A Poem Thread

Discussion in 'Art & Culture' started by Angelus, Nov 9, 2002.

  1. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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  3. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    The Coming of Light
    Mark Strand - 1934-2014
    "Even this late it happens:
    the coming of love, the coming of light.
    You wake and the candles are lit as if by themselves,
    stars gather, dreams pour into your pillows,
    sending up warm bouquets of air.
    Even this late the bones of the body shine
    and tomorrow's dust flares into breath."

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    Last edited: Apr 12, 2021
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  5. Write4U Valued Senior Member

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    Desolation dwells

    Left emptiness, vacant room
    stark walls, lonely broom
    tilting table, checkered cloth
    coffee stains, lifeless moth
    human beings here once dwelt
    perhaps hope here once was felt
    but look around and see
    could it have been but misery
    desolation dwells

    Uninspired ornaments of alabaster
    molded scrolls of casting plaster
    windows smudged with coated grime
    wooden floors revealing time
    desolation dwells

    Left emptiness, vacant room
    stark walls, lonely broom
    tilting table, rusty knife
    reminders of the time
    this lonely place once was alive
    human beings here once dwelt
    joy and sorrow once were felt
    now shadows cast a silent spell
    and desolation dwells

    W4U
     
    Last edited: Apr 12, 2021
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  7. RainbowSingularity Valued Senior Member

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    7,447

    the age of empty nesters
    wrestling empty gestures
    founded cruise ships on brand new artificial hips
    busy doctors offices with social tips
    the age of empty busy lifes
    busy husbands
    busy wifes
    the age of empty lifes
    busy being nesters
    alone in empty gestures
    together alone in work & home
    defining empty nesters

    RainbowSingularity 13/04/2021
    inspired by Write4U Poem - Desolation dwells
    the concept of passing social ages
    lifes many stages
     
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  8. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    16,600
    "If dark nights must come, let them come.
    Open your doors.
    Let them come, my dear, and ask them what they want.
    Maybe all they want is your presence. Nothing else.
    Maybe all they want to do is to hold you so close and polish you secretly, without telling anyone–
    Maybe that is all they want.
    Know that deep inside they hold ten thousand fragrant mornings. They hold the source of laughter.
    They hold life."
    ~ Guthema Roba

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  9. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    "Before you know what kindness really is
    you must lose things,
    feel the future dissolve in a moment
    like salt in a weakened broth.
    What you held in your hand,
    what you counted and carefully saved,
    all this must go so you know
    how desolate the landscape can be
    between the regions of kindness....

    ...Before you know kindness as the deepest thing
    inside,
    you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.
    You must wake up with sorrow.
    You must speak to it till your voice
    catches the thread of all sorrows
    and you see the size of the cloth.

    Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore,
    only kindness that ties your shoes
    and sends you out into the day to mail letters and
    purchase bread,
    only kindness that raises its head
    from the crowd of the world to say
    It is I you have been looking for,
    and then goes with you everywhere
    like a shadow or a friend.”
    ----Naomi Shihab Nye
     
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  10. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    What a great find, MR!
     
    Last edited: Jun 19, 2021
  11. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    Thanks wegs!
     
  12. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    ... Moved fragmented poem to one post below
     
    Last edited: Jun 20, 2021
  13. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    9,253
    The Awakening

    In the early dawn of happiness
    you gave me three kisses
    so that I would wake up
    to this moment of love

    I tried to remember in my heart
    what I'd dreamt about
    during the night
    before I became aware
    of this morning
    of Life

    I found my dreams
    but the moon took me away
    It lifted me up to the firmament
    and suspended me there
    I saw how my heart
    had fallen on your path
    singing a song


    Between my love and my heart
    Things were happening which
    slowly slowly
    Made me recall everything

    Poem by Rumi
     
    Last edited: Jun 20, 2021
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  14. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    16,600
    “won't you celebrate with me
    what i have shaped into
    a kind of life? i had no model.
    born in babylon
    both nonwhite and woman
    what did i see to be except myself?
    i made it up
    here on this bridge between
    starshine and clay,
    my one hand holding tight
    my other hand; come celebrate
    with me that everyday
    something has tried to kill me
    and has failed.”
    ― Lucille Clifton

