Ukiah Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day
April 30, 2008

All the True Vows

David Whyte

All the true vows
are secret vows
the ones we speak out loud
are the ones we break.

There is only one life
you can call your own
and a thousand others
you can call by any name you want.

Hold to the truth you make
every day with your own body,
don't turn your face away.

Hold to your own truth
at the center of the image
you were born with.

Those who do not understand
their destiny will never understand
the friends they have made
nor the work they have chosen

nor the one life that waits
beyond all the others.

By the lake in the wood
in the shadows
you can
whisper that truth
to the quiet reflection
you see in the water.

Whatever you hear from
the water, remember,

it wants you to carry
the sound of its truth on your lips.

Remember,
in this place
no one can hear you

and out of the silence
you can make a promise
it will kill you to break,

that way you'll find
what is real and what is not.

I know what I am saying.
Time almost forsook me
and I looked again.

Seeing my reflection
I broke a promise
and spoke
for the first time
after all these years

in my own voice,

before it was too late
to turn my face again.

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 29, 2008

Katha Pollit

SMALL COMFORT

Coffee and cigarettes in a clean café,

forsythia lit like a damp match against

a thundery sky drunk on its own ozone,

the laundry cool and crisp and folded away

again in the lavender closet --- too late to find

comfort enough in such small daily moments

of beauty, renewal, calm, too late to imagine

people would rather be happy than suffering

and inflicting suffering. We’re near the end,

but oh, before the end, as the sparrows wing

each night to their secret nests in the elm’s green dome,

oh, let the last bus bring

lover to lover, let the starveling

dog turn the corner and lope suddenly,

miraculously, down its own street, home.

S

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month HAIKU of the Day April 26, 2008

REMINDER!!!! – 6^th Annual ukiaHaiku Festival Sunday, April 27 2-4 PM, Conference Center, dedicated this year to the memory of Ukiah Librarian, Dori Anderson

Keynote Speaker: Donna Kerr, Willits Librarian

CLASSICAL HAIKU MASTERS

Snow has melted

how happy they look –

the faces of stars

Issa

Autumn begins –

ocean and fields

all one green

Basho

Winter sun –

frozen on horseback

is my shadow

Buson

MODERN HAIKU

The Golden Gate

creaks

With sunset rust – Jack Kerouac

From across the lake,

Past the black winter trees,

Faint sounds of a flute. – Richard Wright

time out

the setting sun

takes center field – Peggy Lyles

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 25, 2008

Sonnet Week!

PABLO NERUDA (tr. by Ben Belitt)

XC

I dreamed that I died: that I felt the cold close to me;

and all that was left of my life was contained in your presence:

your mouth was the daylight and dark of my world,

your skin, the republic I shaped for myself with my kisses.

Straightway, the books of the world were all ended,

all friendships, all treasures restlessly cramming the vaults,

the diaphanous house that we built for a lifetime together –

all ceased to exist, till nothing remained but your eyes.

So long as we live, or as long as a lifetime’s vexation,

love is a breaker thrown high on the breakers’ successions;

but when death in its time chooses to pummel the doors –

there is only your face to fill up the vacancy,

only your clarity pressing back on the whole of non-being,

only your love, where the dark of the world closes in.

XC

Pensé morir, sentí de cerca el frío,

y de cuanto viví sólo a ti te dejaba:

tu boca era mi día y mi noche terrestres

y tu piel la república fundada por mis besos.

En ese instante se terminaron los libros,

la amistad, los tesoros sin tregua acumulados,

la casa transparente que tú y yo construímos:

todo dejó de ser, menos tus ojos.

Porque el amor, mientras la vida nos acosa,

es simplemente una ola alta sobre las olas,

pero ay cuando la muere viene a local la puerta

hay sólo tu mirada para tanto vacío,

sólo tu claridad para no seguir siendo,

sólo tu amor para cerrar la sombra.

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day
April 25, 2008

WILD GEESE

Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day

April 24, 2008

Introduction to Poetry

Billy Collins

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 24, 2008

Sonnet Week!

