Here were the words of the Blind Poet

This one I picked up from Poets.org, because I didn't have a poem in mind for today.  You could play "name that poem" with the references in here...I put some at the bottom.

An Octave Above Thunder

Carol Muske-Dukes

  ... reverberation

Of thunder of spring over distant mountains

He who was living is now dead

We who were living are now dying

With a little patience.

--T. S. Eliot,

"What the Thunder Said"

1

She began as we huddled, six of us,

in the cellar, raising her voice above

those towering syllables...

Never mind she cried when storm candles

flickered, glass shattered upstairs.

Reciting as if on horseback,

                   she whipped the meter,

trampling rhyme, reining in the reins

of the air with her left hand as she

stood, the washing machine behind her

              stunned on its haunches, not spinning.

She spun the lines around each other,

her gaze fixed. I knew she'd silenced

a cacophony of distractions in her head,

              to summon what she owned, rote-bright:

                             Of man's first disobedience,

                                        and the fruit...

                              of the flower in a crannied wall

                              and one clear call...

for the child who'd risen before school assemblies:

eerie Dakota rumble that rolled yet never brought

rain breaking over the podium. Her voice rose,

                        an octave above thunder:

When I consider how my light is spent--

I thought of her light, poured willy-nilly.

in this dark world and wide: half-blind, blind,

a widening distraction Getting and spending

 we lay waste our powers...Different poem, a trick!

Her eyes singled me out as the wind slowed.

Then, reflective, I'd rather be / a Pagan

 suckled in a creed outworn / than a dullard

                         with nothing by heart.

It was midsummer, Minnesota. In the sky,

the Blind Poet blew sideways, his cape spilling

rain. They also serve! she sang, hailing

                                  closure

as I stopped hearing her. I did not want to

stand and wait. I loathed nothing so much

as the forbearance now in her voice,

              insisting that Beauty was at hand,

but not credible. I considered

how we twisted into ourselves to live.

When the storm stopped, I sat still,

                             listening.

Here were the words of the Blind Poet--

crumpled like wash for the line, to be

dried, pressed flat. Upstairs, someone called

                   my name. What sense would it ever

make to them, the unread world, the getters and spenders,

if they could not hear what I heard,

              not feel what I felt

              nothing ruined poetry, a voice revived it,

                                              extremity.

References:

"Of man's first disobedience" --Milton, Paradise Lost

"of the flower in a crannied wall" -- Tennyson, "Flower in a crannied wall"

"One clear call" -- Tennyson, "Crossing the Bar"

"When I consider how my light is spent" 

 "in this dark world and wide" 

                       --Milton, Sonnet 19, "On His Blindness"

"Getting and spending/we lay waste our powers" 

"I'd rather be / a Pagan suckled in a creed outworn

             -- Wordsworth, "The World is Too Much with Us"

"They also serve"

"stand and wait"

                 --Milton, Sonnet 19, "On His Blindness" 

"The Blind Poet" could be an allusion to Homer or to Milton (at the end of his life), but perhaps also to Tiresias, the blind prophet and a voice in The Waste Land. And the number of allusions here make it seem like she is paying homage to Eliot.