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    Last edited: Jun 22, 2021
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  15. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    37,882
    I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies
    June Jordan, 1976 (Dedicated to the Poet Agostinho Neto, President of The People's Republic of Angola)


    1
    I will no longer lightly walk behind
    a one of you who fear me:
    . . . . . . . . . . Be afraid.
    I plan to give you reasons for your jumpy fits
    and facial tics
    I will not walk politely on the pavements anymore
    and this is dedicated in particular
    to those who hear my footsteps
    or the insubstantial rattling of my grocery
    cart
    then turn around
    see me
    and hurry on
    away from this impressive terror I must be:
    I plan to blossom bloody on an afternoon
    surrounded by my comrades singing
    terrible revenge in merciless
    accelerating
    rhythms
    But
    I have watched a blind man studying his face.
    I have set the table in the evening and sat down
    to eat the news.
    Regularly
    I have gone to sleep.
    There is no one to forgive me.
    The dead do not give a damn.
    I live like a lover
    who drops her dime into the phone
    just as the subway shakes into the station
    wasting her message
    canceling the question of her call:
    fulminating or forgetful but late
    and always after the fact that could save or
    condemn me

    I must become the action of my fate.

    2
    How many of my brothers and my sisters
    will they kill
    before I teach myself
    retaliation?
    Shall we pick a number?
    South Africa for instance:
    do we agree that more than ten thousand
    in less than a year but that less than
    five thousand slaughtered in more than six
    months will
    WHAT IS THE MATTER WITH ME?

    I must become a menace to my enemies.

    3
    And if I
    if I ever let you slide
    who should be extirpated from my universe
    who should be cauterized from earth
    completely
    (lawandorder jerkoffs of the first the
    . . . . .terrorist degree)
    then let my body fail my soul
    in its bedeviled lecheries

    And if I
    if I ever let love go
    because the hatred and the whisperings
    become a phantom dictate I o-
    bey in lieu of impulse and realities
    (the blossoming flamingos of my
    . . . . . .wild mimosa trees)
    then let love freeze me
    out.
    I must become
    I must become a menace to my enemies.


    [via Poets.org↱]
     
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  16. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

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    37,882
    Bridge 14. Feb. 45
    Karl Kirchwey


    Yet why not say what happened?
    ―Robert Lowell


    On his way to New York at the time of the Trade Center attacks,
    Gerhard Richter's flight was rerouted to Halifax.
    . His response, having survived a childhood in wartime cities,
    was to appropriate a black-and-white photo that depicts

    Cologne after a bombing raid in World War II,
    an American aerial reconnaissance photo
    . . containing only information, without judgment,
    and mount it under reflecting Antelio glass, so

    the self is not involved in it anywhere,
    no composition, therefore, no style, pure picture,
    . . freeing the artist from personal experience
    and yet incriminating every passing viewer,

    for whom it is impossible not to be seen in
    that landscape bleak and pitted as the moon,
    . . while the Rhine snags in darts of light on a broken bridge.
    So it was that one day in a gallery on Madison,

    as if drawn by the boisterous and nonchalant whistle
    the Australian butcherbird uses to impale
    . . its prey on a thorn, I was drawn to this picture,
    and watched my own image float and settle

    inside the gray frame and the catastrophe,
    though it wasn't the cunning of it, but a memory
    . . that caught me: and what it was that I remembered,
    or rather, what it was reflected there dully,

    was a visit to the unfinished cathedral church
    across town long ago, and the great porch
    . . for which a friend of ours was carving sculptures.
    I had just dropped by, I wasn't thinking much,

    and in my arms I held our infant daughter.
    Smiling, he turned to greet us, the ghastly pallor
    . . of stone dust on his face, and the baby screamed,
    as Astyanax does when he sees his father Hector

    in the grim helmet of war and the plume nodding,
    for it was as if she had seen a dead thing
    . . climb from the rubble, and she was inconsolable.
    But just before we left, I saw what he was making,

    which was a column capital with a scene of Armageddon
    in which the Twin Towers seemed to waver and lean
    . . toward final judgment in the Valley of Jehoshaphat:
    and you understand this was years before 9/11.

