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"She had forgotten how the August night"
|
She had forgotten how the August night
Was level as a lake beneath the moon,
In which she swam a little, losing sight
Of shore; and how the boy, who was at noon
Simple enough, not different from the rest,
Wore now a pleasant mystery as he went,
Which seemed to her an honest enough test
Whether she loved him, and she was content.
So loud, so loud the million crickets’ choir. . .
So sweet the night, so long-drawn-out and late. . .
And if the man were not her spirit’s mate,
Why was her body sluggish with desire?
Stark on the open field the moonlight fell,
But the oak tree’s shadow was deep and black and
secret as a well.
| Edna St. Vincent Millay | Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
On Teaching
|
Then said a teacher, Speak to us of Teach-
ing.
And he said:
No man can reveal to you aught but that
which already lies half asleep in the dawn-
ing of your knowledge.
The teacher who walks in the shadow of
the temple, among his followers, gives not
of his wisdom but rather of his faith and
his lovingness.
If he is indeed wise he does not bid you
enter the house of his wisdom, but rather
leads you to the threshold of your own
mind.
The astronomer may speak to you of his
understanding of space, but he cannot give
you his understanding.
The musician may sing to you of the
rhythm which is in all space, but he cannot
give you the ear which arrests the rhythm
nor the voice that echoes it.
And he who is versed in the science of
numbers can tell of the regions of weight
and measure, but he cannot conduct you
thither.
For the vision of one man lends not its
wings to another man.
And even as each one of you stands alone
in God’s knowledge, so must each one of
you be alone in his knowledge of God and
in his understanding of the earth.
| Kahlil Gibran | Living,The Mind,Activities,School & Learning,Religion,God & the Divine | null |
On Pleasure
|
Then a hermit, who visited the city once
a year, came forth and said, Speak to us of
Pleasure.
And he answered, saying:
Pleasure is a freedom-song,
But it is not freedom.
It is the blossoming of your desires,
But it is not their fruit.
It is a depth calling unto a height,
But it is not the deep nor the high.
It is the caged taking wing,
But it is not space encompassed.
Ay, in very truth, pleasure is a freedom-
song.
And I fain would have you sing it with
fullness of heart; yet I would not have you
lose your hearts in the singing.
Some of your youth seek pleasure as if it
were all, and they are judged and rebuked.
I would not judge nor rebuke them. I
would have them seek.
For they shall find pleasure, but not her
alone;
Seven are her sisters, and the least of them
is more beautiful than pleasure.
Have you not heard of the man who was
digging in the earth for roots and found a
treasure?
And some of your elders remember
pleasures with regret like wrongs com-
mitted in drunkenness.
But regret is the beclouding of the mind
and not its chastisement.
They should remember their pleasures with
gratitude, as they would the harvest of a
summer.
Yet if it comforts them to regret, let them
be comforted.
And there are among you those who are
neither young to seek nor old to remember;
And in their fear of seeking and remem-
bering they shun all pleasures, lest they
neglect the spirit or offend against it.
But even in their foregoing is their
pleasure.
And thus they too find a treasure though
they dig for roots with quivering hands.
But tell me, who is he that can offend the
spirit?
Shall the nightingale offend the stillness of
the night, or the firefly the stars?
And shall your flame or your smoke
burden the wind?
Think you the spirit is a still pool which
you can trouble with a staff?
Oftentimes in denying yourself pleasure
you do but store the desire in the recesses
of your being.
Who knows but that which seems omitted
today, waits for tomorrow?
Even your body knows its heritage and
its rightful need and will not be deceived.
And your body is the harp of your soul,
And it is yours to bring forth sweet
music from it or confused sounds.
And now you ask in your heart, “How
shall we distinguish that which is good in
pleasure from that which is not good?”
Go to your fields and your gardens, and
you shall learn that it is the pleasure of
the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower
to yield its honey to the bee.
For to the bee a flower is a fountain of
life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of
love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving
and the receiving of pleasure is a need and
an ecstasy.
People of Orphalese, be in your pleas-
ures like the flowers and the bees.
| Kahlil Gibran | Living,The Mind,Love,Desire,Nature,Animals,Trees & Flowers | null |
On Beauty
|
And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:
Where shall you seek beauty, and how
shall you find her unless she herself be your
way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except
she be the weaver of your speech?
The aggrieved and the injured say,
“Beauty is kind and gentle.
Like a young mother half-shy of her
own glory she walks among us.”
And the passionate say, “Nay, beauty is
a thing of might and dread.
Like the tempest she shakes the earth
beneath us and the sky above us.”
The tired and the weary say, “Beauty is
of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint
light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”
But the restless say, “We have heard her
shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of
hoofs, and the beating of wings and
the roaring of lions.”
At night the watchmen of the city say,
“Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the
east.”
And at noontide the toilers and the way-
farers say, “We have seen her leaning over
the earth from the windows of the sunset.”
In winter say the snow-bound, “She shall
come with the spring leaping upon the hills.”
And in the summer heat the reapers say,
“We have seen her dancing with the autumn
leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her
hair.”
All these things have you said of beauty,
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of
needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy.
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty
hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul en-
chanted.
It is not the image you would see nor the
song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you
close your eyes and a song you hear though
you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark,
nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden for ever in bloom and
a flock of angels for ever in flight.
People of Orphalese, beauty is life when
life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mir-
ror.
But you are eternity and you are the mir-
ror.
| Kahlil Gibran | Living,The Mind,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
On Laws
|
Then a lawyer said, But what of our Laws,
master?
And he answered:
You delight in laying down laws,
Yet you delight more in breaking them.
Like children playing by the ocean who
build sand-towers with constancy and then
destroy them with laughter.
But while you build your sand-towers the
ocean brings more sand to the shore,
And when you destroy them the ocean
laughs with you.
Verily the ocean laughs always with the
innocent.
But what of those to whom life is not an
ocean, and man-made laws are not sand-
towers,
But to whom life is a rock, and the law
a chisel with which they would carve it in
their own likeness?
What of the cripple who hates dancers?
What of the ox who loves his yoke and
deems the elk and deer of the forest
stray and vagrant things?
What of the old serpent who cannot
shed his skin, and calls all others naked
and shameless?
And of him who comes early to the
wedding-feast, and when over-fed and tired
goes his way saying that all feasts are
violation and all feasters lawbreakers?
What shall I say of these save that they
too stand in the sunlight, but with their
backs to the sun?
They see only their shadows, and their
shadows are their laws.
And what is the sun to them but a caster
of shadows?
And what is it to acknowledge the laws
but to stoop down and trace their shadows
upon the earth?
But you who walk facing the sun, what
images drawn on the earth can hold you?
You who travel with the wind, what
weather-vane shall direct your course?
What man’s law shall bind you if you
break your yoke but upon no man's prison
door?
What laws shall you fear if you dance
but stumble against no man’s iron chains?
And who is he that shall bring you to
judgment if you tear off your garment yet
leave it in no man’s path?
People of Orphalese, you can muffle the
drum, and you can loosen the strings of the
lyre, but who shall command the skylark
not to sing?
| Kahlil Gibran | Nature,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
On Freedom
|
And an orator said, Speak to us of Free-
dom.
And he answered:
At the city gate and by your fireside I
have seen you prostrate yourself and worship
your own freedom,
Even as slaves humble themselves before
a tyrant and praise him though he slays
them.
Ay, in the grove of the temple and in
the shadow of the citadel I have seen the
freest among you wear their freedom as a
yoke and a handcuff.
And my heart bled within me; for you
can only be free when even the desire of
seeking freedom becomes a harness to you,
and when you cease to speak of freedom
as a goal and a fulfilment.
You shall be free indeed when your days
are not without a care nor your nights with-
out a want and a grief,
But rather when these things girdle your
life and yet you rise above them naked and
unbound.
And how shall you rise beyond your
days and nights unless you break the chains
which you at the dawn of your under-
standing have fastened around your noon
hour?
In truth that which you call freedom is
the strongest of these chains, though its
links glitter in the sun and dazzle your eyes.
And what is it but fragments of your own
self you would discard that you may become
free?
If it is an unjust law you would abolish,
that law was written with your own hand
upon your own forehead.
You cannot erase it by burning your law
books nor by washing the foreheads of your
judges, though you pour the sea upon them.
And if it is a despot you would dethrone,
see first that his throne erected within you is
destroyed.
For how can a tyrant rule the free and
the proud, but for a tyranny in their own
freedom and a shame in their own pride?
And if it is a care you would cast off, that
care has been chosen by you rather than
imposed upon you.
And if it is a fear you would dispel, the
seat of that fear is in your heart and not in
the hand of the feared.
Verily all things move within your being
in constant half embrace, the desired and
the dreaded, the repugnant and the cherished,
the pursued and that which you would
escape.
These things move within you as lights
and shadows in pairs that cling.
And when the shadow fades and is no
more, the light that lingers becomes a
shadow to another light.
And thus your freedom when it loses its
fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater
freedom.
| Kahlil Gibran | Living,The Mind,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
On Clothes
|
And the weaver said, Speak to us of
Clothes.
And he answered:
Your clothes conceal much of your beauty,
yet they hide not the unbeautiful.
And though you seek in garments the
freedom of privacy you may find in them
a harness and a chain.
Would that you could meet the sun
and the wind with more of your skin and less
of your raiment,
For the breath of life is in the sunlight
and the hand of life is in the wind.
Some of you say, “It is the north wind
who has woven the clothes we wear.”
And I say, Ay, it was the north wind,
But shame was his loom, and the soften-
ing of the sinews was his thread.
And when his work was done he laughed
in the forest.
Forget not that modesty is for a shield
against the eye of the unclean.
And when the unclean shall be no more,
what were modesty but a fetter and a fouling
of the mind?
And forget not that the earth delights to
feel your bare feet and the winds long to
play with your hair.
| Kahlil Gibran | Living,The Body,Nature | null |
On Buying and Selling
|
And a merchant said, Speak to us of
Buying and Selling.
And he answered and said:
To you the earth yields her fruit, and you
shall not want if you but know how to fill
your hands.
It is in exchanging the gifts of the earth
that you shall find abundance and be satisfied.
Yet unless the exchange be in love and
kindly justice, it will but lead some to greed
and others to hunger.
When in the market place you toilers of
the sea and fields and vineyards meet the
weavers and the potters and the gatherers of
spices,—
Invoke then the master spirit of the earth,
to come into your midst and sanctify the
scales and the reckoning that weighs value
against value.
And suffer not the barren-handed to take
part in your transactions, who would sell
their words for your labour.
To such men you should say,
“Come with us to the field, or go with
our brothers to the sea and cast your net;
For the land and the sea shall be bountiful
to you even as to us.”
And if there come the singers and the
dancers and the flute players,—buy of their
gifts also.
For they too are gatherers of fruit and
frankincense, and that which they bring,
though fashioned of dreams, is raiment
and food for your soul.
And before you leave the market place,
see that no one has gone his way with
empty hands.
For the master spirit of the earth shall
not sleep peacefully upon the wind till the
needs of the least of you are satisfied.
| Kahlil Gibran | Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics | null |
On Marriage
|
Then Almitra spoke again and said, And
what of Marriage, master?
And he answered saying:
You were born together, and together you
shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white
wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the
silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance
between you.
Love one another, but make not a bond
of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between
the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from
one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat
not from the same loaf.
Sing and dance together and be joyous,
but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone
though they quiver with the same music.
Give your hearts, but not into each
other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain
your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near
together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow
not in each other’s shadow.
| Kahlil Gibran | Living,Marriage & Companionship,Love,Romantic Love | null |
On Love
|
Then said Almitra, Speak to us of Love.
And he raised his head and looked upon
the people, and there fell a stillness upon
them. And with a great voice he said:
When love beckons to you, follow him,
Though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you yield to
him,
Though the sword hidden among his
pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in
him,
Though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you so shall he
crucify you. Even as he is for your growth
so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height and
caresses your tenderest branches that quiver
in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots and
shake them in their clinging to the earth.
•
Like sheaves of corn he gathers you unto
himself.
He threshes you to make you naked.
He sifts you to free you from your husks.
He grinds you to whiteness.
He kneads you until you are pliant;
And then he assigns you to his sacred
fire, that you may become sacred bread for
God’s sacred feast.
All these things shall love do unto you
that you may know the secrets of your
heart, and in that knowledge become a
fragment of Life’s heart.
But if in your fear you would seek only
love’s peace and love’s pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover
your nakedness and pass out of love’s
threshing-floor,
Into the seasonless world where you
shall laugh, but not all of your laughter,
and weep, but not all of your tears.
•
Love gives naught but itself and takes
naught but from itself.
Love possesses not nor would it be
possessed;
For love is sufficient unto love.
When you love you should not say,
“God is in my heart,” but rather, “I am
in the heart of God.”
And think not you can direct the course
of love, for love, if it finds you worthy,
directs your course.
Love has no other desire but to fulfil
itself.
But if you love and must needs have
desires, let these be your desires:
To melt and be like a running brook
that sings its melody to the night.
To know the pain of too much tenderness.
To be wounded by your own under-
standing of love;
And to bleed willingly and joyfully.
To wake at dawn with a winged heart
and give thanks for another day of loving;
To rest at the noon hour and meditate
love’s ecstasy;
To return home at eventide with grati-
tude;
And then to sleep with a prayer for the
beloved in your heart and a song of praise
upon your lips.
| Kahlil Gibran | Love,Romantic Love,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
Growing Apples
|
There is big excitement in C block today.
On the window sill,
in a plastic ice cream cup
a little plant is growing.
This is all the men want to talk about:
how an apple seed germinated
in a crack of damp concrete;
how they tore open tea bags
to collect the leaves, leached them
in water, then laid the sprout onto the bed
made of Lipton. How this finger of spring
dug one delicate root down
into the dark fannings and now
two small sleeves of green
are pushing out from the emerging tip.
