Undistinguished butter-cup Lost among myriads of others, To the red ant eyeing you You are giant stillness. He pauses on the boulder of a clod, Baffled by your nearness to the sky. But to the black loam at your feet You are the atom of a pent-up dream.
Undistinguished butter-cup, Take your little breath of contemplation, Undisturbed by haughty tricks of space.
August sauntered down the mountain-side, Dropping mottled, turbid wraiths of decay. The air was like an old priest Disrobing without embarrassment Before the dark and candid gaze of night. But these things brought no pause To the saucily determined squirrel. His eyes were hungrily upturned To where the stars hung--icily clustered nuts Dotting trees of solitude. He saw the stars just over the horizon, And they seemed to grow On trees that he could reach. So he scampered on, from branch to branch, Wondering why the fairy nut-trees Ran away from him. But, looking down, he spied A softly wild cheeked mountain pool, And there a handful of fairy nuts Bit into the indigo cupping them. With a squeal of weary happiness The squirrel plunged into the mountain pool, And as he drowned within its soundless heart The fairy nuts were jigging over him, Like the unheard stirring of a poem.
Aimless petal of the wind, Spinning gently weird circles, To the flowers underneath You are a drunken king of motion; To the plunging winds above You are momentary indecision.
Aimless petal of the wind, Waver carelessly against this June. The universe, like you, is but The drowsy arm of stillness Spinning gently weird circles in his sleep.
Be a liquid threshold for the dawn And let night touch you with his back. The earth-bowl prisoning you, and cold night winds
Are only pause and rhythm Within an endless fantasy, But you, like they, can be A dream from the loins of a dream, And build a golden stairway of escape.
O coolly unperturbed pool, Slap your ripples in laughter at men, Who splash you with their lordly hands. Time is but a phantom dagger That motion lifts to slay itself.
A trickle of dawn insinuated itself Through the crevices of black satiation. The elderly trees coughed, lightly, hurriedly, In remonstrance against the invasion. Lean with a virginal poison, The grass-blades shook, immune to light and time. A bird lost in a tree Shrilly flirted with its energy.... One fool, in the garden, spoke to another.
Thin and dark green symbol Of an earth forever raising Myriads of chained wings, Breezes have a form, to you, And sounds break into vivid shape. The proud finality of tiny sight Cannot lure your pliant blindness.
Thin and dark green blade, Be not awed by trees and men Whose sound is all that gives them life. You reach the sky because your face Is not turned toward it.
An old Jew munches an apple, With conquering immersion All the thwarted longings of his life Urge on his determined teeth. His face is hard and pear-shaped; His eyes are muddy capitulations; But his mouth is incongruous. Softly, slightly distended, Like that of a whistling girl, It is ingenuously haunting And makes the rest of him a soiled, grey background. Hopes that lie within their grave Of submissive sternness, Have spilled their troubled ghosts upon this mouth, And a tortured belief Has dwindled into tenderness upon it.... He trudges off behind his push-cart And the Ghetto walks away with him.
The oak-tree in front of my house Smells different every morning. Sometimes it smells fresh and wise Like my mother’s hair. Sometimes it stands ashamed Because it doesn’t own the smell It borrowed from our flower-garden. Sometimes it has a windy smell, As though it had come back from a long walk. The oak-tree in front of my house Has different smells, like grown up people.
My doll hides behind her pink cheeks, So that you can’t see when she moves, But it doesn’t matter because She always moves when no one is looking, And that is why people think she is still. People laugh when I say that my doll is alive, But if she were dead, my fingers Wouldn’t know that they were touching her. She lives inside a little house. And laughs because I cannot find the door.
The colours in my room Meet each other and hesitate. Is that what people call shape? Nobody seems to think so, But I believe that lines are dead shapes Unless they fall against each other And look surprised, like the colours in my room!
American poet Maxwell Bodenheim was born in 1892 and died in 1954. He was a central figure in the Chicago literary renaissance of the 1910s and later the Greenwich Village avant-garde. His poetry, written in free verse, combines lyrical romanticism with a sharp, often cynical observation of modern life. Themes of erotic love, social alienation, and the artist's struggle recur throughout his work. He published several collections, including "Minna and Myself" (1918) and "Bringing Jazz!" (1930). Bodenheim's style is characterized by direct, colloquial language and a rejection of traditional poetic forms. He was a contemporary of poets such as Carl Sandburg and Edna St. Vincent Millay. His bohemian lifestyle and tragic death by murder in 1954 overshadowed his literary reputation, but his work remains an important record of early American modernism. He is remembered for his contribution to the development of free verse in American poetry.
Steg för steg, röstinspelningar att dela och påminnelser om att repetera.
