Discoveraboutlove 88 President Discover About Love About Poetry - Poets, Poems, Poetics, Contemporary Poetry and Poetry History

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• “Unfolded out of the Folds,” by Walt Whitman (1860)

  Unfolded out of the folds of the woman, man comes unfolded, as is always to come unfolded....



• “Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,, ” by Emily Dickinson (#790)

  Nature — the Gentlest Mother is,
  Impatient of no Child —
  The feeblest — or the waywardest —
  Her Admonition mild —....



• “Song of the Old Mother, ” by William Butler Yeats (1899)

  I rise in the dawn, and I kneel and blow
  Till the seed of the fire flicker and glow...



• “Mother Earth, ” by Henry Van Dyke (1909)

  Mother of all the high-strung poets and singers departed,
  Mother of all the grass that weaves over their graves the glory of the field,
  Mother of all the manifold forms of life, deep-bosomed, patient, impassive...



• “The Player Queen, ” by William Butler Yeats (1916)

  My mother dandled me and sang,
  “How young it is, how young!”
  And made a golden cradle
  That on a willow swung....



• “Poems Done on a Late Night Car, ” by Carl Sandburg (1916)

  ...Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
  I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
  To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.



• “My Mother, ” by Claude McKay (1922)

  ...Float, faintly-scented breeze, at early morn
  Over the earth where mortals sow and reap—
  Beneath its breast my mother lies asleep.

Remember Nadia Anjuman? Poetry is still inextricably linked with death for the women of Afghanistan. In Eliza Griswold’s article for the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, “Why Afghan Women Risk Death to Write Poetry,” we learn the heartbreaking story of a more recent martyr to poetry: Zarmina, whose secret phone calls from her rural village to read poems to Mirman Baheer, the Afghan women’s literary society based in Kabul, were a soul lifeline. She said to her phone-pals in the city, “You are the luckiest people since you can meet with your friends openly.... You can learn from your mistakes and write better poems.” But after she was caught reading love poems on the phone line (and the assumption is apparently always that there is a man on the other end of the line, hence an illicit affair), her brothers beat her and destroyed her notebooks, and two weeks later Zarmina committed suicide by self-immolation. Now Ogai Amail, who answers the secret phone calls in Kabul, takes care to “note down everything—the dates of the poems, the phone numbers, every single thing...”

Arising out of the suppression of women’s voices is an anonymous form of folk poetry, the landai, often heard at gatherings of Mirman Baheer. “Landai means ‘short, poisonous snake’ in Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. The word also refers to two-line folk poems that can be just as lethal. Funny, sexy, raging, tragic, landai are safe because they are collective. No single person writes a landai; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not hers. Although men do recite them, almost all are cast in the voices of women.” We understand that Eliza Griswold is working with the women of Mirman Baheer “to translate the landai of Afghanistan’s leading poets, which no one has done since Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry, edited by Sayd Majrouh, who was assassinated in Peshawar in 1988”—and we say Bravo! to that effort. We’d like to read more of these little gems in English.

No, we’re not talking about poets as postal employees or letter-carriers.... we’re taking note of the U.S. Postal Service’s National Poetry Month gesture honoring American poetry. They’ve issued a new set of “forever” stamps celebrating 10 of the best-known 20th century American poets: Elizabeth Bishop, Joseph Brodsky, Gwendolyn Brooks, ee cummings, Robert Hayden, Denise Levertov, Sylvia Plath, Theodore Roethke, Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams. Each stamp has a photographic portrait of the poet, and the back side of the sheet of stamps has quoted lines from a poem by each poet. So their words can be your inspiration, and their faces can be the wings that carry your words through the air.