The men are tipsy with this miracle.
Each morning, one by one,
they go to the window and check
the progress of the struggling plant.
All through the day they return
to stand over the seedling
and whisper.
| Nancy Miller Gomez | null | null |
Exit Glacier
|
When we got close enough
we could hear
rivers inside the ice
heaving splits
the groaning of a ledge
about to
calve. Strewn in the moraine
fresh moose sign—
tawny oblong pellets
breaking up
sharp black shale. In one breath
ice and air—
history, the record
of breaking—
prophecy, the warning
of what's yet to break
out from under
four stories
of bone-crushing turquoise
retreating.
| Peggy Shumaker | null | null |
Holy Days
|
Holy the days of the prune face junkie men
Holy the scag pumped arms
Holy the Harlem faces
looking for space in the dead rock valleys of the City
Holy the flowers
sing holy for the raped holidays
and Bessie’s guts spilling on the Mississippi
road
Sing holy for all of the faces that inched
toward freedom, followed the North Star
like Harriet and Douglass
Sing holy for all our singers and sinners
for all the shapes and forms
of our liberation
Holy, holy, holy for the midnight hassles
for the gods of our Ancestors bellowing
sunsets and blues that gave us vision
O God make us strong and ready
Holy, holy, holy for the day we dig ourselves
and rise in the sun of our own peace and place
and space, yes Lord.
1969/70
| Larry Neal | Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Raptus
|
The door to the past is a strange door. It swings open and things pass through it, but they pass in one direction only. No man can return across that threshold, though he can look down still and see the green light waver in the weeds.
Loren Eiseley
A door opens in the wilderness.
People cross through it—bloused women families
Acquaintances friends all the ones I have loved
Sleep-walkers night-walkers each dazed and shorn—
Street aurous with ice, a snowfall scratched into
Moons—and everything I’d known—
Inside the bleak floating light of my lungs
In the capillaries of my eyes a blood
Glancing through the hatches—
If I said I would always be grateful
If I lied or touched with spite
If night is just a foamline of shadows
Though we were both lost—the door
Opening—the fear of being shown
Whole to the one who must love you still—
And stopped as if on a walk to say
Look at that and what matters what really counts
And I’ll tell you everything if you promise I promise
I stood at door and behind me heard
Snow-plows scrape against roads
At the center of night—unknown to yourself
And the word I said out-loud to no one
That meant it was all to no purpose
The word for the desire inside destruction
For everything that can never be brought back—
Loose snow blown hard to each bank
And the common reel of those who
To avoid one extreme rush toward its opposite—
Snow blasted to piles—and never opened up to
Anything that could reach me until you reached me—
Which hours belonged to us
When was I unknowingly alone
Why did you always return to walk here a path
Behind my closed eyes shedding salt
Dry snowfall and sticks—still were you here
With me I might say The moon rose in the casement window
The red-haired boy across the street has learned to ride his bike
There are still picnics there are fountains
And the world I am leaving behind saysOne learns to see one learns to be kind—
I closed my eyes I closed my hands
I shut down the fields in my arms
The cattle on the plains veins ditches
Blue ravines a gray bird
Sailing through a poplar brake kids
Throwing snow I closed the last swinging juncos
Sheep wool caught on barbed wire I closed
Fumes and clear patches of sky I seized
The river the town I shut down
The hard muscles of sleep farmlands
Warming under midnight salt-lights scruff-pines
On the ridge animals scattering across slopes I closed
The smooth bone of evening a storm
On the hills white and noiseless spindled
Prairies where I was born I shut I seized
The clouds I closed in anger—fervor—ardor
| Joanna Klink | Living,Growing Old,Time & Brevity,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Nature,Weather | null |
The Census-Taker
|
I came an errand one cloud-blowing evening
To a slab-built, black-paper-covered house
Of one room and one window and one door,
The only dwelling in a waste cut over
A hundred square miles round it in the mountains:
And that not dwelt in now by men or women.
(It never had been dwelt in, though, by women,
So what is this I make a sorrow of?)
I came as census-taker to the waste
To count the people in it and found none,
None in the hundred miles, none in the house,
Where I came last with some hope, but not much,
After hours’ overlooking from the cliffs
An emptiness flayed to the very stone.
I found no people that dared show themselves,
None not in hiding from the outward eye.
The time was autumn, but how anyone
Could tell the time of year when every tree
That could have dropped a leaf was down itself
And nothing but the stump of it was left
Now bringing out its rings in sugar of pitch;
And every tree up stood a rotting trunk
Without a single leaf to spend on autumn,
Or branch to whistle after what was spent.
Perhaps the wind the more without the help
Of breathing trees said something of the time
Of year or day the way it swung a door
Forever off the latch, as if rude men
Passed in and slammed it shut each one behind him
For the next one to open for himself.
I counted nine I had no right to count
(But this was dreamy unofficial counting)
Before I made the tenth across the threshold.
Where was my supper? Where was anyone’s?
No lamp was lit. Nothing was on the table.
The stove was cold—the stove was off the chimney—
And down by one side where it lacked a leg.
The people that had loudly passed the door
Were people to the ear but not the eye.
They were not on the table with their elbows.
They were not sleeping in the shelves of bunks.
I saw no men there and no bones of men there.
I armed myself against such bones as might be
With the pitch-blackened stub of an ax-handle
I picked up off the straw-dust covered floor.
Not bones, but the ill-fitted window rattled.
The door was still because I held it shut
While I thought what to do that could be done—
About the house—about the people not there.
This house in one year fallen to decay
Filled me with no less sorrow than the houses
Fallen to ruin in ten thousand years
Where Asia wedges Africa from Europe.
Nothing was left to do that I could see
Unless to find that there was no one there
And declare to the cliffs too far for echo,
“The place is desert, and let whoso lurks
In silence, if in this he is aggrieved,
Break silence now or be forever silent.
Let him say why it should not be declared so.”
The melancholy of having to count souls
Where they grow fewer and fewer every year
Is extreme where they shrink to none at all.
It must be I want life to go on living.
| Robert Frost | Living,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity,Activities,Jobs & Working,Nature,Fall,Trees & Flowers,Social Commentaries,Town & Country Life | null |
Fragmentary Blue
|
Why make so much of fragmentary blue
In here and there a bird, or butterfly,
Or flower, or wearing-stone, or open eye,
When heaven presents in sheets the solid hue?
Since earth is earth, perhaps, not heaven (as yet)—
Though some savants make earth include the sky;
And blue so far above us comes so high,
It only gives our wish for blue a whet.
| Robert Frost | Nature,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
In a Disused Graveyard
|
The living come with grassy tread
To read the gravestones on the hill;
The graveyard draws the living still,
But never any more the dead.
The verses in it say and say:
‘The ones who living come today
To read the stones and go away
Tomorrow dead will come to stay.’
So sure of death the marbles rhyme,
Yet can’t help marking all the time
How no one dead will seem to come.
What is it men are shrinking from?
It would be easy to be clever
And tell the stones: Men hate to die
And have stopped dying now forever.
I think they would believe the lie.
| Robert Frost | Living,Death,Time & Brevity | null |
Nothing Gold Can Stay
|
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
| Robert Frost | Living,Coming of Age,Growing Old,Sorrow & Grieving,Time & Brevity,Nature,Spring,Summer,Trees & Flowers,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
The Runaway
|
Once when the snow of the year was beginning to fall,
We stopped by a mountain pasture to say, ‘Whose colt?’
A little Morgan had one forefoot on the wall,
The other curled at his breast. He dipped his head
And snorted at us. And then he had to bolt.
We heard the miniature thunder where he fled,
And we saw him, or thought we saw him, dim and grey,
Like a shadow against the curtain of falling flakes.
‘I think the little fellow’s afraid of the snow.
He isn’t winter-broken. It isn’t play
With the little fellow at all. He’s running away.
I doubt if even his mother could tell him, “Sakes,
It’s only weather.” He’d think she didn’t know!
Where is his mother? He can’t be out alone.’
And now he comes again with a clatter of stone
And mounts the wall again with whited eyes
And all his tail that isn't hair up straight.
He shudders his coat as if to throw off flies.
‘Whoever it is that leaves him out so late,
When other creatures have gone to stall and bin,
Ought to be told to come and take him in.’
| Robert Frost | Nature,Animals,Weather,Winter | null |
The Aim Was Song
|
Before man came to blow it right
The wind once blew itself untaught,
And did its loudest day and night
In any rough place where it caught.
Man came to tell it what was wrong:
It hadn’t found the place to blow;
It blew too hard—the aim was song.
And listen—how it ought to go!
He took a little in his mouth,
And held it long enough for north
To be converted into south,
And then by measure blew it forth.
By measure. It was word and note,
The wind the wind had meant to be—
A little through the lips and throat.
The aim was song—the wind could see.
| Robert Frost | Nature,Weather,Arts & Sciences,Music,Poetry & Poets | null |
Not to Keep
|
They sent him back to her. The letter came
Saying . . . And she could have him. And before
She could be sure there was no hidden ill
Under the formal writing, he was there,
Living. They gave him back to her alive—
How else? They are not known to send the dead—
And not disfigured visibly. His face?
His hands? She had to look, and ask,
‘What was it, dear?’ And she had given all
And still she had all—they had—they the lucky!
Wasn’t she glad now? Everything seemed won,
And all the rest for them permissible ease.
She had to ask, ‘What was it, dear?’
‘Enough
Yet not enough. A bullet through and through,
High in the breast. Nothing but what good care
And medicine and rest, and you a week,
Can cure me of to go again.’ The same
Grim giving to do over for them both.
She dared no more than ask him with her eyes
How was it with him for a second trial.
And with his eyes he asked her not to ask.
They had given him back to her, but not to keep.
| Robert Frost | Living,Health & Illness,Love,Heartache & Loss,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict | null |
Gathering Leaves
|
Spades take up leaves
No better than spoons,
And bags full of leaves
Are light as balloons.
I make a great noise
Of rustling all day
Like rabbit and deer
Running away.
But the mountains I raise
Elude my embrace,
Flowing over my arms
And into my face.
I may load and unload
Again and again
Till I fill the whole shed,
And what have I then?
Next to nothing for weight,
And since they grew duller
From contact with earth,
Next to nothing for color.
Next to nothing for use,
But a crop is a crop,
And who’s to say where
The harvest shall stop?
| Robert Frost | Nature,Fall,Trees & Flowers | null |
The Need of Being Versed in Country Things
|
The house had gone to bring again
To the midnight sky a sunset glow.
Now the chimney was all of the house that stood,
Like a pistil after the petals go.
The barn opposed across the way,
That would have joined the house in flame
Had it been the will of the wind, was left
To bear forsaken the place’s name.
No more it opened with all one end
For teams that came by the stony road
To drum on the floor with scurrying hoofs
And brush the mow with the summer load.
The birds that came to it through the air
At broken windows flew out and in,
Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh
From too much dwelling on what has been.
Yet for them the lilac renewed its leaf,
And the aged elm, though touched with fire;
And the dry pump flung up an awkward arm;
And the fence post carried a strand of wire.
For them there was really nothing sad.
But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept,
One had to be versed in country things
Not to believe the phoebes wept.
| Robert Frost | Living,The Mind,Nature,Animals | null |
Phantom Twin
|
We did not want to be
unblessed, so we were blessed.
Long, thin wire, a little
patch where we might lay our
heads. It was this way, this
looking fore and back, a pole
held tightly in our
hands. You want to tell me
what went wrong? Confusing
shapes across a wall, depression
in the ground. The gorgeous
soldiers fought and fell. Hie
unto hell. How we will lie in
that brave grave apart,
our aperture: a heart
that has been ruptured
absolutely by a passing God.
| Katy Lederer | Living,Death,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
encasement (storage e)
|
what is at first a bodily impression turns out to be a condition of knowing
—Judith Butler
in the airport terminal I sit down in a row of chairs without looking at the man in the chair beside me… my chair is adjacent to a narrow formica table where I set the coffee and muffin I’ve bought… I’m tempted to look at the man sitting on the other side of the formica table but I do not want to take a chance and meet his eyes… a familiar animosity must be what warns me off… warnings that I realize are chewable I’m learning are better swallowed… I watch how this man expresses affront toward me without interrupting his focus on his cell phone… the formica table between us isn’t wide enough for him to have the distance from me he requires… this next sensation has nothing to do with what he knows… though I react as if it could… his disgust is my own as I lie on my side my knees to my chest… in a bed I am a child with my mother her body moving… her body wrapped too close around me… nothing about this should surprise me… nothing is the space between one breath and the next… even if the space is decades long…
| Rusty Morrison | Living,The Body,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Activities,Eating & Drinking,Travels & Journeys | null |
The Ambassador of the Interior Has a Talking to With the Minister of the Cabinet of Vengeance
|
God started small At the first showdown
between good and evil God didn’t come at anyone
like a cowboy God didn’t open with solar flares
or asteroids or mass extinction or planetary heat death
God didn’t outgun anyone God outmanned them
God made man in the face of the beast
And in the face of the beast God made —from inside
the great and gaping maw while languishing
in the hot damp In the face of that
great terror God summoned the smallest—
adrenaline serotonin hemoglobin oxytocin motes
of possibility God started by making—
light into land masses sand into vessels preservation
as civilization and sometimes God won
| Stephanie Ellis Schlaifer | Nature,Religion,God & the Divine | null |
Invective Against Swans
|
The soul, O ganders, flies beyond the parks
And far beyond the discords of the wind.
A bronze rain from the sun descending marks
The death of summer, which that time endures
Like one who scrawls a listless testament
Of golden quirks and Paphian caricatures,
Bequeathing your white feathers to the moon
And giving your bland motions to the air.
Behold, already on the long parades
The crows anoint the statues with their dirt.
