For big tests, such as the one I head to today, from Jabberwocky & Other Poems.
from Rules and Regulations / by Lewis Carroll
Learn well your grammar,
And never stammer,
Write well and neatly,
And sing most sweetly
Month: July 2017
DPF / Carroll
For when up is down and down is up, and for a week of it, from Jabberwocky & Other Poems.
from The Mock Turtle’s Song / by Lewis Carroll
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
Will you, won’t you, will you, won’t you, will you join the dance?
DPF / Plath
For if only we had her today, she’d be 84 until her birthday this year, from the St. Martins Press first edition of this (prose) children’s book, The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit.
from The It-Doesn’t-Matter Suit / by Sylvia Plath
wonderful
woolly
whiskery
brand-new
mustard-yellow
IT-DOESN’T-MATTER SUIT
DPF / Plath
For her looking back over such a short life, and for myself, though I’ve wished it, we never could have crossed paths, as Plath died 17 days before I was born, from the Faber and Faber first edition of Winter Trees.
from Mystic / by Sylvia Plath
The children leap in their cots.
The sun blooms, it is a geranium.
The heart has not stopped.
DPF / Plath
For memories of teenage jobs and all that looking back from a different vantage, from the Faber and Faber first edition of Crossing the Water.
from The Babysitters / by Sylvia Plath
It is ten years, now, since we rowed to Children’s Island.
The sun flamed straight down that noon on the water off Marblehead.
DPF / Plath
For an almost happy poem, a wishful, wistful poem, from the 1972 Harper & Row first edition of Winter Trees.
from Child / by Sylvia Plath
Your clear eye is the one absolutely beautiful thing.
I want to fill it with colors and ducks,
The zoo of the new
Whose names you meditate —
April snowdrop, Indian pipe,
Little
Stalk
DPF / Plath
For another favorite poem with a bit of Roethke in it, and a poem which reminds me of the few days of my life I spent in Ireland, one of them in a cottage overlooking the edge of the sea and a stretch of grass ghosted in barely-moving sheets of sheep, from the Faber “paper covered” edition of Ariel.
from Sheep in Fog / by Sylvia Plath
Hooves, dolorous bells —
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,
A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.
DPF / Plath
For casts and of course Plath’s cast grew a mind of its own, from The London Magazine, February 1962, an issue in which she shares pg. 15 with her husband, Ted Hughes.
from In Plaster / by Sylvia Plath
Without me, she wouldn’t exist, so of course she was grateful.
I gave her a soul, I bloomed out of her as a rose
Blooms out of a vase of not very valuable porcelain
DPF / Plath
For a favorite poem and a week of Plath and sudden sightings of light that often count for signs, from The Collected Poems.
from Black Rook in Rainy Weather / by Sylvia Plath
Miracles occur,
If you care to call those spasmodic
Tricks of radiance miracles. The wait’s begun again,
The long wait for the angel,
For that rare, random descent.
DPF / Heaney
For my friends at St. Brigid Press, and for a pretty, signed, Faber and Faber Limited first-edition of The Spirit Level, from a time when I could afford such things.
from A Brigid’s Girdle / by Seamus Heaney
Now it’s St. Brigid’s Day and the first snowdrop
in County Wicklow, and this is a Brigid’s Girdle
I’m plaiting for you, an airy fairy hoop
(Like one of those old crinolines they’d trindle),
Twisted straw that’s lifted in a circle
To handsel and to heal, a rite of spring
As strange and lightsome and traditional
As the motions you go through going through the thing.
Daily Poetry Fragments {Semi-Daily} 