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    Apples from Shinar: A Book of Poems
    Apples from Shinar: A Book of Poems
    Apples from Shinar: A Book of Poems
    Ebook83 pages48 minutes

    Apples from Shinar: A Book of Poems

    By Hyam Plutzik

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    About this ebook

    Apples from Shinar was Hyam Plutzik's second complete collection. Originally published in 1959 as a part of Wesleyan University Press's newly minted poetry series, the collection includes "The Shepherd"—a section of the book-length poem "Horatio," which earned Plutzik a finalist position for the Pulitzer Prize. "The love and the words and the simplicity," that mark Plutzik's poetry, writes Philip Booth, "are all here [in Apples from Shinar], and the poems come peacefully, and wonderfully, alive." With a previously unpublished foreword by Hyam Plutzik and a new afterword by David Scott Kastan, this edition marks the centenary of Plutzik's birth and will introduce a new generation of readers to the work of one of the best mid-century American poets.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWesleyan University Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2012
    ISBN9780819571687
    Apples from Shinar: A Book of Poems

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      Book preview

      Apples from Shinar - Hyam Plutzik

      BECAUSE THE RED OSIER DOGWOOD

      Because the red osier dogwood

      Is the winter lightning,

      The retention of the prime fire

      In the naked and forlorn season

      When snow is winner

      (For he flames quietly above the shivering mouse

      In the moldy tunnel,

      The eggs of the grasshopper awaiting metamorphosis

      Into the lands of hay and the times of the daisy,

      The snake contorted in the gravel,

      His brain suspended in thought

      Over an abyss that summer will fill with murmuring

      And frogs make laughable: the cricket-haunted time)—

      I, seeing in the still red branches

      The stubborn, unflinching fire of that time,

      Will not believe the horror at the door, the snow-white worm

      Gnawing at the edges of the mind,

      The hissing tree when the sleet falls.

      For because the red osier dogwood

      Is the winter sentinel,

      I am certain of the return of the moth

      (Who was not destroyed when an August flame licked him),

      And the cabbage butterfly, and all the families

      Whom the sun fathers, in the cauldron of his mercy.

      THE DREAM ABOUT OUR MASTER, WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

      This midnight dream whispered to me:

      Be swift as a runner, take the lane

      Into the green mystery

      Beyond the farm and haystack at Stone.

      You leave tomorrow, not to return.

      Hands that were fastened in a vise,

      A useless body, rooted feet,

      While time like a bell thundered the loss,

      Witnessed the closing of the gate.

      Thus sleep and waking both betrayed.

      I had one glimpse: In a close of shadow

      There rose the form of a manor-house,

      And in a corner a curtained window.

      All was lost in a well of trees,

      Yet I knew for certain this was the place.

      If the hound of air, the ropes of shade,

      And the gate between that is no gate,

      Had not so held me and delayed

      These cowardly limbs of bone and blood,

      I would have met him as he lived!

      TO MY DAUGHTER

      Seventy-seven betrayers will stand by the road,

      And those who love you will be few but stronger.

      Seventy-seven betrayers, skilful and various,

      But do not fear them: they are unimportant.

      You must learn soon, soon, that despite Judas

      The great betrayals are impersonal

      (Though many would be Judas, having the will

      And the capacity, but few the courage).

      You must learn soon, soon, that even love

      Can be no shield against the abstract demons:

      Time, cold and fire, and the law of pain,

      The law of things falling, and the law of forgetting.

      The messengers, of faces and names known

      Or of forms familiar, are innocent.

      I AM DISQUIETED WHEN I SEE MANY HILLS

      I am disquieted when I see many hills,

      As one who looks down on the backs of tremendous cattle,

      Shoulder to shoulder, munching in silence the grass

      In a timeless region.

      Where time is not, event and breath are nothing,

      Yet we who are lost in time, growing and fading

      In the shadow of majesty, cannot but dumbly yearn

      For its stronger oblivion.

      Reject this archaic craving to be a herdsman

      Of the immortals. Until they trample you down

      Be still the herdsman’s boy among these giants

      And the ridges of laurel.

      AS THE GREAT HORSE ROTS ON THE HILL

      As the great horse rots on the hill

      till the stars wink through his ribs;

      As the genera of horses become silent,

      the thunder of the hooves receding in the silence;

      As the tree shrivels in the wind of time,

      as the wind Time dries the locust tree—

      Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.

      I have been in many towns and seen innumerable houses,

      also rocks, trees, people, stars and insects.

      Thieves, like ants, are making off with them,

      taking them to your old ant-hill.

      Thus you prepare the future for me and my loved ones.

      What spider made the machine of many threads?

      The threads run

      from time’s instants to all the atoms of the universe.

      In each instant a wheel turns in your head, threads go taut,

      and one

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