And the soul, O ganders, being lonely, flies
Beyond your chilly chariots, to the skies.
| Wallace Stevens | Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
Nuances of a Theme by Williams
|
It’s a strange courageyou give me, ancient star:
Shine alone in the sunrisetoward which you lend no part!
I
Shine alone, shine nakedly, shine like bronze,
that reflects neither my face nor any inner part
of my being, shine like fire, that mirrors nothing.
II
Lend no part to any humanity that suffuses
you in its own light.
Be not chimera of morning,
Half-man, half-star.
Be not an intelligence,
Like a widow’s bird
Or an old horse.
| Wallace Stevens | Nature,Stars, Planets, Heavens,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Welcome
|
Everything you thought you knew
must be relearned overnight.
How to walk.
Walk, not trip, over cords, 2x4s,
used coffee cups, concrete cores.
Walk, 40 pounds on your shoulder, across
rebar or a wood plank; glide,
not wobble, not look like the bounce
beneath each bootstep scares you.
How to dress yourself
to work outdoors all day midwinter
and keep warm, keep working, fingers moving;
or midsummer, with no hint of breasts.
How to climb ladders–
not a stepstool or a 4-footer–
ladders that stretch up two stories
where someone’s impatient
for that bundle of pipe.
How to get coffee–
hot and how they like it–to a crew
spread out 10 floors; to carry muffins
three blocks in a paper sack
through sheets of rain.
How to look.
To never go back empty-handed
when you’re told, Grab me a This/Thatfrom the gangbox, if all you’ve done
is move things around, poke here and there;
if you haven’t emptied out the full contents
so the journeyman won’t shame you
by finding This/That in a quick minute,
after you’ve said, We don’t have any.
How to be dependable
but not predictable-provokable.
Not the lunch break entertainment.
How to read
blueprints,
delivery orders,
the mood on the job;
how long it’s okay to sit down for coffee;
how early you can start rolling up cords.
How to do well in school
from the back row
of a seats-assigned-Jim-Crow classroom
How to learn tricks-of-the-trade
from someone who does not like you.
How to listen, to act-don’t-ask.
To duck when someone motions, Duck!
Or when someone tells you, Don’t talk to Zeke,
to know what they mean
so you don’t even look
at Zeke, the ironworker who’s always first out,
last in, standing there, so four times a day–
start, lunch, quit–all the workers walk past him,
like a sandbar, waves washing back and forth,
that catches debris.
How to pick up the phone and call your friend,
the only one of the women not at class
the night the apprenticeship director met you all
at the door
carrying the nervous rumor
that one of the women had been raped
and you all look at each other
and it wasn’t any of you five.
How to respond–within protocol–
when someone takes your ladder or tools,
imitates your voices on the loudspeaker,
spraypaints Cunt on your Baker staging,
urinates in your hardhat,
drives to your home
where you live alone
with your daughter
and keys your truck parked
in your own driveway.
Later, you’ll need the advanced skills:
how–without dislodging the keystone–
to humiliate a person, how to threaten
a person. Deftly.
So no one’s certain for absolute
that’s what happened. Not even you.
| Susan Eisenberg | Activities,Jobs & Working,School & Learning,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Pioneers, First Women in Construction
|
Her sister was shot, and hers found bludgeoned
dead in her car trunk; her mother was alcoholic,
and hers a suicide; her daughter killed by an uncle,
and hers stayed alive thanks to prison.
Before the term, date-raped, she was. Beforedomestic violence, love punched her face.
We wanted the career. Not just skills and money,
but structure, focus, printed plans, the rowdy order
of raising buildings that years later would still stand
right where you left them. We joined a tradition,
expected a well-marked path and a welcome.
The earnest ads never mentioned
we’d be human minesweepers steering around
barricades, sinkholes, lethal instructions, We learned
Solidarity was a corporation privately held.
Some left in shock. Some were maimed.
Some went missing. A few found gold.
Those with talent for sifting real threat from bluff,
or detecting hair-triggers before the blast, fared best,
We taught ourselves to disarm booby traps, shared
hand-drawn maps, and prepared for a long winter.
We lied on postcards home.
| Susan Eisenberg | Activities,Jobs & Working,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
Anecdote of the Prince of Peacocks
|
In the moonlight
I met Berserk,
In the moonlight
On the bushy plain.
Oh, sharp he was
As the sleepless!
And, “Why are you red
In this milky blue?”
I said.
“Why sun-colored,
As if awake
In the midst of sleep?”
“You that wander,”
So he said,
“On the bushy plain,
Forget so soon.
But I set my traps
In the midst of dreams.”
I knew from this
That the blue ground
Was full of blocks
And blocking steel.
I knew the dread
Of the bushy plain,
And the beauty
Of the moonlight
Falling there,
Falling
As sleep falls
In the innocent air.
| Wallace Stevens | Living,The Mind,Nature,Animals | null |
The Wind Shifts
|
This is how the wind shifts:
Like the thoughts of an old human,
Who still thinks eagerly
And despairingly.
The wind shifts like this:
Like a human without illusions,
Who still feels irrational things within her.
The wind shifts like this:
Like humans approaching proudly,
Like humans approaching angrily.
This is how the wind shifts:
Like a human, heavy and heavy,
Who does not care.
| Wallace Stevens | Living,Growing Old,Nature,Weather | null |
To the One of Fictive Music
|
Sister and mother and diviner love,
And of the sisterhood of the living dead
Most near, most clear, and of the clearest bloom,
And of the fragrant mothers the most dear
And queen, and of diviner love the day
And flame and summer and sweet fire, no thread
Of cloudy silver sprinkles in your gown
Its venom of renown, and on your head
No crown is simpler than the simple hair.
Now of the music summoned by the birth
That separates us from the wind and sea,
Yet leaves us in them, until earth becomes,
By being so much of the things we are,
Gross effigy and simulacrum, none
Gives motion to perfection more serene
Than yours, out of our imperfections wrought,
Most rare, or ever of more kindred air
In the laborious weaving that you wear.
For so retentive of themselves are men
That music is intensest which proclaims
The near, the clear, and vaunts the clearest bloom,
And of all vigils musing the obscure,
That apprehends the most which sees and names,
As in your name, an image that is sure,
Among the arrant spices of the sun,
O bough and bush and scented vine, in whom
We give ourselves our likest issuance.
Yet not too like, yet not so like to be
Too near, too clear, saving a little to endow
Our feigning with the strange unlike, whence
springs
The difference that heavenly pity brings.
For this, musician, in your girdle fixed
Bear other perfumes. On your pale head wear
A band entwining, set with fatal stones.
Unreal, give back to us what once you gave:
The imagination that we spurned and crave.
| Wallace Stevens | Living,The Mind,Arts & Sciences,Music,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
The Death of a Soldier
|
Life contracts and death is expected,
As in a season of autumn.
The soldier falls.
He does not become a three-days personage,
Imposing his separation,
Calling for pomp.
Death is absolute and without memorial,
As in a season of autumn,
When the wind stops,
When the wind stops and, over the heavens,
The clouds go, nevertheless,
In their direction.
| Wallace Stevens | Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Nature,Fall,Weather,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict,Memorial Day | null |
The Revolutionists Stop for Orangeade
|
Capitán profundo, capitán geloso,
Ask us not to sing standing in the sun,
Hairy-backed and hump-armed,
Flat-ribbed and big-bagged.
There is no pith in music
Except in something false.
Bellissimo, pomposo,
Sing a song of serpent-kin,
Necks among the thousand leaves,
Tongues around the fruit.
Sing in clownish boots
Strapped and buckled bright.
Wear the breeches of a mask,
Coat half-flare and half galloon;
Wear a helmet without reason,
Tufted, tilted, twirled, and twisted.
Start the singing in a voice
Rougher than a grinding shale.
Hang a feather by your eye,
Nod and look a little sly.
This must be the vent of pity,
Deeper than a truer ditty
Of the real that wrenches,
Of the quick that’s wry.
| Wallace Stevens | Activities,Eating & Drinking,Arts & Sciences,Music,Social Commentaries,War & Conflict | null |
With a Coat
|
I was cold and leaned against the big oak tree
as if it were my mother wearing a rough apron
of bark, her upraised arms warning of danger.
Through those boughs and leaves I saw
dark patches of sky. I thought a brooding
witch waited to catch me up from under
branches and take me, careening on her broom,
to her home in the jaundiced moon.
I looked to the roof of mom and dad's house
and wondered if the paisley couch patterns
would change during the day. My brother peeked
from a window and waved. When the bus came,
I pawed away from the trunk, fumbled,
and took my first step toward not returning.
| Dante Di Stefano | null | null |
Bakery of Lies
|
My favorite is the cream puff lie,
the kind inflated with hot air,
expanded to make an heroic-sized story.
Another is the cannoli, a long lie,
well-packed with nutty details,
lightly wrapped in flakey truth.
A macaroon isn't a little white lie,
but it's covered
with self-serving coconut.
The apple tart carries slices
of sour gossip, only
slightly sweetened with truth.
Then there's the napoleon,
an Iago lie of pernicious intent,
layer upon layer of dark deceit.
| Judith Askew | null | null |
Old Country Portraits
|
My lost sister used to try the trick
with the tablecloth, waiting until
the wine had been poured, the gravy boat filled,
before snapping the linen her way
smug as a matador, staring down
silver and crystal that would dare move,
paying no mind to the ancestor gloom
gliding across the wallpaper like clouds
of a disapproving front—no hutch
or bureau spared, no lost sister sure
the trick would work this time, all those she loved
in another room, nibbling saltines,
or in the kitchen, plating the last
of the roast beef. How amazed they would be
to be called to the mahogany room
for supper, to find something missing,
something beautiful, finally, they could
never explain, the wine twittering
in its half-globes, candles aflutter, each
thing in its place, or so it seemed then,
even though their lives had changed for good.
| Richard Robbins | null | null |
Cradle Thief
|
"A cradle thief," my mother called the man
we'd see in shops, cafes, parks, even church,
with "that poor girl" beside him. Hand in hand,
they'd walk as if they didn't feel the scorch
of people's stares. The day we saw him press
his lips to hers, my mother blocked my eyes
as if his mouth (I longed for my first kiss)
against her mouth was smothering her cries.
All week, I ran a fever that wouldn't break.
"A cradle thief"—a voice I only half
knew as my own surprised me in the dark,
my sick-bed wet with shivers. "A cradle thief,"
I said again, as if the words could will
my window broken, footprint on the sill.
| Caitlin Doyle | null | null |
The Ambition Bird
|
So it has come to this –
insomnia at 3:15 A.M.,
the clock tolling its engine
like a frog following
a sundial yet having an electric
seizure at the quarter hour.
The business of words keeps me awake.
I am drinking cocoa,
the warm brown mama.
I would like a simple life
yet all night I am laying
poems away in a long box.
It is my immortality box,
my lay-away plan,
my coffin.
All night dark wings
flopping in my heart.
Each an ambition bird.
The bird wants to be dropped
from a high place like Tallahatchie Bridge.
He wants to light a kitchen match
and immolate himself.
He wants to fly into the hand of Michelangelo
and come out painted on a ceiling.
He wants to pierce the hornet’s nest
and come out with a long godhead.
He wants to take bread and wine
and bring forth a man happily floating in the Caribbean.
He wants to be pressed out like a key
so he can unlock the Magi.
He wants to take leave among strangers
passing out bits of his heart like hors d’oeuvres.
He wants to die changing his clothes
and bolt for the sun like a diamond.
He wants, I want.
Dear God, wouldn’t it be
good enough just to drink cocoa?
I must get a new bird
and a new immortality box.
There is folly enough inside this one.
| Anne Sexton | Living,Death,Life Choices,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Appalachian Elegy (Sections 1-6)
|
1.
hear them cry
the long dead
the long gone
speak to us
from beyond the grave
guide us
that we may learn
all the ways
to hold tender this land
hard clay direct
rock upon rock
charred earth
in time
strong green growth
will rise here
trees back to life
native flowers
pushing the fragrance of hope
the promise of resurrection
2.
such then is beauty
surrendered
against all hope
you are here again
turning slowly
nature as chameleon
all life change
and changing again
awakening hearts
steady moving from
unnamed loss
into fierce deep grief
that can bear all burdens
even the long passage
into a shadowy dark
where no light enters
3.
night moves
through the thick dark
a heavy silence outside
near the front window
a black bear
stamps down plants
pushing back brush
fleeing manmade
confinement
roaming unfettered
confident
any place can become home
strutting down
a steep hill
as though freedom
is all
in the now
no past
no present
4.
earth works
thick brown mud
clinging pulling
a body down
heard wounded earth cry
bequeath to me
the hoe the hope
ancestral rights
to turn the ground over
to shovel and sift
until history
rewritten resurrected
returns to its rightful owners
a past to claim
yet another stone lifted to
throw against the enemy
making way for new endings
random seeds
spreading over the hillside
wild roses
come by fierce wind and hard rain
unleashed furies
here in this touched wood
a dirge a lamentation
for earth to live again
earth that is all at once a grave
a resting place a bed of new beginnings
avalanche of splendor
5.
small horses ride me
carry my dreams
of prairies and frontiers
where once
the first people roamed
claimed union with the earth
no right to own or possess
no sense of territory
all boundaries
placed by unseen ones
here I will give you thunder
shatter your hearts with rain
let snow soothe you
make your healing water
clear sweet
a sacred spring
where the thirsty
may drink
animals all
6.
listen little sister
angels make their hope here
in these hills
follow me
I will guide you
careful now
no trespass
I will guide you
word for word
mouth for mouth
all the holy ones
embracing us
all our kin
making home here
renegade marooned
lawless fugitives
grace these mountains
we have earth to bind us
the covenant
between us
can never be broken
vows to live and let live
| bell hooks | Living,Death,Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Landscapes & Pastorals,Religion,The Spiritual,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
Aquarium, February
|
When ice outside makes daggers of the grass,
I come to where the tides of life still flow.
The water here still moves behind the glass.
