POETRY pt. 3

Summer Night By Dennis Jarrett ISSUE 55, FALL 1972 (Paris Review)

Elmer Fudd
by the fire
bald head shining
feet up on a round cushion

orange, transparent
Pluto sniffs
the perfect hedge
outside the window

a couple of sketchy
suburban houses
with lights on
purple grey
sky

Mickey calling
far off
here boy

>1 dianeham: This new thread is off to a nice start! I enjoyed that.

>2 FlorenceArt: :) glad to hear that. Starting off summer with a little whimsy.

Thanks for keeping this going, Diane. I like the "Summer Night" poem.

Vote Your Way to Hell

It’s a long and arduous journey.
Starving with numbness.
Tired of mixing kindness and sabotage.
You can’t trust instinct.
After the election, you can’t believe the weather is wrong again.
The sky cheats on your speech.
The process is complicated and precarious.
Disappointed, there’s no word of a sad sneer.
Nothing has changed.

What else do you expect?
This is already a hell, paved by your blood and passion.
You’d rather go back to the womb, it’s warmer.
May other reckless souls be consumed.

Even so, I want everyone to vote.
Vote your way to an alternative hell.
Congratulations!
You’re part of the construction of our living inferno.

Here, keep cracking and burning bones as fuel.
The walls scream for mercy, sounding like your singing voice.
Many innocent young souls are recognized.
Vote! You deserve limbo, not war.
We need to keep walking in the dark, searching for hellfire and passing offspring an improbable spring and a maybe sunrise.

-Chia-Lun Chang

Here is a cheery one from Poem-A-Day!

>1 dianeham: oh dear, should i be charmed or horrified? I’m both.

>5 msf59: I’m trying to stifle my political inclinations lately, but this rings nicely. 2016 was tough on any future outlook. November 2024 is uncomfortably close.

So many poets I have never heard of. Lovely discovering them here

>5 msf59: I've posted this before, on an earlier iteration of this thread, but this poem speaks to Vote Your Way to Hell so well that I can't resist posting it again here. I love when poems are in conversation with each other.

Voting as Fire Extinguishter
by Kyle Tran Myhre

When the haunted house catches fire:
a moment of indecision.
The house was, after all, built on bones,
and blood, and bad intentions.
Everyone who enters the house feels
that overwhelming dread, the evil
that perhaps only fire can purge.
It’s tempting to just let it burn.
And then I remember:
there are children inside.

>5 msf59: & >8 Julie_in_the_Library: Thanks for putting these together.

>8 Julie_in_the_Library: Wow! What a perfect companion piece to the one I shared. Nice, angry bookends.

I first came to Mandelstam 40 years ago, and am making another revisit as I am just about to read the biography just translated into English. My copy of the poems is beginning to fall apart as I read it so much in my 20s and 30s.

Before the 1930s he wrote much about nature and love.

116

Take from my palms, to sooth your heart,
a little honey, a little sun,
in obedience to Persephone’s bees.

You can’t untie a boat that was never moored
nor hear a shadow in its furs,
nor move through thick life without fear.

For us, all that’s left is kisses
tattered as the little bees
that die when they leave the hive.

Deep in the transparent night they’re still humming,
at home in the dark wood on the mountain,
in the mint and lungwort and the past.

But lay to your heart my rough gift,
this lovely dry necklace of dead bees
that once made a sun out of honey.

(1920)

***

From the 1930s on it got darker.

232

No, it's not for me to duck out of the mess

behind the cabdriver's back that's Moscow.

I am the cherry swinging from the streetcar strap
of an evil time. What am I doing alive?


We'll take Streetcar “A” and then streetcar “B,”

you and I to see who dies first. As for Moscow,
One minute she's a crouched sparrow,

the next she's puffed up like a pastry -

How does she find time to threaten from holes?

You do as you please, I won't chance it.

My glove's not warm enough for the drive

around the whole whore Moscow.

(1931)

Eventually he was sent to a Siberian labour camp for a poem that insulted Stalin.

Enjoyed those. Wish it had gone better for him.

>11 Caroline_McElwee: Interesting poems, Caroline. I was not familiar with him.

