A Displaced Person's Song

 

Chuck says, I just love the names in this: Pointsman, Slothrop, Borgesius

If you see a train this evening,

Far away against the sky,

Lay down in your wooden blanket, (*)

Sleep, and let the train go by.

 

Trains have called us, every midnight,

From a thousand miles away,

Trains that pass through empty cities,

Trains that have no place to stay.

 

No one drives the locomotive,

No one tends the staring light,

Trains have never needed riders,

Trains belong to bitter night.

 

Railway stations stand deserted,

Rights-of-way lie clear and cold,

What we left them, trains inherit,

Trains go on, and we grow old.

 

Let them cry like cheated lovers,

Let their cries find only wind.

Trains are meant for night and ruin

We are meant for song, and sin.

 

-Thomas Pynchon

 

Another song from Gravity's Rainbow. In the novel, it's the time after V-E Day, but before the zones decided on at the Potsdam Conference (17 July - 2 August) have been implemented, and there's just one Zone. (Though for Tyrone Slothrop there's really only ever just one Zone.) People are trying to get home--either their old home, or whatever the new one they might be forced to will be.

"It is a Displaced Person's song, and Slothrop will hear it often around the Zone, in the encampments, out on the road, in a dozen variations." (p. 283)

I finished my rereading a couple of days ago. I won't actually try to say anything about the novel, I guess, but I did think about the poetry in the book a bit more this time.

 

(*) My edition, the second printing of the original paperback edition, really does say wooden, but woolen seems more likely...though maybe it's wood from the sides of the boxcars? But the observer is presumably not in a boxcar. A 'wooden blanket' also suggests a coffin, but maybe that's just me?

 

Ana Blandiana (#poetry)

Dies Illa, Dies Irae

It will come,

It has to come,

That day

Postponed for ages

Will arrive,

It's going to come,

It's getting closer,

You can hear

Its beating pulse

On the horizon,

It will come,

It's in the air,

It can't be put off any longer,

Have no doubt, it will come,

That day,

Like a shining sword,

In the blinding light.

-Ana Blandiana

 

Ana Blandiana (b. 1942) is a Romanian poet. It was recently announced (a month or so ago) that she won this year's Princess of Asturias Literature Award for her lifetime's work. I'd never heard of her before (I think) but I find the Princess/Prince of Asturias Award to be a good selector. In addition to various people who went on to the Nobel Prize but won this first (Mario Vargas Llosa, Doris Lessing, others) they also selected a couple of writers I liked, but didn't win the Nobel, and wouldn't have minded seeing win, such as Álvaro Mutis, Susan Sontag, and Claudio Magris. So, with a list like that, I thought I'd better check her out... 😉 and my library came through.

'Dies Illa, Dies Irae' is, of course, the title of the poem/song/chant on the day of the Last Judgment. ('That day, the day of wrath' is what the Latin says.) This poem was printed on the front page of the newspaper the day after the fall of the Communist government in Romania in 1989 and then collected in her book of 1990, The Architecture of Waves. 

 

A couple of more examples. Several of her poems from before the fall of Communism use sleep as a metaphor for the state of the Romanian people:

Full Moon

Come, moon, and wake us from our sleep,

Cast your nets into our waters

And bring us out,

Pour us

Into the insomnia of air!

We may not survive,

Our lungs have turned to gills from so much sleep,

But,

In spite of the risk, wake us

And leave us, alone and free, at sea:

So we can slowly move,

With infinite care,

Forward across the waters,

A shifting architecture of waves,

A horizon stretched like a rope

Between two hells,

Staring into your lunatic eye, crazed with hope.

-Ana Blandiana

A number of her poems seem to use ballad meter:

Gara de Nord

Dirty platform, carefully guarded

After papers exploding in the air,

Two fists handcuffed at a back, and

Lots of uniforms, may this rare

Image be the stop-frame emblem

Of hope beneath a colourless sun! To see

Through the spectacles of handcuffs

The future of the verb to be.

