High Flight, a poem by John Gillespie Magee.

Post 634 - John Gillespie Magee, Jr. (1922 – 1941) was an American aviator and poet who died at the age of 19 as a result of a mid-air collision over Lincolnshire during World War II. He was serving in the Royal Canadian Air Force, which he joined before the United States officially entered the war. I came across this poem last night while watching a lovely Canadian film, The Snow Walker, where it was recited in its entirety by James Cromwell.
It put me in mind of those 30 brave young Americans who lost their lives fighting on our behalf when their helicopter was shot down last week in Afghanistan. May they rest in peace.

High Flight by Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings;
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds - and done a hundred things

You have not dreamed of - wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up the long delirious, burning blue,
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, or even eagle flew -
And, while with silent lifting mind I've trod
The high unsurpassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand and touched the face of God.

In Millstreet Hospital, a poem by Bernard O'Donoghue.

Post 633 - Bernard O'Donoghue was born in Cullen, County Cork, in 1945, later moving to Manchester. He studied Medieval English at Oxford University, where he's a teacher and Fellow in English at Wadham College. He's the author of Seamus Heaney and the Language of Poetry (1995). His poetry collections are Poaching Rights (1987); The Weakness (1991); Gunpowder (1995), winner of the 1995 Whitbread Poetry Award; Here Nor There (1999); and Outliving (2003). His work of verse translation, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, was published in 2006 and a Selected Poems in 2008.
Bernard O'Donoghue received a Cholmondeley Award in 2009. His most recent poetry collection is Farmers Cross (2011).


In Millstreet Hospital by Bernard O'Donoghue.

My cousin, they tell me, doesn't wake up much,
nor does she seem to see the green mountain

framed in the window of this chapel of ease
for travellers booked in for their long pilgrimage.
When I leave at the end of visiting-hours
a small, tidy man is sitting by the door:
stick, well-knotted tie, watch-chain, tweed jacket.
He gets to his feet, raises his hat and enquires:
'Excuse my troubling you, but would you be
going anywhere near a railway station?'
The young smiling nurse bends over him,
and takes him by the elbow, saying:
'Maybe tomorrow, James. Maybe tomorrow
we'll take you to the station.'

What to Remember When Waking, a poem by David Whyte.

Post 632 - The celebrated writer and teacher David Whyte explores the cyclical, conversational nature of reality and the disciplines that allow us to create an identity robust enough to meet its gifts and demands. An inspiring poem.....

What to Remember When Waking by David Whyte.

In that first hardly noticed moment in which you wake,
coming back to this life from the other,
more secret, movable and frighteningly honest world
where everything began,
there is a small opening into the new day
which closes the moment you begin your plans.

What you can plan is too small for you to live.

What you can live wholeheartedly
will make plans enough for the vitality
hidden in your sleep.

To be human is to become visible
while carrying what is hidden
as a gift to others.

To remember the other world in this world
is to live in your true inheritance.

You are not a trouble guest on this earth,
you are not an accident amidst other accidents.
You were invited from another and greater night
than the one from which you have just emerged.

Now looking through
the slanting light of the morning window
toward the mountain presence
of everything that can be,
what urgency calls you to your one love?
What shape waits in the seed of you
to grow and spread its branches
against a future sky?

Is it waiting in the fertile sea?
In the trees beyond the house?
In the life you can imagine for yourself?
In the open and lovely
white page on the waiting desk?

The Mad Cow Talks Back, a poem by Jo Shapcott.

Post 622 - Jo Shapcott FRSL, (born March 1953, London) is an English poet, editor and lecturer who’s won the National Poetry Competition, the Commonwealth Poetry Prize, the Costa Book of the Year Award, a Forward Poetry Prize and the Cholmondeley Award. She’s Professor of Creative Writing at Royal Holloway College, University of London, and is the current President of The Poetry Society.
But if it hadn't been for "the intervention of really important teachers" in her life, she might well have ended up not in poetry, but in synchronized swimming. She started writing stories and poems as a child, at a time when "playing with the language" is "almost like Plasticene or mud or clay." When her focus shifted, first to synchronized swimming and then to boys and dancing, good teachers kept bringing her back to poetry and "chance and luck" kept her on track. She read English at Trinity College, Dublin and at Oxford, came to America to do a PhD on Elizabeth Bishop and started attending writing workshops. One of these was taught by Seamus Heaney. Shapcott was hooked and "poetry won, the PhD lost." She’s highly engaging as a poet, luminously intelligent as a critic, anthologist and broadcaster, and a widely admired and influential figure in British poetry today.

The following poem first appeared as the concluding sequence of Phrase Book (1992), a brilliantly imaginative response to the-then crisis over Mad Cow Disease.

The Mad Cow Talks Back by Jo Shapcott.

I'm not mad. It just seems that way
because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.

I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I'm a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It's risky when
you're good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there's the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it's glorious
because it's always when you're travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain's like
the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go.

Some Kiss We Want, a poem by Rumi.

