Descriptive Poems And Quotes

Still now I send letters into space Hoping that some mailman somewhere will track you down And recognise you from the descriptions in my poems That he will place the stack of them in your hands and tell you, There is a girl who still writes you, she doesn't know how not to

I was made at right angles to the world and I see it so. I can only see it so.

However gross a man may be, the minute he expresses a strong and genuine affection, some inner secretion alters his features, animates his gestures, and colors his voice. The stupidest man will often, under the stress of passion, achieve heights of eloquence, in thought if not in language, and seem to move in some luminous sphere. Goriot's voice and gesture had at this moment the power of communication that characterizes the great actor. Are not our finer feelings the poems of the human will?

My brother Allie had this left-handed fielder's mitt. he was left handed. The thing that was descriptive about it though, was that he had poems written all over the fingers and the pocket and everywhere. In green ink. He wrote them on it so that he'd have something to read when he was in the field and nobody was up to bat. He's dead now.

We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.

There are moments in every relationship that define when two people start to fall in love. A first glance A first smile A first kiss A first fall… (I remove the Darth Vader house shoes from my satchel and look down at them.) You were wearing these during one of those moments. One of the moments I first started to fall in love with you. The way you gave me butterflies that morning Had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else, and everything to do with you. I was falling in love with you that morning because of you. (I take the next item out of the satchel. When I pull it out and look up, she brings her hands to her mouth in shock.) This ugly little gnome With his smug little grin… He's the reason I had an excuse to invite you into my house. Into my life. You took a lot of aggression out on him over those next few months. I would watch from my window as you would kick him over every time you walked by him. Poor little guy. You were so tenacious. That feisty, aggressive, strong-willed side of you…. The side of you that refused to take crap from this concrete gnome? The side of you that refused to take crap from me? I fell in love with that side of you because of you. (I set the gnome down on the stage and grab the CD) This is your favorite CD ‘Layken’s shit.’ Although now I know you intended for shit to be possessive, rather than descriptive. The banjo started playing through the speakers of your car and I immediately recognized my favorite band. Then when I realized it was your favorite band, too? The fact that these same lyrics inspired both of us? I fell in love with that about you. That had absolutely nothing to do with anyone else. I fell in love with that about you because of you. (I take a slip of paper out of the satchel and hold it up. When I look at her, I see Eddie slide her a napkin. I can’t tell from up here, but that can only mean she’s crying.) This is a receipt I kept. Only because the item I purchased that night was on the verge of ridiculous. Chocolate milk on the rocks? Who orders that? You were different, and you didn’t care. You were being you. A piece of me fell in love with you at that moment, because of you. This? (I hold up another sheet of paper.) This I didn’t really like so much. It’s the poem you wrote about me. The one you titled 'mean?' I don’t think I ever told you… but you made a zero. And then I kept it to remind myself of all the things I never want to be to you. (I pull her shirt from my bag. When I hold it into the light, I sigh into the microphone.) This is that ugly shirt you wear. It doesn’t really have anything to do with why I fell in love with you. I just saw it at your house and thought I’d steal it.

Done with the whole dark & the insect dirge under blue lit lamps. Done trying to remember June, first stars & August when I was Penelope when I was Eurydice when July was missing & I was my own dull shade.

