[New-Poetry] You say it's your birthday? It's my birthday too

[Anny Ballardini]

No comments this time
just that these are beautiful poems,
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Graham 
  To: NewPoetry & Views 
  Sent: Sunday, September 17, 2006 9:58 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] You say it's your birthday? It's my birthday too


  Born on this day:   Hank AND William Carlos Williams.


  To Elsie


         William Carlos Williams




         The pure products of America
         go crazy--
         mountain folk from Kentucky

         or the ribbed north end of 
         Jersey
         with its isolate lakes and

         valleys, its deaf-mutes, thieves
         old names
         and promiscuity between

         devil-may-care men who have taken
         to railroading
         out of sheer lust of adventure--

         and young slatterns, bathed
         in filth
         from Monday to Saturday

         to be tricked out that night
         with gauds
         from imaginations which have no

         peasant traditions to give them
         character
         but flutter and flaunt

         sheer rags-succumbing without
         emotion
         save numbed terror

         under some hedge of choke-cherry
         or viburnum-
         which they cannot express--

         Unless it be that marriage
         perhaps
         with a dash of Indian blood

         will throw up a girl so desolate
         so hemmed round
         with disease or murder

         that she'll be rescued by an 
         agent--
         reared by the state and

         sent out at fifteen to work in
         some hard-pressed
         house in the suburbs--

         some doctor's family, some Elsie--
         voluptuous water
         expressing with broken

         brain the truth about us--
         her great
         ungainly hips and flopping breasts

         addressed to cheap
         jewelry
         and rich young men with fine eyes

         as if the earth under our feet
         were
         an excrement of some sky

         and we degraded prisoners
         destined
         to hunger until we eat filth

         while the imagination strains
         after deer
         going by fields of goldenrod in

         the stifling heat of September
         Somehow
         it seems to destroy us

         It is only in isolate flecks that
         something
         is given off

         No one
         to witness
         and adjust, no one to drive the car
  ==============


  I'm So Lonesome I Could Cry



  Hear that lonesome whipporwill 

  He sounds too blue to fly 

  The midnight train is whinin' low 

  I'm so lonesome I could cry 



  I've never seen a night so long 

  When time goes crawling by 

  The moon just went behind the clouds 

  To hide its face and cry 



  Did you ever see a Robin weep 

  When leaves begin to die 

  That mean's he's lost his will to live 

  I'm so lonesome I could cry 



  The silence of a falling star 

  Lights up a purple sky 

  And as I wonder where you are 

  I'm so lonesome I could cry

   --Hank Williams








  ==========================================

  David Graham

  grahamd at ripon.edu

  Home Page:

  http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/index.html

  Poetry Library:

  http://www.ripon.edu/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html

  ==========================================










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