Backlit by the glitter-chopped horizon

Backlit by the glitter-chopped horizon, each of these 17 Marbled Godwits poking at the tideline must have a heartbeat; every living, perfect Whimbrel, its eyes. The surf is stacked, tilted, as if it were higher than the beach. There is an urgency to turn home, get this assignment of pleasure done, strike it off the list where vanish will be the last task, and then there is the thought of those 17 hearts. Less rain means more salt, anchovies, more whales—a ferment to savor against a distant cloud of Shearwaters above the incessant upwelling.

Killarney Clary

From Poem-A-Day



-Marbled Godwit (I still NEED to see one of these!)

^Yes, I love birds. Maybe more than poetry. 😁🐦

>14 msf59: Love that one! I’d love to see a marbled godwit too, and a whimbrel?

>11 Caroline_McElwee: A poet I've read about but not any of his poems. Need to correct that. Thanks for the nudge.

JOSEPHINE JACOBSEN
The Chinese Insomniacs (1981)

It is good to know
the Chinese insomniacs.
How, in 495 A.D.,
in 500 B.C.,
the moon shining, and the pine-
trees shining back
at it, a poet had to walk
to the window.

It is companionable
to remember my fellow
who was unable to sleep
because of a sorrow, or not;
who had to watch
for the wind
to stir night flowers in the garden
instead of making the deep journey.

They live nine hun-
dred years apart,
and turn, and turn, restless.
She says her sleeve is wet
with tears; he says something difficult
to forget, like
music counts the heartbeat.

A date is only a mark
on paper—it has little to do
with what is long.
It is good to have their company
tonight: a lady, awake
until birdsong:
a gentleman who made
poems later out of frag-
ments of the dark.

>17 dchaikin: Nice one

Rainer Maria Rilke
Evening
(Translation by Stephen Mitchell, 1984)

The sky puts on the darkening blue coat
held for it by a row of ancient trees;
you watch: and the lands grow distant in your sight,
one journeying to heaven, one that falls;

and leave you, not at home in either one,
not quite so still and dark as the darkened houses,
not calling to eternity with the passion
of what becomes a star each night, and rises;

and leave you (inexpressibly to unravel)
your life, with its immensity and fear,
so that, now bounded, now immeasurable,
it is alternately stone in you and star.

>19 dchaikin: love it!

>19 dchaikin: I love Rilke Dan. Time for a reread soon.

In the Park
by Maxine Kumin (1989)

You have forty-nine days between
death and rebirth if you're a Buddhist.
Even the smallest soul could swim
the English Channel in that time
or climb, like a ten-month-old child,
every step of the Washington Monument
to travel across, up, down, over or through
—you won't know till you get there which to do.

He laid on me for a few seconds
said Roscoe Black, who lived to tell
about his skirmish with a grizzly bear
in Glacier Park. He laid on me
not doing anything, I could feel
his heart beating against my heart.
Never mind lie and lay, the whole world
confuses them. For Roscoe Black you might say
all forty-nine days flew by.

I was raised on the Old Testament.
In it God talks to Moses, Noah,
Samuel, and they answer.
People confer with angels. Certain
animals converse with humans.
It's a simple world, full of crossovers.
Heaven's an airy Somewhere, and God
has a nasty temper when provoked,
but if there's a Hell, little is made of it.
No longtailed Devil, no eternal fire,

and no choosing what to come back as.
When the grizzly bear appears, he lies/lays down
on atheist and zealot. In the pitch-dark
each of us waits for him in Glacier Park.

>20 dianeham: >21 Caroline_McElwee: all these are from Sixty Years of American Poetry: Celebrating the Anniversary of the Academy of American Poets. The Rilke was under the American translator’s name. What got me is I’m reading through these, most flickering by, good but just another, and something about the Rilke said: wait, read this again. There’s more. And i read it over several times, and it read a little differently to me each time.

>22 dchaikin: this one’s great too.

>22 dchaikin: I haven't read Kumin for years, if I remember rightly a friend/mentor of Anne Sexton.

>23 dchaikin: I love when a poem draws you back and back. I'm finding that with the Mandelstam Dan. I have revisited him every decade and my joy deepens.