Life is Beautiful? Beyond all the vicissitudes that are presented to us on this short path within this wild planet, we can say that life is beautiful. No one can ever deny that experiencing the whirlwind of emotions inside this body is a marvel, we grow with these life experiences, we strengthen ourselves and stimulate our feelings every day, in this race where the goal is imminent death sometimes we are winners and many other times we lose and the darkness surprises us and our heart is disconnected from this reality halfway and connects us to the server of the matrix once more, debugging and updating our database, erasing all those experiences within this caracara of flesh and blood, waiting to return to earth again. "Life is beautiful gentlemen" is cruel and has unfair behavior about people who looked like a bundle of light and left this platform for no apparent reason, but its nature is not similar to our consciousness and feelings, she has a script for each of us because it was programmed that way, the architects of the game of life they know perfectly well that you must experiment with all the feelings, all the emotions and evolve to go to the next levels. You can't take a quantum leap and get through the game on your own. inventing a heaven and a hell in order to transcend, that comes from our fears of our imagination not knowing what life has in store for us after life is a dilemma "rather said" the best kept secret of those who control us day by day. We are born, we grow up, we are indoctrinated in the classrooms and in the jobs, we pay our taxes, we reproduce, we enjoy the material goods that it offers us the system the marketing of disinformation, Then we get old, get sick and die. I don't like this story! It looks like a parody of Noam Chomsky, Let's go back to the beautiful description of beautiful life, it sounds better! Let's find meaning in all the nonsense that life offers us, 'Cause one way or another we're doomed to imagine that everything will be fine until the end of matter. It is almost always like that. Sometimes life becomes a real nightmare. A heartbreaking horror that we find impossible to overcome. As we grow up, we learn to know the dark side of life. The terrors that lurk in the shadows, the dangers lurking around every corner. We realize that reality is much harsher and ruthless than we ever imagined. And in those moments, when life becomes a real hell, we can do nothing but cling to our own existence, summon all our might and fight with all our might so as not to be dragged into the abyss. But sometimes, even fighting with all our might is not enough. Sometimes fate is cruel and takes away everything we care about, leaving us with nothing but pain and hopelessness. And in that moment, when all seems lost, we realize the terrible truth: life is a death trap, a macabre game in which we are doomed to lose. And so, as we sink deeper and deeper into the abyss, while the shadows envelop us and terror paralyzes us, we remember the words that once seemed to us so hopeful: life is beautiful. A cruel and heartless lie, that leads us directly to the tragic end that death always awaits us.

…description is deadly to a prose poem.

How frail the bloom, how short the stay That terminates us all! Today we flourish green and gay, Like leaves tomorrow fall.

Contrary to popular belief, there aren’t that many descriptions of hell in the Bible, and the majority of images most people carry around in their heads are from the fourteenth-century poem, which means that our contemporary view of hell is actually from the Middle Ages.

Because there is no substitute for vigorous and exact description, I would like to say how your eyes, at twilight, reflect, at the same time, the beauty of the world, and its crimes.

Evening Primrose When once the sun sinks in the west, And dewdrops pearl the evening's breast; Almost as pale as moonbeams are, Or its companionable star, The evening primrose opes anew Its delicate blossoms to the dew; And, hermit-like, shunning the light, Wastes its fair bloom upon the night, Who, blindfold to its fond caresses, Knows not the beauty it possesses; Thus it blooms on while night is by; When day looks out with open eye, Bashed at the gaze it cannot shun, It faints and withers and is gone.

The sugar the ice on planets and stars The romance of the evening Coated in ice from your dead flesh Already rotting from within

No one remembers. But I remember, under the elm's cool awning, watching you watch the clouds.

Your personality should be described in poem not in paragraph.

Rudyard Kipling, in his famous poetic description of what makes for mature and effective adulthood, wrote in part: If you can keep your head When all about you Are losing theirs And blaming it on you... If you can trust yourself When all men doubt you... This famous 1909 poem “If” was inspired in Kipling after observing one military leader’s actions during the Boer Wars (Lt. Colonel Eduardo Jany, personal communication, October, 2007).

And what is Life?—An hour-glass on the run, A mist retreating from the morning sun, A busy, bustling, still repeated dream; Its length?—A minute’s pause, a moment’s thought; And happiness?—A bubble on the stream, That in the act of seizing shrinks to nought.

Let me say to those who practice the way: Seeking worthless things exhausts your mind. People have a spiritual essence, beyond words or description. When you call on it, it responds clearly, when it is hidden, you don’t know where it is. Keep it well, don’t let it be stained.

The most significant events, Bishop seems to argue, are destined to remain outside the scope of description. It is perhaps their very status as excessive or fugitive that makes them, in the end, significant. A poet who believes such things will not arrive uncomplicatedly at self-description.

I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something—a sculptor he would have been, no doubt—who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course, but the point I'm working round to is that there were a couple of lines that went, if I remember correctly: She starts. She moves. She seems to feel The stir of life along her keel. And what I'm driving at is that you couldn't get a better description of what happened to Gussie as I spoke these heartening words. His brow cleared, his eyes brightened, he lost that fishy look, and he gazed at the slug, which was still on the long, long trail with something approaching bonhomie. A marked improvement.