In here, the seasons never seem to pass—
the sullen shark and rays still come and go.
Outside the ice makes daggers of the grass
and coats the roads. The meditative bass
won't puzzle how the blustery blizzards blow.
The water here still moves. Behind the glass,
rose-tinted corals house a teeming mass
of busy neon creatures who don't know
"outside." The ice makes daggers of the grass
and oily puddles into mirrors. Gas
freezes in its lines; my car won't go,
but water here still moves behind the glass.
No piles of valentines, no heart held fast—
just sea stars under lights kept soft and low.
Outside, the ice makes daggers of the grass;
in here, the water moves behind the glass.
| Liz Ahl | null | null |
A Poem of Love in Eleven Lines
|
Dreamer of purified fury and fabulous habit,
your eyes of deserted white afternoons
target, stiffen, riot with unicorn candor
so I swallow your body like meanings or whisky or as you swallow me.
Break rhythm here: your kiss is my justice:
look then now how orange blooms of jubilation unfold in satisfied air!
This sex is more than sex, under the will of the God of sex,
so I softly invoke transformation of your rueful image of haven
–those frozen rocks, that guilty lighthouse isolate from temptation–
to warm Flemish landscape green and brighteyed with daisies of
dizzying color
where pilgrims are dancing after gospelling bird who sing of
new springs, good water.
| Gerrit Lansing | Love,Desire,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
From Under the Mat Where Sat the Cat
|
Extricate, but not too much,
unfaithful digger of concordances,
let be the whole tasty clutch of it, rhyme
of I’m, not, awake,
child,
bequeathing willow trees beside a stream.
Not only old ravines
but Euclid Avenue,
my first escalator (Hal-ease Department Store)
were woven in the mat where sat the cat.
I say Department, was a sexual story
because Mother’s store it was, her bailiwick,
father absent in a void called “Work.”
Precarious. Don’t try get it all in. Bailey’s
was another tasty store, such glitterglass.
And later learned that testicles was store,
alaya-vijnana.
O dark dirty Cleveland, the Viking Club, the mysteries!
All I want is loving you and blank-blank blank-blank blank-blank
It’s only unmentionable because there’s no end to chasing it
the tale of it and you and sustenance.
Hundreds are fleeing, but not hurricanes.
Violets, I always brought her wild violets in spring.
Breathless romanzas secret in the Flats.
Percolate the spiderwebs.
Not what you expected, eh?
I could bite you back, you furry thing, but you’d never understand.
| Gerrit Lansing | Living,Youth,Love,Desire,Relationships,Home Life,Pets | null |
The Great Form is Without Shape
|
All life long
you are unhanding
unhanding and unhanding
what was handed you.
All life long
you throw out the line of life.
You throw out the line, stinging
up from your guts.
Were they planting trees,
your father and your mother?
Did they ever plant?
Is that a line of trees
far away
green line?
All life long
you include something
that includes your life.
You are in the egg.
( In the center of a picture,
two angels hold a transparent crystal
egg of teardrop shape. In the egg
the ocean god is throned, left leg
crossed over right, trident in right
hand. Under his outstretched arms two
children or little people stand, a boy
at his right, a girl at his left. The
boy’s head is crowned with a sun, the
girl’s, with a crescent moon.
That’s the middle level of
the picture. At the top a blazing
sun with human features dominates the
vertical axis. At the bottom a man
and a woman kneel on either side a
furnace, man to the right of the
furnace, woman to the left. In the
furnace itself, directly below the egg
containing the god, is suspended a
similar egg, empty. )
All life long
the dew falls from heaven
all life long
trees climb up from underground waters.
In the seed of the old god the new gods are swarming.
Earth is ready for planting.
The shut eye is opening.
The heat.
| Gerrit Lansing | Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Nature,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
A Letter
|
I came here, being stricken, stumbling out
At last from streets; the sun, decreasing, took me
For days, the time being the last of autumn,
The thickets not yet stark, but quivering
With tiny colors, like some brush strokes in
The manner of the pointillists; small yellows
Dart shaped, little reds in different pattern,
Clicks and notches of color on threaded bushes,
A cracked and fluent heaven, and a brown earth.
I had these, and my food and sleep—enough.
This is a countryside of roofless houses,—
Taverns to rain,—doorsteps of millstones, lintels
Leaning and delicate, foundations sprung to lilacs.
Orchards where boughs like roots strike into the sky.
Here I could well devise the journey to nothing,
At night getting down from the wagon by the black barns,
The zenith a point of darkness, breaking to bits,
Showering motionless stars over the houses.
Scenes relentless—the black and white grooves of a woodcut.
But why the journey to nothing or any desire?
Why the heart taken by even senseless adventure,
The goal a coffer of dust? Give my mouth to the air,
Let arrogant pain lick my flesh with a tongue
Rough as a cat’s; remember the smell of cold mornings,
The dried beauty of women, the exquisite skin
Under the chins of young girls, young men’s rough beards,—
The cringing promise of this one, that one’s apology
For the knife struck down to the bone, gladioli in sick rooms,
Asters and dahlias, flowers like ruches, rosettes. . .
Forever enough to part grass over the stones
By some brook or well, the lovely seed-shedding stalks;
To hear in the single wind diverse branches
Repeating their sounds to the sky—that sky like scaled mackerel,
Fleeing the fields—to be defended from silence,
To feel my body as arid, as safe as a twig
Broken away from whatever growth could snare it
Up to a spring, or hold it softly in summer
Or beat it under in snow.
I must get well.
Walk on strong legs, leap the hurdles of sense,
Reason again, come back to my old patchwork logic,
Addition, subtraction, money, clothes, clocks,
Memories (freesias, smelling slightly of snow and of flesh
In a room with blue curtains) ambition, despair.
I must feel again who had given feeling over,
Challenge laughter, take tears, play the piano,
Form judgments, blame a crude world for disaster.
To escape is nothing. Not to escape is nothing.
The farmer’s wife stands with a halo of darkness
Rounding her head. Water drips in the kitchen
Tapping the sink. To-day the maples have split
Limb from the trunk with the ice, a fresh wooden wound.
The vines are distorted with ice, ice burdens the breaking
Roofs I have told you of.
| Louise Bogan | Living,Life Choices,Sorrow & Grieving,The Mind,Nature | null |
Betrothed
|
You have put your two hands upon me, and your mouth,
You have said my name as a prayer.
Here where trees are planted by the water
I have watched your eyes, cleansed from regret,
And your lips, closed over all that love cannot say,
My mother remembers the agony of her womb
And long years that seemed to promise more than this.
She says, “You do not love me,
You do not want me,
You will go away.”
In the country whereto I go
I shall not see the face of my friend
Nor her hair the color of sunburnt grasses;
Together we shall not find
The land on whose hills bends the new moon
In air traversed of birds.
What have I thought of love?
I have said, “It is beauty and sorrow.”
I have thought that it would bring me lost delights, and splendor
As a wind out of old time. . .
But there is only the evening here,
And the sound of willows
Now and again dipping their long oval leaves in the water.
| Louise Bogan | Living,Life Choices,Marriage & Companionship,Separation & Divorce | null |
Words for Departure
|
Nothing was remembered, nothing forgotten.
When we awoke, wagons were passing on the warm summer
pavements,
The window-sills were wet from rain in the night,
Birds scattered and settled over chimneypots
As among grotesque trees.
Nothing was accepted, nothing looked beyond.
Slight-voiced bells separated hour from hour,
The afternoon sifted coolness
And people drew together in streets becoming deserted.
There was a moon, and light in a shop-front,
And dusk falling like precipitous water.
Hand clasped hand
Forehead still bowed to forehead—
Nothing was lost, nothing possessed
There was no gift nor denial.
2.
I have remembered you.
You were not the town visited once,
Nor the road falling behind running feet.
You were as awkward as flesh
And lighter than frost or ashes.
You were the rind,
And the white-juiced apple,
The song, and the words waiting for music.
3.
You have learned the beginning;
Go from mine to the other.
Be together; eat, dance, despair,
Sleep, be threatened, endure.
You will know the way of that.
But at the end, be insolent;
Be absurd—strike the thing short off;
Be mad—only do not let talk
Wear the bloom from silence.
And go away without fire or lantern
Let there be some uncertainty about your departure.
| Louise Bogan | Living,Separation & Divorce,Activities,Travels & Journeys | null |
Knowledge
|
Now that I know
How passion warms little
Of flesh in the mould,
And treasure is brittle,—
I’ll lie here and learn
How, over their ground,
Trees make a long shadow
And a light sound.
| Louise Bogan | Love,Desire,Heartache & Loss,Activities,School & Learning,Nature,Trees & Flowers | null |
The Alchemist
|
I burned my life, that I might find
A passion wholly of the mind,
Thought divorced from eye and bone,
Ecstasy come to breath alone.
I broke my life, to seek relief
From the flawed light of love and grief.
With mounting beat the utter fire
Charred existence and desire.
It died low, ceased its sudden thresh.
I had found unmysterious flesh—
Not the mind’s avid substance—still
Passionate beyond the will.
| Louise Bogan | Living,The Body,The Mind,Religion,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Sciences | null |
My Voice Not Being Proud
|
My voice, not being proud
Like a strong woman’s, that cries
Imperiously aloud
That death disarm her, lull her—
Screams for no mourning color
Laid menacingly, like fire,
Over my long desire.
It will end, and leave no print.
As you lie, I shall lie:
Separate, eased, and cured.
Whatever is wasted or wanted
In this country of glass and flint
Some garden will use, once planted.
As you lie alone, I shall lie,
O, in singleness assured,
Deafened by mire and lime.
I remember, while there is time.
| Louise Bogan | Living,Death,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Song
|
Love me because I am lost;
Love me that I am undone.
That is brave,—no man has wished it,
Not one.
Be strong, to look on my heart
As others look on my face.
Love me,—I tell you that it is a ravaged
Terrible place.
| Louise Bogan | Love,Realistic & Complicated,Relationships,Men & Women | null |
Fifteenth Farewell
|
I
You may have all things from me, save my breath,
The slight life in my throat will not give pause
For your love, nor your loss, nor any cause.
Shall I be made a panderer to death,
Dig the green ground for darkness underneath,
Let the dust serve me, covering all that was
With all that will be? Better, from time’s claws,
The hardened face under the subtle wreath.
Cooler than stones in wells, sweeter, more kind
Than hot, perfidious words, my breathing moves
Close to my plunging blood. Be strong, and hang
Unriven mist over my breast and mind,
My breath! We shall forget the heart that loves,
Though in my body beat its blade, and its fang.
II
I erred, when I thought loneliness the wide
Scent of mown grass over forsaken fields,
Or any shadow isolation yields.
Loneliness was the heart within your side.
Your thought, beyond my touch, was tilted air
Ringed with as many borders as the wind.
How could I judge you gentle or unkind
When all bright flying space was in your care?
Now that I leave you, I shall be made lonely
By simple empty days, never that chill
Resonant heart to strike between my arms
Again, as though distraught for distance,–only
Levels of evening, now, behind a hill,
Or a late cock-crow from the darkening farms.
| Louise Bogan | Living,Separation & Divorce,Sorrow & Grieving,Love,Heartache & Loss | null |
Sonnet
|
Since you would claim the sources of my thoughtRecall the meshes whence it sprang unlimed,The reedy traps which other hands have timedTo close upon it. Conjure up the hotBlaze that it cleared so cleanly, or the snowDevised to strike it down. It will be free.Whatever nets draw in to prison meAt length your eyes must turn to watch it go.
My mouth, perhaps, may learn one thing too well,My body hear no echo save its own,Yet will the desperate mind, maddened and proud,Seek out the storm, escape the bitter spellThat we obey, strain to the wind, be thrownStraight to its freedom in the thunderous cloud.
| Louise Bogan | Living,The Mind,Relationships,Friends & Enemies | null |
Sonnets by the Night-Sea (VI)
|
The wind of night is mighty on the deep—
A presence haunting sea and land again.
That wind upon the watery waste hath been;
That wind upon the desert soon shall sweep.
O vast and mournful spirit, wherefore keep
Thy vigil at the fleeting homes of men,
Who need no voice of thine to tell them when
Is come the hour to labor or to sleep?
From waste to waste thou goest, and art dumb
Before the morning. Patient in her tree
The bird awaits until thy strength hath passed,
Forgetting darkness when the day is come.
With other tidings hast thou burdened me,
Whom desolations harbor at the last.
| George Sterling | Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Religion,The Spiritual | null |
The Skull of Shakespeare
|
I
Without how small, within how strangely vast!
What stars of terror had their path in thee!
What music of the heavens and the sea
Lived in a sigh or thundered on the blast!
Here swept the gleam and pageant of the Past,
As Beauty trembled to her fate’s decree;
Here swords were forged for armies yet to be,
And tears were found too dreadful not to last.
Here stood the seats of judgment and its light,
To whose assizes all our dreams were led—
Our best and worst, our Paradise and Hell;
And in this room delivered now to night,
The mortal put its question to the dead,
And worlds were weighed, and God’s deep shadow fell.
II
Here an immortal river had its rise,
Though dusty now the fountain whence it ran
So swift and beautiful with good to man.
Here the foundation of an empire lies—
The ruins of a realm seen not with eyes,
That now the vision of a gnat could scan.
Here wars were fought within a little span,
Whose echoes yet resound on human skies.
Life, on her rainbow road from dust to dust,
Spilt here her wildest iris, still thine own,
Master, and with thy soul and ashes one!
Thy wings are distant from our years of lust,
Yet he who liveth not by bread alone
Shall see thee as that angel in the sun.
| George Sterling | Living,Death,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Theater & Dance | null |
The Princess on the Headland
|
My mother the queen is dead.
My father the king is old.
He fumbles his cirque of gold
And dreams of a year long fled.
The young men stare at my face,
But cannot meet my glance—
Cavan tall as a lance,
Orra swift in the race.
