Poems that drop you in your tracks

[Du Lac]

Thank yiou BB for sharing this poem. Not only is it a lesson in poetry but also a strong message on how to live life... wonderful and strong.
ty
Du~

One of the most beautiful poems I ever read, written on the eve of his execution. Who says I've got no feelings?

Chidiock Tichborne (ca. 1558-1586)

My Prime of Youth is but a Frost of Cares

My prime of youth is but a frost of cares,
My feast of joy is but a dish of pain,
My crop of corn is but a field of tares,
And all my good is but vain hope of gain.
The day is gone and I yet I saw no sun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

The spring is past, and yet it hath not sprung,
The fruit is dead, and yet the leaves are green,
My youth is gone, and yet I am but young,
I saw the world, and yet I was not seen,
My thread is cut, and yet it was not spun,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

I sought my death and found it in my womb,
I lookt for life and saw it was a shade,
I trode the earth and knew it was my tomb,
And now I die, and now I am but made.
The glass is full, and now the glass is run,
And now I live, and now my life is done.

 

[Rybka]

This was the first poem that ever touched me. . . made me think maybe there was something to this poetry stuff. . . made me go to the library to read more.
(Years later, I was fortunate enough to meet the author one winter in Antigua.)


Epistle to be left in the Earth

. . . It is colder now, there are many stars, we are drifting
North by the Great Bear, the leaves are falling,
The water is stone in the scooped rocks, to southward
Red sun grey air:

The crows are slow on their crooked wings, the jays have left us:
Long since we passed the flares of Orion,

Each . . . believes in his heart he will die,
Many have written last thoughts and last letters.

None know if our deaths are now or forever:
None know if this wandering earth will be found.

We lie down and the snow covers our garments.
I pray you, you (if any open this writing)
Make in your mouths the words that were our names.

I will tell you all we have learned, I will tell you everything:

The earth is round, there are springs under the orchards,
The loam cuts with a blunt knife,

Beware of elms in thunder, the lights in the sky are stars—

We think they do not see, we think also
The trees do not know nor the leaves of the grasses hear us:
The birds too are ignorant.

Do not listen. Do not stand at dark in the open windows.

We before you have heard this: they are voices

They are not words at all but the wind rising.
Also none among us has seen God.

(. . . We have thought often
The flaws of the sun in the late and driving weather
Pointed to one tree but it was not so.)

As for the nights I warn you the nights are dangerous:
The wind changes at night and the dreams come.

It is very cold, there are strange stars near Arcturus.

Voices are crying an unknown name in the sky.


~ Archibald MacLeish

 

[twelveoone]

Burnt Norton, by TS Eliot


Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage which we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.
Other echoes
Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow?
Quick, said the bird, find them, find them,
Round the corner. Through the first gate,
Into our first world, shall we follow
The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.
There they were, dignified, invisible,
Moving without pressure, over the dead leaves,
In the autumn heat, through the vibrant air,
And the bird called, in response to
The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery,
And the unseen eyebeam crossed, for the roses
Had the look of flowers that are looked at.
There they were as our guests, accepted and accepting.
So we moved, and they, in a formal pattern,
Along the empty alley, into the box circle,
To look down into the drained pool.
Dry the pool, dry concrete, brown edged,
And the pool was filled with water out of sunlight,
And the lotos rose, quietly, quietly,
The surface glittered out of heart of light,
And they were behind us, reflected in the pool.
Then a cloud passed, and the pool was empty.
Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children,
Hidden excitedly, containing laughter.
Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.


II

Garlic and sapphires in the mud
Clot the bedded axle-tree.
The trilling wire in the blood
Sings below inveterate scars
Appeasing long forgotten wars.
The dance along the artery
The circulation of the lymph
Are figured in the drift of stars
Ascend to summer in the tree
We move above the moving tree
In light upon the figured leaf
And hear upon the sodden floor
Below, the boarhound and the boar
Pursue their pattern as before
But reconciled among the stars.

At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where.
And I cannot say, how long, for that is to place it in time.
The inner freedom from the practical desire,
The release from action and suffering, release from the inner
And the outer compulsion, yet surrounded
By a grace of sense, a white light still and moving,
Erhebung without motion, concentration
Without elimination, both a new world
And the old made explicit, understood
In the completion of its partial ecstasy,
The resolution of its partial horror.
Yet the enchainment of past and future
Woven in the weakness of the changing body,
Protects mankind from heaven and damnation
Which flesh cannot endure.
Time past and time future
Allow but a little consciousness.
To be conscious is not to be in time
But only in time can the moment in the rose-garden,
The moment in the arbour where the rain beat,
The moment in the draughty church at smokefall
Be remembered; involved with past and future.
Only through time time is conquered.


