Share A Poet

[PatCarrington]

Trash Day in L.A.
by Allison Heim


Because I like to say today
is the rest of yesterday
I was never really concerned by
putting out the garbage late,
but that was before the dawn parades
collided in disputed territory,
our usually glutted curb. Absent
were the five trash cans simpering
with their lids blown off,
bottles and soda cans bagged with tampons
out of spite for snooping hands,
recyclables buried with cat litter
in the discarded box advertising the upgrade
we just bought. For this,
our rubbish, our private daily lives,
the war of the cans waged on.

On this cloud-scarred morning
already approaching earthquake weather
all their routes met here; they circled
their bicycle rickshaws and Ford Aerostars,
ragged can collectors eyeing empty space
like a troupe of Sherpas waiting for rations
so as to ascend the Himalayas,
and I surrendered, hands in full view,
moving cautiously, grating the maggoty cans
along the driveway one by one then dashing back
on the pretense of scrubbing my hands,
but really, to peer out the window
at the law of the jungle. All was not well.
It seemed the bicycle people had a grudge
against the car people for killing
one of their own, and they demanded
the rights to our garbage, that of the most
prolific Yoo Hoo drinkers in the neighborhood.

Thus mayhem ensued:
women belted each other with chicken carcasses,
glass shattered against cars, alarms droned,
and dogs woofed and went back to the scraps.
Worst of all, a week’s worth of everything
that should be hidden and gotten rid of jiggled softly
or fled down the street for everyone to see
and they saw it and noted
how much one house can eat, drink, buy, break,
kill, and let go untouched. Everyone cheered
the pair of one-armed veterans
as they whacked each other with the vegetables
I didn’t eat, and for one lonely second
I considered the state of things and my contributions
and briefly mourned our collapsing planet
just long enough to miss the best fight
the street had seen in months.

 

[Syndra Lynn]

I am in love, I think, with an old woman.

I just finished, "Why I Wake Early" by Mary Oliver. If you have not read this work, you must. Every poet owes it to herself. I could not choose a favorite, I liked too many. But this one has some of the most wonderful phrases I have ever seen. I want my mind to work this way.


November

by Mary Oliver


The snow
began slowly,
a soft and easy
sprinkling

of flakes, then clouds of flakes
in the baskets of the wind
and the branches
of the trees-

oh, so pretty.
We walked
through the growing stillness,
as the flakes

prickled the path,
then covered it,
then deepened
as in curds and drifts,

as the wind grew stronger,
shaping its work
less delicately,
taking greater steps

over the hills
and through the trees
until, finally,
we were cold,

and far from home.
We turned
and followed our long shadows back
to the house,

stamped our feet,
went inside, and shut the door.
Through the window
we could see

how far it was to the gates of April.
Let the fire now
put on its red hat
and sing to us.



Syn

 

[PatCarrington]

An Instructor's Dream
by Bill Knott

Many decades after graduation
the students sneak back onto
the school-grounds at night
and within the pane-lit windows
catch me their teacher at the desk
or blackboard cradling a chalk:
someone has erased their youth,
and as they crouch closer to see
more it grows darker and quieter
than they have known in their lives,
the lesson never learned surrounds
them; why have they come? Is
there any more to memorize now
at the end than there was then?
What is it they peer at through shades
of time to hear, X times X repeated,
my vain efforts to corner a room's
snickers? Do they mock me? Forever?
Out there my past has risen in
the eyes of all my former pupils but
I wonder if behind them others
younger and younger stretch away
to a world where dawn will never
ring its end, its commencement bell.

 

[CupidsGurl]

In my eyes there lies no vision
But the sight of your dear face.
In my heart there is no feeling
But the warmth of your embrace.
In my mind there are no thoughts
But the thought of you, my dear.

