Poem of Breezes
(A Whitmanesque)
Award winning author and teacher Mike White is assembling some of his best new poems and photographs into book form. As a lead up to its publication (and as a last chance to get some feedback) he’s posting them around the web for a limited time. Here’s a complete list of the poems. Here’s Mike’s Instagram.
1.
This is a poem of breezes
I take them up
diluting them
wheezing them through
gasping their lungy gale
passing them out of me
changed, changed
by my billows, changed
by my filters within.
2.
My eyes, ears, mouth,
voice of the odours that I smell
breath of my perceptive skin
all take it in
receive each blow,
greet each distinctly,
give to each a culture
and a ferment.
3.
but the wind…
it blows for itself
not from or for me or my kin.
What effect could I
exhale among exhales
begin?
4.
Hundred of millions of years of winds
that roused up the first seas,
now tear up the home,
now sink the journey,
now eat the shore,
shave arms into the land,
drag the screaming child
out to sea.
5.
How many fossils
are pressings in the book of the Sea?
How many pages
is the Earth under the covers of the Sea?
But the wind…
it blows the flags…
aids the crossing…
collects every breath,
every voice ever heard,
every phrase has touched it,
was carried by it,
is carried by its still;
breathing in later
what was said before
by lungs of other lands
puffed out in a new voice.
6.
Puffing smoke into the wet air
adding drops to the waning shower
Puffing lung waste of a chimney mouth
towards the weather tower.
7.
… passing somewhere never
to be breathed,
except passed
as the pushed exhale
of the living, of the dead,
equalizing the plant breath,
the dog breath, free breath,
the breath of slaves, screams
of the captured, pleasured;
laughter of the gilded, measured
all invisibly active, featureless
except for what it is touching,
scattering, digging, rustling,
overflowing, burying, prying,
pushing, crumbling, extending.
All particulars,
all seeming only,
blank spaces of the world.
8.
And the wind… it dries
the sunken streets,
it fans flames
blankets forests
sweeps, rains
lifts features
soars the weather
erodes the kippered seaman’s
face and hands…
“I tire,”
he says, “of the wallop.”
and then “I argue with the wind,
these calloused hands
can contain you!”
and the wind shouts back
“you can’t.”
9.
“But when it is still,”
he says
“I rest the sails,
roll ’em up and moor.
The Sun is orange.
The horizon, yellow.
Above, a crimson red.
Ripples of the sunset water
onto twilights water’s bed.
10.
The wind and water make and remake their plans…
I know nothing of their schedule.
The seasons, bad weather… they say nothing
of their arriving or departing to me.
My door is always open….”
