Quails by Francis Brett Young

(In the south of Italy the peasants put out the eyes of a captured quail
so that its cries may attract the flocks of spring migrants into their
nets.)


All through the night
I have heard the stuttering call of a blind quail,
A caged decoy, under a cairn of stones,
Crying for light as the quails cry for love.

Other wanderers,
Northward from Africa winging on numb pinions, dazed
With beating winds and the sobbing of the sea,
Hear, in a breath of sweet land-herbage, the call
Of the blind one, their sister....
Hearing, their fluttered hearts
Take courage, and they wheel in their dark flight,
Knowing that their toil is over, dreaming to see
The white stubbles of Abruzzi smitten with dawn,
And spilt grain lying in the furrows, the squandered gold
That is the delight of quails in their spring mating.

Land-scents grow keener,
Penetrating the dank and bitter odour of brine
That whitens their feathers;
Far below, the voice of their sister calls them
To plenty, and sweet water, and fulfilment.
Over the pallid margin of dim seas breaking,
Over the thickening in the darkness that is land,
They fly. Their flight is ended. Wings beat no more.
Downward they drift, one by one, like dark petals,
Slowly, listlessly falling
Into the mouth of horror:
The nets....

Where men come trampling and crying with bright lanterns,
Plucking their weak, entangled claws from the meshes of net,
Clutching the soft brown bodies mottled with olive,
Crushing the warm, fluttering flesh, in hands stained with blood,
Till their quivering hearts are stilled, and the bright eyes,
That are like a polished agate, glaze in death.

But the blind one, in her wicker cage, without ceasing
Haunts this night of spring with her stuttering call,
Knowing nothing of the terror that walks in darkness,
Knowing only that some cruelty has stolen the light
That is life, and that she must cry until she dies.

I, in the darkness,
Heard, and my heart grew sick. But I know that to-morrow
A smiling peasant will come with a basket of quails
Wrapped in vine-leaves, prodding them with blood-stained fingers,
Saying, 'Signore, you must cook them thus, and thus,
With a sprig of basil inside them.' And I shall thank him,
Carrying the piteous carcases into the kitchen
Without a pang, without shame.

'Why should I be ashamed? Why should I rail
Against the cruelty of men? Why should I pity,
Seeing that there is no cruelty which men can imagine
To match the subtle dooms that are wrought against them
By blind spores of pestilence: seeing that each of us,
Lured by dim hopes, flutters in the toils of death
On a cold star that is spinning blindly through space
Into the nets of time?'

So cried I, bitterly thrusting pity aside,
Closing my lids to sleep. But sleep came not,
And pity, with sad eyes,
Crept to my side, and told me
That the life of all creatures is brave and pityful
Whether they be men, with dark thoughts to vex them,
Or birds, wheeling in the swift joys of flight,
Or brittle ephemerids, spinning to death in the haze
Of gold that quivers on dim evening waters;
Nor would she be denied.
The harshness died
Within me, and my heart
Was caught and fluttered like the palpitant heart
Of a brown quail, flying
To the call of her blind sister,
And death, in the spring night.

What Are Big Girls Made Of by Marge Piercy

The construction of a woman:
a woman is not made of flesh
of bone and sinew
belly and breasts, elbows and liver and toe. 
She is manufactured like a sports sedan. 
She is retooled, refitted and redesigned
every decade. 
Cecile had been seduction itself in college. 
She wriggled through bars like a satin eel, 
her hips and ass promising, her mouth pursed
in the dark red lipstick of desire. 

She visited in '68 still wearing skirts
tight to the knees, dark red lipstick, 
while I danced through Manhattan in mini skirt, 
lipstick pale as apricot milk, 
hair loose as a horse's mane. Oh dear, 
I thought in my superiority of the moment, 
whatever has happened to poor Cecile? 
She was out of fashion, out of the game, 
disqualified, disdained, dis- 
membered from the club of desire. 

