Your Favorite Poems

[Talon]

Nine Below--Joy Harjo


Across the frozen Bering Sea is the invisible border
of two warring countries. I am loyal to neither,

only to the birds who fly over, laugh at the ridiculous
ways of humans, know wars destroy dreams,

divide the country, inside us. Last night there was a breaking
wave, in the center of a dream war.

You were there, but I couldn't see you. Woke up cold in a hot house.
Didn't sleep but fought the distances I had imagined,

and went back to find you. I called my heart's dogs,
gave them the sound of your blue saxophone to know you by,

and let them smell the shirt you wore when we last made love.
I walked with them south along the white sea, and

crossed to the fiery plane of my dreaming. We circled the place,
you were not there. I found nothing that I could see.

No trace of war, of you, but the dogs barked, rolled in your
smell, ears pricked at what they could hear that I couldn't.

They ran to me, licked the smell of the wet tracks of your mouth
on my neck, my shoulder.

They smelled you on my fingers, my face. They felt the quivering
nerve of emotion that forced me to live.

It made them nervous, excited. I loosened my mind's rein;
let them find you.

I watched them follow the invisible connection. They traveled a
spiral arc through an Asiatic burst of time.

There were no false boundaries between countries, between us.
They climbed the polar ice, saw it melt.

They flew through the shimmering houses of the gods,
crossed over into your childhood, and then south.

When they arrived in your heart's atmosphere it was an easy
sixty degrees.

The war was over, it had never begun. And you were alive and
laughing, standing beneath a fat sun, calling me home.

[Talon]

A Satirical Romance...Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz


I can't hold you and I can't leave you,
and in sorting the reasons to leave you or hold you,
I find an intangible one to love you,
and many tangible ones to forgo you.

As you won't change, nor let me forgo you,
I shall give my heart defense against you,
so that half shall always be armed to abhor you,
though the other half be ready to adore you.

[Talon]

ECHO
Christina Rossetti


Come to me in the silence of the night,
Come in the speaking silence of a dream,
Come with soft rounded cheeks and eyes as bright
as sunlight on a stream,
Come back in tears,
O memory, hope and love of finished years.

O dream how sweet, too sweet, too bitter-sweet,
Whose wakening should have been in paradise,
Where souls brim full of love abide and meet,
Where thirsting longing eyes
Watch the slow door
That opening, letting in, lets out no more.

[Talon]

Where Does This Tenderness Come From?
by Marina Tsvetaeva


Where does this tenderness come from?
These are not the first curls I
have stroked slowly
and lips I have known are darker than yours

as stars rise often and go out again
where does this tenderness come from?
so many eyes have risen and died out
in front of these eyes of mine.

And yet no such song
have I heard in the darkness of night before,
where does this tenderness come from?
here, on the ribs of the singer.

Where does this tenderness come from?
And what shall I do with it,
sly singer just passing by?
Your lashes are...longer than anyone's.

[Soon]

Words Wide Night

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you

and this is what it is like or what it is like in words.

[gotoseagrl]

Evening Solace

THE human heart has hidden treasures,
In secret kept, in silence sealed;­
The thoughts, the hopes, the dreams, the pleasures,
Whose charms were broken if revealed.
And days may pass in gay confusion,
And nights in rosy riot fly,
While, lost in Fame's or Wealth's illusion,
The memory of the Past may die.

But, there are hours of lonely musing,
Such as in evening silence come,
When, soft as birds their pinions closing,
The heart's best feelings gather home.
Then in our souls there seems to languish
A tender grief that is not woe;
And thoughts that once wrung groans of anguish,
Now cause but some mild tears to flow.

And feelings, once as strong as passions,
Float softly back­a faded dream;
Our own sharp griefs and wild sensations,
The tale of others' sufferings seem.
Oh ! when the heart is freshly bleeding,
How longs it for that time to be,
When, through the mist of years receding,
Its woes but live in reverie !

And it can dwell on moonlight glimmer,
On evening shade and loneliness;
And, while the sky grows dim and dimmer,
Feel no untold and strange distress­
Only a deeper impulse given
By lonely hour and darkened room,
To solemn thoughts that soar to heaven,
Seeking a life and world to come.

Charlotte Brontë

[Talon]

I See, I See The Crescent Moon~Anna Akhmatova



I see, I see the crescent moon
through the willow's thick foliage.
I hear, I hear the regular heartbeat of unshod hooves.

You don't want to sleep either?
In a year you weren't able to forget me,
you're not used to finding your bed empty?

Don't I talk with you
in the sharp cries of falcons?
Don't I look into your eyes
from the matt white pages?

why do you circle round,
my silent house like a thief?
Or do you remember the agreement
and wait for me alive?

I am falling asleep. The moon's blade
cuts through the stilling dark.
Again hoofbeats.
It is my own warm heart
that beats so.