-Ana Blandiana

Both those poems were also collected in The Architecture of Waves (1990). Here's one from her book of 2016, Clock Without Hours:

That Year

Small things started to grow that year

And they didn't stop. Nature's laws transcended.

Flourishing growth, perverse, was everywhere.

Birds looked like bulls and their flying ended.

Purslane, nettles, grasshoppers, mites,

Sorrel and burdock, mandrake and sedge

Grew and grew to an amazing height,

Delirious waves beneath the outsized thistles' heads.

Elephants with giant spiders entwined,

Eagles, quite sad, from claws of sparrows hung,

Lions in the desert trembled and whined,

Discordant hymns from puffed-up crickets rang.

Worms in a year to snakes had grown.

A blade of grass became a club;

A speck of dust, a boulder stone.

-Ana Blandiana

I assume that year is 1989 and that's her sense of the outcome, but I'm sure the poem can be read in more than one way. Five Books is (as you might guess...) a collection of five of Ana Blandiana's books from across her career, and was issued by Bloodaxe Books (in the U.K.) in 2021, translated by Paul Scott Derrick & Viorica Patea. All the poems I've quoted come from that volume. The Sun of Hereafter and Ebb of the Senses are two of her books, in one volume, also from Bloodaxe with the same translators; that volume came out in English in 2017. 

I've stuck with political poems just for a theme, but there are also quite a lot of love poems, some happy, some sad: she married Romulus Rusan, also a writer; he died in 2016, at the age of 81. Poems from the later books also frequently deal with mortality, whether her own or that of her husband's.

The Constant Lover

The Constant Lover

Out upon it, I have lov'd

  Three whole days together!

And am like to love three more,

  If it prove fair weather.

Time shall moult away his wings

  Ere he shall discover

In the whole wide world again

  Such a constant lover.

But the spite on 't is, no praise

  Is due at all to me;

Love with me had made no stays

  Had it any been but she.

Had it any been but she,

  And that very face,

There had been at least ere this

  A dozen dozen in her place.

-Sir John Suckling

Sir John Suckling was a Cavalier poet who's also supposed to have invented the game of cribbage, which I played constantly with my dad when I was about eight. 

Sir John was born in 1609 and died young in 1641. 

Poking through old commonplace books & still thinking about ballads was how I hit upon this. My earlier scratchings:

Emily Dickinson

#1075

The Sky is low -- the Clouds are mean.

A Travelling Flake of Snow

Across a Barn or through a Rut

Debates if it will go --

A Narrow Wind complains all Day

How some one treated him

Nature, like Us is sometimes caught

Without her Diadem.

-Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson is probably my favorite writer of ballad-meter poems, and when I was thinking about ballads, I pulled the book off the shelf & started browsing. I must have read this one before, but I didn't remember it, and it struck me on this reading. Though not yet seasonally appropriate: we've had glorious Indian Summer weather lately (at least until tonight when we're getting a light rain) and they're predicting more lovely weather next week. But maybe the poem is newish to you, too.

But in case that's not enough... 😉 One of my favorites, and a more commonly anthologized poem:

#410

We grow accustomed to the Dark --

When Light is put away --

As when the Neighbor holds the Lamp

To witness her Goodbye --

A Moment -- We uncertain step

For newness of the night --

Then -- fit our vision to the Dark --

And meet the Road -- erect --

And so of larger -- Darknesses --

Those Evenings of the Brain --

When not a Moon disclose a sign --

Or Star -- come out -- within --

The Bravest -- grope a little --

And sometimes hit a Tree

Directly in the Forehead --

But as they learn to see --

Either the Darkness alters --

Or something in the sight

Adjusts itself to Midnight --

And Life steps almost straight.

-Emily Dickinson

I did once walk into a tree, hitting it with my forehead, in the woods on a pitch-black night. I'm not sure I'm one of the Bravest, though... 😉

My Papa's Waltz

My Papa's Waltz

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing was not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt.