>25 Caroline_McElwee: i don’t know anything about Maxine Kumin. Thanks for that. I’ve read some essays by Mandelstam, and found them hard to process (in translation, of course). But I haven’t read his poetry.

Desiderata - Words for Life

Go placidly amid the noise and haste,
and remember what peace there may be in silence.
As far as possible without surrender
be on good terms with all persons.
Speak your truth quietly and clearly;
and listen to others,
even the dull and the ignorant;
they too have their story.

Avoid loud and aggressive persons,
they are vexations to the spirit.
If you compare yourself with others,
you may become vain and bitter;
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
Enjoy your achievements as well as your plans...

(I like how the poem ends too-)

With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.

— Max Ehrmann 1927

Full poem: https://allpoetry.com/Desiderata---Words-for-Life

>22 dchaikin: I love the "In the Park" poem, Dan. Thanks for sharing.

Was my Ehrmann entry too lightweight for everyone? 😁

Stability Is a Feeling

I am doing nothing with my exile
of a life.

I go to the supermarket Saturday
on walks in the wilderness
of America on Sunday. I get thin.

I encourage the man I married
to work hard
at a career I don’t admire.

He is not sweet or funny.
He is as steady and strong as death.

I find myself horrified
of the future; the woman I want to be

is implausible. Voicing
my tender ideas is not possible.

The book of poems inside me
is desperate for morning.

-Nazifa Islam

From Poem-A-Day

The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world and am free.

-Wendell Berry

>31 dianeham: beautiful !

>32 FlorenceArt: I wondered if you would like it.

>33 dianeham: Because it mentions Paris? It’s certainly far from the usual stereotypical descriptions you might expect with a title like that. Possibly it contributed to my reaction. And I keep wondering if I actually know this rue Charlot. The name rings a bell.

Anyway I also liked the poem for itself. A lot.

>31 dianeham: makes me want to go to Paris

>35 dchaikin: Bonne idée!

We can have a meet-up 😉

DEBORA GREGER

Adam's Daughter (1996)

Golden Transparent: by the light of an apple
I saw the earth, and it was green and good.
Under the dust it almost glowed. Gorged,
I lay in the back of the station wagon

between the boxes of apples my father had picked.
Golden Delicious: I had eaten of the fruit
of the knowledge of good and evil
but my eyes were not opened, I was no god.

No, I was a snake, well-fed,
crushed beneath the heel of the desert air
heavy with isotopes. I was none the wiser.
Brought forth in sorrow, I was the daughter

of a radiation monitor, entry level,
who would work his way up to "feasibility studies"
for reactors yet to be built. Once a month
he left two glass flasks of his urine in a leaden case

on the front porch. Oh, let him not be "hot."
By the unearthly glow of an apple
no, by the faint, sainted blue of atomic decay,
uranium father to daughter, longing to be lead,

the cottonwoods of the shelterbelt shivered.
Leaves whispered rumors of nothing, nothing amiss.
A rattlesnake's lazy hiss turned on itself,
a cyclotron asleep in the dirt.

A train wailed like a prophet weary of wilderness.
In a lead-lined car, steel flasks of plutonium,
squeezed drop by drop from rock,
tried not to be shaken by the world

outside the reactor gates. But what did I know?
As if out there at the checkpoint
a seraph had lifted a fiery sword.

No, the human heart
Is unknowable.
But in my birthplace
The flowers still smell
The same always.

Ki No Tsurayuki (lived 842-946)
translation by Kenneth Rexroth

THE GIVING IN
By Marvin Bell (today is his birthday)

Once I could ignore
birds everywhere,
though they were everywhere
I had to go.
Now I go wherever
birds are everywhere;
now I go anywhere
birds go,
having gone nowhere
they could not go.
That is the half of it.

>27 msf59: A reminder we need Mark.

>29 msf59: The book of poems inside me
is desperate for morning.

Perfect.

>30 msf59: Love WB Mark.

>31 dianeham: I have seen that Paris Diane.

>38 dchaikin: Thought provoking. >39 dchaikin: Speaking to us across so many years.

