The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Mon 3/17/06)

[RetroLounge]

At Seventy-Five: Rereading An Old Book

My prayers have been answered, if they were prayers. I live.
I'm alive, and even in rather good health, I believe.
If I'd quit smoking I might live to be a hundred.
Truly this is astonishing, after the poverty and pain,
The suffering. Who would have thought that petty
Endurance could achieve so much?
And prayers --
Were they prayers? Always I was adamant
In my irreligion, and had good reason to be.
Yet prayer is not, I see in old age now,
A matter of doctrine or discipline, but rather
A movement of the natural human mind
Bereft of its place among the animals, the other
Animals. I prayed. Then on paper I wrote
Some of the words I said, which are these poems.

Hayden Carruth

********************

RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul

[yvr girl]

1. We always like to think that somebody is listening

Everyone wants to be heard.

[RetroLounge]

4. True

:hi:

RL

[miss_american_pie]

2. ...

Poem Catching Up With An Idea


Freedom is not to be proved but is rather a postulate
of action. Thus excellent Berdyaev,
who has meant much to me,
although I must shake my head and make a face
when he undertakes to explain
the Holy Ghost. We are unbelievers,
Cindy, which may be (I regularly
think it is) our misfortune. But we are still
existentialist lovers. Yes,
strange Soren Kierkegaard of Hamlet's province
would approve of us--well, somewhat--in our unchurchly
dark
devotions. In Syracuse the rain falls every day,
or so it seems; the faces
of the good unchurchly burghers of Edgehill Road
are as bland as marshmallows and as puffy.
To live here, to love here,
as Jack our friend the Gilbert would say,
sighing, smiling,
requires an extraordinary knowledge of freedom,
unhistorical and reinvented by us here in every
act, as when I brought for you for a love token
the plastic sack of just sprouted lilies-of-the-valley
to plant around the steps of our arched doorway.
That was phenomenon, not poetry, not symbol, the act
without a proof, freedom-in-love.

Hayden Carruth

[RetroLounge]

3. I almost posted this one instead!

:hi:

RL

[miss_american_pie]

5. You have impeccable taste

:hi:

[RetroLounge]

6. That is true...

:hug:

RL