Poems that you love

[Lizzie]

Ode to Elizabeth

"Grimy Elizabeth," Time magazine intones.
This city escaped the race riots
Never quite sank
And, consequently, never rose.

It's not a town for poets.
You live here, you work the factory or a trade.
Down the burg, in Peterstown,
Italian bricklayers sit
on stoops, boxes, chairs,
playing poker
into one a.m.

Drive up Elizabeth Avenue
and you'll hear the salsa music blast from every window.
Even the potted geraniums dance.
In La Palmita, old Cuban guys sip coffee
from little plastic cups.
They talk politics, prizefights, Castro,
soccer, soccer, soccer.

Our Mayor looks like a lesser Mayor Daley:
smokes cigars, wears loud plaid suits,
the penultimate used car salesman.
He's been in since '64, a Mick with a machine.
He's been re-elected because he's a consistent evil
and, here in Elizabeth, we appreciate consistency.

Half the law of life is hanging out, hanging on
to frame houses, pensions.
Every Sunday, ethnic radio: Irish hour, Polish hour,
Lithuanian hour. My father sits in the kitchen
listening to Kevin Barry.
He wishes he could still sing.
Two years ago, they cut his voice box out:
cigarettes, factory, thirty years' worth of
double shifts. My father's as grimy as Elizabeth,
as sentimental, crude.
He boxed in the Navy, bantamweight.
As a kid I'd beg him to pop a muscle
and show off his tattoo.

We are not the salt of the earth.
I've got no John Steinbeck illusions.
I know the people I love have bad taste
in furniture. They are likely to buy
crushed-velvet portraits of Elvis Presley
and hang them next to the Pope.
They fill their lives with consumer goods,
leave the plastic covering on sofas
and watch Let's Make a Deal.

They are always dreaming the lottery number
that almost wins.
They are staunch Democrats who voted for Reagan.
They are working class, laid off when
Singer's closed, stuck between chemical dumps and oil
refineries in a city where Alexander Hamilton
once went to school.

In the graveyard by the courthouse,
lie Caldwells, Ogdens, Boudinots.
Milton is quoted on their graves.
Winos sleep there on summer afternoons
under hundred-year-old elms.
They sleep on the slabs of our Founding Fathers
and snore for History.

The Irish of Kerry Head have vanished,
but up in Elmora, you still can see
the Jewish families walking home from synagogue.
They are devout, they are well dressed,
They read the Talmud.

Twelve years ago, I used to go to the Elmora Theater
with twenty other kids.
It was a run-down movie house that never
got the features till they'd been out a year.
Because the Elmora was poor, it showed
foreign films; art films we didn't know were art:
Fellini, Wertmuller, Bergman.
It cost a dollar to get in.

We'd sit there, factory workers' kids, half hoods,
watching Amarcord.
When the uncle climbed the tree
in Amarcord and screamed, "I want a woman!"
we all agreed.
For weeks, Anthony Bravo went around school
screaming, "I want a woman!" every chance he got.
I copped my first feel there,
saw Hester Street, The Seduction of Mimi.
Once they had a double feature:
Bruce Lee's Fists of Fury with Ingmar Bergman's
The Seventh Seal.

I remember, two hundred kids exploding
when Jack Nicholson choked the nurse
in Cuckoo's Nest.
Sal Rotolo stood up, tears streaming down his face,
and when they took Jack's soul away,
we all sat there silent.
It lingered with us all the way home,
empty-eyed and sad.

Here in Elizabeth, the tasteless city,
where Amarcord was allowed to be just another flick,
where no one looked for symbols,
or sat politely through the credits.
If Art moved us at all, it was with real amazement;
We had no frame of reference.

And so I still live here,
because I need a place where poets are not expected.
I would go nuts in a town where everyone read Pound,
where old ladies never swept their stoops
or poured hot water on the ants.

I am happiest in a motley scene,
stuck between Exxon and the Arthur Kill...
I don't think Manhattan needs another poet.
I don't think Maine could use me.
I'm short, I'm ugly, I prefer Mrs. Paul's Fish Sticks
to blackened redfish.
I don't like to travel because I've noticed
no matter where you go, you take yourself with you,
and that's the only thing I care to leave behind.

