Poetry Month: What Girls' Fathers are Really Thinking

Song To Be Sung by the Father of Infant Female Children by Ogden Nash

My heart leaps up when I behold A rainbow in the sky; Contrariwise, my blood runs cold When little boys go by. For little boys as little boys, No special hate I carry, But now and then they grow to men, And when they do, they marry. No matter how they tarry, Eventually they marry. And, swine among the pearls, They marry little girls. Oh, somewhere, somewhere, an infant plays, With parents who feed and clothe him. Their lips are sticky with pride and praise, But I have begun to loathe him. Yes, I loathe with loathing shameless This child who to me is nameless. This bachelor child in his carriage Gives never a thought to marriage, But a person can hardly say knife Before he will hunt him a wife. I never see an infant (male), A-sleeping in the sun, Without I turn a trifle pale And think is he the one? Oh, first he'll want to crop his curls, And then he'll want a pony, And then he'll think of pretty girls, And holy matrimony. A cat without a mouse Is he without a spouse. Oh, somewhere he bubbles bubbles of milk, And quietly sucks his thumbs. His cheeks are roses painted on silk, And his teeth are tucked in his gums. But alas the teeth will begin to grow, And the bubbles will cease to bubble; Given a score of years or so, The roses will turn to stubble. He'll sell a bond, or he'll write a book, And his eyes will get that acquisitive look, And raging and ravenous for the kill, He'll boldly ask for the hand of Jill. This infant whose middle Is diapered still Will want to marry my daughter Jill. Oh sweet be his slumber and moist his middle! My dreams, I fear, are infanticiddle. A fig for embryo Lohengrins! I'll open all his safety pins, I'll pepper his powder, and salt his bottle, And give him readings from Aristotle. Sand for his spinach I'll gladly bring, And Tabasco sauce for his teething ring. Then perhaps he'll struggle through fire and water To marry somebody else's daughter.

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Poetry Month: Seven Stanzas at Easter

Seven Stanzas at Easter

By John Updike Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells' dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall. It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His Flesh: ours. The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved heart that — pierced — died, withered, paused, and then regathered out of enduring Might new strength to enclose. Let us not mock God with metaphor, analogy, sidestepping transcendence; making of the event a parable, a sign painted in the faded credulity of earlier ages: let us walk through the door. The stone is rolled back, not papier-mache, not a stone in a story, but the vast rock of materiality that in the slow grinding of time will eclipse for each of us the wide light of day. And if we will have an angel at the tomb, make it a real angel, weighty with Max Planck's quanta, vivid with hair, opaque in the dawn light, robed in real linen spun on a definite loom. Let us not seek to make it less monstrous, for our own convenience, our own sense of beauty, lest, awakened in one unthinkable hour, we are embarrassed by the miracle, and crushed by remonstrance. Telephone Poles and Other Poems © 1961 by John Updike. Reprinted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House Inc.

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Poetry Month: The Heaven of Animals

April is National Poetry Month, or something like that, so once again this year I'll post a few.

The Heaven of Animals

BY jAMES dICKEY

Here they are. The soft eyes open.

If they have lived in a wood

It is a wood.

If they have lived on plains

It is grass rolling

Under their feet forever.

Having no souls, they have come,

Anyway, beyond their knowing.

Their instincts wholly bloom

And they rise.

The soft eyes open.

To match them, the landscape flowers,

Outdoing, desperately

Outdoing what is required:

The richest wood,

The deepest field.

For some of these,

It could not be the place

It is, without blood.

These hunt, as they have done,

But with claws and teeth grown perfect,

More deadly than they can believe.

They stalk more silently,

And crouch on the limbs of trees,

And their descent

Upon the bright backs of their prey

May take years

In a sovereign floating of joy.

And those that are hunted

Know this as their life,

Their reward: to walk

Under such trees in full knowledge

Of what is in glory above them,

And to feel no fear,

But acceptance, compliance.

Fulfilling themselves without pain

At the cycle’s center,

They tremble, they walk

Under the tree,

They fall, they are torn,

They rise, they walk again.

James Dickey, “The Heaven of Animals” from The Whole Motion: Collected Poems 1945-1992. Copyright © 1992 by James Dickey.

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I Love Dorothy Parker

Best...book review...ever:

Dorothy Parker reviews Ayn Rand's novel Atlas Shrugged: “This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.”

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