In my soul no other longing
But just to have you near.
All my dreams are built around you
And I have come to know it's true
In my life there is no living
That is not a part of you.


~~~~~~~Helen Rice

I had to mention this one. What a wonderful love.
All consuming, and yet so dear to the heart.
My ideal love..My one..
Just Twitterpated so to say~ *winks*
I love this poem....~

 

[PatCarrington]

Costa Rica
~By Michael Zack~

The sheaves of poems blew off the deck,
toward the Costa Rican hills.
The one about driving crashed the mangrove and
the good-bye poem disappeared in banana tree groves.

Some first lines breezed to a Pacific beach,
some last lines to a Caribbean.
When the sonnet flew by, a cow and a sow
looked up from their grazing. The snowy egret
swooped near the one about Escher's fish.

Everything in life exchanges into something else,
especially words. I needed those mangos,
sunsets, howling monkeys in the canopy
to rhyme me to the man who left the last port.
I sought new adjectives and verbs,
maybe density like the river hyacinth,
maybe glide like the grey osprey.

And when the winds reverse
perhaps those poems will all fly back
rearranged, fonted with this new place,
all the better for their night out in the jungle,

so that the one about my childhood
will reminisce about a village,
and the one about you
can begin with the dulcet fragrance of hibiscus.

 

[Merrymaker]

Luna
by Gerald Miller

Too soon the sunset comes; too soon
Opens the night its curious eyes,
Greedy to watch the maiden moon
Unloose her silver draperies

And walk upon the star-flowered fields.
Her cloudy garments one by one
To waiting winds she slowly yields,
And now, her last disrobing done,

Flashes lithe limbs across the sky
And flaunts the cold and slender grace
Of unconcerned virginity.
O now before her smiling grace

A thousand rivers, lakes and seas
Hold up their mirrors to her gaze:
A thousand moonlets there she sees
Float on a thousand starry ways.

Beneath her footfall light and free
The peeping star follows shake and fall;
Cold as her watery mirrors, she
Drinks admiration from them all.

In them her nakedness she views,
In love with her own limbs displayed,
And through the wondering night pursues
Her strange unreasonable parade.

 

[Merrymaker]

Renoir
by Anfisa Osinnik - Russia 1957
translation by Johannes Beilharz

Renoir liked to enlarge women's eyes,
giving roundness to cheeks and lips.
Renoir liked to play with women's hair.
Excellent painter and magnificent hatter,
every hat in his pictures shouts:
I'm the spirit of nature!
When he mixed crimson, cobalt and cinnabar on his pallet,
the oil in the paint turned solar,
the sun took unceremonious walks on his canvases
without noticing the frame.
The day he died
was gray, gray, gray,
or maybe it wasn't,
or maybe he died at night.
But I think that his spirit,
looking at his own portrait
in the frame of the coffin, thought:
Here's my worst picture.
Then the spirit fled,
surely towards the sun,
surely to step on women's hats,
surely to portray angels
with enlarged eyes,
with round cheeks
and fleshy lips.
Of course the angels
wear hats now;
the angels like
natural beauty turned spiritual.

 

[Angeline]

Palm
Rainer Maria Rilke

Interior of the hand. Sole that has come to walk
only on feelings. That faces upward
and in its mirror
receives heavenly roads, which travel
along themselves.
That has learned to walk upon water
when it scoops,
that walks upon wells,
transfiguring every path.
That steps into other hands,
changes those that are like it
into a landscape:
wanders and arrives within them,
fills them with arrival.

 

[Angeline]

Mark Doty

Heaven for Helen

Helen says heaven, for her,
would be complete immersion
in physical process,
without self-consciousness—

to be the respiration of the grass,
or ionized agitation
just above the break of a wave,
traffic in a sunflower's thousand golden rooms.

Images of exchange,
and of untrammeled nature.
But if we're to become part of it all,
won't our paradise also involve

participation in being, say,
diesel fuel, the impatience of trucks
on August pavement,
weird glow of service areas

along the interstate at night?
We'll be shiny pink egg cartons,
and the thick treads of burst tires
along the highways in Pennsylvania:

a hell we've made to accompany
the given: we will join
our tiresome productions,
things that want to be useless forever.

But that's me talking. Helen
would take the greatest pleasure
in being a scrap of paper,
if that's what there were to experience.

Perhaps that's why she's a painter,
finally: to practice disappearing
into her scrupulous attention,
an exacting rehearsal for the larger

world of things it won't be easy to love.
Helen I think will master it, though I may not.
She has practiced a long time learning to see
I have devoted myself to affirmation,