Look at pictures in French fashion
magazines of the 18th century: 
century of the ultimate lady
fantasy wrought of silk and corseting. 
Paniers bring her hips out three feet
each way, while the waist is pinched
and the belly flattened under wood. 
The breasts are stuffed up and out
offered like apples in a bowl. 
The tiny foot is encased in a slipper
never meant for walking. 
On top is a grandiose headache: 
hair like a museum piece, daily
ornamented with ribbons, vases, 
grottoes, mountains, frigates in full
sail, balloons, baboons, the fancy
of a hairdresser turned loose. 
The hats were rococo wedding cakes
that would dim the Las Vegas strip. 
Here is a woman forced into shape
rigid exoskeleton torturing flesh: 
a woman made of pain. 

How superior we are now: see the modern woman
thin as a blade of scissors. 
She runs on a treadmill every morning, 
fits herself into machines of weights
and pulleys to heave and grunt, 
an image in her mind she can never
approximate, a body of rosy
glass that never wrinkles, 
never grows, never fades. She
sits at the table closing her eyes to food
hungry, always hungry: 
a woman made of pain. 

A cat or dog approaches another, 
they sniff noses. They sniff asses. 
They bristle or lick. They fall
in love as often as we do, 
as passionately. But they fall
in love or lust with furry flesh, 
not hoop skirts or push up bras
rib removal or liposuction. 
It is not for male or female dogs
that poodles are clipped
to topiary hedges. 

If only we could like each other raw. 
If only we could love ourselves
like healthy babies burbling in our arms. 
If only we were not programmed and reprogrammed
to need what is sold us. 
Why should we want to live inside ads? 
Why should we want to scourge our softness
to straight lines like a Mondrian painting? 
Why should we punish each other with scorn
as if to have a large ass
were worse than being greedy or mean?

When will women not be compelled
to view their bodies as science projects,
gardens to be weeded,
dogs to be trained?
When will a woman cease
to be made of pain?

Spraying the Potatoes by Patrick Kavanagh

Spraying the Potatoes was written by Patrick Kavanagh and was voted as one of Ireland's top 50 favourite poems. Kavanagh was raised in rural Ireland and knew of the hardship that went with working on farms. He resented the idyllic view that city poets had of rural Ireland. 

The barrels of blue potato-spray
Stood on a headland of July
Beside an orchard wall where roses
Were young girls hanging from the sky. 

The flocks of green potato-stalks
Were blossom spread for sudden flight,
The Kerr's Pinks in a frilled blue,
The Arran Banners wearing white. 

And over the potato-field
A lazy veil of woven sun. 
Dandelions growing on headlands, showing
Their unloved hearts to everyone. 

 And I was there with the knapsack sprayer
On the barrel's edge poised. A wasp was floating
Dead on a sunken briar leaf
Over a copper-poisoned ocean.  

The axle-roll of a rut-locked cart
Broke the burnt stick of noon in two. 
An old man came through a cornfield
Remembering his youth and some Ruth he knew. 

 He turned my way. "God further the work."
He echoed an ancient farming prayer.
I thanked him. He eyed the potato-drills. 
He said: "You are bound to have good ones there." 

 We talked and our talk was a theme of kings,
A theme for strings. He hunkered down
In the shade of the orchard wall. O roses
The old man dies in the young girl's frown. 

 And poet lost to potato-fields,
Remembering the lime and copper smell
Of the spraying barrels he is not lost
Or till blossomed stalks cannot weave a spell. 

The Bat by D. H. Lawrence

                     Bat

By D. H. Lawrence

At evening, sitting on this terrace,

When the sun from the west, beyond Pisa, beyond the mountains of Carrara

Departs, and the world is taken by surprise ...

When the tired flower of Florence is in gloom beneath the glowing

Brown hills surrounding ...

When under the arches of the Ponte Vecchio

A green light enters against stream, flush from the west,

Against the current of obscure Arno ...

Look up, and you see things flying

Between the day and the night;

Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together.

