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-   -   Your Favorite Poems (http://www.butchfemmeplanet.com/forum/showthread.php?t=257)

Hollylane 06-28-2012 08:09 PM

Clover

by Tennessee Williams

These are fragrant acres where
Evening comes long hours late
And the still unmoving air
Cools the fevered hands of Fate.

Meadows where the afternoon
Hangs suspended in a flower
And the moments of our doom
Drift upon a weightless hour.

And we who thought that surely night
Would bring us triumph or defeat
Only find the stars are white
Clover at our naked feet.

Hollylane 06-28-2012 08:13 PM


When I Am Among the Trees

by Mary Oliver

When I am among the trees,
especially the willows and the honey locust,
equally the beech, the oaks and the pines,
they give off such hints of gladness.
I would almost say that they save me, and daily.

I am so distant from the hope of myself,
in which I have goodness, and discernment,
and never hurry through the world
but walk slowly, and bow often.

Around me the trees stir in their leaves
and call out, "Stay awhile."
The light flows from their branches.

And they call again, "It's simple," they say,
"and you too have come
into the world to do this, to go easy, to be filled
with light, and to shine."

femmedyke 06-28-2012 09:08 PM

For the Dead
by Adrienne Rich

I dreamed I called you on the telephone to say: Be kinder to yourself but you were sick and would not answer

The waste of my love goes on this way trying to save you from yourself

I have always wondered about the left-over energy, the way water goes rushing down a hill long after the rains have stopped

or the fire you want to go to bed from but cannot leave, burning-down but not burnt-down the red coals more extreme, more curious in their flashing and dying than you wish they were sitting long after midnight

femmedyke 06-28-2012 09:19 PM

off to sleep with loveliness on ny mind... *s
 
Barter

by Sara Teasdale

Life has loveliness to sell, All beautiful and splendid things, Blue waves whitened on a cliff, Soaring fire that sways and sings, And children's faces looking up Holding wonder like a cup.

Life has loveliness to sell, Music like a curve of gold, Scent of pine trees in the rain, Eyes that love you, arms that hold, And for your spirit's still delight, Holy thoughts that star the night.

Spend all you have for loveliness, Buy it and never count the cost; For one white singing hour of peace Count many a year of strife well lost, And for a breath of ecstasy Give all you have been, or could be.

SoNotHer 06-29-2012 02:39 PM

http://lettersfromalaska.files.wordp...ary-oliver.jpg

The Poet Visits the Museum of Fine Arts
by Mary Oliver

For a long time
I was not even
in this world, yet
every summer

every rose
opened in perfect sweetness
and lived
in gracious repose,

in its own exotic fragrance,
in its huge willingness to give
something, from its small self,
to the entirety of the world.

I think of them, thousands upon thousands,
in many lands,
whenever summer came to them,
rising

out of the patience of patience,
to leaf and bud and look up
into the blue sky
or, with thanks,

into the rain
that would feed
their thirsty roots
latched into the earth—

sandy or hard, Vermont or Arabia,
what did it matter,
the answer was simply to rise
in joyfulness, all their days.

Have I found any better teaching?
Not ever, not yet.
Last week I saw my first Botticelli
and almost fainted,

and if I could I would paint like that
but am shelved somewhere below, with a few songs
about roses: teachers, also, of the ways
toward thanks, and praise.


http://3.bp.blogspot.com/_iSObXWSI2t...ummer+1964.jpg

femmedyke 07-02-2012 09:38 PM

Her Kind
By Anne Sexton

I have gone out, a possessed witch, haunting the black air, braver at night; dreaming evil, I have done my hitch over the plain houses, light by light: lonely thing, twelve-fingered, out of mind. A woman like that is not a woman, quite. I have been her kind.

I have found the warm caves in the woods, filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves, closets, silks, innumerable goods; fixed the suppers for the worms and the elves: whining, rearranging the disaligned. A woman like that is misunderstood. I have been her kind.

I have ridden in your cart, driver, waved my nude arms at villages going by, learning the last bright routes, survivor where your flames still bite my thigh and my ribs crack where your wheels wind. A woman like that is not ashamed to die. I have been her kind.

femmedyke 07-03-2012 10:54 PM

Solitude
Ella Wheeler Wilcox

Laugh, and the world laughs with you;
Weep, and you weep alone.
For the sad old earth must borrow it's mirth,
But has trouble enough of its own.
Sing, and the hills will answer;
Sigh, it is lost on the air.
The echoes bound to a joyful sound,
But shrink from voicing care.