III

Here is a place of disaffection
Time before and time after
In a dim light: neither daylight
Investing form with lucid stillness
Turning shadow into transient beauty
With slow rotation suggesting permanence
Nor darkness to purify the soul
Emptying the sensual with deprivation
Cleansing affection from the temporal.
Neither plenitude nor vacancy. Only a flicker
Over the strained time-ridden faces
Distracted from distraction by distraction
Filled with fancies and empty of meaning
Tumid apathy with no concentration
Men and bits of paper, whirled by the cold wind
That blows before and after time,
Wind in and out of unwholesome lungs
Time before and time after.
Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

Descend lower, descend only
Into the world of perpetual solitude,
World not world, but that which is not world,
Internal darkness, deprivation
And destitution of all property,
Desiccation of the world of sense,
Evacuation of the world of fancy,
Inoperancy of the world of spirit;
This is the one way, and the other
Is the same, not in movement
But abstention from movement; while the world moves
In appetency, on its metalled ways
Of time past and time future.


IV

Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?

Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.


V

Words move, music moves
Only in time; but that which is only living
Can only die. Words, after speech, reach
Into the silence. Only by the form, the pattern,
Can words or music reach
The stillness, as a Chinese jar still
Moves perpetually in its stillness.
Not the stillness of the violin, while the note lasts,
Not that only, but the co-existence,
Or say that the end precedes the beginning,
And the end and the beginning were always there
Before the beginning and after the end.
And all is always now. Words strain,
Crack and sometimes break, under the burden,
Under the tension, slip, slide, perish,
Decay with imprecision, will not stay in place,
Will not stay still. Shrieking voices
Scolding, mocking, or merely chattering,
Always assail them. The Word in the desert
Is most attacked by voices of temptation,
The crying shadow in the funeral dance,
The loud lament of the disconsolate chimera.

The detail of the pattern is movement,
As in the figure of the ten stairs.
Desire itself is movement
Not in itself desirable;
Love is itself unmoving,
Only the cause and end of movement,
Timeless, and undesiring
Except in the aspect of time
Caught in the form of limitation
Between un-being and being.
Sudden in a shaft of sunlight
Even while the dust moves
There rises the hidden laughter
Of children in the foliage
Quick now, here, now, always—
Ridiculous the waste sad time
Stretching before and after.

***********

I talk about it all the time, and realize it may be somewhat obscure or maybe I am just crazy, who knows. Anyway, here it is...sigh I still cant point out exactly what it is that gets me about this work..someone analyze me?

yeh, it's called good taste...

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot (1925)

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

this one gives me visuals of a painting I think by Giorgio de Chirico, but I can't remember the title
Sunlight on a broken column
Falls the shadow

 

[mojo_cat]

People in school get on me for liking this since it's not "edgy" to like poems by Frost, but this has stuck in my head since hearing it in grade school, and eventually migrated into one of my many tattoo's.


Fire & Ice by Robert Frost

Some say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favour fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.

 

[Maria2394]

hey 1201,
i think, should i ever be stranded on an island, with only 2 books, one would be a complete works of TS Eliot, the other, How to make Cheesecake with crap you find on a deserted island."

love the Hollow Men, glad to have read it here.

yeh, it's called good taste...

The Hollow Men

T. S. Eliot (1925)

I

We are the hollow men
We are the stuffed men
Leaning together
Headpiece filled with straw. Alas!
Our dried voices, when
We whisper together
Are quiet and meaningless
As wind in dry grass
Or rats' feet over broken glass
In our dry cellar

Shape without form, shade without colour,
Paralysed force, gesture without motion;

Those who have crossed
With direct eyes, to death's other Kingdom
Remember us -- if at all -- not as lost
Violent souls, but only
As the hollow men
The stuffed men.

II

Eyes I dare not meet in dreams
In death's dream kingdom
These do not appear:
There, the eyes are
Sunlight on a broken column
There, is a tree swinging
And voices are
In the wind's singing
More distant and more solemn
Than a fading star.

