January 2012
29 posts
3 tags
The Bend
by Claude Esteban
Around the bend of a phrase you return, it’s dawn in a book, it’s a garden, one can see everything, the dew, a moth on a leaf and it’s you who rises suddenly amid the pages and the book grows more lovely because it’s you and you’ve not grown old, you walk slowly to the door.
3 tags
A Poison Tree
by William Blake
I was angry with my friend; I told my wrath—my wrath did end. I was angry with my foe; I told it not—my wrath did grow, And I watered it in fears, Night and morning with my tears, And I sunned it with smiles And with soft deceitful wiles, And it grew both day and night ‘Til it bore an apple bright, And my foe beheld it shine, And he knew that it was mine— ...
3 tags
The Forest
by Rati Amaghlobeli
This forest is thick, but it’s light, Like a temple, like Athens city. In the forest every daybreak seems An outbreak of harmless fire. When the sun rises, its descent is silent – Here rarely anyone comes to visit. It is dozing fitfully, or mist has descended. There is no pillow On its bed. The empty paths Are eternally circular. Deep breathing, Rational breathing – carefree...
3 tags
The Bangs
by Eugenio Montale
Don’t let your hand brush back the bang of hair that veils your cherub brow. It too speaks of you; on my road, it’s my whole horizon, my only light, it and the jades circling your wrist; the curtain your dispensations spread in the tumult of sleep; the wing on which you move unharmed, transmigratory Artemis among the wars of the stillborn. And if, now, the background blooms...
3 tags
Possible Activities
by Margaret Atwood
You could sit on your chair and pick over the language as if it were a bowl of peas. A lot of people do that. It might be instructive. You don’t even need the chair, You could juggle plates of air.
You could poke sticks through the chain-link fence at your brain, which you keep locked up in there, which crouches and sulks like an old tortoise, and glares out at you, sluggish...
3 tags
A Winter Night
by Tomas Tranströmer
The storm puts its mouth to the house and blows to get a tone. I toss and turn, my closed eyes reading the storm’s text. The child’s eyes grow wide in the dark and the storm howls for him. Both love the swinging lamps; both are halfway towards speech. The storm has the hands and wings of a child. Far away, travelers run for cover. The house feels its own constellation of...
3 tags
Ann
by Herman de Coninck
I remember myself most. How, all of a sudden I had one wife, instead of now and then this love or that. And how we had to love each other, instead of simply falling in love sometimes. I used to sit in bars, boasting about how beautiful you were, and shy, and brash too, until my women friends would say: why don’t you just go and be in love at home — and how I still needed to...
3 tags
A Great Need
by Hafiz
Out Of a great need We are all holding hands And climbing. Not loving is a letting go. Listen, The terrain around here Is Far too Dangerous For That.
3 tags
Leaving the Silver City
by J. Bradley
I’m terrible at painting. You can tell from the way the bulls-eye shifts based on her name.
I look for the red flags, burn the ones I can’t live with, fuck her on top of the ones I’ll tolerate.
The ending constantly revises itself. Mondays, she gets bored of my fingernail biting. Thursdays, I catch her kissing light poles. Saturdays, her patience erodes when for the fiftieth time...
3 tags
Lot's Wife
by Anna Akhmatova
The righteous man followed God’s luminous angels And hurried after them over the hill. But his wife heard an anxious voice that whispered: “It isn’t too late, not yet; you can still Look back at the towers of the town you came from, At the street where you sang and the room where you spun, At the empty windows of the house you cared for And the bed where all your children...
3 tags
Clouds Gathering
by Charles Simic
It seemed the kind of life we wanted. Wild strawberries and cream in the morning. Sunlight in every room. The two of us walking by the sea naked. Some evenings, however, we found ourselves Unsure of what comes next. Like tragic actors in a theater on fire, With birds circling over our heads, The dark pines strangely still, Each rock we stepped on bloodied by the sunset. We were...
3 tags
Renascence
by Edna St. Vincent Millay
All I could see from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood; I turned and looked another way, And saw three islands in a bay. So with my eyes I traced the line Of the horizon, thin and fine, Straight around till I was come Back to where I’d started from; And all I saw from where I stood Was three long mountains and a wood.
Over these things I could not...
