Reading Life

Followers

Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts
Showing posts with label poetry. Show all posts

Saturday, October 23, 2021

Poems with a scientific bent

 


This month I'm focusing on poems with a scientific bent. I found a poem by David Hathwell, "Hidden Force Observed" (2015) that employs scientific themes.

 

Here's a poem written by a poem by a poet who is new to me, Charlotte Turner Smith, but its written much earlier(poets.org).

 Sonnet XLIV ("Sonnet Written in The Church Yard at Middleton in Sussex")

Press’d by the Moon, mute arbitress of tides,
    While the loud equinox its pow’r combines,
    The sea no more its swelling surge confines,
But o’er the shrinking land sublimely rides.
The wild blasts, rising from the Western cave,
    Drives the huge billows from their heaving bed;
    Tears from their grassy tombs the village dead,
And breaks the silent sabbath of the grave!
With shells and seaweed mingled, on the shore,
    Lo! their bones whiten in the frequent wave;
    But vain to them the winds and waters rave;
They hear the warring elements no more:
While I am doom’d—by life’s long storm opprest,
To gaze with envy, on their gloomy rest.

 

I love the phrase "mute arbitress of tides" and "silent sabbath."

The surprise in the end is that the speaker/narrator is envious of the dead. 

Charlotte Turner Smith was a poet and novelist of the Romantic age. 

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

"If I should have a daughter" by Sarah Kay

This is an amazing poem about motherhood, starting over, finding strength in the face of adversity; its also filled with Sarah Kay's trademark humor.

"If I should have a daughter" by Sarah Kay.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JQgz2AhHaQg

Tuesday, June 5, 2018

Whale Road Review, Summer Issue, 2018

My favorite poems are poems that teach e.g. "On the Occassion of Eating Bird's Nest Soup With Trung and Kim" by Rachel Barton.

The poem explores the notion of how everything is connected through a food chain. A woman eats bird's nest soup, a delicacy in China, and contemplates how everything is connected as the swifters rise into view.

The soup, she admits, is flavorless. She marvels that even the spit of the swifters, which the birds use to construct their nests, is a "jewel."

Another instructive nature poem, "Whale Fall Deadsong Heavenly Blues #17," by Christopher Todd Anderson compares a whale carcass to a cathedral. 


...Boneworms
humble themselves in the chapel of her heart,

decapods haunt her lungs’ cloisters. 


Later, its clear that the carcass is not a church but a universe. However, both are impressive and big so really a church and a universe are interchangeable:

...Creatures

born here, in the interstices of bone and blubber,
think this is the whole universe: cell-rot sky
and jaw-cave homeland, a history founded on decay

See the Summer issue of Whale Road Review,

Sunday, August 10, 2014

Badlands Canyons


Speech after long silence,
It is right,
Just as right,
as lightning hitting dead air,
or an army of wildflowers--
Scorpionweed and beeplant,
creeping into position,
like soldiers,
in cracked and bald canyons.

Pictures courtesy of,
http://www.atlasobscura.com/


Blog Archive