Lilaced thing The soft rustle of beetle wings In air that is warm and grey And is not strong

I only dream of your ankles brushed by dark violets, of honeybees above you murmuring into a crown. Antique queen, the night dreams on:

You asked for love I gave you only descriptions

From above, you looked small as an afterthought, something lightly brushed in.

immaculate middle-of-the-night quiet rainlessness the late moony sadness of the one specific mosquito dear someone you habituate me to the invisible I exit through you not as myself

If we leave that general descriptive talk where everything which looks like a poem can be called a poem and turn instead to normative talk, we will of course not recognize as a poem everything that looks like a poem. A real poem has to be a successful poem, a successful speech act. In approximately the same way that only a mathematical proof which really proves something can be called a mathematical proof. It is not enough that it looks like a proof. The proof has to prove. For the poem it is not enough to look like a poem. It has to achieve something.

But no matte what kind of an understanding is adopted, whether associated with positivism, which asserts that the truth can only be reached by trial and error, or rationalism, which asserts that everything can be explained and grasped by reason, whether the perspective of romanticism, which overemphasizes imagination and sensitivity, or an approach based on ardent naturalism, whether based on realism, which aims to describe everything as it is including its shortcomings, or a curiosity-raising approach such as surrealism, whether idealism, which asserts that there is nothing real but ideas, or cubism, which asserts that there is nothing real but instead of direct description, or some other such current or perspective, that is not true poetry.

In the early summer of 1846 he moved his family to a cottage in Fordham, which was then far out in the country. He was ill and Virginia was dying, so that he was in no condition to do much work. As a result, their meagre income vanished; when winter game they even lacked money to buy fuel. A friend who visited the cottage wrote a description of Virginia's plight: There was no clothing on the bed... but a snow white spread and sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat on her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth... A public appeal for funds was made in the newspapers -- an act which Poe, of course, resented. But Virginia was beyond all human aid. She died on January 30, 1847, and her death marked the end of the sanest period in her husband's life. He plunged into the writing of a book-length mystical and pseudo-scientific work entitled Eureka, in which he set forth his theories of the universe. He intended it as a prose poem, and as such is should be judged, rather than as a scientific explanation of matters beyond it's author's ken.

Now the twelfth canto of Book II is an almost literal translation from Tasso description in the Jerusalem Delivered of the island of Armida. That poem was not printed till 1582. It is likely enough that Spenser may have seen part of it in manuscript, which would account for the general resemblance of the Adonis passages, though the likeness is not close enough to make any debt certain.

Compromised by longing & looking for language to note the differences in the map: the pointed spruces tipped against the moon this time & the water halflit, star-slid—but it makes no difference in the telling.

It matters, because everything we say Of the past is description without place, a cast Of the imagination, made in sound; And because what we say of the future must portend, Be alive with its own seemings, seeming to be Like rubies reddened by rubies reddening.

Even writing this email I'm feeling a little loose and dissociative. Rilke has a poem that ends: 'Who is now alone, will long remain to,/will wake, read, write long letters/and wander restlessly, as the leaves are drifting'. A better description of my state I couldn't invent, except it's April and the leaves aren't drifting.

That's why your poems can never be no more than a description of life. The page is finite. Once you put the words down on paper, you've fossilized your thought. Bugs in amber, nigger. But music is life itself. Music is time. Played live, played at seventy-eight rpms, thirty-three and a third, backwards, looped, whatever. There's no need for translation. You understand or you don't.

One day the thought hit me—could the whole story of the Jews in Egypt have simply been a poem? More or less like Homer describing magical cattle, and ravenous women and so on? Ancient peoples saw no difference between a vivid description of marvels and what we call reality—for them the description itself was the reality. In short, the Jews may never have been literally enslaved in Egypt; or perhaps some had been, but the story as we know it may have been largely fictional, an overwhelmingly powerful act of imagination.

When in the chronicle of wasted time I see descriptions of the fairest wights, And beauty making beautiful old rhyme, In praise of ladies dead and lovely knights, Then, in the blazon of sweet beauty's best, Of hand, of foot, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique pen would have expressed Even such a beauty as you master now. So all their praises are but prophecies Of this our time, all you prefiguring; And for they looked but with divining eyes, They had not skill enough your worth to sing: For we, which now behold these present days, Have eyes to wonder, but lack tongues to praise.

