Tag: poetry

“Motto”

I play it cool

And dig all jive.

That’s the reason 

I stay alive.

My motto,

As I live and learn,

        is:

Dig and Be Dug

In Return.

By Langston Hughes, in his jazz poetry suite Montage of a Dream Deferred (sometimes called Harlem), published in 1951.

Canis Major

The great Overdog,
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye,
Gives a leap in the east.

He dances upright
All the way to the west
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest.

I’m a poor underdog,
But tonight I will bark
With the great Overdog
That romps through the dark.

Robert Frost, from the collection West-Running Brook [1928]. I’m adding this to my repertoire of memorized poems. 

This public domain image of the Great Dog and Lepus the Hare is from a set of hand-tinted etched cards that were included in copies of  A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy by Jehoshaphat Aspin, 1825. 

Canis Major

The great Overdog,
That heavenly beast
With a star in one eye,
Gives a leap in the east.

He dances upright
All the way to the west
And never once drops
On his forefeet to rest.

I’m a poor underdog,
But tonight I will bark
With the great Overdog
That romps through the dark.

Robert Frost, from the collection West-Running Brook [1928]. I’m adding this to my repertoire of memorized poems. 

This public domain image of the Great Dog and Lepus the Hare is from a set of hand-tinted etched cards that were included in copies of  A Familiar Treatise on Astronomy by Jehoshaphat Aspin, 1825. 

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

-Wendell Berry, in Farming: A Handbook, 1970

The Man Born to Farming

The grower of trees, the gardener, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

-Wendell Berry, in Farming: A Handbook, 1970

A Poem, and Thoughts on Poetry

Spring is sprung,

The grass is ris.

I wonder where the birds all is.

They say the birds is on the wing.

But that’s absurd,

The wing’s on the bird.

Comic doggerel sometimes attributed to Spike Milligan, though the actual author is most likely Anonymous.

This is one of the first poems I ever learned, and once I learned it I especially liked saying the word “absurd.” I liked it much more than the stuffy old poems in my first poetry book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Blech. 

A Poem, and Thoughts on Poetry

Spring is sprung,

The grass is ris.

I wonder where the birds all is.

They say the birds is on the wing.

But that’s absurd,

The wing’s on the bird.

Comic doggerel sometimes attributed to Spike Milligan, though the actual author is most likely Anonymous.

This is one of the first poems I ever learned, and once I learned it I especially liked saying the word “absurd.” I liked it much more than the stuffy old poems in my first poetry book, Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses. Blech.