Grania at the Museum of Science and Industry

I am Grania.
I am sitting here looking at a baby in a bottle.
Its feathery hair floats in formaldehyde,
Its eyes are closed tight in an undersea nap
From which there will be no awakening.
It has everything,
All the human necessities,
Fingernails
Eyelashes
Tiny conch-like ears
Dimples and creases and a fat little belly.
It’s a great little baby,
Except that it’s dead.

Bottled rudiments, all in a row.
Flecks of humanity
Dropped from inhospitable wombs,
Cold-packed by scientists from
A bleak harvest to be placed
Like a housewife’s summer’s work
On a cellar shelf. This freak show.
Is this one mine? That one yours?
The mothers come as if to Parents’ Day at school
To wonder who is the prize of the display,
Unique in some hellish way.

By this one, I am beguiled.
Observe that plump rump.
Reminds me
Of J. Swift’s recipe
For fricassee
Of child.

In the first flush of love,
My true love gave to me
One embryo
Nestled inconveniently.
She was a girl,
With her sex tucked inward between fat little pads.
Just one of many abandoned by fun-loving dads.

By the third week,
There was a heart,
A mere pinpoint, but
Though its elfin beats are silenced,
They echo and echo,
Sending bubbles of reproach to the top of the jar.
And I hear
And hear
And I feel
Your gargantuan wrath,
but from afar.

Sorry, sweetie,
Mommie simply had to commit you to the jar.

- Rosemary Hamilton

Haikus Are Easy

Haikus are easy
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator

Archimedes Quatrain

Jerusalem, fulcrum of our uplift,
Is not this rough plank the Cross, laid aslant Golgatha,
The lever with which the philosophers boasted
They could move the world?

- Amit Majmudar

Poetry Speaks to Children

Inside this pencil
Crouch words that have never been written -
Never been spoken -
Never been taught.
They're hiding -
They're awake in there -
Dark in the dark,
Hearing us . . .

- W. S. Merwin

Hymn to the Church

Your voice speaks:
In my arms I still carry flowers from the wilderness,
the dew on my hair is from the valleys of the dawn of mankind.
I have prayers that the meadows lend an ear to,
I know how storms are tempered, how water is blessed.
I carry in my womb the secrets of the desert,
on my head the noble web of ancient thought.
For I am mother to all earth’s children:why do you scorn me,
world, when my Heavenly Father makes me so great?
Behold, in me long-vanished generations still kneel,
and out of my soul many pagans shine towards the infinite.
I lay hidden in the temples of their gods,
I was darkly present in the sayings of their wise men.
I was on the towers with their star-gazers,
I was with the solitary women on whom the spirit descended.
I was the desire of all times, I was the light of all times,
I am the fullness of all times.
I am their great union, I am their eternal oneness.
I am the way of all their ways,
on me the millennia are drawn to God.

- Gertrude von Le Fort

Sequence

God so loved
A small ball, spun
On its own axis round a lesser sun;
And on the ball that lemur creature, man,
Standing upon the ground as one who can
Perceive and know and name the beasts and birds
With whistles and with clicks, his early words.

God the Word made
Flesh in a daughter of Eve
At prayer by the well
Of a Syrian village, born
In the chill of a cold stable,
Done to death on a hard tree,
Be merciful to all, have mercy on me.

- George Every

Entrenched Passion: The Poetry of War

To Rupert Brooke's glorification of war:

If I should die, think only this of me:
That there's some corner of a foreign field
That is for ever (mine).

I offer Wilfred Owen's depiction of the sufferings of the trenches: Dulce et Decorum Est. The pathos of war has turned grim and moribund.