Tag Archives: poetry

End-of-Course Reverie

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End-of-Course Reverie

I watch my students

click and decide

if I am a good teacher.


My voice is now silent,

so I try to stir them using only my mind

(but I don’t see anything happening).


I think about what I did

and what I didn’t

and wish I had a few do-overs

until my aching head

reminds me what a bad idea

that would be.


So I tell myself

“It’ll be alright–

or if not, it doesn’t matter (eternally).”


But unfortunately,

I don’t really listen to myself

any better than my students do.


So it comes down to the fruits of a thousand hours,

being placed in four bins to produce one number.

Pretty coarsely-weighed for so dear a harvest.



WDS 4/20/2013



poem VI, from ‘Leavings’ by Wendell Berry

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VI

O saints, if I am even eligible for this prayer,
though less than worthy of this dear desire,
and if your prayers have influence in Heaven,
let my place there be lower than your own.
I know how you longed, here where you lived
as exiles, for the presence of the essential
Being and Maker and Knower of all things.
But because of my unruliness, or some erring
virtue in me never rightly schooled,
some error clear and dear, my life
has not taught me your desire for flight:
dismattered, pure, and free. I long
instead for the Heaven of creatures, of seasons,
of day and night. Heaven enough for me
would be this world as I know it, but redeemed
of our abuse of it and one another. It would be
the Heaven of knowing again. There is no marrying
in Heaven, and I submit; even so, I would like
to know my wife again, both of us young again,
and I remembering always how I loved her
when she was old. I would like to know
my children again, all my family, all my dear ones,
to see, to hear, to hold, more carefully
than before, to study them lingeringly as one
studies old verses, committing them to heart
forever. I would like again to know my friends,
my old companions, men and women, horses
and dogs, in all the ages of our lives, here
in this place that I have watched over all my life
in all its moods and seasons, never enough.
I will be leaving how many beauties overlooked?
A painful Heaven this would be, for I would know
by it how far I have fallen short. I have not
paid enough attention, I have not been grateful
enough. And yet this pain would be the measure
of my love. In eternity’s once and now, pain would
place me surely in the Heaven of my earthly love.

— Wendell Berry, from ‘Leavings’


This is the wonderful poem that was read before this year’s Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities by Wendell Berry. I first read the text of his lecture and then watched a video of it. It is remarkable. Berry is the prophet of our time. He warms my heart and chills my spine at the same time.

Text of “It All Turns on Affection”



poem 314 (“Hope is the thing with feathers”) by Emily Dickenson

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“Hope” is the thing with feathers –
That perches in the soul –
And sings the tune without the words –
And never stops – at all –

And sweetest – in the Gale – is heard –
And sore must be the storm –
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm –

I’ve heard it in the chillest land –
And on the strangest Sea –
Yet – never – in Extremity,
It asked a crumb – of me.

— Emily Dickenson



poem 950 (The cricket sang) by Emily Dickenson

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The cricket sang,
And set the sun,
And workmen finished, one by one,
Their seam the day upon.

The low grass loaded with the dew,
The twilight stood as strangers do
With hat in hand, polite and new,
To stay as if, or go.

A vastness, as a neighbor, came,–
A wisdom without face or name,
A peace, as hemispheres at home,–
And so the night became.

— Emily Dickinson

I Go Back to the House for a Book — a poem by Billy Collins

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I Go Back to the House for a Book


I turn around on the gravel
and go back to the house for a book,
something to read at the doctor’s office,
and while I am inside, running the finger
of inquisition along a shelf,
another me that did not bother
to go back to the house for a book
heads out on his own,
rolls down the driveway,
and swings left toward town,
a ghost in his ghost car,
another knot in the string of time,
a good three minutes ahead of me —
a spacing that will now continue
for the rest of my life.

Sometimes I think I see him
a few people in front of me on a line
or getting up from a table
to leave the restaurant just before I do,
slipping into his coat on the way out the door.
But there is no catching him,
no way to slow him down
and put us back in synch,
unless one day he decides to go back
to the house for something,
but I cannot imagine
for the life of me what that might be.

He is out there always before me,
blazing my trail, invisible scout,
hound that pulls me along,
shade I am doomed to follow,
my perfect double,
only bumped an inch into the future,
and not nearly as well-versed as I
in the love poems of Ovid —
I who went back to the house
that fateful winter morning and got the book.

— Billy Collins




September Day — a poem

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September Day


Today I try to work,

but I’m pulled away again and again,

not by irritant or worry,

but by the sheer pleasure

of sun and breeze and the song of the flicker.

September, unmoored by Julius and Augustus,

is made dearer than April

by momento mori making their way lazily to the earth.

And this month, defamed by the small and the lost,

is made bittersweet

because it whispers just how much we will lose.

But today, even my thoughts of departing

and leaving this behind make me glad

because I know I got to be alive

and see this one, perfect September day.



WDS 9/9/2012

Sonnet 91 — by William Shakespeare

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Sonnet 91

Some glory in their birth, some in their skill,
Some in their wealth, some in their bodies’ force,
Some in their garments, though new-fangled ill,
Some in their hawks and hounds, some in their horse;
And every humour hath his adjunct pleasure,
Wherein it finds a joy above the rest:
But these particulars are not my measure;
All these I better in one general best.
Thy love is better than high birth to me,
Richer than wealth, prouder than garments’ cost,
Of more delight than hawks or horses be;
And having thee, of all men’s pride I boast:
Wretched in this alone,that thou mayst take
All this away and me most wretched make.

— by William Shakespeare





The 7/22/12 “Sunday Poem” from 3 quarks daily (3qd).