"I Never See the Red Rose Crown the Year," by John Masefield

"oh, yes," by Charles Bukowski

I hear a rumbling - music + Margaret Walker poem

"The Name of It is 'Autumn,'" by Emily Dickinson

What Have You Done For Me, Lately?

*
*
*


What Have You Done for Me, Lately?


What have you done for me, Lately?
 I don't even understand your name--
"Lately" can mean tardy or recent,
and hell, "late" can even mean dead.
"My late uncle" doesn't mean, "Oh,
I wonder what's keeping my uncle!"
Death's keeping him. I'm compulsively

early in a world that slops past appointments
like bilge. The others arrive late--but not
lately. Good God, Lately, you're a rejected
adverb! You're a part of speech wandering
in a desert. What have you done for me
except make me rush, glance at my watch,
worry when a friend doesn't show?

Lately, you are time's freelancer, a runner
for bookies, the line of people that doesn't
move. I'd like to do something for you,
Lately. For really I would.

"Fox and You," by Hans Ostrom

"Sometimes," by Herman Hesse

"Little Lyric (Of Great Importance)"

"Give Us Our Peace," by Langston Hughes

One By Samuel Daniel

Reposting a link to a poem by Samuel Daniel, a lesser known but very fine Renaissance poet:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ucfxFFhojjU&feature=related

and the soup

*
*
*


and the soup


and I'm glad for soup,
 for hot soup on  bitter days

and I'm happy there is
black hair, white hair, brown
and red hair, gold hair;

and for breath--so easy
to forget I owe everything
to it, to breath, to . . .

. . . to the Circumstances
(one way to say it) I am
grateful, for I am here,

I was here, will have been

here. . . and I'm glad for light,
day and sky and bulb,
light in dreams;
and glad for darkness--

black silhouettes of pines
against blackness and stars,
holy, holy . . .and the soup.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom

"Sonnet: Time, That Renews," by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Lime Cove

*
*
*

Lime Cove


Charlotte sings a lullaby
to her bedroom, making sure
it's slow asleep before she
quicks herself away. Charlotte
and the night are in a kind
of clanky love. She says
to her doorbell, "Please come
in," and washes from it all
those oily index-finger prints.

Solicitations, she thinks, take up
so much of our lives. Asking,
answering. "God," she asks,
"help me to find a place in pause,
a site, a situation, for it seems
I am defeated by the business
of each day."  Charlotte knows

she hasn't earned or isn't due
a special treatment. She also
knows she isn't out of line
in asking for some cease of
time, a cove carved out of
lime, where a pod of echoes
soaks itself in brine.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom