Author Archives: Sally Ashton

The Hollow Men
T.S. Eliot

This is a culminating work of Eliot’s.  Given the challenges that face us today—limited resources, environmental concerns, and world events—I think this poem, while somewhat dark, brings the reader into a thought provoking place. I begin here with part V.  The most famous part of this poem is the ending.

Supervisor Liz Kniss, District 5
Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors

The Hollow Men

 V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o’clock in the morning.
 
Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow
                                Life is very long
Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
                                For Thine is the Kingdom
For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the
 
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

T.S. Eliot
excerpt from “The Hollow Men” 1925

Last night, as I was sleeping
Antonio Machado

Every stanza carries healing. I prefer the Spanish of “blessed illusion” to “marvelous error.” For me springs have always been a magical connection to the earth, through which life flows.

The golden bees transform my regrets.

We are reminded of what, in whatever form, each of us has in our hearts.

Paul Draper
CEO/Winemaker Ridge Vineyards

Last night, as I was sleeping

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that a spring was breaking
out in my heart.
I said: Along which secret aqueduct,
Oh water, are you coming to me,
water of a new life
that I have never drunk?

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.

Last night, as I was sleeping,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that a fiery sun was giving
light inside my heart.
It was fiery because I felt
warmth as from a hearth,
and sun because it gave light
and brought tears to my eyes.

Last night, as I slept,
I dreamt — marvelous error!—
that it was God I had
here inside my heart.

Antonio Machado from Times Alone
Translated by Robert Bly

Song of the Powers
David Mason

Poetry is the sharing of self and common experience through the celebration of language.

Nancy Glaze, Executive Director
Arts Council Silicon Valley

Song of the Powers

Two Kinds of People
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox

I discovered this poem when I was in 8th or 9th grade, while working on an English project. When I came across this Ella Wheeler Wilcox poem in the library, it caused me to stop everything. I always felt that I was a doer—a problem solver—a man of action. After I read this poem several times, I realized that I was a lifter. And I was determined to never change from that and also do my part to help others lean less and lift more. I’m forever grateful to Ella Wheeler Wilcox for helping me understand who I really am and for the motivation her poem has brought me throughout my life.

Chuck Page
Vice Mayor, City of Saratoga

Two Kinds of People

There are two kinds of people on earth today;
Just two kinds of people, no more I say.

Not the sinner and the saint, for it’s well understood
The good are half bad and the bad are half good.

Not the rich and the poor, for to rate a man’s wealth,
You must first know the state of his conscience and health.

Not the humble and proud, for in life’s little span,
He who puts on vain airs, is not counted a man.

Not the happy and sad, for the swift flying years
Bring each man his laughter and each man his tears.

No; the two kinds of people on earth I mean
Are the people who lift and the people who lean.

Wherever you go you will find the earth’s masses
Are always divided in just these two classes

And oddly enough, you will find, too, I ween,
There’s only one lifter to twenty who lean.

In which class are you?  Are you easing the load
Of overtaxed lifters who toil down the road?

Or are you a leaner who lets others bear
Your portion of labor and worry and care?

Ella Wheeler Wilcox
1850–1919

Recipe For Happiness In Khabarovsky Or Anyplace
Lawrence Ferlinghetti

I love the profound simplicity of Ferlinghetti’s “Recipe for Happiness…”   He, in very few words, creates a scene, a mood, a contentment that defines the essence of happiness and that resonates in me.  He validates MacLeish’s notion that “a poem should not mean but be.”  This poem is about “being” at its best and the reading of it is so evocative that it re-creates our own moments of happiness.

Bonnie Salera
English teacher, CUHSD, retired

Recipe For Happiness In Khabarovsky Or Anyplace

One grand boulevard with trees
with one grand café in sun
with strong black coffee in very small cups

One not necessarily very beautiful
man or woman who loves you

One fine day

Lawrence Ferlinghetti, from Endless Life: The Selected Poems

The Second Coming
William Butler Yeats

Like many people, I first learned “The Second Coming” in high school(thank you, Ms. Cecile Shea), but it has stuck with me in the two decades since. The imagery of many poems lies flat, waiting for the reader or listener to pick it up. But Yeats’ imagery in this poem stands up and demands attention. It is powerful stuff when you’re 17 years old, and it’s only become more vivid as I’ve gotten older.

