poetry collection of lanscape and human
Contents
4 6 7 8 10 12 14 17 18 20 22 23 25 27 28 30 32 35 37 38 42
Introduction to poetry of landscape and human Nature On the Mountain Sensation Mountainal Cold Valley Bad Weather The Wind Shifts The Promise We Live Summer Weatherman Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening Human condition Everything Moon Sonnet Humanist Human sunlight A wandering thing Residence on Earth The Man Moves Earth Credits
Introduction to poetry of landscape and human
4
In this poem collection I strive to explore the fascination humans tend to feel towards natural enviroments. Some poems discuss the human, others simply take characteristics of nature to describe human feelings. With words and images I invite the reader to explore this tension between human and nature.
5
As a fond mother, when the day is o'er, Leads by the hand her little child to bed, Half willing, half reluctant to be led, And leave his broken playthings on the floor, Still gazing at them through the open door, Nor wholly reas sured and comforted By promises of others in their stead, Which, though more splendid, may not please him more; So Nature deals with us, and takes away Our playthings one by one, and by the hand Leads us to rest so gently, that we go Scarce knowing if we wish to go or stay, Being too full of sleep to understand How far the unknown transcends the what we know.
Nature by HENRY WADSWORTH LONGFELLOW
6
On the Mountain by JOHN HAINES
We climbed out of timber, bending on the steep meadow to lo ok for berries, then still in the reddening sunlight went on up the windy shoulder.
A shadow followed us up the mountain like a black moon rising. Minute by minute the autumn lamps on the slope burned out.
Around us the air and the rocks whispered of night.
A great cloud blew from the north, and the mountain vanished in the rain and stormlit darkness.
7
Sensation by JOHN GREEN
I walk the alleys trampled through the wheat, Through whole blue summer eves, on velvet grass. Dreaming, I feel the dampness at my feet; The breezes bathe my naked head and pass. I do not think a single thought, nor say A word, but in my soul the mists upcurl Of infinite love. I will go far away With nature, happily, as with a girl.
8
9
Mountainal by JANE HIRSHFIELD
10
This first light mountain, its east peak and west peak. Its first-light creeks Lagunitas, Redwood, Fern. Their fishes and mosses. Its night and day hawk-life, slope-life, fogs, coyote, tan oaks, white-speckled amanita. Its spiderwebs’ sequins. To be personal is easy: Wake. Slip arms and legs from sleep into name, into story. I wanted to be mountainal, wateral, wrenal.
11
Cold Valley BY CEDAR SIGO The fog shades a smooth stone bust then slips into rain my mind is well suited on shining edges the reflection itself Traces of mist
on an old window
The best part is grinding the ink down endlessly, filling my brush
grey morning
I first feel the mind as reflex
12
Bright and clear The end of Evergreen road is closed and crumbling away Bill McNeil’s red poppy resolves to be eaten alive exposed to a shaft of air between the flower and its flat glassmasterful The black bleeds out from his beak in long tears, ink onto sopping head feathers slicked back black stiches on yellow powdered eyes aglow white speckles thrown onto autumn breast feathers a white field below
13
Bad Weather by MARIE HOWE
What does it matter that this cold June breaks, another dish on the kitchen floor, skittering under the table legs. So it requires the long strawed broom, the extra stoop. It will have out. When the sun comes back. When the rain stops. But something doesn't fit. Something isn't fitting. The washing machine jams and hums too loudly. The chickadees fall from the trees. A swallow is caught in the chimney. The smallest ram lamb isn't eating. The days pass.
No letters come. The small tin flag is down. The house creeps farther from the road. The grass rises in the rain. The scythes rust and will not cut. The blades squeak and sigh, nothing to be done. We close the porch doors, but every night they open just a little. We hear it from the bedroom, a small creak. no one there. The cold lies down in the meadow where the sheep are credulous and sturdy and dumb, but the ram lamb will not eat. His mother has already forgotten him. 14
June is too cold. The spiders threaten to overrun the nest lodged in the rafters. They can't be eaten fast enough. The mother, beside herself, has seen this happen only once before, the eggs draped with gauze. with the wood stacked and the snow rushing from miles away. Then too, the trees leaned a little funny and the cat disappeared for days. Nothing would make him come back.
The windows will not stay shut. Even the small nails we bang in are loose in the morning, and the screens flap a little in the small cold wind. From under the covers, I watch you move around the house, fixing the broken things: the desk lamp, the toaster, the radio that still will not speak. The red hens haven't laid in a week. There's nothing we can do. Nothing. It could be ten years ago. I could be dreaming. This could be last winter all over again 15
16
The Wind Shifts by WALLACE STEVENS
This is how the wind shifts: Like the thoughts of an old human, who still thinks eagerly and despairingly. The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions, Who still feels irrational things within her. The wind shifts like this: Like humans approaching proudly, Like humans approaching angrily. This is how the wind shifts: Like a human,heavy and heavy, who does not care.