Rejoice, and men will seek you;
Grieve, and they turn and go.
They want full measure of all your pleasure,
But they do not need your woe.
Be glad, and your friends are many;
Be sad, and you lose them all.
There are none to decline your nectared wine,
But alone you must drink life's gall.

Feast, and your halls are crowded;
Fast, and the world goes by.
Succeed and give, and it helps you live,
But no man can help you die.
There is room in the halls of pleasure
For a long and lordly train,
But one by one we must all file on
Through the narrow aisles of pain.

Hollylane 07-04-2012 03:34 PM


Hinterhof
by James Fenton

Stay near to me and I'll stay near to you —
As near as you are dear to me will do,
Near as the rainbow to the rain,
The west wind to the windowpane,
As fire to the hearth, as dawn to dew.

Stay true to me and I'll stay true to you —
As true as you are new to me will do,
New as the rainbow in the spray,
Utterly new in every way,
New in the way that what you say is true.

Stay near to me, stay true to me. I'll stay
As near, as true to you as heart could pray.
Heart never hoped that one might be
Half of the things you are to me —
The dawn, the fire, the rainbow and the day

Hollylane 07-10-2012 11:37 PM

Eagle Poem
by Joy Harjo

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circles in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon, within a
True circle of motion,
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us.
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

JAGG 07-11-2012 04:25 AM

Death is nothing at all
 
I copied this from a book I just read. I thought it was pretty awesome.

" Death is nothing at all.
I have only slipped away to the next room.
I am I, and you are you.
Whatever we were to each other,
That, we still are.

Call me by my old familiar name.
Speak to me in the easy way
which you always used.
Put no difference into your tone.
Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow.

Laugh as we always laughed
at the little jokes we enjoyed together.
Play, smile, think of me. Pray for me.
Let my name be ever the household word
that it always was.
Let it be spoken without effect.
Without the trace of a shadow on it.

Life means all that it ever meant.
It is the same that it ever was.
There is absolute unbroken continuity.
Why should I be out of mind
because I am out of sight?

I am but waiting for you.
For an interval.
Somewhere. Very Near.
Just around the corner.

All is well. "

Nomad 07-11-2012 07:03 AM

Allan Peterson
 
The Totality of Facts

The laughing gull that flew behind the fencepost
and never came out was the beginning
and then a hand smaller than my hand covered Wisconsin
with a gesture for explanation.
In the afternoon there are pauses between the words
through which commas can grow like daisy fleabane.
A fish with an osprey in its back emerges from the Sound
and nothing can be learned by more analysis.
The book of her hair opens to its binding and I leaf through
the glorious pages of appreciation and that's not all.
We could not have turned fast enough to catch
light and leftovers from so much of what happened:
the swift figures behind you like a planet's dark
companion, ships entering and leaving the hall closet
the real and imagined between which is no difference.

Hollylane 07-13-2012 09:56 PM

A Thought
by Benjamin S. Grossberg

Like a feather descending
in its back-and-forth motion,
slow twirl down to one
end of a balance, and that end
begins to sink—
but so slowly that days pass,
an unscrolling of weather,
the view out the same window
over a series of months:
trees burst in lime-green flowers
so tiny that three or four buds
could rest on the tip of your thumb,
and then come rainy days,
darker leaves, and brightness
expanding like the yawning
of one just woken—
everything unfolding, changing.
And now you find it is
autumn, and somewhere
inside is a difference. A quiet,
monumental thing, difference.
Some dream had long
seemed foundation wall
to a structure you’d hoped to build—
a Jeffersonian grandness.
You’d imagined marble, imagined
columns. But now it is you
who seem to find the structure
more trouble than it’s worth, you
who might just, you decide, be
okay without so much grandiosity.
You even surprise yourself
with that word, grandiosity,
with its undertone of mocking.
What was it? A word, a look
from a man that wasn’t—
you realized a moment too late—
directed at you. A small, casual
failure that added its name
like another entry on a long
petition. No one, not even you
heard the creaking sweep,
the rusted iron gate
of your will. Though afterward,
at the window, you may
have wondered what bird
dropped that feather—
though so long ago now
there’s no telling what kind,
or on its way to what country.


