John Donne’s Sonnet #7 from the Divine Meditations:

At the round earth’s imagined corners, blow
Your trumpets, angels, and arise, arise
From death, you numberless infinities
Of souls, and to your scattered bodies go,
All whom the flood did, and fire shall o’erthrow,
All whom war, death, age, agues, tyrannies.
Despair, law, chance hath slain, and you whose eyes,
Shall behold God, and never taste death’s woe.
But let them sleep, Lord, and me mourn a space,
For, if above all these, my sins abound,
‘Tis late to ask abundance of thy grace,
When we are there; here, on this lowly ground,
Teach me how to repent; for that’s as good
As if thou hadst sealed my pardon, with thy blood.

References:
[tag]John Donne[/tag] [1971]:  The Complete English Poems.  London, England: Penguin Classics. Edited by A. J. Smith. pp. 311-312.
Previous posts in this series can be found here.

This poem, The Hours, is by Australian poet Aidan Coleman, whom I thank for his permission to post this:

Evenings I get nothing done.
The late night ads hunt in packs.  I stay up.
The clack, clack, clack of the fan. The hours.
And there all the time, prayer:
the pool I sit beside,
the cool of every drink and shadow.

 
References:
Aidan Coleman [2005]:  Avenues and Runways.  Australia: Brandl & Schlesinger Poetry.
Some more poems by Aidan Coleman can be found in an ABC Radio National podcast,  here.
Previous poetry posts can found be here.

As we leave behind the economic troubles of 2008, I thought it fitting to post this poem by Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930), Russian futurist poet.   Mayakovsky’s life is celebrated by one of the greatest museums anywhere, the Mayakovsky House  in Moscow, which re-creates in visual and spatial terms the constructivism of Mayakovsky’s writing.   The image is from their web-site, and shows a room in the museum.
The middle quartrain formed part of Mayakovsky’s suicide note, with “you” replaced with “life”.

Past one o’clock.  You must have gone to bed.
The Milky Way streams silver through the night.
I’m in no hurry; with lightning telegrams
I have no cause to wake or trouble you.
And, as they say, the incident is closed.
Love’s boat has smashed against the daily grind.
Now you and I are quits. Why bother then
to balance mutual sorrows, pains and hurts.
Behold what quiet settles on the world.
Night wraps the sky in tribute from the stars.
In hours like these, one rises to address
The ages, history, and all creation.

Reference:
Vladimir Mayakovsky [1960]:  The Bedbug and Selected Poetry.  Translation by Max Hayward and George Reavey.  Bloomington, IA, USA:   Indiana University Press.

Today’s poem is “A Dream Within a Dream” by American writer and poet, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849):

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand –
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep – while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Today’s poem is by Judith Wright (1915-2000), an Australian poet whose childhood was spent in the Northern Tablelands of New South Wales, and who then spent most of her married life in Mount Tamborine, in south east Queensland (just west of the Gold Coast), moving later to Braidwood, in the Southern Tablelands of NSW (east of Canberra).   To always live so close to the sea, but not at it, marked her clearly as someone of the Great Divide.   All these places are very familiar to me, and growing up with similar stories of cattle droving and bushrangers such as Thunderbolt, her poem resonates greatly.  Of course, the season there now is summer, not the chilling, high-ranges winter she writes of.

The image that was once above was of the film “Red River” by Howard Hawks (1948), which was also about a long cattle drove.

South of my days’ circle, part of my blood’s country,
rises that tableland, high delicate outline
of bony slopes wincing under the winter,
low trees, blue-leaved and olive, outcropping granite-
clean, lean, hungry country. The creek’s leaf-silenced,
willow choked, the slope a tangle of medlar and crabapple
branching over and under, blotched with a green lichen;
and the old cottage lurches in for shelter.
O cold the black-frost night. the walls draw in to the warmth
and the old roof cracks its joints; the slung kettle
hisses a leak on the fire. Hardly to be believed that summer
will turn up again some day in a wave of rambler-roses,
thrust it’s hot face in here to tell another yarn-
a story old Dan can spin into a blanket against the winter.
seventy years of stories he clutches round his bones,
seventy years are hived in him like old honey.
During that year, Charleville to the Hunter,
nineteen-one it was, and the drought beginning;
sixty head left at the McIntyre, the mud round them
hardened like iron; and the yellow boy died
in the sulky ahead with the gear, but the horse went on,
stopped at Sandy Camp and waited in the evening.
It was the flies we seen first, swarming like bees.
Came to the Hunter, three hundred head of a thousand-
cruel to keep them alive – and the river was dust.
Or mustering up in the Bogongs in the autumn
when the blizzards came early. Brought them down;
down, what aren’t there yet. Or driving for Cobb’s on the run
up from Tamworth – Thunderbolt at the top of Hungry Hill,
and I give him a wink. I wouldn’t wait long, Fred,
not if I was you. The troopers are just behind,
coming for that job at the Hillgrove. He went like a luny,
him on his big black horse.
Oh, they slide and they vanish
as he shuffles the years like a pack of conjuror’s cards.
True or not, it’s all the same; and the frost on the roof
cracks like a whip, and the back-log break into ash.
Wake, old man. this is winter, and the yarns are over.
No-one is listening
South of my days’ circle.
I know it dark against the stars, the high lean country
full of old stories that still go walking in my sleep.