marvellous, thanks I missed that and hadn't come across it beforeOriginally Posted by Hes
marvellous, thanks I missed that and hadn't come across it before
For What Binds Us
There are names for what binds us:
strong forces, weak forces.
Look around, you can see them:
the skin that forms in a half-empty cup,
nails rusting into the places they join,
joints dovetailed on their own weight.
The way things stay so solidly
wherever they've been set down—
and gravity, scientists say, is weak.
And see how the flesh grows back
across a wound, with a great vehemence,
more strong
than the simple, untested surface before.
There's a name for it on horses,
when it comes back darker and raised: proud flesh,
as all flesh,
is proud of its wounds, wears them
as honors given out after battle,
small triumphs pinned to the chest—
And when two people have loved each other
see how it is like a
scar between their bodies,
stronger, darker, and proud;
how the black cord makes of them a single fabric
that nothing can tear or mend.
JANE HIRSHFIELD
Am Yisrael Chai
A poem to listen to on a driek day like today and a bit of romance thrown in to!.....
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6_9V_nkZXM
Am Yisrael Chai
Very nice. Its flipping miserable here today. I'm plucking up courage to go down the garden to the studio.
Not very cheery but a beautiful poem about love lost.
Sounds of the Day
When a clatter came,
it was horses crossing the ford.
When the air creaked, it was
a lapwing seeing us off the premises
of its private marsh. A snuffling puff
ten yards from the boat was the tide blocking and
unblocking a hole in a rock.
When the black drums rolled, it was water
falling sixty feet into itself.
When the door
scraped shut, it was the end
of all the sounds there are.
You left me
beside the quietest fire in the world.
I thought I was hurt in my pride only,
forgetting that,
when you plunge your hand in freezing water,
you feel
a bangle of ice round your wrist
before the whole hand goes numb.
Norman MacCaig
He does tend to be rather melancholic - but I kinda like that.
Here's another that won't set you chortling either...
AFTER
Let’s choose a pretty word, say, evening,
And climb through it into the past,
or stand on a towering If, surveying
The rosy kingdoms we have lost.
From every corner creep a thousand
Boredoms saying, Greet us. We’re life.
Let’s round the sunset up and milk it
Into a jug and drink it off.
Or in the hawthorn let us tangle
Our dreary look like gossamer
To shudder with that sparrow’s chirping
And when the dew falls be on fire.
Or drag the distance home and chain it
There in the corner of the room
To charm us with its savage howling
And beg for fragments of our dream.
There’s a clue somewhere. Can you find it?
Can you say it over and over again
‘Love’, till its incantation makes us
Forget how much we are alone?
Norman MacCaig.
Am Yisrael Chai
Ah! A sense of humour and a new perspective...
ROOMS – Billy Collins
After three days of steady, inconsolable rain,
I walk through the rooms of the house
wondering which would be best to die in.
The study is an obvious choice
with its thick carpet and soothing paint,
its overstuffed chair preferable
to a doll-like tumble down the basement stairs.
And the kitchen has a certain appeal –
it seems he was boiling water for tea,
the inspector will offer, holding up the melted kettle.
Then there is the dining room,
just the place to end up facedown
at one end of its long table in a half-written letter
or the bedroom with its mix of sex and sleep,
upright against the headboard,
a book having slipped to the floor –
make it Mrs. Dalloway, which I have yet to read.
Dead on the carpet, dead on the tiles,
dead on the stone cold floor –
it’s starting to sound like a ballad
sung in a pub by a man with a coal red face.
It’s all the fault of the freezing rain
which is flicking against the windows,
but when it finally lets up
and gives way to broken clouds and a warm breeze,
when the trees stand dripping in the light,
I will quit these dark, angular rooms
and drive along a country road
into the larger rooms of the world,
so vast and speckled, so full of ink and sorrow –
a road that cuts through bare woods
and tangles of red and yellow bittersweet
these late November days.
And maybe under the fallen wayside leaves
there is hidden a nest of mice,
each one no bigger than a thumb,
a thumb with closed eyes,
a thumb with whiskers and a tail,
each one contemplating the sweetness of grass
and the startling brevity of life.
Am Yisrael Chai
Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road
Healthy , Free ,the world before me,
The long brown path before me leading
whever I choose
Henceforth I ask not good fortune,I myself am
good-fortune,
Henceforth I whimper no more,postpone no
more,need nothing,
Done with indoor complaints,libaries,
querulous critisms
Strong and contentI travel the open road.
hi there ! I hope you are all keeping well. I haven't been on in ages but thought I d just check in...I absolutely adored this poem just what the doctor ordered for a tired pre Xmas mum xx
funny to see this thread revived...just been reading this:
"Candles of gnarled resin, apple branches, the tacky
mistletoe. 'Look' they said and again 'look'. But
I ran slowly; the landscape flowed away, back to
its source."
Geoffrey Hill. Mercian Hymns.
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