Solo for Saturday Night Guitar

Each Friday we provide the link to the blogger who is hosting a celebration of poetry around the blogosphere. There you can find the links to the many other blogs that are posting poems (new and old), discussions of poems, and reviews of poetry books. It’s also a great way to explore the internet.

Enjoy the festivities!

The host this week is Sara Lewis Holmes.

You can visit her here at Read Write Believe.


(The Acanthus, paper cutout collage by Henri Matisse,
1869-1954, French printmaker, painter, and sculptor)

“Love is the poetry of the senses.” ~ Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), French writer

SOLO FOR SATURDAY NIGHT GUITAR

Time was. Time is. Time shall be.
Man invented time to be used.
Love was. Love is. Love shall be.
Yet man never invented love
Nor is love to be used like time.
A clock wears numbers one to twelve
And you look and read its face
And tell the time pre-cise-ly ex-act - ly.
Yet who reads the face of love?
Who tells love numbers pre-cise-ly ex-act-ly?
Holding love in a tight hold for keeps,
Fastening love down and saying
“It's here now and here always.”
You don’t do this off hand, careless-like.
Love costs. Love is not so easy
Nor is the shimmering of star dust
Nor the smooth flow of new blossoms
Nor the drag of a heavy hungering for someone.

Love is a white horse you ride
or wheels and hammers leaving you lonely
or a rock in the moonlight for rest
or a sea where phantom ships cross always
or a tall shadow always whispering
or a circle of spray and prisms —
maybe a rainbow round your shoulder.

Heavy heavy is love to carry
and light as one rose petal,
light as a bubble, a blossom,
a remembering bar of music
or a finger or a wisp of hair
never forgotten.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet, writer, and biographer of Lincoln

Being Born Is Important

(The Butterfly by William Kurelek, 1927-1977,
Canadian artist and writer)

The life of Jean Vanier is an example of agape (pronounced ah•gah•pay) or unconditional charity in action.

Born in 1928, Vanier is a Canadian philosopher and theologian. In 1964, he established L’Arche, or “the ark,” an international movement of communities where intellectually disabled persons live and work together with those who take care of them. He travels around the globe to plead for the poor, the lonely, and the handicapped.

“To love people,” wrote Vanier in Becoming Human, “is also to celebrate them . . . . every child, every person, needs to know that they are a source of joy.”

BEING BORN IS IMPORTANT

Being born is important.
You who have stood at the bedposts
and seen a mother on her high harvest day,
the day of the most golden of harvest moons for her.

You who have seen the new wet child
dried behind the ears,
swaddled in soft fresh garments,
pursing its lips and sending a groping mouth
toward the nipples where white milk is ready —

You who have seen this love’s payday
of wild toil and sweet agonizing —

You know being born is important.
You know nothing else was ever so important to you.
You understand the payday of love is so old,
So involved, so traced with circles of the moon,
So cunning with the secrets of the salts of the blood —
It must be older than the moon, older than salt.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer and biographer of Lincoln

The People, Yes

(The dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg,
November 19, 1863)


(Detail of the picture above: the only confirmed photograph
of President Lincoln at Gettysburg — he stands hatless just
below the man with the sash and beside the man in the top hat.)

Today is the anniversary of President Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

On July 1, 1863, General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate forces collided by chance with Major General George G. Meade’s Union forces just outside of a sleepy hamlet in Pennsylvania. In the three days of fighting that followed, the countryside around Gettysburg was transformed into the bloodiest battlefield of the war, with almost 50,000 casualties evenly distributed between the two sides. It took months to bury the fallen soldiers and to clear away the carcasses of the dead horses.

This was the decisive battle of the Civil War. Gettysburg was the farthest point north the Southern army would ever get. Lee’s gamble was breathtaking. Had he won this battle, his army would have been within striking distance of Washington. Instead, his army never really recovered from the loss.

More than four months later, there remained many dead yet to be buried. In this atmosphere, on the afternoon of November 19, Abraham Lincoln spoke at the dedication of the National Cemetery at Gettysburg. The ceremony began with Edward Everett’s delivery of a long oration. Then Lincoln spoke briefly.

Lincoln’s remarks are the ones that have echoed through history. In a note the next day, Everett told the President, “I should be glad if I could flatter myself that I came as near to the central idea of the occasion, in two hours, as you did in two minutes.”

