MAY-FLOWERS

MAY-FLOWERS

by Emily Dickinson (1830 - 1886)

Pink, small and punctual,

Aromatic, low, 

Covert in April,

Candid in May,

Dear to the moss,

Known by the knoll,

Next to the robin

In every soul.

Bold little beauty,

Bedecked with thee,

Nature forswears

Antiquity.

Tunisian poet

I visited TUNISIA in late-March and April. While in the city of Tozeur, I met a fellow poet. Her name is SOUAD KHCHIM.

I'm pleased to share one of her poems, translated into English by Dr. Abdellatif Ben Halima:

LOVE

 

When you loved me,

trees had more leaves

and the morning dew appeared

with the light of the sun

and the light of the moon.

When you loved me,

every bird found for itself a nest

and every butterfly a flower.

Palaces found their

kings and life its meaning.

When you loved me,

my heart started to beat

and my lips had a fire in them

and my bosom yielded nothing

but tenderness.

It is your tenderness that gives more

life to my life

and that resurrects me into

an antelope that springs in the desert,

an ever-blossoming flower that knows

no other season but Spring!

 

Shakespeare's wife, Anne Hathaway

William Shakespeare was born on April 23, 1564 and died in 1616 on the same day in April as his birth.

He married Anne Hathaway in November of 1582. He was 18 and she was 26 and pregnant with their first child (Suzanna).  The average age of marriage for a woman was 26. William, being 18, was considered a minor and had to have Anne's father's consent to marry. Suzanna was born six months after the wedding. Three years later Anne gave birth to twins, Hamnet and Judith. Anne and William remained married  until his death.

His will of March 25, 1616, a month before he died, states that he left her the second-best bed (with its bedding and curtains).  This was not a slight. The second-best bed was the marriage bed, the best bed being reserved for guests. 

Here is Carol Anne Duffy's poem,"Anne Hathaway."

ANNE HATHAWAY

'Item I gyve unto my wife my second best bed...'

        (from Shakespeare's will)

The bed we loved in was a spinning word

of forests, castles, torchlight, clifftops, seas

where he would dive for pearls. My lover's words

were shooting stars which fell to earth as kisses

on these lips; my body now a softer rhyme

to his, now echo, assonance; his touch

a verb dancing in the centre of a noun.

Some nights, I dreamed he'd written me, the bed

a page beneath his writer's hands. Romance

and drama played by touch, by scent, by taste.

In the other bed, the best, our guests dozed on,

dribbling their prose. My living laughing love -

I hold him in the casket of my widow's head

as he held me upon that next best bed.

        by Carol Anne Duffy

        from The World's Wife (1999)

Carol Anne Duffy is former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

MY NEW BOOK

My new book, Sunshine Has Its Limits is here! 

This collection of poems tells the story of a couple's journey, from the exhilaration of first attraction, through marriage and its daily rituals, to the final disenchantment. In the end, one partner accepts the other's estrangement and begins to triumph in self-awareness in this new world. 

Here are two of the poems from my book:

UNRULY ACCRUALS

The same month as the canister

vacuum cleaner dies, she claims

the refrigerator needs replacing.

His comeback is a mischievous grin

with "Does this marriage merit

a second generation of appliances?"

Her relaxed laugh and smile make plain

her disbelief that the usefulness of their

devices is what holds the two together.

Throughout those unruly accruals,

she can count on what persists,

their uncontrived delight in each other,

like some self-evident truth

that becomes its own affirmation.

        Lenny Lianne

        from Sunshine Has Its Limits (Kelsey Books, 2023)

NEITHER PERFECT NOR CONSTANT

Outside her window, a winter wind

batters bushes and leafless branches

of the silver oaks. In the sky,

the Little Dipper, that looked level

in autumn, appears on its side

as though knocked over, its contents gone.

                Who cares what's been lost,

                what's never our to keep?

she asks of no one

but the wordless universe

which, itself, is neither perfect

nor constant.                Like snow,

which overnight conceals

the hardened ground. Her world

it seems is changing clothes

and character. Each incidental

flake drops in the down-

draft, full of flight and fall,

while a chilly quietness grips the air,

like a familiar after shave. 

        Lenny Lianne

        from Sunshine Has Its Limits (Kelsay Books, 2023)

My book is available at

Kelsaybooks.com

    and

on Amazon.

 

WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

William Butler Yeats (1865-1939) is considered one of Ireland's greatest poets. Born in Dublin, he spent much of his boyhood with his grandparents in County Sligo in western Ireland. In 1987 his family moved to London where he wrote poems, plays, novels and short stories. Much of what he wrote was about Ireland, its landscape and myths. He was a driving force behind the Irish Literary Revival. In 1923 he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

One of his best loved poems is "The Lake of Innisfree." For Yeats, the image was what started a poem. He wrote that a window display in London triggered his famous poem:

"I had still the ambition formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough Gill, and when walking through Fleet Street very homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, and began to remember lake water. From this sudden remembrance came my poem Innisfree, my first lyric with anything in its rhythm of my own music." 

THE LAKE AT INNISFREE

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honeybee,

And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,

Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;

There midnight's all a glimmer, and moon a purple glow,

And evening full of linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day

I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;

While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,

I hear it in the deep heart's core.

        by Willian Butler Yeats

        from THE ROSE (1893)

    

AN IRISH POEM

As St. Patrick's Day is soon, I'm featuring a poem by an Irish poet, Vona Groake, one of the leading Irish poets of her generation.

Born in Mostrim in the Irish midlands in 1964, she's published eleven books of poetry. Groake is the former editor of Poetry Ireland Review. In 2012, Groake was elected a member of the Irish academy of the arts.

Here's her sonnet, FOLDEROL:

FOLDEROL

I have been walking by the harbour

where I see it’s recently sprayed

that Fred loves Freda, and Freda cops Fred.

Which reminds me of you, and the twenty-four

words for ‘nonsense’ I wrote on your thighs and back

(the night you came home from her house with some cock-

and-bull story of missed connections and loose ends)

with passion-fruit lipstick and mascara pens,

Including, for the record: blather, drivel, trash,

prattle, palaver, waffle, balderdash, gibberish, shit.

Thinking I had made a point of sorts, but not

so sure when I woke up to find my own flesh

covered with your smudged disgrace

while you, of course, had vanished without trace.

        by Vona Groake

        Other People's Houses, The Gallery Press

 

Another Love Poem

Here's an unusual love poem:

:

VALENTINE

Not a red rose or a satin heart.

I give you an onion.

It is a moon wrapped in brown paper.

It promises light

like the careful undressing of love.

Here.

It will blind you with tears

like a lover.

It will make your reflection

a wobbling photo of grief.

I am trying to be truthful.

Not a cute card or kissogram.

I give you an onion.

Its fierce kiss will stay on your lips,

possessive and faithful

as we are,

for as long as we are.

Take it.

Its platinum loops shrink to a wedding ring,

if you like.

Lethal.

Its scent will cling to your fingers,

cling to your knife. 

        by Carol Ann Duffy

        From New and Selected Poems 1984-2004 (Picador, 2004) 

Carol Ann Duffy is the former Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom (2009-2019), the first female and first Scottish Poet Laureate in the role's 400-year history.