17
18
by SIMON J. ORTIZ
The Promise We Live
It’s almost unnatural but I hope not, having already found reliable the promise of loss. My expectation is unfulfilled.
On the West Coast, days of rainstorm wrestle the Coast Range, their wet fury driven landward.
Somewhere within the universe of the prairie hills is a climate that is yet unnoticed, and from it is welling a warm rupture of another sure season.
We never quite known what the sky promises, and there is certain assurance in that fate. It is for that we wait.
Believe it is not unusual, I urge myself whose myths are always changing in the light. So it’s this we arrive into daily, another season, warm or frigid, and it’s we who wage weather within our furious spirits.
We’ve already weathered more than promises. They’ve passed us by. So I’m not sure this morning when I step outside, and suddenly it’s not winter anymore but some warm mas that molds the contours of my face with unbidden warmth.
Tomorrow’s dawn is a promise that will fulfill. Never mind if the sky does not quite agree.
19
Summer by ROBIN COSTE LEWIS
20
Last summer, two discrete young snakes left their skin on my small porch, two mornings in a row. Being postmodern now, I pretended as if I did not see them, nor understand what I knew to be circling inside me. Instead, every hour I told my son to stop with his incessant back-chat. I peeled a banana. And cursed God His arrogance, His gall to still expect our devotion after creating love. And mosquitoes. I showed my son the papery dead skins so he could know, too, what it feels like when something shows up at your door—twice telling you what you already know.
21
Weatherman by CHARD DENIORD
A cloud spelled out a rune I couldn’t read fast enough before it morphed into another form that changed again, so I recited something true enough from an ancient book: “The wind blows to the south and turnsto the north;
ro
un d
an d r
n ou d
it goes.” The screen went blank and then the slip. No matter, I thought, I’ll drive a truck. “The clouds are codes for reading the blues,” I said beneath my breath as I walked out into the rain with my umbrella and attitude that kept me lean if unemployed. A hermit thrush reported the dusk somewhere in the woods on my way home and I called back like a human bird who’d lost his wings: “Light’s such a fickle thing but I sing for it.” 22
Stopping By Woods On a Snowy Evening by ROBERT FROST
Whose woods these are I think I know. His house is in the village though; He will not see me stopping here To watch his woods fill up with snow.
He gives his harness bells a shake To ask if there is some mistake. The only other sound’s the sweep Of easy wind and downy flake.
My little horse must think it queer To stop without a farmhouse near Between the woods and frozen lake The darkest evening of the year.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, But I have promises to keep, And miles to go before I sleep, And miles to go before I sleep.
23
24
Human condition
In the established border there balances a mere Pinpoint of consciousness. I stay, or start from, here: No fog makes more or less The street lamps, visibie, Drop no light on the ground But press beams painfuly in a yard of fog around I am condemned to be an individual. Now it is fog, I walk contained within my coat, No castle more cut off By reason of its moat: Only the sentry cough, The mercenaries talk
25
When the river rose that year, we were beside it and ourselves with fear;
the balance was ours to share, and responsibility for rivers had as much to do with anything as rain on the roof and sweet fish for supper, as forests and trembling and berries at sunrise;
not that it would do anything to us, mind you our hopes were much too high for that but there was always that remote, unacknowledged possibility that we had thrown one stone too many, by the handful, and that by some force of nature, as they called it, it might rain and rain for days, as it had been, with nothing to hold it and the structure back, and with everything to blame, including children
thus it was, then, that we kept our watch, that we kept our wits about us and all the respectwe could muster, sitting in silence, sleeping in shifts, and when the fire died, everyone was there to keep it alive; somehow, though, in the middle of the night, despite our vigils, our dreams, our admonitions, our structure, our people, and all our belongings broke free with a shudder and went drifting away past the landing, the swing, the anchored cages, down through the haunted rapids, never to be found;
on into late summer and all the years ahead, when it would be ours to bear, to do much more with than remember and let it go at that some mud, some driftwood, some space of sky as a reminder before getting on with the world again; no, 26
27
by LAWSON FUSAO INADA
Everything
when we awoke that morning, the sun was back, the river had receded under our measuring stick, and everything had been astonishingly replaced, including people and pets, the structure intact, but in the solitude of all our faces as we ate,the knowledge was there, of what we all had done, and that everything would never be the same.
Moon Sonnet by LILY ZHOU
Based on the Chinese myth of Change
Saturday. The good bread set out for the dogs to eat. The rabbit hurt on milk & tall willows that I’ve bound to storefront.
The headlines say the waves are coming in today. The waves & spoiled fruit & all the lives I’ve wasted playing archer.
The rabbit drops its mouth into a crater.
