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Sad, Albert Cook, in English Clear filters

SadAlbert Cook

Schönbrunner Tiergarten

The hated way I followed Has made me like the lion in a cage That when I bring my children To the zoo, I am likely to avoid. Chestnuts bloom there, Subdued cries, Shells underfoot, Gloriette In desuetude, run as a showpiece. I am forever a stage, Condition under which I live.
SadAlbert Cook

The Marginal Farmer

Lean cheek, lone head. The work is never done. It wears a differing aspect if his hands Plying their utmost, keep a bit ahead. In rocky soil scarified a seed Might or might not grow, all depending. Here even the wind is meagre, and light Drifts cold through stalks and pods and numb fingers. Rough graveyard of his tribulation, rocks, Glare-flecked, igneous, lie thickly buried Throughout his fields, whose produce he eats, A stale season's labor boiled, on oilcloth, With the same set resigned faraway look. Elsewhere the skies are blue. His lips are blue. And the snowfence, a poor windbreak, is not up yet. Frost has heaved late earth and gemmed the rocks. In the old silo this year's corn garnered
SadAlbert Cook

Life Urges Its Alternatives Are Dim

When you were sick they brought up cambric tea. You sipped. And summers for your running limbs Lush, blowing grasses grew below Chirruping birds, stormbleating lambs. If now you sicken and let memory Benumb the foregone present with those calms, Is there no other way? When the ripe fields had shrunk and unforeseen Loves truckling to your short temper bowled You over, and you made big days careen, Till when you were told 'Kill or be killed' Your bloodless hands were willing to demean The substance that the shadow be upheld, Was there no other way? Though out of such brawls you steered a steady course, In every room that flattered your aplomb,
SadAlbert Cook

Sestina I

Stirring to rings the black well of our rage We twitch the elusive scar of our old wound That gushed with fresh blood on the barren mountain Where stumbling we fell (not delicately torn On thorns of rose, but boulders of defeat, And overwhelmed knew perfect our despair. We who across the desert of despair Have shouted till lungs bled our impotent rage And heard unheeded echoes of defeat Fall deadly back, have learned the sorest wound Is not the one time's unicorn has torn With golden horn on the peak of a pine mountain, But one we took when, mid way up the mountain Grey scarped and cold of solitude, despair Like a blind, giant Mars we faced, saw torn Our hope and fed the bonfire of our rage,
SadAlbert Cook

In Memory of My Grandfather

In the river where you went fishing, crayfish Trailed foetal white at the edge of the brown sluggish current. Behind the iron railing trees grew too dense for deep shade. You used doughballs for bait, crayfish lacking, and were gone all afternoon, Returning, often as not, laden with carp, Your eyes unladen. Such was your decline. Your eyes affirmed that the burden of eight children Constrained but did not depress the unwizened Indeterminate set, scarce darkened by age, Of their steel gray answer to grandchildren and strangers. Sent into the world too young by your father's drink, You avoided drink, from that Tennessee moved north, Had a family, and ended up papering houses,

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