Larry’s Pretty Good Journal

For Poetry Monday, another cat poem from Le Guin:

Black Leonard in Negative Space, Ursula K. Le Guin

All that surrounds the cat
is not the cat, is all
that is not the cat, is all,
is everything, except the animal.
It will rejoin without a seam
when he is dead. To know
that no-space is to know
what he does not, that time
is space for love and pain.
He does not need to know it.


--L.

Subject quote from The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

For Poetry Monday, more autumn from an early Modernist:

Leaves, Frederic Manning

A frail and tenuous mist lingers on baffled and intricate branches;
Little gilt leaves are still, for quietness holds every bough;
Pools in the muddy road slumber, reflecting indifferent stars;
Steeped in the loveliness of moonlight is earth, and the valleys,
Brimmed up with quiet shadow, with a mist of sleep.

But afar on the horizon rise great pulses of light,
The hammering of guns, wrestling, locked in conflict
Like brute, stone gods of old struggling confusedly;
Then overhead purrs a shell, and our heavies
Answer, with sudden clapping bruits of sound,
Loosening our shells that stream whining and whimpering precipitately,
Hounding through air athirst for blood.

And the little gilt leaves
Flicker in falling, like waifs and flakes of flame.


Manning (1882-1935) was an Australian-born writer best known for his WWI novels, but he was also a significant Imagist. This is from 1915.

---L.

Subject quote from In August, William Dean Howells.

For Poetry Monday:

The More Loving One, W.H. Auden

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well
That, for all they care, I can go to hell,
But on earth indifference is the least
We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn
With a passion for us we could not return?
If equal affection cannot be,
Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am
Of stars that do not give a damn,
I cannot, now I see them, say
I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,
I should learn to look at an empty sky
And feel its total dark sublime
Though this might take me a little time.


From his collection Homage to Clio.

---L.

Subject quote from “Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,” W.H. Auden.

For Poetry Monday:

War Is Kind, Stephen Crane

Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

    Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
    Little souls who thirst for fight,
    These men were born to drill and die.
    The unexplained glory flies above them,
    Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom—
    A field where a thousand corpses lie.

Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
Do not weep.
War is kind.

    Swift, blazing flag of the regiment,
    Eagle with crest of red and gold,
    These men were born to drill and die.
    Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
    Make plain to them the excellence of killing
    And a field where a thousand corpses lie.

Mother whose heart hung humble as a button
On the bright splendid shroud of your son,
Do not weep.
War is kind.


Crane knew how to write creepy af.

---L.

Subject quote from The Court of the Crimson King, King Crimson.

For Poetry Monday:

“I walked in a desert,” Stephen Crane

I walked in a desert.
And I cried,
“Ah, God, take me from this place!”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”
I cried, “Well, But—
The sand, the heat, the vacant horizon.”
A voice said, “It is no desert.”


From his 1895 collection The Black Rider & Other Lines, published when he was 23.

---L.

Subject quote from Sprawl II, Arcade Fire.

For Poetry Monday:

“This is the first thing,” Philip Larkin

This is the first thing
I have understood:
Time is the echo of an axe
Within a wood.


I assume he means both senses of wood.

---L.

Subject quote from I Can’t Stop Loving You, Ray Charles.

For Poetry Monday:

Down, Wanton, Down!, Robert Graves

Down, wanton, down! Have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love’s name,
Or Beauty’s, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?

Poor Bombard-captain, sworn to reach
The ravelin and effect a breach—
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So be that in the breach you die!

Love may be blind, but Love at least
Knows what is man and what mere beast;
Or Beauty wayward, but requires
More delicacy from her squires.

Tell me, my witless, whose one boast
Could be your staunchness at the post,
When were you made a man of parts
To think fine and profess the arts?

Will many-gifted Beauty come
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb,
Or Love swear loyalty to your crown?
Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down!


Graves (1895-1985) was a poet, novelist, and eccentric mythographer. This is from his collection Poems 1930-1933.

---L.

Subject quote from Forever, CHVRCHES.

For Poetry Monday:

Prayer (I), George Herbert

Prayer the church’s banquet, angel’s age,
God's breath in man returning to his birth,
The soul in paraphrase, heart in pilgrimage,
The Christian plummet sounding heav’n and earth
Engine against th’ Almighty, sinner’s tow’r,
Reversed thunder, Christ-side-piercing spear,
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
A kind of tune, which all things hear and fear;
Softness, and peace, and joy, and love, and bliss,
Exalted manna, gladness of the best,
Heaven in ordinary, man well drest,
The milky way, the bird of Paradise,
Church-bells beyond the stars heard, the soul’s blood,
The land of spices; something understood.


Sonnet the verbless vivid. Published in 1633 in The Temple, Herbert’s only collection, as just “Prayer,” the first of a couple poems with that title, thus the commonly added (I). That last semicolon (which in modern practice would probably be a colon) is pulling an amazing amount of weight.

---L.

Subject quote from Bridge Over Troubled Water, Simon & Garfunkel, which is just as much a hymn.

For Poetry Monday:

I Sit and Sew, Alice Dunbar Nelson

I sit and sew—a useless task it seems,
My hands grown tired, my head weighed down with dreams—
The panoply of war, the martial tread of men,
Grim-faced, stern-eyed, gazing beyond the ken
Of lesser souls, whose eyes have not seen Death,
Nor learned to hold their lives but as a breath—
But—I must sit and sew.

I sit and sew—my heart aches with desire—
That pageant terrible, that fiercely pouring fire
On wasted fields, and writhing grotesque things
Once men. My soul in pity flings
Appealing cries, yearning only to go
There in that holocaust of hell, those fields of woe—
But—I must sit and sew.

The little useless seam, the idle patch;
Why dream I here beneath my homely thatch,
When there they lie in sodden mud and rain,
Pitifully calling me, the quick ones and the slain?
You need me, Christ! It is no roseate dream
That beckons me—this pretty futile seam,
It stifles me—God, must I sit and sew?


Alice Ruth Moore was born in 1875 in New Orleans to mixed-race parents, and is better known today as a journalist and activist than for her poetry and fiction, or for that matter for being a teacher. Her first husband was poet and novelist Paul Lawrence Dunbar (married 1898-1906, when he died, though she left him in 1902 for being abusive) and her third was journalist and activist Robert J. Nelson (married 1914-1935, when she died).

---L.

Subject quote from War Pigs, Black Sabbath.

For Poetry Monday:

Betrayed, Labi Siffre

To despise your government
To distrust your government
To be unable to respect your government
To know the leader of your country has contempt
for the people of your country
To be angered
not because it’s “Not in my name”
but because it IS in my name


Siffre is a British singer and songwriter who posted this on his blog on 7 Mar 2022 .

---L.

Subject quote from Rhythm Nation, Janet Jackson. Both song and video slap hard.