Bone by Mary Oliver

1. Understand, I am always trying to figure out what the soul is, and where hidden, and what shape and so, last week, when I found on the beach the ear bone of a pilot whale that may have died hundreds of years ago, I thought maybe I was close to discovering something for the ear bone 

2. is the portion that lasts longest in any of us, man or whale; shaped like a squat spoon with a pink scoop where once, in the lively swimmer’s head, it joined its two sisters in the house of hearing, it was only two inches long and thought: the soul might be like this so hard, so necessary  

3. yet almost nothing.Beside me the gray sea was opening and shutting its wave-doors, unfolding over and over its time-ridiculing roar; I looked but I couldn’t see anything through its dark-knit glare; yet don’t we all know, the golden sand is there at the bottom, though our eyes have never seen it, nor can our hands ever catch it 

4. lest we would sift it down into fractions, and facts certainties and what the soul is, also I believe I will never quite know.Though I play at the edges of knowing, truly I know our part is not knowing, but looking, and touching, and loving, which is the way I walked on, softly, through the pale-pink morning light.

I see a lot of poems with this format, I like how the stanzas are numbered and how its a mix between prose and not prose. I think I said before (I don’t really remember though) that I didn’t really like poetry with punctuation because it sounded too formal but its growing on me. It divides up thoughts easily. As for the poems content, I really like how each stanza can be interpreted as its own thing. my favorite is the third stanza, the way Oliver describes the ocean is beautiful. I never thought of waves as doors.

An Envelope by Jack Underwood

What about days when you feel nothing.
Waiting in the car, relative arbitration,
pigeon-pewter or urinal-cake sky, whatever.
A man shouting, a parade of missiles…

You chew the food and harvest thoughts
from a seafloor. Control subject,
a raincoat blurred in close-circuit resolution,
you pinch the nerveless gummy flesh

of  your elbows and fail to love well.
You try to carry a flag, at least,
in the distance. This is not sickness.
This is not anything. Hand gripping

the big knife cutting onions. You could
cut fifty onions this way. You could sleep
until Easter. Maybe the fog will have lifted
by then and time will not seem to pass

like small bones being broken in order.
What’s that sound? Bald human instinct,
pounding on the windows like a fly.
Who am I? All blown open, paper fold,

you cannot stop the living obligations,
debts abstracting in neutral waves.
Please come back. Patient hearts
are lining up along the shore.

I like this poem its very bouncy if that make sense. All my poems seem very bland compared to this one, I really like when Underwood says

“Waiting in the car, relative arbitration,
pigeon-pewter or urinal-cake sky, whatever.”

The poem is kind of hard for me to understand maybe its just to above me.

The Winter Beach at Sanderling by Stanley Plumly

The “wolves in the waves” driving or being driven
inside the rain, which is one sort of day to be alone
in, then again the beach mile either way disappearing
into the thinness of the air, dead detail of the gone world
from the night before—probably an eaten-out barrel
or two, traps and lines of netting, lumber and almost
carcasses and scored horseshoe shells—brought home
from who knows where, then someone with a dog
making a single shadow out of an idea of sun: each
day rising and thinking I died for some kind of beauty,
standing in the morning on the height of my deck,
trying to wake up, nothing but my eyes to go by—
how dark down does the water go before the tide—
I the god of starfish fallen, the flounder’s whiter bones.

I like the structure of this poem, I usually don’t like single bodies of text because I like dividing reading (especially poems) up so I can understand each part better. But this poem sounds like a journal entry, a eloquent account on beach life and death. love it

I Shall Not Care by Sara Teasdale

When I am dead and over me bright April 
Shakes out her rain-drenched hair, 
Tho’ you should lean above me broken-hearted, 
I shall not care. 

I shall have peace, as leafy trees are peaceful 
When rain bends down the bough, 
And I shall be more silent and cold-hearted 
Than you are now.

Apparently this poem is a suicide note from the author years before she committed. Both stanzas have different focuses, the first focusing on maybe a lover or someone missing her when she’s gone and her not caring. The second stanza is a jab at the lover or person who didn’t care for her when she was alive but did when she died.

Song of the Builders by Mary Oliver

On a summer morning I sat down on a hillside to think about God –

 a worthy pastime. Near me, I saw a single cricket; it was moving the grains of the hillside 

this way and that way. How great was its energy, how humble its effort. Let us hope 

 it will always be like this, each of us going on in our inexplicable ways building the universe.

Oh to sit on a hillside and think about god. Only 110 wish days til summer and you bet I will sit on a hill notice the crickets and locusts and every minuscule thing going on with their day. writing about poetry is weird, its hard to tell someone its meaning, its like describing color to someone who’s colorblind.

In my medicine cabinet BY JACK KEROUAC

In my medicine cabinet
the winter fly
Has died of old age

I like this haiku, its kind of an absurd subject to think of and it fills me with dread. There are a lot of poems about death and they leave you feeling hopeful or sad, this just leaves me feeling weird.

[goes out comes back] by Kobayashi Issa

Goes out, 
comes back— 
      the love life of a cat.

I really love how haikus are easily understandable, they fit the definition of poetic. Haikus are like song verses, some like bible verses. I think the act of writing a haiku is beautiful too, it takes a lot of thought. Like a puzzle, each word has is place.

Useless! Useless! by Jack Kerouac

Useless! Useless! 
—heavy rain driving
into the sea

I really like this poem, haikus are really beautiful and easier to understand. Kerouac is noticing something I’ve noticed before, how so much fresh rain goes into the salty sea. And there it’s not much use.

My life has been the poem I would have writ By Henry David Thoreau

My life has been the poem I would have writ

But I could not both live and utter it.

This poem is really short, but it says a lot. He talks about life and how it represents a poem, its very hard to understand. I’m trying to understand what writ means but I think it means write, Thoreau just wanted the poem to rhyme.

Nature by Henry David Thoreau

O Nature! I do not aspire
To be the highest in thy quire,—
To be a meteor in the sky,
Or comet that may range on high;
Only a zephyr that may blow
Among the reeds by the river low;
Give me thy most privy place
Where to run my airy race.

In some withdrawn, unpublic mead
Let me sigh upon a reed,
Or in the woods, with leafy din,
Whisper the still evening in:
Some still work give me to do,—
Only—be it near to you!

For I’d rather be thy child
And pupil, in the forest wild,
Than be the king of men elsewhere,
And most sovereign slave of care:
To have one moment of thy dawn,
Than share the city’s year forlorn.

I really like the imagery in this poem it makes me feel calm. I noticed a lot of rhyming in a AB pattern. I also noticed that this poem is very structured and has a lot of punctuation. Nature writing is usually in this tone. I think Thoreau was an OG nature writer/poet. Good for him!