-Theodore Roethke

My father was quite a light drinker, I never knew him to dance, and he worked a desk job. Still I've always liked this poem. 😉

But I was thinking about ballad meters and this came to mind. I might post some other ballad-y things in the near future.

Theodore Roethke was an American poet born in Saginaw, Michigan in 1908, who died in 1963. This is from his second book of poems, The Lost Son and Other Poems, of 1948. It's one of two poems of his that I used to have memorized (and might still if I thought about it). 

Night Song

Night Song

Stack the cups and clear away;

The bonfire sinks to ash;

Daytime is so much trash,

Night climbs the stairway.

We have done what we can to use the light,

Cricket and jar take over;

Children snore, the smell of clover

Tickles the poacher's nose as he treads it over.

Poppy and rose swim in the warm remainder,

Exhausted current of day;

Cold comes down from the air, hay

Hears warm in the field what the lovers say.

Bare to the teeming black the heady tree

Sighs in its sleep and stirs;

Softly an owl-wing whirrs,

The water chuckles, the paper-beetle burrs.

Stack the cups and clear away;

The bonfire sinks to ash;

Daytime is so much trash,

Night climbs the stairway.

-David Holbrook

I lifted that picture of David Holbrook from a rather lovely obituary of him in The Guardian. He died in 2011 at the good age of 88. He was a teacher and D-Day veteran as well as a quite prolific author--plays, memoirs, novels, as well as poetry.

As I had to Google some to figure it out, it might help you, too: jar in the second stanza will be a nightjar, a medium-sized insect-eating bird of the same family as what's called a nighthawk in North America.

Appropriate that I'm posting 'Night Song' at the very end of the day...

O let/my soul glimpse the divine - poem/prayer of Nahman of Busk

 

Beating its wings, seeking the aether,

But neither crane nor raven,

My soul, which knows no conqueror,

Soars up into the heavens.

It can't be trapped in sulfur, iron,

Get tangled in the heart,

Will never die of plague in prison,

Be subject to man's court.

Breaking down walls, it freely flies

Over rumors and smooth words,

For it wants not your narrow streets,

Your alleys, boulevards.

Knowing no limits, it roams free,

Mocks what you all deem wise,

Calls beauty ugly secretly,

Dispels illusions, lies.

It shakes its plumes and sets a light

That can't be put in words,

It cares not not who and what sort might

Hold places in this world.

O Father, help me wield my tongue

So that I voice my pain

And add truth to man's talk--o let

My soul glimpse the divine.

-Nahman of Busk

This was in Olga Tokarczuk's The Books of Jacob where it's said to be a translation by Moliwda (Antoni Kossakowski) of Nahman of Busk's original Hebrew into Polish. Both those figures--Nahman and Moliwda--are actual historical individuals (though for Moliwda, you'll see I was limited to linking the Polish Wikipedia). Jennifer Croft in her translator's afterword says the verse translation was by her husband Boris Dralyuk, who's an interesting poet and significant translator in his own right (Isaac Babel, Andrey Kurkov). It shows up later in the novel in a second version, quite different, which is supposed to be a French translation by Junius Frey of a German version. (But I liked the first version better.) 

Who among all that list of people to attribute the poem to, I can't tell you. I only know I liked it. 😉

Hafez (Wine, Boys, and Song)

 

My Love Has Sent No Letter

My love has sent no letter for

  A long time now--I've heard

No salutations from him, no

  Inquiries, not one word;

I've written him a hundred times,

  But that hard-riding king

Has sent no emissary back,

  No message, not a thing!

I'm wild with waiting, crazy, but

  He's sent no envoy here--

No strutting partridge has turned up,

  No graceful, skittish deer.

He knows my heart must now be like

  A fluttering bird, but he

Has yet to send one sinuous line

  To lure and capture me.

