HEAVEN
by Rupert Brooke

FISH (fly-replete, in depth of June,
Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)
Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,
Each secret fishy hope or fear.
Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;
But is there anything Beyond?
This life cannot be All, they swear,
For how unpleasant, if it were!
One may not doubt that, somehow, Good
Shall come of Water and of Mud;
And, sure, the reverent eye must see
A Purpose in Liquidity.
We darkly know, by Faith we cry,
The future is not Wholly Dry.
Mud unto mud! -- Death eddies near --
Not here the appointed End, not here!
But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.
Is wetter water, slimier slime!
And there (they trust) there swimmeth One
Who swam ere rivers were begun,
Immense, of fishy form and mind,
Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;
And under that Almighty Fin,
The littlest fish may enter in.
Oh! never fly conceals a hook,
Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,
But more than mundane weeds are there,
And mud, celestially fair;
Fat caterpillars drift around,
And Paradisal grubs are found;
Unfading moths, immortal flies,
And the worm that never dies.
And in that Heaven of all their wish,
There shall be no more land, say fish.

Poems - The New Yorker
November 30, 2020 Issue 

 
November
By Charles Simic

The crosses all men and women
Must carry through life
Even more visible
On this dark and rainy night.

Discovered On Episode 1 of The Queen's Gambit

Not Waving but Drowning

BY STEVIE SMITH

Nobody heard him, the dead man,

But still he lay moaning:

I was much further out than you thought

And not waving but drowning.



Poor chap, he always loved larking

And now he’s dead

It must have been too cold for him his heart gave way,

They said.



Oh, no no no, it was too cold always

(Still the dead one lay moaning)

I was much too far out all my life

And not waving but drowning.

Hurry

BY MARIE HOWE

We stop at the dry cleaners and the grocery store
and the gas station and the green market and
Hurry up honey, I say, hurry,
as she runs along two or three steps behind me
her blue jacket unzipped and her socks rolled down.

Where do I want her to hurry to? To her grave?
To mine? Where one day she might stand all grown?
Today, when all the errands are finally done, I say to her,
Honey I'm sorry I keep saying Hurry—
you walk ahead of me. You be the mother.

And, Hurry up, she says, over her shoulder, looking
back at me, laughing. Hurry up now darling, she says,
hurry, hurry, taking the house keys from my hands.

A Sight

By BILLY COLLINS

Last night I watched a documentary on war,
and the part I carry with me today
was the spectacle of a line
of maybe 20 blinded soldiers
being led, single-file,
away from a yellow cloud of gas.

That must be what accounts
for this morning’s brightness—
sunlight slathered over everything
from the royal palms to the store awnings,
from the blue Corolla at the curb
to a purple flower climbing a fence,
one gift of sight after another.

I couldn’t see their bandaged faces,
but each man had one hand
resting on the shoulder
of the man in front of him
so that every man was guiding
and being guided at the same time,
and in the same tempo,
given the unison of their small, cautious steps.

HEAVEN by Rupert Brooke (Found in the book - How A Poem Means)

ISH (fly-replete, in depth of June,

Dawdling away their wat'ry noon)

Ponder deep wisdom, dark or clear,

Each secret fishy hope or fear.

Fish say, they have their Stream and Pond;

But is there anything Beyond?

This life cannot be All, they swear,

For how unpleasant, if it were!

One may not doubt that, somehow, Good

Shall come of Water and of Mud;

And, sure, the reverent eye must see

A Purpose in Liquidity.

We darkly know, by Faith we cry,

The future is not Wholly Dry.

Mud unto mud! -- Death eddies near --

Not here the appointed End, not here!

But somewhere, beyond Space and Time.

Is wetter water, slimier slime!

And there (they trust) there swimmeth One

Who swam ere rivers were begun,

Immense, of fishy form and mind,

Squamous, omnipotent, and kind;

And under that Almighty Fin,

The littlest fish may enter in.

Oh! never fly conceals a hook,

Fish say, in the Eternal Brook,

But more than mundane weeds are there,

And mud, celestially fair;

Fat caterpillars drift around,

And Paradisal grubs are found;

Unfading moths, immortal flies,

And the worm that never dies.

And in that Heaven of all their wish,

There shall be no more land, say fish.

By Richard Brautigan

 For Fear You Will Be Alone

For fear you will be alone
you do so many things
that aren’t you at all.

