by J.R.R. Tolkien
All that is gold does not glitter;
Not all those who wander are lost.
The old that is strong does not wither;
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken;
A light from the shadows shall spring.
Renewed shall be blade that was broken;
The crownless again shall be king.
by Emily Dickinson
Our share of night to bear,
Our share of morning
Our blank in bliss to fill,
Our blank in scorning.
Here are star, and there a star,
Some lose their way.
Here a mist, and there a mist,
Afterwards—day!
by Ales Debeljak
How it rises out of waves in the bay
and shudders like a gentle thrust
of the sea, which sooner forgives
than punishes, doomed as it is to feckless birth.
How it wakes me up, takes me inside
with a slender hand, with shimmering dust,
gliding like a guess or premonition, up and up
to the eyelashes, the eyebrows, the mouth
and spilling across the face and over the ears,
where the cries of gulls are caught.
A hymn to the moment that lasts
and lasts, so nothing belonging together
will separate, like a boat that worries only about
its arrival in the harbor, dropping its anchor
next to a dock, so the story will reach
the close it was meant to reach. And the sailor,
once turned to a pillar of salt, will forever remain
doubled over, where lobes of water
linger like wedding guests
years after the flood has folded back.
by Kurt Vonnegut
The crucified planet Earth,
should it find a voice
and a sense of irony,
might now well say
of our abuse of it,
“Forgive them, Father,
They know not what they do.”
The irony would be
that we know what
we are doing.
When the last living thing
has died on account of us,
how poetical it would be
if Earth could say,
in a voice floating up
perhaps
from the floor
of the Grand Canyon,
“It is done.”
People did not like it here.
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—
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
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 breathing here.
I took a good look round –
The trees belong to all sorts of religions:
This tree is Lao-Tze, that one is Confucius,
Fruit has bowed the branch with ripeness,
It’s given a good harvest.
In the forest grow verbs’ infinitives,
Words’ roots, dreams’ notions,
The golden fleece, if it’s the Lord’s drink,
The voice here is forest-like.
The echo of this forests is unbroken in time,
An echo which has never cut short
Similar words, a forest, or a land of words,
That is a foreign country.
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 with airy down, it’s you, suddenly
descending, you’re there to marble it, your restless brow
fuses with the dawn, darkens it.
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 and eyeless.
You could tease it that way,
make it blunder and think,
and emit a croaking sound
you could call truth.
A harmless activity,
sort of like knitting,
until you go too far with it
and they bring out the nooses and matches.
Or you could do something else.
Something more sociable.
More group-oriented.
A lot of people do that too.
They like the crowds and the screaming,
they like the adrenalin.
Hunker down. Get a blackout curtain.
Pretend you’re not home.
Pretend you’re deaf and dumb.
Look: pitchforks and torches!
Judging from old pictures,
things could get worse.
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 nails
holding the walls together.
The night is calm in our rooms,
where the echoes of all footsteps rest
like sunken leaves in a pond,
but the night outside is wild.
A darker storm stands over the world.
It puts its mouth to our soul
and blows to get a tone. We are afraid
the storm will blow us empty.
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 order that one last drink.
I remember how silently you sat sometimes, hugging
your knees; how you wanted to be all sorts of women
for me, if only I’d be there.
And how, too young, I was unable to receive so much.
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.
by J. Bradley
”[…] I look for the red flags, burn
the ones I can’t live with, fuck her
on top of the ones I’ll tolerate […]”
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 were born.”
And of course she looked back. She felt a quick pang
And then everything ended. Her eyes closed
And her body dissolved into bitter crystals.
Her small feet stopped and grew into the ground.
No one seems to have mourned this woman;
She was only a minor event in the book.
But my heart holds fast to her memory:
A woman who gave up her life for a look.
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 back on our terrace sipping wine.
Why always this hint of an unhappy ending?
Clouds of almost human appearance
Gathering on the horizon, but the rest lovely
With the air so mild and the sea untroubled.
The night suddenly upon us, a starless night.
You lighting a candle, carrying it naked
Into our bedroom and blowing it out quickly.
The dark pines and grasses strangely still.
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 see;
These were the things that bounded me;
And I could touch them with my hand,
Almost, I thought, from where I stand.
And all at once things seemed so small
My breath came short, and scarce at all.
But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And — sure enough! — I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.
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.
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 sunlight ladled over
ponds and meadows. We’ve never seen a meadow.
Now, we want to wade into one—up to our chins in the grassy
welter—the long reach of our vision grabbing up great
handfuls and armloads of scenery at the clouds’
white sale, at the bargain basement giveaway
of clods and scat and cow pies. We want to feel half
of America to the left of us and half to the right, ourselves
like a spine dividing the book in two, ourselves holding
the whole great story together.
Then, suddenly, the train pulls into the station,
and the scenery begins to creep forward—the ramshackle shapes
of Main Street, a Chevy dozing at a ribbon of curb, and here is a hound
and a trolley, the street lights on their long stems, here is the little park
and the park stuff: bum on a bench, deciduous trees, a woman upholstered
in a red dress, the bus out of town sunk to its chromium bumper in shadows.
The noise of a train gathers momentum and disappears into the distance,
and there is a name strolling across the landscape in the crisply voluminous
script of the title page, as though it were a signature on the contract, as though
it were the author of this story.
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 cheer you up,
and to remind you that,
among your duties, pleasure
is a thing,
that also needs accomplishing
Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds
of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder
or a safe spare tire?
Tomorrow you may be utterly
without a clue
but today you get a telegram,
from the heart in exile
proclaiming that the kingdom
still exists,
the king and queen alive,
still speaking to their children,
- to any one among them
who can find the time,
to sit out in the sun and listen.
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 feather.
