Poem for a Tuesday — “Alone at Night” by Kwon P’il
The way of the world as it is,
What can I do about the fleeting time?
As a few chrysanthemums shiver in the late autumn,
Cricket chirps grow louder as the night deepens.
The sad moon throws its beams on the windowpanes;
And the wind shakes the rustling branches.
Recalling what has happened over the last ten years,
I sit before a lamp, counting the moths flying into it.
translated from the Chinese by Sung-Il Lee
in The Gift of Tongues (Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press), 1996, page 168.
Kwon P’il (1569-1612) was a classical Korean poet of the early Chosun Dynasty (1392-1910). Although Korea has had its own language for several thousand years, it has had a writing system only since the mid-15th century when Hangul was invented. As a result, early Korean literary activity was in Chinese characters and was heavily influenced by Chinese intellectual thought. Kwon P’il was among the first poets to work in both Chinese and the newly developed Hangul. His poetry reflects an attempt to cultivate an authentically Korean voice and shake off the traditional social norms and standards of Chinese literature.
Poem for a Tuesday — “Love Poem Earth” by Shu Ting
I love earth
Just as I love my wordless father
Earth breathing warmth with its rivers of blood
Earth fermenting with sweat, fertile with oil
Quickening slightly under the strong plow and bare feet
Rising and falling from heat at the heart’s core
You must shoulder bronze statues, monuments, museums
But sign the last judgment on the line of the fault.
My frost-crusted, mud-coated, sun-cracked earth
My stern, generous, indignant earth
Earth granting me skin color and language
Earth granting me wisdom and strength
I love earth
Just as I love my compassionate mother
Robust earth covered with kissprints from the sun’s lips
Collector of leaf-layers, of sprouts springing up after sprouts
Time and again abandoned by man, never abandoning man
Creating each sound, each color, each curse
And still you are called dirt.
My lead-lustred, red-pooled, white-spotted earth
My rough, lonely, untended earth
Earth granting me love and hate
Earth granting me pain and joy
Father grants me an infinite dream
Mother grants me a sensitive heart
The lines of my poems
are the sounds of the gramtree grove
Day and night sending out to the earth
its incessant shower of loveseed
— in Smoking People, chapbook 19. The Beloit Poetry Journal, vol. 39, no. 2, Winter 1988/1989, page 20.
Shu Ting is a modern Chinese poet associated with the Misty Poets, a group of 20th-century Chinese writers whose work speaks to the restrictions on art during the Cultural Revolution. After her father was accused of ideological aberrance, he moved the family to the countryside to avoid government scrutiny. She began writing poetry at age 27 and published in the underground journal Jīntiān. During the “anti-spiritual pollution” movement of the 1980s, Shu and other writers were deemed subversive and faced strong criticism from the state.
Poem for a Tuesday — “From Blossoms” by Li-Young Lee
From blossoms comes
this brown paper bag of peaches
we bought from the boy
at the bend in the road where we turned toward
signs painted Peaches.
From laden boughs, from hands,
from sweet fellowship in the bins,
comes nectar at the roadside, succulent
peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,
comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.
O, to take what we love inside,
to carry within us an orchard, to eat
not only the skin, but the shade,
not only the sugar, but the days, to hold
the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into
the round jubilance of peach.
There are days we live
as if death were nowhere
in the background; from joy
to joy to joy, from wing to wing,
from blossom to blossom to
impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.
in 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, New York: Random House, 2005, page 143.
Li-Young Lee is a poet, essayist and memoirist. His work is marked by the spare elegance of traditional Chinese poets and the mystical edge of Eliot, Keats, and Rilke. He thoughtfully and sensitively explores themes of family, spirituality, and belonging. Lee’s family fled political persecution in China and Indonesia before emigrating to the United States, where his father attended seminary and became a Presbyterian minister. As a student at the University of Pittsburgh, Lee began writing poetry and discovered his life’s work. He received the American Book Award for his lyrical memoir The Wingéd Seed: A Remembrance. In an interview with Tina Chang of the American Academy of Poets, Lee reflected, “If you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of causes. What’s another name for the totality of causes? The Cosmos. So, everything is a shape of Cosmos or God. It feels like something bigger than me—that I can’t possibly fathom but am embedded in.”
in Rose: Poems by Li-Young Lee. New York: BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986.