April 7, 1969

I feel so bad today
that I want to write a poem.
I don’t care: any poem, this
poem.

if i should die before you do

When
you wake up
from death,
you will find yourself
in my arms,
and
I will be
kissing you,
and
I
will be crying

Star Hole

I sit here
on the perfect end
of a star, watching light
pour itself toward
me.

Love Poem

It’s so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don’t love them
any more.

"I open my eyes in the morning.
For a minute
I am neither here nor there.
Then in the next minute
I am here but starting
to be there."


Peggy Freyberg (excerpt from Wait A Minute)

Beloved One,

You cannot judge yourself and know who you are.

The truth about you cannot be judged.

Put aside your judgments then,

for one sweet holy moment,

and let me show you

something wonderful.

See what it’s like to be you

when you stop judging yourself.

What you judge is just an image.

After the last judgement you will know yourself again.

Love will appear in your own mirror.

To greet you as your friend.

For you are lovable.

And you are made

of love.

-Robert Holden

Dover Beach (Via 12945 movie, Without Love)

BY MATTHEW ARNOLD

The sea is calm tonight.

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Ægean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

THE IMAGINED

 BY STEPHEN DUNN

If the imagined woman makes the real woman
seem bare-boned, hardly existent, lacking in
gracefulness and intellect and pulchritude,
and if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good, how, in spite
of knowing this, does the imagined woman
keep getting into your bedroom, and joining you
at dinner, why is it that you always bring her along
on vacations when the real woman is shopping,
or figuring the best way to the museum?

…………………………And if the real woman
has an imagined man, as she must, someone
probably with her at this very moment, in fact
doing and saying everything she’s ever wanted,
would you want to know that he slips in
to her life every day from a secret doorway
she’s made for him, that he’s present even when
you’re eating your omelette at breakfast,
or do you prefer how she goes about the house
as she does, as if there were just the two of you?
Isn’t her silence, finally, loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn’t the time come,

…………………………once again, not to talk about it?

------------------------

Letter By Richard Chess (Published in Image)

Dear Steve,

I’ve had to look away for most of three decades now—away from your work.

“Why.” That’s the title of a poem, a poem in your book Here and Now, I read this morning.

“Because you can be sure a part of yourself is always missing,” the poem begins.

When I read your poems now, like when I read them regularly decades ago, when, for a brief time, I was your student, your friend, I discover a part of myself that, if not exactly missing, had been nagging to be recognized, acknowledged, expressed.

“If the imagined woman makes the real woman / seem bare-boned, hardly existent…” you write in “The Imagined,” and I nod, no, not nod, exactly, but soften, warmed by the companionship of a poem that knows me better than most people do, a poem that says what I’ve experienced but would never, could never say aloud.

At thirty-six, Steve, I married. You know this. I visited you once before the wedding. I said, she doesn’t read poetry. We won’t have that to talk about. You can find plenty of people, you said, to talk poetry with.

I brought it up with you, her inexperience with poetry, because, at the time, I still had the fantasy of making a name for myself as a poet, and I thought it would be helpful to know if you thought marrying someone who isn’t as in love with poetry as I am might, somehow, be a hindrance to my fulfilling that dream. I also wanted you to still be my teacher.

“The Imagined” continues,

if you come to realize the imagined woman
can only satisfy your imagination, whereas
the real woman with all her limitations
can often make you feel good

I’ve been married to her, the real woman, for almost twenty-four years now. Often, she makes me feel good.

And I love limitations. Little makes me more productive than a deadline. Little makes me more productive than too many things to do. (Though is it really too many when, somehow, I manage to get them all done—the grading, the programming, the meetings with colleagues and students, the tax preparations, the writing, the swimming, the sitting, the the, the the, the the…?)

When I found her—my real woman—when I entered into the covenant of marriage with her, I said to myself: I know what it’s like to live single. I know the heat, the intensity of sex with a near stranger, each woman onto whom I’d project my vision of the one woman, the one of all for me. Inevitably, she would say what I wouldn’t have her say, do what I wouldn’t have her do, demand what I wouldn’t have her demand of me, and my vision would be cracked, shattered, and I’d have to find a way to avoid, escape her, lured in by my sensitivity and declarations of love, love, love.

