A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Munseetown

At the seventh hour when the children rise
(The river has risen) they go about bagging
Tons for the feast; as they blitzen and donder
She turns from the window and curses in thunder.
Her rage is their wonder.
At four o’clock daylight, December’s fagging
Middle begins as the buses are hooting;
Teachers go mad sending [...]

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- Y -

It may be all movements through time are like dance
steps, but sometimes the tempi,
The patterns seem random, seem to us frantic,
confuse us and lose us
In rhythms that stutter and stumble, carry us off
of our footing.
Fitting that you, then, pentultimate letter, occasion
reflection.
Slow down the score to molto adagio, make the mood
pensive.
X in proximity’s like [...]

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From Gene’s Notebook
…along 281, one of my favorite roads, highway of dreams and development and movement, I love it ….
…linemen stringing power lines for BISD High School Six, and I stop and say, “Hey! US electric needs will double in 20 years! Will there be enough power?”
A lineman, he on the ground, says, “Sure! Wind [...]

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A Poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Joseph Satterwhite)

I

If at the whole year’s nooning and the noon
Of days, at the still daylight hour I am begot
Of fleshéd bones, death, darknesses, of doom
The which I pray Thou sparest me, what-not:
If at the whole day’s nooning and the year’s
Day, and the bright hour [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(For Carol and Jerry Kasparek)

Amasis was in Egypt king
(Whose dwelling ran a measured mile)
The upper and the lower Nile
Long ago
Whose women when he bade them sang:
The desert boogied, heaven rang,
The painted women and their men
Congoed kickshaws then and ran
In circles to the throne again
(An awesome sight
All [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

The wolf-wind howling down the steppes
Balloons the market-bound babushka,
Mottles the cheeks of malchiks slipping
Past the pale of teacher’s rozha;
Fast the western evening fades
On car, on sledge, the nation’s freight.
It is the vulkov wind that chills you,
Ivan. I have no wish to kill you.
Ivan, at your evening’s [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

When Luisa Tetrazzini and Nellie Melba met
There occurred the sort of precious set-to we ought not forget:
Both were booked at Covent Garden for a summer’s season; fame
Had not yet ruined Luisa nor was Nellie yet a Dame;
And neither of them threw things, and neither showed her claws,
Although [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
His is a pose one seldom sees these days,
Right shoulder forward in a togaed pose,
The left hand togaed there, welding the lace
Like an inverted goblet lightly chased
(Above the wine-dark robe run from its rim)
To the translucence of the swan-like stem
Sweeps neck to crown of that crushed velvet [...]

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From Gene’s Notebook
…went to Austin with wife/friend/companion/pal/partner/guardian of my solititude and guardian of my togetherness because she asked me to; she was an Obama delegate at the State Democratic Convention, and I now share two images ….
…the more than 12,000 people in the Austin Convention Center, EVERY face in Texas, EVERY language in Texas, and [...]

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A poem by Rudy H. García

I listen to the River,
Because my body is molded with its fertile clay
My blood mingles with its rejuvenating water,
Cleansing my spirit free.
I listen to the river
Because I hear over and over from the Eagle and the Jaguar
That the name is El Rio Bravo…The Brave River
I too am brave.

I listen to [...]

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A comment from Stan
This morning’s Brownsville Herald brings the news that Betsy Price, former KMBH board member and a person deeply experienced in public radio, has stepped forward to begin to organize a new entity to sponsor public radio in the Valley, including new local productions.
We welcome Ms. Price’s enterprise and offer whatever support an [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

(for Merrill Rippy)
Yonder three nuns come trailing their tattered Latin,
And there a lady blue nimbussed, High Priestess of Grammar,
The freshmen are lost in autumnal quads of confusion,
The drunken Greeks lowing like cattle at bay,
False tallies are taken and totaled, vespers et matins,
The wrong books are ordered, the computer [...]