So I stay here.
At night, I can still hear mothers yelling,
"Michael, supper! Get your ass in gear!"
Where nothing is sacred, everything is sacred;
Where no one writes, the air seems strangely
charged with metaphor.

In short, I like a grimy city.
I suspect Culture because it has been given over
to grants, credentials, and people with cute haircuts.
I suspect Poetry because it talks to itself
too much, tells an inside joke.
It has forgotten how to pray.
It has forgotten how to praise.

Tonight, I write no poem, I write to praise.
I praise the motley city of my birth.
I write to be a citizen of Elizabeth, New Jersey.
Like a goddamned ancient Greek, I stand for this smallest
bit of ground, my turf, this squalid city.
Here in the armpit of the beast.

Tonight, the ghosts of Ogdens, Caldwells, Boudinots
walk among the winos.
They exist in the salsa music blaring on Elizabeth Avenue.
They rise up and kiss the gargoyles of Cherry Street.
They are like King David dancing naked
unashamed before the covenant.

Tonight, even the stones can praise.
The Irish dead of Kerry Head are singing in their sleep.
And I swear, the next time someone makes a face,
gives me that bite the lemon look, as if to say,
"My Gawd...how can you be a poet and live
in that stinking town?"
My answer will be swift:
I'll kick him in the balls.

~Joe E. Weil

[RiverNotch]

Is this a poem? Meh, I still love it, and it's poetic enough to be stuck in here, I think -- although I've yet to finish even A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I'm too slow a reader. Of novels, at least.

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

[Lizzie]

Is this a poem? Meh, I still love it, and it's poetic enough to be stuck in here, I think -- although I've yet to finish even A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, I'm too slow a reader. Of novels, at least.

"I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish Wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down to me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes."

Amazing. Thanks for the share.

[RiverNotch]

Not only is the following film one big poem, but it's filled with poems, ones composed I believe by the director's father, Arseny Tarkovsky.

---

First Dates, by Arseny Tarkovsky

Each moment of our dates, not many,
We celebrated as an Epiphany.
Alone in the whole world.
More daring and lighter than a bird
Down the stairs, like a dizzy apparition,
You came to take me on your road,
Through rain-soaked lilacs,
To your own possession,
To the looking glass world.

As night descended
I was blessed with grace,
The altar gate opened up,
And in the darkness shining
And slowly reclining
Was your body naked.
On waking up I said:
God bless you!
Although I knew how daring and undue
My blessing was: You were fast asleep,
Your closed eyelids with the universal blue
The lilac on the table so strained to sweep.
Touched by the blue, your lids
Were quite serene, your hand was warm.

And rivers pulsed in crystal slits,
Mountains smoked, and oceans swarmed.
You held a sphere in your palm,
Of crystal; on your throne you were sleeping calm.
And, oh my God! -
Belonging only to me,
You woke and at once transformed
The language humans speak and think.
Speech rushed up sonorously formed,
With the word “you” so much reformed
As to evolve a new sense meaning king.

And suddenly all changed, like in a trance,
Even trivial things, so often used and tried,
When standing 'tween us, guarding us,
Was water, solid, stratified.
It carried us I don’t know where.
Retreating before us, like some mirage,
Were cities, miraculously fair.
Under our feet the mint grass spread,
The birds were following our tread,
The fishes came to a river bend,
And to our eyes the sky was open.

Behind us our fate was groping,
Like an insane man with a razor in his hand.

(translated from the Russian by Tatiana Kameneva)

[cvanshelton]

A couple years ago a got turned on to the Spanish speaking surrealists. It changed my whole writing paradigm. The following is a translation of a poem by Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas and was one of the first surrealist poems I read. Once I finished reading it, I sat back in my chair and just said, "Shit." In a good way. It haunted me for weeks. I hope you all enjoy it too.

Portrait of a Woman


The night will always be there, woman, to look you in the face,
alone in your mirror, free of your husband, naked
in the exact and terrible reality of that great vertigo
which destroys you. You will always have your night and your knife
and the silly telephone to listen to my slashing goodbye.
 
I swore not to write you. So I’m calling you through the air
to tell you nothing, like the void says: nothing, nothing,
only the same and always the self-same thing
which you never hear, which you never understand
although your veins catch flame with what I’m saying.
 
Put on that red dress that goes with your mouth and your blood,
and burn me up in the last cigarette of your fear
of great love and go barefoot in the air as you came
with the visible wound of your beauty. Pity
for her who weeps and weeps in the tempest.
 
 - Gonzalo Rojas

[Lizzie]

The Hospital Window

I have just come down from my father.
Higher and higher he lies
Above me in a blue light
Shed by a tinted window.
I drop through six white floors
And then step out onto pavement.

Still feeling my father ascend,
I start to cross the firm street,
My shoulder blades shining with all
The glass the huge building can raise.
Now I must turn round and face it,
And know his one pane from the others.

Each window possesses the sun
As though it burned there on a wick.
I wave, like a man catching fire.
All the deep-dyed windowpanes flash,
And, behind them, all the white rooms
They turn to the color of Heaven.

Ceremoniously, gravely, and weakly,
Dozens of pale hands are waving
Back, from inside their flames.
Yet one pure pane among these
Is the bright, erased blankness of nothing.
I know that my father is there,

In the shape of his death still living.
The traffic increases around me
Like a madness called down on my head.
The horns blast at me like shotguns,
And drivers lean out, driven crazy --
But now my propped-up father

Lifts his arm out of stillness at last.
The light from the window strikes me
And I turn as blue as a soul,
As the moment when I was born.
I am not afraid for my father --
Look! He is grinning; he is not

Afraid for my life, either,
As the wild engines stand at my knees
Shredding their gears and roaring,
And I hold each car in its place
For miles, inciting its horn
To blow down the walls of the world

That the dying may float without fear
In the bold blue gaze of my father.
Slowly I move to the sidewalk
With my pin-tingling hand half dead
At the end of my bloodless arm.
I carry it off in amazement,

High, still higher, still waving,
My recognized face fully mortal,
Yet not; not at all, in the pale,
Drained, otherworldly, stricken,
Created hue of stained glass.
I have just come down from my father.

~James Dickey

[ellajam]

A couple years ago a got turned on to the Spanish speaking surrealists. It changed my whole writing paradigm. The following is a translation of a poem by Chilean poet Gonzalo Rojas and was one of the first surrealist poems I read. Once I finished reading it, I sat back in my chair and just said, "Shit." In a good way. It haunted me for weeks. I hope you all enjoy it too.

Portrait of a Woman


The night will always be there, woman, to look you in the face,
alone in your mirror, free of your husband, naked
in the exact and terrible reality of that great vertigo
which destroys you. You will always have your night and your knife
and the silly telephone to listen to my slashing goodbye.
 
I swore not to write you. So I’m calling you through the air
to tell you nothing, like the void says: nothing, nothing,
only the same and always the self-same thing
which you never hear, which you never understand
although your veins catch flame with what I’m saying.
 
Put on that red dress that goes with your mouth and your blood,
and burn me up in the last cigarette of your fear
of great love and go barefoot in the air as you came
with the visible wound of your beauty. Pity
for her who weeps and weeps in the tempest.
 
 - Gonzalo Rojas

I especially like S2, these lines made me smile.

"I swore not to write you. So I’m calling you through the air
to tell you nothing, like the void says: nothing, nothing,"

[RiverNotch]

Still reading Miklós Radnóti. All from http://www.thehypertexts.com/Mikl%C3%B3s...or_Bio.htm

Postcards -- translated by Michael R. Burch

1 -- written August 30, 1944
Out of Bulgaria, the great wild roar of the artillery thunders,
resounds on the mountain ridges, rebounds, then ebbs into silence
while here men, beasts, wagons and imagination all steadily increase;
the road whinnies and bucks, neighing; the maned sky gallops;
and you are eternally with me, love, constant amid all the chaos,
glowing within my conscience — incandescent, intense.
Somewhere within me, dear, you abide forever —
still, motionless, mute, like an angel stunned to silence by death
or a beetle inhabiting the heart of a rotting tree.