Edna St. Vincent Millay

(Thanks, Sally Gearhart, for the suggestion!)

clxviii

I will put Chaos into fourteen lines

And keep him there; and let him thence escape

If he be lucky; let him twist, and ape

Flood, fire, and demon – his adroit designs

Will strain to nothing in the strict confines

Of this sweet Order, where, in pious rape,

I hold his essence and amorphous shape,

Till he with Order mingles and combines.

Past are the hours, the years, of our duress,

His arrogance, our awful servitude:

I have him. He is nothing more nor less

Than something simple not yet understood;

I shall not even force him to confess;

Or answer. I will only make him good.

April is National Poetry Month

Happy Birthday
William Shakespeare

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day

April 23, 2008

52

So am I as the rich, whose blessed key

Can bring him to his sweet up-lockèd treasure,

The which he will not ev’ry hour survey,

For blunting the fine point of seldom pleasure.

Therefore are feasts so solemn and so rare,

Since seldom coming in the long year set,

Like stones of worth they thinly placèd are,

Or captain jewels in the carconet*.

So is the time that keeps you as my chest,

Or as the wardrobe which the robe doth hide,

To make some special instant special blest,

By new unfolding his imprison’d pride.

Blessed are you whose worthiness gives scope,

Being had to triumph, being lacked to hope.

William Shakespeare

1609

April 23 is celebrated as Shakespeare’s birthday.

If alive, he would be 444 years old today.

He died on April 23, 1616.

* A carconet was a style of necklace with a

large jewel at the bottom center, other

smaller jewels in the rest of the necklace.

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month
April 23, 2008

Sonnet 54

O how much more doth beauty beauteous seem,

By that sweet ornament which truth doth give!

The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

For that sweet odour which doth in it lye

The canker-blooms have full as deep a dye

As the perfumed tincture of the roses,

Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly

When summer’s breath their masked buds discloses:

But, for their vitue only is their show

They live unwoo’d, and unrespected fade;

Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

Of their sweet death are sweetest odours made:

And so of you, beauetous and lovely youth,

When that shall fade, by verse distils your truth

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Library Month
April 22, 2008

WANTING MORE AND MORE

TO LIVE UNOBSERVED, UNOBSERVING

Jane Hirshfield

Wanting more and more to live unobserved,

unobserving,

like a dog who takes the bone and goes to another room

where it just fits under the low-legged table or couch.

In the farthest depths, no sunlight reaches.

Yet certain fish, now eyeless streak with luminescence

when excited;

a lowered bathyspere turns on a floodlight

and is mobbed, the strange-formed bodies drawing in for miles.

No one was ever meant to see this.

Certainly not the fish, who see nothing, whose

tentacles travel the cold light, and no one know how or why.

Like human beings to a mystery

They imagine feels some passion for their fate.

And the dog? Fallen into the marrow-pleasure completely.

Willits Library National Library Month Poem of the Day April 22, 2008

Special Earth Day Poem

Philip Appleman

Last-Minute Message for a Time Capsule

I have to tell you this, whoever you are:

that on one summer morning here, the ocean

pounded in on tumbledown breakers,

a south wind, bustling along the shore,

whipped the froth into little rainbows,

and a reckless gull swept down the beach

as if to fly were everything it needed.

I thought of your hovering saucers,

looking for clues, and I wanted to write this down,

so it wouldn’t be lost forever –

that once upon a time we had

meadows here, and astonishing things,

swans and frogs and luna moths

and blue skies that could stagger your heart.

We could have had them still,

and welcomed you to earth, but

we also had the righteous ones

who worshipped the True Faith, and Holy War.

When you go home to your shining galaxy,

say that what you learned

from this dead and barren place is

to beware the righteous ones.