3 tags
Dreams
by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams, For if dreams die, Life is a broken-winged bird That cannot fly. Hold fast to dreams, for when dreams go, Life is a barren field Frozen with snow.
3 tags
Out of Metropolis
by Lynn Emanuel
We’re headed for empty-headedness, the featureless amnesias of Idaho, Nebraska, Nevada, states rich only in vowel sounds and alliteration. We’re taking the train so we can see into the heart of the heart of America framed in the windows’ cool oblongs of light. We want cottages, farmhouses with peaked roofs leashed by wood smoke to the clouds; we want the golden broth of...
3 tags
The Word
by Tony Hoagland
Down near the bottom of the crossed-out list of things you have to do today,
between “green thread” and “broccoli” you find that you have penciled “sunlight.”
Resting on the page, the word is as beautiful, it touches you as if you had a friend
and sunlight were a present he had sent you from some place distant as this morning — to...
3 tags
A Marriage
by R.S. Thomas
We met under a shower of bird-notes. Fifty years passed, love’s moment in a world in servitude to time. She was young; I kissed with my eyes closed and opened them on her wrinkles. ‘Come,’ said death, choosing her as his partner for the last dance. And she, who in life had done everything with a bird’s grace, opened her bill now for the shedding of one sigh no heavier than a...
3 tags
Epitaph: Zion
by Anne Carson
Murderous little world once our objects had gazes. Our lives Were fragile, the wind Could dash them away. Here lies the refugee breather Who drank a bowl of elsewhere.
3 tags
The Obligation to Be Happy
by Linda Pastan
It is more onerous than the rites of beauty or housework, harder than love. But you expect it of me casually, the way you expect the sun to come up, not in spite of rain or clouds but because of them.
And so I smile, as if my own fidelity to sadness were a hidden vice— that downward tug on my mouth, my old suspicion that health and love are brief irrelevancies, no more...
3 tags
Other Lives and Dimensions and Finally a Love Poem
by Bob Hicok
My left hand will live longer than my right. The rivers of my palms tell me so. Never argue with rivers. Never expect your lives to finish at the same time. I think praying, I think clapping is how hands mourn. I think staying up and waiting for paintings to sigh is science. In another dimension this is exactly what’s happening, it’s what they write grants about: the...
3 tags
Colonial Girls School
by Olive Senior
Borrowed images willed our skins pale muffled over laughter lowered our voices let out our hems dekinked our hair denied our sex in gym tunics and bloomers harnessed our voices to madrigals and genteel airs yoked our minds to declensions in Latin and the language of Shakespeare Told us nothing about ourselves There was nothing about us at all
How those pale northern eyes and...
3 tags
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
by William Wordsworth
I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills, When all at once I saw a crowd, A host, of golden daffodils; Beside the lake, beneath the trees, Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.
Continuous as the stars that shine And twinkle on the Milky Way, They stretched in never-ending line Along the margin of a bay: Ten thousand saw I at a glance,...
fridablida asked: Today's poem is actually Leonard Cohen's inspiration for "Take This Waltz," one of his best songs. There is a website that compares the lyrics to the poem but tumblr won't allow me to include it in this text. Thought you might find it interesting or want to share. Thanks!
unlearn-me asked: Thank you for choosing one of my poems to share on this blog! :) It was really nice to see that poem getting some appreciation. I had almost forgotten about it myself. - Amelia M. Garcia
3 tags
The Cowardly One
by Christopher Newgent
In another version, the lion leapt without hesitation.
He called it courage, how simple his heavy paws dashed her to the yellow bricks, swatted the little dog at his haunches, how his powerful maw carried their little bodies back to his den careless, their heads drooping towards the forest floor.
He called it courage, how he dismantled the Tin Man, made an oven...
3 tags
Little Viennese Waltz
by Federico García Lorca
In Vienna there are ten little girls, a shoulder for death to cry on, and a forest of dried pigeons. There is a fragment of tomorrow in the museum of winter frost. There is a thousand-windowed dance hall. Ay, ay, ay, ay! Take this close-mouthed waltz. Little waltz, little waltz, little waltz, of itself of death, and of brandy that dips its tail in the sea. I love you, I...
