The RetroLounge Daily Poem Thread (Sun 5/14/06)

Thanks to miss_american_pie for posting some great poems the past 3 days while I was out of town. :yourock:



When Dylan Left Hibbing, Minnesota, August 1959

Not even Dylan then, more like David the Blue-Eyed Shepherd Boy Giant Killer instead,
the way he must have looked in those Golden Book Illustrated Bible Stories we never read,
the ones with the pictures of the prophets, each with a gold record stuck to his head,
or like the Classic Comics Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov rocking and rolling on his bed,
heading on down the highway out of St. Petersburg, the landlord's axe still in the shed,
throwing stones at all the stop signs a-bleeding in his head.

Wasn't he a singing terrorist then, slaying us in the aisles, knocking us dead,
like some wild-eyed kid from Fallujah now, his machine gun guitar slipped over his head,
his ass in a sling, his mind full of dynamite, his righteous streets turning red,
his only song his heaven's door, toward which he runs, arms outspread.
Oh, Zimmerman, we never heard a single word you ever said,
from Ararats to ziggurats, from alpha down to zed,
our heads cut off, our tongues cut out, no words left to be said,
all the things we've ever loved, dead, dead, dead, dead.

John Hodgen

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John Hodgen lives in Shrewbury, MA, holds a Master’s Degree in English from Assumption College, and teaches at Mount Wachusett Community College and the Worcester Art Museum. He is the author of In My Father’s House (winner of the 1993 Bluestem Award from Emporia State University in Kansas) and Bread Without Sorrow (2002, Lynx House Press / Christopher Howell, 420 West 24th St., Spokane, WA 99203, ISBN# 0-89924-112-3.)
He has won the Grolier Prize for Poetry, an Arvon Foundation Award, the Yankee Magazine Award for Poetry, first prize in the Red Brick Review poetry competition, and a Massachusetts Cultural Council Finalist Award in Poetry in 2000. Several of his poems have been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and he was one of five finalists in the Massachusetts Artists Foundation Fellowship Program. He was a finalist in Houghton Mifflin’s New Poetry Series, Cleveland State University’s Poetry Center Prize, Carnegie Mellon University’s Poetry Series, and Northeastern University’s Samuel French Morse Poetry Award.
John’s work has been included in the anthologies Witness and Wait: Thirteen Poets From New England and Something Understood (Every Other Thursday Press, Cambridge, MA, 1989, 1996); We Teach Them All: Teachers Writing About Diversity (Stenhouse Publishers, York, Maine, 1996); and Bone Cages (Haley Press, Athol, MA, 1996).


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RL

If you have a request for a certain Poet, post their name in the thread and I will find a poem by them and post it...

if you want to see some of my poetry, see the blog at:
http://www.myspace.com/retropaul
Loss is cumulative. But so is poetry, and art, and faith

:hi:

Had a great weekend.

RL

You deserve some "great".

:hug:

Glad to hear it. :hug:

but the WiFi wouldn't let me get on line...

:hi:

RL

:*

since I was doing the same.

:D

RL

Welcome back to the arms of the Lounge!

And what a poem to announce your return.....whew!

I had to read it a couple of times just to start getting it.....

Very vivid!

Thank you

:hug:

I missed the lounge...

and you. :hug:

RL

:hi:












that is sure SOME poem you choose for Mother's Day....sheesh but you ARE a strange one and I reckon we love ya for it...

A better compliment I could not hope for...

:hug:

RL

Thank you. :loveya:

:loveya:

RL