Funeral Blues - W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,

Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,

Silence the pianos and with muffled drum

Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead

Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,

Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,

Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,

My working week and my Sunday rest,

My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;

I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;

Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;

Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.

For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Witchgrass - Louise Glück

Something

comes into the world unwelcome

calling disorder, disorder—

If you hate me so much

don’t bother to give me

a name: do you need

one more slur

in your language, another

way to blame

one tribe for everything—

as we both know,

if you worship

one god, you only need

one enemy—

I’m not the enemy.

Only a ruse to ignore

what you see happening

right here in this bed,

a little paradigm

of failure. One of your precious flowers

dies here almost every day

and you can’t rest until

you attack the cause, meaning

whatever is left, whatever

happens to be sturdier

than your personal passion—

It was not meant

to last forever in the real world.

But why admit that, when you can go on

doing what you always do,

mourning and laying blame,

always the two together.

I don’t need your praise

to survive. I was here first,

before you were here, before

you ever planted a garden.

And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon

are left, and the sea, and the wide field.

I will constitute the field.

To Be a Danger - C.G. Hanzlicek

Just once I’d like to be a danger

To something in this world,

Be hunted by cops

And forced into hiding in the mountains,

Since if they left me on the streets

I’d turn the country around,

Changing everyone’s mind with a word.

But I’ve lived so long a quiet life,

In a world I’ve made small,

That even my own mind changes slowly.

I’m a danger only to myself,

Like the daydreaming night watchman

Smoking his cigar

Near the dynamite shed.

The Rider - Naomi Shihab Nye

A boy told me

if he roller-skated fast enough

his loneliness couldn’t catch up to him,

the best reason I ever heard

for trying to be a champion.

What I wonder tonight

pedaling hard down King William Street

is if it translates to bicycles.

A victory! To leave your loneliness

panting behind you on some street corner

while you float free into a cloud of sudden azaleas,

pink petals that have never felt loneliness,

no matter how slowly they fell.

Sadness - Stephen Dunn

It was everywhere, in the streets and houses,

    on farms and now in the air itself.

It had come from history and we were history

    so it had come from us.

I told my artist friends who courted it

    not to suffer

on purpose, not to fall in love

    with sadness

because it would naturally be theirs

    without assistance,

I had sad stories of my own,

    but they made me quiet

the way my parents’ failures once did,

    nobody’s business

but our own, and, besides, what was left to say

    these days

when the unspeakable was out there being spoken,

    exhausting all sympathy?

Yet, feeling it, how difficult to keep

    the face’s curtains

closed - she left, he left, they died -

    the heart rising

into the mouth and eyes, everything so basic,

    so unhistorical

at such times. And then, too, the woes

    of others would get in,

but mostly I was inured and out

    to make a decent buck

or in pursuit of some slippery pleasure

    that was sadness disguised.

I found it, it found me, oh

    my artist friends

give it up, just mix your paints,

    stroke,

the strokes unmistakably will be yours.

The Untrustworthy Speaker - Louise Glück

Don't listen to me; my heart's been broken.

I don't see anything objectively.

I know myself; I've learned to hear like a psychiatrist.

When I speak passionately,

that's when I'm least to be trusted.

It's very sad, really: all my life I've been praised

for my intelligence, my powers of language, of insight.

In the end, they're wasted--

I never see myself,

standing on the front steps, holding my sister's hand.

That's why I can't account

for the bruises on her arm, where the sleeve ends.

In my own mind, I'm invisible: that's why I'm dangerous.

People like me, who seem selfless,

we're the cripples, the liars;

we're the ones who should be factored out

in the interest of truth.

When I'm quiet, that's when the truth emerges.

A clear sky, the clouds like white fibers.

Underneath, a little gray house, the azaleas

red and bright pink.

If you want the truth, you have to close yourself

to the older daughter, block her out:

when a living thing is hurt like that,

in its deepest workings,

all function is altered.

That's why I'm not to be trusted.

Because a wound to the heart

is also a wound to the mind.