Let me be no nearer
In death's dream kingdom
Let me also wear
Such deliberate disguises
Rat's coat, crowskin, crossed staves
In a field
Behaving as the wind behaves
No nearer --

Not that final meeting
In the twilight kingdom

III

This is the dead land
This is cactus land
Here the stone images
Are raised, here they receive
The supplication of a dead man's hand
Under the twinkle of a fading star.

Is it like this
In death's other kingdom
Waking alone
At the hour when we are
Trembling with tenderness
Lips that would kiss
Form prayers to broken stone.

IV

The eyes are not here
There are no eyes here
In this valley of dying stars
In this hollow valley
This broken jaw of our lost kingdoms

In this last of meeting places
We grope together
And avoid speech
Gathered on this beach of the tumid river

Sightless, unless
The eyes reappear
As the perpetual star
Multifoliate rose
Of death's twilight kingdom
The hope only
Of empty men.

V

Here we go round the prickly pear
Prickly pear prickly pear
Here we go round the prickly pear
At five o'clock in the morning.

Between the idea
And the reality
Between the motion
And the act
Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception
And the creation
Between the emotion
And the response
Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire
And the spasm
Between the potency
And the existence
Between the essence
And the descent
Falls the Shadow
For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is
Life is
For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.

this one gives me visuals of a painting I think by Giorgio de Chirico, but I can't remember the title
Sunlight on a broken column
Falls the shadow

 

[flyguy69]

hey 1201,
i think, should i ever be stranded on an island, with only 2 books, one would be a complete works of TS Eliot, the other, How to make Cheesecake with crap you find on a deserted island."

love the Hollow Men, glad to have read it here.

I hope I wash up on that beach!

 

[Angeline]

Your Eyes Have Their Silence
Gerald William Barrax

Your eyes have their silence in giving words
back more beautifully than trees can rain
and give back in swaying the rain
that makes silence mutable and startles nesting birds.

And so it rains. And so I speak or not
as your eyes go from silence suddenly
at love to wonder (as those quiet birds suddenly
at rain) letting, finally, myself be taught

silence before your eyes conceding everything
spoken as experience, as love, as reason
enough not to speak of them and my reason
crawls into the silence of your eyes. Spring

always promises something, sometimes only more
beauty: and so it rains. And so I take
whatever promise there is in silence as you take
words as rain and give them back in silence before

there are ways to say that more beauty is nothing
for you before my hands can memorize
the beauty of your slender movements and nothing
is beautiful as words nesting in your eyes.

 

[wildsweetone]

Angeline,
what form is that poem please?

 

[Maria2394]

I hope I wash up on that beach!

I hope you do too!!
flyguy AND cheesecake, yummmmmmy

 

[Angeline]

Angeline,
what form is that poem please?

it is not a form as far as i know--it's derivative of an ee cummings poem though. beautiful, isn't it?

 

[Angeline]

it is not a form as far as i know--it's derivative of an ee cummings poem though. beautiful, isn't it?

My dear WSO, I went searching to show you the poem I am pretty sure inspired Gerald William Barrax to write his poem I posted. I have loved the Barrax poem for many, many years. A few years ago I was reading ee cummings and I realized he (Barrax) derived Your Eyes Have Their Silence from it.

somewhere i have never traveled
E.E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


See what I mean?

 

[Maria2394]

bumpity-bumP

this is a GOOD thread and I found apoem that belongs here, deserves to be read..oh well, just my opinion

heres the link--

http://prairieschooner.unl.edu/html/Lindsay.html

 

[wildsweetone]

My dear WSO, I went searching to show you the poem I am pretty sure inspired Gerald William Barrax to write his poem I posted. I have loved the Barrax poem for many, many years. A few years ago I was reading ee cummings and I realized he (Barrax) derived Your Eyes Have Their Silence from it.

somewhere i have never traveled
E.E. Cummings

somewhere i have never travelled, gladly beyond
any experience your eyes have their silence:
in your most frail gesture are things which enclose me,
or which i cannot touch because they are too near

your slightest look easily will unclose me
though i have closed myself as fingers,
you open always petal by petal myself as Spring opens
(touching skillfully, mysteriously) her first rose

or if your wish be to close me i and
my life will shut very beautifully, suddenly,
as when the heart of this flower imagines
the snow carefully everywhere descending;

nothing which we are to perceive in this world equals
the power of your intense fragility: whose texture
compels me with the color of its countries,
rendering death and forever with each breathing

(i do not know what it is about you that closes
and opens; only something in me understands
the voice of your eyes is deeper than all roses)
nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands


See what I mean?

the Barrax poem reads with such repetition that i really expected it to be a form of some kind. i'm surprised it isn't, surprised and pleased.

some leaves fall straight to the ground, other leaves weave on the breeze. these two poems seem to weave on the breeze (i guess there is a correct name for it, but i don't know it). they are both very beautiful poems, i shall hunt out Barrax for sure! i recall looking at an ee cummings' poem last year, i might hunt that out too.

thank you for taking the time to share them with me. you are very much appreciated.



