No commentary is necessary on this one. It's just a really fine poem, by Alice Corbin Henderson (1881 - 1949). Enjoy:

Muy Vieja Mexicana

I've seen her pass with eyes upon the road --
An old bent woman in a bronze-black shawl,
With skin as dried and wrinkled as a mummy's,
As brown as a cigar-box, and her voice
Like the low vibrant strings of a guitar.
And I have fancied from the girls about
What she was at their age, what they will be
When they are old as she. But now she sits
And smokes away each night till dawn comes round,
Thinking, beside the pinyons' flame, of days
Long past and gone, when she was young -- content
To be no longer young, her epic done:

         For a woman has work and much to do,
         And it's good at the last to know it's through,
         And still have time to sit alone,
         To have some time you can call your own.
         It's good at the last to know your mind
         And travel the paths that you traveled blind,
         To see each turn and even make
         Trips in the byways you did not take --
         But that, `por Dios', is over and done,
         It's pleasanter now in the way we've come;
         It's good to smoke and none to say
         What's to be done on the coming day,
         No mouths to feed or coat to mend,
         And none to call till the last long end.
         Though one have sons and friends of one's own,
         It's better at last to live alone.
         For a man must think of food to buy,
         And a woman's thoughts may be wild and high;
         But when she is young she must curb her pride,
         And her heart is tamed for the child at her side.
         But when she is old her thoughts may go
         Wherever they will, and none to know.
         And night is the time to think and dream,
         And not to get up with the dawn's first gleam;
         Night is the time to laugh or weep,
         And when dawn comes it is time to sleep . . .

When it's all over and there's none to care,
I mean to be like her and take my share
Of comfort when the long day's done,
And smoke away the nights, and see the sun
Far off, a shrivelled orange in a sky gone black,
Through eyes that open inward and look back.

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The winner of the Joe Don Baker Haiku contest is . . .

more...

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Today is William Carlos Williams' birthday (1883 - 1963). i don't think you can make a list of the greatest American poets without including Williams. What i like so much about WCW was that he wasn't neurotic or mentally ill, he didn't commit suicide, he was like a normal guy who wrote great stuff. In fact, he was a practicing physician in Rutherford New Jersey and happily married. Here's a well-known fragment from one of his longer poems, which is so simple, but so good.

so much depends
upon

a red wheel
barrow

glazed with rain
water

beside the white
chickens.

The Young Housewife

At ten AM the young housewife
moves about in negligee behind
the wooden walls of her husband's house.
I pass solitary in my car.

Then again she comes to the curb
to call the ice-man, fish-man, and stands
shy, uncorseted, tucking in
stray ends of hair, and I compare her
to a fallen leaf.

The noiseless wheels of my car
rush with a crackling sound over
dried leaves as I bow and pass smiling.

The Term

A rumpled sheet
Of brown paper
About the length

And apparent bulk
Of a man was
Rolling with the

Wind slowly over
And over in
The street as

A car drove down
Upon it and
Crushed it to

The ground. Unlike
A man it rose
Again rolling

With the wind over
And over to be as
It was before.

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Here's a good poem for first year law students, like me:

Insomnia

Even though the house is deeply silent
and the room, with no moon,
is perfectly dark,
even though the body is a sack of exhaustion
inert on the bed,

someone inside me will not
get off his tricycle,
will not stop tracing the same tight circle
on the same green threadbare carpet.

It makes no difference whether I lie
staring at the ceiling
or pace the living-room floor,
he keeps on making his furious rounds,
little pedaler in his frenzy,
my own worst enemy, my oldest friend.

What is there to do but close my eyes
and watch him circling the night,
schoolboy in an ill-fitting jacket,
leaning forward, his cap on backwards,
wringing the handlebars,
maintaining a certain speed?

Does anything exist at this hour
in this nest of dark rooms
but the spectacle of him
and the hope that before dawn
I can lift out some curious detail
that will carry me off to sleep--
the watch that encircles his pale wrist,
the expandable band,
the tiny hands that keep pointing this way and that.

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Today's short poem is by the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. No stranger to death and horror during her own lifetime (she survived the Bolshevik Revolution, Stalin's purges, the siege of Leningrad, the imprisonment of two sons and one husband, and the execution of another husband), the following poem is terribly poignant this week.

Why is this Age Worse?

Why is this age worse than earlier ages?
In a stupor of grief and dread
have we not fingered the foulest wounds
and left them unhealed by our hands?

In the west the falling light still glows,
and the clustered housetops glitter in the sun,
but here Death is already chalking the doors with crosses,
and calling the ravens, and the ravens are flying in.

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