When I married her, my real woman, I said to myself: I know the heat, and I know the ice of inadequacy, the sense of my own inadequacy: am I not handsome enough, bright enough, lucky enough in love? And having been betrayed, I know the knife of betrayal.

When I married her, my real woman, I said: I know what it’s like to long for a wife, now I’ll see what it’s like to live for the rest of my nights and days with a wife, a good wife. That’s the limit: death. Until death we do part.

You know limits, too, how the end of a line, for instance, can create an opportunity for a loving reader to linger over a few words, to savor their pleasure and, perhaps, discover some meaning that might otherwise be missed.

“If the imagined woman makes the real woman”: Does the imagined woman make (create) the real woman? What is the relationship between art and life? These intriguing questions, teased out by the line on its own, deepen our reading of the next part of the sentence, which comes in the next line:  “If the imagined woman makes the real woman / seem bare-boned, hardly existent…”

This isn’t merely a matter of the fantasy of another woman compared to the actuality of the one you are with. Neither, however, is this merely an intellectual exercise, an opportunity for disinterested reflection on the relationship between art and life.

Steve, I know the imagined woman of whom you write. I know, too (though before reading your poem, I hadn’t ever thought to acknowledge it), the wisdom of not talking about her.

I love the way, in your poem, you move on, from the real man’s imagined woman to the real woman’s imagined man, “someone / probably with her at this very moment, in fact / doing and saying everything she’s ever wanted.” And I love the way you ask, “would you want to know that he slips in / to her life every day” or “do you prefer how she goes about the house / as she does, as if there were just the two of you?”

The poem concludes:

Isn’t her silence, finally loving? And yours
not entirely self-serving? Hasn’t the time come

once again, not to talk about it?

I turned away, Steve, from your poems, because I needed enough distance to become whatever kind of writer, whatever kind of man I could become.

Now I’m returning to say thank you for your friendship, your teaching. And thank you for your poems that return to me parts of myself that had been missing, poems that say what I wouldn’t say, what I might not even know there was to be said if you hadn’t, gracefully, wisely, said it.

And thank you, most of all, for your silence, all these years, never telling me that my poems never lived up to your fantasy of what my poems were then, and what you imagined they would become. 

Introduction to Poetry

BY BILLY COLLINS

I ask them to take a poem

and hold it up to the light

like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem

and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room

and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski

across the surface of a poem

waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do

is tie the poem to a chair with rope

and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose

to find out what it really means.

Against the Illusion of Separateness

Against the Illusion of Separateness

By Pablo Neruda

There is no insurmountable solitude. All paths lead to the same goal: to convey to others what we are. And we must pass through solitude and difficulty, isolation and silence in order to reach forth to the enchanted place where we can dance our clumsy dance and sing our sorrowful song -- but in this dance or in this song there are fulfilled the most ancient rites of our conscience in the awareness of being human and of believing in a common destiny.

AND THE PEOPLE STAYED HOME

By Kitty O'Meara

And people stayed at home
And read books
And listened
And they rested
And did exercises
And made art and played
And learned new ways of being
And stopped and listened
More deeply
Someone meditated, someone prayed
Someone met their shadow
And people began to think differently
And people healed.
And in the absence of people who
Lived in ignorant ways
Dangerous, meaningless and heartless,
The earth also began to heal
And when the danger ended and
People found themselves
They grieved for the dead
And made new choices
And dreamed of new visions
And created new ways of living
And completely healed the earth
Just as they were healed.

Carrie Grossman

I am paradox embodied,⁣

formed out of the most beautiful nothing.⁣
⁣
My body is made of sap and songs, red earth, musk, and morning light. ⁣
My mind is a flaming windflower. My soul: the sky.⁣
⁣
Tossed on the potter’s wheel, I am supple and shriveled, resistant, surrendered,⁣ forever destroyed and re-made. ⁣I know blossoms born of burning, and I also know rain.⁣
⁣
I am the story of a slow burning star.⁣
My yearning is rebellion, my pleasure unmoored.⁣
⁣
I am the wound and the medicine, protestor and protested—bound and ever-free. ⁣

Beneath the painted masks of personality, I am consort of eternity.⁣
⁣
Loved and rejected, respected, subjected, praised, and put down—⁣
when all of this fades, I am what remains.⁣
⁣
Who writes these words?⁣
Who thinks these thoughts?⁣
⁣
Woman of tides and bones, her full potential still unknown.⁣
⁣
Ripening, I am.