Li-Young Lee is a poet, essayist and memoirist. His work is marked by the spare elegance of traditional Chinese poets and the mystical edge of Eliot, Keats, and Rilke. He thoughtfully and sensitively explores themes of family, spirituality, and belonging. Lee’s family fled political persecution in China and Indonesia before emigrating to the United States, where his father attended seminary and became a Presbyterian minister. As a student at the University of Pittsburgh, Lee began writing poetry and discovered his life’s work. He received the American Book Award for his lyrical memoir The Wingéd Seed: A Remembrance. In an interview with Tina Chang of the American Academy of Poets, Lee reflected, “If you rigorously dissect it, you realize that everything is a shape of the totality of causes. What’s another name for the totality of causes? The Cosmos. So, everything is a shape of Cosmos or God. It feels like something bigger than me—that I can’t possibly fathom but am embedded in.”
Poem for a Tuesday “Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward” by John Donne
Let man’s soul be a sphere, and then, in this,
The ‘intelligence that moves, devotion is,
And as the other spheres, by being grown
Subject to foreign motion, lose their own,
And being by others hurried every day,
Scarce in a year their natural form obey:
Pleasure or business, so, our souls admit
For their first mover, and are whirled by it.
Hence is’t, that I am carried towards the West
This day, when my soul’s form bends toward the East.
There I should see a Sun, by rising set,
And by that setting endless day beget;
But that Christ on this cross, did rise and fall,
Sin had eternally benighted all.
Yet dare I’almost be glad, I do not see
That spectacle of too much weight for mee.
Who sees Gods face, that is self-life, must die;
What a death were it then to see God die?
It made his own lieutenant, Nature, shrink;
It made his footstool crack, and the sun wink.
Could I behold those hands which span the poles,
And tune all spheres at once pierced with those holes?
Could I behold that endless height which is
Zenith to us, and our antipodes,
Humbled below us? or that blood which is
The seat of all our Soules, if not of his,
Made dirt of dust, or that flesh which was worn
By God, for his apparel, ragg’d, and torn?
If on these things I durst not look, durst I
Upon his miserable mother cast mine eye,
Who was Gods partner here, and furnished thus
Half of that sacrifice, which ransomed us?
Though these things, as I ride, be from mine eye,
They’re present yet unto my memory,
For that looks towards them; and thou look’st towards mee,
O Saviour, as thou hang’st upon the tree;
I turn my back to thee but to receive
Corrections, till thy mercies bid thee leave.
O think me worth thine anger; punish me,
Burn off my rusts, and my deformity,
Restore thine image, so much, by thy grace,
That thou may’st know me, and I’ll turn my face.
In the Norton Anthology of Poetry, New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1970, pp. 189-190.
John Donne
Poet, writer, and clergyman John Donne was born in 1576 in Oxford. As a young man, he studied law, traveled as a gentleman adventurer to Cadiz and the Azores, and served as the secretary of Sir Thomas Egerton, the lord keeper of England. His secret marriage to Lady Anne More in 1602 led to a falling out with the Egerton family which put an end to his service to the household and blighted his professional opportunities for a number of years. Plagued by a sense of his own unworthiness, he was reluctant to become a priest. Ordained in 1615, he soon became a celebrated preacher. When his wife died in childbirth in 1617, Donne committed his energies to the church. He was elected dean of St. Paul’s in November 1621 and frequently preached before the king at court. Although his work was immensely popular during his lifetime, he fell out of favor during the Restoration and was little read until the late 19th and early twentieth century when his poetry was rediscovered and championed by T.S. Eliot and William Butler Yeats.
The spirit that walked upon the face of the waters walks the meadow of long grass; green shines to silver where the spirit passes.
Wind from the compass points, sun at meridian, these are forms the spirit enters, breath, ruach, light that is witness and by which we witness.
