A Poet Reflects: litverve: “We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes... -
“We have many shelves of poetry at home, but still, it takes an effort to step out of the daily narrative of existence, draw that neglected cloak of stillness around you—and concentrate, if only for three or four minutes. Perhaps the greatest reading pleasure has an element of…
(Source: The New York Times)
Sharing Poetry: e.e. cummings, "if I have made, my lady, intricate" -
If I have made, my lady, intricate
imperfect various things chiefly which wrong
your eyes (frailer than most deep dreams are frail)
songs less firm than your body’s whitest song
upon my mind - if I have failed to snare
the glance too shy - if through my singing slips
the very skilful…
I sat opposite you, the paper in between
Listening to a radio just out of range
That spoke rhythms of sentences
Recited old phrases
And seemed to me
Like a tune once known.
You’ve forgotten the lyrics
Tap hints of the tune
And pause, expecting applause,
You get back claps of old age
…
I always feel that which I don’t
want to hear
like your breath along my neck
a Morse code of respiration
”you’re not her
you’re not her
you’re not her”
(Source: anengravedmind)
A nomadic voyage, a heart’s quest
Quiet and alone were an attractive option
But your music makes me dance
Your beauty induced a trance
What do I have to offer, but this heart
I could swim the sea to you
I can drown
or take this love to my last breath
The warmth while holding you, oh….
creates an infinite confirmation
My moist eyes looking into yours are not sad,
no…
I’m jubilant and thankful
You held resilient to your promise
and gave all that you are
I was lost and you restored me
My caramel coated aspirations live
in memories
Dark brown eyes and a body of firm silk
my hands and soul are deprived of you
My heart’s demise begins one minute apart
A day or more is torture lancing outward
through my flesh
Inspirations defeat all lucidity
I need you
Every future thought, you are there
Your motivated smile is a victory for me
and I can smile
My endless home is now wherever you are
Scott Mitchell
09 August 2011
“
I had drawn my chair to the hotel window, to watch the rain.
I was in a kind of dream or trance—
in love, and yet
I wanted nothing.
It seemed unnecessary to touch you, to see you again.
I wanted only this:
the room, the chair, the sound of the rain falling,
hour after hour, in the warmth of the spring night.
I needed nothing more; I was utterly sated.
My heart had become small; it took very little to fill it.
I watched the rain falling in heavy sheets over the darkened city—
You were not concerned; I could let you
live as you needed to live.
At dawn the rain abated. I did the things
one does in daylight, I acquitted myself,
but I moved like a sleepwalker.
It was enough and it no longer involved you.
A few days in a strange city.
A conversation, the touch of a strange hand.
And afterward, I took off my wedding ring.
That was what I wanted: to be naked.
” — Louise Glück, “Eros” (The Seven Ages, Ecco, 2001)(Source: gammasandgerunds, via commovente)
borges by Solnabanya on Flickr.
If I could live again I would start going barefoot
when spring comes and not stop till fall’s long gone.
I would walk down more side streets, contemplate more dawns,
and play with more children, if I had my life ahead of me again.
(Source: englishforums.com, via gnostix1)
“
The brightest stars are the first to explode. Also hearts.
It is important to pay attention to love’s high voltage signs.
The mockingbird is really ashamed of its own feeble
song lost beneath all those he has to imitate. It’s true,
the Carolina Wren caught in the bedroom yesterday died
because he stepped on a glue trap and tore his wings off.
Maybe we have both fallen through the soul’s thin ice already.
Even Ethiopia is splitting off from Africa to become its own
continent. Last year it moved 10 feet. This will take a million years.
There’s always this nostalgia for the days when Time was
so unreal it touched us only like the pale shadow of a hawk.
Parmenedes transported himself above the beaten path of
the stars to find the real that was beyond time. The words you left
are still smoldering like the cigarette left in my ashtray as if it were
a dying star. The thin thread of its smoke is caught on the ceiling.