2 -- written October 6, 1944 near Crvenka, Serbia
A few miles away they're incinerating
the haystacks and the houses,
while squatting here on the fringe of this pleasant meadow,
the shell-shocked peasants quietly smoke their pipes.
Now, here, stepping into this still pond, the little shepherd girl
sets the silver water a-ripple
while, leaning over to drink, her flocculent sheep
seem to swim like drifting clouds.

3 -- written October 24, 1944 near Mohács, Hungary
The oxen dribble bloody spittle;
the men pass blood in their piss.
Our stinking regiment halts, a horde of perspiring savages,
adding our aroma to death's repulsive stench.

4 -- his final poem, written October 31, 1944 near Szentkirályszabadja, Hungary
I toppled beside him — his body already taut,
tight as a string just before it snaps,
shot in the back of the head.
"This is how you’ll end too; just lie quietly here,"
I whispered to myself, patience blossoming from dread.
"Der springt noch auf," the voice above me said
but I could only dimly hear
through the filthy blood slowly sealing my ear.


Foamy sky -- translated by Gina Gönczi

The moon sways on a foamy sky,
I am amazed that I live.
An overzealous death searches this age
and those it discovers are all so very pale.

At times the year looks around and shrieks,
looks around and then fades away.
What an autumn cowers behind me again
and what a winter, made dull by pain.

The forest bled and in the spinning
time blood flowed from every hour.
Large and looming numbers were
scribbled by the wind onto the snow.

I lived to see that and this,
the air feels heavy to me.
A war sound-filled silence hugs me
as before my nativity.

I stop here at the foot of a tree,
its crown swaying angrily.
A branch reaches down — to grab my neck?
I'm not a coward, nor am I weak,

just tired. I listen. And the frightened
branch explores my hair.
To forget would be best, but I have
never forgotten anything yet.

Foam pours over the moon and the poison
draws a dark green line on the horizon.

I roll myself a cigarette
slowly, carefully. I live.


For a copy of Steep Road -- translated by Gina Gönczi

I'm a poet and nobody needs me,
not even if I mutter wordlessly:
u-u-u- no matter, for instead of me,
prying devils will sing relentlessly.

And believe me, believe you me,
the cautious suspicion is justified.
I'm a poet who's fit for the stake's fire
because to the truth he's testified.

One, who knows that the snow is white,
the blood is red, as is the poppy,
and the poppy's furry stalk is green.

One, whom they will kill in the end,
because he himself has never killed.


Lines from "Eclogue VII" -- translated by Steven Polgár

Without commas, one line touching the other
I write poems the way I live, in darkness,
blind, crossing the paper like a worm.
Flashlights, books — the guards took everything.
There's no mail, only fog drifts over the barracks.


Forced March -- translated by George Szirtes

He's foolish who, once down, resumes his weary beat,
A moving mass of cramps on restless human feet,
Who rises from the ground as if on borrowed wings,
Untempted by the mire to which he dare not cling,
Who, when you ask him why, flings back at you a word
Of how the thought of love makes dying less absurd.
Poor deluded fool, the man's a simpleton,
About his home by now only the scorched winds run,
His broken walls lie flat, his orchard yields no fruit,
His familiar nights go clad in terror's rumpled suit.
Oh could I but believe that such dreams had a base
Other than in my heart, some native resting place;
If only once again I heard the quiet hum
Of bees on the verandah, the jar of orchard plums
Cooling with late summer, the gardens half asleep,
Voluptuous fruit lolling on branches dipping deep,
And she before the hedgerow stood with sunbleached hair,
The lazy morning scrawling vague shadows on the air ...
Why not? The moon is full, her circle is complete.
Don't leave me, friend, shout out, and see! I'm on my feet!