Damn him, that sweet-lipped serving boy

  Knows very well that I

Need wine now, but he pours me none

  Although my glass is dry.

How much I boasted of his favors,

  The kindnesses we share--

And now I've no idea at all

  Of how he is, or where.

But this is no surprise, Hafez;

  Calm yourself, and behave!

A king can't be expected to

  Write letters to a slave.

-Hafez (tr. Dick Davis)

Hafez (1325-1390, roughly) was a Persian poet, largely based in Shiraz. He enjoyed the patronage of Abu Es'haq (transliterations vary) of the Inju dynasty who ruled in southwestern Iran until Abu Es'haq was deposed in 1353. Abu Es'haq tolerated wine, liked poetry, but his replacement Mobarez al-Din was a more conventional Muslim, and Hafez was forced into exile, at least until Mobarez al-Din was subsequently overthrown a year later.

I've read other translations of Hafez (Robert Bly, others), but I've been quite taken with Dick Davis', which was done for Penguin. There are two other Shirazi poets in the volume--Jahan Malek Khatun, the niece of Abu Es'haq, and Obayd-e Zakani, but I haven't gotten to them yet. Given Hafez' reputation, I felt a glass of wine should stand by his side.

But wine, women (or boys), and song isn't all there is to Hafez. He's sometimes read as if he were writing drinking songs, and sometimes read as if he were a mystic. Davis is insistent that both interpretations are valid, and neither be dismissed, and this poem struck me as a good example of one that could be read either way. It was apparently a convention of Persian poetry of the time to treat one's lover as royalty and one's self as base, so it's not certain that the king mentioned is actually kingly. But it is equally possible that Hafez is thinking of someone altogether more Lordly, who's not responding to Hafez' entreaties.

The happy few who live in peace

 

from Chorus, The Madness of Hercules

Such is the lot of common people,

Who praise each day for its rewards,

Grateful for peace, they envy no one

But prize the small joys life affords.

Let ambition rule the City

Where truth and virtue are sold short,

Where suitors sleep in rich men's doorways,

And poets lisp their lies in Court.

Let the miser count his riches

Always aching to have more.

Each new coin adds to his nightmare

Of his death unloved and poor.

Noble politicians preach

Virtue to the shifting mob.

Defenders of a commonwealth

No one else but they can rob.

The happy few who live in peace

Realize it may not last.

The slightest change of fortune may

Leave joy and comfort in the past.

While fate permits, enjoy this life.

Death stalks us all with steady pace.

The wheel of Time turns just one way.

The steps we take we can't retrace.

The Fates themselves who measure life

Cannot lengthen what they've spun.

Why tempt death by seeking glory?

Why hurry to oblivion?

Only Hercules...

-Seneca (tr. Dana Gioia)

This is about half the first chorus in Seneca's tragedy Hercules Furens or The Madness of Hercules, as translated by Dana Gioia. It's a pretty free translation, but catches the spirit well, I thought.

As the play starts, Hercules has not (yet) returned from the underworld after the last of his twelve labours. (Capturing Cerberus, the three-headed dog of Hades.) His kingdom, Thebes, is under attack by Lycus, because everyone assumes Hercules won't return. But of course he does. He kills Lycus to restore his kingdom, but in his battle rage he goes on to kill his wife Megara, and their children together. "Why tempt death by seeking glory?"

I recently read that volume of Seneca's tragedies in translation.