Death was ever my price,
Since my maidenhood began:
At the thought of a Gaelic man
My heart is sister of ice.
’Tis another for whom I wait,
Though I have not kissed his sword:
He or none is my lord,
Though our night be soon or late.
The star grows great in my breast:
It is crying clearly now
To the star on the burnished prow
Of his galley far in the West.
The capes of the North are dim,
And the windward beaches smoke
Where the last long roller spoke
The tidings it held of him.
Sorrow I know he brings,
Battle, despair and change,—
Beauty cruel and strange,
And the shed bright blood of kings.
Breast, be white for his sake!
Mouth, be red for the kiss!
Soul, be strong for your bliss!
Heart, be ready to break!
| George Sterling | Love,Desire,Mythology & Folklore,Fairy-tales & Legends | null |
The Ship and Her Makers
|
THE ORE
Before Man’s labouring wisdom gave me birth
I had not even seen the light of day;
Down in the central darkness of the earth,
Crushed by the weight of continents I lay,
Ground by the weight to heat, not knowing then
The air, the light, the noise, the world of men.
THE TREES
We grew on mountains where the glaciers cry,
Infinite sombre armies of us stood
Below the snow-peaks which defy the sky;
A song like the gods moaning filled our wood;
We knew no men—our life was to stand staunch,
Singing our song, against the avalanche.
THE HEMP AND FLAX
We were a million grasses on the hill,
A million herbs which bowed as the wind blew,
Trembling in every fibre, never still;
Out of the summer earth sweet life we drew.
Little blue-flowered grasses up the glen,
Glad of the sun, what did we know of men?
THE WORKERS
We tore the iron from the mountain’s hold,
By blasting fires we smithied it to steel;
Out of the shapeless stone we learned to mould
The sweeping bow, the rectilinear keel;
We hewed the pine to plank, we split the fir,
We pulled the myriad flax to fashion her.
Out of a million lives our knowledge came,
A million subtle craftsmen forged the means;
Steam was our handmaid and our servant flame,
Water our strength, all bowed to our machines.
Out of the rock, the tree, the springing herb
We built this wandering beauty so superb.
THE SAILORS
We, who were born on earth and live by air,
Make this thing pass across the fatal floor,
The speechless sea; alone we commune there
Jesting with death, that ever open door.
Sun, moon and stars are signs by which we drive
This wind-blown iron like a thing alive.
THE SHIP
I march across great waters like a queen,
I whom so many wisdoms helped to make;
Over the uncruddled billows of seas green
I blanch the bubbled highway of my wake.
By me my wandering tenants clasp the hands,
And know the thoughts of men in other lands.
| John Masefield | Activities,Travels & Journeys,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Trees & Flowers,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics | null |
Ode on the Centenary of the Birth of Robert Browning
|
As unto lighter strains a boy might turn
From where great altars burn
And Music’s grave archangels tread the night,
So I, in seasons past,
Loved not the bitter might
And merciless control
Of thy bleak trumpets calling to the soul.
Their consummating blast
Held inspirations of affright,
As when a faun
Hears mournful thunders roll
On breathless, wide transparencies of dawn.
Nor would I hear
With thee, superb and clear
The indomitable laughter of the race;
Nor would I face
Clean Truth, with her cold agates of the well,
Nor with thee trace
Her footprints passing upward to the snows,
But sought a phantom rose
And islands where the ghostly siren sings;
Nor would I dwell
Where star-forsaking wings
On mortal thresholds hide their mystery,
Nor watch with thee
The light of Heaven cast on common things.
But now in dreams of day I see thee stand
A grey, great sentry on the encompassed wall
That fronts the Night forever, in thy hand
A consecrated spear
To test the dragons of man's ancient fear
From secret gulfs that crawl—
A captain of that choral band
Whose reverend faces, anxious of the Dark,
Yet undismayed
By rain of ruined worlds against the night,
Turned evermore to hark
The music of God's silence, and were stayed
By something other than the reason’s light.
And I have seen thee as
An eagle, strong to pass
Where tempest-shapen clouds go to and fro
And winds and noons have birth,
But whose regard is on the lands below
And wingless things of earth.
And yet not thine for long
The feignéd passion of the nightingale,
Nor shards of haliotis, nor the song
Of cymballed fountains hidden in the dale,
Nor gardens where the feet of Fragrance steal:
’Twas thine the laying-on to feel
Of tragic hands imperious and cold,
That grasping, led thee from the dreams of old,
Making thee voyager
Of seas within the cosmic solitude,
Whose moons the long-familiar stars occlude,—
Whose living sunsets stir
With visions of the timelessness we crave.
And thou didst ride a wave
That gathered solemn music to its breast,
And breaking, shook our strand with thought’s unrest,
Till men far inland heard its mighty call
Where the young mornings leap the world’s blue wall.
* * *
Nature hath lonely voices at her heart
And some thou heardst, for at thine own
Were chords beyond all Art
That thrill but to the eternal undertone.
But not necessitous to thee
The dreams that were when Arcady began
Or Paphos soared in iris from the sea;
For thou couldst guess
The rainbows hidden in the frustrate slime,
And sawst in crownless Man
A Titan scourged thro’ Time
With pains and raptures of his loneliness.
And thou wast wanderer
In that dim House that is the human heart,
Where thou didst roam apart,
Seeing what pillars were
Between its deep foundations and the sun,
What halls of dream undone,
What seraphs hold compassionate their wings
Between the youth and bitterness of things,
Ere all see clear
The gain in loss, the triumph in the tear.
Time’s whitest loves lie radiant in thy song,
Like starlight on an ocean, for thine own
Was as a deathless lily grown
In Paradise—ethereal and strong.
And to thine eyes
Earth had no earth that held not haughty dust,
And seeds of future harvestings in trust,
And hidden azures of eventual skies.
Yet hadst thou sharper strains,
Even as the Power determines us with pains,
And seeing harvests, sawst as well the chaff,
And seeing Beauty, sawst her shames no less,
Loosing the sweet,
High thunder of thy Jovian laugh
On souls purblind in their self-righteousness.
O vision wide and keen!
Which knew, untaught, that pains to joyance are
As night unto the star
That on the effacing dawn must burn unseen.
And thou didst know what meat
Was torn to give us milk,
What countless worms made possible the silk
That robes the mind, what plan
Drew as a bubble from old infamies
And fen-pools of the past
The shy and many-colored soul of man.
Yea! thou hast seen the lees
In that rich cup we lift against the day,
Seen the man-child at his disastrous play—
His shafts without a mark,
His fountains flowing downward to the dark,
His maiming and his bars,
Then turned to see
His vatic shadow cast athwart the stars,
And his strange challenge to infinity.
But who am I to speak,
Far down the mountain, of its altar-peak,
Or cross on feeble wings,
Adventurous, the oceans in thy mind?
We of a wider day’s bewilderings
For very light seem blind,
And fearful of the gods our hands have formed.
Some lift their eyes and seem
To see at last the lofty human scheme
Fading and topping as a sunset stormed
By wind and evening, with the stars in doubt.
And some cry, “On to Brotherhood!” And some
(Their Dream's high music dumb):“Nay! let us hide in roses all our chains, Tho’ all the lamps go out! Let us accept our lords! Time’s tensions move not save to subtler pains.”
And over all the Silence is as swords. …
Wherefore be near us in our day of choice,
Lest Hell’s red choirs rejoice;
And may our counsels be
More wise, more kindly, for the thought of thee;
And may our deeds attest
Thy covenant of fame
To men of after-years that see thy name
Held like a flower by Honor to her breast.
Thy station in our hearts long since was won—
Safe from the jealous years—
Thou of whose love, thou of whose thews and tears
We rest most certain when the day is done
And formless shadows close upon the sun!
Thou wast a star ere death’s long night shut down,
And for thy brows the crown
Was graven ere the birth-pangs, and thy bed
Is now of hallowed marble, and a fane
Among the mightier dead:
More blameless than thine own what soul hath stood?
Dost thou lie deaf until another Reign,
Or hear as music o’er thy head
The ceaseless trumpets of the war for Good?
Ah, thou! ah, thou!
Stills God thy question now?
| George Sterling | Nature,Religion,The Spiritual,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
The Racer
|
I saw the racer coming to the jump,
Staring with fiery eyeballs as he rusht,
I heard the blood within his body thump,
I saw him launch, I heard the toppings crusht.
And as he landed I beheld his soul
Kindle, because, in front, he saw the Straight
With all its thousands roaring at the goal,
He laughed, he took the moment for his mate.
Would that the passionate moods on which we ride
Might kindle thus to oneness with the will;
Would we might see the end to which we stride,
And feel, not strain in struggle, only thrill,
And laugh like him and know in all our nerves
Beauty, the spirit, scattering dust and turves.
| John Masefield | Living,Life Choices,Nature,Animals | null |
The Haunted
|
Here, in this darkened room of this old house,
I sit beside the fire. I hear again,
Within, the scutter where the mice carouse,
Without, the gutter dropping with the rain.
Opposite, are black shelves of wormy books,
To left, glazed cases, dusty with the same,
Behind, a wall, with rusty guns on hooks,
To right, the fire, that chokes one panting flame.
Over the mantel, black as funeral cloth,
A portrait hangs, a man, whose flesh the worm
Has mawed this hundred years, whose clothes the moth
A century since, has channelled to a term.
I cannot see his face : I only know
He stares at me, that man of long ago.
I light the candles in the long brass sticks,
I see him now, a pale-eyed, simpering man,
Framed in carved wood, wherein the death-watch ticks,
A most dead face : yet when the work began
That face, the pale puce coat, the simpering smile,
The hands that hold a book, the eyes that gaze,
Moved to the touch of mind a little while.
The painter sat in judgment on his ways :
The painter turned him to and from the light,
Talked about art, or bade him lift his head.
Judged the lips’ paleness and the temples’ white,
And now his work abides ; the man is dead.
But is he dead ? This dusty study drear
Creaks in its panels that the man is here.
Here, beyond doubt, he lived, in that old day.
“He was a Doctor here,” the student thought.
Here, when the puce was new, that now is grey,
That simpering man his daily practice wrought.
Here he let blood, prescribed the pill and drop,
The leech, the diet ; here his verdict given
Brought agonies of hoping to a stop,
Here his condemned confessioners were shriven.
What is that book he holds, the key, too dim
To read, to know ; some little book he wrote,
Forgotten now, but still the key to him.
He sacrificed his vision for his coat.
I see the man ; a simpering mask that hid
A seeing mind that simpering men forbid.
Those are his books no doubt, untoucht, undusted,
Unread, since last he left them on the shelves,
Octavo sermons that the fox has rusted,
Sides splitting off from brown decaying twelves.
This was his room, this darkness of old death,
This coffin-room with lights like embrasures,
The place is poisonous with him ; like a breath
On glass, he stains the spirit ; he endures.
Here is his name within the sermon book,
And verse, “When hungry Worms my Body eat” ;
He leans across my shoulder as I look,
He who is God or pasture to the wheat.
He who is Dead is still upon the soul
A check, an inhibition, a control.
I draw the bolts. I am alone within.
The moonlight through the coloured glass comes faint,
Mottling the passage wall like human skin,
Pale with the breathings left of withered paint.
But others walk the empty house with me,
There is no loneliness within these walls
No more than there is stillness in the sea
Or silence in the eternal waterfalls.
There in the room, to right, they sit at feast ;
The dropping grey-beard with the cold blue eye,
The lad, his son, that should have been a priest,
And he, the rake, who made his mother die.
And he, the gambling man, who staked the throw,
They look me through, they follow when I go.
They follow with still footing down the hall,
I know their souls, those fellow-tenants mine,
Their shadows dim those colours on the wall,
They point my every gesture with a sign.
That grey-beard cast his aged servant forth
After his forty years of service done,
The gambler supped up riches as the north
Sups with his death the glories of the sun.
The lad betrayed his trust ; the rake was he
Who broke two women’s hearts to ease his own :
They nudge each other as they look at me,
Shadows, all our, and yet as hard as stone.
And there, he comes, that simpering man, who sold
His mind for coat of puce and penny gold.
O ruinous house, within whose corridors
None but the wicked and the mad go free.
(On the dark stairs they wait, behind the doors
They crouch, they watch, or creep to follow me.)
Deep in old blood your ominous bricks are red,
Firm in old bones your walls’ foundations stand,
With dead men’s passions built upon the dead,
With broken hearts for lime and oaths for sand.
Terrible house, whose horror I have built,
Sin after sin, unseen, as sand that slips
Telling the time, till now the heaped guilt
Cries, and the planets circle to eclipse.
You only are the Daunter, you alone
Clutch, till I feel your ivy on the bone.
| John Masefield | Living,Death,Mythology & Folklore,Ghosts & the Supernatural,Horror | null |
The Builders
|
Before the unseen cock had called the time,
Those workers left their beds and stumbled out
Into the street, where dust lay white as lime
Under the last star that keeps bats about.
Then blinking still from bed, they trod the street,
The doors closed up and down ; the traveller heard
Doors opened, closed, then silence, then men’s feet
Moving to toil, the men too drowsed for word.
The bean-field was a greyness as they passed,
The darkness of the hedge was starred with flowers,
The moth, with wings like dead leaves, sucked his last,
The triumphing cock cried out with all his powers ;
His fire of crying made the twilight quick,
Then clink, clink, clink, men’s trowels tapped the brick.
I saw the delicate man who built the tower
Look from the turret at the ground below,
The granite column wavered like a flower,
But stood in air whatever winds might blow.
Its roots were in the rock, its head stood proud,
No earthly forest reared a head so high ;
Sometimes the eagle came there, sometimes cloud,
It was man’s ultimate footstep to the sky.
And in that peak the builder kept his treasure,
Books with the symbols of his art, the signs
Of knowledge in excitement, skill in pleasure,
The edge that cut, the rule that kept the lines.