At least this side of the kingdomwill still love me. I pull the weeds. I pull the tides& storm the shores. 28
The waves overtake the red city with spears in hand. June & the headlines announce the end of the world. I am terrible at playing heroine. I’ve done all I can:
plucked the apples, swept the chimney. Washed the rabbit, saved the tortoise from its slow drowning. 29
You do no longer wither from the scorn of foolish men, nor bloom to the momentary glory of a cordial nod: butalways in the far blue of your eyes is patient waiting for that you know will come But never in your time.
Humanist
You would not bind yourself within the safe establishments of cloth or toga. You wore in your fingers a pencil stub, thrust its point beyond precedent, and in many symbols wrote: Peace is ustice, not a Covenant. You wrote, but the pages fluttered in obscurity, like golden leaves faling in a wilderness. You wrote. Printers inked wisdom; got no inkling of the thing they inked. A nation read golf scores and politics, made cataracts upon its eyes with film from California, drank cocktails, had no minutes left. What was the thing you said at last? 30
the dead; the bankrupt; the oppressed; the humbled; the weak; the deceived; the cheated; the hurt; the outcast;
War has taught only greed only injustice arrogance power deception dishonor cruelty intolerance
31
Human sunlight by GERARD MALANGA
We are read to by someone Beyond our sensation, reading something into the sensation we believe, Receaving the flash Light in the air Shaft of those dreams That cannot protect us. We walk miles out Side of the "exclusive town Ship, leading Up through the snow Back to something hidden for what is ours Not turning to anything else.
32
33
34
A wandering thing The hopeless raina sigh, a shadow Falters and drifts again, again over the meadow. It wanders lost, drifts hither thither; It blows, it goes, it knows not whither. A profound grief, an unknown sorrow wanders always my strange life thoro know not ever what brings it hither, Nor whence it comes nor goes it whither.
35
As we approached the front door, I noticedgrills on the windows, bullet pockmarks in the wall; inside, a maid served us salad, potato and cilantro soup and I saw, in the amphitheater above MedellĂn, the stage where twenty-eight poets read; clouds gathered; in the ensuing downpour, I expected the five thousand people to rush out; instead, a sea of umbrellas appeared, and people swayed under them; when the readings resumed, a poet stood, chanted in Vietnamese, and when I stepped up to the podium, two rivers flowed down the steps to the far right and left; as I read our emotions resemble leaves and alive to their shapes we are nourished,
I understood how poets from all over the world had come for peace, solidarity, justice and when my host, and reader of my poems in Spanish, invited me into his home, I saw one way to live during our residencia en la tierra.
36
Residence on Earth by ARTHUR SZE
37
The Man Moves Earth by CATHY SONG
The man moves earth to dispel grief. He digs holes the size of cars. The woman sweeps air to banish sadness. She dusts floors, polishes objects made of clay and wood. In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies— the task of something else to clean. Gleaming appliances beg to be smudged, breathed upon by small children and large animals flicking out hope as she whirls by, flap of tongue, scratch of paw, sweetly reminding her.
38
In proportion to what is taken what is given multiplies rain-swollen ponds and dirt mounds rooted with flame-tipped flowers. He carries trees like children struggling to be set down. Trees that have lived out their lives, he cuts and stacks like loaves of bread which he will feed the fire. The green smoke sweetens his house.
The man moves earth, the woman sweeps air. Together they pull water out of the other, pull with the muscular ache of the living, hauling from the deep well of the body the rain-swollen, the flame-tipped, the milk-fed— all that cycles through lives moving, lives sweeping, water circulating between them like breath, drawn out of leaves by light.
39
40
41
Credits Free University of Bozen-Bolzano Faculty of Design and Art Bachelor in Design and Art – Major in Design WUP 20/21 | 1st-semester foundation course Project Modul: Editorial Design Design by: Sarah Kofler Magazine | poetry collection - of landscape and human Supervision: Project leader: Prof. Antonino Benincasa Project assistants: Andreas Trenker, Emilio Grazzi Photography: Eberhard Grossgasteiger - 5 Marten Dzedyshko - 7 Ant Rozetsko - 8 Erik Mdean - 11 Henry Coap - 13 Artem Kniaz - 14 Griffin Woolgridge - 18/19 Robert Bahn - 22 Johannes Weismuller - 25 Carolin Manyard - 27 Theodor Vasile - 29 Craig Bowcut - 31 Ivans Krutainis - 32/33 Valentin Muller 34
42
Format: 160 x 230 mm Fonts | Font Sizes & Leading: Body Text Roc Grotesk 10/14 pt Title Text Roc Grotesk / Bold 18/21 pt Subtitle Text Roc Grotesk / Light 10/14 pt
Layout Grid: 6 Column Grid
Module proportion: 1.622 : 1
CPL | Character per line - Body Text: 72 characters including spaces
Printed: Bozen-Bolzano, January 2021 Digital Printing
43
