Lost in the Hospital by Rafael Campo (Lavinia)

Lost in the Hospital

BY RAFAEL CAMPO

It’s not that I don’t like the hospital.

Those small bouquets of flowers, pert and brave.

The smell of antiseptic cleansers.

The ill, so wistful in their rooms, so true.

My friend, the one who’s dying, took me out

To where the patients go to smoke, IV’s

And oxygen in tanks attached to them—

A tiny patio for skeletons. We shared

A cigarette, which was delicious but 

Too brief. I held his hand; it felt

Like someone’s keys. How beautiful it was,

The sunlight pointing down at us, as if

We were important, full of life, unbound.

I wandered for a moment where his ribs

Had made a space for me, and there, beside 

The thundering waterfall of his heart,

I rubbed my eyes and thought, “I’m lost.”

Level: Lower Sec

Themes: Living, Health, Illness, Death, Relationships, Friendship

Stylistic features: Blank verse

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper by Martín Espada (Lavinia)

Who Burns for the Perfection of Paper

BY MARTÍN ESPADA

At sixteen, I worked after high school hours

at a printing plant

that manufactured legal pads:

Yellow paper

stacked seven feet high

and leaning

as I slipped cardboard

between the pages,

then brushed red glue

up and down the stack.

No gloves: fingertips required

for the perfection of paper,

smoothing the exact rectangle.

Sluggish by 9 PM, the hands

would slide along suddenly sharp paper,

and gather slits thinner than the crevices

of the skin, hidden.

Then the glue would sting,

hands oozing

till both palms burned

at the punchclock.

Ten years later, in law school,

I knew that every legal pad

was glued with the sting of hidden cuts,

that every open lawbook

was a pair of hands

upturned and burning.

Level: Lower Sec

Themes: Youth, Jobs, Working, School, Learning, Maturity, Social Responsibility

Stylistic Features: Free verse, juxtaposition

First Love by Jan Owen (Lavinia)

First Love

BY JAN OWEN

Titian’s Young Englishman with a Glove, circa 1530

It happened in Physics,

reading a Library art book under the desk,

(the lesson was Archimedes in the bath)

I turned a page and fell

for an older man, and anonymous at that,

hardly ideal –

he was four hundred and forty-five,

I was fourteen.

‘Eureka!’ streaked each thought

(I prayed no-one would hear)

and Paradise all term

was page 179

(I prayed no-one would guess).

Of course

my fingers, sticky with toffee and bliss,

failed to entice him from his century;

his cool grey stare

fastened me firmly in mine.

I got six overdues,

suspension of borrowing rights

and a D in Physics.

But had by heart what Archimedes proves.

Ten years later I married:

a European with cool grey eyes,

a moustache,

pigskin gloves.

Level: Lower Sec

Themes: Youth, First Love, Infatuation & Crushes, Unrequited Love, Reading & Books, Sciences, School & Learning

Stylistic features: Free verse, parentheses

hurtling by Stephanie Ye (Lavinia)

hurtling by Stephanie Ye

(the 'L', chicago)

i once saw a weeping man standing

at a window. our eyes met, and

for one fierce moment

i knew we shared a deep connection.

then the 'L' train i was on shot by,

a horizontal shape slicing the vertical,

sundering our budding relationship

decisively.

i still think of him sometimes,

especially on the 'L',

though i've never found his window again.

as if a hole opened

in the gleaming fabric of the city

and swallowed up the window

and the man;

then with a shimmer rippled shut, smoothening

itself out

to become another anonymous glass wall.

people look more beautiful up here,

coiled

in each window

like a portrait in a picture frame.

when i see someone looking, i always

look back. i indulge in these

random acts of intimacy,

because in the next moment

i am gone,

hurtling through the city

in the air.

