to being single?  I’m married now and that’s all that matters. 
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tsupon21@comcast.net

The Idiot Boy, Wordsworth 
(original poem not provided)

1.          He wandered down the mountain grade

2.          Beyond the speed assigned –

3.          A youth whom Justice often stayed

4.          And generally fined.

5.          He went alone, that none might know

6.          If he could drive or steer.

7.          Now he is in the ditch, and Oh!

8.          The differential gear!

1.          He drove down the mountainside

2.          Beyond the speed limit

3.          A youth which law officers knew

4.          And generally penalized.

5.          He went alone, so no one would know

6.          So he could try to drive and steer.

7.          Now he has crashed into the ditch, and Oh!

8.          The different gears.
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Heather Glover

Yet Do I Marvel
  Countee Cullen

I doubt not God is good, well-meaning, kind,
And did He stoop to quibble could tell why
The little buried mole continues blind,
Why flesh that mirrors Him must some day die,
Make plain the reason tortured Tantalus
Is baited by the fickle fruit, declare
If merely brute caprice dooms Sisyphus
To struggle up a never-ending stair.
Inscrutable His ways are, and immune
To catechism by a mind too strewn
With petty cares to slightly understand
What awful brain compels His awful hand.
Yet do I marvel at this curious thing:
To make a poet black, and bid him sing!  (1925) 

I Wonder   Neutered by Heather L. Glover

I know God’s great

And that, if he wanted, he could give good reason

For lonely, blind moles and

Human mortality.

He could reveal why man

Always wants what he can’t have,

If man’s struggles are punishment

For his wrongdoings.

God’s mysterious—the human mind, so inferior in its

Focus on unimportant things, will never begin to understand

Him or His logic and thus hasn’t the right or the ability to question him.

Still, I wonder how he justifies creating a black poet

And compelling that poet to try and survive

In a society that despises him.
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Pamela Melton

Tulips

By Sylvia Plath

The tulips are too excitable, it is winter here.
Look how white everything is, how quiet, how snowed-in
I am learning peacefulness, lying by myself quietly
As the light lies on these white walls, this bed, these hands.
I am nobody; I have nothing to do with explosions.
I have given my name and my day-clothes up to the nurses
And my history to the anaesthetist and my body to surgeons.

They have propped my head between the pillow and the sheet-cuff
Like an eye between two white lids that will not shut.
Stupid pupil, it has to take everything in.
The nurses pass and pass, they are no trouble,
They pass the way gulls pass inland in their white caps,
Doing things with their hands, one just the same as another,
So it is impossible to tell how many there are.

My body is a pebble to them, they tend it as water
Tends to the pebbles it must run over, smoothing them gently.
They bring me numbness in their bright needles, they bring me sleep.
Now I have lost myself I am sick of baggage -
My patent leather overnight case like a black pillbox,
My husband and child smiling out of the family photo;
Their smiles catch onto my skin, little smiling hooks.

I have let things slip, a thirty-year-old cargo boat
Stubbornly hanging on to my name and address.
They have swabbed me clear of my loving associations.
Scared and bare on the green plastic-pillowed trolley
I watched my teaset, my bureaus of linen, my books
Sink out of sight, and the water went over my head.
I am a nun now, I have never been so pure.

I didn't want any flowers, I only wanted
To lie with my hands turned up and be utterly empty.
How free it is, you have no idea how free -
The peacefulness is so big it dazes you,
And it asks nothing, a name tag, a few trinkets.
It is what the dead close on, finally; I imagine them
Shutting their mouths on it, like a Communion tablet.

The tulips are too red in the first place, they hurt me.
Even through the gift paper I could hear them breathe
Lightly, through their white swaddlings, like an awful baby.
Their redness talks to my wound, it corresponds.
They are subtle: they seem to float, though they weigh me down,
Upsetting me with their sudden tongues and their colour,
A dozen red lead sinkers round my neck.

