Amelia Rosselli: O Little Swallow

O little swallow full of grace you invent your words and whistle
                                    free outside any plantation
with you I would dance far beyond the precise nests I would know
the indulgent summit. If the self-propelling
troubles keep coming, if rebellion must wither, if your feather falls
                                    to the ground
may I at least dream! indifference and may the
blond tyrannies (and may the madhouse)
look after your hot blast (your blond tyrannies). 


Tr. Giuseppe Leporace. Rosselli (1930-1996) was a force of nature who should be better known outside Italy.  She was trilingual (including English), a musicologist, resistant to being categorised inside the groups and movements that infest Italian poetry, and subject to depression which may have been undiagnosed and was eventually suicidal. It's not reductionist to say that this poem seems to be about some aspects of the depression.

John Blight: Plankton

I have watched plankton over reefs float by
in rivers wide as seas that strained belief;
but, most, the shapes so intimate that I
could think that children drew them. Sheaf on sheaf
of comic drawings, unspoiled primitives
that couldn't live, yet represented lives
so simply limned; and, yet, seen here alive
too difficult to understand, so make-believe
and yet alive. Have you seen plankton float,
barely an outline round transparent space?
It can here represent whatever crayons trace
extravagantly wild. No nature note
has chronicled such shapes. Only a child's quick mind
has realised this life so naively designed.


Published in the 1960s. Blight was a Queensland poet who liked to squeeze his beachcombing thoughts into sonnet form - his sonnet-writing eventually became obsessive. This isn't a good poem: the central conceit is too laboured to come alive. Still, a plankton poem!

Johannes Bobrowski: Night-Swallows

I

Cold,

the pierced air,

the black and the white, light, speaking

on routes of birds. The evening, its

bull-horn

aslant in the fire-smoke on the

horizon. You saw

the fish rise, as the waters

clashed, you took your hand

from my eyes, blackness flew

round us and without wing

and without cry.

II

We breathed,

the roof on my shoulder

was light and like a rain

skyless

the needles strewn in the sand,

night-swallows, souls,

where shadow was,

thick on the earth,

cold.

Tr. Ruth & Mathew Mead. A poem from the German Baltic. D.H. Lawrence also wrote of swallows in the gloom: "Look up, and you see things flying / Between the day and the night; / Swallows with spools of dark thread sewing the shadows together." Lawrence's swallows turn out to be bats; is that also what Bobrowski is seeing?

Christian Morgenstern: Two nonsense poems

The Aesthetic Weasel (tr. Max F. Knight)

A weasel
perched on an easel
within a patch of teasel.

But why
and how?

The Moon Cow
whispered her reply
one time:

The sopheest-
icated beest
did it just for the rhyme.

The Seagulls (tr. Karl F. Ross)

The seagulls by their looks suggest
that Emma is their name;
they wear a white and fluffy vest
and are the hunter's game.

I never shoot a seagull dead;
their life I do not take.
I like to feed them gingerbread
and bits of raisin cake.

O human, you will never fly
the way the seagulls do;
but if your name is Emma, why,
be glad they look like you.


Morgenstern (1871-1914) had very German philosophical pretensions but it’s for his rather un-German nonsense verse that he’s remembered. His (English) Wikipedia page contains his “Night Song of the Fish”, which reads the same in German and English.

Robin Robertson: Cat; Failing

A figment, a thumbed
maquette of a cat, some
ditched plaything, something
brought in from outside:
his white fur stiff and grey,
coming apart at the seams.
I study the muzzle
of perished rubber, one ear
eaten away, his sour body
lumped like a bean-bag
leaking thinly
into a grim towel. I sit
and watch the light
degrade in his eyes.

He tries and fails
to climb to his chair, shirks
in one corner of the kitchen,
cowed, denatured, ceasing to be
anything like a cat,
and there's a new look
in those eyes
that refuse to meet mine
and it's the shame of  being
found out.  Just that.
And with that
loss of face
his face, I see,
has turned human.

Published 2007. I don't know if that last line is fanciful or not: the poet is dealing with his own grief. But an old cat does know when it's going. And may have little concern with the sadness of humans.

Marianne Moore: The Fish

wade

through black jade.

   Of the crow-blue mussel shells, one keeps

   adjusting the ash-heaps;

      opening and shutting itself like

an

injured fan.

   The barnacles which encrust the side

   of the wave, cannot hide

      there for the submerged shafts of the

sun,

split like spun

   glass, move themselves with spotlight swiftness

   into the crevices —

      in and out, illuminating

the

turquoise sea

   of bodies. The water drives a wedge

   of iron through the iron edge

      of the cliff; whereupon the stars,

pink

rice-grains, ink-

   bespattered jellyfish, crabs like green

   lilies, and submarine

      toadstools, slide each on the other.

All

external

   marks of abuse are present on this

   defiant edifice —

      all the physical features of

ac-

cident — lack

   of cornice, dynamite grooves, burns, and

   hatchet strokes, these things stand

      out on it; the chasm side is

dead.

Repeated

   evidence has proved that it can live

   on what can not revive

      its youth. The sea grows old in it.

Published in 1918, in a far more conventional-looking version and with radically different line structure. Was its later rearrangement into this structure opportunistic?

Laura McKee: rain

cows do have best friends
and become stressed
if they are separated
how do they know
who their friends are really
or if it’s going to rain
but still they lie waiting
bent at the knees

Published 2014. Laura McKee "started writing poetry a few years ago by mistake." That's very British self-deprecation but there's something less recognisably British and more gently universal going on here.