The Gettysburg Address

Four score and seven years ago, our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that “all men are created equal.”

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived, and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battlefield of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of it, as a final resting place for those who died here, that the nation might live. This we may, in all propriety do. But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate — we can not consecrate — we can not hallow, this ground — The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have hallowed it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here; while it can never forget what they did here.

It is rather for us, the living, we here be dedicated to the great task remaining before us — that, from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they here, gave the last full measure of devotion — that we here highly resolve these dead shall not have died in vain; that the nation, shall have a new birth of freedom, and that government of the people by the people for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

from THE PEOPLE, YES

Lincoln?
He was a mystery in smoke and flags
Saying yes to the smoke, yes to the flags,
Yes to the paradoxes of democracy,
Yes to the hopes of government
Of the people by the people for the people,
No to debauchery of the public mind,
No to personal malice nursed and fed,
Yes to the Constitution when a help,
No to the Constitution when a hindrance
Yes to man as a struggler amid illusions,
Each man fated to answer for himself:
Which of the faiths and illusions of mankind
Must I choose for my own sustaining light
To bring me beyond the present wilderness?

Lincoln? Was he a poet?
And did he write verses?
“I have not willingly planted a thorn
in any man’s bosom.”
“I shall do nothing through malice: what
I deal with is too vast for malice.”

Death was in the air.
So was birth.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet, writer, and biographer of Lincoln

Jazz Fantasia

(Jazz at Montreux by Romare Bearden, 1911-1988,
American artist)

All over the world, jazz is recognized as a uniquely American art.

“First created by the descendants of African slaves, born of the blues in New Orleans, raised in Chicago and along the Mississippi, jazz has since visited hot Chicago and the cool West Coast, got run out of New York, spent April in Paris and a Night in Tunisia, and has even traveled to outer and inner space,” writes the American poet Kevin Young (born 1970), in his introduction to a collection of jazz poems.

“[J]azz was a sharp thorn in the sides of power-hungry men, from Hitler to Brezhnev, who successfully ruled in my native land,” recalls Josef Škvorecký (born 1924), the Czech novelist and essayist who lived under both Nazi and Communist oppression of his country. He now resides in Canada.

“[T]he essence of this music, this ‘way of making music,’ is not simply protest. Its essence is something far more elemental: an élan vital, a forceful vitality, an explosive creative energy as breathtaking as that of any true art, that may be felt, even in the saddest of blues. Its effect is cathartic.”

JAZZ FANTASIA

Drum on your drums, batter on your banjoes,
sob on the long cool winding saxophones.
Go to it, O jazzmen.

Sling your knuckles on the bottoms of the happy
tin pans, let your trombones ooze, and go husha-
husha-hush with the slippery sand-paper.

Moan like an autumn wind high in the lonesome treetops,
moan soft like you wanted somebody terrible, cry like a
racing car slipping away from a motorcycle cop, bang-bang!
you jazzmen, bang altogether drums, traps, banjoes, horns,
tin cans — make two people fight on the top of a stairway
and scratch each other's eyes in a clinch tumbling down
the stairs.

Can the rough stuff . . . now a Mississippi steamboat pushes
up the night river with a hoo-hoo-hoo-oo . . . and the green
lanterns calling to the high soft stars . . . a red moon rides
on the humps of the low river hills . . . go to it, O jazzmen.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer and biographer of Lincoln

Washington Monument at Night

(March to Valley Forge by William Trego, 1858-1909,
American painter)

The price of freedom is steep.

In the eighteenth century, wars were waged in campaigns during the spring, summer and early autumn. Because it was impossible to fight battles under the brutally frigid conditions of winter, armies would hold their ground by going into encampment during the “severe season.”

The winter of 1777-1778 was the darkest period for the Americans in the Revolutionary War. They had settled into winter quarters in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania.

By February, the situation had become so dire that General Washington wrote to Governor Clinton: "For some days past there has been little less than a famine in camp. A part of the army has been a week without any kind of flesh [meat], and the rest three or four days." The men were wet and cold from the snow, their clothes and blankets in tatters, their shoes so destroyed that they wrapped their feet in rags. But, “naked and starving as they are,” said Washington, “we cannot enough admire the incomparable patience and fidelity of the soldiery.”

