Christmas Poem: "Christmas Trees (A Christmas Circular Letter)" by Robert Frost

 

The city had withdrawn into itself

And left at last the country to the country;

When between whirls of snow not come to lie

And whirls of foliage not yet laid, there drove

A stranger to our yard, who looked the city,

Yet did in country fashion in that there

He sat and waited till he drew us out

A-buttoning coats to ask him who he was.

He proved to be the city come again

To look for something it had left behind

And could not do without and keep its Christmas.

He asked if I would sell my Christmas trees;

My woods—the young fir balsams like a place

Where houses all are churches and have spires.

I hadn’t thought of them as Christmas Trees.

I doubt if I was tempted for a moment

To sell them off their feet to go in cars

And leave the slope behind the house all bare,

Where the sun shines now no warmer than the moon.

I’d hate to have them know it if I was.

Yet more I’d hate to hold my trees except

As others hold theirs or refuse for them,

Beyond the time of profitable growth,

The trial by market everything must come to.

I dallied so much with the thought of selling.

Then whether from mistaken courtesy

And fear of seeming short of speech, or whether

From hope of hearing good of what was mine, I said,

“There aren’t enough to be worth while.”

“I could soon tell how many they would cut,

You let me look them over.”

 

                                                     “You could look.

But don’t expect I’m going to let you have them.”

Pasture they spring in, some in clumps too close

That lop each other of boughs, but not a few

Quite solitary and having equal boughs

All round and round. The latter he nodded “Yes” to,

Or paused to say beneath some lovelier one,

With a buyer’s moderation, “That would do.”

I thought so too, but wasn’t there to say so.

We climbed the pasture on the south, crossed over,

And came down on the north. He said, “A thousand.”

“A thousand Christmas trees!—at what apiece?”

 

He felt some need of softening that to me:

“A thousand trees would come to thirty dollars.”

 

Then I was certain I had never meant

To let him have them. Never show surprise!

But thirty dollars seemed so small beside

The extent of pasture I should strip, three cents

(For that was all they figured out apiece),

Three cents so small beside the dollar friends

I should be writing to within the hour

Would pay in cities for good trees like those,

Regular vestry-trees whole Sunday Schools

Could hang enough on to pick off enough.

A thousand Christmas trees I didn’t know I had!

Worth three cents more to give away than sell,

As may be shown by a simple calculation.

Too bad I couldn’t lay one in a letter.

I can’t help wishing I could send you one,

In wishing you herewith a Merry Christmas.

 

by Robert Frost

 

 

For more information about poet, Robert Frost, see:

 

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/robert-frost

 

 

Tuesday Poem: "Frederick Douglass" by Robert Hayden

When it is finally ours, this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful
and terrible thing, needful to man as air,  
usable as earth; when it belongs at last to all,  
when it is truly instinct, brain matter, diastole, systole,  
reflex action; when it is finally won; when it is more  
than the gaudy mumbo jumbo of politicians:  
this man, this Douglass, this former slave, this Negro  
beaten to his knees, exiled, visioning a world  
where none is lonely, none hunted, alien,  
this man, superb in love and logic, this man  
shall be remembered. Oh, not with statues’ rhetoric,  
not with legends and poems and wreaths of bronze alone,
but with the lives grown out of his life, the lives  
fleshing his dream of the beautiful, needful thing.


by Robert Hayden

For more information about poet, Robert Hayden, see:


https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-hayden

Tuesday Poem: "America Doubts Itself" by Andrew M. Bell

(Photo Credit: Andrew M. Bell)

America,

the land of fat people is

now casting a thin shadow.

It is worried that it is not “great” any more.

It is afraid of China,

growing capitalist power out of

a communist socket.

Mao wouldn't have approved

of the American dollars bulging

in the people's pocket.

It has waged one too many

“interventions”, got too much

egg on its face.

It has been nine-eleven-ed and it has

lost its swagger.

It is tentative like a

teenager with its first bloom of acne.

And now it is banking on a saviour,

a man who epitomises The American Dream

when the myth has been stripped away,

a self-made man whose father left him a huge sum,

a swaggering, shouting misogynist

whose ego squeezes the air out of

every room.

He is a man who has never known

hardship, never slept under a copy

of The New York Times on a park bench

in a windswept, dangerous park,

never pushed his meagre belongings around

in a supermarket trolley,

never wandered the streets talking to himself

because no one else will,

never known the escape of the crack pipe or

the bottle and never

searched through a trash can for his next meal.

