Today's poet

[Hes]

That's beautiful and so sad.

I can't remember if I posted this before but I am reading an excellent biography on Edna St. Vincent Millay at the moment called 'Savage Beauty'.
This is one of her sonnets:

I shall go back again to the bleak shore


I shall go back again to the bleak shore
And build a little shanty on the sand,
In such a way that the extremest band
Of brittle seaweed will escape my door
But by a yard or two; and nevermore
Shall I return to take you by the hand;
I shall be gone to what I understand,
And happier than I ever was before.
The love that stood a moment in your eyes,
The words that lay a moment on your tongue,
Are one with all that in a moment dies,
A little under-said and over-sung.
But I shall find the sullen rocks and skies
Unchanged from what they were when I was young.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Hes]

I love this! For all those people that are told that they can't do something and for all of us that are pig headed and will try and do it anyway!

I may, I might, I must

If you will tell me why the fen
appears impassable, I then
will tell you why I think that I
can get across it if I try.

Marianne Moore (1887-1972)

[Hes]

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its colours

W.S. Merwin (b. 1927)

[freckle]

Separation

Your absence has gone through me
Like thread through a needle.
Everything I do is stitched with its colours

W.S. Merwin (b. 1927)

Oooooooooo this is delicious...thanks for posting Hes x

[freckle]

Lest we forget it is the weekend and we can take a break from the tredmill.. (well some of us anyway)...


Wages
DH Lawrence

The wages of work is cash.
The wages of cash is want more cash.
The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.
The wages of vicious competition is - the world we live in.

The work-cash-want circle is the viciousest circle
that ever turned men into fiends.

Earning a wage is a prison occupation
and a wage-earner is a sort of gaol-bird.

Earning a salary is a prison overseer's job
a gaoler instead of a gaol-bird.

Living on our income is strolling grandly outside the prison
in terror lest you have to go in. And since the work-prison covers
almost every scrap of the living earth, you stroll up and down
on a narrow beat, about the same as a prisoner taking exercise.

This is called universal freedom.

[Stef F]

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 your 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 the 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.

The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

[freckle]

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 your 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 the 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.


The Wild Geese by Mary Oliver

love that poem stef thanks for reminding me :-)

[Stef F]

I haven't been in the zone for poetry much at all for ages and have struggled with a lot of the poems on here Freckle.

I found that one whilst searching for healing poetry. Is it a repeat?

[Mossdog]

I am good thanks Mossy...just liked the poem! and your baby running bare foot choice too! Good that we can rely on old stalwarts such as yourself to drag this thread back from the brink of the second page (she states aghast!) ....

here is a little offering inspired by my love of autumn (amongst other things)...

Tricking the sloes

I was so satiated words vanished
And all that remained was a wish for time
to be frozen by a great imaginary shutter
capable of snapping this golden leitmotif,
writ large in the forest with its slight clart underfoot,
and leaves in varying continua of life and death.

Through the lens a discrete image would form
our hands unknotting, working in unison
to capture with enthusiasm
each purple waxy drupe before the frost.
It would remember with ease our discussion
of how simple trickery via a blast in the freezer,
would transform the astringent blooms
into sweet heady fruit ripe for infusion.

Yet try as I might, time cannot be paused
I failed to develop the camera of my dreams
And as the light fell in dappled blankets
Over the hush of secret elms
it was time to go home.
Passing an elderly couple
who were one step ahead of us
with their own blend of liquid memories
I was reminded with a small pang of reality

It will not always be time to trick the sloes.

That's really very excellent freckle, and i know just what you mean, that sense of urgency to want to capture a rich moment, and the sadness of recognising that impossibilty. I think you've definitely captured quite a 'Keatsian' tone to it though, as in...

To Autumn

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

John Keats

[freckle]

I haven't been in the zone for poetry much at all for ages and have struggled with a lot of the poems on here Freckle.

I found that one whilst searching for healing poetry. Is it a repeat?

Mmm I think it might be but I never regard that as problematic, I think it is just a sign of a good poem! Its good to have you back on the thread...I struggle at times too with some poems and i know what you mean about not always feeling in the zone for it but i guess one of the nice things is to be able to dip in and out when the mood is right :-)