E. E. Cummings (#1940Club)

 

love is more thicker than forget

more thinner than recall

more seldom than a wave is wet

more frequent than to fail

it is most mad and moonly

and less it shall unbe

than all the sea which only

is deeper than the sea

love is less always than to win

less never than alive

less bigger than the least begin

less littler than forgive

it is most sane and sunly

and more it cannot die

than all the sky which only

is higher than the sky

-e. e. cummings

This is from e. e. cummings' book 50 Poems, which came out in 1940. None of what I think of as his best-known and most-anthologized poems appear in it: 'i sing of Olaf glad and big' is earlier and 'pity this busy monster, manunkind,' and 'what if a much of a which of a wind' appear in the next book 1x1, which came out in 1944. The balloonMan whistles in spring, far and wee, in the first book, Tulips and Chimneys, of 1923. (Which would have been a good mud-licious sort of poem for the season.) But the 1940 club is on, and so, 50 Poems,  a sort of lost middle-child among his books, is it. 😉

But it does have some lovely poems: 'it is most sane and sunly/and more it cannot die'. There are those poems in cummings that just make me happy.

I hadn't really twigged to it, but it turned out 1940 was a good year for poetry, at least as represented on my blog... What I tend to think of as Auden's best book, Another Time, came out in 1940. There's two poems already on the blog from it: 'The Unknown Citizen' and 'Roman Wall Blues'. But I can't be doing Auden all the time. And Ogden Nash had a book in 1940, The Face is Familiar, which included the incomparable 'Portrait of the Artist as a Prematurely Old Man'. 

Sally Simpkin's Lament (Poem For A Thursday)

 

Sally Simpkin's Lament

"Oh! What is that comes gliding in,

And quite in middling haste?

It is the picture of my Jones,

And painted to the waist.

It is not painted to the life,

For where's the trousers blue?

Oh Jones, my dear! Oh dear! my Jones,

What is become of you?"

"Oh! Sally dear, it is too true,--

The half that you remark,

Is come to say my other half

Is bit off by a shark!

Oh! Sally, sharks do things by halves,

Yet most completely do!

A bite in one places seems enough,

But I've been bit in two.

You know I once was all your own,

But now a shark must share!

But let that pass--for now to you

I'm neither here nor there.

Alas! Death has a strange divorce

Effected in the sea.

It has divided me from you,

And even me from me.

Don't fear my ghost will walk o' nights

To haunt as people say;

My ghost can't walk, for oh! my legs

Are many leagues away!

Lord! Think, when I am swimming round

And looking where the boat is,

A shark just snaps away a half

Without a quarter's notice!

One half is here, the other half

Is near Columbia placed:

Oh, Sally! I have got the whole

Atlantic for my waist.

But now adieu--a long adieu!

I've solved Death's awful riddle.

I would say more, but I am doomed

To break off in the middle!"

-Thomas Hood

I no longer have any clue where I first came across this poem--it doesn't seem to be in any book I have--but nevertheless it sticks in my head...

Thomas Hood lived from 1799 to 1845 and that's his portrait up there from the National Portrait Gallery. Is there just possibly a hint of a smile on his face?

Heinrich Heine (#poem)

 

Sapphires are those eyes of yours,

Ravishingly sweet,

Oh, triply fortunate the man

Whom lovingly they greet.

Your heart is like the diamond

That sparkles noble beams;

Oh, triply lucky is the man

For whom with love it gleams.

Your lips are like twin ruby stones,

None lovelier anywhere;

Oh, triply fortunate is the man

To whom they love aver.

Oh, if I knew this lucky man

And found him thus in clover,

Just tète-a-tète in the deep green wood

His luck would soon be over.

-Heinrich Heine (tr. Walter Arndt) 

I've been reading Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) lately, looking first at the German, but then quickly cheating and reading the English. Heine was the major German poet after Goethe, Jewish but not usually practicing. He got into trouble with the authorities and lived his later years in France. 

The German (if it helps):

Saphire sind die Augen dein,
Die lieblichen, die süßen,

Oh, dreimal glücklich ist der Mann,

Den sie mit Liebe grüßen.

Dein Herz, es ist ein Diamant,

Der edle Lichter sprühet.

Oh, dreimal glücklich ist der Mann,

Für den es liebend glühet.

Rubinen sind die Lippen dein,

Man kann nicht schönre sehen.

Oh, dreimal glücklich ist der Mann,

Dem sie die Liebe gestehen.

