[Lent: day 21/40]

[hermionesviolin]

Daily Bread
-Denise Levertov

A gull far-off
rises and falls, are of a breath,
two sparrows pause on the telephone wire,
chirp a brief interchange, fly back to the ground,
the bus picks up one passenger and zooms on up the hill,
across the water the four poplars
conceal their tremor, feet together, arms pressed to their sides,
behind them the banked conifers dark and steep;
my peartree drops a brown pear from its inaccessible height
into the bramble and ivy tangle, grey sky
whitens a little, now one can see vague forms of cloud
pencilled lightly across it.
This is the day that the Lord hath made,
let us rejoice and be glad in it.

from Place of Passage: Contemporary Catholic Poetry ed. David Craig and Janet McCann (Ashland, OR: Story Line Press, 2000) p. 262

Comments

[hermionesviolin.livejournal.com]

I'm not particularly taken with it my own self. One of those times when nothing I've read recently has jumped out at me and I'm flailing about a bit to find something to post for the day. Also, I did like the idea of rejoicing even in the mundande. It's a bit of a fanwank to say "See, it's dull, but we are supposed to rejoice anyway," and in an ideal world I would have found a poem that transformed the mundande more successfully than I feel this poem did.

I'd never heard of her. Googling tells me her father converted from Hasidic Jew to Anglican priest and her mother was a Congregationalist ... and she converted to Roman Catholicism late in life.

I pull out my poetry book.....

[lunabee34.livejournal.com]

Levertov wrote to T.S. Eliot about her poetry at the age of 12 and received encouraging replies from him. She was a World War II nurse and a British immigrant to the US. She's tangentially connected with the Beat Poets and the San Francisco Rennaisance. She was a Vietnam protester, and had a storied academic career at a handful of prestigious universities. *

Talking to Grief

Ah, Grief, I should not treat you
like a homeless dog
who comes to the back door
for a crust, for a meatless bone.
I should trust you.

I should coax you
into the house and give you
your own corner,
a worn mat to lie on,
your own water dish.

You think I don't know you've been living
under my porch.
You long for your real place to be readied
before winter comes. You need
your name,
your collar and tag. You need
the right to warn off intruders,
to consider
my house your own
and me your person
and yourself
my own dog.



The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth
We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.



*Women of the Beat Generation by Brenda Knight