Hollylane 07-13-2012 10:07 PM

Summer Rain
by Gerald Fisher

Father Sky is gray
As the new light appears
And the laughter of the birds is still
the clouds shed their tears
and the land drinks of this heavenly dew
puddles replace the dust
irresistible temptations for little feet
Turning my face to the sky
and feeling the gentleness of the mist
washing away my cares
filling my heart with happiness
Lifting my spirits
like the quenching of the crops
Raising my arms
I turn to the four winds
and give thanks for this
gentle Summer Rain.

stonewalldog 07-14-2012 09:08 AM

This is the only poem I know by heart...so it must be my favorite...I apologize in advance if anyone if offended....

There once was a hermit named Dave
who kept a dead whore in his cave
he must admit
it smelled a bit
but think of all the money he saved!

grenade 07-14-2012 09:13 AM

Tonight I Can Write by Pablo Neruda

translated by WS Merwin



Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, 'The night is starry
and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.'

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

This is all. In the distance someone is singing. In the distance.
My soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

My sight tries to find her as though to bring her closer.
My heart looks for her, and she is not with me.

The same night whitening the same trees.
We, of that time, are no longer the same.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but how I loved her.
My voice tries to find the wind to touch her hearing.

Another's. She will be another's. As she was before my kisses.
Her voice, her bright body. Her infinite eyes.

I no longer love her, that's certain, but maybe I love her.
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.

Because through nights like this one I held her in my arms
my soul is not satisfied that it has lost her.

Though this be the last pain that she makes me suffer
and these the last verses that I write for her.

· From Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

skeeter_01 07-14-2012 01:32 PM

From the book A Rocket in my Pocket:

Ladles and Jellyspoons!

I come before you,
to stand behind you,
to tell you something I know nothing about.

Next Tuesday which is Good Friday,
there'll be a mothers meeting for fathers only,

Wear your good clothes if you haven't any,
and if you can come, please stay at home!

:seeingstars:

grenade 07-15-2012 06:22 AM

William Shakespeare (1564-1616)
Sonnet CXVI: Let me not to marriage of true minds admit impediments

Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come:
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.

grenade 07-15-2012 06:28 AM

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost


Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

grenade 07-15-2012 06:34 AM

Sonnets 04: Only Until This Cigarette Is Ended
by Edna St. Vincent Millay


Only until this cigarette is ended,
A little moment at the end of all,
While on the floor the quiet ashes fall,
And in the firelight to a lance extended,
Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended,
The broken shadow dances on the wall,
I will permit my memory to recall
The vision of you, by all my dreams attended.
And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done.
Yours is a face of which I can forget
The color and the features, every one,
The words not ever, and the smiles not yet;
But in your day this moment is the sun
Upon a hill, after the sun has set.

grenade 07-15-2012 06:43 AM

mantra
 
Still I Rise
by Maya Angelou


You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
'Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops.
Weakened by my soulful cries.

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
'Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin' in my own back yard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I'll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history's shame
I rise
Up from a past that's rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.
Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that's wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

Greco 07-22-2012 07:31 AM

Mary Oliver
 
Moon and Water

I wake and spend
the last hours
of darkness
with no one

but the moon.
She listens
to my complaints
like the good

companion she is
and comforts me surely
with her light.
But she, like everyone,

has her own life.
So finally I understand
that she has turned away,
is no longer listening.

She wants me
to refold myself
into my own life.
And, bending close,

as we all dream of doing,
she rows with her white arms
through the dark water
which she adores.

by Mary Oliver from her
book "Evidence"

macele 07-22-2012 08:45 AM

jagg, who wrote "death is nothing at all"?

great writing.

Hollylane 07-22-2012 10:08 AM

This is a pretty gut wrenching poem to me...The perspective is astounding...