As I saw how powerful and affirming this ancient blessing could be, I decided it was time for Christian women to take back Proverbs 31. Somewhere along the way, we surrendered it to the same people who invented airbrushing and Auto-Tune and Rachel Ray. We abandoned the meaning of the poem by focusing on the specifics, and it became just another impossible standard by which to measure our failures. We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description. But according to Ahava, the woman described in Proverbs 31 is not some ideal that exists out there; she is present in each one of us when we do even the smallest things with valor.

THE Oldest Ones of All were gluttons. Probably it was because they seldom had enough to eat. You can read even nowadays a poem written by one of them, which is known as the Vision of Mac Conglinne. In this Vision there is a description of a castle made out of different kinds of food. The English for part of the poem goes like this: A lake of new milk I beheld In the midst of a fair plain. I saw a well-appointed house Thatched with butter. Its two soft door-posts of custard, Its dais of curds and butter, Beds of glorious lard, Many shields of thin pressed cheese. Under the straps of those shields Were men of soft sweet smooth cheese, Men who knew not to wound a Gael, Spears of old butter had each of them. A huge cauldron full of meat (Methought I’d try to tackle it), Boiled, leafy kale, browny-white, A brimming vessel full of milk. A bacon house of two-score ribs, A wattling of tripe—support of clans— Of every food pleasant to man, Meseemed the whole was gathered there. Of chitterlings of pigs were made Its beautiful rafters, Splendid the beams and the pillars Of marvellous pork.

Another challenge we face is describing something commonly thought of as ugly,imperfect or disgusting. Again, we’re likely to jump to conclusions. Rather than considering our subject firsthand and describing what we observe, we label it. Because we’ve already established, for instance, that slugs are disgusting, we go on to describe them as “slimy” creatures that leave “gooey trails.” Cliché upon cliché. But when we engage our all-accepting eye, when we look beyond surface prejudices and preconceptions into the actual nature of our subject, clichés disappear. In her poem “The Connoisseuse of Slugs,” Sharon Olds transforms her subject with descriptive phrases like “naked jelly of those gold bodies,/translucent strangers glistening among the/stones” and “glimmering umber horns/rising like telescopes.” Her description forces us to see an old subject in a new way. We no longer have to choose between ugliness and beauty; they have realigned themselves, each side illuminating the other. When we engage our all-accepting eye, we discover the flaw that makes surface beauty interesting as well as the arresting detail that redeems a seemingly ugly image. THE

Speaking generally, there are two kinds of descriptive music. The first comes under the heading of literal description. A composer wishes to recreate the sound of bells in the night. He therefore writes certain chords, for orchestra or piano or whatever medium he is using, which actually sound like bells in the night. Something real is being imitated realistically. A famous example of that kind of description in music is the passage in one of Strauss’s tone poems where he imitates the bleating of sheep. The music has no other raison d’être than mere imitation at that point. The other type of descriptive music is less literal and more poetic. No attempt is made to describe a particular scene or event; nevertheless some outward circumstance arouses certain emotions in the composer which he wishes to communicate to the listener. It may be clouds or the sea or a country fair or an airplane. But the point is that instead of literal imitation, one gets a musicopoetic transcription of the phenomenon as reflected in the composer’s mind. That constitutes a higher form of program music. The bleating of sheep will always sound like the bleating of sheep, but a cloud portrayed in music allows the imagination more freedom. One principle must be kept firmly

Science is analytical description, philosophy is synthetic interpretation. Science wishes to resolve the whole into parts, the organism into organs, the obscure into the known. It does not inquire into the values and ideal possibilities of things, nor into their total and final significance; it is content to show their present actuality and operation, it narrows its gaze resolutely to the nature and process of things as they are. The scientist is as impartial as Nature in Turgenev's poem: he is as interested in the leg of a flea as in the creative throes of a genius. But the philosopher is not content to describe the fact; he wishes to ascertain its relation to experience in general, and thereby to get at its meaning and its worth; he combines things in interpretive synthesis; he tries to put together, better than before, that great universe-watch which the inquisitive scientist has analytically taken apart. Science tells us how to heal and how to kill; it reduces the death rate in retail and then kills us wholesale in war; but only wisdom desire coordinated in the light of all experience- can tell us when to heal and when to kill. To observe processes and to construct means is science; to criticize and coordinate ends is philosophy: and because in these days our means and instruments have multiplied beyond our interpretation and synthesis of ideals and ends, our life is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. For a fact is nothing except in relation to desire; it is not complete except in relation to a purpose and a whole. Science without philosophy, facts without perspective and valuation, cannot save us from havoc and despair. Science gives us knowledge, but only philosophy can give us wisdom.