By Mash Muirhead

Wearing his life vest
the little boy runs
through the sprinkler

By Marsh Muirhead

Between fence rails
the little boy explains
cows to the cows

Dudley Wright

by Franz Wright:

Lighting a candle for my father
I am also my father
lighting a candle
for his
in the past, where he is
also his father
lighting one for me

First Fig By Edna St. Vincent Mailay

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.

Psalm

by Harvey Shapiro

I am still on a rooftop in Brooklyn
on your holy day. The harbor is before me,
Governor's Island, the Verrazano Bridge
and the Narrows. I keep in my head
what Rabbi Nachman said about the world
being a narrow bridge and that the important thing
is not to be afraid. So on this day
I bless my mother and father, that they be
not fearful where they wander. And I
ask you to bless them and before you
close your Book of Life, your Sefer Hachayim,
remember that I always praised your world
and your splendor and that my tongue
tried to say your name on Court Street in Brooklyn.
Take me safely through the Narrows to the sea.

Going Too Far

by Mildred Howells

Posted by Poornima in her blog, A Spoonful of Ideas, and tweaked in a comment by Karen Humphries

A Woman who lived in Holland of old,
Polished her brass till it shone like gold,
She washed her pig after all it’s meals,
In spite of his energetic squeals.

She scrubbed her doorstep, into the ground,
And the children’s faces pink and round,
She washed so hard that in several cases,
She polished the features off their faces.

Until, to the rage of all the people,
she cleaned the weather-vane right off the steeple.
As she looked at the sky one one summer’s night,
she thought that the stars shone out less bright.

She said with a sigh,If I were up there ,
I’d scrub them all up till the world would stare
That night a storm began to brew,
and a wind from the ocean blew and blew

till when she came to her door next day,
it whisked her up, and blew her away.
Up and up in the air so high,
that she vanished, at last, in the stormy sky.

Since then it’s said that each twinkling star
and the big white moon, shine brighter by far.
But the neighbors shake their heads in fear,
she may rub so hard they will disappear.

I Believe

BY ROBERT W. SERVICE

It’s my belief that every man

   Should do his share of work,

And in our economic plan

   No citizen should shirk.

That in return each one should get

   His meed of fold and food,

And feel that all his toil and sweat

   Is for the common good.

It’s my belief that every chap

   Should have an equal start,

And there should be no handicap

   To hinder his depart;

That there be fairness in the fight,

   And justice in the race,

And every lad should have the right

   To win his proper place.

It’s my belief that people should

   Be neither rich nor poor;

That none should suffer servitude,

   And all should be secure.

That wealth is loot, and rank is rot,

   And foul is class and clan;

That to succeed a man may not

   Exploit his brother man.

It’s my belief that heritage

   And usury are wrong;

That each should win a worthy wage

   And sing an honest song ....

Not one like this — for though I rue

   The wrong of life, I flout it.

Alas! I’m not prepared to do

   A goddam thing about it.

Mindful

by Mary Oliver

Every day
I see or hear
something
that more or less

kills me
with delight,
that leaves me
like a needle

in the haystack
of light.
It was what I was born for -
to look, to listen,

to lose myself
inside this soft world -
to instruct myself
over and over

in joy,
and acclamation.
Nor am I talking
about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
the very extravagant -
but of the ordinary,
the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
Oh, good scholar,
I say to myself,
how can you help

but grow wise
with such teachings
as these -
the untrimmable light

of the world,
the ocean's shine,
the prayers that are made
out of grass?

Keeping Quiet

 by Pablo Neruda

Now we will count to twelve
and we will all keep still
for once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language;
let's stop for a second,
and not move our arms so much.

It would be an exotic moment
without rush, without engines;
we would all be together
in a sudden strangeness.

Fishermen in the cold sea
would not harm whales
and the man gathering salt
would not look at his hurt hands.

Those who prepare green wars,
wars with gas, wars with fire,
victories with no survivors,
would put on clean clothes
and walk about with their brothers
in the shade, doing nothing.

What I want should not be confused
with total inactivity.

Life is what it is about...

If we were not so single-minded
about keeping our lives moving,
and for once could do nothing,
perhaps a huge silence
might interrupt this sadness
of never understanding ourselves
and of threatening ourselves with
death.

Now I'll count up to twelve
and you keep quiet and I will go.

