Bev Tappan

Category: Poetry and Music Poems

Thoughts on the arts

  • RIVERWOODS POEMS: SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    THE SQUAMSCOTT BIRCH

    Barrel chested and brawny armed,

    The aged birch still stands

    Incongruous on the riverbank.

    They have fenced it in

    With posts and a metal chain

    To ward off scrambling kids.

    How many years did it take

    To put out all those limbs,

    One torn off by lightning

    Or by wind: the scar remains.

    It’s younger than the pines

    That sheltered shell diggers,

    But did it watch the big-sailed

    Gundalows barging bricks?

    It could not in its salad days

    Arrow skyward slimly straight

    But branched and branched again

    For what was near at hand.

    Hugely ugly, it calls

    Out to me.  It haunts my

    Memory.  It’s begging to be

    Made into a poem.

  • REFLECTIONS: COUNTERPOINT

    I ask myself why Baroque music
    Is the music for me
    Why not Tchaikovsky but W.A. Mozart
    Is my main man
    And not just for the horn passages
    Sweet as they are

    Stravinsky says all eighteenth century
    Music is to dance by.
    It’s true my feet prance off without me
    At the opening measure
    Of any toe-tapping tune and especially
    Contra dancing

    Where men and women take their turns
    Meet and separate
    Do their things and greet their friends
    Together and apart
    Grand right and left and swing your partner
    On equal terms.

    Baroque music is like that: two voices
    Male and female
    In animated cross-talk. The flute
    Makes a remark.
    The harpsichord agrees and amplifies

    Or the bas viol asks a question
    The violin responds
    And off they go in joyful repartee.
    If daughters could talk
    With fathers like that they’d grow up
    To be happy women.

  • AT HOME: RIGHT BRAIN AT WORK

    Poems swim up unsummoned
    When you are not fishing.
    Like wary young sunfish they nibble
    But never bite on your nightcrawlers

    Or settle like a charter flight
    Of waxwings noisily snackbreaking
    On smoky blue cedar berries
    Before resuming their scenic tour.

    Poems are showers of falling stars
    Caught by the camera you thought
    You aimed at Halley’s comet or
    The big dipper over New York City.

    You might as well try to net
    A sunbeam, corral a hurricane
    Or harvest snowflakes as tame
    A poem to come on call like
    A hummingbird to a sweetwater feeder.

  • FRIENDS: TO A STUDENT WHO READ HER POEM IN CHAPEL

    Your words are so damaged
    I am compelled to suspect
    They may be poetry

    As Emily Dickinson knew
    When the top of her head
    Began to come off
    That she was in
    The presence of a poem.

    Your images
    Ignited by resentment
    Exploded in our heads.
    Your laser sentences
    Melt down our cool.

    Your atomic words
    We fear
    If the reactor overheats
    May self destruct.