>40 dianeham: I think he speaks about Mark Diane

Note on Birds by Rainer Maria Rilke

I’ve figured it out, something that was never clear to me before – how all of creation transposes itself out of the world deeper and deeper into our inner world, and why birds cast such a spell on this path into us. The bird’s nest is, in effect, an outer womb given by nature; the bird only furnishes it and covers it rather than containing the whole thing inside itself. As a result, birds are the animals whose feelings have a very special, intimate familiarity with the outer world; they know that they share with nature their innermost mystery. That is why the bird sings its songs into the world as though it were singing into its inner self, that’s why we take a birdsong into our own inner selves so easily, it seems to us that we translate it fully, with no remainder, into our feelings; a birdsong can even, for a moment, make the whole world into a sky within us, because we feel that the bird does not distinguish between its heart and the world’s.

>40 dianeham: Since, I am seriously into birds, I think this one really speaks to me.

>42 dianeham: I love Note on Birds. Diane. Not all of Rilke's poetry works for me but this one is a gem.

I Go Back to May 1937

I see them standing at the formal gates of their colleges,
I see my father strolling out
under the ochre sandstone arch, the
red tiles glinting like bent
plates of blood behind his head, I
see my mother with a few light books at her hip
standing at the pillar made of tiny bricks,
the wrought-iron gate still open behind her, its
sword-tips aglow in the May air,
they are about to graduate, they are about to get married,
they are kids, they are dumb, all they know is they are
innocent, they would never hurt anybody.
I want to go up to them and say Stop,
don’t do it—she’s the wrong woman,
he’s the wrong man, you are going to do things
you cannot imagine you would ever do,
you are going to do bad things to children,
you are going to suffer in ways you have not heard of,
you are going to want to die. I want to go
up to them there in the late May sunlight and say it,
her hungry pretty face turning to me,
her pitiful beautiful untouched body,
his arrogant handsome face turning to me,
his pitiful beautiful untouched body,
but I don’t do it. I want to live. I
take them up like the male and female
paper dolls and bang them together
at the hips, like chips of flint, as if to
strike sparks from them, I say
Do what you are going to do, and I will tell about it.

-BY SHARON OLDS

This Be The Verse BY PHILIP LARKIN

They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.

But they were fucked up in their turn
By fools in old-style hats and coats,
Who half the time were soppy-stern
And half at one another’s throats.

Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.

Leaving the Island

Packing up, we are out of sorts,
And speak as two who’ve never loved.
The chores come due like book reports;
Kids shrug and shirk. At last you’ve shoved

Into the trunk the broken bike
(Which has to be repaired in town)
You shouldered on a mountain hike
Because the gears jammed halfway down …

And you’re ill-slept – the blessed cat
That can’t tell time, except for dawn,
Pawed you awake. The thermostat
That starts your runny nose is on;

But only yesterday you stood
On a ladder in the orange tree
And picked – as many as you could –
Globes from our golden orrery.

You lift them, and just now, by chance
The bulging sack seems to explode,
And in a mad, atomic dance
They jump in bright arcs down the road.

Your anger stutters into curse;
But for the bike, you’d slam the trunk.
I know to laugh would make it worse.
(Whole marriages that way are sunk.)

Out of our hands, our labours spill,
Irretrievable and sweet,
Faster and farther down the hill.
The day’s catastrophe complete,

Yet aren’t we lightened by an ounce
As our misgivings veer amiss?
My heart leaps as the oranges bounce
Ungovernable as happiness.

-A. E. Stallings

The Humming-Bird

The sundial makes no sign
At the point of the August noon.
The sky is of ancient tin,
And the ring of the mountains diffused and unmade
(One always remembers them).
On the twisted dark of the hemlock hedge
Rain, like a line of shivering violin-bows
Hissing together, poised on the last turgescent swell,
Batters the flowers.
Under the trumpet-vine arbor,
Clear, precise as an Audubon print,
The air is of melted glass,
Solid, filling interstices
Of leaves that are spaced on the spines
Like a pattern ground into glass;
Dead, as though dull red glass were poured into the mouth,
Choking the breath, molding itself into the creases of soft red tissues.

And a humming-bird darts head first,
Splitting the air, keen as a spurt of fire shot from the blow-pipe,
Cracking a star of rays; dives like a flash of fire,
Forked tail lancing the air, into the immobile trumpet;
Stands on the air, wings like a triple shadow
Whizzing around him.

