Juggling in Verse

HAZARDOUS OCCUPATIONS

By Carl Sandburg

 

Jugglers keep six bottles in the air.

Club swingers toss up six and eight.

The knife throwers miss each other's

 ears by a hair and the steel quivers

 in the target wood.

The trapeze battlers do a back-and-forth

 high in the air with a girls feet

 and ankles upside down.

So they earn a living - till they miss

 once, twice, even three times.

So they live on hate and love as gypsies,

 live in satin skins and shiny eyes.

In their graves do the elbows jostle once

 in a blue moon - and wriggle to throw

 a kiss answering a dreamed-of applause?

Do the bones repeat: It's a good act ­

we got a good hand...?

The juggler stood firmly and relaxed. He began his

cascade with the sun. It rose and was then followed by

the man and woman, a double toss, not one after

the other but together. From this point the sun, woman

and man fell into the pattern every juggler owns.

          Sun up... woman up... sundown

  man up... woman down... sun up... mandown

and so on until the juggler became loosened enough

to play another pattern.

Crys Aprill, New Orleans, LA 

 

 

EASTER SUNDAY

By Jorie Graham, Arcata, CA

 

we took a walk through the public

gardens. There was jazz, pantomime, fortune

telling. Children ran with balloons, a happy

gravity, and thousands of faces floated by.

 

the human cloudbank held down

by joy. The self

is a wake, I thought, of something terribly

quick-like notes or prophesies

 

or the juggler at the heart

of our small crowd

playing a butcher knife, a flaming torch

and an apple he bites

each time it comes around.

We spent the day this way, a day

you told me you loved me

for the first time

 

as if in a way we too could enter

that swift galaxy

where sense is made

of gravity. When dusk came on

 

he was still there.

In the dark only the flame was visible - the real

and its reflection in the blade - the apple

grown invisible

 

to us, a patch of dark

though he kept finding it and the beautiful

was secured again and again

by its loss.

 

JUGGLER

 

By Richard Wilbur

From "The Poems of Richard Wilbur" (c) 1963

 

A ball will bounce, but less and less. It's not

A light-hearted thing, resents its own resilience.

Falling is what it loves, and the earth falls

So in our hearts from brilliance,

Settles and is forgot.

It takes a sky-blue juggler with five red balls

 

To shake our gravity up. Whee, in the air

The balls roll round, wheel on his wheeling hands,

Learning the ways of lightness, alter to spheres

Grazing his finger ends,

Cling to their courses there,

Swinging a small heaven about his ears.

 

But a heaven is easier made of nothing at all

Than the earth regained, and still and sole within

The spin of worlds, with a gesture sure and noble

He reels that heaven in,

Landing it ball by ball,

And trades it all for a broom, a plate, a table.

 

Oh, on his toe the table is turning, the broom's

Balancing up on his nose, and the plate whirls

On the tip of the broom! Damn, what a show, we cry:

The boys stamp, and the girls

Shriek, and the drum booms

And all comes down, and he bows and says good-bye.

 

If the juggler is tired now, if the broom stands

In the dust again, if the table starts to drop

Through the daily dark again, and though the plate

Lies flat on the table top,

For him we batter our hands

Who has won for once over the world's weight.