An older man is trying valiantly to resuscitate

the vision of your founding fathers,

but he will be bought off with party favours because

Big Money has you by the balls, America,

and is squeezing ever tighter.

Ave, America, morituri te salutant.

Hail, America, those who are about to die salute you.

Tuesday Poem: "Happy first anniversary (in anticipation of your thirty ninth)" by Bob Hicok

I don’t have much time. I’m an important person
to chickadees and mourning doves, whose feeder
was smashed last night by a raccoon. Soon
I’ll be wielding duct tape, noticing the dew,
wanting to bathe in it, hoping the awkwardness
of yesterday (three instances of people talking
with bear traps for mouths) never repeats itself
and we all go forward as if to a party
for a five year old who refuses to smash candy
out of a burro. It’s too cute, the burro, too real
for him not to ask his mother, can I keep it,
and when the other children cry, they’re given
lake front property, it works out, this
is what I see for you, the working out. Think of the year
behind you as a root or think of going to Spain
and feeling sorry for bulls or don’t think,
this isn’t the SATs, don’t think but stay.
Stay happy, honest, stay as tall as you are
as long as you can using giraffes if you need to
to see each other above the crowd. I have these moments
when I realize I’m not breathing, my wife
is never why I’m not breathing and always why
I want to lick a human heart, remember that each of you
is half of why your bed will sag toward the middle
of being a boat and that you both will sag
if you’re lucky together, be lucky together
and acquire in sagging more square footage
to kiss and to hold. And always remember
that I hate you for being so much closer
than I am to where none of us ever get to go
again - first look, first touch, first
inadvertent brush of breath or hair, first time
you turned over and looked at who was surprising
you by how fully she was there.


by Bob Hicok

For more information about the poet, Bob Hicok, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/bob-hicok

Tuesday Poem: "Advertisement" by Wisława Szymborska

I’m a tranquilizer.
I’m effective at home.
I work in the office.
I can take exams
on the witness stand.
I mend broken cups with care.
All you have to do is take me,
let me melt beneath your tongue,
just gulp me
with a glass of water.

I know how to handle misfortune,
how to take bad news.
I can minimize injustice,
lighten up God’s absence,
or pick the widow’s veil that suits your face.
What are you waiting for—
have faith in my chemical compassion.

You’re still a young man/woman.
It’s not too late to learn how to unwind.
Who said
you have to take it on the chin?

Let me have your abyss.
I’ll cushion it with sleep.
You’ll thank me for giving you
four paws to fall on.

Sell me your soul.
There are no other takers.

There is no other devil anymore.


by Wisława Szymborska (translated from the Polish by Stanisław Barańczak)

For more information on poet, Wisława Szymborska, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wisaawa-szymborska

Tuesday Poem: "Saying Goodbye to Very Young Children" by John Updike

They will not be the same next time. The sayings  
so cute, just slightly off, will be corrected.  
Their eyes will be more skeptical, plugged in  
the more securely to the worldly buzz  
of television, alphabet, and street talk,  
culture polluting their gazes' pure blue.  
It makes you see at last the value of  
those boring aunts and neighbors (their smells  
of summer sweat and cigarettes, their faces                        
like shapes of sky between shade-giving leaves)  
who knew you from the start, when you were zero,  
cooing their nothings before you could be bored  
or knew a name, not even your own, or how  
this world brave with hellos turns all goodbye.


by John Updike

For more information about poet, John Updike, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Updike

Tuesday Poem: "Hard-Wired" by Jenny Xie

A misfortune can swell
for a long, long time in the mind.

While goodness shrinks
down to a hard shell.

I reach for the hammer,
but it doesn't crack.

Evolutionarily, it makes sense.

These fishbone days, this fatty grief.


by Jenny Xie

For more information about poet, Jenny Xie, see:

https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/jenny-xie-0

Tuesday Poem: "They'll say: "She must be from another country" by Imtiaz Dharker

When I can’t comprehend
why they’re burning books
or slashing paintings,
when they can’t bear to look
at god’s own nakedness,
when they ban the film
and gut the seats to stop the play
and I ask why
they just smile and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I speak on the phone
and the vowel sounds are off
when the consonants are hard
and they should be soft,
they’ll catch on at once
they’ll pin it down
they’ll explain it right away
to their own satisfaction,
they’ll cluck their tongues
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When my mouth goes up
instead of down,
when I wear a tablecloth
to go to town,
when they suspect I’m black
or hear I’m gay
they won’t be surprised,
they’ll purse their lips
and say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

When I eat up the olives
and spit out the pits
when I yawn at the opera
in the tragic bits
when I pee in the vineyard
as if it were Bombay,
flaunting my bare ass
covering my face
laughing through my hands
they’ll turn away,
shake their heads quite sadly,
‘She doesn’t know any better,’
they’ll say,
‘She must be
from another country.’

