This is the poem Derek Walcott wrote for Obama. Read it out loud twice. I dare you. I couldn’t get through it the second time. Too weepy. This is a beautiful, beautiful piece.

Forty Acres

Out of the turmoil emerges one emblem, an engraving —
a young Negro at dawn in straw hat and overalls,
an emblem of impossible prophecy, a crowd
dividing like the furrow which a mule has ploughed,
parting for their president: a field of snow-flecked
cotton
forty acres wide, of crows with predictable omens
that the young ploughman ignores for his unforgotten
cotton-haired ancestors, while lined on one branch, is
a tense
court of bespectacled owls and, on the field’s
receding rim —
a gesticulating scarecrow stamping with rage at him.
The small plough continues on this lined page
beyond the moaning ground, the lynching tree, the tornado’s
black vengeance,
and the young ploughman feels the change in his veins,
heart, muscles, tendons,
till the land lies open like a flag as dawn’s sure
light streaks the field and furrows wait for the sower.

[Tags: obama derek_walcott poem inauguration #inaug09 ]

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Warlocks and Morlocks
don’t grok door locks.

[Tags: poem warlock morlock grok door_locks ]

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Root canal

My burning bone
magnified by proximity
smells sweet,
oaky,
Chardonnay.

On a fall day
like this
distance once rendered
the concentration
of molecules
the same.

Strong measures
were in the air.

[Tags: poetry root_canal ]

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Chris Daly read my over-worked, under-thought article on bits and atoms, and sent me this poem by Emily Dickinson:

Part One: Life

CXXVI

THE BRAIN is wider than the sky,
For, put them side by side,
The one the other will include
With ease, and you beside.

The brain is deeper than the sea,
For, hold them, blue to blue,
The one the other will absorb,
As sponges, buckets do.

The brain is just the weight of God,
For, lift them, pound for pound,
And they will differ, if they do,
As syllable from sound.

[Tags: poetry emily_dickinson brains ]

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Ode to an Outdoor Shower

Bird watching
Becomes
Birds watching.

[Tags: poetry summer birdwatching humor ]

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I’ve posted the video of my talk at Defrag about the value of the implicit. It’s about four or five links down on this page. The original is here.

The talk is 30 minutes long and mainly incoherent.

[Tags: defrag implicit language rilke everything_is_miscellaneous ]

And while I’m being self-centered, HearsayCulture just posted a podcast interview with me.

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Here’s a poem, via Ethan Zuckerman.

The Icelandic Language

In this language, no industrial revolution;
no pasteurized milk; no oxygen, no telephone;
only sheep, fish, horses, water falling.
The middle class can hardly speak it.

In this language, no flush toilet; you stumble
through dark and rain with a handful of rags.
The door groans; the old smell comes
up from under the earth to meet you.

But this language believes in ghosts;
chairs rock by themselves under the lamp; horses
neigh inside an empty gully, nothing
at the bottom but moonlight and black rocks.

The woman with marble hands whispers
this language to you in your sleep; faces
come to the window and sing rhymes; old ladies
wind long hair, hum, tat, fold jam inside pancakes.

In this language, you can’t chit-chat
holding a highball in your hand, can’t
even be polite. Once the sentence starts its course,
all your grief and failure come clear at last.

Old inflections move from case to case,
gender to gender, softening consonants, darkening
vowels, till they sound like the sea moving
icebergs back and forth in its mouth.

— Bill Holm

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Before the fall’s woodfired breath
rooms are refreshed
by recently shaved pencils and
the air between newly turned pages.

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Critt Jarvis has left an audio comment that’s a limerick version of the Dylan Thomas poem.

FWIW, I plan on going into that good night whining.

And while I’m at it, here’s Romeo and Juliet’s balcony scene as a limerick:

Girl, hush! It’s death if we are seen.
You’re so hot. Omigod, like I mean
if Juliet’s an alias
You’re still one fair lass
And you don’t look a day over thirteen.

[Tags: critt_jarvis dylan_thomas romeo_juliet limericks humor]

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The Crow

The crow is a well-shaped bird.
To the east, a fan splays out.
Crescents point west and south.
Beak down, tail up, it inquires
forward, but then flaps north
where it is not pointing.
The crow is a well-shaped bird.
And then it opens its goddamn mouth.

[Tags: poetry humor]

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