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month

April 19, 2008

Just As You Said Love

It’s A Death

‘runners using the heart to span the brink of disaster’

Mary Norbert Korte

mark this night carved upon the breast carved

deep into the skin as the scars of some

mediaeval mystic everyone left alone

mark this down into the belly where it

disappears under the shadow that shadow inside

where love dries stiff clotted dries where

madrone blossoms sit like virgins burning

inside a remembering dark this night

carved upon the breast carved

upon the nipples lifed like amaranth

it is the tough the touch that scores

the skin this blossomed flesh the moss rose

lips lying the tongue at those petals

the light dimmed by the body the learning

the night this marked night carved upon the breath

carved into the hollow space where passion sits

thingking with branches growing from it

growing branches that bargain for some light

where the only light is stubs in flames that lick

the air slowly of its breath its breath

carved into thighs the strong swelling

the proud the pulse the seed the great

thrust leaping in the hands into a vortex a vortex of

bent trees ghost cries amaranth moss rose amaranth

just so love it’s a death a drawing out of life

fine as silt through spread hands fine as fire

this cold spring dried fine and rooted with pain

a world gathered against the skin a world

heaving and backing about the breast covered

with moss rose with coral root with amaranth amaranth

the breast all covered and carved with holy saving this night

set rivers in stone tumbling and pushing to the sea

Sanctuary Station

28 May 1977

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 19, 2008

Poem for the 1^st Passover Seder

MARGE PIERCY

Matzoh

Flat you are as a door mat

and as homely.

No crust, no glaze, you lack

a cosmetic glow.

You break with a snap.

You are dry as a twig

split from an oak

in midwinter.

You are bumpy as a mud basin

in a drought.

Square as a slab of pavement,

you have no inside

to hide raisins or seeds.

You are pale as the full moon

pocked with craters.

What we see is what we get,

honest, plain, dry

shining with nostalgia

as if baked with light

instead of heat.

The bread of flight and haste

in the mouth you

promise, home

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 18, 2008

“Scientists find universe awash in tiny diamonds”*

Pat Mayne Ellis

But haven’t we always known?

The shimmer of trees, the shaking of flames

every cloud lined with something

clean water sings

right to the belly

scouring us with its purity

it too is awash with diamonds

“so small that trillions could rest

on the head of a pin”

It is not unwise then to say

that the air is hung close with diamonds

that we breathe diamond

our lungs hoarding, exchanging

our blood sowing them rich and thick

along every course it takes

Does this explain

why some of us are so hard

why some of us shine

why we are all precious

that we are awash in creation

spumed with diamonds

shot through with beauty

that survived the deaths of stars

*quotations found in a newspaper clipping on the subject

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month – April 18, 2008

SONNET

Robert Haas

A man talking to his ex-wife on the phone.

He has loved her boice and listens with attention

to every modulation of its tone. Knowing

it intimately. Not knowing what he wants

from the sounds of it, from the tendered civility.

He studies, out the window, the seed shapes

Of the broken pods of ornamental trees.

The kind that grow in everyone’s garden, that no one

But horticulturists can name. Four arched chambers

of pale green, tiny vegetal proscenium arches,

a pair of black tapering seeds bedded in each chamber.

A wish geometry, miniature, Indian or Persian,

lovers or gods in their apartments. Outside, white,

patient animals, and tangled vines, and rain.

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month – April 17, 2008

"The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty."
( On the edifice of the Boston Public Library

In honor of National Library Week)

Spring

Edna St. Vincent Millay

To what purpose, April, do you return again?

Beauty is not enough

You can no longer quiet me with the redness

Of little leaves opening stickily.

I know what I know.

The sun is hot on my neck as I observe

The spikes of the crocus.

The smell of the earth is good.

It is apparent that there is no death.

But what does that signify?

Not only under ground are the brains of men

Eaten by maggots.

Life in itself

Is nothing,

An empty cup, a flight of uncarpeted stairs.

It is not enough that yearly, down this hill

April

Comes like an idiot, babbling and strewing flowers.

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 18, 2008

Hope

Lisel Mueller

It hovers in dark corners

before the lights are turned on,

it shakes sleep from its eyes

and drops from mushroom gills,

it explodes in the starry heads

of dandelions turned sages,

it sticks to the wings of green angels

that sail from the tops of maples.

It sprouts in each occluded eye

of the many-eyed potato,

it lives in each earthworm segment

surviving cruelty,

it is the motion that runs

from the eyes to the tail of a dog,

it is the mouth that inflates the lungs

of the child that has just been born.