3 tags
The Bricklayer's Lunch Hour
by Allen Ginsberg
Two bricklayers are setting the walls of a cellar in a new dug out patch of dirt behind an old house of wood with brown gables grown over with ivy on a shady street in Denver. It is noon and one of them wanders off. The young subordinate bricklayer sits idly for a few minutes after eating a sandwich and throwing away the paper bag. He has on dungarees and is bare above ...
3 tags
The Wayfarer
by Sara Teasdale
Love entered in my heart one day, A sad, unwelcome guest; But when he begged that he might stay, I let him wait and rest. He broke my sleep with sorrowing, And shook my dreams with tears, And when my heart was fain to sing, He stilled its joy with fears.
But now that he has gone his way, I miss the old sweet pain, And sometimes in the night I pray That he may come again.
2 tags
The Solitary Woodsman
by Charles G.D. Roberts
When the gray lake-water rushes Past the dripping alder bushes, And the bodeful autumn wind In the fir-tree weeps and hushes, When the air is sharply damp Round the solitary camp, And the moose-bush in the thicket Glimmers like a scarlet lamp, When the birches twinkle yellow, And the cornel bunches mellow, And the owl across the twilight Trumpets to his downy fellow, When...
December 2011
31 posts
2 tags
Invictus
by William Ernest Henley
Out of the night that covers me, Black as the pit from pole to pole, I thank whatever gods may be For my unconquerable soul.
In the fell clutch of circumstance I have not winced nor cried aloud. Under the bludgeonings of chance My head is bloody, but unbowed.
Beyond this place of wrath and tears Looms but the Horror of the shade, And yet the menace of the years ...
2 tags
Inhale, Exhale
by Gesshu Soko
Inhale, exhale Forward, back Living, dying: Arrows, let flown each to each Meet midway and slice The void in aimless flight
Thus I return to the source.
2 tags
Balance
by Adam Zagajewski
I watched the arctic landscape from above and thought of nothing, lovely nothing. I observed white canopies of clouds, vast expanses where no wolf tracks could be found.
I thought about you and about the emptiness that can promise one thing only: plenitude— and that a certain sort of snowy wasteland bursts from a surfeit of happiness.
As we drew closer to our landing, ...
2 tags
The Piano Speaks
by Sandra Beasley
After Erik Satie
For an hour I forgot my fat self, my neurotic innards, my addiction to alignment.
For an hour I forgot my fear of rain.
For an hour I was a salamander shimmying through the kelp in search of shore, and under his fingers the notes slid loose from my belly in a long jellyrope of eggs that took root in the mud. And what
would hatch, I did not know— a lie. A...
2 tags
B-Side Poem Story: a Response to PJ
by Amelia M. Garcia
Hello to the could-have-beens, the never-weres, the last-calls-ignored and the times wasted. I’m not exactly sure what to say to the person who slept with their back to me that last night at home, the last time I hoped to remember. During those hours I was writing poems on your spine and pushing them through the spaces in your ribcage. When you coughed in the morning, I...
2 tags
Explosion at Winco No. 9
by Diane Gilliam Fisher
Delsey Salyer knowed Tom Junior by his toes, which his steel-toed boots had kept the fire off of. Betty Rose seen a piece of Willy’s ear, the little notched part where a hound had bit him when he was a young’un, playing at eating its food. It is true that it is the men that goes in, but it is us that carries the mine inside. It is us that listens to what all they are...
2 tags
Skating in Harlem, Christmas Day
by Cynthia Zarin
Beyond the ice-bound stones and bucking trees, past bewildered Mary, the Meer in snow, two skating rinks and two black crooked paths
are a battered pair of reading glasses scratched by the skater’s multiplying math. Beset, I play this game of tic-tac-toe.
Divide, subtract. Who can tell if love surpasses? Two naughts we’ve learned make one astonished— a hectic...
2 tags
A Visit from St. Nicholas
by Clement Clark Moore
‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all thro’ the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there; The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar plums danc’d in their heads, And Mama in her ‘kerchief, and I in my...
2 tags
Sandwich Notch Road, Two Days Before Christmas
by John Evans
On dirt roads with good friends the names come back all at once.
No one I know who lives without deep sorrow. No one ever really finished with desire.
The soft animal of my body does not love what it has learned.
How could it?
I wind constantly the fragile timepiece of another life.