[Leanne]

The Absence

I speak to you across cities
I speak to you across plains

My mouth is upon your pillow

Both faces of the walls come meeting
My voice discovering you

I speak to you of eternity

O cities memories of cities
Cities wrapped in our desires
Cities come early cities come lately
Cities strong and cities secret
Plundered of their master's builders
All their thinkers all their ghosts

Fields pattern of emerald
Bright living surviving
The harvest of the sky over our earth
Feeds my voice I dream and weep
I laugh and dream among the flames
Among the clusters of the sun

And over my body your body spreads
The sheet of its bright mirror.

-- Paul Eluard

[Leanne]

Dawn

Dawn in New York has
four columns of mire
and a hurricane of black pigeons
splashing in the putrid waters.
Dawn in New York groans
on enormous fire escapes
searching between the angles
for spikenards of drafted anguish.

Dawn arrives and no one receives it in his mouth
because morning and hope are impossible there:
sometimes the furious swarming coins
penetrate like drills and devour abandoned children.

Those who go out early know in their bones
there will be no paradise or loves that bloom and die:
they know they will be mired in numbers and laws,
in mindless games, in fruitless labors.

The light is buried under chains and noises
in the impudent challenge of rootless science.
And crowds stagger sleeplessly through the boroughs
as if they had just escaped a shipwreck of blood.

-- Federico Garcia Lorca

[Lizzie]

A Moment

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field. It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless,
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snow melts on this second fair day.
Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parking lot
with doughnut and coffee.
We are silent.
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe;
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

~ Ruth Stone

More thoughts on this poem can be found under the thread "A Moment" in the category "Poetry Discussion."

[Achebe]

A Moment

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field. It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless,
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snow melts on this second fair day.
Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parking lot
with doughnut and coffee.
We are silent.
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe;
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

~ Ruth Stone

I like Ruth Stone, but this one somehow irritates me. I want to say to her 'no one cares a duck about your inability to connect with your presumably teenaged little shit of a kid, you spoilt first world freerider on cheap Chinese labour that made the ducking plastic spoon you're eating your donut with.'

[next]

A Moment

Across the highway a heron stands
in the flooded field. It stands
as if lost in thought, on one leg, careless,
as if the field belongs to herons.
The air is clear and quiet.
Snow melts on this second fair day.
Mother and daughter,
we sit in the parking lot
with doughnut and coffee.
We are silent.
For a moment the wall between us
opens to the universe;
then closes.
And you go on saying
you do not want to repeat my life.

~ Ruth Stone

I like Ruth Stone, but this one somehow irritates me. I want to say to her 'no one cares a duck about your inability to connect with your presumably teenaged little shit of a kid, you spoilt first world freerider on cheap Chinese labour that made the ducking plastic spoon you're eating your donut with.'

And yet, there they are...  Personally, I'd like the poem to end on "We are silent". That would make it a much better poem for me.
But then, I don't have teenage daughter.

[Lizzie]

The Man on the Hotel Room Bed

He shifts on the bed carefully, so as
not to press through the first layer
into the second, which is permanently sore.
For him sleep means lying as still as possible
for as long as possible thinking the worst.
Nor does it help to outlast the night—
in seconds after the light comes
the inner darkness falls over everything.
He wonders if the left hand of the woman
in the print hanging in the dark above the bed,
who sits half turned away, her right hand
clutching her face, lies empty,
or does it move in the hair of a man
who dies, or perhaps died long ago
and sometimes comes and puts his head in her lap,
and then is gone and lies under a sign
in a field filled nearly up to the roots
holding down the hardly ever trampled grass
with mortals, the once-lovers. He goes over
the mathematics of lying awake all night alone
in a strange room: still the equations require
multiplication, by fear, of what is,
to the power of desire. He feels around—
no pillow next to his, no depression
in the pillow, no head in the depression.
Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft.
No doubt his mother's arms still waver up
somewhere reaching for him; and perhaps
his father's are now ready to gather him
there where peace and death dangerously mingle.
But, the arms of prayer, which pressed his chest
in childhood—long ago, he himself, in the name of truth,
let them go slack. He lies face-down,
like something washed up. Out the window
first light pinks the glass hotel across the street.
In the religion of love to pray is to pass,
by a shining word, into the inner chamber
of the other. It is to ask the father and mother
to return and be forgiven. But in this religion
not everyone can pray—least of all
a man lying alone to avoid being abandoned,
who wants to die to escape the meeting with death.
The final second strikes. On the glass wall
the daylight grows so bright the man sees
the next darkness already forming inside it.

