Tag: poems

Michael Walsh: “Whispering to the Nearby Warriors”

Photographers Unknown, Whispering to the Nearby Warriors

        At Jeffers Petroglyphs

By their initials and first names
           scratched into quartzite

underfoot, I know the culprits: Otto
           like a fancy scar

on a buffalo’s flank, Sven
           muddling the lines of a glyph,

the meaning of its shape forgotten, and Judy
           who needed to record the date

of defacement. I hear her story from the guide:
           how she stole her father’s chisel,

chipped her way into a turtle’s back,
           how much shame she brought

to her family in this search for the lost meanings
           hidden within the shapes of the letters,

written on a shell next to the sun, an attempt,
           if I’m generous,

to contrast two languages and find,
           in the mixed -up symbols,

the trees of her homeland cut down long ago.
           She still lives. I believe, on some days,

wherever she is, she hears the forest mumbling
           when the wind blows across the carved twigs

of her name, out here, whispering to the nearby warriors,
           asking forgiveness for this trespass.

Michael Walsh, The Kids Who Carved into Petroglyphs, The Dirt Riddles, 2021

Michael Walsh is a poet and writer, an independent scholar, and a creative writing instructor. With an early interest in writing, he began his studies at Illinois’s Knox College in 1993. Walsh studied under Poet-in-Residence Sheryl St. Germain and the Philip Sydney Post Professor of English Robin Metz, both of whom made an impact on his writing career. Supported by his professors, Walsh was able, as a Queer student, to connect and have meaningful conversations with the faculty. He graduated with his Bachelor of Arts in Creative Writing in 1997.

After a period of reflection on his past studies during a stay at his family’s farm, Walsh entered the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities from which he graduated with his Master of Fine Arts in Creative and Professional Writing. His first collection of poetry, “The Dirt Riddles”, was published in 2010 by the University of Arkansas Press; this volume won the Miller Williams Prize and the Thom Gunn Award for Gay Poetry. Walsh’s poetry collections also include two chapbooks through Red Dragonfly Press, the 2003 “Adam Working the Garden” and the 2011 “Sleepwalks”. His 2021 “Creep Love”, published by Autumn House Press, was a Lambda Poetry Award finalist.

Michael Walsh is the editor of the 2022 “Queer Nature: A Poetry Anthology”, the first eco-queer anthology of contemporary nature poetry that magnifies and centers LBGTQ+ voices and perspectives. It contains work from over two hundred queer writers from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Expanding the genre of nature poetry and offering new views on queerness and the natural world, the anthology features poets Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Bianco and Allen Ginsber, as well as, emerging poets such as Jari Bradley, Alicia Mountain and Eric Tan.

In recognition for his work, Walsh was awarded a Minnesota State Arts Board Fellowship in Poetry and a Jerome Foundation Emerging Artist Fellowship. After residing in Minneapolis for more than two decades, Michael Walsh now lives with his husband in the Driftless region of southwest Wisconsin where he continues to develop his eco-queer and literary teachings.

Michael Walsh’s website, which includes information on readings, lectures and poetry manuscript reviews, is located at: https://www.michaeltwalsh.com

Header Image (Eight): Danny Lyon, “Showers”, 1968, Gelatin Silver Print, Detail, 35.6 x 27.9 cm, Private Collection

Top Insert Photo: Adam Nelsen, “Michael Walsh”, Date Unknown, Color Print

Digby Mackworth Dolben: “For Should He Ever Pass. . .”

Photographers Unknown, For Should He Ever Pass

My sister Death! I pray thee come to me
Of thy sweet charity,
And be my nurse but for a little while;
I will indeed lie still,
And not detain thee long, when once is spread,
Beneath the yew, my bed:
I will not ask for lilies or for roses;
But when the evening closes,
Just take from any brook a single knot
Of pale Forget-me-not,
And lay them in my hand, until I wake,
For his dear sake;
(For should he ever pass and by me stand,
He yet might understand—)
Then heal the passion and the fever
With one cool kiss, for ever.

Digby Macworth Dolben, Sister Death

Born in Guernsey in February of 1848, Digby Augustus Stewart Mackworth Dolben was an English poet. His father, William Harcourt Isham Mackworth, was the younger son of the Third Baronet, Sir Digby Mackworth, and his mother Frances Dolben was the daughter and heiress of Sir John English Dolben, the Fourth Baronet. Digby Dolben was raised, under a strict and uncompromising Protestant discipline, at Finedon Hall, his mother’s family estate in Northamptonshire, England.

