘Cause he didn’t want the Irish,
When they died, to go to hell.

So, he traveled through the countryside
Converting all the kings.
To hear the places that he went,
I’m sure the man had wings.

He loved the birds and animals
But snakes he couldn’t stand,
So he prayed to God to take them,
And they exited the land.

Please remember this, your heritage,
When March hits seventeen.
Celebrate the fact you’re Irish,
And dress up in something green.

First Child ... Second Child, a poem by Ogden Nash.

Post 598 - Ogden Nash was born in 1902 in Rye, New York, and educated at St. George's School in Rhode Island and, briefly, at Harvard University. His first job was writing advertising copy for Doubleday, Page Publishing in 1925 and he published his first collection of poems in 1931. He joined the staff at the New Yorker in 1932 and quickly established himself as a very popular writer of light and funny verse. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1950. His principal home was in Baltimore, Maryland, where he died in 1971. His one-line observations are still often quoted - two examples are;
“People who work sitting down get paid more than people who work standing up,” and “Progress might have been all right once, but it has gone on too long.”


First Child ... Second Child by Ogden Nash

FIRST

Be it a girl, or one of the boys,
It is scarlet all over its avoirdupois,
It is red, it is boiled; could the obstetrician
Have possibly been a lobstertrician?
His degrees and credentials were hunky-dory,
But how's for an infantile inventory?
Here's the prodigy, here's the miracle!
Whether its head is oval or spherical,
You rejoice to find it has only one,
Having dreaded a two-headed daughter or son;
Here's the phenomenon all complete,
It's got two hands, it's got two feet,
Only natural, but pleasing, because
For months you have dreamed of flippers or claws.
Furthermore, it is fully equipped:
Fingers and toes with nails are tipped;
It's even got eyes, and a mouth clear cut;
When the mouth comes open the eyes go shut,
When the eyes go shut, the breath is loosed
And the presence of lungs can be deduced.
Let the rockets flash and the cannon thunder,
This child is a marvel, a matchless wonder.
A staggering child, a child astounding,
Dazzling, diaperless, dumbfounding,
Stupendous, miraculous, unsurpassed,
A child to stagger and flabbergast,
Bright as a button, sharp as a thorn,
And the only perfect one ever born.


SECOND

Arrived this evening at half-past nine.
Everybody is doing fine.
Is it a boy, or quite the reverse?
You can call in the morning and ask the nurse.

Valentine, a poem by Carol Ann Duffy.

Post 597 - Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. She graduated with an honors degree in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1977 and now holds honorary doctorates from the University of Dundee, the University of Hull, the University of St Andrews and the University of Warwick. Duffy first reached a wide audience with The World's Wife (1999), a series of witty dramatic monologues spoken by women from fairy tales and myths, and the women usually air-brushed from history, such as Mrs. Midas and Mrs. Darwin. Duffy is also a playwright and her output has included a formidable amount of writing for children. She’s Professor of Contemporary Poetry at the Manchester Metropolitan University and Creative Director of the Manchester Writing School. She was awarded an OBE in 1995, and a CBE in 2002, and was appointed Britain's poet laureate in May 2009.

Duffy says of her poetry: "I like to use simple words but in a complicated way."


Valentine by Carol Ann Duffy.

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.
It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.
It promises light
Like the careful undressing of love.

Here.
It will blind you with tears
Like a lover.
It will make your reflection
A wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or a kissogram.

I give you an onion.
Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,
Possessive and faithful
As we are,
For as long as we are.

Take it.
Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding-ring,
If you like.
Lethal.
Its scent will cling to your fingers,
Cling to your knife.

A Ritual To Read To Each Other by William Stafford

Post 596 - William Edgar Stafford was born in Hutchinson, Kansas, on January 17, 1914, the eldest of three children. He graduated from the University of Kansas in 1937. In 1939 he enrolled at the University of Wisconsin to begin graduate studies in Economics, but by the next year he had returned to Kansas to earn his master's degree in English in 1947. In 1948 he moved to Oregon to teach at Lewis and Clark College. Though he traveled and read his poems widely, he taught at Lewis and Clark until his retirement in 1980. Stafford won the National Book Award in 1963 and went on to publish more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose. Among his many honors and awards were a Shelley Memorial Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Western States Lifetime Achievement Award in Poetry. In 1970, he was the Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (a position currently known as the Poet Laureate). He died at his home in Lake Oswego, Oregon, on August 28, 1993.
He believed that “A writer is not so much someone who has something to say as he is someone who has found a process that will bring about new things he would not have thought of if he had not started to say them.”


A Ritual To Read To Each Other by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.

For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty
to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider -
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give - yes or no, or maybe -
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.

For My Daughter, a poem by David Ignatow.

Post 595 - David Ignatow (1914 – 1997) was born in Brooklyn and spent most of his life in the New York City area. He was president of the Poetry Society of America from 1980 to 1984 and poet-in-residence at the Walt Whitman Birthplace Association in 1987. Mr. Ignatow's many honors include a Bollingen Prize, two Guggenheim fellowships, the John Steinbeck Award, and a National Institute of Arts and Letters award "for a lifetime of creative effort." He received the Shelley Memorial Award (1966), the Frost Medal (1992), and the William Carlos Williams Award (1997) of the Poetry Society of America.
He taught at the New School for Social Research, the University of Kentucky, the University of Kansas, Vassar College, York College of the City University of New York, New York University, and Columbia University.

Commenting on the life of the poet, he once observed, "There's a metaphysical loneliness. We all feel it. The burden of living one's own life is experiencing sensations that no one else can share. You take a step in a house, you start moving around the house, no one else moves with you. You're walking by yourself."


For My Daughter in Reply to a Question.

We're not going to die.
We'll find a way.
We'll breathe deeply
and eat carefully.
We'll think always on life.
There'll be no fading for you or for me.
We'll be the first
and we'll not laugh at ourselves ever
and your children will be my grandchildren.
Nothing will have changed
except by addition.
There'll never be another as you
and never another as I.
No one ever will confuse you
nor confuse me with another.
We will not be forgotten and passed over
and buried under the births and deaths to come.