But, after one quick trace of his tongue between her lips, he abruptly pulled away and stepped back from her. She was leaning into him so hard he had to put his hands on her shoulders to steady her. Catherine’s eyes flew open. Releasing her shoulders, he pointed past her to the books he’d set on the desk. She opened her mouth to protest, but closed it again. As she followed Jim, she caught a glimpse of his profile when he picked up the books and slate. There was a smug grin on his face. He was toying with her, teaching her a lesson—that two could play at heating things up and abruptly cooling them down. Indignation and amusement competed in her as she took her seat beside him and he handed her the paper he’d written. She hadn’t set him any homework. He’d done it on his own, printed a brief description of their picnic in short sentences or single words. It was almost like a poem without rhyme. “Fish swim water. Sky. Trees. Leaves. Eat food. Drink.” She smiled at him. “Very good.” He touched his lips, puckering them in a kiss, and tapped the signing book. “Kiss,” she said and looked up the sign for it. “Fingers touching thumbs as both hands come together,” the text said. Her cheeks flushed as she read, “trembling slightly to indicate the degree of passion.” Catherine made the movement as she repeated the word aloud. “Kiss.” Jim copied the movement, shaping his lips like hers. He pointed to the slate and offered her the chalk so she could spell the word. He studied each letter as she wrote it, before printing them himself: K-i-s-s. Catherine’s cheeks flamed even hotter from seeing it written in glaring white against the black slate. Kiss. Kiss. Somehow there seemed to be no denying or hiding it now that it was written down. She glanced at Jim’s lips and her nipples tightened at the memory of his mouth sucking them.

Neamh. Evie. Neamh. Evie. Lend, Lend, Lend. Neamh. Evie. “What are you doing, my love?” I scowled at Reth for breaking my concentration. “Thinking. Shut up.” The Light Queen was speechifying up on a podium made of liquid light, her radiance bathing all the faeries in a glow that was nearly overpowering. Within a few seconds of being around this much faerie glamour I was having a hard time seeing straight and found myself slack-jawed and dazed. Thus, the name equivalent of pinching myself. I realized at some point she had stopped talking, and now every single set of faerie eyes—a few hundred of them—were trained intently on me. “Oh, uh, hey.” I waved. “What did I miss?” I whispered to Reth. “You’re supposed to tell us how to convince the Dark Court to join us.” “I—What? Seriously? I’m only here to make sure everything happens. I thought the queen would have a plan! I’m a glorified doorman. I open the gate, I close the gate. Nowhere in my job description of Empty One does it say I also manage to convince a mob of anti-Evie faeries to saunter through the gate.” Reth smiled. “And just when she’d finished praising human ingenuity and assuring us that everything will work out according to plan.” “Yes! Plan! Her plan! Gosh, you guys are sucking it up all over the place. Aren’t you supposed to have these things in place for centuries, or were you too busy writing pretty little poems to describe the plans that you never bothered actually making them?” His golden eyes, now with fine lines around them, twinkled with amusement. “We had a plan, my love. I was to fill you up and you were to open a fate for us immediately. But I seem to recall you doing everything in your power to resist and change that plan. So now we’ve had to account for all the other creatures from our world and conform to your requirements. I think you’ll find that we fey, while obviously superior in nearly every way, are not quite as adaptable as temporary creatures. If you want improvisations, you’ll have to provide it yourself.