when I should have kept my eyes on the ground.

 

[Angeline]

I heart Ted Berrigan

A CERTAIN SLANT OF SUNLIGHT
Ted Berrigan

In Africa the wine is cheap, and it is
on St. Mark's Place too, beneath a white moon.
I'll go there tomorrow, dark bulk hooded
against what is hurled down at me in my no hat
which is weather: the tall pretty girl in the print dress
under the fur collar of her cloth coat will be standing
by the wire fence where the wild flowers grown not too tall
her eyes will be deep brown and her hair styled 1941 American
will be too, but
I'll be shattered by then
But now I'm not and can also picture white clouds
impossibly high in blue sky over small boy heartbroken
to be dressed in black knickers, black coat, white shirt,
buster-brown collar, flowing black bow-tie
her hand lightly fallen on his shoulder, faded sunlight falling
across the picture, mother & son, 33 & 7, First Communion Day, 1941 --
I'll go out for a drink with one of my demons tonight
they are dry in Colorado 1980 spring snow.

 

[Merrymaker]

Gold Medal
by Philippe Soupault
translated by Johannes Beilharz

Night jostles her stars
It rains sand and cotton
It is so hot
but silence weaves sighs
and the glory of summer
Signals a little bit everywhere
of heated crimes
of people who'll overthrow thrones
and a great light
in the West
and the East
tender like a rainbow
It's noon now
All the bells answer
Noon
Waiting deaf
like a great animal
Gets its limbs out of all four corners
it advances its claws
the shadows and the beams
The sky will fall on our heads
Wind is expected
That today has to be blue
like a flag

 

[flyguy69]

Tired Sex

TIRED SEX
by Chana Bloch

Trying to strike a match in a matchbook
that has lain all winter under the woodpile:
damp sulfur
on sodden cardboard.
I catch myself yawning. Through the window
I watch that sparrow the cat
keeps batting around.

Like turning the pages of a book the teacher assigned --

You ought to read it, she said.
It's great literature.

 

[Merrymaker]

Eros Turannos
by Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869–1935)

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost.—
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days—
Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,—
As if the story of a house
Were told, or ever could be;
We’ll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen,—
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.

 

[PatCarrington]

That’s the Life
by Sarah Sloat


I say to myself
I wish I were a pie
maker on the plains
way west of here,
watching grain tilt
windward, on the lookout

for cyclones. Or I say
I wish I were a quilter
on a Vermont hillside,
patchworking fabric,
counting Guernseys cross
the grass. Yes,

yes, that’s the life!
I could fall for a farmer,
be the mother of robust sons
and daughters, lullabye
singer, spinner
of yarns.

Ach! I say to myself,
You go too far.
Bring me a cigarette,
you stupid,
stupid fool.

 

[Reltne]

EXCAVATION OF TROY


Girl do you think

Girl do you think ever

Waking stretching your small

Arms your back arched

Your long legs straight

Out your mouth red

Round in a pout in a half

Yawn half smile

Do you think delicate

Girl with the skin smoother than

Silver cooler than apples

Delicate cool girl

Do you think as your throat

Lifts your breath

Catches ever of

Me

far back

Buried under the many

Nights layer on layer

Like a city taken a town

Fallen in antique wars and Forgotten?

Half awake on your bed the images

Fading from the edge of sleep

As the salt rim of the surf from the wet

Sand do you think of me

As men long landed from the famous ships

Beached by the bright Aegean and the sails brought silver

down

Of the fallen town

Of the white walls in the sun the cicadas

The smell of eucalyptus by the sea?

- Archibald MacLeish

 

[Solid Muldoon]

Andromache's Lament from the Iliad by Homer

So she cried,
dashing out of the royal halls like a madwoman,
her heart racing hard, her women close behind her.
But once she reached the tower where soldiers massed
she stopped on the rampart, looked down and saw it all—
saw him dragged before the city, stallions galloping,
dragging Hector back to Achaea's beaked warships—
ruthless work. The world went black as night
before her eyes, she fainted, falling backward,
gasping away her life breath…

..."The Lord of the City, so the Trojans called him,
because it was you, Hector, you and you alone
who shielded the gates and the long walls of Troy.
But now by the beaked ships, far from your parents,
glistening worms will wriggle through your flesh,
once the dogs have had their fill of your naked corpse—
though we have such stores of clothing laid up in the halls,
fine things, a joy to the eye, the work of women's hands.
Now, by god, I'll burn them all, blazing to the skies!
No use to you now, they'll never shroud your body—
