Poem of the day, Nov. 29 2009

They Are Human After All
They are human after all, you think,
as the waiter steps up to a table
out of sight of you,
reserved, corner table—
they too are thin-skinned and pleasure-seeking,
with their own feelings and their own sufferings.
You’re not so all alone
in your mess, your restlessness, your shakes,
they too will be full of doubt, dither, shilly-shallying,
even if [...]

Read Full Post »

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1933

From Conquistador
Dedication

“O frati,” dissi, “che per cento milia
Perigli siete giunti all’ occidente.”
(“O brothers,” I said, “who through a hundred thousand/Perils have reached the West.” The speaker is Ulysses, encouraging his shipmates to continue with their last voyage of exploration from Ithaca westward, as reported by himself to Dante in hell. They ultimately discovered a [...]

Read Full Post »

The Angel Tree

At work this week we were discussing Christmas movies. Many came to mind: Christmas in Connecticut with Barbara Stanwyck, The Bishop’s Wife with Loretta Young, White Christmas with Rosemary Clooney, The Bells of St. Mary’s with Ingrid Bergman, Holiday Inn, Miracle on 34th St., It’s A Wonderful Life.
Something about the final scene in A Christmas Memory [...]

Read Full Post »

Pulitzer Prize for the Novel 1932

Pearl S. Buck (1892-1973) is the first American woman to win the Nobel Prize and the first woman to win both the Nobel and Pulitzer prizes. She won both awards for her book The Good Earth, published in 1931, which revolves around family life in a Chinese village before the 1949 Revolution.
Here are two quotes [...]

Read Full Post »

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1932

One Beauty
I
One beauty still is faultless; not
Deflowered in the bed of thought:
It is a sound of sunken seas.
It is an avid wish for ease.
It is the earth, it is the sky
When passion is a lute put by
And life a dancer out of breath.
It is the lovely face of death,
Adored and guessed at—never once
Beheld in chrysoprase [...]

Read Full Post »

Poem of the day, Nov. 22 2009

Nothing Gold Can Stay
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

Read Full Post »

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1931

The Gift Outright
The land was ours before we were the land’s.
She was our land more than a hundred years
Before we were her people. She was ours
In Massachusetts, in Virginia.
But we were England’s, still colonials,
Possessing what we still were unpossessed by,
Possessed by what we now no more possessed.
Something we were withholding made us weak.
Until we [...]

Read Full Post »

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1930

The House of Dust
The wandering one, the inquisitive dreamer of dreams,
The eternal asker of answers, stands in the street,
And lifts his palms for the first cold ghost of rain.
‘I will ask them all, I will ask them all their dreams,
I will hold my light above them and seek their faces.
I will hear them whisper, [...]

Read Full Post »

Pulitzer Prize in Poetry 1929

Music
My friend went to the piano; spun the stool
A little higher; left his pipe to cool;
Picked up a fat green volume from the chest;
And propped it open.
Whitely without rest,
His fingers swept the keys that flashed like swords,
. . . And to the brute drums of barbarian hordes,
Roaring and thunderous and weapon-bare,
An army stormed the bastions [...]

Read Full Post »

Mr. Smith Goes to Washington

Read Full Post »