Tips for the late night poets and their readers. Tips for those voices we can turn to in ourselves and in books that can lead us to keener understanding and a steadier, braver path.

I have a thing for sonnets (even though I have no talent at writing them), this is another by GM Hopkins (who I adore as a poet despite the constant references to Christianity).

GLORY be to God for dappled things--
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches' wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced--fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;   
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)   
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;   
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:           
Praise him.

what an intense writing!  Bravo for this selection.  

Remembering the costs of our democracy, our freedom.....remembering Kent State

Find the cost of freedom
bury it in the ground
Mother Earth will swallow you
lay your body down
(Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young)

FLYING OVER SONNY LISTON

by Gary Short

Sonny Liston is on all fours,
trying to rise, a flame of pain
in the center of his head.

The crowd noise blurs,
then distances, as though he is shut
in a room by himself.

In his face there is silence.

His skin glistens with sweat,
& the glare & flurry of camera flashes
are far-away lights in his eyes.

Cassius Clay thin & sharp, stands
above him, arms in a recited W.

The airplane rises over the cemetery
where Liston is buried
next to the runway at McCarran Airport.

What I recall is his bad press--
how he learned to box in prison,
how he hung out with the worst people.

His violence & his size,
a film clip of him
sullenly jumping rope
to a record of "Night Train."

A woman in a pink blouse sits next to me.
Her fingers try to memorize a thick crucifix
on a chain around her neck.

She's nervous. But from this safe distance,
looking out the oval window
& beyond the wing, I see the cross
of the airplane shadowing grave sites.

A boxer knows momentum
can suddenly shift. One blow
changes everything.

The plane lifts. Closing my eyes, I hear
the referee's eight-count, the knockout signaled.

Liston is out of time & still on his knees,
suffering & silent, "Inarticulate
in the way we all are," James Baldwin wrote,
"when more has happened to us
than we know how to express."

In eight seconds an aircraft can bank into
& fly through fists of clouds
above the city of Las Vegas
& the grave of Sonny Liston.

He died alone in a motel room.

His life was nothing like mine,
& so we share a solitariness,
like the passengers on this plane who rise
or fall together
& individually, each with defeats.

The fight for survival is the fight.

the words for as it was too long to memorize.

This is "The Fish" by Elizabeth Bishop.

I like the use of imagery and the changing narrative in this poem.

I caught a tremendous fish
and held him beside the boat
half out of water, with my hook
fast in a corner of its mouth.
He didn't fight.
He hadn't fought at all.
He hung a grunting weight,
battered and venerable
and homely. Here and there
his brown skin hung in strips
like ancient wallpaper,
and its pattern of darker brown
was like wallpaper:
shapes like full-blown roses
stained and lost through age.
He was speckled with barnacles,
fine rosettes of lime,
and infested
with tiny white sea-lice,
and underneath two or three
rags of green weed hung down.
While his gills were breathing in
the terrible oxygen
-- the frightening gills,
fresh and crisp with blood,
that can cut so badly --
I thought of the coarse white flesh
packed in like feathers,
the big bones and the little bones,
the dramatic reds and blacks
of his shiny entrails,
and the pink swim-bladder
like a big peony.
I looked into his eyes
which were far larger than mine
but shallower, and yellowed,
the irises backed and packed
with tarnished tinfoil
seen through the lenses
of old scratched isinglass.
They shifted a little, but not
to return my stare.
-- It was more like the tipping
of an object toward the light.
I admired his sullen face,
the mechanism of his jaw,
and then I saw
that from his lower lip
-- if you could call it a lip --
grim, wet, and weaponlike,
hung five old pieces of fish-line,
or four and a wire leader
with the swivel still attached,
with all their five big hooks
grown firmly in his mouth.
A green line, frayed at the end
where he broke it, two heavier lines,
and a fine black thread
still crimped from the strain and snap
when it broke and he got away.
Like medals with their ribbons
frayed and wavering,
a five-haired beard of wisdom
trailing from his aching jaw.
I stared and stared
and victory filled up
the little rented boat,
from the pool of bilge
where oil had spread a rainbow
around the rusted engine
to the bailer rusted orange,
the sun-cracked thwarts,
the oarlocks on their strings,
the gunnels -- until everything
was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow!
And I let the fish go.

by James Henry Leigh Hunt (my personal favorite poem!):

Abou Ben Adhem (may his tribe increase!)

Awoke one night from a deep dream of peace,

And saw, within the moonlight in his room,

Making it rich, and like a lily bloom,

An angel writing in a book of gold:-

Exceeding peace had made Ben Adhem bold,

And to the presence in the room he said,

"What writest thou?"-The vision raised its head,

And with a look made of all sweet accord,

Answered, "The names of those who love the Lord."

"And is mine one?" said Abou. "Nay, not so,"

Replied the angel. Abou spoke more low,

But cheerly still; and said, "I pray thee, then,

Write me as one that loves his fellow men."

The angel wrote, and vanished. The next night

It came again with a great wakening light,

And showed the names whom love of God had blest,

And lo! Ben Adhem's name led all the rest.