Tuesday Poem: "Advice to a Prophet" by Richard Wilbur

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters.  We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling.  What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

by Richard Wilbur

For more information about poet, Richard Wilbur, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/richard-wilbur

Tuesday Poem: "To Put One Brick Upon Another" by Philip Larkin

To put one brick upon another,
Add a third and then a forth,
Leaves no time to wonder whether
What you do has any worth.
 
But to sit with bricks around you
While the winds of heaven bawl
Weighing what you should or can do
Leaves no doubt of it at all.

by Philip Larkin

For more information about the poet, Philip Larkin, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/philip-larkin

Tuesday Poem: "Truth" by Gwendolyn Brooks

And if sun comes 
How shall we greet him?
Shall we not dread him,
Shall we not fear him
After so lengthy a
Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,
Though we have prayed
All through the night-years—
What if we wake one shimmering morning to
Hear the fierce hammering
Of his firm knuckles
Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—
Shall we not flee
Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter
Of the familiar
Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it
To sleep in the coolness
Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily
Over the eyes.

by Gwendolyn Brooks

For more information about the poet, Gwendolyn Brooks, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/gwendolyn-brooks

Tuesday Poem: "The Mixed Marriage" by Paul Muldoon

My father was a servant-boy.
When he left school at eight or nine
He took up billhook and loy
To win the ground he would never own.

My mother was the school-mistress,
The world of Castor and Pollux.
There were twins in her own class.
She could never tell which was which.

She had read one volume of Proust,
He knew the cure for farcy.
I flitted between a hole in the hedge
And a room in the Latin Quarter.

When she had cleared the supper-table
She opened The Acts of the Apostles,
Aesop’s Fables, Gulliver’s Travels.
Then my mother went on upstairs

And my father further dimmed the light
To get back to hunting with ferrets
Or the factions of the faction-fights,
The Ribbon Boys, the Caravats.

by Paul Muldoon

For more information about the poet, Paul Muldoon, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/paul-muldoon

Tuesday Poem: "A Series of Haiku" by Etheridge Knight

1 
Eastern guard tower 
glints in sunset; convicts rest 
like lizards on rocks. 

2 
The piano man 
is stingy, at 3 A.M. 
his songs drop like plum. 

3 
Morning sun slants cell. 
Drunks stagger like cripple flies 
On jailhouse floor. 

4 
To write a blues song 
is to regiment riots 
and pluck gems from graves. 

5 
A bare pecan tree 
slips a pencil shadow down 
a moonlit snow slope. 

6 
The falling snow flakes 
Cannot blunt the hard aches nor 
Match the steel stillness. 

7 
Under moon shadows 
A tall boy flashes knife and 
Slices star bright ice. 

8 
In the August grass 
Struck by the last rays of sun 
The cracked teacup screams. 

9 
Making jazz swing in 
Seventeen syllables AIN’T 
No square poet’s job. 

by Etheridge Knight

 For more information about the poet, Etheridge Knight, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/etheridge-knight

Tuesday Poem: "Easter, 1916" by W.B. Yeats

I have met them at close of day   
Coming with vivid faces
From counter or desk among grey   
Eighteenth-century houses.
I have passed with a nod of the head   
Or polite meaningless words,   
Or have lingered awhile and said   
Polite meaningless words,
And thought before I had done   
Of a mocking tale or a gibe   
To please a companion
Around the fire at the club,   
Being certain that they and I   
But lived where motley is worn:   
All changed, changed utterly:   
A terrible beauty is born.

That woman's days were spent   
In ignorant good-will,
Her nights in argument
Until her voice grew shrill.
What voice more sweet than hers   
When, young and beautiful,   
She rode to harriers?
This man had kept a school   
And rode our wingèd horse;   
This other his helper and friend   
Was coming into his force;
He might have won fame in the end,   
So sensitive his nature seemed,   
So daring and sweet his thought.
This other man I had dreamed
A drunken, vainglorious lout.
He had done most bitter wrong
To some who are near my heart,   
Yet I number him in the song;
He, too, has resigned his part
In the casual comedy;
He, too, has been changed in his turn,   
Transformed utterly:
A terrible beauty is born.

Hearts with one purpose alone   
Through summer and winter seem   
Enchanted to a stone
To trouble the living stream.
The horse that comes from the road,   
The rider, the birds that range   
From cloud to tumbling cloud,   
Minute by minute they change;   
A shadow of cloud on the stream   
Changes minute by minute;   
A horse-hoof slides on the brim,   
And a horse plashes within it;   
The long-legged moor-hens dive,   
And hens to moor-cocks call;   
Minute by minute they live:   
The stone's in the midst of all.

Too long a sacrifice
Can make a stone of the heart.   
O when may it suffice?
That is Heaven's part, our part   
To murmur name upon name,   
As a mother names her child   
When sleep at last has come   
On limbs that had run wild.   
What is it but nightfall?
No, no, not night but death;   
Was it needless death after all?
For England may keep faith   
For all that is done and said.   
We know their dream; enough
To know they dreamed and are dead;   
And what if excess of love   
Bewildered them till they died?   
I write it out in a verse—
MacDonagh and MacBride   
And Connolly and Pearse
Now and in time to be,
Wherever green is worn,
Are changed, changed utterly:   
A terrible beauty is born.

by W.B. Yeats

For more information about the poet, William Butler yeats, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-butler-yeats

Tuesday Poem: "Horses at Midnight Without a Moon" by Jack Gilbert

Our heart wanders lost in the dark woods.

Our dream wrestles in the castle of doubt.
But there’s music in us. Hope is pushed down
but the angel flies up again taking us with her.
The summer mornings begin inch by inch
while we sleep, and walk with us later
as long-legged beauty through
the dirty streets. It is no surprise 
that danger and suffering surround us.
What astonishes is the singing.
We know the horses are there in the dark
meadow because we can smell them,
can hear them breathing. 
Our spirit persists like a man struggling 
through the frozen valley
who suddenly smells flowers
and realizes the snow is melting
out of sight on top of the mountain,
knows that spring has begun.

by Jack Gilbert

For more information about poet, Jack Gilbert, see:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/jack-gilbert