Don’t say you have never asked yourself
if the world needs beauty as much as it needs
food. May I toil not as a lily of the field,
starscattered while you trudge upright
acknowledged paths, useful.
Like train tracks we need not touch
to hum; with practical passion, quiet
prayer, you swim south as I arrow north
shivering, surviving, a drop-in-this-ocean
way of happening
Title and last line borrowed from W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.”
When I shouldn’t be wasting my time, he is before me
in the funny thing that aches his disappearance all over
again. Now convinced that the closing of my heart
dates to that winter day, along with all the distance
and shell-layers of brittle lacquer, the lack of warmth
in laughter, the need to say again in print it’s not fair
how we each carry in our cells some pain that spreads
dark cold
This morning thinking of my dad, not exactly related to but folding in with last night’s reading of W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats.” I used three lines from his poem as a kind of word list:
1) He disappeared in the dead of winter
2) The day of his death was a dark cold day.
3) And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
From the fragrant
tea-shop warm
clatter-chatter
to funeral still-life—
dark coats, umbrella-
shrouded natives
grouped murmuring
around the deep
clean-cut hole,
polite enough
not to stare
at the spring-green
raincoated tourist
One must pass
the church door
find the simple
gray slab, wait
for the hearse-driver
to turn away
toss his cigarette
ignore quick photo-
snapping—the green-coat’s
rain-soaked companions
anxious for the end
of this awkward
visitation
More than nineteen autumns
have passed since I fell in love
with Ireland, with words—
brilliant creatures lyrical
mysterious, beautiful
I don’t know if I can claim
that I’d never before desired
a bee-loud glade; nor can I blame
you entirely for my choice
and my pride to stitch
and unstitch these lines
rather than scrub kitchens
break stones
(Soul, clap your hands and sing
to find again these phrases, to hear
with older ears the cadence
of the dim, green isle
Heart, skim back the years to see
a pulsing belief in faeryland, star-laden
seas and terrible beauty…)
I will go soon to Drumcliff churchyard
by the road, an ancient cross
there I will gaze and pray that I know
the song of linnet’s wings
peace dropping slow
I don’t know how better to pay my respects than to steal favorite lines from his works—“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” “The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland,” “Adam’s Curse,” “The Wild Swans at Coole,” “Easter 1916,” “Sailing to Byzantium,” ”Under Ben Bulben”
Graceful Press Poetry 