In order to grasp how exploitation is overcome by sublimation, it is not enough to stay with this standard definition of sublimation as the elevation of an ordinary object to the dignity of a Thing. As Lacan aptly demonstrated apropos courtly love, an ordinary object (woman) is there elevated to the dignity of the Thing, she becomes an “inhuman partner,” dangerous to get too close to, always out of reach, mixing horror and respect. The paradox of desire is here brought to an extreme, turning the experience of love into an endlessly postponed tragedy. In true love, however, comedy enters: while the beloved remains a Thing, it is simultaneously “desublimated,” accepted in all her ridiculous bodily imperfections. A true miracle is thus achieved: I can hold the Thing-jouissance in my hands, making fun of it and playing games with it, enjoying it without restraint – true love doesn’t idealize – or, as Lacan put it in his seminar on anxiety: “Only love-sublimation makes it possible for jouissance to condescend to desire.” This enigmatic proposition was perspicuously interpreted by Alenka Zupančič who demonstrated how, in the comedy of love, sublimation paradoxically comprises its opposite, desublimation – you remain the Thing, but simultaneously I can use you for my enjoyment: “to love the other and to desire my own jouissance. To ‘desire one’s own jouissance’ is probably what is the hardest to obtain and to make work, since the enjoyment has trouble appearing as an object.” One should not shirk from a quite concrete and graphic description of what this amounts to: I love you, and I show this by fucking you just for pleasure, mercilessly objectivizing you – this is how I am no longer exploited by serving the Other’s enjoyment. When I worry all the time whether you also enjoy it, it is not love – “I love you” means: I want to be used as an object for your enjoyment. One should reject here all the Catholic nonsense of preferring the missionary position in sex because lovers can whisper tender words and communicate spiritually, and even Kant was too short here when he reduced the sexual act to reducing my partner to an instrument of my pleasure: self-objectivization is the proof of love, you find being used degrading only if there is no love. This enjoyment of mine should not be constrained even by the tendency to enable my partner to reach orgasm simultaneously with me – Brecht was right when, in his poem “Orges Wunschliste,” he includes in the wish-list of his preferences non-simultaneous orgasms: “Von den Mädchen, die neuen. / Von den Weibern, die ungetreuen. / Von den Orgasmen, die ungleichzeitigen. / Von den Feindschaften, die beiderseitigen.” “Of the girls, the new. / Of the women, the unfaithful. / Of orgasms, the non-simultaneous. / Of the animosities, the mutual.

He watched her, as she looked up at the sky, her hair curtaining her face. Orion glowed softly above. He remembered that was the title of her favorite poem. Orion. She wasn’t a sentimental sort, but she had moments of deep feeling. There was a curious kind of romance about her, not the florid descriptions of poetry. But some of the stripped-down simplicity of prose clung to her, some grace. She crossed back to the trailer entrance

D. Donovan, Senior Reviewer, Midwest Book Review writes: "Sea Creatures and Poems: Plus Some Other Fish Rhymes illustrates the fun that poetry can embrace, providing a zany collection for all ages that is both ocean-focused and whimsical. The operative description for both poems and pictures is "silly," and the book fulfills this promise with a series of engaging observations that belay the usual staid approaches of too many poetry books. Art combined with poetry is "a delicious combination," as Richard Merritts reflects in the collection's introduction. The poems inspired the author to add illustrations which are just as whimsically touched...and, also, quite artistically rendered. These aren't demanding works. Take "Pompano Pompano Pompano," for example. Its very short observation concludes with an ironic twist after identifying the "flat fish from Florida" outside of its normal sea environment. Succinct? Yes. But the poem really...snags readers, landing a winning insight on both the pompano and its ultimate fate. Readers trawling for humor will find plenty in this book. Even the poetry titles present original, fun observations, as in "By Jove, I Hooked a Snook." Aside from its delightful observations, the poems represent diverse structures, from free verse to rhyme: "From the depths of the sea;/Came a fish that could be;/From a prison did flee;/Dressed in stripes, so you see..." From redfish and ahi to the anglers who long for them, Sea Creatures and Poems will appeal to a wide audience, especially those who do not view poetry as an opportunity for philosophical and psychological analysis alone. Its blend of natural history info, inviting color illustrations, and accompanying fun insights is recommended for those who fish to those who enjoy eating or studying them, as well as poetry lovers who will appreciate the very different approaches, poetic variety, and whimsical inspections within. Libraries catering to these audiences will want to include it in their collections, but Sea Creatures and Poems will prove a delightful choice for adults who seek to instill in the young an appreciation for poetry's capability for fun and its diverse structural representations.