WASHINGTON MONUMENT BY NIGHT

1

The stone goes straight.
A lean swimmer dives into night sky,
Into half-moon mist.

2

Two trees are coal black.
This is a great white ghost between.
It is cool to look at,
Strong men, strong women, come here.

3

Eight years is a long time
To be fighting all the time.

4

The republic is a dream.
Nothing happens unless first a dream.

5

The wind bit hard at Valley Forge one Christmas.
Soldiers tied rags on their feet.
Red footprints wrote on the snow . . .
. . . and stone shoots into stars here
. . . into half-moon mist tonight.

6

Tongues wrangled dark at a man.
He buttoned his overcoat and stood alone.
In a snowstorm, red hollyberries, thoughts, he stood alone.

7

Women said: He is lonely
. . . fighting . . . fighting . . . eight years . . .

8

The name of an iron man goes over the world.
It takes a long time to forget an iron man.

9

. . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . .

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer and biographer of Lincoln

At a Window

(The Angelus by Jean-François Millet, 1814–1875,
French painter)

“Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things,” wrote Paul of Tarsus (circa 3-66 A.D.) in his letter to the Christians in Corinth, Greece.

AT A WINDOW

Give me hunger,
O you gods that sit and give
The world its orders.
Give me hunger, pain and want,
Shut me out with shame and failure
From your doors of gold and fame,
Give me your shabbiest, weariest hunger!

But leave me a little love,
A voice to speak to me in the day end,
A hand to touch me in the dark room
Breaking the long loneliness.
In the dusk of day-shapes
Blurring the sunset,
One little wandering, western star
Thrust out from the changing shores of shadow.
Let me go to the window,
Watch there the day-shapes of dusk
And wait and know the coming
Of a little love.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer and biographer of Lincoln

Happiness

(Hungarian State Folk Ensemble)

I like this poem very much for its answer to that all-important philosophical question about the meaning of life. I’m sure my opinion has nothing to do with the fact that my father, Gyula (Jules) Horváth, is Hungarian and this is the first poem in English I have found that mentions Hungarians.

HAPPINESS

I asked the professors who teach the meaning of life to tell me what is happiness
And I went to famous executives who boss the work of thousands of men.
They all shook their heads and gave me a smile as though I was trying to fool with them
And then one Sunday afternoon I wandered out along the Desplaines river
And I saw a crowd of Hungarians under the trees with their women and children and a keg of beer and an accordion.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer and biographer of Lincoln

Happy Birthday, part one

A birthday is the one anniversary that calls out for the happy wishes to be expressed in rhyme.

There are few poems of the “happy birthday to you” variety, but you can find many that celebrate the miracle of birth and are perfect to send out between the pages of a beautiful greeting card.

Perfect like the last verse of this poem.

BEING BORN IS IMPORTANT

Being born is important.
You who have stood at the bedposts
and seen a mother on her high harvest day,
the day of the most golden of harvest moons for her.

You who have seen the new wet child
dried behind the ears,
swaddled in soft fresh garments,
pursing its lips and sending a groping mouth
toward the nipples where white milk is ready –

You who have seen this love’s payday
of wild toil and sweet agonizing –

You know being born is important.
You know nothing else was ever so important to you.
You understand the payday of love is so old,
So involved, so traced with circles of the moon,
So cunning with the secrets of the salts of the blood –
It must be older than the moon, older than salt.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer and biographer of Lincoln

Let's Begin at the Beginning

(This month the George Hail Library celebrates the annual National Poetry Month. Here we will spend the next weeks taking a special look at poetry. Poetry brings beauty to our lives. It speaks for us when we cannot find the words. It shows us different ways of looking at the world. And it can be fun.)

What is poetry all about? Why not just stick with prose?

This is what the Belle of Amherst had to say.

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 –

~ Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), American poet

Snatch of Sliphorn Jazz

Are you happy? It's the only
way to be, kid.
Yes, be happy, it's a good nice
way to be.
But not happy-happy, kid, don't
be too doubled-up doggone happy.
It's the doubled-up doggone happy-
happy people . . . bust hard . . . they
do bust hard . . . when they bust.
Be happy, kid, go to it, but not too
doggone happy.

~ Carl Sandburg (1878-1967), American poet and writer
and biographer of Lincoln