Tag: poetry

When you are most homesick, inexplicably
for some places you’ve never even lived,
an unexpected ocean breeze salts the heavy air,
stirring everything.

It says: your happiness will return to you
like the prodigal son, having spent
your inheritance of expectations extravagantly,
but ready now to do the work of joy.
Have faith.

The signs of life gather themselves in any darkness.
It’s a rebirth, a rebuilding, of what was never really destroyed.
In what is its own kind of starlight,
a thousand bright minds flicker on,
our imaginations like flashlights,
searching for a path,
blinking in the dark.

Mindy Nettifee, The Connection Between God and Nature Beats Me Over The Head With Its Earthy Mallet (via thymoss)

April 25, 2014: This Hour and What Is Dead, Li-Young Lee

april-is:

This Hour and What Is Dead
Li-Young Lee

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?   
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
Does he remember his earth, his birthplace set to torches?   
His love for me feels like spilled water
running back to its vessel.

At this hour, what is dead is restless   
and what is living is burning.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

My father keeps a light on by our bed   
and readies for our journey.
He mends ten holes in the knees
of five pairs of boy’s pants.
His love for me is like his sewing:
various colors and too much thread,
the stitching uneven. But the needle pierces   
clean through with each stroke of his hand.

At this hour, what is dead is worried   
and what is living is fugitive.

Someone tell him he should sleep now.

God, that old furnace, keeps talking   
with his mouth of teeth,
a beard stained at feasts, and his breath   
of gasoline, airplane, human ash.   
His love for me feels like fire,
feels like doves, feels like river-water.

At this hour, what is dead is helpless, kind   
and helpless. While the Lord lives.

Someone tell the Lord to leave me alone.   
I’ve had enough of his love
that feels like burning and flight and running away.

—

Also by Li-Young Lee:

+ From Blossoms
+ Goodnight

On this day in:

2013: To Myself, Franz Wright
2012: Manet’s Olympia, Margaret Atwood
2011: Three Rivers, Alpay Ulku
2010: Ode to Hangover, Dean Young
2009: We become new, Marge Piercy
2008: The Only Animal, Franz Wright
2007: Dream Song 385, John Berryman
2006: The Quiet World, Jeffrey McDaniel
2005: Man and Wife, Robert Lowell

radicalvulnerability:

jenny holzer:

calm is more conducive to creativity than is anxiety
emotional responses are as valuable as intellectual responses
at times inactivity is preferable to mindless functioning
guilt and self-laceration are indulgences
listen when your body talks
rechanneling destructive impulses is a sign of maturity
the only way to be pure is to stay by yourself
you are responsible for constituting the meaning of things
pain can be a very positive thing
turn soft and lovely any time you have a chance

Second Didactic Poem by Denise Levertov

artofthehive:

The honey of man is

the task we’re set to:  to be

‘more ourselves’

in the making:

                 ‘bees of the invisible’ working

in cells of flesh and psyche,

filling

     ‘la grande ruche d’or.’

Nectar,

    the makings of the

incorruptible,

    is carried upon the

corrupt tongues of

mortal insects,

fanned with their wisps of wing

    ‘to evaporate

excess water,’

    enclosed and capped

with wax, the excretion

of bees’ abdominal glands.

Beespittle, droppings, hairs

of beefur:  all become honey.

Virulent micro-organisms cannot

survive in honey.

     The taste,

the odor of honey:

each has no analogue but itself.

In our gathering, in our containing, in our

working, active within ourselves,

slowly the pale

dew-beads of light

lapped up from flowers

can thicken

darken to gold:

honey of the human.

    the makings of the

incorruptible

Life-Long Undercover

What planet are you from, stranger?
You have an outer-space violin in your left ear
that plays a string of quiet clouds
in the noisy subway.
I suspected it, and others, too, suspected it
and, true: you have a strange device on your retina
that can always catch the small ads falling from the sky
through the windy air down to the streets.
Even the sleeping fats in your body are suspiciously
beautiful.
I worry that one day you will
wing your way back to that other planet with the potato chips
that are left in your hands decorating your big wings.
And I will be left here alone trying to decipher
your space diary written in snow.
I worry. I always worry.
Fortunately: I’ve snapped a wavelength of your planet
by pulling out a poetic antenna
in the back of my head
while you are cooking in the kitchen.
You are cooking again, this morning.
A little voice of alien vowels issues an order
to the woodpecker
five meters
from our balcony: Let her stay there
as our life-long
undercover
at his side, do not try to wake her up!

~Hu Xudong

The art of losing isn’t hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother’s watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn’t hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn’t a disaster.

–Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident
the art of losing’s not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

Alive: One Art by Elizabeth Bishop 

Margaret Atwood, “Men with the Heads of Eagles”

airwalker:

Men with the heads of eagles
no longer interest me
or pig-men, or those who can fly
with the aid of wax and feathers

or those who take off their clothes
to reveal other clothes
or those with skins of blue leather

or those golden and flat as a coat of arms
or those with claws, the stuffed ones
with glass eyes; or those
hierarchic as greaves and steam-engines.

All these I could create, manufacture,
or find easily: they swoop and thunder
around this island, common as flies,
sparks flashing, bumping into each other,

on hot days you can watch them
as they melt, come apart,
fall into the ocean
like sick gulls, dethronements, plane crashes.

I search instead for the others,
the ones left over,
the ones who have escaped from these
mythologies with barely their lives;
they have real faces and hands, they think
of themselves as
wrong somehow, they would rather be trees.

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you’re tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They’ll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren’t alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren’t alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town
and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

“The Sciences Sing a Lullaby,” Albert Goldbarth  (via commovente)