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POETRY IN MOTION
London's Poems on the Underground program began in subway cars in 1986. In 1992, New York City Transit followed London's lead and Poetry in Motion was born, a collaboration between the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the Poetry Society of America. Wouldn't it be something if we could get poems onto trains and buses in South Africa?
London subway art, Ingrid Wolsky's photos
The first four poems
Poetry in Motion debuted with: "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry" by Walt Whitman, "Hope is the Thing with Feathers" by Emily Dickinson, "When You Are Old" by William Butler Yeats, and "Let There Be New Flowering" by Lucille Clifton.
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CRY A RIVER
According to the keyword tools that track daily search engine traffic, the most searched for poems on the internet are 'love poems' and 'sad poems'. This is merely another pointer to what we already know: despair is the siamese twin of joy.
When life gets to us, we seek consolation with the desperation of betrayed lovers, reading lines of favourite poems over and over again, listening for nuances of rhythm and pattern that might comfort us with new insight. We seek the bitter-sweet pleasure of honest words set in unfamiliar patterns; like the poems on this page. We turn to the poets who fearlessly tell us that death matters.
The best poems are those that find us when we least expect it. Perhaps that's why subways and buses and trains are such marvelous places to discover a poem; our restless spirit is brought to a transitory pause. If we pay attention the message of the words remains with us long after the trip is done.
by Consuelo Roland
LISEL MUELLER
When I am Asked
When I am asked
how I began writing poems,
I talk about the indifference of nature.
It was soon after my mother died,
a brilliant June day,
everything blooming.
I sat on a gray stone bench
in a lovingly planted garden,
but the day lilies were as deaf
as the ears of drunken sleepers
and the roses curved inward.
Nothing was black or broken
and not a leaf fell
and the sun blared endless commercials
for summer holidays.
I sat on a gray stone bench
ringed with the ingenue faces
of pink and white impatiens
and placed my grief
in the mouth of language,
the only thing that would grieve with me.
From Alive Together. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller. Reprinted with the permission of Louisiana State University Press. Source: Poetry (October 1987).
* Recommended by Bev Rycroft
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Bred to a harder thing
Than triumph, turn away
And like a laughing string
Where on mad fingers play
Amid a place of stone,
Be secret and exult,
Because of all things known,
That is most difficult.
William Butler Yeats
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FINUALA DOWLING
To the doctor who treated the raped baby and who felt such despair
I just wanted to say on behalf of us all
that on the night in question
there was a light on in the hall
for a nervous little sleeper
and when the bleeding baby was admitted to your care
faraway a Karoo shepherd crooned a ramkietjie lullaby in the veld
and while you staunched
there was space on a mother-warmed sheet
for a night walker
and when you administered an infant-sized opiate
there were luxuriant dark nipples
for fist-clenching babes
and when you called for more blood
a bleary-eyed uncle got up to make a feed
and while you stitched
there was another chapter of a favourite story
and while you cleaned
a grandpa's thin legs walked up and down for a colicky crier
and when finally you stood exhausted at the end of her cot
and asked, "Where is God?",
a father sat watch.
And for the rest of us, we all slept in trust
that you would do what you did,
that you could do what you did.
We slept in trust that you lived.
From I Flying, by kind permission of Finuala Dowling, Copyright © Carapace Poets
* Recommended by Consuelo Roland
Available from selected book stockists
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You can buy I Flying from bestwebbuys.com
& from selected BookShops
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"I remember
the sequence of writing this poem almost more clearly than any of my other poems. Like many South Africans, I read with deep horror and repugnance the story of baby Tshepang's rape in the Cape Times of Monday October 29 2001. When you read a story like that, there is so little you can relate to -- it is all unimaginable. But towards the end of the article, the reporter described the doctor on duty as saying something like "I stood at the end of her cot, and thought, Where is God?". I was so moved by that comment, it stayed with me all day. The next day I wrote the poem as a gesture of healing, comfort and consolation. I wrote as if I were speaking to the doctor in the first instance, but then also to all men who might be feeling ashamed to be men, to all parents, all South Africans. The poem made me feel very afraid as I wrote. I was afraid of the magnitude of the topic -- that I couldn't do it justice. But there was this other voice telling me that I could do it as long as I kept the tone understated, ordinary."
Finuala Dowling, 9th March 2008
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PHILIP LARKIN
Aubade
I sleep all day and get half-drunk at night.
Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare
In time the curtain-edges will grow light.
Till then I see what's nearly always there:
Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,
Making all thought impossible but how
And where and when I shall myself die.
Arid interrogation: yet the dread
Of dying, and being dead,
Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.
The mind blanks at the glare.Not in remorse
-The good not done, the love not given, time
Torn off unused- not wretchedly because
An only life can take sp long to climb
Clear of the wrong beginnings, and may never;
But at the total emptiness for ever,
The sure extinction that we travel to
And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,
Not to be anywhere,
And soon, nothing more terrible, nothing more true.
This is a special way of being afraid
No trick dispels. Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die,
And specious stuff that says No rational thing
Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing
That this is what we fear- no sight, no sound,
No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,
The anaesthetic from which none come round.
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision
Most things may never happen; this one will,
And realisation of it rages out
In furnace -fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good;
It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave,
Death is no different whined at than withstood.
Slowly the light strengthens, and the room takes shape.
It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,
Yet can't accept. One side will have to go.
Meanwhile the telephones crouch, getting ready to ring
In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring
Intricate rented world begins to rouse.
The sky is white as clay, with no sun.
Work has to be done.
Postmen like doctors go from house to house.
29 November 1977 Times Literary Supplement, 23 December 1977
* Recommended by Winnie Thompson
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You can buy Required Writing from Amazon
& from selected BookShops
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"… asked about
whether thinking about growing older worried him, Larkin replied "Yes, dreadfully. If you assume you are going to live to be 70, seven decades, and each decade is a day of the week, starting with Sunday, then I'm on Friday afternoon now. Rather a shock isn't it? If you ask me why does it bother me, I can only say I dread endless extinction."
Larkin was 57 at the time. His dates are 1922-1985. He didn't even live the seven decades.
Kindly provided by Winnie Thompson, extract from an interview with the Observer taken from Required Writing- some essays by Philip LarkinCopyright © Faber and Faber, London, 1983
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