He who had seen his tower beneath the grass,
Rock in the earth, now smiled, because it was.
How many thousand men had done his will,
Men who had hands, or arms, or strength to spend,
Or cunning with machines, or art, or skill !
All had obeyed him, working to this end.
Hundreds in distant lands had given their share
Of power, to deck it ; on its every stone
Their oddity of pleasure was laid bare,
Yet was the tower his offspring, his alone.
His inner eye had seen, his will had made it,
All the opposing army of men’s minds
Had bowed, had turned, had striven as he bade it,
Each to his purpose in their myriad kinds.
Now it was done, and in the peak he stood
Seeing his work, and smiled to find it good.
It had been stone, earth’s body, hidden deep,
Lightless and shapeless, where it cooled and hardened.
Now it was as the banner on man’s keep
Or as the Apple in Eden where God gardened.
Lilies of stone ran round it, and like fires
The tongues of crockets shot from it and paused,
Horsemen who raced were carven on’t, the spires
Were bright with gold ; all this the builder caused.
And standing there, it seemed that all the hive
Of human skill which now it had become,
Was stone no more, nor building, but alive,
Trying to speak, this tower that was dumb,
Trying to speak, nay, speaking, soul to soul
With powers who are, to raven or control
| John Masefield | Activities,Jobs & Working,Religion,Christianity | null |
About Suffering
|
Part of suffering is the useless urge to announce that you’re suffering.
There is no other way to say it: I’m suffering. Just to say “I suffer”
helps.
I read somewhere, “we become lyrical when we suffer.”
Happiness is suffering for the right reasons.
First-order suffering is second-order happiness.
You have to suffer for beauty? Because you have to suffer.
We pride ourselves on a high quality of suffering.
Turgenev was born in 1818 in the Province of Orel, and suffered
during his childhood from a tyrannical mother.
In the past their suffering was less absurd.
The problem is, everything’s worse. Like, paper or plastic? We’re all
still going to die suffering.
I value being alone with my thoughts, but it’s weird to say, “This
thing that makes us suffer less, we have to stop doing it.”
Isn’t it kind of the point of culture to assuage our feeling needless
and alone?
How does one suffer “gladly,” exactly?
At least the rich get to suffer in comfort.
It makes the life feel longer. Live to suffer another day.
One’s past suffering can be a great source of comfort. A torturous
luxury. Velvet upholstery.
Suffering is happiness, after forty minutes of desolate shuffling. The
point is, life is suffering.
About suffering, no one is ever wrong.
| Elisa Gabbert | Living,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy | null |
Weren't We Beautiful
|
growing into ourselves
earnest and funny we were
angels of some kind, smiling visitors
the light we lived in was gorgeous
we looked up and into the camera
the ordinary things we did with our hands
or how we turned and walked
or looked back we lifted the child
spooned food into his mouth
the camera held it, stayed it
there we are in our lives as if
we had all time
as if we would stand in that room
and wear that shirt those glasses
as if that light
without end
would shine on us
and from us.
| Marjorie Saiser | null | null |
Ascension
|
First day of February,
and in the far corner of the yard
the Adirondack chair,
blown over by the wind at Christmas,
is still on its back,
the snow too deep for me
to traipse out and right it,
the ice too sheer
to risk slamming these old bones
to the ground.
In a hospital bed in her room
where her bed used to be,
and her husband,
my Aunt Millie keeps reaching up
for the far corner of the room,
whispering That is so interesting.I will go now.
In April
I will walk out
across the warming grass,
and right the chair
as if there had never been anything
to stop me in the first place,
listening for the buzz of hummingbirds
which reminds me of how fast
things are capable of moving.
| John L. Stanizzi | null | null |
Happiness
|
Abandoned house roofless three walls
no floor a ruin if you think house—
to brown towhees a place to scratch
in the leaves for bugs and worms,
for the male to sing a territorial song
from what remains of the chimney—
an imagination problem like the time
friends said we must be very happy
in the beautiful house we built because
they couldn't see the ruins inside us.
| Richard Jarrette | null | null |
The View from There
|
Where in the world
does my mother go, eyes
shut so tight her lower lashes
curl in toward a view
that's hers alone?
Yesterday she told
me—after the rains, the windscame, and this morning
that's what they do.
| Pauletta Hansel | null | null |
Happiness
|
The storm was headed in our direction—
big loom of gray like the absolute West
leaned over us. Reports of damage
in the neighboring counties—a silo unfurled
and took wing, a house trailer
twisted loose. On the Doppler screen
the storm looked alive, yellow and green
at the fringes, with a fierce red heart
trending to violet. Sirens swept over
to scare it away, like songbirds
grow strident, circle and bluff
at the sight of an owl.
When the rain came in sheets,
I regretted my sins. When lightning
cracked the red pine's half-rotted heart,
I wished the world more joy
in general. When the worst was over
and the grass lay flat, but alive,
and the sky was a waning bruise,
I thought of that silo, how it wasn't mine,
and all that grain cast back into the world's
wind, maybe some of it still flying.
| Max Garland | null | null |
the name before the name before mine
|
the unknown has hold of me and its grip is strong as honey on the underside of a spoon
the unknown i mean is not the usual one the future the tomorrow of survival
but the past and what happened in the name of the name after mine and in the name of the name before mine
i do not know enough to speak i do not know enough to remain silent
there is a fear that holds me and it sounds like wind it sounds like katydids in catalpa
ah the tall grass of the days before i knew there was a before me
where do i live if there’s no home remaining
where do i live if the home i helped build can never be mine and the one i was born into never was
| Jay Besemer | Living,Time & Brevity,Relationships,Home Life | null |
even tho yr sampler broke down on you
|
magnolias & forsythia blossom
from yr Sugar Hill/ Ray Drummond
plays nasty riffs & i imagine
alla the Palm Cafe turns out
when you glow at dusk on
Convent Avenue/ slidin easily by
the just-for-us propositions Gylan Kain
fashioned at every other Harlem corner/
we usedta leave deluxe issues of
love potions/ remedies even insinuations
danglin from Baptist steeples/ Methodist steps
jump back/ jump up/ beatin down/ flyin
yng wenches whose skirts still
tease solos over to the Savoy/
(you cd make yrself irresistible/ be my
Willis Avenue Bridge/ floatin/ Rican wet
su lengua dulce/ over an East River of
gardenias/ remember the minor sixth)
you hummed to me while I was
reachin for the/ ceilin/ where our
folks was carryin on before Michelangelo
or Lionel Richie/ some where round there
where you brush up gainst baobabs/ well
(you know where my beauty marks are/ all
over
HARLEM)
we sing like flowers/ i see
round brown honies giggle at us/ the
silly/ niggahness of yr quick light
kisses/ cómo fresh/ mi chabalo negro/ mi propio Tito
Puente/
my own rhythm section/ that petal
opening every time yr lips/ let
love/ cada vez / yr lips
let love fall/ all
over
Sugar Hill
| Ntozake Shange | Love,Romantic Love,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,Race & Ethnicity | null |
i. Mood Indigo
|
it hasnt always been this way
ellington was not a street
robeson no mere memory
du bois walked up my father’s stairs
hummed some tune over me
sleeping in the company of men
who changed the world
it wasnt always like this
why ray barretto used to be a side-man
& dizzy’s hair was not always grey
i remember i was there
i listened in the company of men
politics as necessary as collards
music even in our dreams
our house was filled with all kinda folks
our windows were not cement or steel
our doors opened like our daddy’s arms
held us safe & loved
children growing in the company of men
old southern men & young slick ones
sonny til was not a boy
the clovers no rag-tag orphans
our crooners/ we belonged to a whole world
nkrumah was no foreigner
virgil aikens was not the only fighter
it hasnt always been this way
ellington was not a street
| Ntozake Shange | Living,Youth,Relationships,Home Life,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity | null |
for my dead & loved ones
|
(for gail, tracie & viola)
whatever shall i do with my dead
my tombs & mausoleums
these potted plants tended by strangers
over yr eyes closed
maybe dreaming dead/ loved
so particularly i dont know
what to do with you
shall i see you dancin/
hold yr child askin/ what’s mammy like
should i sleep with yr husband
who sees yr childself in my memories
yr mother will she bosom talk me to death with you
pretend she has been no mother
our smokey robinson fantasies set aside
recollections comin to no good end
grandma/ grandma
must i ride with yr daughters to sit
in the cemetery on sunny days/ weedin
yr womb/ wdnt it be better if i stayed
in my kitchen/ makin gumbo/ codfish cakes
watchin edge of nite/
rubbin me hands of my apron/ hummin
his eye is on the sparrow
yr photograph at 25 is on my wall
awready you had given yr woman over/
no one wd know you/ only mama is remembered
when waz there more
i shall not lie fondling a dead man’s love
bakin apples for a locket jammed with hair from
a head no longer arrogant
but what shall i do
with my dead/ loved so particularly
leavin me/ specifically
some never stop breathin
wantin kisses
some disappear/ slammin the door
bangin the phone
one went off in a VW bus/ another
stole my sleep
i sit here drinking memories
entertainin ghosts/ longin for arms
no longer warm/ too enchanted
to tend the pulse pushin me on
to go off from you/ my dead & loved ones
when i meet a someone/ i must know
i place you round me like a court of holy seers
if this stranger is to have a space in my life
she must pull yr spirits to her own
for i wander regularly in moments of the dead
if you wd have me speak
you must learn the tongue of my dead & loved ones
i have been left behind
a survivor
holdin out for more
| Ntozake Shange | Living,Death,Sorrow & Grieving,Love,Heartache & Loss | null |
senses of heritage
|
my grandpa waz a doughboy from carolina
the other a garveyite from lakewood
i got talked to abt the race & achievement
bout color & propriety/
nobody spoke to me about the moon
daddy talked abt music & mama bout christians
my sisters/ we
always talked & talked
there waz never quiet
trees were status symbols
i’ve taken to fog/
the moon still surprisin me
| Ntozake Shange | Relationships,Family & Ancestors,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity | null |
who am i thinkin of
|
(for beverly)
when i write i think of my friends
the people of my visions
but how cd i presume to think of men
who leave so little behind i find them
in my wash cloth in the dirty dishes
by my unmade bed
when i write i erase these dark halls
lone subway stops the car followin
too closely how cd i presume
to address my self
to men
they leave so little behind
& still i dont remember.
once a poet
delivered valentino
on a tie-dyed sheet w/
tequila passion
the sheik gallopin a desert for me
another sketched me
in the midst of bougainvillea
another saturated my basement with painted skeletons
long ago a poet
telephoned from ny
to have breakfast
in seattle
i’ve waded in hidden creeks
with the men i remember
the others had no sense of humor
| Ntozake Shange | Relationships,Men & Women,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
nappy edges (a cross country sojourn)
|
st. louis/ such a colored town/ a whiskey
black space of history & neighborhood/ forever ours/
to lawrenceville/ where the only road open
to me/ waz cleared by colonial slaves/ whose children never
moved/ never seems like/ mended the torments of the Depression
the stains of demented spittle/ dropped from lips of crystal women/
still makin independence flags/
from st. louis/ on a halloween’s eve to the veiled prophet/
usurpin the mystery of mardi gras/ made it mine tho the queen
waz always fair/ that parade/ of pagan floats & tambourines/
commemoratin me/ unlike the lonely walks wit liberal trick or
treaters/ back to my front door/ bag half empty/
my face enuf to scare anyone i passed/ a colored kid/
whatta gas 1) here a tree wonderin the horizon dipped in blues & untended bones usedta hugs drawls rhythm & decency here a tree waitin to be hanged
sumner high school/ squat & pale on the corner/ like
our vision/ waz to be vague/ our memory
of the war/ that made us free to be forgotten
becomin paler/ a linear movement from south carolina
to missouri/ freedman/ landin in jackie wilson’s yelp/ daughters of
the manumitted swimmin in tina turner’s grinds/ this is chuck
berry’s town/ disavowin misega-nation/ in any situation/ & they let
us be/ electric blues & bo diddley’s cant/ rockin pneumonia &
boogie-woogie flu/ the slop & short-fried heads/ running always to
the river
/ from chambersbourg/ lil italy/ i passed everyday
at the sweet shoppe/ & waz afraid/ the cops raided truants/
regularly/ after dark i wd not be seen/ wit any other colored/
sane/ lovin my life/
in the 'bourg/ seriously expectin to be gnarled/
hey niggah/ over here/
& behind the truck lay five hands claspin chains/
round the trees/ 4 more sucklin steel/
hey niggah/ over here/
this is the borderline/
a territorial dispute/
hey/ niggah/
over here/
cars loaded wit families/ fellas from the factory/ one or two
practical nurses/ black/ become our trenches/ some dig into cement
wit elbows/ under engines/ do not be seen/ in yr hometown/ after
sunset we suck up our shadows/
2) i will sit here
my shoulders brace an enormous oak dreams waddle in my lap round to miz bertha’s where lil richard gets his process runs backwards to the rosebushes/ a drunk man/ lyin down the block to the nuns in pink habits prayin in a pink chapel my dreams run to meet aunt marie my dreams draw blood from ol sores these stains & scars are mine this is my space i am not movin
| Ntozake Shange | Living,Youth,Social Commentaries,Cities & Urban Life,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity | null |
its happenin/ but you dont know abt it
|
(for david)
these kisses are clandestine
no one can see them
i hold them in my hand
shd i be discovered/
i stick them in my hair & my head gets hot
so i haveta excuse myself
under no circumstances
can the legs that slip over my hips
leave tellin marks/ scents
of love/ this wd be unpardonable
so i am all the time
rubbin my arms/ exposing myself
to river mists/ to mask the sweetness
you leave me swillin in
i cant allow you to look at me
how you do so i am naked & wantin
to be explored like a honeysuckle patch
when you look at me how you do so
i am all lips & thigh/
my cover is blown & the kisses
run free/ only to hover sulkin over
yr cheek/ while i pretend
they are not mine
cuz its happenin/ but you dont know abt it
this kisses they take a slow blues walk
back to me
in the palm of my hand
they spread out/ scratch kick curse & punch
til my skin cries/
kisses raisin hell/ in my fists/
they fly out mad & eager
they’ll fly out mad & eager
if you look at me how you do so i am naked
& wantin/ if you look at me how you do so
i am all lips & thigh/
they gonna fly out mad & eager
they fly out & climb on you
the kisses/ they
flyin
if you look at me
how you do so
| Ntozake Shange | Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated | null |
Turning Over
|
In zero cold the engine's slow
to turn over, coughing
awake like my father sitting on the edge
of the bed staring at the blue linoleum floor,
coughing again, lifting his heavy body
into another day on the railroad section gang,
the icy wind through Lehigh Gap blasting
down on him as he raises the sledge hammer
and strains against the crowbar.