The grasses numberless, bowing and rising, silently cry hosanna as the spirit moves them and moves burnishing
over and again upon mountain pastures a day of spring, a needle’s eye space and time are passing through like a swathe of silk.
in Oblique Prayers, New Castle upon Tyne: Bloodaxe Books, 1986, p. 80.
When British-American poet Denise Levertov was five years old, she declared she would be a writer. At the age of 12, she sent some of her poems to T. S. Eliot, who replied with a two-page letter of encouragement. Her father Paul Levertov was a Russian Hasidic Jew who taught at the University of Leipzig. During the First World War, he was held under house arrest as an enemy alien by virtue of his ethnicity. After emigrating to the UK, he converted to Christianity and became an Anglican priest. Denise said, “My father’s Hasidic ancestry, his being steeped in Jewish and Christian scholarship and mysticism, his fervor and eloquence as a preacher, were factors built into my cells.” She was described by the New York Times as, “the most subtly skillful poet of her generation, the most profound, the most modest, the most moving.” She wrote and published twenty-four books of poetry.
Poem for a Tuesday — “Acceptance Speech” by Lynn Powell
The radio’s replaying last night’s winners and the gratitude of the glamorous, everyone thanking everybody for making everything so possible, until I want to shush the faucet, dry my hands, join in right here at the cluttered podium of the sink, and thank
my mother for teaching me the true meaning of okra, my children for putting back the growl in hunger, my husband, primo uomo of dinner, for not begrudging me this starring role—
without all of them, I know this soup would not be here tonight.
And let me just add that I could not have made it without the marrow bone, that blood— brother to the broth, and the tomatoes who opened up their hearts, and the self-effacing limas, the blonde sorority of corn, the cayenne and oregano who dashed in in the nick of time.
Special thanks, as always, to the salt— you know who you are—and to the knife, who revealed the ripe beneath the rind, the clean truth underneath the dirty peel.
—I hope I’ve not forgotten anyone— oh, yes, to the celery and the parsnip, those bit players only there to swell the scene, let me just say: sometimes I know exactly how you feel.
But not tonight, not when it’s all coming to something and the heat is on and I’m basking in another round of blue applause.
in 180 More Extraordinary Poems for Every Day, ed. Billy Collins. New York: Random House, 2005, p. 99.
Lynn Powell is a poet, writer of creative non-fiction, and educator. She has been awarded an NEA Fellowship in Poetry, the Felix Pollak Prize in Poetry, the Studs and Ida Terkel Author Award, the Brittingham Prize in Poetry, 4 Ohio Arts Council Excellence Awards, and the Great Lakes Colleges Association New Writers Award. She lives in Oberlin, Ohio, where she teaches creative writing and serves as the director of Oberlin College’s Writers-in-the-Schools program.
Joann White is a writer, pastor, spiritual director, and enthusiast of wild places. Sometimes she finds God in the moment, like in eating an apple. She says she isn’t a poet, but Ross Gay makes her want to be.
Poem for a Tuesday — “Sorrow Song” by Lucille Clifton
for the eyes of the children, the last to melt, the last to vaporize, for the lingering eyes of the children, staring, the eyes of the children of buchenwald, of viet nam and johannesburg, for the eyes of the children of nagasaki, for the eyes of the children of middle passage, for cherokee eyes, ethiopian eyes, russian eyes, american eyes, for all that remains of the children, their eyes, staring at us, amazed to see the extraordinary evil in ordinary men.
in Blessing the Boats, Rochester: BOA Editions, 2000, p. 39.
Lucille Clifton grew up in Buffalo, before attending Howard University and SUNY Fredonia. Her spare poems capture human experience in deeply revelatory ways, with hopeful focus on the enduring strength of the African American experience and family life. She wrote ten books of poetry and seventeen books for children, racking up a number of honors and awards, including the National Book Award for Blessing the Boats. Clifton was the Maryland Poet Laureate from 1974-1985 and served as the Distinguished Professor of Humanities at St. Mary’s College in Columbia, Maryland. Asked once how she wished to be remembered, Clifton said, “I would like to be seen as a woman whose roots go back to Africa, who tried to honor being human. My inclination is to try to help.”
Joann White 