Pirate Xmas: A Song

Here’s a bit of doggeral for singing:
"Pirate Xmas" --  

Ran out of Irish --
Drinking rum --
Pirate Xmas

Futility feeds into despair
Lack of hope fills that empty chair
Friends and family in disarray
Dead, distant,
Dreadfully dismayed
Under sentence
Ducking attack
Don’t count the blessings that we lack
Don’t count the blessings in arrears
Just bless, just bless
Find the needy and just bless
Pirate Xmas

Look beyond
Look beyond
Feed whom you can
Toast the rest
Pirate Xmas

Ran out of Irish –
Drinking rum –
Pirate Xmas

X marks the spot . . . .

--MD

I expect to revise this one, but the tune's in my head.
Feel free to sing as you wish.

Field of Clay

The Winding and Unwinding

THE WINDING AND UNWINDING

The shape of your thought
Entices me
Quite as much as
The thought of your shape.

Clay-minded,
Bloody-brained,
Fickle as a stick in water:
I swim towards you.

I reach for you
Again and again and again
In thought, in force,
Not withholding aught
Save what wyrd demands
From each of us.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide,
Again releasing,
Again embracing,
Tasting and chasing,
Like river-otters sliding
Down the sloped bank.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide:
The rounded lift and heft,
The nipple’s assertion,
The twinned-blood rising
Like the swift pull
Of the river’s pulse
And penetration --
Flowing,
Falling,
Following –-

That shared current
Streaming just past the shore,
Stranding us between
Just enough
And quite enough.
___

Coda:
Laughing lips sip --
Swallow -- another draft.
Glasses, glances,
Clash and chime,
Toasting the new year.

Harken to the hearty
Admonition:
Draft, not drift.

--Matthew Duckworth

Draft

Clay-minded,
Bloody-brained,
Fickle as a stick in water --

--MD

Take Note (Take Two)

TAKE NOTE

We are the grit
That mars the paint
Or makes the pearl.

"Fiery dust,"
Lord Byron wrote,
Illustrious, notorious,
Untrammeled by our common clay,
And utterly undismayed.

Be equally furious,
Be equally industrious:
Take full note --
And write.

MD

Just revised: 12/18/15.

HWAET!

Lead figurines from the 1970s:
orc-warrior
vs. Spear-Dane.

Hurly-Burly: Poetry in Motion

This was a last-day hurly-burly of What-Poetry-Can-Be-And-Do and How-You-Can-Enjoy-The-Ride. Some of the following works were treated fully, but the others received glancing treatment, mere introductions or excerpts or highlighted singular effects: sacrifices on the altars of poetic efficacy and exuberant aesthetic trail-guiding.  Voice and story, voice and story.  What and how, what and how.

Hughes' "Suicide's Note"
        (body of the poem first, then the title revealed);
Auden's "The Shield of Achilles"
        (for we've read The Iliad this term);
Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" paraphrased to set up
Gluck's "Gretel in Darkness"
       (trauma and serious poetic conversations);
two quotations matched and set
       from Auden's "September 1, 1939"
       and Shelley's "Julian and Maddalo"
             (mere bits in parallel and contradiction);
a foray into Jackie Leven's lyrics
       from "Classic Northern Diversions"
(to read mood even if you don't know what the song is about, to find signs);
close-reading exercises
       with Frost's "Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening"
       and Wyatt's "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek"
       and Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be";
then, Frost's apocalyptic "Fire and Ice";
Spenser's logical/romantic playing with "My Love is Like to Ice, and I to Fire";
Donne's twisty-fun "Woman's Inconstancy";
a quick look at Dante Gabriel Rossetti's artwork to set up
       Christina Rossetti's beautiful and incisive "In An Artist's Studio";
and finally Herrick's playful "Cherry-ripe" -----------

(I had some Elvis Costello one-liners for flavor and effect in my back pocket, but I ended up not having time to use them appropriately and so held back.)

a very full 75-minute class.

Oh, I also quoted with context that venerable bumper sticker "Question Authority" and that mug I saw at Pegasus On Solano with "Birds have wings / Humans have books".

Burton Raffel's How To Read A Poem -- along with a slew of handouts -- was the textbook at hand.