Sal Pizarro
Around Town columnist
San Jose Mercury News

The Second Coming

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939)

The Man Watching
by Rainer Maria Rilke

I have many favorites, but I’ve selected this one in light of my current role. This is a poem that inspires me to rise above the petty daily battles of politics, to tackle greater challenges.

Sam Liccardo, Councilmember
City of San Jose, District 9

The Man Watching

I can tell by the way the trees beat, after
so many dull days, on my worried windowpanes
that a storm is coming,
and I hear the far-off fields say things
I can’t bear without a friend,
I can’t love without a sister.

The storm, the shifter of shapes, drives on
across the woods and across time,
and the world looks as if it had no age:
the landscape, like a line in the psalm book,
is seriousness and weight and eternity.

What we choose to fight is so tiny!
What fights with us is so great.
If only we would let ourselves be dominated
as things do by some immense storm,
we would become strong too, and not need names.

When we win it’s with small things,
and the triumph itself makes us small.
What is extraordinary and eternal
does not want to be bent by us.
I mean the Angel who appeared
to the wrestlers of the Old Testament:
when the wrestlers’ sinews
grew long like metal strings,
he felt them under his fingers
like chords of deep music.

Whoever was beaten by this Angel
(who often simply declined the fight)
went away proud and strengthened
and great from that harsh hand,
that kneaded him as if to change his shape.
Winning does not tempt that man.
This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,
by constantly greater beings.

Rainer Maria Rilke

Concord Hymn
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

My favorite poem of all time is Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Concord Hymn,” and in particular the first two stanzas. I feel it is an expression of life, longing, and all things people yearn for. As a free country, we probably do not realize the sacrifices people made to make sure we would be safe, secure, and free of tyranny. These lines are still important today with many Middle Eastern and African countries seeking a change in governance. They provide a visualization for all that we see on the news or read in the paper. Emerson’s words ring true for all.

Dr. Penny Kyler, Public Health Analyst, Region 9

Concord Hymn
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, July 4, 1837

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,
Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;
Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,
We set today a votive stone;
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1803–1882

The Dancing
by Gerald Stern

Gerald Stern’s poem “The Dancing” is one my family includes in our Passover Seder.  It’s a great poem illustrating how grief and joy are intertwined.  And the poem remembers both World War II and Jewish-American history.

Alan Soldofsky
Director of Creative Writing
Professor of English and Comparative Literature
San José State University

The Dancing

In all these rotten shops, in all this broken furniture
and wrinkled ties and baseball trophies and coffee pots
I have never seen a post-war Philco
with the automatic eye
nor heard Ravel’s “Bolero” the way I did
in 1945 in that tiny living room
on Beechwood Boulevard, nor danced as I did
then, my knives all flashing, my hair all streaming,
my mother red with laughter, my father cupping
his left hand under his armpit, doing the dance
of old Ukraine, the sound of his skin half drum,
half fart, the world at last a meadow,
the three of us whirling and singing, the three of us
screaming and falling, as if we were dying,
as if we could never stop—in 1945—
in Pittsburgh, beautiful filthy Pittsburgh, home
of the evil Mellons, 5,000 miles away
from the other dancing—in Poland and Germany—
oh God of mercy, oh wild God.

From Paradise Poems by Gerald Stern

Love Comes Quietly
by Robert Creeley

22 years ago, when I was living in the Upper East Side, I first came upon a book of love poems by Robert Creeley at a rummage sale on First and 65th in New York. I recognized in this poem the feeling I had not yet named, the feeling of love for my boyfriend. I shared the poem with him boldly one evening, and we affirmed our love for one another for the first time.

Sadly, those feelings waned over our 20 year marriage, and our divorce is nearly final. However, I’ve been speaking the words again. And quietly, (happily) love has come again, in the old ways.

Angela McConnell, Executive Director
Montalvo Arts Center

Love Comes Quietly

Love comes quietly,
finally, drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.

What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.

from For Love: Poems 1950-1960, Robert Creeley