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A note from Jack King
I was skimming through a book entitled “The World’s Great Speeches” and ran across one delivered on December 8, 1897 by the US Ambassador to Great Britain, John Hay, before the Omar Khayamm Club of London. Here is an excerpt from the speech. I hope you enjoy it:
The exquisite beauty, the [...]

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More commentary from What’s His Name
We begin to prepare for yet another major poetry project at NunnaYerBizness Today, re-visiting The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam and bringing the language up to date (or past the present day–who knows?–a printout of NunnaYerBizness Today could very well be the sole surviving fragment in the next medieval revival of [...]

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from Gene’s Notebook
sultry, hot morning, this one of the three longest weeks of the year ….
…and down by the Rio Grande/Rio Bravo Sunday twilight at still-another anti-wall vigil, I felt like I was at a wake, funeral, burial …and the river, green bushes on the sides flowed on, chocolate-green …and the wall got closer and [...]

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- A -
In the Orient they say there was a tortoise
Swimming in the incoherent deep,
The world inscribed in runes upon his back.
The first of mankind watched it churning there
And read, they say, and knew it for a tortoise,
Knew himself for a man. Or else, they say,
Alef, sacred ox it was, first cause, uncaused,
Who bore [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
When Matthew Paris wrought to write
The Lives of all the early abbots,
He rove by rush and tallow light.
By his scriptorium mailed feet
And tumbrels knocking in the street
Worked further wrongs; the herded night
Advanced on sandal and sabot.
That men should sing in praise of kings
To set them on some middle [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
Crosswalked in winter where your dream was riven
Into red fragments on a city street,
We pause today as curbed and unforgiven,
As jayed and ticketed and incomplete.
Clio had wooed and won you long before us,
Whose dress is draggled in such ancient blood
That, had you lived, were you quite sure this [...]

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A notice
Dancing on the head of a pin,
As passé as drinking gin,
Who you nailin’ down again?
The elite, they’s not like me,
the elite, why we let them be?
Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason, has a thing or two to say about the denigration and the most common misuse in political discourse of the [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters

Who has not read of mankilling Achilles?
Him of the mighty thews, myrmidon mannered one
In whose red such ichor ran the ships where he dallied
Sail in our sayings, the heads that he hammered;
As hilted as language is, the bloodsayings backing us,
Screwing our courage, it is his name tracks us.
Who [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
1
SWEET Lesbia, would you know the half
of all my pleasure when your husband laughs
delighted at your flyting and the flashing spite
that lights your countenance when we two fight?
watch out, my girl, your fat fool’s treasure,
I may absent myself and rob the only pleasure
he takes in both of us. [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg from Ancient Letters
The day was blithe as she swung by,
Dimple-shouldered, hair awry,
Soft kirtled in a downy gown
To do her washing by the town;
She rilling, whistled tirra, lira,
Knelt beside the lilting water.
Arlotta, the tanner’s daughter.
When she awoke, the wadded tunic
Beneath her hip was dark, was dank;
The river ran on, ancient, runic;
She [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg
from Ancient Letters (1987)
 
After the last trick had been turned in the game,
The bumpers drunk, the galley fallen apart;
The lying maid having drunk to a different name
A cup for the journey, so to speak, at the start;
One wonders whether that harried dame ever thought
In terms of that fat man she and [...]

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A poem by Thomas Thornburg
 
 
One wonders whom the next elected
Criminal for these troubled times
Will the feckless public, suspect,
Lever in the long direction
(Between the last war and the next)
We take in our quotidian crimes;
How long our matrons skirt the leering
Lawless on main ways to market;
How long our aged folk in fear
Imprisoned at their portals peering
On them [...]

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A nostalgic comment by Stan Raines
Hillary Clinton’s recent comment that her husband’s clinching his first nomination in June of 1992 and of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination in June, 1968 was peculiar not only because it was in poor taste in the second part, but because no one has noted that, in former times, it was usual for the [...]

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