"is there really a man
whose eyes leak blue?"

#Poetry #PoetryMonth #AmWritingPoetry #PoetryCommunity #APoemADay

https://vocal.media/poets/a-poem-with-colours-instead-of-eyes

Here is my #flipboard dedicated to #PoetryMonth

I’ve been posting #APoemADay for #NationalPoetryMonth

#Poetry #PoetryCommunity #PoetryLovers

http://surl.li/gmwov

Rock tumbling

It is enviable
the silent persistence
of stones.

Such longing,
alone in the current,
to make curves
of hard edges,
surrendering
so much of oneself
to the ceaseless tumble
of erosion,

Decades of loss,
rubbed away
to reveal, in the blue filtered light,
the perfect polish
of your wanting.
#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

Final Words

The last birthday,
father's rough face,
"How is your lunch, Pop?"
Old spice stubble and manicured hair in the afternoon sun,
"Huh...I don't like it."

Across the table
his lucky ring
a loose glinting horseshoe on the polished wood,
"So and so is doing well."
a dismissal hand
waving a fry,
"I never liked him."

On the drive home
the silence sitting between us,
a red beer cooler
(the one he always brought when we went shrimping)
coming up empty
just the dregs of
small talk and empty brown bottles.

Dad's last day,
an intubated wan face swathed blue in hospital linens,
"I love you, Dad"
his terrified
cloud green eyes pleading,
"Blink... Blink"

The end,
a parade jacket, shining green with ribbon
and brass accolades
the ones that kept him away,
"Goodbye, Dad."
the worn red button
and black conveyer belt humming to life,
"Clank clank clank."

#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

Things to Think
By Robert Bly

Think in ways you've never thought before.
If the phone rings, think of it as carrying a message
larger than anything you've ever heard,
vaster than a hundred lines of Yeats.
Think that someone may bring a bear to your door, maybe wounded and deranged;
or think that a moose has risen out of the lake, and he's carrying on his antlers
a child of your own whom you've never seen.
When someone knocks on the door, think that he's about to give you something large:
tell you you're forgiven,
that it's not necessary to work all the time,
or that it's been decided
that if you lie down
no one will die.
#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

“Let’s suppose you were able, every night, to dream any dream you wanted to dream, and that you could dream in one night 90 years worth of time.
You would, naturally, as you began on this adventure of dreams, fulfill all your wishes.
Then you would get bored and become more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further gambles as to what you would dream.
Over time, eventually you would dream where you are now.
You would dream the dream of the life that you are actually living today.
This exact life would be within the infinite multiplicity of the choices you would have.
The dream of playing that you weren’t God. Because the whole nature of the godhead, according to this idea, is to play that he’s not.
The first thing that he says to himself is ‘Man, get lost!', because he gives the game away.

So in this idea, then, everybody is fundamentally the ultimate reality. Not God in a politically kingly sense, but God in the sense of being the self, the deep-down basic whatever there is.
And you’re all that, only you’re pretending you’re not."

-Alan Watts

#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

"Sometimes a man stands up during supper and walks outdoors and he keeps walking because of a church that stands far to the east and his children say blessings on him as if he were dead.
And another man who remains inside his own house dies there inside the dishes and in the glasses. It is left to his children to go far out into the world towards that same church that he forgot." ~Rilke
#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

Little Sleeps Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.
By Galway Kinnell

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us.
I think you think
I will never die,
I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell
the sun, don’t go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don’t grow old,
don’t die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,

until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward the true north,
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the
dark, "O corpse-to-be …"

And yet
perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, "caca! caca! caca!"
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.

Yes, you cling
because I, like you, only sooner
than you,
will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,

your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old men,
which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying
over and over
their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît, *here lies, here lies, here lies,

and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there unable
to let them in.

5

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

1/2

#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

learn,
as you stand
at this end of the bridge which arcs,
from love, you think, into enduring love,
learn to reach deeper
into the sorrows
to come – to touch
the almost imaginary bones
under the face, to hear under the laughter
the wind crying across the black stones.
Then
kiss the mouth
which tells you,
here, here is the world.
This mouth.
This laughter.
These temple bones.
This still undanced cadence of vanishing.

6

In the light the moon
sends back, I can see in your eyes

the hand that waved once
in my father’s eyes, a tiny kite
wobbling far up in the twilight of his last look:
as the angel
of all mortal things lets go the string.

7

Back you go, into your crib.

The last blackbird lights up his gold wings: farewell.
Your eyes close inside your head,
in sleep. Already
in your dreams the hours begin to sing.

Little sleep’s-head sprouting hair in the moonlight,
when I come back
we will go out together,
we will walk out together among
the ten thousand things,
each scratched too late with such knowledge, the wages
of dying is love.
2/2
#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

Little Sleeps Head Sprouting Hair in the Moonlight.
By Galway Kinnell

You scream, waking from a nightmare.

When I sleepwalk
into your room, and pick you up,
and hold you up in the moonlight, you cling to me
hard,
as if clinging could save us.
I think you think
I will never die,
I think I exude to you the permanence of smoke or stars,
even as
my broken arms heal themselves around you.