Family Stories

by Dorianne Laux

I had a boyfriend who told me stories about his family,
how an argument once ended when his father
seized a lit birthday cake in both hands
and hurled it out a second-story window. That,
I thought, was what a normal family was like: anger
sent out across the sill, landing like a gift
to decorate the sidewalk below. In mine
it was fists and direct hits to the solar plexus,
and nobody ever forgave anyone. But I believed
the people in his stories really loved one another,
even when they yelled and shoved their feet
through cabinet doors, or held a chair like a bottle
of cheap champagne, christening the wall,
rungs exploding from their holes.
I said it sounded harmless, the pomp and fury
of the passionate. He said it was a curse
being born Italian and Catholic and when he
looked from that window what he saw was the moment
rudely crushed. But all I could see was a gorgeous
three-layer cake gliding like a battered ship
down the sidewalk, the smoking candles broken, sunk
deep in the icing, a few still burning.

Hollylane 07-22-2012 10:36 AM

Progress
by X. J. Kennedy

Sundays we'd stroll to the railroad track,
My white-collared father and I,
Where he'd gaze after freight trains billowing past
And deliver himself of a sigh—

"If I still worked for the railroad,
I'd retire with a pass. I could ride
To any place in the country,
And the country, they say, is wide."

Yet for thirty years my father
With fountain pen wielded power
At the boiler factory in Dover,
Keeping track of each man-hour:

He would total up columns of numbers
In a flash with astonishing skill
And never a man's pay envelope
Fell short of a dollar bill.

He would hike to the bank every Thursday
To fetch payroll cash in a sack,
The insurance company insisting
That a blue steel pistol he pack.

How the neighbors would taunt and tease him—
"Hey, Joe, would you pull your gun
And shoot it out with that stickup man?"—
"No, I'd throw him the money and run."

He continued to add up numbers
In his head till there came on the scene
A formidable robot rival,
The Burroughs adding machine.

My father saw that his number
Would be up soon. As he feared,
Anybody could tug on a handle
And an accurate total appeared.

They broke the news to him gently,
They professed their profound regret
And presented him, not with a pension
But a pen-and-pencil set.

For a time he displayed it proudly
Till the pencil had to be tossed,
When it wouldn't quite twist as it used to
And the cap of the pen got lost.

For more than eight thousand mornings
He had walked to his job past a sign
Where the Women's Christian Temperance
Union had posted a line

Ill fitting the situation
Of the obsolescently skilled:
Life is no goblet to be drained
But a measure to be filled.

Fancy 07-23-2012 09:21 AM

Halleluiah

Everyone should be born into this world happy
and loving everything.
But in truth it rarely works that way.
For myself, I have spent my life clamoring toward it.
Halleluiah, anyway I'm not where I started!

And have you too been trudging like that, sometimes
almost forgetting how wondrous the world is
and how miraculously kind some people can be?
And have you too decided that probably nothing important
is ever easy?
Not, say, for the first sixty years.

Halleluiah, I'm sixty now, and even a little more,
and some days I feel I have wings.

Mary Oliver
Evidence

Hollylane 07-26-2012 11:58 PM


Count That Day Lost


by George Eliot

If you sit down at set of sun
And count the acts that you have done,
And, counting, find
One self-denying deed, one word
That eased the heart of him who heard,
One glance most kind
That fell like sunshine where it went —
Then you may count that day well spent.

But if, through all the livelong day,
You've cheered no heart, by yea or nay —
If, through it all
You've nothing done that you can trace
That brought the sunshine to one face —
No act most small
That helped some soul and nothing cost —
Then count that day as worse than lost.

Hollylane 07-28-2012 09:42 AM


Let The Day Go

by Grace Paley

..............who needs it
I had another day in mind
something like this one
..............sunny green the earth
just right having suffered
the assault of what is called
torrential rain the pepper
the basil sitting upright
in their little boxes waiting
I suppose for me also the
cosmos the zinnias nearly
blooming a year too late
forget it let the day go
the sweet green day let it
take care of itself

Hollylane 07-28-2012 11:50 AM

Interesting...
 
Leeks
by Richard Spilman

We planted the seeds in the spring
And up they came innocuous as crabgrass.
The tomatoes soon lorded over them,
And even the jalapenos, sad lumps
Hanging from their limbs like mittens
From children playing in the snow.

They stayed that way all summer,
And before the frosts of November
We pulled them up, declaring failure,
And used them as scallions in salads.
Winter white covered the clay soil,
Like layers of dust in an unused room.

