Daybreak
John Donne
STAY, O sweet and do not rise!
The light that shines comes from thine eyes;
The day breaks not: it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.
Stay! or else my joys will die
And perish in their infancy.
STAY, O sweet and do not rise!
The light that shines comes from thine eyes;
The day breaks not: it is my heart,
Because that you and I must part.
Stay! or else my joys will die
And perish in their infancy.
If I were a bird,
I would also use my coarse throat to sing:
This land stricken by storms,
These rivers forever torrential with our indignation,
This wind ceaselessly blowing in rages,
And that incomparably mild dawn coming from the forest…
—Then I die,
Decomposed into the land even with my feathers.
A thing of beauty is a joy for ever:
Its lovliness increases; it will never
Pass into nothingness; but still will keep
A bower quiet for us, and a sleep
Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.
Therefore, on every morrow, are we wreathing
A flowery band to bind us to the earth,
Spite of despondence, of the
Has there ever been
since Stephen the Great
a time of peace and stability
when forest and soil thrived
and people lived and danced
in their traditional ways.
Rival powers of the day
have continually fought to possess
your rich dark earth,
your resources of forest and river,
of a populace to be taxed –
ammunition for future wars.
Pleasure of the night laid legs on my honeypot
To bring alive my unborn children from heaven
Groaning of the day deeper my soul into spirituality
Claw of incantation serrated my waist with beads
They fed me with strange herbs and lizard eggs without honour
Clapping and dancing on naked breasts to their gods
Still and still,
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may tread me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.
Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
‘Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.
I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o’er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a
Where’s the Poet? show him! show him,
Muses nine! that I may know him.
‘Tis the man who with a man
Is an equal, be he King,
Or poorest of the beggar-clan
Or any other wonderous thing
A man may be ‘twixt ape and Plato;
‘Tis the man who with a bird,
Wren or Eagle, finds his way to
All
CHILD – River bird, river bird,
Sitting all day long
On hook over grass,
River bird, river bird,
Sing to me a song
Of all the pass
And say,
Will mother come back today?
If every woman is a concubine of pain
My mother is that everyone –
A shepherdess flocks of pain.
Barely each day gone by without her back
Become animal skin that pastes on a mahogany tree
And beat every day with maestro-stroke of shame.
When you ask who can dance most in public places
Set a cause of rev for her
I’ve got the children to tend
The clothes to mend
The floor to mop
The food to shop
Then the chicken to fry
The baby to dry
I got company to feed
The garden to weed
I’ve got shirts to press
The tots to dress
The can to be cut
Wrote a mother to her child:
Why do you say, I don’t understand,
I’ve brought you all way braving,
The scorching sun and blistering sand.
I have heard your heartbeats,
When none could see you in me,
I have felt your heartbeats,
Whenever you have felt lonely.
The snails have made a garden of green lace:
broderie anglaise from the cabbages,
chantilly from the choux-fleurs, tiny veils-
I see already that I lift the blind
upon a woman’s wardrobe of the mind.
Such female whimsy floats about me like
a kind of tulle, a flimsy mesh,
while feet in gumboots pace the rectangles-
garden abstracted, geometry awash-
an
The wind howls, the trees sway,
The loose house-top sheets clatter and clang,
The open window shuts with a bang,
And the sky makes night of the day.
Helter-skelter the parents run,
Pressed with a thousand minor cares:
‘Hey, you there! pack the house-wares!
And where on earth’s my son?
Salvation to all that will is nigh;
That All, which always is all everywhere,
Which cannot sin, and yet all sins must bear,
Which cannot die, yet cannot choose but die,
Lo, faithful virgin, yields Himself to lie
In prison, in thy womb; and though He there
Can take no sin, nor thou give, yet He will wear,
Taken from
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists
I SAW the Connaught Rangers when they were passing by,
On a spring day, a good day, with gold rifts in the sky.
Themselves were marching steadily along the Liffey quay
An’ I see the young proud look of them as if it were to-day!
The bright lads, the right lads, I have them in my mind,
With the green
Thy soul shall find itself alone
‘Mid dark thoughts of the grey tomb-stone;
Not one, of all the crowd, to pry
Into thine hour of secrecy.
Be silent in that solitude,
Which is not loneliness- for then
The spirits of the dead, who stood
In life before thee, are again
In death around thee, and their will
Shall overshadow thee; be
Born for a reason and learning are not the same.
Putting tradition aside for one day’s pain is not good.
Hot pepper of the Game!
The brave sat down and thought.
He said, “Kumba! Beloved Kumba!”
“Yes?” she replied.
She said, “Kambili the Hunter, Kambili Sanafila!
The man-eating lion is going to die in Jimini.
I will go to the hair-dressing
He is stark mad, who ever says,
That he hath been in love an hour,
Yet not that love so soon decays,
But that it can ten in less space devour;
Who will believe me, if I swear
That I have had the plague a year ?
Who would not laugh at me, if I should say,
I saw a