But now he's drinking coffee,
looking toward the dark window,
thinking of what?
Maybe watching Friday Night Fights
or ordering tomato seeds,
maybe the ghostly face in the window
staring back at him.
| Paul Martin | null | null |
Pinned in Place
|
A bed sheet hung out to dry
became a screen for shadow animals.
But of all laundry days in the neighborhood
the windy ones were best,
the clothespins like little men riding
lines that tried to buck them off.
One at a time we ran down the aisles
between snapping sheets
that wanted to put us in our place.
Timing them, you faked and cut
like famous halfbacks. But if a sheet
tagged you it put you down, pinned
by the whiteness floating
against a sky washed by the bluing
our mothers added to the wash water.
Could anyone make it through those days
untouched? You waited for
your chance, then jumped up and finished
the course, rising if you fell again.
Later, let the sky darken suddenly
and we'd be sent out to empty the lines.
All up and down the block, kids
running with bed sheets in their arms,
running like firemen rescuing children.
All night those sheets lay draped
over furniture, as though we were leaving
and would not return for a long time.
| Thomas Reiter | null | null |
The Great Deceiver
|
I will donate my head
I will uncover the seams
I will acknowledge my dust
as silver elixir
to be fed to the masses
I’ve never been more dead than now
more a product of misspent music
halted at the border
flicking seeds sent
through a blister in the wall
I plant movements
that carry all the king’s men
through a crack in the planet
where monkeys sink into
a song their fathers grew
on filaments of language
& certain birds
are mad to hunt a spectrum
of only one meaning
where handmade clouds sound
free from ligament
released beyond bounds
offering steam to relax gem
I can float here combing my hair into waterfall
I am a human fly
wings slick with telepathic goo
an archive of earth piled on my back
This is theater ...
so please assume the role of curtain
I am the director of this fuzz
a tardy imago: the result of clandestine flare
When we returned to your house
we noticed that it wasn’t there
so we built a human pyramid
without flesh
without internal radar or private song
a formation known to drain the color of black suns
and toward this stone we lean
where birds are higher
than sapphire mammatus
where we speak of things mouth-less, bare
| Brian Lucas | Living,The Body,Nature,Animals,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
Taking Turns
|
I pass a woman on the beach.
We both wear graying hair,
feel sand between our toes,
hear surf, and see blue sky.
I came with a smile.
She came to get one.
No. I'm wrong.
She sits on a boulder
by a cairn of stacked rocks.
Hands over her heart,
she stares out to sea.
Today's my turn to hold the joy,
hers the sorrow.
| Jeanie Greensfelder | null | null |
In a Daydream of Being the Big House Missus
|
I rocked in a chair of charred Grand Dragon’s bones,
legs silent as molasses drooling from a cloud of linen.
My fat white maid in her potholder hat
did not watch me watch her sons
molt like dandelions in la-di-da noon
standing squarely on the blacks of their own shadows as they willed.
She crushed lemons in her bear claw fists
and pushed a sugar dust around the pitcher.
The mister started in on the mare,
phantasm of a centaur where it splinters.
Three latticed glasses harmonized on the platter:
my quiet kindness to the albess
for where I sent her daughter.
It was Saturday. There was salt in his seams
and the slip between my knees slumped with heat
and sheets jedidiah-teething the clothesline already.
Followed hours full of our trying to be full of each other
and sunlight yearning like egg white through
the cracked curtains
and the usual evidence of bluegrass his shoulders shed
beneath my nails, the rooms in me he could not enter
branching annexes: my elderberry privacies.
Out of the yard’s farthest hem, darkness
from the world’s first days braided into the tobacco
and I could only imagine tomorrow
if I expected to be slaughtered in my sleep.
| Justin Phillip Reed | Living,The Mind,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Taste
|
All my life I’ve asked my master
Why I am unable to choose
This sweet man or fancy shoes
Over this stranger, more difficult lover
And these expensive but practical loafers
And why I am unable to author
A book exhibiting my full potential
And have focused instead on inconsequential
Letters to strange and difficult lovers
Who by my letters were never changed.
I certainly haven’t been constrained
By terrible parents or trauma or poverty
And even if I had it wouldn’t explain
My propensity for misery
Anymore than it would my
Propensity for joy.
Maybe I’m just a procrastinator
As life is a procrastination of death
And each breath just a procrastination of breath
And friends a procrastination of work
And work a procrastination of love
And love a procrastination I’m just not above.
| Jessica Laser | Living,Disappointment & Failure,Life Choices,The Mind,Time & Brevity,Love,Realistic & Complicated,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets | null |
Things to Do in Hell
|
Grab lunch
Polish your silver
Try a new flavor of yogurt
Burn in a lake of fire
Smoke some weed
Overeat
Finally understand some things
Talk to Steve
Cry out breathlessly
Pay the electric bill
Go to the aquarium in the mall
Worry over the shape and color of your moles
Sell out the people you used to call friends
Learn how to bake bread
Feed the ducks at the lake by the highway
Exaggerate your earnings
Get elected
Mull things over
Attend a livestock auction
Pull down the statues of people who tortured your ancestors
Seek employment
Knit
Regret mostly everything
Paint the windows shut
Pull down the statues of your ancestors
Get down on your knees
Read Kierkegaard
Pick the kids up from Montessori
Lose your appetite
Linger
Imagine that hell is only an abstraction
DVR Homeland
Take another free breath mint
Cry out endlessly
Blame those closest to you
Love even the barest light pissing through the trees
| Chris Martin | Living,Death,Religion,Arts & Sciences,Philosophy,Social Commentaries,History & Politics | null |
Decorating a Cake While Listening to Tennis
|
The commentator's rabbiting on and on
about how it's so easy for Roger, resentment
thick as butter still in a box. Yet word
from those who've done their homework
is how the man loves to train—how much
he relishes putting in the hours
just as magicians shuffle card after card,
countless to mere humans
but carefully all accounted for.
At hearing "luck" again, I stop
until my hands relax their clutch
on the cone from which a dozen more
peonies are to materialize. I make it look easy
to grow a garden on top of a sheet
of fondant, and that's how it should appear:
as natural and as meant-to-be
as the spin of a ball from the sweetest spot
of a racquet whisked through the air like a wand.
| Peg Duthie | null | null |
The Doll Museum
|
The stone dolls, found in an Egyptian tomb,
are eyeless, armless, heavy for a child
to hold. Not like the dolls that lined the room
my sister and I shared, their bodies light
and made for being bent, their eyelids mobile,
hair that tangled with our own. "At night,"
our father winked at us, "they come to life."
We never pressed our cheeks against cold stone
as pharoah's daughters did. The doctor's knife
could not have caught my sister more off-guard
or left me less alone; I had my dolls.
Though, soon, they lay on tables in the yard
with price tags. Even then they looked alive,
survivors with no sickness to survive.
| Caitlin Doyle | null | null |
Open
|
When they entered the house, which was a very large house
the way a cloud is large, the pages of their story
seemed like cracks in the earth, a man's shirt, or a woman's
blouse, and the stranger in the house told them to make
themselves at home in the house that was not their house,
and told them to write down the three most important gifts
in each of their lives, and then continued to explain how
there were three doors in the house and at each door they must
forfeit one of these gifts, and how the real story always begins
at the third door, where each of them will pause and begin
to crawl, leaving the field of time, where now you pause,
touching the door of this page, wiping away each word, waiting to enter.
| Mark Irwin | null | null |
My Mother's Van
|
Even now it idles outside the houses
where we failed to get better at piano lessons,
visits the parking lot of the ballet school
where my sister and I stood awkwardly
at the back. My mother's van was orange
with a door we slid open to reveal
beheaded plastic dragons and bunches
of black, half-eaten bananas; it was where
her sketchbooks tarried among
abandoned coffee cups and
science projects. She meant to go places
in it: camp in its back seat
and cook on its stove while
painting the coast of Nova Scotia,
or capturing the cold beauty of the Blue Ridge
mountains at dawn. Instead, she waited
behind its wheel while we scraped violins,
made digestive sounds
with trumpets, danced badly at recitals
where grandmothers recorded us
with unsteady cameras. Sometimes, now,
I look out a window and believe I see it,
see her, waiting for me beside a curb,
under a tree, and I think I could open the door,
clear off a seat, look at the drawing in her lap,
which she began, but never seemed to finish.
| Faith Shearin | null | null |
Symbiosis
|
I sit with my thermos of coffee on the mall:
a mile-long promenade, arcades of elms
flanking a generous aliquot of benches.
But at this early hour it starts to dawn:
I am the only one without a dog.
So, a witness to an ancient symbiosis,
as it's evolved within a modern city:
The dogs, I note, are smaller, the owners
less ferocious. The former sniff then poop,
the latter, like potty-training parents, pat their heads,
gather it in plastic doggy-bags.
It's no longer for the hunt or for protection;
both species have adapted to survive
hard loneliness inside a small apartment.
| Kenneth Lee | null | null |
Lost in Plain Sight
|
Somewhere recently
I lost my short-term memory.
It was there and then it moved
like the flash of a red fox
along a line fence.
My short-term memory
has no address but here
no time but now.
It is a straight-man, waiting to speak
to fill in empty space
with name, date, trivia, punch line.
And then it fails to show.
It is lost, hiding somewhere out back
a dried ragweed stalk on the Kansas Prairie
holding the shadow of its life
against a January wind.
How am I to go on?
I wake up a hundred times a day.
Who am I waiting for
what am I looking for
why do I have this empty cup
on the porch or in the yard?
I greet my neighbor, who smiles.
I turn a slow, lazy Susan
in my mind, looking for
some clue, anything to break the spell
of being lost in plain sight.
| Peter Schneider | null | null |
The Great San Bernardino Pitch Party
|
“I’m interested in feminist oratory,” we think
Jess should say
“Specifically that.”
Yellow-breasted engine sounds on the
Joshua tree
Joshua tree mid-shimmy
I think every bird is mad
at me. Does that make me
an alcoholic?
Let’s take a break, after
the great San Bernardino sculpture party
sparkling toilet pieces lay tiled into
the pavilion,
silver flushers too.
TV piles. I am
uneasy. So what?
No match for the always sand and always
Air. I find a pair of leather pants
Hanging in a hut & touch them.
Definitely not leather.
I can see the sunscreen on your face
not rubbed in,
rivulets wet
the under-chin. Let’s get this next pitch
right, guys,
decades left of percolation.
| Callie Garnett | Nature,Animals,Arts & Sciences,Painting & Sculpture,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
An Animal Unfit for Living Unmolested
|
I find the heavens beautiful,
I find the earth so too,
the seas and the ground,
the furling of water and gas,
the bright distant points
of our isolation. I take comfort
in the swinging pendant traffic lights,
the slurry of wet raw flour.
I am programmed to this language,
and can only voice my rejection of it
in the same language.
This is the power of diaspora,
the difficulty in finding alternative.
Let us send messages to the half-existent.
To excuse oneself, to claim not knowing
the future, is inhuman. I am so worthless
that my body serves as brick,
conscripted to build up my prison
until it is time to lay my own body
down for the walls. It is mechanical,
snipping into the loop of every lace,
separating from every link
the cold wrapped bud. At first the skin
is thick and bright,
then darkly collapses.
Nothing keeps its shape,
nothing stands itself upright,
we keep sliding apart into smaller
and smaller components, and it is
in the air above us now,
we do not mingle with the outcome
of ideas any longer, the energy
that knows whether cruelty
is disinterested or rightful.
They are so happy
while we laugh at them,
their eyes enthused and shining
while we trick them
into hurting themselves.
| Ginger Ko | Relationships,Friends & Enemies,Arts & Sciences,Language & Linguistics,Social Commentaries,Race & Ethnicity | null |
Held in the Arms of St. Francis & the Virgin
|
It tastes like all my night
when I'm at the bottom of the borough
sheets burn around me
through the night
Consecrate me
Consecrate me
Conserve me lover
In the sills of your love
in the cells of your palms
from the womb to cell
break me from the belly of ship
let me crash upon you
Consecrate me my lover in your rectum
in a rehabilitation center where athletes seek the best care
I break into you
Consecrate me I want to love you in Syracuse woods
in Sonnino love me against lamb’s wool
I am my sister's wife keeper
Consecrate me
in the discretion of sisters
nuns loving
and hating jobs that ask
with fangs barred
| Jasmine Gibson | Living,The Body,Love,Desire,Religion,Christianity | null |
15 Years of Paris
|
(for Daniel, because
the Catacombs)
You’re leaving Las Vegas, except
In German. Point. Point. Point.
Gave it out, beautiful gentilhommeComme vous êtes, toujours,
Unforgettable, circa 2008 how
You made me cum like that -
She got so mad in the bed - the
Hotel bathroom floor,
The bathtub, the apartment where
I was the crying queen
Those o’s still unforgettable
And now Paris. I cried today OW!
Your Antarctica cold last
Night. You told me they fucked
You up / I told you he broke
My heart and OW! Freeze
Dried my bandaid right off.
