To Waken an Old Lady

Old age is
a flight of small cheeping birds
skimming bare trees
above a snow glaze.
Gaining and failing
They are buffeted
By a dark wind
But what?
On harsh weedstalks
The flock has rested, 
the snow 
is covered with broken
seedhusks
and the wind tempered 
by a shrill 
piping of plenty

	William Carlos Williams


________


The Second Coming

Although Ireland and Nigeria are quite different places, they share a
history of civil war, religious conflict and colonization.  Chinua
Achebe, a Nigerian, took the title of Things Fall Apart from a poem by
William Butler Yeats, one of Ireland's finest writers.  On another
piece of paper, explicate this poem.  Provide a paragraph or two of
analysis.  Then explain why Achebe would allude to this poem for the
title of TFA.

1	Turning and turning in the widening gyre		
	The falcon cannot hear the falconer;			
	Things fall apart; the center cannot hold;		
	Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,		
5	The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere	
	The ceremony of innocence is drowned;		
	The best lack all conviction, while the worst		
	Are full of passionate intensity.			

	Surely some revelation is at hand;			
10	Surely the Second Coming is at hand,
	The Second Coming!  Hardly are those words out
	When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
	Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
	A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
15	A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
	Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
	Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
	The darkness drops again; but now I know 
	That twenty centuries of stony sleep
20	Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
	And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
	Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

                            William Butler Yeats
________

It's Raining

It's raining women's voices as if they had died even in memory
And it's raining you as well marvelous encounters of my life O little
drops
Those rearing clouds begin to neigh a whole universe of auricular 
cities
Listen if it rains while regret and disdain weep to an ancient music
Listen to the bonds fall off which hold you above and below

                                      Apollinaire

________

You Begin

You begin this way:
this is your hand,
this is your eye,
that is a fish, blue and flat
on the paper, almost
the shape of an eye.
This is your mouth, this is an O
or a moon, whichever 
you like.  This is yellow.

Outside the window 
is the rain, green
because it is summer, and beyond that
the trees and then the world, 
which is round and has only 
the colors of these nine crayons.

This is the world, which is fuller
and more difficult to learn than I have said.
You are right to smudge it that way
with the red and then 
the orange: the world burns.

Once you have learned these words
you will learn that there are more
words than you can ever learn.
The word hand floats above your hand
like a small cloud over a lake.
The word hand anchors
your hand to this table,
your hand is a warm stone
I hold between two words.

This is your hand, these are my hands, this is the world,
which is round but not flat and has more colors
than we can see.

It begins, it has an end
this is what you will 
come back to, this is your hand.

                    Margaret Atwood