(sorry for taking so long to get to this thread, i forgot i had asked the question and it was only through stalking Maria that i re-read it )

 

[Maria2394]

(sorry for taking so long to get to this thread, i forgot i had asked the question and it was only through stalking Maria that i re-read it )

ooohhh!!! you were stalking ME?? IM absolutely tickled

oh, another poem, a really good one, I guess I'm pretty easy to drop....

its titled "Kaanapali" and has some special formatting that I am afraid wouldnt look right of I tried to post it here. This is an emotionally tough poem for me, maybe its because I have to daughters, but this poem stunned me. I hope you will read it and feel...just feel.

Kaanapali



maria

 

[Nirvanadragones]

this touches me deeply every time i read it

"You do not have to be good.
"You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting--
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things."

Mary Oliver: Wild Geese.

 

[wildsweetone]

ooohhh!!! you were stalking ME?? IM absolutely tickled

oh, another poem, a really good one, I guess I'm pretty easy to drop....

its titled "Kaanapali" and has some special formatting that I am afraid wouldnt look right of I tried to post it here. This is an emotionally tough poem for me, maybe its because I have to daughters, but this poem stunned me. I hope you will read it and feel...just feel.

Kaanapali



maria

omgosh, what a poem!

 

[The Mutt]

I first read this in junior high and was so blown away I memorized it. It seems to get more topical every year,.

The Second Coming -- W. B. Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all convictions, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

 

[Nirvanadragones]

Has anyone heard of Shakuntala Howaldar? I have been looking for two years...

Read a poem once that left me with deep emotion

 

[Angeline]

Has anyone heard of Shakuntala Howaldar? I have been looking for two years...

Read a poem once that left me with deep emotion

I googled her. The correct spelling of her name is Shakuntala Hawoldar and she is from Mauritius. Couldn't find any poems online, but it looks like she has some publications you might be able to find. Here's a link to an anthology in which she is published.

 

[Nirvanadragones]

I googled her. The correct spelling of her name is Shakuntala Hawoldar and she is from Mauritius. Couldn't find any poems online, but it looks like she has some publications you might be able to find. Here's a link to an anthology in which she is published.

You're sweet thank you. I googled her many times for past two years - tried to follow up on some links, but still somehow i can't find her work - either not available or or or... Will try your link thanks

 

[Tzara]

Sometimes a poem whacks you in the head. It may not be that great a poem or it may be a really great poem. It's sometimes hard to tell in the first rush of enthusiasm. It took me a while to find this thread, but I wanted to post this poem here rather than in the Share a Poet thread, as this one did "drop me in my tracks."

Your mileage may vary.

Drunken Memories Of Anne Sexton
Alan Dugan

The first and last time I met
my ex-lover Anne Sexton was at
a protest poetry reading against
some anti-constitutional war in Asia
when some academic son of a bitch,
to test her reputation as a drunk,
gave her a beer glass full of wine
after our reading. She drank
it all down while staring me
full in the face and then said
"I don't care what you think,
you know," as if I was
her ex-what, husband, lover,
what? And just as I
was just about to say I
loved her, I was, what,
was, interrupted by my beautiful enemy
Galway Kinnell, who said to her
"Just as I was told, your eyes,
you have one blue, one green"
and there they were, the two
beautiful poets, staring at
each others' beautiful eyes
as I drank the lees of her wine.​

Oh, man. My sorry life, encapsulated and made text.

Carry on.

 

[another realm]

This poem from Patti Smith's latest volume just knocked me out when I read it for the first time. Is it actually a poem? She says it is.

Written By A Lake
Patti Smith

New Year’s Day. Rain. Two candles light the room where they sleep. He writes. She confesses. This is where she weeps. She is the cause of the rain. She could not stop weeping and the sky obliged to follow.

