Tag Archives: love poetry

New Poems Published in “Melusine”!

books poetry lit, this & that February 8, 2016 Leave a comment

Very excited and honored this morning to say that I have two poems included in the winter issue of Melusine, a journal for women in the 21st century (but not just for women, and not just including women). Huge respect and thanks to editor Janelle Elyse Kihlstrom, and I’m especially pleased because I love the work of two other poets in this issue – Mary Cresswell and Simon Perchik (I’ll  link Mary’s poem below along with mine).

Dear Peter

I came home tired from China.
You were a sudden warmth on a violet doorstep –

Present and tender, with a smudge of laughter.
Closer than calluses, you sway me and
I fall.

read more

Check out Mary’s “Spy Story” poem here.

Peter Quince at the Clavier

books poetry lit March 17, 2015 Leave a comment

ken howard, the blue dress

The Blue Dress, Ken Howard

UST as my fingers on these keys
Make music, so the self-same sounds
On my spirit make a music, too.
Music is feeling, then, not sound;
And thus it is that what I feel,
Here in this room, desiring you,
Thinking of your blue-shadowed silk,
Is music.

-from Peter Quince at the Clavier, Wallace Stevens

She Walks in Beauty

books poetry lit March 15, 2015 Leave a comment

At_the_Shrine jww

At the Shrine, John William Waterhouse

She walks in Beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which Heaven to gaudy day denies.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express,
How pure, how dear their dwelling-place.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

-Lord Byron

Poetry: You Said Is

books poetry lit March 14, 2015 Leave a comment

Raffaela-Blanc-Romantica-5-82802

Romantica 1, Raffaella Blanc

you said Is
there anything which
is dead or alive more beautiful
than my body, to have in your fingers
(trembling ever so little)?
Looking into
your eyes Nothing, I said, except the
air of spring smelling of never and forever.

-e.e cummings

Love is Not All: It is Not Meat Nor Drink

books poetry lit March 3, 2015 Leave a comment

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love cannot fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

-Edna St. Vincent Millay

Poetry: Do Us Part by Dawn Dorland

books poetry lit February 28, 2015 Leave a comment

I’ve been wanting to ask you, Do you remember what I said at your wedding? Once you’d exchanged vows by banjo and your parents cried through their speeches; after Hava Nagila, when you and your bride flew on chairs. Later, when I’d blistered my feet dancing in heels, started telling big stories with flying hands. Later, when I took pictures with people I’d only just met and planned to visit their cities—but what I said, Saul, it was later than that, when you cut cake with your darling, and she smeared it up to your eyebrows. Later, much later, when we all heard a groomsman, having crept off, empty his stomach onto the sea rocks. And we laughed, willed sickness away, went headlong into a humming numbness, the wind whipping us in June off the Maine coast, dancing hard to Beat It

read more at Green Mountains Review

-Dawn Dorland

 

Poetry: Text by Carol Ann Duffy

books poetry lit February 23, 2015 1 Comment

I tend the mobile now
like an injured bird.

We text, text, text
our significant words.

I re-read your first,
your second, your third,

look for your small xx,
feeling absurd.

The codes we send
arrive with a broken chord.

I try to picture your hands,
their image is blurred.

Nothing my thumbs press
will ever be heard.

Poetry: Plantains

books poetry lit December 19, 2014 Leave a comment

Very excited to say that my poem “Plantains” was picked up for Blue Fifth Review’s December Poetry Special.

Peeling plantains,
I sway in the kitchen while the orchid you gave
eases toward the lamplight.

I am waiting for your staccato on the door.
Green spikes my fingertips, and I roll bites
in sugar my tongue rejects.

Read more at Blue Fifth Review 

Poetry: Crown for a Young Marriage

books poetry lit November 26, 2014 Leave a comment

This excerpt is from one of my favorite contemporary poems, which was just selected by Rattle for one of this year’s Pushcart Prize nominations. Extraordinary, illuminated.

If I was nothing else, but was a wife;
If I did nothing else, but could make meals
with scraps and pantry staples and a knife
I got when I was twenty-nine; if real
commitment (an abstract and noble word
before it tangles up with sacrifice)
turns out to mean a smaller life, less heard,
less heralded, less published, and less prized;
if after spending summer days indoors
for several years, and writing frightening verse
I’m eighty-odd and pale and little more
than what I am today, will I be worse
off than my single, roving poet friends?
I doubt it, but you’ll have to ask me then.
3
I doubt it, but you’ll have to ask me then.
I doubt that I’ll be doddering and hunched
and wishing I could do it all again
because I felt I’d missed out on a bunch
of fellowships. And Christ, I love you. Christ
do I remember loneliness, and what
I did for scraps of evenings, what sufficed
for kindness. Offer me a life, a glut
of love, of undeserved reserves of grace
and nice interpretations of my faults.
I’ll still find ways to be unhappy. Face
the facts, though—I’m at home filling the salt
shakers, cleaning the microwave, unknown.
But staunchly, resolutely unalone.
Read more
-Mary Block (view her website here)

Thank you to Linebreak for publishing one of my poems!

books poetry lit October 15, 2014 Comments: 2

linebreak poem claire hellar

Lovely followers, I’m so excited to say that Linebreak, one of my very favorite poetry publications, picked up one of my poems, “Kitchen Ode”! Please read below and share on Facebook/Twitter if so inclined! (There are handy links at the bottom of the page)

Read or listen to “Kitchen Ode”  on Linebreak

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