Best Famous Inaugurate Poems
Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Inaugurate poems. This is a select list of the best famous Inaugurate poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Inaugurate poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of inaugurate poems.
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Written by
Marilyn Hacker |
August First: it was a year ago
we drove down from St.-Guilhem-le-Désert
to open the house in St. Guiraud
rented unseen. I'd stay; you'd go; that's where
our paths diverged. I'd settle down to work,
you'd start the next month of your Wanderjahr.
I turned the iron key in the rusted lock
(it came, like a detective-story clue,
in a manila envelope, postmarked
elsewhere, unmarked otherwise) while you
stood behind me in the midday heat.
Somnolent shudders marked our progress. Two
horses grazed on a roof across the street.
You didn't believe me until you turned around.
They were both old, one mottled gray, one white.
Past the kitchen's russet dark, we found
bookshelves on both sides of the fireplace:
Verlaine, L'Étranger, Notes from the Underground.
Through an archway, a fresh-plastered staircase
led steeply upward. In a white room stood
a white-clad brass bed. Sunlight in your face
came from the tree-filled window. "You did good."
We laid crisp sheets we would inaugurate
that night, rescued from the grenier a wood-
en table we put under the window. Date
our homes from that one, to which you returned
the last week of August, on a late
bus, in shorts, like a crew-cut, sunburned
bidasse. Sunburned, in shorts, a new haircut,
with Auden and a racing pulse I'd earned
by "not being sentimental about
you," I sprinted to "La Populaire."
You walked into my arms when you got out.
At a two minute bus stop, who would care?
"La Populaire" puffed onward to Millau
while we hiked up to the hiatus where
we'd left ourselves when you left St. Guiraud
after an unambiguous decade
of friendship, and some months of something new.
A long week before either of us said
a compromising word acknowledging
what happened every night in the brass bed
and every bird-heralded blue morning
was something we could claim and keep and use;
was, like the house, a place where we could bring
our road-worn, weary selves.
Now, we've a pause
in a year we wouldn't have wagered on.
Dusk climbs the tiled roof opposite; the blue's
still sun-soaked; it's a week now since you've gone
to be a daughter in the capital.
(I came north with you as far as Beaune.)
I cook things you don't like. Sometimes I fall
asleep, book open, one A.M., sometimes
I long for you all night in Provencal
or langue d'oc, or wish I could, when I'm
too much awake. My early walk, my late
walk mark the day's measures like rhyme.
(There's nothing I hate---perhaps I hate
the adipose deposits on my thighs
---as much as having to stay put and wait!)
Although a day alone cuts tight or lies
too limp sometimes, I know what I didn't know
a year ago, that makes it the right size:
owned certainty; perpetual surprise.
|
Written by
Carl Sandburg |
(Handbook for Quarreling Lovers)I THOUGHT of offering you apothegms.
I might have said, “Dogs bark and the wind carries it away.”
I might have said, “He who would make a door of gold must knock a nail in every day.”
So easy, so easy it would have been to inaugurate a high impetuous moment for you to look on before the final farewells were spoken.
You who assumed the farewells in the manner of people buying newspapers and reading the headlines—and all peddlers of gossip who buttonhole each other and wag their heads saying, “Yes, I heard all about it last Wednesday.”
I considered several apothegms.
“There is no love but service,” of course, would only initiate a quarrel over who has served and how and when.
“Love stands against fire and flood and much bitterness,” would only initiate a second misunderstanding, and bickerings with lapses of silence.
What is there in the Bible to cover our case, or Shakespere? What poetry can help? Is there any left but Epictetus?
Since you have already chosen to interpret silence for language and silence for despair and silence for contempt and silence for all things but love,
Since you have already chosen to read ashes where God knows there was something else than ashes,
Since silence and ashes are two identical findings for your eyes and there are no apothegms worth handing out like a hung jury’s verdict for a record in our own hearts as well as the community at large,
I can only remember a Russian peasant who told me his grandfather warned him: If you ride too good a horse you will not take the straight road to town.
It will always come back to me in the blur of that hokku: The heart of a woman of thirty is like the red ball of the sun seen through a mist.
Or I will remember the witchery in the eyes of a girl at a barn dance one winter night in Illinois saying: Put off the wedding five times and nobody comes to it.
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