~Galway Kinnell

[next]

The Man on the Hotel Room Bed
...
~Galway Kinnell

Well, thank goodness I'm not feeling suicidal today; this might have pushed me off the cliff.

This line:
"Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft."
So simple, so complex.

[Lizzie]

Here is another one by an old workshop friend:

Neanderthal Bone Flute
by Rose Kelleher

“...if it really is a flute, it provides significant evidence that Neanderthals may have been the equal of Homo Sapiens in the evolution of humankind.”
                      — Wikipedia.com, Divje Babe

Let it be a flute. Let some young man,
perhaps red-haired, have carved it just for fun.
Or better yet, to serenade someone:
one of the jut-chinned girls, not of his clan,
a stranger from the east. And let his genes
thrive still in solitary types, the shy
who fidget when you look them in the eye,
the tongue-tied, who must woo by other means.

Ignore the new genetic tests that say
the girl rejected him, that winter came
and spear could not compete with bow and arrow;
that want, or slaughter, whittled him away
because his ways and ours were not the same.
Let bone be flute, the music in our marrow.

This is wonderful, Milo. Thanks for sharing. I hope it's a flute too

---

It’s Like This By Stephen Dobyns

for Peter Parrish

Each morning the man rises from bed because the invisible
.....cord leading from his neck to someplace in the dark,
.....the cord that makes him always dissatisfied,
.....has been wound tighter and tighter until he wakes.

He greets his family, looking for himself in their eyes,
.....but instead he sees shorter or taller men, men with
.....different degrees of anger or love, the kind of men
.....that people who hardly know him often mistake
.....for him, leaving a movie or running to catch a bus.

He has a job that he goes to. It could be at a bank
.....or a library or turning a piece of flat land
.....into a ditch. All day something that refuses to
.....show itself hovers at the corner of his eye,
.....like a name he is trying to remember, like
.....expecting a touch on the shoulder, as if someone
.....were about to embrace him, a woman in a blue dress
.....whom he has never met, would never meet again.
.....And it seems the purpose of each day’s labor
.....is simply to bring this mystery to focus. He can
.....almost describe it, as if it were a figure at the edge
.....of a burning field with smoke swirling around it
.....like white curtains shot full of wind and light.

When he returns home, he studies the eyes of his family to see
.....what person he should be that evening. He wants to say:
.....All day I have been listening, all day I have felt
.....I stood on the brink of something amazing.
.....But he says nothing, and his family walks around him
.....as if he were a stick leaning against a wall.

Late in the evening the cord around his neck draws him to bed.
.....He is consoled by the coolness of sheets, pressure
.....of blankets. He turns to the wall, and as water
.....drains from a sink so his daily mind slips from him.
.....Then sleep rises before him like a woman in a blue dress,
.....and darkness puts its arms around him, embracing him.
.....Be true to me, it says, each night you belong to me more,
.....until at last I lift you up and wrap you within me.

Holy Christ, this is a good one.

I wish there was a slow-clap emoticon.

---

The Man on the Hotel Room Bed
...
~Galway Kinnell

Well, thank goodness I'm not feeling suicidal today; this might have pushed me off the cliff.

This line:
"Love is the religion that bereaves the bereft."
So simple, so complex.

Everyone's waiting for you to post a poem, you know that right?

No pressure

There's a Suicide Awareness Month thread, if you feel so inclined to contribute I jest, but it's actually a good one. I've contributed myself.