Digby Mackworth Dolben was educated at Cheam School, a mixed preparatory school in Hampshire, and, starting in 1862, at Eaton College, where he studied under Headmaster and poet William Johnson Cory. William Cory’s method of teaching and his collection of verses, “Ionica” were sources of inspiration for Dolben in his own poetic writings. While at Eaton in the early 1860s, Dolben met his distant older cousin, Robert Bridges, who became his mentor and introduced him to his circle of high church friends. During his school years, Dolben seemed abstracted and other-worldly to his college friends; by his activities, he appeared to his headmaster as an agitator who was dangerously misguided.

In 1863, Dolben started to cause considerable scandal at Eaton College with his eccentric and exhibitionist behavior. Defying his strict Protestant upbringing, he became a novice in the English Order of Saint Benedict and began to sign his letters ‘Dominic’. By associating with the new ritualistic, religious revival of that time and wearing a monk’s habit, Dolben would cause scandal by walking, often barefoot, through the streets of the city. He also began to mark his romantic attachment to fellow student Martin Le Merchant Gosselin, a year senior, with written love poems. It was during this period that Dolben destroyed by fire all his previous written poetic work.

In July of 1863, Robert Bridges left Eaton to attend Oxford College. Several weeks later on July 30th, Digby Dolben was dismissed from Eaton after engaging in secret meetings with Jesuit priests. He maintained his communication with Bridges through letters sent to Oxford; however, there is no evidence of any poems being written since the destruction of his earlier work. It was not until the Lenten season of 1864 that Dolben resumed his poetry writing. At the age of sixteen, he wrote his first mature poem “Homo Factus Est” and had six poems published in the Union Review.

On his seventeenth birthday in 1865, Digby Dolben was introduced by his cousin Robert Bridges to Gerald Manley Hopkins, a fellow poet who was attending Oxford’s Balliol College. In accounts to his biographer, Hopkins stated that meeting Dolben, who was four years his junior, was the most emotional event of his undergraduate years, and probably his entire life. After Hopkins was forbidden by his High Anglican confessor to have any contact with Dolben, Hopkins and Dolben maintained their communication through letters; Hopkins wrote, during this time, two poems about his love for Dolben, “Where Art Thou Friend” and “The Beginning of the End’.

In 1865, Dolben’s work began to mature as he turned from writing Christian themed poetry to poems portraying a more Greco or pagan ideal of beauty. By 1866, he had moved to the Welsh village of Boughrood and studied there under tutor Henry de Winton for his Oxford entrance exams. Dolben took his entrance exams on May 2nd of 1867; however, he fainted during the exams and received a failing score. Thirteen days later on June 28th, Digby Mackworth Dolben, at the age of nineteen, drowned in the River Welland.

In 1865, Dolben’s work began to mature as he turned from writing Christian themed poetry to poems portraying a more Greco or pagan ideal of beauty. By 1866, he had moved to the Welsh village of Boughrood and studied there under tutor Henry de Winton for his Oxford entrance exams. Dolben took his entrance exams on May 2nd of 1867; however, he fainted during the exams and received a failing score. Thirteen days later on June 28th, Digby Dolben, at the age of nineteen, drowned in the River Welland.

Digby Dolben had taken Walter, the ten year old son of his tutor, Reverend C. E. Pritchard, on his back across the deep river. Upon the return swim, Dolben sank within several yards of the shoreline. Walter Pritchard, only able to float on his back, made it to shore with the assistance of men who came to the rescue. Dolben’s body was found several hours later when it surfaced further down the river. He was buried under the altar at Finedon Estate on July 6th of 1867.

In 1911, Robert Bridges, who would become poet laureate of England two years later, published the poetry of his cousin Digby Dolben, all of which had been written in the last three years of Dolben’s life. Approached by Gerald Manley Hopkins as to whether the Dolben family would publish Dolben’s work, the independently wealthy Bridges decided he would finance the publishing of both Dolben’s and Hopkins’s collectibe poetry. Published in a single volume entitled “Poems”, Digby Dolben’s work is considered to be among the best poetry of the Oxford Movement.

In 1981, “The Poems and Letters of Digby Mackworth Dolben, 1848-1867”, compiled by Martin Cohen, was published by the Avebury press. In 2017, author Simon Edge published his historical fiction novel “The Hopkins Conundrum”, a story about Gerald Hopkins’s infatuation with Dolben.

Note: A journal article on the life of Digby Mackworth Dolben, written by Liam Brophy, can be found at the JSTOR site located at: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20513622

An online copy of Robert Bridges’s 1911 “Poems of Digby Mackworth Dolben”, published by Oxford University Press, can be found on The Internet Archive located at: https://archive.org/details/poemsofdigbymack00dolb_0/page/n3/mode/2up