Level: Lower/Upper Sec

Themes: disconnect, estrangement, alienation, urban life, human connection/relationships, intimacy, transience, global citizenship, cosmopolitanism

Stylistic Devices: Consistent use of the lowercase, free verse, extended metaphor

The Day The Saucers Came By Neil Gaiman (andrea)

That Day, the saucers landed. Hundreds of them, golden,
Silent, coming down from the sky like great snowflakes,
And the people of Earth stood and
stared as they descended,
Waiting, dry-mouthed, to find out what waited inside for us
And none of us knowing if we would be here tomorrow
But you didn’t notice because
That day, the day the saucers came, by some some coincidence,
Was the day that the graves gave up their dead
And the zombies pushed up through soft earth
or erupted, shambling and dull-eyed, unstoppable,
Came towards us, the living, and we screamed and ran,
But you did not notice this because
On the saucer day, which was zombie day, it was
Ragnarok also, and the television screens showed us
A ship built of dead-men’s nails, a serpent, a wolf,
All bigger than the mind could hold,
and the cameraman could
Not get far enough away, and then the Gods came out
But you did not see them coming because
On the saucer-zombie-battling-gods
day the floodgates broke
And each of us was engulfed by genies and sprites
Offering us wishes and wonders and eternities
And charm and cleverness and true
brave hearts and pots of gold
While giants feefofummed across
the land and killer bees,
But you had no idea of any of this because
That day, the saucer day, the zombie day
The Ragnarok and fairies day,
the day the great winds came
And snows and the cities turned to crystal, the day
All plants died, plastics dissolved, the day the
Computers turned, the screens telling
us we would obey, the day
Angels, drunk and muddled, stumbled from the bars,
And all the bells of London were sounded, the day
Animals spoke to us in Assyrian, the Yeti day,
The fluttering capes and arrival of
the Time Machine day,
You didn’t notice any of this because
you were sitting in your room, not doing anything
not even reading, not really, just
looking at your telephone,
wondering if I was going to call.

For Jane by Charles Bukowski ( Andrea)

225 days under grass
and you know more than I.
they have long taken your blood,
you are a dry stick in a basket.
is this how it works?
in this room
the hours of love
still make shadows.

when you left
you took almost
everything.
I kneel in the nights
before tigers
that will not let me be.

what you were
will not happen again.
the tigers have found me
and I do not care.

Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden (Cherie)

Funeral Blues by W.H. Auden

Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone,
Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone,
Silence the pianos and with muffled drum
Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come.

Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead
Scribbling on the sky the message He Is Dead,
Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves,
Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves.

He was my North, my South, my East and West,
My working week and my Sunday rest,
My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song;
I thought that love would last for ever: I was wrong.

The stars are not wanted now: put out every one;
Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun;
Pour away the ocean and sweep up the wood.
For nothing now can ever come to any good.

Level: Lower Sec
Themes: Death, Love
Stylistic Features: Rhyming Couplets, Imagery, Metaphor, Hyperbole

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas (Cherie)

Do not go gentle into that good night by Dylan Thomas

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Level: Lower Sec
Themes: Death, Age
Stylistic Features: Villanelle

How do I love thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Cherie)

How do I love thee? (Sonnet 43) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day's 
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light. 
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears of all my life; and if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death. 

Level: Lower Sec, Upper Sec
Themes: Love
Stylistic Features: Petrarchan Sonnet, Repetition, Hyperbole

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins (Cherie)

Introduction to Poetry by Billy Collins

I want them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem's room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author's name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means. 

Level: Lower Sec

Themes: Poetry, Language

Stylistic Features: Metaphors

My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke (Cherie)

My Papa's Waltz by Theodore Roethke

The whiskey on your breath

Could make a small boy dizzy;

But I hung on like death:

Such waltzing is not easy.

We romped until the pans

Slid from the kitchen shelf;

My mother's countenance

Could not unfrown itself.

The hand that held my wrist

Was battered on one knuckle;

At every step you missed

My right ear scraped a buckle.

You beat time on my head

With a palm caked hard by dirt,

Then waltzed me off to bed

Still clinging to your shirt. 

 Level: Lower Sec

Themes: Family Relationships, Violence

 Stylistic Devices: Euphemism, alternate rhyme