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Marie Howe, Sylvia Plath and Me: For National Poetry Month

4/18/2015

 
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Simply put, in honor of Poetry and its month here are two of my favorite poems by two powerful female poets and one poem I was inspired to write while reading Seamus Heaney's District and Circle on my kitchen floor.   

I was lucky enough to hear Marie Howe read at the Irish Arts Center, I was struck by her honesty in images.  The end of "The Meadow" made me cry in agreement.  Either read it below or hear her read it at http://www.onbeing.org/program/feature/the-meadow-by-marie-howe/5341

"As we walk into words that have waited for us to enter them, so
the meadow, muddy with dreams, is gathering itself together

and trying, with difficulty, to remember how to make wildflowers.
Imperceptibly heaving with the old impatience, it knows

for certain that two horses walk upon it, weary of hay.
The horses, sway-backed and self important, cannot design

how the small white pony mysteriously escapes the fence every day.
This is the miracle just beyond their heavy-headed grasp,

and they turn from his nuzzling with irritation. Everything
is crying out. Two crows, rising from the hill, fight

and caw-cry in mid-flight, then fall and light on the meadow grass
bewildered by their weight. A dozen wasps drone, tiny prop planes,

sputtering into a field the farmer has not yet plowed,
and what I thought was a phone, turned down and ringing,

is the knock of a woodpecker for food or warning, I can’t say.
I want to add my cry to those who would speak for the sound alone.

But in this world, where something is always listening, even
murmuring has meaning, as in the next room you moan

in your sleep, turning into late morning. My love, this might be
all we know of forgiveness, this small time when you can forget

what you are. There will come a day when the meadow will think
suddenly, water, root, blossom, through no fault of its own,
and the horses will lie down in daisies and clover. Bedeviled,
human, your plight, in waking, is to choose from the words

that even now sleep on your tongue, and to know that tangled
among them and terribly new is the sentence that could change your life."




The following is the first section of Sylvia Plath's "Poem for a Birthday" written in 1959.  The entire poem is absolutely stunning and the final section entitled 'The Stones' is the most famous from this poem (here Sylvia Plath herself read this section at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gUpZQMeHumw)

"1. Who

The month of flowering’s finished. The fruit’s in,
Eaten or rotten. I am all mouth.
October’s the month for storage.

The shed’s fusty as a mummy’s stomach:
Old tools, handles and rusty tusks.
I am at home here among the dead heads.

Let me sit in a flowerpot,
The spiders won’t notice.
My heart is a stopped geranium.

If only the wind would leave my lungs alone.
Dogbody noses the petals. They bloom upside down.
They rattle like hydrangea bushes.

Mouldering heads console me,
Nailed to the rafters yesterday:
Inmates who don’t hibernate.

Cabbageheads: wormy purple, silver-glaze,
A dressing of mule ears, mothy pelts, but green-hearted,
Their veins white as porkfat.

O the beauty of usage!
The orange pumpkins have no eyes.
These halls are full of women who think they are birds.

This is a dull school.
I am a root, a stone, an owl pellet,
Without dreams of any sort.

Mother, you are the one mouth
I would be a tongue to. Mother of otherness
Eat me. Wastebasket gaper, shadow of doorways.

I said: I must remember this, being small.
There were such enormous flowers,
Purple and red mouths, utterly lovely.

The hoops of blackberry stems made me cry.
Now they light me up like an electric bulb.
For weeks I can remember nothing at all."













SH by Samantha Keogh


cold floor with a warm non-breeze
blueberries afloat
hoping this doesn’t bring bugs-
but then not to care.
smell of a home well-loved,
of the children we care,
a delicate breakfast.
The gifts of one and of me.

syllables sounding sharp,
crisply clean
no need to comprehend outside sound
the noise is the experience-
no image makes it out of the cacophony,
the dog barking in the still night,
a siren slicing through city din and turning on stillness of waiting.
The gifts of another brought to me.

This is my church of a moment.
Beyond lies, lists, worries, colliding things.
I will seek out of, but not yet.
Instead I sit in the cozy gloom 
of blueberry perfume and aromas of sound.
sleep if attained-
the cold floor keep me vibrating.
Until gifts gone.


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    SAMANTHA KEOGH

    Multidisciplinary Artist
    [email protected]

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