May 2013
1 post
4 tags
April 2013
1 post
2 tags
March 2013
3 posts
1 tag
“Others came before me / Others to come”
– “Infinite Arms”- Band of Horses
1 tag
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man...”
– Theodore Roosevelt
1 tag
February 2013
2 posts
To prevent indifference
sometimes, we need to talk.
3 tags
January 2013
10 posts
6 tags
apoetreflects:
Hieroglyphic
Did one look at what one saw Or did one see what one looked at?
—Hart Crane, from Complete Poems of Hart Crane (Liveright, 1989)
4 tags
“The condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak”
– Theodor Adorno
4 tags
Eating Together by Li-Young Lee
In the steamer is the trout seasoned with slivers of ginger, two sprigs of green onion, and sesame oil. We shall eat it with rice for lunch, brothers, sister, my mother who will taste the sweetest meat of the head, holding it between her fingers deftly, the way my father did weeks ago. Then he lay down to sleep like a snow-covered road winding through pines older than him, ...
4 tags
Mother to Son by Langston Hughes
Well, son, I’ll tell you: Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair. It’s had tacks in it, And splinters, And boards torn up, And places with no carpet on the floor — Bare. But all the time I’se been a-climbin’ on, And reachin’ landin’s, And turnin’ corners, And sometimes goin’ in the dark Where there ain’t been no light. So boy,...
Words
Restarting Daily Poems Tomorrow—
2 tags
“…I would like to beg you dear Sir, as well as I can, to have patience with everything unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live...
4 tags
Secret of Life by Diana Der-Hovanessian
Once during the war on a bus going to Portsmouth a navy yard worker told me the secret of life. The secret of life, he said, can never be passed down one generation to the other. The secret of life, he said, is hunger. It makes an open hand. The secret of life is money. But only the small coins. The secret of life, he said, is love. You become what you lose. The secret of life, he said, is water....
4 tags
"The New Dog" Linda Pastan
Into the gravity of my life, the serious ceremonies of polish and paper and pen, has come
this manic animal whose innocent disruptions make nonsense of my old simplicities—
as if I needed him to prove again that after all the careful planning, anything can happen.
December 2012
21 posts
3 tags
"Rock Me, Mercy" Yusef Komunyakaa
The river stones are listening because we have something to say. The trees lean closer today. The singing in the electrical woods has gone down. It looks like rain, because it is too warm to snow. Guardian angels, wherever you’re hiding, we know you can’t be everywhere at once. Have you corralled all the pretty wild horses? The memory of ants asleep and day lilies, roses, holly and...
2 tags
Kobayashi Issa
Reflected In the eye of the dragonfly the mountains
- Kobayashi Issa
2 tags
One Day by Robert Creeley
One day after another—
Perfect.
They all fit.
4 tags
Noel by Linda Pastan
Like a single ornament, the red cardinal on a pine outside the window is our only decoration,
until the snow.
4 tags
[love is more thicker than forget]
love is more thicker than forget more thinner than recall more seldom than a wave is wet more frequent than to fail
it is most mad and moonly and less it shall unbe than all the sea which only is deeper than the sea
love is less always than to win less never than alive less bigger than the least begin less littler than forgive
it is most sane and sunly and more it cannot die than all the sky...
4 tags
4 tags
[little tree] by e e cummings
little tree little silent Christmas tree you are so little you are more like a flower
who found you in the green forest and were you very sorry to come away? see i will comfort you because you smell so sweetly
i will kiss your cool bark and hug you safe and tight just as your mother would, only don’t be afraid
look the spangles that sleep all the year in a dark box...
4 tags
The Bear by Galway Kinnell
1
In late winter I sometimes glimpse bits of steam coming up from some fault in the old snow and bend close and see it is lung-colored and put down my nose and know the chilly, enduring odor of bear.
2
I take a wolf’s rib and whittle it sharp at both ends and coil it up and freeze it in blubber and place it out on the fairway of the bears.
And when it has vanished I...
4 tags
Shark's Teeth by Kay Ryan
Everything contains some silence. Noise gets its zest from the small shark’s-tooth- shaped fragments of rest angled in it. An hour of city holds maybe a minute of these remnants of a time when silence reigned, compact and dangerous as a shark. Sometimes a bit of a tail or fin can still be sensed in parks.
4 tags
Quote from Pooh
“But it isn’t easy,” said Pooh. “Because Poetry and Hums aren’t things which you get, they’re things which get you. And all you can do is to go where they can find you.”
__ Winnie-the-Pooh The House at Pooh Corner
6 tags
Sonnet XVII by Pablo Neruda (trans. Mark Eisner)
I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire: I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.
I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom but carries the light of those flowers, hidden, within itself, and thanks to your love the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my...
4 tags
Taking the Hands by Robert Bly
Taking the hands of someone you love, You see they are delicate cages … Tiny birds are singing In the secluded prairies And in the deep valleys of the hand.
4 tags
Love After Love by Derek Walcott
The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other’s welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by...
4 tags
The Sky by William Stafford
I like it with nothing. Is it what I was? What I will be? I look out there by the hour, so clear, so sure. I could smile, or frown—still nothing.
Be my father, be my mother, great sleep of blue; reach far within me; open doors, find whatever is hiding; invite it for many clear days in the sun.
When I turn away I know you are there. We won’t forget each other: every look is a promise....
5 tags
Ask Me by William Stafford
Some time when the river is ice ask me mistakes I have made. Ask me whether what I have done is my life. Others have come in their slow way into my thought, and some have tried to help or to hurt: ask me what difference their strongest love or hate has made.
I will listen to what you say. You and I can turn and look at the silent river and wait. We know the current is there, hidden; and there are...
3 tags
Language by W. S. Merwin
Certain words now in our knowledge we will not use again, and we will never forget them. We need them. Like the back of the picture. Like our marrow, and the color in our veins. We shine the lantern of our sleep on them, to make sure, and there they are, trembling already for the day of witness. They will be buried with us, and rise with the rest.
3 tags
Lullaby of the Onion by Miguel Hernandez...
The onion is frost
shut in and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
large and round.
My little boy
was in hunger's cradle.
He was nursed
on onion blood.
But your blood
is frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.
A dark woman
dissolved in moonlight
pours herself thread by thread
into the cradle.
Laugh, son,
you can swallow the moon
when you want to.
Lark...
3 tags
.
Not man enough to leave, but man enough to always care
November 2012
1 post
3 tags
October 2012
2 posts
September 2012
2 posts
2 tags
calmy,
he gazes at the mountain—
the frog
- Issa Kobayashi
July 2012
4 posts
2 tags
1 tag
6 tags
Late Harvest I look up and see a white buffalo emerging from the enormous red gates of a cattle truck lumbering into the mouth of the sun. The prairie chickens do not seem to fear me; neither do the girls in cellophane fields, near me, hear me changing the flat tire on my black tractor. I consider screaming to them; then, night comes.
...
3 tags
June 2012
6 posts
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
