Tag Archives: Poems

Poem

Posted on by
1

I became nostalgic thinking of some of the weirdest poems that I loved back in those days….

Ode to an Artichoke (Pablo Neruda)

The artichoke
of delicate heart
erect
in its battle-dress, builds
its minimal cupola;
keeps
stark
in its scallop of
scales.
Around it,
demoniac vegetables
bristle their thicknesses,
devise
tendrils and belfries,
the bulb’s agitations;
while under the subsoil
the carrot
sleeps sound in its
rusty mustaches.
Runner and filaments
bleach in the vineyards,
whereon rise the vines.
The sedulous cabbage
arranges its petticoats;
oregano
sweetens a world;
and the artichoke
dulcetly there in a gardenplot,
armed for a skirmish,
goes proud
in its pomegranate
burnishes.
Till, on a day,
each by the other,
the artichoke moves
to its dream
of a market place
in the big willow
hoppers:
a battle formation.
Most warlike
of defilades-
with men
in the market stalls,
white shirts
in the soup-greens,
artichoke field marshals,
close-order conclaves,
commands, detonations,
and voices,
a crashing of crate staves.

And
Maria
come
down
with her hamper
to
make trial
of an artichoke:
she reflects, she examines,
she candles them up to the light like an egg,
never flinching;
she bargains,
she tumbles her prize
in a market bag
among shoes and a
cabbage head,
a bottle
of vinegar; is back
in her kitchen.
The artichoke drowns in a pot.

So you have it:
a vegetable, armed,
a profession
(call it an artichoke)
whose end
is millennial.
We taste of that
sweetness,
dismembering scale after scale.
We eat of a halcyon paste:
it is green at the artichoke heart

———————————————————

This ties in with my previous snapshot of NY; sometimes we are just like an artichoke, thinking greater of us than we are, until the moment it strikes us to realize that Maria is coming to boil us down. Perhaps, that is the very reason why movies featuring the destruction of the city due to natural disasters tend to be stimulating (not in a positive sense)…

If there is glory in something fleeting, when will New York become glorious?

Subway Riders Can’t Miss This

Posted on by
4

Without a doubt, the acronym “MTA” has a negative connotation do it.

Nonetheless, we all use it. In the recent years MTA has implemented a program called “Arts for Transit”, which displays any form of arts in the stations, in the trains, basically anywhere in the transit system.

I remember we read a poem in the beginning of the year called “Construction Site, Windy Night” (Pg 201 in Poems of New York). The thing that I most remembered from it was some sort of scaffolds, plastic sheets that was flying from the building. Today, as I was on the D train going back to the dorms, I notice a poem titled “Scaffolding” by Seamus Heaney (1939-2013). The poem went something like this:

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

Make sure that planks won’t slip at busy points,
Secure all ladders, tighten bolted joints.

And yet all this comes down when the job’s done
Showing off walls of sure and solid stone.

So if, my dear, there sometimes seems to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me

Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

This beginning of the poem is pretty straight forward. The first two stanzas pretty much depicts a mason’s job when they begin to build. However, the poem starts to change in the third stanza, when the speaker seems to be sad that the scaffolds are falling. This however exposes the beauty of the building when its done.

The fourth stanza is the highlight of the poem. The speaker speaks to someone he cares, someone he loves, most likely a mate, and it reveals that the relationship between the two may be “falling apart”. But he ends up with the fifth stanza, saying that whats behind that scaffold is something stronger, something more beautiful.

So next time you take a ride on the MTA, check out the arts and all the stuff you see just may very much surprise you! See if you can spot this poem as well! 🙂

~Christopher Chong