The poet Allen Ginsberg was born ninety-two years ago today, on June 3rd, 1926.
America by Allen Ginsberg _ Poetry Foundation
“America I’ve given you all and now I’m nothing.”
Allen Ginsberg
poetry
After The Voices
The End – Mark Strand
Not every man knows what he shall sing at the end,
Watching the pier as the ship sails away, or what it will seem like
When he’s held by the sea’s roar, motionless, there at the end,
Or what he shall hope for once it is clear that he’ll never go back.
When the time has passed to prune the rose or caress the cat,
When the sunset torching the lawn and the full moon icing it down
No longer appear, not every man knows what he’ll discover instead.
When the weight of the past leans against nothing, and the sky
Is no more than remembered light, and the stories of cirrus
And cumulus come to a close, and all the birds are suspended in flight,
Not every man knows what is waiting for him, or what he shall sing
When the ship he is on slips into darkness, there at the end.
A blessed Feast of St. George to you all!
Let faith be my shield and let joy be my steed
‘Gainst the dragons of anger, the ogres of greed
And let me set free with the sword of my youth,
From the castle of darkness, the power of the truth.
The Little Birds of St. Francis
The little birds fly to ask me what I have seen in the heavens: I saw your little souls longing. – Tadeusz Micinski
Our feeble wings
knock against
a blue windowpane, Lord.
We wait, we sing
every day at your door.
We gaze at the sun,
above the trees flutter
and sing since the dawn.
Are we forever
to linger on earth
in this world of yours, Lord?
There is no penance,
Is there no reward?
Lost in our own song,
one day of the year
among the trees, we’ll expire,
entangled in the leaves.
The wind will lift us,
the earth will receive us
burying the dry wings.
Will none of us, Lord
sing in the heavens
facing your throne?
the earth will receive us
burying the dry wings.
Will none of us, Lord
sing in the heavens
facing your throne?
Is not our singing,
pleasing to you, Lord?
Our singing choose,
Our waiting use.
From the unknown,
deliver the birds on high, Lord.
From the ends of the earth
unbounded and vast,
from pine and beech
from our home
we’ll fly, we’ll flutter
to your side, Lord.
Whatever your will –
too deep for the birds –
on earth and in heaven
your eyes to please,
your smile to see,
we wing, crowding the trees.
– Jerzy Liebert
Sometimes I forget completely – Rumi
Sometimes I forget completely
what companionship is.
Unconscious and insane, I spill sad
energy everywhere. My story
gets told in various ways: a romance,
a dirty joke, a war, a vacancy.
Divide up my forgetfulness to any number,
it will go around.
These dark suggestions that I follow,
are they a part of some plan?
Friends, be careful. Don’t come near me
out of curiosity, or sympathy.
Paris alley
The Comfort of Darkness
Darkness swept the earth in my dream,
Cold crowded the streets with its wings,
Cold talons pursued each river and stream
Into the mountains, found out their springs
And drilled the dark world with ice.
An enormous wreck of a bird
Closed on my heart in the darkness
And sank into sleep as it shivered.
Not even the heat of your blood, nor the pure
Light falling endlessly from you, like rain,
Could stay in my memory there
Or comfort me then.
Only the comfort of darkness,
The ice-cold, unfreezable brine,
Could melt the cries into silence,
Your bright hands into mine.
– Galway Kinnell
Today, like every other day…
Today, like every other day, we wake up empty
and frightened. Don’t open the door to the study
and begin reading. Take down the dulcimer.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.
Rumi
Lot’s Wife by Anna Akhmatova
And the just man trailed God’s shining agent,
over a black mountain, in his giant track,
while a restless voice kept harrying his woman:
“It’s not too late, you can still look back
at the red towers of your native Sodom,
the square where once you sang, the spinning-shed,
at the empty windows set in the tall house
where sons and daughters blessed your marriage-bed.”
A single glance: a sudden dart of pain
stitching her eyes before she made a sound . . .
Her body flaked into transparent salt,
and her swift legs rooted to the ground.
Who will grieve for this woman? Does she not seem
too insignificant for our concern?
Yet in my heart I never will deny her,
who suffered death because she chose to turn.
The Ghost by Frank Bidart
You must not think that what I have accomplished through you could have been accomplished by any other means. Each of us is to himself indelible. I had to become that which could not be, by time, from human memory, erased. I had to burn my hungry, unappeasable furious spirit so inconsolably into you you would without cease write to bring me rest. Bring us rest. Guilt is fecund. I knew nothing I made myself had enough steel in it to survive. I tried: I made beautiful paintings, beautiful poems. Fluff. Garbage. The inextricability of love and hate? If I had merely made you love me you could not have saved me.
Edge of Atlantic 