(How is it mapped? What is the refrain? Why must the sky follow?) The heart drops in the center of an inexhaustible lake. How light the heart appears, yet how weighty a thing. A powerful stone carved in the shape of an organ with chambers pumping. How slick a shadow it leaks as its signature. Sticky, oxblood, the color of new shoes. High topped, gold laced and worn with expectations poised to ride out life on horseback. Racing from hill to hill with humor, horror, bits of Spanish stitched on sleeves.

The work wrung with this cry. Look you radiant wash yard. The sheets billow. Their wet folds tell a tale. Once there was a girl who walked straight, yet she was truly lame. She walked upright in new boots, yet I tell you her feet were bare. She lives forever, yet she lies buried in a vault of fertile air.

New Year’s Day. The wicks twist. The insistent mirror winks. An eye with time as her lashes. And if he----slipping at last, face pressed against the glass, releasing beads of spittle from parting lips----should suddenly speak, what would he say? And if she, shaken from her torpor, should rise to write, what would she write? Their table is laid with the promise of the lake. Water sighs for want of blood. It is nothing. These remains, malleable ash, are nothing. Signs for want of substance. A sack of sticks spilling order upon the surface. Words traced on a slab hewn from another forested mind.

a postscript prefiguring ----

Your fingers press the door triggering a spring exposing the hard corner where you have walked. You shall not stumble. Offer a fist encasing rivets extracted from the wet pout of this time or that. Prick the hour’s hand with nothing but eyes. Think nothing of it. For what remains to flush is nothing but salt jamming the mechanism of formal delights, former misery. Nothing but salt to bundle and fling over a shoulder. Nothing but clumps of salt to toss, years later, like dice across a board of glass where you’ll sit on a ledge circling a glowing body, unfastening the dressings of a burden gone. The cremation of all my sorrow ---- may you spread the singed grains with your fingers, and without thought brush them aside.

Thus free to drown in sorrow of your own, may you sit in the shadows of our lost life, immersed in stillness, flanked by translucent hills, one a mountain coated immaculate and ringed at the throat with beads of cloud.

......................................................................................... ~

These words were written by a lake.

String them around a wrist. Do not grip a sword or draw what might be drawn, for wisdom is a dying bird, engraved on a palm. Next to nothing. And these words were written by a lake, before being as being was scripted and dealt. A pack of lives, each with a winning face, each with this blushing command:

Prick this. This moment the hand is free

 

[Senna Jawa]

(never mind)

 

[champagne1982]

I was thinking of all the beautiful poems I'd read when my muse gave me a subject for my daily poem. Michael asked me to pen my imagery of "healing places". Being poetic in feeling, after my exercise, I continued with this thinking and carried it into thoughts of healing words. This poem by William Butler Yeats flowed out of my memory and I share it with all of you as I shared it with my love.

Cloths of Heaven

William Butler Yeats

Had I the heavens' embroidered cloths,
Enwrought with golden and silver light,
The blue and the dim and the dark cloths
Of night and light and the half-light,
I would spread the cloths under your feet:
But I, being poor, have only my dreams;
I have spread my dreams under your feet;
Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

 

[The Mystery Valiant]

the Center Heart

In all poetry, I think the major killer, heart-thumper, the catch-in-the-throat poem. Is always effective in it's largest form when we are in that position in our lives that we need a "bell-ringer"! We leave ourselves closed to most of our emotion's because we can't live life in contunual, emotional fluctuations. But there are weak points in our armor. And that's very apparent when we come upon a crux that yanks at our soft notions in the most vunerable enviroments. This poem is the most powerful for me because I had a woman out on a date and she agreed. Then after a few days, I called her and she wasn't there..., supposedly. I called several other times that day and still she was not there..., accordingly. Finally, I raelized that she had reneged. I went to work two days later and she was there also. She did everything possible to avoid me. And so, in my anger, grief and pain..., I wrote this poem.

“Pounded”

My world has been wasted and nuked!
And the voice hidden in the sky,
has declared me the last survivor.
The exalted “King of Ashes.”
For the dust that billows and boils,
mingled with the remains of a bitter society.
No life endures and the most terrible sound,
that echoes my single, exposed heartbeat.
With my crown, bent and askew,
I am given a shattering gift.
Immortality!
So I may mourn the faithless numbers,
and countless ghosts,
who bend their knee to my voided title.
“King of Ashes.”
The avalanche of silence, rings in my ears.


The Mystery Valiant
2-16-1998