Nobody watched me before, now I am watched.
The tulips turn to me, and the window behind me
Where once a day the light slowly widens and slowly thins,
And I see myself, flat, ridiculous, a cut-paper shadow
Between the eye of the sun and the eyes of the tulips,
And I have no face, I have wanted to efface myself.
The vivid tulips eat my oxygen.

Before they came the air was calm enough,
Coming and going, breath by breath, without any fuss.
Then the tulips filled it up like a loud noise.
Now the air snags and eddies round them the way a river
Snags and eddies round a sunken rust-red engine.
They concentrate my attention, that was happy
Playing and resting without committing itself.

The walls, also, seem to be warming themselves.
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
The water I taste is warm and salt, like the sea,
And comes from a country far away as health.

Tulips

By Pamela Yoko Melton

The color of these flowers is too bright because it’s quiet here and we are hibernating like bears. Look at how sterile and safe and padded  Everything is! I can’t hurt myself here and I lie here and look at my hands because I am drugged and I cannot harm myself or others. Nurses and doctors Are my new Mothers and Fathers and I am a baby in the hospital.

I am hiding in the sheets—Whee!   I can see you, but you can’t see me. Why do I HAVE to see anything, DEAL With anything? The nurses are wearing                    white and are harmless and useless and exist in some great herd of whiteness.                       

I can’t really feel my body because the nurses are drugging the hell out of me and they float by me. I love this feeling, but wait! My annoying husband and kid still exist—ACH! There they are in a photo – they are so annoying that my skin tingles and I don’t have that warm, fuzzy-licious feeling anymore. Huh!

I am 30 and I have let my body and brain go and I want to die—geez, do I HAVE to go back home? (‘Cause I like it here.) They have drugged me so hard that I have lost my identity and it feels good to not be myself because when I am myself I feel like killing myself.

I wasn’t planning on being alive to receive these stupid flowers. I just wanted to die because to be dead seems more peaceful than being alive – just look at dead bodies and how at peace with themselves they appear. It seems so final, the end, mouth closed, clamped, done with speaking and being. How wonderful!

Well, since I’m alive, I’m going to bitch about the flowers I received. They are not the ones I would have preferred because I don’t want to be cheered up. However, they seem to be so alive (in comparison to me) that they are connecting with me through color.  Blood equals red and spilling blood equals death. (Yippee!) But wait! Even though they are loud and lively, they give me PAIN. Oh, PAIN.

Okay, now the drugs are officially making me crazy and neurotic and good God! The flowers have turned their heads and are LOOKING at me. Wait! I am now two-dimensional – I am a cartoon a shadow to them and the SUN (which I haven’t seen for days because I have been hiding underneath my sheets). I feel that now, I am alive, but I don’t exist! Why did they have to save me? Give me a razor, bitch! The tulips are stealing my air and I’d rather die my way than their way.
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Arthur Tanny

St. Crispin's Day Speech from King Henry V, IV. iv. 40-67
Shakespeare

This day is call’d the feast of Crispian

He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,

Will stand a tiptoe when this day is named

And rouse him at the name of Crispian.

He that shall see this day, and live old age,

Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbors,

And say, “Tomorrow is Saint Crispian”

Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars

And say “These wounds I had on Crispin’s day”

Old men forget; yet all shall be forgot

But he’ll remember with advantages

What feats he did that day.  Then shall our names

Familiar in his mouth as household words

Harry the King, Bedford and Exeter,

Warwick and Talbot, Salisbury and Gloucester

Be in their flowing cups freshly rememb’red

This story shall the good man teach his son;

And Crispin Crispian shall ne’er go by,

From this day to the ending of the world,

But we in it shall be remembered—

We few, we happy few, we band of brothers;

For he to-day that sheds his blood with me

Shall be my brother; be he ne’er so vile,

This day shall gentle his condition;

And gentlemen in England, now a-bed,

Shall think themselves accurs’d they were not here;

And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks

That fought with us upon Saint Crispin’s day

Neutered Text