Category Archives: Pocket Poems

Laura found this poem, perfect for helping us through the hardest part of winter. February by Margaret Atwood Winter. Time to eat fat and watch hockey. In the pewter mornings, the cat,  a black fur sausage with yellow Houdini eyes, jumps up on the bed and tries  to get onto my head. It’s his way of telling whether or not I’m dead. If I’m not, he wants to be scratched; if I am  He’ll think of something. He settles on my chest, breathing his breath of burped-up meat and musty sofas, purring like a washboard. Some other tomcat,  not yet a capon, has been spraying our front door,  declaring war. It’s all about sex and territory,  which are what will finish us off in the long run. Some cat owners around here  should snip a few testicles. If we wise  hominids were sensible, we’d do that too,  or eat our young, like sharks. But it’s love that does us in. Over and over  again, He shoots, he scores! and famine crouches in the bedsheets, ambushing the pulsing  eiderdown, and the windchill factor hits  thirty below, and pollution pours out of our chimneys to keep us warm. February, month of despair, with a skewered heart in the centre. I think dire thoughts, and lust for French fries  with a splash of vinegar. Cat, enough of your greedy whining and your small pink bumhole. Off my face! You’re the life principle, more or less, so get going on a little optimism around here. Get rid of death. Celebrate increase. Make it be spring.

 Good Hours by Robert Frost I had for my winter evening walk— No one at all with whom to talk, But I had the cottages in a row Up to their shining eyes in snow. And I thought I had the folk within: I had the sound of a violin; I had a glimpse through curtain laces Of youthful forms and youthful faces. I had such company outward bound. I went till there were no cottages found. I turned and repented, but coming back I saw no window but that was black. Over the snow my creaking feet Disturbed the slumbering village street Like profanation, by your leave, At ten o’clock of a winter eve.

Talking to Strangers by Rufus Collinson The ancient, unshaven man at Dunkin’ Donuts speaks to me. ‘You see the sky this mornin’?’ I had seen the radiant blooming rose rising from the harbor. I nodded, ‘Yes, I did.’ He smiled and continued, elbowing and bending in a jig of recognition, ‘And how ‘bout that crescent moon?’ I remembered with him the distant brilliant curve and the deep cerulean night. ‘One time,’ he was effusing now so soon into our relationship, ‘a guy I knew invited me to go up in the Goodyear Blimp.’ ‘What was that like?’ ‘Why it was like climbing into that van out there and driving it up into the sky.’ And so, there I was with him in a moment that hangs still above all time. Always talk to strangers. They are waiting to tell you their best stories.

From ‘O Thou, Opening, O’ by Theodore Roethke The dark has its own light A son has many fathers Stand by a slow stream: Hear the sigh of what is. Be a pleased rock On a plain day. Waking’s Kissing. Yes.

I Dwell in Possibility by Emily Dickinson I dwell in Possibility A fairer House than Prose More numerous of Windows Superior for Doors Of Chambers as the Cedars Impregnable of Eye And for an Everlasting Roof The Gambrels of the Sky Of Visitors the fairest For Occupation This The spreading wide my narrow Hands To gather Paradise

Air of November by Denise Levertov In the autumn brilliance feathers tingle at fingertips. This tingling brilliance burns under cover of gray air and brown lazily unfalling leaves, it eats into stillness zestfully with sound of plucked strings, steel and brass strings of the zither, copper and silver wire played with a gold ring, a plucking of crinkled afternoons and evenings of energy, thorns under the pot. In the autumn brilliance a drawing apart of curtains a fall of veils a flying open of doors, convergence of magic objects into feathered hands and crested heads, a prospect of winter verve, a buildup to abundance.

Daring Enough to Finish By Rumi Face that lights my face, you spin intelligence into these particles I am. Your wind shivers my tree. My mouth tastes sweet with your name in it. You make my dance daring enough to finish. No more timidity! Let fruit fall and wind turn my roots up in the air, done with patient waiting. (from The Glance, trans. Coleman Barks)

Natural History By E.B. White   The spider, dropping down from twig, Unwinds a thread of her devising: A thin, premeditated rig To use in rising. And all the journey down through space, In cool descent, and loyal-hearted, She builds a ladder to the place From which she started. Thus I, gone forth, as spiders do, In spider’s web a truth discerning, Attach one silken strand to you For my returning.

Lines on Ale by Edgar Allan Poe   Fill with mingled cream and amber, I will drain that glass again. Such hilarious visions clamber through the chamber of my brain – Quaintest thoughts – queerest fancies come to life and fade away; What care I how time advances: I am drinking ale today.

Ode to Socks by Pablo Neruda Mara Mori brought me A pair of socks that she wove with her shepherdess hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I put my feet in them like in two cases woven with threads of twilight and sheep-skin. Violent socks, my feet were two woolen fish two long sharks of sea blue pierced with one golden plait, two gigantic blackbirds, two cannons my feet were honored in this way by these celestial socks. They were so handsome that for the first time my feet seemed to me unacceptable, like two decrepit firemen, firemen unworthy of that embroidered fire, those luminous socks. Nevertheless, I resisted the sharp temptation to keep them as schoolboys preserve fireflies, as the scholars collect sacred texts, I resisted the furious impulse to put them in a golden cage and each day give them birdseed and the pulp of pink melon. Like discoverers that in the forest hand over the rarest green deer to the spit and eat it with remorse I stretched my feet and sheathed them in those beautiful socks and then my shoes. And the moral of my Ode is this: the beauty is twice the beauty and what is good is doubly good, when it is a question of two socks of wool in winter.   Translation © 2007 Rob Fletcher