No set hour. No luck. No path that doesn’t eventually double...
2 tags
Now Winter Nights Enlarge
by Thomas Campion
Now winter nights enlarge This number of their hours; And clouds their storms discharge Upon the airy towers. Let now the chimneys blaze And cups o’erflow with wine, Let well-tuned words amaze With harmony divine. Now yellow waxen lights Shall wait on honey love While youthful revels, masques, and courtly sights Sleep’s leaden spells remove. This time doth well...
2 tags
London, Winter
by Luke Davies
Pass unseen through a godforsaken floodplain, city of treachery, siege and publishers. No backbone here at all, nothing to fight, or with. All sunken in unmerciful decay. Every girl who ever rode a pony prostrate in the stables. The one thing that would save us, that would clatter through the galaxies, a chariot perhaps, evaporates. Frost rime blackened on the ponds is left. The...
2 tags
Night Snow
by Bai Juyi
I was surprised my quilt and pillow were cold, I see that now the window’s bright again. Deep in the night, I know the snow is thick, I sometimes hear the sound as bamboo snaps.
2 tags
A Woman Speaks
by Audre Lorde
Moon marked and touched by sun my magic is unwritten but when the sea turns back it will leave my shape behind. I seek no favor untouched by blood unrelenting as the curse of love permanent as my errors or my pride I do not mix love with pity nor hate with scorn and if you would know me look into the entrails of Uranus where the restless oceans pound. I do not dwell within my birth...
2 tags
Weather Report
by B. H. Fairchild
We will have a continuation of today tomorrow
Clouds will form these ragged gloves in which the hands of God make giant fists as He grits His teeth against the slaves of time. And the sun and moon will never rest.
from the boring grind of dark and light: subway tokens glittering on the ground, dogs in their habits, the hours soon or late, nuns and assassins in their daily...
2 tags
Autumn Passage
by Elizabeth Alexander
On suffering, which is real. On the mouth that never closes, the air that dries the mouth.
On the miraculous dying body, its greens and purples. On the beauty of hair itself.
On the dazzling toddler: “Like eggplant,” he says, when you say “Vegetable,”
“Chrysanthemum” to “Flower.” On his grandmother’s suffering, larger...
2 tags
My First Memory (of Librarians)
by Nikki Giovanni
This is my first memory: A big room with heavy wooden tables that sat on a creaky wood floor A line of green shades—bankers’ lights—down the center Heavy oak chairs that were too low or maybe I was simply too short For me to sit in and read So my first book was always big
In the foyer up four steps a semi-circle desk presided To the left side the card catalogue On the right...
2 tags
Westgate-on-Sea
by John Betjeman
Hark, I hear the bells of Westgate, I will tell you what they sigh, Where those minarets and steeples Prick the open Thanet sky.
Happy bells of eighteen-ninety, Bursting from your freestone tower! Recalling laurel, shrubs and privet, Red geraniums in flower.
Feet that scamper on the asphalt Through the Borough Council grass, Till they hide inside the shelter Bright...
2 tags
The Guest
by Anna Akhmatova
The blizzard beats with snow On my windows, as before. I have not become new, Yet a visitor is at my door. I asked, “What do you want?” “To be in hell with you.” I laughed, “Oh, you will spell For both of us misfortune.” But, lifting his lean hand, He lightly touched the flowers. “Tell me, how are you kissed? How do you kiss the...
2 tags
Love After Love
by Derek Walcott
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows...
2 tags
After Reading 'Antony and Cleopatra'
by Robert Louis Stevenson
As when the hunt by holt and field Drives on with horn and strife, Hunger of hopeless things pursues Our spirits throughout life. The sea’s roar fills us aching full Of objectless desire— The sea’s roar, and the white moon-shine, And the reddening of the fire. Who talks to me of reason now? It would be more delight To have died in Cleopatra’s arms...
2 tags
The Zen of La Llorona
by Deborah Miranda
La Llorona rises over my town— a solitary curve, sharpened by someone else’s fury. I read a small gray Zen book Everyone loses everything. Lovers, families, friends, possessions, egos— we keep nothing of this world, not even our bodies. It’s as if you’d lost your favorite teacup, you see. No amount of searching, weeping or wailing will bring...