Wednesday, December 9, 2009

A Short Poem



Watched The Night of the Iguana (1964) from a play by Tennessee Williams, Directed by John Huston, Starring Richard Burton, Ava Gardner, Grayson Hall, Deborah Kerr and Sue Lyon.

As soon as the Olive Branch poem was finished, this poem popped into my head, it's quite neat, so I wrote it down:



The coin of life,
One side's death,
One side's birth.
We try to understand it,
For all we're worth.

Michael Holloway 12/09/2009


And,

By Tennessee Williams

How calmly does the olive branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Some time while light obscures the tree
The zenith of its life will be
Gone past forever
And from thence
A second history will commence

A chronicle no longer gold
A bargaining with mist and mold
And finally the broken stem
The plummeting to earth, and then

And intercourse not well designed
For beings of a golden kind
Whose native green must arch above
The earth's obscene corrupting love

And still the ripe fruit and the branch
Observe the sky begin to blanch
Without a cry, without a prayer
With no betrayal of despair

Oh courage! Could you not as well
Select a second place to dwell
Not only in that golden tree
But in the frightened heart of me

Text of the poem courtesy:
Linda Sue Grimes
Classic Poetry Aide



mh

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