It’s called a flower,” Kelsier said. “They used to grow on plants, before the Ascension. Descriptions of them appear in the old poems and stories—things that only Keepers and rebel sages know about anymore. Apparently, these plants were beautiful, and they had a pleasant smell.

  What is Love?   Love is something that you cannot pick up and hold in your hand. It is invisible to the naked eye and cannot be seen by mortal man.   Love is like the wind that comes then softly and gently blows, drifting slowly past until it fades and gradually goes.   Its substance cannot be seen, touched, smelled or even heard, yet the evidence of it cannot even be put into a thousand words.   It can be felt, not only in our mind, but also in our heart. It is strong when we are together; it is even stronger when we are apart.   Love is what keeps the world turning and all the evil at bay. It’s what makes life worth living each and every day   It is stronger than anger, hate or any other thing For only with love, can true happiness bring.   This is only the beginning of the description of love, Yes, it is the greatest of all gifts and it comes from God up above.      I also read once that love is never boastful, never selfish, never prideful and always willing to forgive.  Love is the greatest thing on earth.  It is also the greatest thing in heaven for God is love, 1John 4:8 and 4:16.

The Greek astronomer Eudoxus described the motions of the heavenly bodies by means of the celestial globe, or sphere of heaven. He concluded that the stars were fixed to a sphere that rotated at a constant speed. The earliest complete description of the constellations themselves was given in Aratus of Soli’s poem The Phenomena, (270 B.C). The Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy (c. 137 A.D.)

The Genesis account of the advent of mankind (Adam-man) is far more eloquent and significant than a casual reading of the passage in English might suggest. In this majestic “Poem of the Dawn” or “Hymn of Creation” (cf. H. Orton Wiley, Christian Theology, Vol. I, Nazarene Publishing House, Kansas City, Mo., pp. 450 ff.), the metaphorical use of the terms “dust,” “image,” “likeness,” “create,” “made,” “breath of life,” and others, contributes much to biblical understanding of man, sin, redemption, holiness, and all the implications of “grace” in relation to man. The writer of the Genesis story chose his words carefully. In 1:26 he tells us that God said, “Let us make man in our image after our likeness,” and (1:27) then, “God created man in his own image … male and female created he them.” Strangely, the second account (Genesis 2) introduces a most mundane and earthy note to the almost too idealistic and incredible first description. “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life [‘lives, ’ Hebrew plural, here]; and man became a living being” (Gen. 2:7; RSV). Note the progress; formed, breathed into, and then the process of becoming. There will be no attempt made here to formulate any theory of man's appearance on earth. These terms are noted to suggest that the wording gives room for more than one interpretation. However, no attempt to interpret these passages from the standpoint of modern science should be permitted to obscure the main ideas proposed in Genesis 1—2. This is not a scientific account nor was it in any sense intended to be. The role of science is to unpack all the facts possible which are built into man and his history and world. But the meaning of man and his universe must be derived from another source. And it is this meaning that the biblical story seeks to impart. This starkly beautiful, unembroidered introduction to man as made in his Creator's image establishes the fundamental religious meaning of man as he stands in relationship to God and to nature. This noble concept must precede and throw light upon all that the Hebraic-Christian teaching will assume about man—a sinful creature as of now, yet created in the Imago Dei.

I saw—no, I think the word is beheld—the most wondrous thing in the world. This church was indescribably complex and harmonious; it was like stepping into the mind of God. I was overcome by the desire to worship—a feeling I would not see as adequately articulated until many years later, when I would read Dante Alighieri’s description, in his first book, Vita nuova, of the first time he, as a child, saw Beatrice:

As you review the descriptions in your stories or poems, looking for places where tone has gone astray, don’t just look at the words, noting their denotations and connotations. Listen to their musical pitch, color and volume, and to the rhythms and durations of your phrases. Since tone resides not only in what you say but in how you say it, you can’t ignore those messages even a dog can understand. Like muffled voices you hear through motel walls, the tones of your descriptions permeate your story’s inner boundaries. Tone