Post 621 - Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī, also known as Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Rūmī, but known to the English-speaking world simply as Rumi, was a 13th-century Persian Muslim poet, jurist, theologian, and Sufi mystic (September 1207 – December 1273). Rūmī is a descriptive name meaning "the Roman" since he lived most of his life in an area called Rūm (then under the control of Seljuq dynasty) because it was once ruled by the Eastern Roman Empire. He was actually born in Afghanistan. Following his death, his followers founded the Mawlawīyah Sufi Order, also known as the Order of the Whirling Dervishes, famous for its Sufi dance known as the samāʿ ceremony.
Although a number of major Islamic poets easily rival the likes of Dante, Shakespeare and Milton in importance and output, they still enjoy only a marginal literary fame in the West because the works of Arabic and Persian thinkers, writers and poets are considered as mere sideshows beside the grand narrative of Western literature. Rumi's poems have been widely translated into many of the world's languages and transposed into various formats. In 2007, he was described as the "most popular poet in America."

Some Kiss We Want by Rumi.

There is some kiss we want with
our whole lives, the touch of

spirit on the body. Seawater
begs the pearl to break its shell.

And the lily, how passionately
it needs some wild darling! At

night, I open the window and ask
the moon to come and press its

face against mine. Breathe into
me. Close the language-door and

open the love window. The moon
won't use the door, only the window.

Advice to a Poet, a poem by Patrick Galvin.

Post 620 - Patrick Galvin, one of the leading Irish poets and dramatists of his generation, was born in Cork City in 1927 and died recently in May 2011. He was the son of Patrick Galvin, a docker and a leading local boxer, a colorful character who had fought Jack Dempsey. Paddy was one of 12 children who grew up in a tough, militant environment, and he left school at 12 to become a delivery boy. After he ran away to join the Foreign Legion, he joined the RAF in 1942 and fought in Libya and Palestine. He worked for the Irish Times as a war correspondent in Korea, and then became part of the group around Brendan Behan who were to do so much to revitalize Irish, then English drama. He disliked the new suburban middle class in Ireland and in his poetry and his plays, he held an uncomfortable mirror up to his fellow countrymen. He loved the public role of the disorderly poet, but played it creatively, without falling into the self-destructive booziness of Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas. He renewed himself by periodic disappearances into the Munster countryside, the most productive of which was a sojourn with the tinkers wandering around Waterford and Kerry. In his last years, he spent much of his time in Belfast as resident dramatist at the Lyric Theatre.

Advice to a Poet by Patrick Galvin.

Be a chauffeur, my father said
And never mind the poetry.
That’s all very well for the rich
They can afford it.
What you need is money in your belt
Free uniform and plenty of travel.
Besides that, there’s nothing in verse.
And all poets are raging homosexuals.

I’d still like to be a poet

Another thing: don’t ever marry
And if you do, then marry for cash.
Love, after all, is easily come by
And any old whore will dance for a pound.
Take my advice and be a chauffeur
The uniform will suit you a treat
Marriage and poems will blind you surely
And poets and lovers are doomed to hell.

I’d still like to be a poet

But where’s the sense in writing poetry?
Did any poet ever make good?
I never met one who wasn’t a pauper
A prey to bailiffs, lawyers and priests.
Take my advice and be a chauffeur
With your appearance you’re bound to do well
You might even meet some rich old widow
Who’ll leave you a fortune the moment she dies.

I’d still like to be a poet

Well, blast you then, your days are darkened
Poverty, misery, carnage and sin.
The poems you’ll write won’t be worth a penny.
And the women you marry will bleed you to death.
Take my advice and buy a revolver
Shoot yourself now in the back of the head.
The Government then might raise a subscription
To keep your poor father from breeding again.

“El Siete Mares,” a poem by Bradley Paul.

Post 619 - Bradley Paul was born in Baltimore in 1972. A graduate of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, his poems have appeared in American Poetry Review, Pleiades, Smartish Pace, Boston Review, and other journals. His first book of poetry, The Obvious, was selected by Brenda Hillman for the 2004 New Issues Poetry Prize, and his second book of poetry, The Animals All Are Gathering, won the 2009 AWP Donald Hall Prize in Poetry. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, the painter and writer Karri Paul, and their dog, Violet.

“El Siete Mares” by Bradley Paul.

Not Los Siete Mares.
Though there are seven seas
there is only one restaurant.
Octopus with Veracruz sauce.
Pulpo.
Like pulp? Like from a tree?
Beaten and bleached into paper?
But what comes is not pulpo.
Nor is it takonigiri,
white ellipse with a purple edge
and wrapped with a green-black band,
pretty shapes and colors.
Nor meunière nor paillard nor confit.
They grabbed an octopus from the tank
and chopped it up and got it hot
and here in a mound on a plate
is a hot chopped up octopus.
There is saltwater still in its flesh.
My wife meanwhile
orders fried catfish,
which is a catfish thrown whole into oil
and brought out to stare at her.
Which is not how they do it
in Tennessee.
Can’t pretend now, friend.
You know you’re eating me.

Bradley Paul explains, "One day, I ate at El Siete Mares, a family-owned place down on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, and the scene described above took place. My wife grew up in Tennessee, and fried catfish there means a filet of catfish, breaded and fried in oil. The final product doesn’t even look like a fish. But the fried catfish at El Siete Mares is quite literally a catfish thrown whole into oil. When it’s brought out, it has a horrifying look on its face. The abstraction is gone; there’s no illusion that you’re eating something other than an animal that was alive a few minutes earlier and was then fried to death. It’s not a totally new experience — I grew up in Baltimore, so I’ve watched my fair share of live blue crabs go into a pot and come out a few minutes later with their eyes still in place, only red and covered in Old Bay (hell for them; heaven for me). In this instance, however, I think I was expecting one thing, while another, more scary thing arrived on my plate. Out of that jarring experience came this poem. Maybe that’s where all poems come from."