    Then my face slid from the picture and I was back
    in the gallery, in the world of poor passing fact,
    . . and I realized I had never seen it in place
    on the church facade, that sculpture both prophetic

    and now anachronistic of its own loss.
    In the roaring avenue I took a bus
    . . —and I suppose it should not have surprised me
    (I knew the stoneyard had been gone for years)

    to find someone had climbed the Great Portal
    and, driven by who knows what conspiratorial
    thinking, smashed those towers to limestone stubs,
    someone for whom the moral mirror was intolerable,

    the implication in a greater crime,
    and no relief from self, and I by random
    . . ways come to witness this,
    still squared, forever squared, in that gray frame.


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  17. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    Two Butterflies went out at noon
    By Emily Dickinson

    Two Butterflies went out at Noon—
    And waltzed above a Farm—
    Then stepped straight through the Firmament
    And rested on a Beam—


    And then—together bore away
    Upon a shining Sea—
    Though never yet, in any Port—
    Their coming mentioned—be—


    If spoken by the distant Bird—
    If met in Ether Sea
    By Frigate, or by Merchantman—
    No notice—was—to me—
     
  18. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    If the Cure for AIDS,
    Linda Gregerson


    said someone in that earlier pandemic, were
    a glass of clean water, we couldn't save half the people here.

    If half​
    the workers at Tyson Meats come down with the virus we still
    have a plan for protecting the owners from lawsuits.

    If the phone in the farmhouse​
    rings when it's long past dark and the milk …
    If the tanks at the co-op are full …​

    If milk dumped into the culvert makes you think of death.

    My neighbor drove to Lansing in his pickup, I expect
    you've seen the photos too. The statehouse floor. The rifles. He

    had just culled half his herd. And while​
    we're casting about for ways to summon normal, I've been
    watching footage of the day-old chicks.

    The hundred and sixteen​

    thousand buried alive, it seems we can't afford the feed.
    Or can't afford the falling price of​
    chicken. I'm mostly confused

    by the articles meant to explain.​
    Look at the spill of them, dump truck into the pre-
    dug ditch, the mewling yellow spill of them, still​

    in the down we find adorable. Red earth.​
    Impassive skyscape. Skittering
    bits of agitation on the body of the whole.​

     
  19. wegs Matter and Pixie Dust Valued Senior Member

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    9,253
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  20. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    “You must learn one thing:
    the world was made to be free in.

    Give up all the other worlds
    except the one to which you belong.

    Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
    confinement of your aloneness
    to learn

    anything or anyone
    that does not bring you alive
    is too small for you.”
    ― David Whyte
     
  21. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    16,600
    “Rain"
    Oh amiable rain
    Washer of trees
    and roofs
    who has prepared them
    for
    the pink ray
    of evening"
    ("Poems")”
    ― Charlotte Gardelle, The Cubist Poets in Paris: An Anthology
     
  22. Tiassa Let us not launch the boat ... Valued Senior Member

    Messages:
    37,882
    Tonsure
    by Kevin Young (2021)


    Forever you find
    your father​
    in other faces―

    a balding head
    or beard enough​
    to send you following

    for blocks after
    to make sure​
    you're wrong, or buying

    some stranger a beer
    to share. Well, not​
    just one―and here,

    among a world that mends
    only the large things,​
    let the shadow grow

    upon your face
    till you feel​
    at home. It's all

    yours, this father
    you make​
    each day, the one

    you became when yours
    got yanked away.​
    Take your place between

    the men bowed
    at the bar, the beer​
    warming, glowing faint

    as a heart: lit
    from within & just​
    a hint bitter.

     
  23. Magical Realist Valued Senior Member

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    16,600
    “Come clean with a child heart
    Laugh as peaches in the summer wind
    Let rain on a house roof be a song
    Let the writing on your face
    be a smell of apple orchards on late June.”
    ― Carl Sandburg, Honey and Salt

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