Blow, blow, thou winter wind
Blow, blow, thou winter wind,
Thou art not so unkind
As man's ingratitude;
Thy tooth is not so keen,
Because thou art not seen,
Although thy breath be rude.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly;
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
Freeze, freeze, thou bitter sky,
That dost not bite so nigh
As benefits forgot;
Though thou the waters warp,
Thy sting is not so sharp
As friend remembered not.
Heigh-ho! sing, heigh-ho! unto the green holly:
Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly;
Then, heigh-ho, the holly!
This life is most jolly.
-William Shakespeare
Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then wtih cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.
I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he'd call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,
Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love's austere and lonely offices?
-Robert Hayden
Out of the bosom of the Air,
Out of the cloud-folds of her garments shaken,
Over the woodlands brown and bare,
Over the harvest-fields forsaken,
Silent, and soft, and slow
Descends the snow.
Even as our cloudy fancies take
Suddenly shape in some divine expression,
Even as the troubled heart doth make
In the white countenance confession,
The troubled sky reveals
the grief it feels.
This is the poem of the air,
Slowly in silent syllables recorded;
This is the secret of despair,
Long in its cloudy bosom hoarded,
Now whispered and revealed
To wood and field.
-Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
drifting we wake
to a world of no angles
no edges
mysterious loaves
huddle
in front of each house
an old VW
is a rising bun
an upended egg
everywhere the plumpness of doves
the hospitable hollows
the scooped out insides of waves
--Nan Fry
from _Pocket Poems_, edited by Paul Janeczko
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village through;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
-Robert Frost
are the desolate, dark weeks
when nature in its barrenness
equals the stupidity of man.
The years plunges into night
and the heart plunges
lower than night
to an empty, windswept place
without sun, stars or moon
but a peculiar light as of thought
that spins a dark fire—
whirling upon itself until,
in the cold, it kindles
to make a man aware of nothing
that he knows, not loneliness
itself—Not a ghost but
would be embraced—emptiness,
despair—(They
whine and whistle) among
the flashes and booms of war;
houses of whose rooms
the cold is greater than can be thought,
the people gone that we loved,
the beds lying empty, the couches
damp, the chairs unused—
Hide it away somewhere
out of the mind, let it get roots
and grow, unrelated to jealous
ears and eyes—for itself.
In this mine they come to dig—all.
Is this the counterfoil to settest
music? The source of poetry that
seeing the clock stopped, says,
The clock has stopped
that ticked yesterday so well?
and hears the sound of lakewater
splashing—that is now stone.
-William Carlos Williams (1883-1963, American)
The Golden Ecco Anthology
As in a birthday
or a fistful of birthdays
clawing my liver
I remember the raven and my cowboy
hat rolled in tractor grease
down miles of windrow and green clay
I am sleepwalking with an oat straw in my teeth
barbwire and bottle of rum
till the sweating fields
tighten like stone
and it is morning
below zero
This is what it means
to be a bag of bones a leathery
two-fisted surprise wobbling upright
on hard ground a skin
pulled over rope and amber spurs
bag of smart pulp hanging
by a corkscrew of smoke
and a red vein
from the sun
I inhale this cold morning
always for the first time
my lungs sparkle
as a tree full of hoarfrost
becomes a huge rose
inside the mountain
light crack
like a rifle.
Tiny white blossoms
on my horse's nostril
and a raven preaching to the emptiness
again
The same raven circles
the clearcut and sinking
cabin at the edge
of more bones and frozen furrows
still stretching
bare beneath me
My short human breath grows
shorter and more human each morning
in this country I have chopped and seeded
this valley that sparkles around and around me
as the blue lung of a glacier
keeps blowing
the raven rises and falls
back and forth aspen to spruce
croaking some crude proverb
I think I should translate
I think I should get the ink
out of his wings
-Stephen Torre
Man Living on a Side Creek and Other Poems
On the window panes the icy frost
Leaves feathered patterns, criped and crossed
But in our house the Christmas tree
Is decorated festively
With tiny dots of colored light
That cozy up this winter night.
Christmas songs familiar, slow
Play softly on the radio.
Pops and hisses from the fire
Whistle with the bells and choir.
Trying now to fall asleep
On my back and dreaming deep
Tomorrow's what I'm waiting for,
But I can wait a little more.
--Ashley Stuart
THE FIRST SNOW OF THE YEAR
The old man, listening to the careful
Steps of his old wife as she came,
Up, up, so slowly, then her slippered
Progress down the long hall to their door--
Outside the wind, wilder suddenly,
Whirled the first snow of the year; danced
Round and round with it, coming closer
And closer, peppering the panes; now here she was--
Said "Ah, my dear, remember?" But his tray
Took all of her attention, having to hold it
Level. "Ah, my
dear, don't you remember?"
"What?"
"That time we walked in the white woods."
She handed him his napkin;
felt the glass
to make sure the milk in it was warm;
Sat down; got up again; brought comb and brush
To tidy his top hair:
"Yes, I remember."
He wondered if she saw now what he did.
Possibly not. An
afternoon so windless,
The huge flakes rustled upon each other,
Filling the woods, the world, with cold, cold--
They shivered, having a long way to go,
And then their mittens touched; and touched again;
Their eyes, trying not to meet, did meet;
They stopped, and in the cold held out their arms.
Till she came into his:
awkwardly,
as girl to boy that never kissed before.
The woods, the darkening world, so cold, so cold,
While these two burned together. He remembered,
And wondered if she did, how like a sting,
A hidden heat it was; while there they stood
And trembled, and the snow made statues of them.
"Ah, me dear, remember?" "Yes, I do."
She rocked and thought:
he wants me to say something
But we said nothing then.
The main thing is,
I'm with him still; he still calls me and I come.
But slowly. Time
makes sluggards of us all.
"Yes, I do remember." The wild wind
Was louder, but a sweetness in her speaking
Stung him, and he heard.
While round and round
The first snow of the year danced on the lawn.
--Mark Van Doren
from _The Crystal Image_ ed. by Paul Janeczko