2

I have heard you tell
the sun, don’t go down, I have stood by
as you told the flower, don’t grow old,
don’t die. Little Maud,

I would blow the flame out of your silver cup,
I would suck the rot from your fingernail,
I would brush your sprouting hair of the dying light,
I would scrape the rust off your ivory bones,
I would help death escape through the little ribs of your body,
I would alchemize the ashes of your cradle back into wood,
I would let nothing of you go, ever,

until washerwomen
feel the clothes fall asleep in their hands,
and hens scratch their spell across hatchet blades,
and rats walk away from the cultures of the plague,
and iron twists weapons toward the true north,
and grease refuses to slide in the machinery of progress,
and men feel as free on earth as fleas on the bodies of men,
and lovers no longer whisper to the presence beside them in the
dark, "O corpse-to-be …"

And yet
perhaps this is the reason you cry,
this the nightmare you wake screaming from:
being forever
in the pre-trembling of a house that falls.

3

In a restaurant once, everyone
quietly eating, you clambered up
on my lap: to all
the mouthfuls rising toward
all the mouths, at the top of your voice
you cried
your one word, "caca! caca! caca!"
and each spoonful
stopped, a moment, in midair, in its withering
steam.

Yes, you cling
because I, like you, only sooner
than you,
will go down
the path of vanished alphabets,
the roadlessness
to the other side of the darkness,

your arms
like the shoes left behind,
like the adjectives in the halting speech
of old men,
which once could call up the lost nouns.

4

And you yourself,
some impossible Tuesday
in the year Two Thousand and Nine, will walk out
among the black stones
of the field, in the rain,

and the stones saying
over and over
their one word, ci-gît, ci-gît, ci-gît, *here lies, here lies, here lies,

and the raindrops
hitting you on the fontanel
over and over, and you standing there unable
to let them in.

5

If one day it happens
you find yourself with someone you love
in a café at one end
of the Pont Mirabeau, at the zinc bar
where white wine stands in upward opening glasses,

and if you commit then, as we did, the error
of thinking,
one day all this will only be memory,

1/3

#poetry #poem #dailypoetry #apoemaday

I’ve Been Thinking about Love Again
-Vievee Francis

Those who live to have it and
those who live to give it.

Of course there are those for whom both are true,
but never in the same measure.

Those who have it to give are
like cardinals in the snow. So easy
and beautifully lit. Some
are rabbits. Hard to see
except for those who would prey upon them:
all that softness and quaking and blood.

Those who want it
cannot be satisfied. Eagle-eyed and such talons,
any furred thing will do. So easy
to rip out a heart when it is throbbing so hard.

I wander out into the winter.
I know what I am.
#poetry #poems #love #APoemADay

In 2017, Matthew Francis published a poem-ising of the old Welsh stories The Mabinogi. This is the opening section of Branch Four ("The Tale of the Pigs and the Flower-Woman".)

Here we have the king relaxing (obnoxiously?) and the magician and minstrel Gwydion getting ready to tell his tale...

#APoemADay #APoemADayFromDeemikay #TodaysPoem #MatthewFrancis #mabinogion #mabinogi #Poetry #PoetryCommunity

Density

I want
for a day
to speak the language of songbirds,
maybe on the branch of a cherry tree
hidden in the pink snow like blossoms,
a soliloquy about the joy of hollow bones in flight,
or perhaps
just outside the window
perched in a yaupon
flush with scarlet berries,
a lengthy sonnet to the sun
as it highlights the
way you ripple the bath
with your wings.
It's a small thing
to want,
I think,
just the one day
to wake
without the density of bones
and sing.

~Aqua

#poetry #apoemaday #poem #dailypoem

I found this in The Ecco Anthology of International Poetry* and know nothing about Gloria Fuertes beyond what Wikipedia tells me. This has been translated by one Brian Barker.

It seems to me to be a call to challenge authorities. Which is always worth doing, no?

#APoemADay #APoemADayFromDeemikay #GloriaFuertes #todayspoem #poetry #PoetryCommunity

* Would be nice to have a map or at least a list of countries to gauge how international.

This jolly little rhyme of eye-colour in souls off to Hades is from Rossetti's 'Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book' from 1872.

Observation: the boatman doesn't care about your eye-colour just as long as you give him that penny ($8?)

#APoemADay #APoemADayFromDeemikay #TodaysPoem #ChristinaRossetti #Boatman

This jolly little rhyme of eye-colour in souls off to Hades is from Rossetti's 'Sing-Song: A Nursery Rhyme Book' from 1872.

Observation: the boatman doesn't care about your eye-colour just as long as you give him that penny ($8?)

#APoemADay #APoemADayFromDeemikay #TodaysPoem #ChristinaRossetti #Boatman

A different version of this appears in one of the early chapters Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy (Chp 23 of Titus Groan). This version I found in his Collected Nonsense and it totally rocks teenage goth mopiness.

A Peake painting of these three characters in the comments below.

#APoemADay #APoemADayFromDeemikay #MervynPeake #Gormenghast #Poetry #PoetryCommunity

A different version of this appears in one of the early chapters Peake's Gormenghast Trilogy (Chp 23 of Titus Groan). This version I found in his Collected Nonsense and it totally rocks teenage goth mopiness.

A Peake painting of these three characters in the comments below.

#APoemADay #APoemADayFromDeemikay #MervynPeake #Gormenghast #Poetry #PoetryCommunity

This is in the excellent anthology 'The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain 950 - 1492' translated by Peter Cole.

This is the only poem by a woman in the book. Read the notes in the second photo.

#APoemADayFromDeemikay #APoemADay #todayspoem #HebrewSpain #HebrewPoetry #poetry #poetrycommunity

After the note-heavy 5-liner yesterday, here's a much simpler sonnet about bugs.

#GoBugs

#APoemADay #APoemADayFromDeemikay #todayspoem #JohnClare #Ants #Sonnet