[Janice D. Soderling]

Christina Georgina Rossetti (1830-1894)

A Birthday

MY heart is like a singing bird
xxx Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
My heart is like an apple-tree
xxx Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
My heart is like a rainbow shell
xxx That paddles in a halcyon sea;
My heart is gladder than all these,
xxx Because my love is come to me.

Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
xxx Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
xxx And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
Work it in gold and silver grapes,
xxx In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
Because the birthday of my life
xxx Is come, my love is come to me.

[Janice D. Soderling]

I Am a Union Woman - Aunt Molly Jackson

I am a union woman,
As brave as I can be;
I do not like the bosses,
And the bosses don't like me.

Ref:
Join the NMU,
Come join the NMU.

I was raised in old Kentucky,
In Kentucky borned and bred;
And when I joined the union
They called me a Rooshian Red.

When my husband asked the boss for a job
These is the words he said:
"Bill Jackson, I can't work you sir,
Your wife's a Rooshian Red."

This is the worst time on earth
That I have ever saw;
To get shot down by gun thugs
And framed up by the law.

If you want to join a union
As strong as one can be,
Join the dear old NMU
And come along with me.

We are many thousand strong
And I am glad to say,
We are getting stronger
And stronger and stronger every day.

The bosses ride fine horses
While we walk in the mud;
Their banner is a dollar sign
While ours is striped in blood.

(Aunt Molly Jackson, 1880-1961. At fourteen she married a coal miner. Complaining about the constant child-bearing of miners' wives and vowing "not to grow up to be a fool," she learned to read and write, and became a registered nurse and midwife. She was famous in Harlan Country, Kentucky, as a woman who could take the place of several doctors. Mining accidents killed her father, her husband and her son. With other organizers, she was blacklisted, harassed and forced to leave Kentucky in 1931.)

[Julie Steiner]

Pete Seeger's sister Peggy wrote this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cgzl1Sai4Y0

[Janice D. Soderling]

A Sunset of the City
BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS
Kathleen Eileen

Already I am no longer looked at with lechery or love.
My daughters and sons have put me away with marbles and dolls,
Are gone from the house.
My husband and lovers are pleasant or somewhat polite
And night is night.

It is a real chill out,
The genuine thing.
I am not deceived, I do not think it is still summer
Because sun stays and birds continue to sing.

It is summer-gone that I see, it is summer-gone.
The sweet flowers indrying and dying down,
The grasses forgetting their blaze and consenting to brown.

It is a real chill out. The fall crisp comes.
I am aware there is winter to heed.
There is no warm house
That is fitted with my need.
I am cold in this cold house this house
Whose washed echoes are tremulous down lost halls.
I am a woman, and dusty, standing among new affairs.
I am a woman who hurries through her prayers.

Tin intimations of a quiet core to be my
Desert and my dear relief
Come: there shall be such islanding from grief,
And small communion with the master shore.
Twang they. And I incline this ear to tin,
Consult a dual dilemma. Whether to dry
In humming pallor or to leap and die.

Somebody muffed it? Somebody wanted to joke.

[Gail White]

Nice choices, people!

Here's one of my favorite sonnets by Edna Millay. It's the last in the sequence "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree."

Gazing upon him now, severe and dead,
It seemed a curious thing that she had lain
Beside him many a night in that cold bed,
And that had been which would not be again.
From his desirous body the great heat
Was gone at last, it seemed, and the taut nerves
Loosened forever. Formally the sheet
Set forth for her today those heavy curves
And lengths familiar as the bedroom door.
She was as one who enters, sly, and proud,
To where her husband speaks before a crowd,
And sees a man she never saw before--
The man who eats his victuals at her side,
Small, and absurd, and hers: For once, not hers, unclassified.

[Janice D. Soderling]

Bumpity bump.

[Edward Zuk]

The first sonnet sequence in English appears as an appendix to a volume written by Anne Locke. Most scholars now believe that the sequence was, in fact, composed by Locke.

Here is the first sonnet of "A Meditation of a Penitent Sinner" (1560), which is based on Psalm 51. The rest can be read here.

The hainous gylt of my forsaken ghost
So threates, alas, vnto my febled sprite
Deserued death, and (that me greueth most)
Still stand so fixt before my daseld sight
The lothesome filthe of my disteined life,
The mighty wrath of myne offended Lorde,
My Lord whos wrath is sharper than the knife,
And deper woundes than dobleedged sworde,
That, as the dimmed and fordulled eyen
Full fraught with teares & more & more opprest
With growing streames of the distilled bryne
Sent from the fornace of a grefefull brest,
Can not enioy the comfort of the light,
Nor finde the waye wherin to walke aright:

[Marion Shore]

This was one of my mother's favorites, and she often recited it when I was a child . I came to know it by heart, and loved it, even though I didn't understand it. Now that I've grown into it, I love it even more, not only because of the poem itself, but because it so exemplifies the spirit of my mother. I read it at her funeral.

Let No Charitable Hope

Now let no charitable hope
Confuse my mind with images
Of eagle and of antelope;
I am in nature none of these.

I was, being human, born alone;
I am, being woman, hard beset;
I live, by squeezing from a stone
The little nourishment I get.

In masks outrageous and austere
The years go by in single file;
But none has merited my fear,
And none has quite escaped my smile.

Elinor Wylie

[Janice D. Soderling]

Elinor Wylie deserves much more attention than she gets, IMO. Thx Marion.

[Mary Meriam]

Here's someone new to me. Her voice is fresh and alive.

Change
BY LETITIA ELIZABETH LANDON (1802–1838)

And this is what is left of youth! . . .
There were two boys, who were bred up together,
Shared the same bed, and fed at the same board;
Each tried the other’s sport, from their first chase,
Young hunters of the butterfly and bee,
To when they followed the fleet hare, and tried
The swiftness of the bird. They lay beside
The silver trout stream, watching as the sun
Played on the bubbles: shared each in the store
Of either’s garden: and together read
Of him, the master of the desert isle,
Till a low hut, a gun, and a canoe,
Bounded their wishes. Or if ever came
A thought of future days, ’twas but to say
That they would share each other’s lot, and do
Wonders, no doubt. But this was vain: they parted
With promises of long remembrance, words
Whose kindness was the heart’s, and those warm tears,
Hidden like shame by the young eyes which shed them,
But which are thought upon in after-years
As what we would give worlds to shed once more.

They met again, — but different from themselves,
At least what each remembered of themselves:
The one proud as a soldier of his rank,
And of his many battles: and the other
Proud of his Indian wealth, and of the skill
And toil which gathered it; each with a brow
And heart alike darkened by years and care.
They met with cold words, and yet colder looks:
Each was changed in himself, and yet each thought
The other only changed, himself the same.
And coldness bred dislike, and rivalry
Came like the pestilence o’er some sweet thoughts
That lingered yet, healthy and beautiful,
Amid dark and unkindly ones. And they,
Whose boyhood had not known one jarring word,
Were strangers in their age: if their eyes met,
’Twas but to look contempt, and when they spoke,
Their speech was wormwood! . . .
. . . And this, this is life!