Glad you like the poem this time

[RiverNotch]

The Man on the Hotel Room Bed
~Galway Kinnell

Wonderful work -- rings very true to me. Although the man does feel a little bit more like a coward, he doesn't treat his world like a prison ---- an honest coward, perhaps unlike me, in that he doesn't treat his world like a prison.   Wonderful work.
I do wonder, though -- what vision of truth made him give up those arms of prayer, and what he would feel now, in the poem's time, had he not let go?

[next]

@RiverNotch: Things would certainly be going better for him if he'd not let go.  The religion of God is much more compatible
with the religion of romantic love than truth.  Truth is responsible for more suicides than illusion (I'd be willing to bet).


And moving right along...  I love this poem:


un4seen Fxs  -  Ann Vickery

Typographical err Or makes me live you more
              peach day; all the fruitiest
                            salad days of my unastounding youth
fresh firm to ouch, sluice running rivulets
              down my hum-dingers
leaves of green a sticky miss. Wilt. Upturned facia to cuss,
my inner coast dealings on display,
                                          here they are 4 all 2 cc. Can I
whistle fluent profanities to you if my mood autocorrects
song to joy always as
                            sing tomboy
                            and says you are a hut?
Moonlight soon after by compost Lord pig’s van,
my blind blissful germ and his bland loaves. Fly this motion
              through a sow’s and years. Take a sissy stile
              from Marlena, garbage revival &
              tolled mine leaven in blue angle. Am I four ever tagged
              to you displeasing Parisienne evening? Tear open the pain
and butter freely while warm. Home-maid is best
for service cleaning while you make light work of it.
             Love looks more and more like louvers
when you try to sms this ♥ and find only glasnost.
              Common ownership is now a closed window.
                            [txt] only tampering provokes sudden fonts:
                                          I am wooden blocked.




@lizziep:
you said:  "Everyone's waiting for you to post a poem, you know that right?"
Everybody? I hardly think so. But it's nice thinking you are (unless it's the lying-in-wait type).
But that may be awhile. While I passionately love poetry (read it compulsively), I don't write it.
I've tried in the past, and though my poetry wasn't that bad (or good), I didn't enjoy it.  My pleasure
comes from reading it.  But who knows, I've never been able to predict myself (or anyone else).

[Lizzie]

@lizziep:
you said:  "Everyone's waiting for you to post a poem, you know that right?"
Everybody? I hardly think so. But it's nice thinking you are (unless it's the lying-in-wait type).
But that may be awhile. While I passionately love poetry (read it compulsively), I don't write it.
I've tried in the past, and though my poetry wasn't that bad (or good), I didn't enjoy it.  My pleasure
comes from reading it.  But who knows, I've never been able to predict myself (or anyone else).

Oh, no it's not at all a lying in wait type of thing. Not at all.

Yeah, if you don't enjoy it, then why do it? I get it.

I thought that you might be waiting out of timidity, and I was trying to encourage you

[next]

I thought that you might be waiting out of timidity, and I was trying to encourage you

The world's in need of empathetic people; consider yourself needed.


Now here's a woman to be reckoned with:


Golden Rice Sheaves   - Zheng Min - Translated from Chinese by poetryeastwest.com

Golden rice stands in sheaves
in the newly cut autumn field.
I think of many exhausted mothers,
I see rugged faces along the road at dusk.
On the day of harvest, a full moon hangs
atop the towering trees,
and in the twilight, distant mountains
approach my heart.
Nothing is more quiet than this, a statue,
shouldering so much weariness –
you lower your head in thought
in the autumn field that stretches afar.
Silence. Silence. History is nothing
but a small stream flowing under your feet.
And you stand over there,
becoming a thought of humanity.




A Glance    - Zheng Min - Translated from Chinese by poetryeastwest.com

—While contemplating Rembrandt's Young girl at a half-open door

What’s beautiful are the two shoulders sinking
into the shadows locking the chest, rich as an orchard.
Only the radiant face, a dream suddenly appearing,
corresponds to the slim fingers that rest on the low

gate. River of time carries away another leaf.
From her half lowering eyes, sphinxlike, flows out a tranquility
that dazzles. Her unchangeable calm is facing a limited life
when in a chance evening she casts a long glance
at this changing world.