Posts tagged: poetry
April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
dull roots with spring rain.
(T.S.Eliot)
I wanted to speak at length about
the happiness of my body and the
delight of my mind for it was
April, night, a
full moon and—
but something in myself or maybe
from somewhere other said: not too
many words, please, in the
muddy shallows the
frogs are singing.
(Mary Oliver)
No treaty
I foresee will salve completely your tracked
And stretchmarked body, the big pain
That leaves you raw, like opened ground, again.
(Seamus Heaney)
Maybe I thought that for one night
I could wear your beauty through closeness
and for a few hours believe myself
splendidly arrayed.
Sonnet L’Abbé
(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)
Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.
It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.
My eyes already touch the sunny hill.
going far beyond the road I have begun,
So we are grasped by what we cannot grasp;
it has an inner light, even from a distance—
and changes us, even if we do not reach it,
into something else, which, hardly sensing it,
we already are; a gesture waves us on
answering our own wave…
but what we feel is the wind in our faces.
(Rilke; Trans. Robert Bly)
Shouldn’t the distance between impossible
and improbable be widened? Might miracle
deserve its own appendix: the ease with which night
becomes winter? There must be a word for it,
a term unique and apropos to star-pocked sky
and village roads blanketed by snow,
a good-natured—but stone drunk—schoolteacher
leaving a warm bar. It is improbable she will drive.
She does.
(Luke Johnson)
Love is so short, forgetting is so long.
(Pablo Neruda)
When I point
out to you that
the flat face of the lake’s water in
stillness is made suddenly
more striking for how a wind
just now, coming, spoils it,
I have in mind
only how even a least
disturbance, strangely
heightening a thing’s
beauty, can at last
define it.
(Carl Phillips)
and i. what dreams had i suspended
above our short order lives
when death covered you with bells.
call her back for me
bells. call back this memory
still fresh with cactus pain.
(Sonia Sanchez)
each dull morning the mirror imagines me a future: older misshapen
forest: stinging adder and sprawling spider
the way to haven seems interminable. I creak and shuffle
listen, you wilderness: make plain and let me pass
(D.A. Powell)
We are a meadow where the bees hum,
mind and body are almost one
as the fire snaps in the stove
and out eyes close,
and mouth to mouth, the covers
pulled over our shoulders,
we drowse as the horses drowse afield,
in accord; though the fall cold
surrounds our warm bed, and though
by day we are singular and often lonely.
(Denise Levertov)