Read to the end, it's worth it.

The Cord

I used to lie on the floor for hours after
school with the phone cradled between
my shoulder and my ear, a plate of cold
rice to my left, my school books to my right.
Twirling the cord between my fingers
I spoke to friends who recognized the
language of our realm. Throats and lungs
swollen, we talked into the heart of the night,
toying with the idea of hair dye and suicide,
about the boys who didn’t love us, 
who we loved too much, the pang
of the nights. Each sentence was
new territory, like a door someone was
rushing into, the glass shattering
with delirium, with knowledge and fear.
My Mother never complained about the phone bill,
what it cost for her daughter to disappear
behind a door, watching the cord
stretching its muscle away from her.
Perhaps she thought it was the only way
she could reach me, sending me away
to speak in the underworld.
As long as I was speaking
she could put my ear to the tenuous earth
and allow me to listen, to decipher.
And these were the elements of my Mother,
the earthed wire, the burning cable,
as if she flowed into the room with
me to somehow say, Stay where I can reach you,
the dim room, the dark earth. Speak of this
and when you feel removed from it
I will pull the cord and take you
back towards me.

—Leanne O’Sullivan

https://images.search.yahoo.com/search/images;_ylt=A2KLfRsBqsdePcoAM.tXNyoA;_ylu=X3oDMTE0cjZlNW04BGNvbG8DYmYxBHBvcwMxBHZ0aWQDQjg3NDZfMQRzZWMDcGl2cw--?p=swaaji+map+of+love&fr2=piv-web&fr=mcafee#id=19&iurl=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.poemhunter.com%2Fi%2Fpoem_images%2F823%2Fa-map-of-love.jpg&action=click

Small Song

The reeds give way to the wind
and give the wind away.

In Praise of My Sister

Wisława Szymborska

My sister doesn’t write poems.
and it’s unlikely that she’ll suddenly start writing poems.
She takes after her mother, who didn’t write poems,
and also her father, who likewise didn’t write poems.
I feel safe beneath my sister’s roof:
my sister’s husband would rather die than write poems.
And, even though this is starting to sound as repetitive as
Peter Piper,
the truth is, none of my relatives write poems.

My sister’s desk drawers don’t hold old poems,
and her handbag doesn’t hold new ones,
When my sister asks me over for lunch,
I know she doesn’t want to read me her poems.
Her soups are delicious without ulterior motives.
Her coffee doesn’t spill on manuscripts.

There are many families in which nobody writes poems,
but once it starts up it’s hard to quarantine.
Sometimes poetry cascades down through the generations,
creating fatal whirlpools where family love may founder.

My sister has tackled oral prose with some success.
but her entire written opus consists of postcards from
vacations
whose text is only the same promise every year:
when she gets back, she’ll have
so much
much
much to tell.

Some People Like Poetry

By WISLAWA SZYMBORSKA

Some people—
that means not everyone.
Not even most of them, only a few.
Not counting school, where you have to,
and poets themselves,
you might end up with something like two per thousand.

Like—
but then, you can like chicken noodle soup,
or compliments, or the color blue,
your old scarf,
your own way,
petting the dog.

Poetry—
but what is poetry anyway?
More than one rickety answer
has tumbled since that question first was raised.
But I just keep on not knowing, and I cling to that
like a redemptive handrail.

—Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.

