Friday Poetry Blogging

Halloween's coming ...

Macbeth, Act IV, Scene I
by William Shakespeare

The three witches, casting a spell

Round about the cauldron go;
In the poison’d entrails throw.
Toad, that under cold stone
Days and nights hast thirty one
Swelter’d venom sleeping got,
Boil thou first i’ the charmed pot.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Fillet of a fenny snake,
In the cauldron boil and bake;
Eye of newt, and toe of frog,
Wool of bat, and tongue of dog,
Adder’s fork, and blind-worm’s sting,
Lizard’s leg, and howlet’s wing,
For a charm of powerful trouble,
Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Scale of dragon, tooth of wolf,
Witches’ mummy, maw and gulf
Of the ravin’d salt-sea shark,
Root of hemlock digg’d i’ the dark,
Liver of blaspheming Jew,
Gall of goat, and slips of yew
Sliver’d in the moon’s eclipse,
Nose of Turk, and Tartar’s lips,
Finger of birth-strangled babe
Ditch-deliver’d by a drab,
Make the gruel thick and slab:
Add thereto a tiger’s chaudron,
For the ingredients of our cauldron.

Double, double toil and trouble;
Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Friday Poetry Blogging

In honor of autumn:

These Green-Going-to-Yellow
by Marvin Bell

This year,
I'm raising the emotional ante,
putting my face
in the leaves to be stepped on,
seeing myself among them, that is;
that is, likening
leaf-vein to artery, leaf to flesh,
the passage of a leaf in autumn
to the passage of autumn,
branch-tip and winter spaces
to possibilities, and possibility
to God. Even on East 61st Street
in the blowzy city of New York,
someone has planted a gingko
because it has leaves like fans like hands,
hand-leaves, and sex. Those lovely
Chinese hands on the sidewalks
so far from delicacy
or even, perhaps, another gender of gingko--
do we see them?
No one ever treated us so gently
as these green-going-to-yellow hands
fanned out where we walk.
No one ever fell down so quietly
and lay where we would look
when we were tired or embarrassed,
or so bowed down by humanity
that we had to watch out lest our shoes stumble,
and looked down not to look up
until something looked like parts of people
where we were walking. We have no
experience to make us see the gingko
or any other tree,
and, in our admiration for whatever grows tall
and outlives us,
we look away, or look at the middles of things,
which would not be our way
if we truly thought we were gods.

Friday Poetry Blogging

There was a time, both on this blog and on past efforts, when I regularly posted a poem on Fridays. Cos I like poetry, and it's fun to share my favorites. I think I stopped from sheer inertia, but today I was going through some boxes of old stuff and found the book eWAC made for me for my 18th birthday, which has a lot of great poems in it, so I thought I'd maybe start up again. The poem below is posted in honor of our dear Governor Tim Pawlenty, who indicated in a conference call yesterday that he may invoke the 10th Amendment to prevent any of Obama's healthcare reforms from taking effect in MN. Glad to know you, Tim.

Go West Young Man
by James Laughlin

Yessir they're all named
either Ken or Stan or Don
every one of them and
those aren't just nick-
names either no they're
really christened like
that just Ken or Stan or
Don and you shake hands
with anybody you run into
no matter who the hell
it is and say "glad to
know you Ken glad to
know you Don" and then
two minutes later (you
may not have said ten
words to the guy) you
shake hands again and
say "glad to have met
you Stan glad to" and
they haven't heard much
about Marx and the class
struggle because they
haven't had to and by
god it makes a country
that is fit to live in
and by god I'm glad to
know you Don I'm glad!