Maybe there is a country
where all of us live,
all of us freaks
who aren’t able to give
our loyalty to fat old fools,
the crooks and thugs
who wear the uniform
that gives them the right
to wave a flag,
puff out their chests,
put their feet on our necks,
and break their own rules.

But from where we are
it doesn’t look like a country,    
it’s more like the cracks
that grow between borders
behind their backs.
That’s where I live.
And I’ll be happy to say,
‘I never learned your customs.
I don’t remember your language
or know your ways.
I must be
from another country.’


by Imtiaz Dharker

For more information on poet, Imtiaz Dharker, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imtiaz_Dharker

Tuesday Poem: "Crawfordsville Confidential" by G.E. Murray

     

 

1.

 

In the land of milk and cream delivered early

and daily, and always in glass bottles, we care

about good grooming and, of course, news

of slurs and curs ... Can it really be that home

 

becomes a place to be stranded?

“I don’t see a single storm cloud

anywhere in the sky, but I can sure smell rain,”

out on the edge of Crawfordsville, Indiana,

where the answers and questions become identical

as evil twins.

 

 

2.

 

Basketball ghosts bounce and sweat again

in that second-floor gym in the middle of July—

that never-to-be-forgotten home

of the first-ever Boys State Championship.

Rusty jump shots and long-ago corner hooks

rim out in a stream of dusted sunlight.

“Just to play the game, don’t you know,

you know, no matter how much the sacrifice ... ”

How searing afternoon’s vagueness now,

dreamed in a daylong haze of headache pills

downed at the General Lew Wallace Motor Lodge:

how the arc of the ball rises

to echoes of split-jump cheers

in lubricated air, when phantom bodies

strive and leap and go prostrate

to that squeak of rubber on polished wood—

in a game of shirts and skins.

 

 

3.

 

You can only wonder how Ezra Pound dissected his time here,

among tractors and proctors and temples of antebellum style,

as he cooed sweet Greek in the ear

of his secular Madonna ... Just now, two pigeons

greet first daylight on the Green of Wabash College.

 

Something to be said for being scandalized silly,

and in more than one language

when life becomes holier than the Crusades.

And what’s more—didactic passions

eventually drive you insane, thinks young EP, so what?

Sew buttons, ha!

 

And make it new always ... and always

leave the door cracked open, a light on,

and one foot on the floor.

 

 

4.

 

“The meatloaf here’s not very good,”

warns waitress Lucy, a pretty girl

with a tooth missing. Indifferently,

day proceeds utterly.

Off Country Road X-10, out by Carcus Creek,

driving past Minnie Betts’s florist shop

and what’s left of the old city jail,

you figure each small detail adds

glory to any story.

                            “Relax,” says Elton Bidwell,

the county’s dead-buzzard collector,

“I’ll take care of us all

when we com’ on home.”

 

 

5.

 

The town goes dark in a killer storm.

Collective forgetting and forgiving

occurs. But safety comes in many forms.

In this vast black you get to thinking

about giddy joys and little sorrows,

the curse of full employment at minimum wage,

and those conspicuous professors—

their bowties and braces speaking to the ages

and marking moments of learned unworthiness.

Maybe, it’s vacuum-packed fear

in a stage-managed town. Time to guess

what’s behind each tiny crime and local leer,

at once rancorous and baffling. Strangers

need not apply. A few lights click on

at the Shortstop Grille. These cruel weathers

turn asphalt slick. The old intramurals begin again.

 

 

6.

 

Early Sunday morning and a drunken Elton Bidwell

is strung like a scarecrow on his front porch swing,

deposited by Grand Wizards from the Odd Fellows Lodge bar

late last night—reminder to those devoted folks

heading up Church Street with songbooks in hand,

that home sure proves just another place to be stranded. 

 

by G. E. Murray

 

 

For more information about poet, G.E. Murray, see: 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/g-e-murray