but they will be your glory
burned by the Trojan men and women in your honor!"
Her voice rang out in tears and the women wailed in answer.

 

[Jennifer C]

A fav Of Mine

Daffodils ~ By William Wordsworth




I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced, but they
Out-did the sparkling leaves in glee;
A poet could not be but gay,
In such a jocund company!
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

 

[Jennifer C]

Jerusalem ~ By William Blake




And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen?

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark satanic mills?

Bring me my bow of burning gold!
Bring me my arrows of desire!
Bring me my spear! O clouds, unfold!
Bring me my chariot of fire!

I will not cease from mental fight,
Nor shall my sword sleep in my hand,
Till we have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant land.

 

[Jennifer C]

Masefield John Edward - Poem



BEAUTY
John Masefield

Have seen dawn and sunset on moors and windy hills
Coming in solemn beauty like slow old tunes of Spain:
I have seen the lady April bringing in the daffodils,
Bringing the springing grass and the soft warm April rain.

I have heard the song of the blossoms and the old chant of the sea,
And seen strange lands from under the arched white sails of ships;
But the loveliest things of beauty God ever has showed to me
Are her voice, and her hair, and eyes, and the dear red curve of her lips.

 

[Jennifer C]

How Do I Love Thee?
a poem by Elizabeth Barrett Browning


How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and ideal Grace.

I love thee to the level of everyday's
Most quiet need, by sun and candlelight.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right;
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.

I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood's faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints, I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life! and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

 

[Jennifer C]

Beautiful Dreamer a poem by Stephen Foster



Beautiful dreamer, wake unto me,
Starlight and dewdrops are waiting for thee;
Sounds of the rude world heard in the day,
Lull'd by the moonlight have all pass'd away!

Beautiful dreamer, queen of my song,
List while I woo thee with soft melody;
Gone are the cares of life's busy throng.

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!
Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

Beautiful dreamer, out on the sea,
Mermaids are chaunting the wild lorelie;
Over the streamlet vapors are borne,
Waiting to fade at the bright coming morn.

Beautiful dreamer, beam on my heart,
E'en as the morn on the streamlet and sea;
Then will all clouds of sorrow depart,

Beautiful dreamer, awake unto me!

 

[PatCarrington]

INK by Bob Hicok

I feel obligated to get a tattoo.
It's how the skin of the species
is evolving. If I continue
living without plumage,
it will be impossible to mate
or hold a conversation
with a banker. My favorite
is strawberry ice cream. Not
average size scoops, Baskin
and Robbins size scoops
but three and tiny
I discovered one night
tattooed to a thigh.
It was the possibility
of kissing a private dessert
I so admired. I've decided
to get tattoos of my eyes
on the inside of my eyelids
so I can stare at the oceans
of my dreams. I'll have
muscles tattooed to my chest,
money to my palms, the smell
of honeysuckle to my breath. I want
break glass in case of fire
tattooed to my brain, mouths
to the bottom of my feet, you
to me. There is not
enough art in this life.
Tattoo my front door
to my tombstone and place
a key on my tongue
like a mint. It's not for me
to decide whether my return
will be called
breaking out or breaking in.

 

[flyguy69]

INK by Bob Hicok

....

I confess, Pat, every time I read Hicok I think of you! Your styles are quite similar.

Wonderful poem, btw.

 

[Jennifer C]

Heredity

I am the family face;
Flesh perishes, I live on,
Projecting trait and trace
Through time to times anon,
And leaping from place to place
Over oblivion.

The years-heired feature that can
In curve and voice and eye
Despise the human span
Of durance -- that is I;
The eternal thing in man,
That heeds no call to die

Thomas Hardy

 

[Jennifer C]

London - a poem by William Blake



I wander thro' each charter'd street,
Near where the charter'd Thames does flow,
And mark in every face I meet
Marks of weakness, marks of woe.

In every cry of every Man,
In every Infant's cry of fear,
In every voice, in every ban,
The mind-forg'd manacles I hear.

How the Chimney-sweeper's cry
Every black'ning Church appalls;
And the hapless Soldier's sigh
Runs in blood down Palace walls.

But most thro' midnight streets I hear
How the youthful Harlot's curse
Blasts the new born Infant's tear,
And blights with plagues the Marriage hearse.