Oh, kennt ich nur den glücklichen Mann,

Oh, daß ich ihn nur fände,

So recht allein im grünen Wald,

Sein Glück hätt' band ein Ende.

I've found the Arndt translations pretty good overall, but I'm not really sure why he changes up the third line refrain in this.

Poem For A Thursday is a meme started by Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness. Also Brona has a poem.

Les Murray's Dog Fox Field (#AusReadingMonth2020)

 

Dog Fox Field is a collection of poems by Les Murray that came out in 1990. Murray was born in 1938 and was by then a well-established poet. He died in April of last year, and was, until then, often named as a possible Nobel prize laureate. 

His poems are mostly in a rough-hewn formal verse; he likes, for instance, ballad meter:

So it's back to window shopping

on Aphrodite Street

for the apples are stacked and juicy

but some are death to eat.  [From 'The Fall of Aphrodite Street']

You can decide what that metaphor is about on your own.  

Sometimes his use of sound is quite over the top: [From 'On Removing Spiderweb']

Like summer silk its denier
but stickily, o ickilier
miffed bunny-blinder, silver tar,
gesticuli-gesticular,
crepe when cobbed,  crap when rubbed,...

There's more, but maybe that's enough about icky spiderwebs... 😉

As those quotes maybe show, he has a sense of humor; anyway, he does for me. He says the nicest thing about accordions I've ever heard anyone say: ['Accordion Music'] "it can conjure Paris up, or home, or unclench a chinstrap jaw/but it never sang for a nob's baton, or lured the boys to war." Though I just Googled accordion sonata, and naturally there are a few. So some nob somewhere once tried to tell an accordion what to do.

I think he's better at longer length; this volume has a number of quite good narrative poems. And, in fact, my favorite volume of his (I've not read that much) is Fredy Neptune, a novel in verse of 250 pages. Fredy (Friedrich) is the child of German immigrants to Australia and he manages to become involved in practically every major event in the first half of the 20th Century. He fights on both sides in WWI, witnesses the Armenian genocide, joins Lawrence of Arabia, meets Banjo Paterson in Egypt, goes to Hollywood, outwits the Nazis, etc., etc.

Historical events show up in this as well. One is in the voice of a shako-wearing soldier of Austria-Hungary: ['The Lieutenant of Horse Artillery'] "...the length of a desperate ride/for my Emperor and King, as our Empire died/with its dream of happy cultures dancing in a ring." I don't think anybody at the time quite thought Austria-Hungary was a multicultural paradise, but maybe in retrospect? Another was based on the story/legend of Aimée Dubucq de Rivéry, which was new to me, but fascinating, and made a good poem.

There are also rural, agricultural poems. Murray's background was rural--he lived much of his life in small town New South Wales--and a number of his poems reflect that. These kind of went past me. Well, I'm not much of a farmer. Still there was one in the voice of an older heifer whose milk has dried up, and is about to be killed, that was very poignant. ['The Cows on Killing Day'] It starts:

All me are standing on feed. The sky is shining.

All me have just been milked. Teats all tingling still

from that dry toothless sucking by the chilly mouths

that gasp loudly in in in, and never breathe out.

I had a thought about a certain generation of male poets that like formal structures but avoid mellifluousness, using harder consonants (g, k, t) and word-pairings that imply a glottal stop, as if the euphony of Tennyson or Swinburne were somehow suspicious. Les Murray fits in here. I'm also thinking of Ted Hughes (b. 1930) or Seamus Heaney (b. 1939). Paul Fussell in his Poetic Meter and Poetic Form (1965) bad mouths Tennyson for his euphoniousness and not his Victorian sentimentality, which kind of shocked me when I first read it. (As it turns out I'm mostly OK with both euphony and Victorian sentimentality.) But this is an AusReadingMonth post, and I don't feel like pulling a bunch of other books off the shelf, so you'll have to imagine the examples I might use...