Till spring bullied us into wakefulness:
Thunder and lightning and the gray rain
That heartens depressives with reasons
For misery, then out of the sodden ground,
Tiny blades twisting in the wound
Of the old season. It was shocking:

Nothing worse than discarded hopes
Butting in when you have given up,
Thrusting faith into comfortable loss,
Demanding your heart again because
This time they've made a proper start,
This time they will rise in triumph.


Hollylane 07-28-2012 11:58 AM

Terra Incognita
by Andrea Witzke Slot


I have scaled unknown ridges and cliffs,
only to abseil downward, dropping inside
the holes of caves where stalagmites pierced

the floors of darkened rooms. I have found
mines deep within the crevices of sleeping
mountains, waded in underground springs

of manatees, minerals, sand. I have upturned
rocks, searched the roots of trees in acres
of eclipsed valleys, hiked along shores,

lakes, becks, running streams.
Once I stopped for days at a single hillside,
made a bed inside, woke to the sound

of falcons and the distant morning dove,
the sun glinting off pines that reached
upwards with outstretched hands.

But do not tell me that love makes us into fools.
I know the shadows that pause within the folds
of these hills, still miles from where I stand.

I've heard the secrets farmers keep, irrigation
and rotating crops, when to move in, when to start a fire.
I've seen the red skies. I know the warning of dawn.

I know too that frozen waters can flow,
can once again flow, how fields will blaze
anew, if touched by the sun.

Blame me, but I will open the curtains.
After all, I have lived here for a million years
and am long past finding my way home.

Hollylane 07-29-2012 01:15 AM


Fireflies

by Marilyn Kallet

In the dry summer field at nightfall,
fireflies rise like sparks.
Imagine the presence of ghosts
flickering, the ghosts of young friends,
your father nearest in the distance.
This time they carry no sorrow,
no remorse, their presence is so light.
Childhood comes to you,
memories of your street in lamplight,
holding those last moments before bed,
capturing lightning-bugs,
with a blossom of the hand
letting them go. Lightness returns,
an airy motion over the ground
you remember from Ring Around the Rosie.
If you stay, the fireflies become fireflies
again, not part of your stories,
as unaware of you as sleep, being
beautiful and quiet all around you.

Hollylane 07-29-2012 01:22 AM

http://www.examiner.com/images/blog/...nning11(3).jpg


Dogs
by Patty Paine

It's said dogs don't think
they're human; they believe us

to be dogs. What odd dogs
we must seem. So clean

and clothed. What dog would
want our upright

concerns, the responsibility
of thumbs, burden of metaphor?

They lunge into every morning, whirl
my feet, until I take them

to the park, where they gazelle
through fescue, scramble over

fallen trees, dart after quarry,
real, and imagined. Sometimes I feel

like a child with holes
in my pockets, every day losing

some small stone of myself.
But on mornings like this—the dark

branches ice-limned and glistening,
the good sting of cold on my face—

I feel freed from the cage of my body,
so light I might soar.

Hollylane 07-30-2012 06:49 AM

Love this...
 

I Could Take

by Hayden Carruth

I could take
two leaves
.........and give you one.
Would that not be
a kind of perfection?

But I prefer
one leaf
.........torn to give you half
.............showing

(after these years, simply)
love's complexity in an act,
.........the tearing and
..............the unique edges —
one leaf (one word) from the two
imperfections that match.

Hollylane 07-31-2012 06:46 AM

Cool and cute...
 

Unification

by Ramon Montaigne

The Mississippi at its mouth
Joins the Gulf of Mexico,
The west wind mixes with the south,
High pressure with the low.
Nothing in nature stands apart,
All things rendezvous—
I'd like to mingle with you.
Intermingled, intertwined,
This is what I have in mind.
I just feel a sudden urge
To merge.

The compound that is chlorophyll
Formed as the light increases
Makes every little flower thrill
With photosynthesis.
The morning glory mingles
With the honeysuckle vine,
Come wrap your little tendrils around mine.

I've been lonely as a cloud,
Drifting miserable and proud,
Lonely as a limestone butte—
Handsome, noble, destitute,
But I need you, I confess
Let's coalesce.

