Tag Archives: poetry

Poetry: Ghost Walk

books poetry lit March 26, 2015 Leave a comment

We used to overturn rocks on the shore
and expose them to the belly of the sun.
I knew that some rocks should not be moved
but you picked them up to skip pebbles
and slice fountains in the sea
where they were lost
and you were satisfied
because yours had skipped the farthest
and the deepest
while mine grew steam in my palm.

Your hand in mine was sandpaper.
When you closed your fingers I was a bottled neck
with no wings flapping but the heartbeat
of one chipped stone against another.

read more at Cadence Collective

-Robin Dawn Hudechek

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

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

All Hallow’s Eve, Sheldon Vanauken

books poetry lit March 6, 2015 Leave a comment

Tonight, while weighing wild winged hope with fears

Of loss, again the girl’s voice crying gay

And sweet – O playmate of lost pagan years! –

Comes ringing in the glory of the May.

O singing beauty! Singing though there nears

The moment of all finding and all loss:

Together in our laughter and our tears,

Wind-driven to the centre where ways cross.

Rose garden in blue night, where souls embraced

In holy silence, timeless ecstasy:

Truth grew between us, final beauty laced

The stars, and awed we knew eternity.

A secret sharing passed from eye to eye:

In death the singing beauty does not die.

-Sheldon Vanauken

La Figlia Che Piange(The Weeping Girl)

books poetry lit March 5, 2015 Leave a comment

impressionistic painting girl

Stand on the highest pavement of the stair –
Lean on a garden urn –
Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair –
Clasp your flowers to you with a pained suprise –
Fling them to the ground and turn
With a fugitive resentment in your eyes:
But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave,
So I would have had her stand and grieve,
So he would have left
As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised,
As the mind deserts the body it has used.
I should find
Some way incomparably light and deft,
Some way we both should understand,
Simple and faithless as a smile and a shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather
Compelled my imagination many days,
Many days and many hours:
Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.
And I wonder how they should have been together!
I should have lost a gesture and a pose.
Sometimes these cogitations still amaze
The troubled midnight, and the noon’s repose.

— T. S. Eliot

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: Leave-Taking

books poetry lit February 27, 2015 Leave a comment

the trees react to colder nights by stripping naked
the meadow too

it’s as if they’re about to set off somewhere
all excess baggage is left at the gate

the sun too is a budget traveler
abandoning most of the sky
the days are so quiet now

take me with you
even if there’s nowhere to go
even if it means leaving myself behind

-Dave Bonta, Gnarled Oak

Poetry: Text by Carol Ann Duffy

books poetry lit February 23, 2015 Comments: 10

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: Cardinals

books poetry lit February 20, 2015 Leave a comment

With but his red to woo her,

in a courtship of minutes,

he captured her jackhammer heart.

For three years, with each

never losing sight of the other,

they’ve wrapped countless presents

of tree and sky with the scissor-

curled ribbons of their flight,

managing, with nothing

but the cap-pistol firepower

of their BB-sized brains,

two lifetimes of devotion.

-Larry D Thomas, Right Hand Pointing