A circle swoop, and a quick parabola under the bridge arches

Where light pushes through;

A sudden turning upon itself of a thing in the air.

A dip to the water.

And you think:

"The swallows are flying so late!"

Swallows?

Dark air-life looping

Yet missing the pure loop ...

A twitch, a twitter, an elastic shudder in flight

And serrated wings against the sky,

Like a glove, a black glove thrown up at the light,

And falling back.

Never swallows!

Bats!

The swallows are gone.

At a wavering instant the swallows gave way to bats

By the Ponte Vecchio ...

Changing guard.

Bats, and an uneasy creeping in one's scalp

As the bats swoop overhead!

Flying madly.

Pipistrello!

Black piper on an infinitesimal pipe.

Little lumps that fly in air and have voices indefinite, wildly vindictive;

Wings like bits of umbrella.

Bats!

Creatures that hang themselves up like an old rag, to sleep;

And disgustingly upside down.

Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags

And grinning in their sleep.

Bats!

In China the bat is symbol for happiness.

Not for me!

Sparrow by Norman MacCaig

He's no artist.

His taste in clothes leans towards

the dowdy and second hand.

And his next — that blackbird, writing

pretty scrolls on the air with the gold nib of his beak

would call it a slum. 

To stalk solitary on lawns,

to sing solitary in midnight trees,

to glide solitary over grey Atlantics — 

not for him: he'd rather

a punch-up in a gutter. 

He carries what learning he has

lightly — it is, frankly, based

on the usefulness whose result

is survival. A proletarian bird.

No scholar. 

But when the winter soft-shoes in,

and these other birds — 

ballet dancers, pedants, architects —

die in the snow

and freeze to branches,

watch him happily flying

on the O-levels and A-levels

of the air. 

The Meadow Mouse by Theodore Roethke

I 

In a shoe box stuffed in an old nylon stocking

Sleeps the baby mouse I found in the meadow,

Where he trembled and shook beneath a stick

Till I caught him up by the tail and brought him in, 

Cradled in my hand,

A little quaker, the whole body of him trembling,

His absurd whiskers sticking out like a cartoon-mouse,

His feet like small leaves,

Little lizard-feet,

Whitish and spread wide when he tried to struggle away,

Wriggling like a minuscule puppy. 

Now he's eaten his three kinds of cheese and drunk from his 

             bottle-cap watering-trough—

So much he just lies in one corner,

His tail curled under him, his belly big

As his head; his bat-like ears

Twitching, tilting toward the least sound. 

Do I imagine he no longer trembles

When I come close to him? 

He seems no longer to tremble. 

II

But this morning the shoe-box house on the back porch is empty

Where has he gone, my meadow mouse, 

My thumb of a child that nuzzled in my palm? —

To run under the hawk's wing,

Under the ey of the great owl watching from the elm-tree,

To live by courtesy of the shrike, the snake, the tom-cat. 

I think of the nestling fallen into the deep grass,

The turtle gasping in the dusty rubble of the highway,

The paralytic stunned in the tub, and the water rising,—

All things innocent, hapless, forsaken. 

The War Against the Trees by Stanley Kunitz (1905 – 2006)

The man who sold his lawn to standard oil

Joked with his neighbors come to watch the show

While the bulldozers, drunk with gasoline,

Tested the virtue of the soil

Under the branchy sky                                

By overthowing first the privet-row.

Forsythia-forays and hydrangea-raids

Were but preliminaries to a war

Against the great-grandfathers of the town,

So freshly lopped and maimed.                       

They struck and struck again,

And with each elm a century went down.

All day the hireling engines charged the trees,

Subverting them by hacking underground

In grub-dominions, where dark summer’s mole         

Rampages through his halls,

Till a northern seizure shook

Those crowns, forcing the giants to their knees.

I saw the ghosts of children at their games

Racing beyond their childhood in the shade,         

And while the green world turned its death-foxed

     page

And a red wagon wheeled,

I watched them disappear

Into the suburbs of their grievous age.