It is the singular gift

we cannot destroy in ourselves,

the argument that refutes death,

the genius that invents the future,

all we know of God.

It is the serum which makes us swear

not to betray one another,

it is in this poem, trying to speak.

April is National Poetry Month

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 16, 2008

Chogyam Trungpa

Meteoric iron mountain

Meteoric iron mountain piercing to the sky,

With lightning and hailstorm clouds round about it.

There is so much energy where I live

Which feeds me.

There is no romantic mystique,

There is just a village boy

On a cold wet morning

Going to the farm

Fetching milk for the family.

Foolishness and wisdom

Grandeur and simplicity

Are all the same

Because they live on what they are.

There is no application for exotic wisdom,

Wisdom must communicate

To the men of now.

Dharma is the study of what is

And fulfills the understanding of what is here right now.

The ripple expands when you throw the pebble:

It is true, a fact.

That is the point of faith,

Of full conviction,

Which no one can defeat or challenge.

Please, readers,

Read it slowly

So you can feel

That depth of calmness as you read.

Love to you.

I am the Bodhisattva who will not abandon you,

In accordance with my vow.

Compassion to all.

17 December 1969

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Week
April 16, 2008

My Mother’s Pansies

Sharon Olds

And all that time, in back of the house,

there were pansies growing, some silt blue,

some silt yellow, most of them sable

red or purplish sable, heavy

as velvet curtains, so soft they seemed wet but were

dry as powder on a luna’s wing,

dust on an alluvial path, in a drought

summer. And they were open like lips,

and pouted like lips and had a tiny fur-gold

v, which made bees not be able

to not want. And so, although women, in our

lobes and sepals, our corollas and spurs, seemed

despised spathe, style-arm, standard,

crest, and fall,

still there were those plush entries,

night mouth, pillow mouth,

anyone might want to push

their pinky, or anything, into such velveteen

chambers, such throats, each midnight-velvet

petal saying touch-touch-touch, please-touch, please-touch

each sex like a spirit—shy, flushed, praying.

April is National Poetry Month

Ukiah Library Poem of the Day for National Poetry Month
April 15, 2008

The Song of Wandering Aengus

W. B. Yeats

I went out to the hazel wood.

Because a fire was in my head.

And cut and peeled a hazel wand;

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame.

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass;

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

“The Commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty"

(In honor of National Library Week)

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 15, 2008

Wilfred Owen

DULCE ET DECORUM EST

(1921)

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,

Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,

Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs,

And towards our distant rest began to trudge.

Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots,

But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame, all blind;

Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots

Of gas-shells dropping softly behind.

Gas! GAS! Quick, boys! – An ecstasy of fumbling,

Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time,

But someone still was yelling out and stumbling

And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime. –

Dim through the misty panes and thick green light,

As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams before my helpless sight

He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace

Behind the wagon that we flung him in,

And watch the white eyes wilting in his face,

His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin,

If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood

Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs

Bitten as the cud

Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues, -

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest

To children ardent for some desperate glory,

The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est

Pro patria mori*.

*Translation from Horace, Odes iii.2.13 “It is sweet and honorable to die for one’s country.”

April is National Poetry Month

In Memory of Dori Anderson

1938-2008

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month- Poem of the day April 11, 2008

THE DROWNED WOMAN OF THE SKY

Woven butterfly, garment

hung from the trees,

drowned in sky, derived

amid squalls and rains, alone, alone, compact,

with clothes and tresses born to shreds

and centers corroded by the air.

Motionless, if you withstand

the racous needle of winter,

the river of angry water that harasses you. Celestial

shadow, dove branch

broken by night among the dead flowers:

I stop and suffer

When like a slow and cold-filled sound

you spread your red glow beaten by the water.

LA AHOGADA DEL CIELO

Tejida mariposa, vestidura

Colgada de los árboles,

Ahogada en cielo, derivada

Entre rachas y iluvias, sola, sola compacta,

Con rops y cabellera hecha jirones
Y centros corroí́dos por el aire.