When love is threatened, the heart crackles with anger like kindling.
It’s lucky we are not like hippos who fling dung at each other
with their ridiculously tiny tails. Okay, that’s more than ten
things I know. Let’s try twenty five, no, let’s not push it, twenty.
How many times have we hurt each other not knowing? Destiny
wears her clothes inside out. Each desire is a memory of the future.
The past is a fake cloud we’ve pasted to a paper sky. That is
why our dreams are the most real thing we possess. My logic
here is made of your smells, your thighs, your kiss, your words.
I collect stars but have no place to put them. You take my breath
away only to give back a purer one. The way you dance creates
a new constellation. Off the Thai coast they have discovered
a new undersea world with sharks that walk on their fins.
In Indonesia, a kangaroo that lives in a tree. Why is the shadow
I cast always yours? Okay, let’s say I list 33 things, a solid
symbolic number. It’s good to have a plan so we don’t lose
ourselves, but then who has taken the ladder out of the hole
I’ve dug for myself? How can I revive the things I’ve killed
inside you? The real is a sunset over a shanty by the river.
The keys that lock the door also open it. When we shut out
each other, nothing seems real except the empty caves of our
hearts, yet how arrogant to think our problems finally matter when
thousands of children are bayoneted in the Congo this year.
How incredible to think of those soldiers never having loved.
Nothing ever ends. Will this? Byron never knew where
his epic, Don Juan, would end and died in the middle of it.
The good thing about being dead is that you don’t have to
go through all that dying again. You just toast it. See, the real is
what the imagination decants. You can be anywhere with
the turn of a few words. Some say the feeling of out-of-the-body
travel is due to certain short circuits in parts of the brain. That
doesn’t matter because I’m still drifting towards you. Inside you are
cumulous clouds I could float on all night. The difference is always
between what we say we love and what we love. Tonight, for instance,
I could drink from the bowl of your belly. It doesn’t matter if
our feelings shift like sands beneath the river, there’s still the river.
Maybe the real is the way your palms fit against my face,
or the way you hold my life inside you until it is nothing at all,
the way this plant droops, this flower called Heart’s Bursting Flower,
with its beads of red hanging from their delicate threads any
breeze might break, any word might shatter, any hurt might crush.
(Source: commovente, via buried-denmark)
Moon’s an umbrella caught rolling
in night’s samba, the best of me
still too self conscious to dance
with an asking shadow. The hull
tips and cascades a galaxy into
the forward compartments, the x-ray
will show most of its denser momentum
was never seen at all. I leapt when
I thought we had drowned,
the floor done spinning about
the day’s array, and passed around
the couch for another sip of sleep.-C.S. Henderson
(Source: thetargetbird)
A finger held to lips
to silence independence
free thinking is contagious
so keep it to yourself
don’t ask anything
that I cannot answer
just accept your fate
middle class mediocrity
Thinking is dangerous
it could make you dream
that you deserve more
than the life of a slave
so keep your mouth shut
or the others might hear
where would any of us be
if we all were free?
[video]
“What is hell? Hell is oneself.
Hell is alone, the other figures in it
Merely projections. There is nothing to escape from
And nothing to escape to. One is always alone.”
— T.S. Eliot, The Cocktail Party (via munstersandghosts)
(Source: liquidnight, via buried-denmark)
(via abillionbees)
Above: Shoen Uemura “Waiting for the Moon”, 1926 Kyoto Municipal Museum of Art
.
Since encountering my beloved
While I dozed,
I have begun to feel
That it is dreams, not reality,
On which I can rely.
.
Ono no Komachi (Tr. Helen Craig McCullough)
if you love me you will read.: you look at the sunyou say don’t go downyou say don’t you darebut... -
you look at the sun
you say don’t go down
you say don’t you dare
but it always always
does.what can you do?
you wouldn’t dare
to seize the sun;
your hands are always
too thin to bring downover the fire, daring
you look again, always
forcing you look down,
or go blind is what you’ll…