Ripped from the craters much too big for hearts     

The club-roots bared their amputated coils,

Raw gorgons matted blind, whose pocks and scars

Cried Moon! On a corner lot

One witness-moment, caught

In the rear-view mirrors of the passing cars.  

POET NOTES

Stanley Kunitz became the tenth Poet Laureate of the United States in the autumn of 2000. Kunitz was ninety-five years old at the time, still actively publishing and promoting poetry to new generations of readers. In the New York Times Book Review, Robert Campbell noted that Kunitz's selection as poet laureate—the highest literary honor in America—"affirms his stature as perhaps the most distinguished living American poet." Atlantic Monthly contributor David Barber likewise cited Kunitz as "not only one of the most widely admired figures in contemporary poetry but also, rarer still, a true ambassador for his art." Barber felt that Kunitz, having "continued to write poems of a startling richness at an advanced age . . . has arguably saved his best for last. . . . The venerable doyen of American poetry is still a poet in his prime."

Haley's Comet by Stanley Kunitz (1905 - 2006)

Miss Murphy in first grade

wrote its name in chalk

across the board and told us

it was roaring down the stormtracks

of the Milky Way at frightful speed

and if it wandered off its course

and smashed into the earth

there’d be no school tomorrow.

A red-bearded preacher from the hills

with a wild look in his eyes

stood in the public square

at the playground’s edge

proclaiming he was sent by Gd

to save every one of us,

even the little children.

“Repent, ye sinners!” he shouted,

saving his hand-lettered sign.

At supper I felt sad to think

that it was probably

the last meal I’d share

with my mother and my sisters;

but I felt excited too

and scarcely touched my plate.

So mother scolded me

and sent me early to my room.

The whole family’s asleep

except for me. They never heard me steal

into the stairwell hall and climb

the ladder to the fresh night air.

Look for me, Father on the roof

of the red brick building

at the foot of Green Street –

that’s where we live, you know, on the top floor.

I’m the boy in the white flannel gown

sprawled on this coarse grave bed

searching the starry sky,

waiting for the world to end.

Ode to Hummingbird by Pablo Neruda (1904-1973)

Pablo Neruda was a Chilean poet. 

The hummingbird
in flight
is a water-spark,
an incandescent drip
of American
fire,
the jungle’s
flaming resume,
a heavenly,
precise
rainbow:
the hummingbird is
an arc,
a golden
thread,
a green
bonfire!

Oh
tiny
living
lightning,
when
you hover
in the air,
you are
a body of pollen,
a feather
or hot coal,
I ask you:
What is your substance?
Perhaps during the blind age
of the Deluge,
within fertility’s
mud,
when the rose
crystallized
in an anthracite fist,
and metals matriculated
each one in
a secret gallery
perhaps then
from a wounded reptile
some fragment rolled,
a golden atom,
the last cosmic scale,
a drop of terrestrial fire
took flight,
suspending your splendor,
your iridescent,
swift sapphire.

You doze
on a nut,
fit into a diminutive blossom;
you are an arrow,
a pattern,
a coat-of-arms,
honey’s vibrato, pollen’s ray;
you are so stouthearted–
the falcon
with his black plumage
does not daunt you:
you pirouette,
a light within the light,
air within the air.
Wrapped in your wings,
you penetrate the sheath
of a quivering flower,
not fearing
that her nuptial honey
may take off your head!

From scarlet to dusty gold,
to yellow flames,
to the rare
ashen emerald,
to the orange and black velvet
of our girdle gilded by sunflowers,
to the sketch
like
amber thorns,
your Epiphany,
little supreme being,
you are a miracle,
shimmering
from torrid California
to Patagonia’s whistling,
bitter wind.
You are a sun-seed,
plumed
fire,
a miniature
flag
in flight,
a petal of silenced nations,
a syllable
of buried blood,
a feather
of an ancient heart,
submerged