Shadows thrown on the midnight streets by a snow-flecked arc-light,
Shadows like sword-play,
Splinters and spines from a thousand dreams
Whizz from his wings!

-Beatrice Ravenel From Poem-A-Day (first published 1923)



-Violet Sabrewing

>44 msf59: i love Sharon Olds. Terrific poem!

>45 dianeham: always entertaining to revisit.

>46 msf59: lovely

>47 msf59: this is fun. The “air of melted glass”…

Just an opening stanza (Rilke, 1923, translated by Stephen Mitchell):

We say release, and radiance, and rose,
and echo upon everything that’s known;
and yet, behind the world our names enclose is
the nameless: our true archetypes and home.

(Original German begins: “Wir sagen Reinheit und wir sagen Rose”. So a lot of Mitchell…)

August 15

I await the end of August and the murder of September.

I am here, tardy Autumn, waiting for you. I’ve prepared you a wheat porridge and lit a fire. Come with your wind and sweep away the shameless sun. Lift its hand from my shoulders.

Summer lies heavily on my chest. But my white hand swears by Autumn, and readies the saddle for its wretched horses. Autumn considers my idea then implements it: rows of stones ringing the hillside, and scattered clouds climbing the slope of the sky. Nothing more than this, nothing more.

Of course, you could add a burst of lightning to shatter my bones and the bones of the world.

You were all mistaken. You thought that horses live on the hills of Spring.

Autumn’s hills are the horses’ residence. The scent of rain excites them, their nostrils flare, then they leap over stone walls toward the summit, to graze on the edges of clouds.

-Zakaria Mohammed

Translated from the Arabic

>50 msf59: Oh I enjoyed that.

Finale
BY PABLO NERUDA
TRANSLATED BY WILLIAM O'DALY

Matilde, years or days
sleeping, feverish,
here or there,
gazing off,
twisting my spine,
bleeding true blood,
perhaps I awaken
or am lost, sleeping:
hospital beds, foreign windows,
white uniforms of the silent walkers,
the clumsiness of feet.

And then, these journeys
and my sea of renewal:
your head on the pillow,
your hands floating
in the light, in my light,
over my earth.

It was beautiful to live
when you lived!

The world is bluer and of the earth
at night, when I sleep
enormous, within your small hands.

A Note from the Editor
"Pablo Neruda died on this day in 1973. Known for both his poetic and political work, many have argued that his work was difficult to translate into English and that much is lost, including sonic components, when removing the poem from its original language, Spanish. This prompts us to wonder: to what extent is a poem mediated by the language it was written in?" - Guest Editor Alisha Isherwood

>52 dianeham: Good one, Diane. I am a fan of Neruda too.

Something Like We Did IV

Space is the place.
—Sun Ra

Wind in the leaves
of the live oak next door

and the June bugs
click-click

hard bodies
hitting the screen.

Couldn’t tell how much
time had passed.

Light from traffic
on the ceiling.

Late that sound
in the sky soft.

Thinking out loud
then inside my head:

they were still there—
the way they walked

that bright flicker
in their chests.

Sometimes I have believed

I don’t belong
here— I mean

it’s not just
the American insanities

but everywhere: the sense
of having been left

on Earth
with no explanation—

a mouse dropped in a maze

-by Tim Seibles

>54 msf59: beautiful!

Memory of a Bird

What is left is a beak,
a wing,
a sense of feathers,

the rest lost
in a pointless blur of tiny
rectangles.

The bird has flown,
leaving behind
an absence.

This is the very
essence
of flight--a bird

so swift
that only memory
can capture it

The Birds

are heading south, pulled
by a compass in the genes.
They are not fooled
by this odd November summer,
though we stand in our doorways
wearing cotton dresses.
We are watching them

as they swoop and gather—
the shadow of wings
falls over the heart.
When they rustle among
the empty branches, the trees
must think their lost leaves
have come back.

The birds are heading south,
instinct is the oldest story.
They fly over their doubles,
the mute weathervanes,
teaching all of us
with their tailfeathers
the true north.