My vague sense is that Les Murray became more crotchety and conservative as he got older. Not much sign of it in this. He thanks Paul Keating in a brief acknowledgements section. I thought this quite a good volume, and Les Murray is a poet worth knowing better.

Two short ones to close. A wise, but not very Japanese, haiku:

Politics and Art

Brutal policy,
like inferior art, knows
whose fault it all is.

And one of:  

Three Last Stanzas

Absolutely anything
is absolute to those
who see the poem in it.
Relegation is prose.

Poem For A Thursday: Coluccio

Where Has All The Mayo Gone?

Hungry late I clank around
the kitchen for a snack.
A pickle first and then why not
I peel apart a pack

of luncheon meat, some Swiss, a leaf
of something limp and wan.
And now oh no the lid's on tight
but look--the mayo's gone. 

It feels like only yesterday
I parked my father's car
and peeked at other shopper's carts
and tootled to a jar 

for slathering on hot dogs
and for dolloping on frites--
there's loads of foods whose fatty goodness
mayonnaise completes. 

My pumpernickel won't go down.
It's like a warning bell,
the chilly clink of stainless steel
on glass. I know it well. 

And wonder under nibbles
if at bottom human lives
aren't always scraping empty jars
with tips of pointless knives.

-Pino Coluccio

I'm more a mustard person myself, but I will admit to being amused by this poem nevertheless. It's classic close observation leading to a more general insight. I especially like 'tips of pointless knives.'

Pino Coluccio is a contemporary Canadian formal poet. This is from his first book of 2005. He has a new book of poems out from Biblioasis titled Class Clown.

Jennifer is featuring a great W. B. Yeats poem this week. 

Poem for a Thursday: Bishop

Manners

For a Child of 1918

My grandfather said to me
as we sat on the wagon seat,
"Be sure to remember to always
speak to everyone you meet." 

We met a stranger on foot.
My grandfather's whip tapped his hat.
"Good day, sir. Good day. A fine day."
And I said it and bowed where I sat. 

Then we overtook a boy we knew
with his big pet crow on his shoulder.
"Always offer everyone a ride;
don't forget that when you get older," 

my grandfather said. So Willy
climbed up with us, but the crow
gave a "Caw!" and flew off. I was worried.
How would he know where to go? 

But he flew a little way at a time
from fence post to fence post, ahead;
and when Willy whistled, he answered.
"A fine bird," my grandfather said, 

"and he's well brought up. See, he answers
nicely when he's spoken to.
Man or beast, that's good manners.
Be sure that you both always do." 

When automobiles went by,
the dust hid the people's faces,
but we shouted, "Good day! Good day!
Fine day!" at the top of our voices. 

When we came to Hustler Hill,
he said that the mare was tired,
so we all got down and walked,
as our good manners required.

-Elizabeth Bishop

Though the poem is set in 1918, (when Elizabeth Bishop would have been seven) it appears in her book of 1965 Questions of Travel.

Jennifer at Holds Upon Happiness, the originator of the Poem for a Thursday idea, is featuring Jane Kenyon this week.

Poem For A Thursday: Cornford

Poem

Heart of the heartless world,
Dear heart, the thought of you
Is the pain at my side,
The shadow that chills my view. 

The wind rises in the evening,
Reminds that autumn is near.
I am afraid to lose you,
I am afraid of my fear. 

On the last mile to Huesca,
The last fence for our pride,
Think so kindly, dear, that I
Sense you at my side. 

And if bad luck should lay my strength
Into the shallow grave,
Remember all the good you can;
Don't forget my love.

-John Cornford

John Cornford was an English volunteer for the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. He was twenty when he wrote this, and bad luck did come by to lay him into the shallow grave, not at the battle of Huesca, but not long after. 

I first found this at The Guardian's Poem of the Week some years ago. The poet Carol Rumens who writes that column has more information, plus some analysis of the poem when she featured it.

Jennifer is featuring Wendell Berry this week.