And then the glasses shopping
Memories today yada yada
Wasn’t about the cum shot
Where or if, was about the
Islands and how you said
in the langue d’enemie
No less: “DON’T TOUCH”
Don’t Touch!? We just …
They fucked you up all right.
You give so clearly but have iced
Out all the incoming gifts. WELL
PING my darling Walden island.
I can’t take that kind of cold.I’m leaving Las Vegas.
Just a moon in Taurus trying
To sing the sweet and
It’s not a great user experience
But I just want you to know
How unforgettable you are
When the candles call to Hera
I hope they melt your
I hope a goddess or many
Wash that loneliness away
And when I see you again (in 15 years)
There’s only joy and more
I prefer you laughing to tears
The good way. Drink us when
We’re done. Well, I guess I did
Almost kill you with a
Razor shave once so it
Seems silly to say I’m sorry I
Lost the phantom thread.
Maybe everything’s a ridiculous
never-ending non-planet
Tho, u did kiss me like unicorns
Exist and bond our skin
Like the organ it deserves to be
Known as
To know how unforgettable
you are because there
lies the bridge to the
Mainland. & baby, you
Deserve it all.
| Katy Bohinc | Love,Desire,Realistic & Complicated,Activities,Travels & Journeys | null |
X Number
|
of waves dropped into froth Jellyfish a jar
of innards half-buried in sand Dead nature What are
these things and who are they for? This blue rug
is its own genre And these painted apples
round out the essence of what can be made
into what can be eaten Winter interest
3.9 APR April come She will not
swipe the sun into sky Limits of credentialed
credit “At least you’re not the janitor’s
azaleas of the everyday dustpan” There’s
the problem It’s like a concussive
grenade at the end of the mine Mind the
income gap Let’s activate the fact that
every word means go back to the back of the line
because that is where the front leads Years
of the postmodern translated by the annuity
of spring Hello My name
is the first person I I am indebted I am
indented I insist on remaining
unidentified
| Chris Glomski | Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Seas, Rivers, & Streams,Spring,Social Commentaries,Money & Economics | null |
So
|
I wait and wonder
what I’d do
if someone said pick your 60 best poems.
Pick all of them? Or any?
Maybe commit suicide, but everyone would say
“It’s because he’s really gay,” or maybe
“really not gay.”
*
Read Anne Waldman and Terence Winch,
Bruce Andrews and Adrienne Rich, wonder what might happen
to me this summer if I go away, or stay here in Washington DC
where you can see Watergate live!
*
If you want to know the truth today’s my birthday
and though I often feel older, and sometimes appear younger
I’m 31, and like everything else that too can be fun
or a bummer, a drain on the cosmic energy, depending on what?
If you know the answer you win the future;
if you don’t the future is ours to lose or—
whatever happened to the old way of construction?
Well, one line still follows another, and my voices moves
between each space, and when I think of you I sweat,
or maybe just imagine myself like a cartoon troublemaker
big beads of perspiration jumping out from my skin as I
cringe behind the fence that the bully is about to
throw a bomb over, or drop an anvil over, or just put his
meaty fist through and right on into my scared shitless grin,
the analogy resting on our mutual vulnerability—
that’s poetry isn’t it?
*
Of course I don’t talk like this.
I talk like this.
*
And now it’s time to go back to THE HISTORY OF ROCK’N’ROLL
which means it’s my night to cook dinner for “the house”—
collective—and it’s gonna be smoked sausage cooked in peppers
and mushrooms and carrots, maybe some onions, and beans
for protein, or something nutritional. I picked the sausage
because it seemed to be looking at me in the Safeway,
not exactly the way I was looking at one of the cashiers,
a young man with curly blonde hair and nice build
who seemed to have a down home kind of friendliness,
or the woman with the little girl the same sizes as Miles,
who is a little smaller than Caitlin, both of whom were
pulling on my pants leg for pennies for gumballs as I watched
the curve of the woman’s arm as she placed each
well thought over item on the counter behind my
vibrational buying and didn’t even notice how much I fell in love
with her arm and felt guilty for objectifying a part of her
although she might all be like her arm and then I might
fall in love with all of her, but that would cause problems,
she probably is already in love with at least one person, and
I’m already in love with about fourteen on a regular basis, and
that keeps causing all kinds of problems because people who are
attracted to my style don’t like my ways—that sounded like
a pretentious folk singing prodigy’s idea of an early Dylan line,
but what I meant would never be explained right in a poem like this,
or one like Anne Waldman’s either though I like to read hers
because they make me want to write, and in my world that’s what
“great” writers are supposed to do–make everyone else, or
at least me, feel like I can write too, and then make me feel,
like I will, and then I do.
*
After dinner we’ll eat the cake Atticus made for my birthday
there’ll be some presents from some of the people in the house, and
maybe Annie will stop over, or Matthew might call from work, or we
might all go down to watch him make salads at
FOOD FOR THOUGHT,
and maybe eat some too, all along getting stoned on the house doobie,
which goes too fast these days but never fast enough, which is
about the way I feel on my birthday about my life, either that or
the way I’m easily satisfied but never feel I can get too much–
sometimes everything is enough, you know?
*
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME, HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME,
I THINK I JUST HEARD CHUCK COME IN, CAITLIN’S
ANGRY WITH ME AND THROWING A TANTRUM IN
HER ROOM, IT’S RAINING BUT I HEAR THE DISHES
BEING DONE FINALLY BY SOMEONE ELSE
HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO ME
*
Resolution: No more guilt trips
from outside or inside
going either direction
–is everybody happy?
| Michael Lally | Living,Birth & Birthdays,Time & Brevity,Love,Desire,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
Autumn 2017
|
There’s coffee and pie
with a widow from church.
Why do you sit
in the back pew? she asks.
I’m close enough, I say.
Can I sit back there with you?
I’ve always sat there, I tell her,
with my same two friends,
and their clicking oxygen pumps.
One sat next to me for years,
called herself my church girlfriend,
who metastasized, telling me she was
tired of waiting to die.
Now, there’s just my 88-year-old friend,
his pump echoing in the sanctuary,
and there’s that empty
space between us.
I’d like to invite the widow to sit there,
but I miss my dead friend’s laugh,
her loving stories about her husband,
and how we were always
glad to see one another.
I tell the widow all this.
What if I just sat there? she asks.
It’s a free country, I tell her,
and she smiles.
| Bruce Pemberton | null | null |
Roadrunners
|
In the pink light,
haloes of cloud form over the mountains;
lightning, two valleys away,
then, not an hour later,
the explosion of thunder.
The roadrunners
pecking for breadcrumbs on the porch
have long since fled into the rabbitbrush,
into the endless ocean of grass.
Driving in every direction
down licks of red road, I have lost
myself in a militarized topography;
everything named after army units,
generals, scouts, miners…The Dragoon Mountains,Cochise Stronghold; defunct
Gleeson and Pearce,
weird, rusty ghost towns, the only
non-derelict structure
for miles, the local school,
its polished windows and well-kept lawn,
a source of great local pride.
No mountain monograms
for these desiccated whistle-stops,
no giant Q or C or W in bright
white paint to mark
the township's still functional
sorta functional breathing, no
carving for them
into the planet's bark;
and thus they are blesséd
to me like no other;
every successful city
is a flimsy affair with civility,
its eternalness, like Paris or Rome,
mere hypocrisy.
MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN,
BUY REAL ESTATE! Hail follows rain.
Nearby, the township of Sunsites,
once billed as the safest
spot to survive
the inevitable nuclear winter,
actually topped Soviet Russia's
list of high-priority targets… Enter
the Orange Duck Candidate.
A haboob sweeps across
the Valley of the Senile.
In a week, the mountains
have switched from brown
to purple to green.
The desert is human
endeavour's most fitting graveyard;
the slow bleaching,
the gradual eroding into sand,
the heat stifling sound as it leaps into the air.
IT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE. But it always does.
Sulphur Springs Valley
| André Naffis-Sahely | Living,Time & Brevity,Nature,Animals,Landscapes & Pastorals,Weather,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Town & Country Life,War & Conflict | null |
Cat Moving Kittens
|
We must have known,
Even as we reached
Down to touch them
Where we'd found them
Shut-eyed and trembling
Under a straw bale
In the haymow, that
She would move them
That night under cover
Of darkness, and that
By finding them
We were making certain
We wouldn't see them again
Until we saw them
Crouching under the pickup
Like sullen teens, having gone
As wild by then as they'd gone
Still in her mouth that night
She made a decision
Any mother might make
Upon guessing the intentions
Of the state: to go and to
Go now, taking everything
You love between your teeth.
| Austin Smith | null | null |
Nerve
|
In the next scene Walt Whitman
is walking around Boston
Common. He’s young.
It’s winter. Emerson
is there. They walk
and talk for hours, or really
Emerson talks. He scolds
Whitman for slavering
after tree knots and bobbing
with the swimmer. Whitman nods
but in his head he’s busy
tallying his orgasms.
At the carousel
an ancient Puritan is passing
his hat, singing, “Kill It Babe.”
Dozens of geese have gathered
on the frozen pond,
standing on one leg,
tucking the other like a dagger
into their feathery centers.
Well, Emerson asks the poet,
what do you have to say for yourself?
And Whitman, respectfully,
but sure now
all the way down in his bones
where the deep, frontier feeling
of disobedience lives, says,
essentially, go fuck yourself.
I’ll go my own way.
| Geoffrey Hilsabeck | Living,The Body,Arts & Sciences,Poetry & Poets,Social Commentaries,Gender & Sexuality | null |
[lady in brown] "de library waz right down from de trolly tracks"
|
lady in brown
de library waz right down from de trolly tracks
cross from de laundry-mat
thru de big shinin floors & granite pillars
ol st. louis is famous for
i found toussaint
but not til after months uv
cajun katie/ pippi longstockin
christopher robin/ eddie heyward & a pooh bear
in the children’s room
only pioneer girls & magic rabbits
& big city white boys
i knew i waznt sposedta
but i ran inta the ADULT READING ROOM
& came across
TOUSSAINT
my first blk man
(i never counted george washington carver
cuz i didnt like peanuts)
still
TOUSSAINT waz a blk man a negro like my mama say
who refused to be a slave
& he spoke french
& didnt low no white man to tell him nothin
not napolean
not maximillien
not robespierre
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
waz the beginnin uv reality for me
in the summer contest for
who colored child can read
15 books in three weeks
i won & raved abt TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
at the afternoon ceremony
waz disqualified
cuz Toussaint
belonged in the ADULT READING ROOM
& i cried
& carried dead Touissant home in the book
he waz dead & livin to me
cuz TOUSSAINT & them
they held the citadel gainst the french
wid the spirits of ol dead africans from outta the ground
TOUSSAINT led they army of zombies
walkin cannon ball shootin spirits to free Haiti
& they waznt slaves no more
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
became my secret lover at the age of 8
i entertained him in my bedroom
widda flashlight under my covers
way inta the night/ we discussed strategies
how to remove white girls from my hopscotch games
& etc.
TOUSSAINT
waz laying in bed wit me next to raggedy ann
the night i decided to run away from my
integrated home
integrated street
integrated school
1955 waz not a good year for lil blk girls
Toussaint said ‘lets go to haiti’
i said ‘awright’
& packed some very important things in a brown paper bag
so i wdnt haveta come back
then Toussaint & i took the hodiamont streetcar
to the river
last stop
only 15¢
cuz there waznt nobody cd see Toussaint cept me
& we walked all down thru north st. louis
where the french settlers usedta live
in tiny brick houses all huddled together
wit barely missin windows & shingles uneven
wit colored kids playin & women on low porches sippin beer
i cd talk to Toussaint down by the river
like this waz where we waz gonna stow away
on a boat for new orleans
& catch a creole fishin-rig for port-au-prince
then we waz just gonna read & talk all the time
& eat fried bananas
we waz just walkin & skippin past ol drunk men
when dis ol young boy jumped out at me sayin
‘HEY GIRL YA BETTAH COME OVAH HEAH N TALK TO
ME’
well
i turned to TOUSSAINT (who waz furious)
& i shouted
‘ya silly old boy
ya bettah leave me alone
or TOUSSAINT’S gonna get yr ass’
de silly ol boy came round de corner laughin all in my face
‘yellah gal
ya sure must be somebody to know my name so quick’
i waz disgusted
& wanted to get on to haiti
widout some tacky ol boy botherin me
still he kept standin there
kickin milk cartons & bits of brick
tryin to get all in my business
i mumbled to L’OUVERTURE ‘what shd I do’
finally
i asked this silly ol boy
‘WELL WHO ARE YOU?’
he say
‘MY NAME IS TOUSSAINT JONES’
well
i looked right at him
those skidded out cordoroy pants
a striped teashirt wid holes in both elbows
a new scab over his left eye
& i said
‘what’s yr name again’
he say
‘i’m toussaint jones’
‘wow
i am on my way to see
TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE in HAITI
are ya any kin to him
he dont take no stuff from white folks
& they gotta country all they own
& there aint no slaves’
that silly ol boy squinted his face all up
looka heah girl
i am TOUSSAINT JONES
& i’m right heah lookin at ya
& i dont take no stuff from no white folks
ya dont see none round heah do ya?’
& he sorta pushed out his chest
then he say
‘come on lets go on down to the docks
& look at the boats’
i waz real puzzled goin down to the docks
wit my paper bag & my books
i felt TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE sorta leave me
& i was sad
til i realized
TOUSSAINT JONES waznt too different
from TOUSSAINT L’OUVERTURE
cept the ol one waz in haiti
& this one wid me speakin english & eatin apples
yeah.
toussaint jones waz awright wit me
no tellin what all spirits we cd move
down by the river
st. louis 1955 hey wait.
| Ntozake Shange | Living,Youth,Love,First Love,Arts & Sciences,Reading & Books,Social Commentaries,History & Politics,Race & Ethnicity | null |