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." Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
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
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
"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 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
"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
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
“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 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!
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↱]
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. Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image! [via The Yale Review↱]
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 awayUpon 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—
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 halfthe 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 farmhouserings 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 whilewe'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 ofchicken. 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. [via The Yale Review↱]
“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
“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
Tonsure by Kevin Young (2021) Forever you find your fatherin other faces― a balding head or beard enoughto send you following for blocks after to make sureyou're wrong, or buying some stranger a beer to share. Well, notjust one―and here, among a world that mends only the large things,let the shadow grow upon your face till you feelat home. It's all yours, this father you makeeach day, the one you became when yours got yanked away.Take your place between the men bowed at the bar, the beerwarming, glowing faint as a heart: lit from within & justa hint bitter. ― via American Life in Poetry↱
“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 Please Register or Log in to view the hidden image!