Today is World Poetry Day
What is your favorite poem?
Mine is If We Must Die by Claude McKay
If We Must Die
Claude McKay - 1889-1948
If we must die—let it not be like hogs
Hunted and penned in an inglorious spot,
While round us bark the mad and hungry dogs,
Making their mock at our accursed lot.
If we must die—oh, let us nobly die,
So that our precious blood may not be shed
In vain; then even the monsters we defy
Shall be constrained to honor us though dead!
Oh, Kinsmen! We must meet the common foe;
Though far outnumbered, let us show us brave,
And for their thousand blows deal one deathblow!
What though before us lies the open grave?
Like men we'll face the murderous, cowardly pack,
Pressed to the wall, dying, but fighting back!
= new reply since forum marked as read
beneath the cherry blossoms
while the moon is full.
—Saigyo (1118-1190)
. . . Forever And Ever, Amen
by George Miksch Sutton
A very little time shall pass ---
A white-crowned sparrow’s song or two, a rustle in the grass ----
Ere I shall die: ere that which now is grief and sense of loss
And emptiness unbearable shall vanish
As curved reflections vanish with the shattering of a glass.
By the wind I shall be scattered
Up and down the land,
By strong waves strewn along the farthest shore;
No part of the dear world shall I not reach and, reaching, understand,
No thing that I have loved shall I not love the more.
No leaf of sedge nor cattail blade shall push
Up from the dark mud toward the open sky
But I shall be there, in the tender tip,
Experiencing the steady surge of growing.
No drop of water shall move upward, cell by cell,
No sunlight fall on any opening fern,
No breeze send waves across the yellowing grain,
But I shall be there, intimately learning
All that all things know and, knowing all, discerning
The full significance of suffering and pain.
No bird of passage shall fly north or south
Breasting the stiff wind or pushing through the fog
But I shall be there, feeling the deep urge
That drives it otherwhere at summer’s ending,
And otherwhere once more with spring’s return;
Ever so thoroughly I shall learn
The signs a bird must travel by,
The many ways in which a bird can die.
Knowing the fierce drive of hunger,
Day after day, season after season, brown in summer, white in winter,
With the slender weasel I shall hunt, and with the rabbit die ---
I at the place where the sharp white teeth
Pierce the skin and the tearing hurts,
I, too, shivering while the hot blood spurts.
No vainly croaking, vainly struggling frog shall feel
The water snake’s inexorable jaws
Moving over and round it, slowly engulfing it
But I shall be there struggling too, and crying
An anguished, futile protest against dying.
With the snake too I shall die:
Clutched by sharp talons, borne swiftly upward from the shallow creek,
I shall look down bewildered and surprised
By this new aspect of a familiar place,
Writhing, twisting, striking at the claws which hold me fast
I shall feel the hooked beak closing on my neck at last.
With the hawk, too, I shall die:
I shall feel the hot sting of shot, the loss of power, the sudden collapse,
The falling downward through unsupporting space,
The last swift rush of air past my face.
No creature the world over shall experience love,
Drying its wings impatiently while clinging to the old cocoon,
Leaping the swollen waterfall, yapping to the desert moon,
Looping the loop above some quaking bog,
Pounding out drum-music from some rotting log,
But I shall be there in each sound and move ---
Now with the victor, now with the vanquished,
Now in the parted mouth, now in the feet,
Now in the lifted nose, now in the bloodstream,
Now in the pounding heart’s accelerated beat ---
Experiencing the tender, quiet joy of mating,
And blinding ecstasy of procreating.
A thousand thousand times I shall suffer pain,
And that will be a mere beginning.
A thousand thousand times I shall die,
Yet never finally, never irrevocably,
Always with enough left of life to start again: to be born,
To grow, give battle, win, lose, laugh, cry, sing, and mourn,
To love, hate, admire, and despise,
Never quite losing the feeling of surprise
That it is good to live and die;
Learning to forget the word “finally,”
Learning to unlearn the word “ultimately,”
Learning, the long stretch of eternity having just begun,
That joy, gladness, grief, and suffering are one.
This is the full and correct writing of the poem " . . . Forever And Ever, Amen" by George Miksch
Sutton as edited and approved by him for publication in an out-of-print book by Fulcrum Press
and as it that appeared in Audubon magazine (September, 1985, pp. 86-87).
Thanks
There's an Angela Davis reading today on Zoom - will try to find a link
Look at that girl shake that thing,
We can't all be Martin Luther King
The first time I read it (in The Poetry for the Negro 1746-1970) I laughed and laughed and never forgot it. 
Happy Sunday my friend
Great poem
Frost was really good
