Happy National Poetry Month!

[bironic]

Have a poem about writing.


Personal Helicon

for Michael Longley

As a child, they could not keep me from wells
And old pumps with buckets and windlasses.
I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells
Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss.

One, in a brickyard, with a rotted board top.
I savoured the rich crash when a bucket
Plummeted down at the end of a rope.
So deep you saw no reflection in it.

A shallow one under a dry stone ditch
Fructified like any aquarium.
When you dragged out long roots from the soft mulch
A white face hovered over the bottom.

Others had echoes, gave back your own call
With a clean new music in it. And one
Was scaresome, for there, out of ferns and tall
Foxgloves, a rat slapped across my reflection.

Now, to pry into roots, to finger slime,
To stare, big-eyed Narcissus, into some spring
Is beneath all adult dignity. I rhyme
To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

Seamus Heaney, Eleven Poems, 1965

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ETA: Oh! And everyone should go read catilinarian's gorgeous half-sestina, Holy Week. Gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous.

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Share a favorite of yours in comments?

Other links:

- "when faces called flowers float out of the ground" by ee cummings from musesfool
- "A Story That Could Be True" by William Stafford from pwcorgigirl
- "What is it to be human?" by Waldo Williams from nightdog_barks
- Excerpt from Milton's Paradise Lost from elynittria
- "Instructions" by Neil Gaiman from thewlisian_afer
- "West Wall" by W.S. Merwin from pwcorgigirl

Comments

[poorfrances.livejournal.com]

Heh, I posted this several days ago for no reason, might as well claim I knew it was poetry month! Losses (http://poorfrances.livejournal.com/96181.html) by Randall Jarrell.