Hollylane 08-02-2012 11:52 PM

http://i48.tinypic.com/ei5tu0.jpg


Interval

by Jeffrey Harrison

Sometimes, out of nowhere, it comes back,
that night when, driving home from the city,
having left the nearest streetlight miles behind us,

we lost our way on the back country roads
and found, when we slowed down to read a road sign,
a field alive with the blinking of fireflies,

and we got out and stood there in the darkness,
amazed at their numbers, their scattered sparks
igniting silently in a randomness

that somehow added up to a marvel
both earthly and celestial, the sky
brought down to earth, and brought to life,

a sublunar starscape whose shifting constellations
were a small gift of unexpected astonishment,
luminous signalings leading us away

from thoughts of where we were going
or coming from, the cares that often drive us
relentlessly onward and blind us

to such flickering intervals when moments
are released from their rigid sequence
and burn like airborne embers, floating free.

Hollylane 08-06-2012 08:16 PM


The Real Work

by Wendell Berry

It may be that when we no longer know what to do
we have come to our real work,

and that when we no longer know which way to go
we have come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Hollylane 08-06-2012 08:17 PM


French Lesson

by Rosemary Okun

I wanted to know
the language of my ancestors
I wanted to know what they said
when they made love
and when they spoke to the neighbors
I wanted to know how
they spoke to their children
and what my great-great-grandfather said
when he stubbed his toe

But ancestry is who your mother was
and mine came from Brooklyn
with a grandmother from Syracuse
who said Glory be to God
when someone dropped a cup
and Bless me Father
when she confessed

My ancestors went by shanks mare
and shouted give him the hook
if they were displeased
They ate apple pie and
their potatoes were Idahos

Hollylane 08-06-2012 08:21 PM

At the intersection: burnt August fields
by Jennifer Wallace

At the intersection: burnt August fields and blistered streets.
The city readies for summer's last fling.
Vendors circle the band shell
with curried goat and Red Stripe beer. The sound man
"check, checks" his mics and Marley's wail unites
with insect wings and chicken smoke and air.

Where is Jamaica? Baltimore? Where?
Tonight they reside on music's continent —
behind the chain link, where holstered cops
keep peace between the races
who don't appear to need much help...
they boogie bum to bum under the moon
and all the colored lights and everyone singing One Love.

Hollylane 08-08-2012 01:15 AM

http://i45.tinypic.com/2cp7teg.jpg



In the Moment
by Maxine Kumin

Some days the pond
wears a glaze of yellow pollen.

Some days it is clean-swept.
The trout leap up, feasting on insects.

A modest size, it sits
like a soup tureen in a surround of white

pine where Rosie, 14 lbs., some sort
of rescued terrier, part bat

(the ears), part anteater (the nose),
shyly paddles in the shallows

for salamanders, frogs
and little painted turtles. She logged

ten years down south in a kennel, secured
in a crate at night. Her heart murmur

will carry her off, no one can say when.
Meanwhile she is rapt in

the moment, our hearts leap up observing.
Dogs live in the moment, pursuing

that brilliant dragonfly called pleasure.
Only we, sunstruck in this azure

day, must drag along the backpacks
of our past, must peer into the bottom muck

of what's to come, scanning the plot
for words that say another year, or not.

Massive 08-09-2012 08:29 AM

For The Fallen - Laurence Binyon
 
For The Fallen

With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,
England mourns for her dead across the sea.
Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,
Fallen in the cause of the free.

Solemn the drums thrill; Death august and royal
Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,
There is music in the midst of desolation
And a glory that shines upon our tears.

They went with songs to the battle, they were young,
Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.
They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;
They fell with their faces to the foe.

They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years contemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning
We will remember them.

They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;
They sit no more at familiar tables of home;
They have no lot in our labour of the day-time;
They sleep beyond England's foam.

But where our desires are and our hopes profound,
Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,
To the innermost heart of their own land they are known
As the stars are known to the Night;

As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,
Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;
As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,
To the end, to the end, they remain.


I'd say this applies to all our brothers, sisters, sons, daughters, mothers, fathers, aunts, uncles and friends in all the armed forces out there fighting for us.

Katniss 08-11-2012 11:43 AM

True Love....
 
True Love

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.


Wislawa Szymborska


Katniss


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