Tuesday Poem: "An Arrangement for Seeing Children" by Edwin Brock

You were born in the front room
of a house behind the police station
and because I was a policeman
the midwife let me stay to watch.

You were not much trouble or so it seemed to me.
She groaned only intermittently
and the lady let me hold her hand.
At the moment of delivery

you managed to get your navel cord caught
like a silk strand around your throat
and this was a symbol I could understand
having done the same thing all my life.

I was not much interested in you then,
you looked as if you had been crudely carved in marble,
but I helped give you your names,
hoping you would fit them as you grew.

When you grew we pointed cameras at you
we stopped you playing, badgered you to stand still,
clicked the little button at the side
and then went on with what we had been doing.

That was all that parenthood required –
you fixed inside a cardboard box.
Thus you would not be forgotten
no matter how faulty our two memories.

And we two? We had reasons and excuses of our own.
We had our lives to lead, each other to enjoy
and a theory about not pampering our children.
We fed you, clothed you and used you by the names that we had chosen.

Now as you know we have broken - I live in one house
and you in another where I call on Saturdays.
I will never be able to explain why this is so
never having understood it for myself.

I know only that your red and freckled head
which waves out of our window points at me –
half way to the bus stop I hear your shutter click
as the road's curve covers me.

And I pray the picture you have taken
will be fogged and faulty
and that you will go on happily
with the things you had been doing.

by Edwin Brock

Photo Credit: Enitharmon Press

For more information on the poet, Edwin Brock, see:

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

Tuesday Poem: "My Blue Piano" by Else Lasker-Schüler

At home I have a blue piano.
But I can't play a note.

It's been in the shadow of the cellar door
Ever since the world went rotten.

Four starry hands play harmonies.
The Woman in the Moon sang in her boat.

Now only rats dance to the clanks.
The keyboard is in bits.

I weep for what is blue. Is dead.
Sweet angels, I have eaten

Such bitter bread. Push open
The door of heaven. For me, for now --

Although I am still alive --
Although it is not allowed.

by Else Lasker-Schüler (translated from the German by Eavan Boland)

For more information about the poet, Else Lasker-Schuler, see:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Else_Lasker-Sch%C3%BCler
 

Tuesday Poem: "Poetry" by Marianne Moore

I, too, dislike it: there are things that are important beyond all this fiddle.
Reading it, however, with a perfect contempt for it, one discovers in
it after all, a place for the genuine.
Hands that can grasp, eyes
that can dilate, hair that can rise
if it must, these things are important not because a
high-sounding interpretation can be put upon them but because they are
useful. When they become so derivative as to become unintelligible,
the same thing may be said for all of us, that we
do not admire what
we cannot understand: the bat
holding on upside down or in quest of something to

eat, elephants pushing, a wild horse taking a roll, a tireless wolf under
a tree, the immovable critic twinkling his skin like a horse that feels a flea, the base-
ball fan, the statistician –
nor is it valid
to discriminate against ‘business documents and school-books’;
all these phenomena are important. One must make a distinction
however: when dragged into prominence by half poets, the result is not poetry,
nor till the poets among us can be
‘literalists of the imagination-‘ above

insolence and triviality and can present

for inspection, ‘imaginary gardens with real toads in them,’ shall we have
it. In the meantime, if you demand on one hand,
the raw material of poetry in
all its rawness, and
that which is on the other hand
genuine, then you are interested in poetry.

by Marianne Moore

 

For more information about poet, Marianne Moore, see:

 

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/marianne-moore