-Linda Pastan

^ I am currently reading Patan's collection Almost an Elegy and enjoying it very much. Yes, I am a big bird lover.

Enjoying these recent posts

Marina Tsvetaeva

from SEPARATION

I know, I know
That earth’s enchantment—
This carved
Charmed cup—
Is no more ours
Than air is ours
Than stars
Than nests
Suspended in the dawn.

I know, I know
It has a master.
Still, like a towering
Eagle rising
High
With your wing
Purloin this cup.
From the cold pink lips
Of God.
—1921

—Translated from the Russian by Rose Styron and Olga Carlisle

Thank you Mark & Diane. Food for the soul.

From Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, a stanza of a sunset

The dayes honour, and the hevenes eye,
The nyghtes foo—al this clepe I the sonne—
Gan westren faste, and downward for to wrye,
As he that hadde his dayes cours yronne,
And white thynges wexen dymme and donne,
For lakke of light, and sterres for t’apere,
That she and al hire folk in wente yfeere.

>58 dianeham: gorgeous!

A poem is never by Diane Hamilton

A poem is never an open hand
Is never extended
A poem is a bird who
Flies into your closed window
In the middle of the night
A poem sits on your
Back porch stunned
Still barely blinking
A poem is a closed fist
Never knocking at the door
Knocking against your teeth
Bleeding knuckles
A poem is always hungry
Gnawing at your stomach
Stripping your bones of calcium
A poem is a kiss that bruises your lips
And bites your neck
A poem is a lie worse
Than any truth
A poem cannot reassure you
Or hold your hand
Or stroke your hair
And if it does
It’s dangerous
It will whisper in your ear
And soothe you
Lull you into a state of unknowing
It will tell you it is the only
Poem you’ll ever need
And it will become
All the poems you never write
It will become the last words
You ever hear
And still
It will not extend its hand
It will not reassure
But it will bury you
In mounds of blank
White paper.

>62 dianeham: Wow.

>63 FlorenceArt: :-)

>62 dianeham: I love that.

>65 lisapeet: thank you

That's a powerful poem Diane.

>62 dianeham: I really like Hamilton poem, Diane.

Lightning

Neon zigzag…
migraine embedded in cloud…
I draw all the blinds,
hide in the darkened basement.
The rumble of thunder
like a feared uncle threatening
from the next room.
Even the dog trembles,
the fur on a cartoon cat stands on end,
its paw caught in a live socket.
Fluorescence blinding
every window.
There was a meeting
of people struck by lightning
who lived to proudly tell of it,
and Captain Marvel wears its emblem
bright on his chest. Think
of Ben Franklin’s crazy kite probing
for answers. Still,
the barometer tumbles,
a sizzle of fear splits the sky.
It’s Zeus, high on amphetamines, aiming
his bolts in my direction.

-Linda Pastan

Kuroda Saburo

Evening Glow

Like being where I shouldn’t
this guilty conscience—
when
oh, why
did it lodge within me?
Wordless I watch
the faded evening glow, cloudlike
in the window of this late city train,
the sunset sky
the twilight treetops
the ashen buildings wave upon wave—
Shadows,
beautiful shadows.
Beautiful shadows of ugly things.

—Translated from the Japanese by Bruno Peter Navasky

From The Paris Review issue no. 121 (Winter 1991)

>53 msf59: Me too.

>56 msf59: Lovely.

>58 dianeham: Haven't read her for years.

>62 dianeham: Wonderful, and one of yours Diane. I shall save it.

O wild angels of the open hills
Before all legends and before all tears:
O voyagers of where the evening falls
In the vast August of the years:
O half-seen passers of the lonely knolls,
Before all sorrow and before all truth
You were: and you were with me in my youth.

Angels of the shadowed ancient land
That lies yet unenvisioned, without myth,
Return, and silent-winged descend
On the winds that you have voyaged with,
And in the barren evening stand
On the hills of my childhood, in whose silences,
Savage, before all sorrow, your presence is.

Early Ursula Le Guin

I am currently, slowly reading her complete poems.

>72 Caroline_McElwee: Caro, if you post some of your poetry, I'll post some of mine....

>73 avaland: I'll take a look later Lois. It's a while since I've written any.