Inmõvil, si resistes

La ronca aguja del invierno,

El rio de agua airada que te acosa. Celeste

Sombra, ramo de palomas

Roto de noche entre las flores muertas:

yo me detengo y sufro

cuando como un sonido lento y lleno de frio

propagas tu arrebol golpeado por el agua.

Willits Library National Library Month Poem of the Day April 11, 2008

AUDRE LORDE

The Day They Eulogized Mahalia

The day they eulogized Mahalia

the echoes of her big voice were stilled

and the mourners found her

singing out from their sisters mouths

from their mothers toughness

from the funky dust in the corners

of sunday church pews

sweet and dry and simple

and that hated sunday morning fussed over feeling

the songs

singing out from their mothers toughness

would never threaten the lord’s retribution

any more.

Now she was safe

acceptable

that big Mahalia

Chicago turned all out

to show her that they cared

but her eyes were closed

And although Mahalia loved our music

nobody sang her favorite song

and while we talked about

what a hard life she had known

and wasn’t it too bad Sister Mahalia

didn’t have it easier

earlier

Six Black children

burned to death in a day care center

on the South Side

kept in a condemned house

for lack of funds

firemen found their bodies

like huddled lumps of charcoal

with silent mouths and eyes wide open.

Small and without song

six black children found a voice in flame

the day the city eulogized Mahalia.

April is National Poetry Month

In Memory of Dori Anderson
1938-2008

Tonight
David Smith-Ferri
Poet Laureate of Ukiah
will read at Mendocino College
7:30 p.m. in Room 5310

Ukiah Library National Poetry Month

Poem of the Day April 10th

First Day in Amman

Ahmed speaks

Amman, Jordan December, 2006
I want to show you something.
My left ear does not work
thanks to a car bomb,
and my right eye
thanks to a metal fragment lodged in its cornea.
Day and night, an echo of that explosion
rings in my ear –
not an ocean crashing or a river
carrying its musical load of rock and stone,
not a wind sighing or shrieking,
not two-year-old Abdullah calling from infested Baghdad,
but the voice of a bomb
in my ear,
and in my eye, one of its ten thousand teeth.

But that is not what I want to show you.
That is only the surface, moving downriver,
only a reflection of Baghdad today.
I want to show unchanging depths,
past, present, future bundled in the immutable
body of the river.

For that, you must look at my hand
and take it
and come with us to dinner
and eat shawarma.
Laugh with us.
Talk with us.
Think with us, habibi,
about how to extract the worm
eating the heart of my country.
TONIGHT! TONIGHT! TONIGHT!

Willits Library National Poetry Month Poem of the Day April 10, 2008

BILLY COLLINS, The Lanyard

The other day as I was ricocheting slowly

off the pale blue walls of this room,

bouncing from typewriter to piano,

from bookshelf to an envelope lying on the floor,

I found myself in the L section of the dictionary

where my eyes fell upon the word lanyard.

No cookie nibbled by a French novelist

could send one more suddenly into the past –

a past where I sat at a workbench at a camp

by a deep Adirondack lake

learning how to braid thin plastic strips

into a lanyard, a gift for my mother.

I had never seen anyone use a lanyard

or wear one, if that’s what you did with them,

but that did not keep me from crossing

strand over strand again and again

until I had made a boxy

red and white lanyard for my mother.

She gave me life and milk from her breasts,

and I gave her a lanyard.

She nursed me in many a sickroom,

lifted teaspoons of medicine to my lips,

set cold face-cloths on my forehead,

and then led me out into the airy light

and taught me to walk and swim,

and I, in turn, presented her with a lanyard.

Here are thousands of meals, she said,

and here is clothing and a good education.

And here is your lanyard, I replied,

which I made with a little help from a counselor.

Here is a breathing body and a beating heart,

strong legs, bones and teeth,

and two clear eyes to read the world, she whispered,

and here, I said, is the lanyard I made at camp.

And here, I wish to say to her now,

is a smaller gift – not the archaic truth

that you can never repay your mother,

but the rueful admission that when she took

the two-tone lanyard from my hands,

I was as sure as a boy could be

that this useless, worthless thing I wove

out of boredom would be enough to make us even.