Oatmeal

I eat oatmeal for breakfast.
I make it on the hot plate and put skimmed milk on it.
I eat it alone.
I am aware it is not good to eat oatmeal alone.
Its consistency is such that is better for your mental health
if somebody eats it with you.
That is why I often think up an imaginary companion to have
breakfast with.
Possibly it is even worse to eat oatmeal with an imaginary
companion.
Nevertheless, yesterday morning, I ate my oatmeal porridge,
as he called it with John Keats.
Keats said I was absolutely right to invite him:
due to its glutinous texture, gluey lumpishness, hint of slime,
and unsual willingness to disintigrate, oatmeal should
not be eaten alone.
He said that in his opinion, however, it is perfectly OK to eat
it with an imaginary companion, and that he himself had
enjoyed memorable porridges with Edmund Spenser and John
Milton.
Even if eating oatmeal with an imaginary companion is not as
wholesome as Keats claims, still, you can learn something
from it.
Yesterday morning, for instance, Keats told me about writing the
"Ode to a Nightingale."
He had a heck of a time finishing it those were his words "Oi 'ad
a 'eck of a toime," he said, more or less, speaking through
his porridge.
He wrote it quickly, on scraps of paper, which he then stuck in his
pocket,
but when he got home he couldn't figure out the order of the stanzas,
and he and a friend spread the papers on a table, and they
made some sense of them, but he isn't sure to this day if
they got it right.
An entire stanza may have slipped into the lining of his jacket
through a hole in his pocket.
He still wonders about the occasional sense of drift between stanzas,
and the way here and there a line will go into the
configuration of a Moslem at prayer, then raise itself up
and peer about, and then lay \ itself down slightly off the mark,
causing the poem to move forward with a reckless, shining wobble.
He said someone told him that later in life Wordsworth heard about
the scraps of paper on the table, and tried shuffling some
stanzas of his own, but only made matters worse.
I would not have known any of this but for my reluctance to eat oatmeal
alone.
When breakfast was over, John recited "To Autumn."
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn't offer the story of writing "To Autumn," I doubt if there
is much of one.
But he did say the sight of a just-harvested oat field go thim started
on it, and two of the lines, "For Summer has o'er-brimmed their
clammy cells" and "Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours,"
came to him while eating oatmeal alone.
I can see him drawing a spoon through the stuff, gazing into the glimmering
furrows, muttering.
Maybe there is no sublime; only the shining of the amnion's tatters.
For supper tonight I am going to have a baked potato left over from lunch.
I am aware that a leftover baked potato is damp, slippery, and simultaneaously
gummy and crumbly, and therefore I'm going to invite Patrick Kavanagh
to join me.

Galway Kinnell

When
By John O’Donnell

And when this ends we will emerge, shyly
and then all at once, dazed, longhaired as we embrace
loved ones the shadow spared, and weep for those
it gathered in its shroud. A kind of rapture, this longed-for
laying on of hands, high cries as we nuzzle, leaning in
to kiss, and whisper that now things will be different,
although a time will come when we’ll forget
the curve’s approaching wave, the hiss and sigh
of ventilators, the crowded, makeshift morgues;
a time when we may even miss the old-world
arm’s-length courtesy, small kindnesses left on doorsteps,
the drifting, idle days, and nights when we flung open
all the windows to arias in the darkness, our voices
reaching out, holding each other till this passes.

The Mower

BY PHILIP LARKIN


The mower stalled, twice; kneeling, I found
A hedgehog jammed up against the blades,
Killed. It had been in the long grass.

I had seen it before, and even fed it, once.
Now I had mauled its unobtrusive world
Unmendably. Burial was no help:

Next morning I got up and it did not.
The first day after a death, the new absence
Is always the same; we should be careful

Of each other, we should be kind
While there is still time.

Flower in the Crannied Wall

By Alfred, Lord Tennyson

Flower in the crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower-but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, all in all,
I should know what God and man is.

A Prose Poem By Carrie Grossman

I love the color of morning. I love blank journals and the minds that fill them. I love dirt roads, passing clouds, and long nights washed with tenderness and rain. I love that we’re all secretly in love with each other, even if we’ve never met.

I love how habitually I want to hide, and how life keeps putting me in front of people. I love brave souls who live their truth and pay no mind to the rolling eyes of others. I love that the same moon shines on every continent and the same sky embraces all beings. I love my secrets, though I'm not sure what they are.

I love worshipping this sacred world through sound. I love that I’ve touched the depths of shame and forgotten myself in a song. I love autumn air and late light and strong hands that work in gardens and with clay. I love healing plants and honeybees, car mechanics, candlemakers, comics, shamans, scribes, and singing birds. I love my heart for never abandoning me, even when others do.

I love that tears taste like the ocean. I love that Brussels sprouts look like little brains. I love that there are unknown heroes all across the globe—people who serve with no expectation of reward. I love that so many of these amazing beings will never be recognized, yet their good deeds spin threads of light around the planet and benefit the entire creation. I love that there are still a few places in the world where wild animals roam free beneath the stars.

I love how people look innocent when they eat. I love how we all want love, even when we push it away. I love resilience, rituals, forgiveness, and muffins. I love weathered books, midnight blossoms, mountain salt, and mixing boards. I love when I burn for something nameless, cry like a child, move like a woman, and make a good pot of soup.