Childhood events aren’t the only forces that shape a writer’s vision. Your present-day preoccupations, interests and obsessions provide you with original metaphors, as do the subjects you discover through research or accident. Look back over your writing. Reread your stories, poems and essays, noting successful images or metaphors, those passages that seem to have sprung from imagination, not fancy. Notice what you’ve taken time and care to describe—description is one of the entries into metaphor. If you keep a journal or a writer’s notebook, reread old entries. Circle recurring images, descriptions, or isolated words; if the entries are stored in a computer, you can even do a search to see how often a particular word or phrase occurs. This process can help you discover your inner “constellation of images,” the ruling passions that fuel your most original work. Too

What Rhymes with Therapy" is a unique self-help book that offers psychological guidance for depression, anxiety, grief, anger, trauma recovery, and relationship issues. The book’s distinction is that the guidance is written in the language of rhythm-and-rhyme poetry. Each poem comes complete with a full description of the therapeutic intervention and exercises that can be used to implement the ideas into real life.

What moves lives. What is said endures. There's nothing in life that's less real for having been well described. Small-minded critics point out that such-and-such poem, with its protracted cadences, in the end says merely that it's a nice day. But to say it's a nice day is difficult, and the nice day itself passes on. It's up to us to conserve the nice day in a wordy, florid memory, sprinkling new flowers and new stars over the fields and skies of the empty, fleeting outer world.

I didn’t know then that was a keeper, Just the keeper and no door, A keeper alluding to a door, Wondrous even easy to open, If you knew how, never using force. She offered me small side doors, meanwhile Opening into dank basements… When in the morning I awoke and you entered The constitution of thoughts That in infinite phrasings spelled out The enigmas to be solved, the sacrifices and gifts... I was guilty. Of not being able to reach For having aimed too straight at it the cloistered softness Of your heart… Of not being able to find The door that wasn’t there, the dreamed-of door That locked you away in goodness multiplied, Which even you, tired keeper, knew Was not there, but which even you dreamed of, Hoping that the keys the laborious virtue of my keys, could bring into existence what wasn’t there, for if only I had found out the right sound, the right combination of words, managed the right description, we might bother have entered into that invention. To finally discover pleasure has no doors and that if it does they’re wide open, and that we could have stayed outside both of us ill equipped and surrendering equally playing at doors and keys with me as the door and you as the keys.

Along with its unforgettable description of the eerie space this woman inhabits, the poem also locates her very precisely in time, offering two almost unique words which transport the reader into the exact moment of her sorrow. First is uhtcearu, a compound which means ‘sorrow before dawn’ or ‘grief at early morning’. In Old English uht is the name for the last part of the night, the empty chilly hours just before the dawn, an especially painful time for grief and loneliness (as well as other kinds of threat: the dragon in Beowulf is called an uhtfloga, a creature who flies before dawn). The word suggests the sting of waking to the memory of sorrow, or the anxiety of lying awake in the early morning, worrying over what the day will bring.

But it is the epic Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf that provides us with truly invaluable descriptions of the huge reptilian animals which, only 1400 years ago, infested Denmark and other parts of Europe,

The master said, ‘Learn about a pine tree from a pine tree, and about a bamboo stalk from a bamboo stalk.’ What he meant was that the poet should detach his mind from self… and enter into the object, sharing its delicate life and its feelings. Whereupon a poem forms itself. Description of the object is not enough: unless a poem contains feelings which have come from the object, the object and the poet’s self will be separate things.

Antropoesía is a process of discovery more than a confirmation of the already known. If one knows precisely where a poem is going before beginning to write there is no point in going further. The same can be said of thick description in ethnography where theory is to be discovered in the details. The details inspire theory rather than illustrate already formulated theory. Like an ethnographer, the antropoeta looks and looks, listens and listens, until she sees or hears what she did not apprehend at first.

Much of medieval literature is what Lewis, in one scholarly article, refers to as “traditional poetry.” Certain poems, such as the Iliad or the poems of Thomas Malory, are not individual acts of inspiration, but rather are more the works of a storyteller who, repeating the essential plot line, weaves new characters, themes, descriptions, or details into the basic outline he inherited, a kind of literary recycling. Lewis had analyzed, in particular, the Arthurian legends, which had been repeated, retold, translated, updated, and modified. Like a snowball rolling down a hill, they tended to become accumulations of the techniques and additions of all previous editions rather than a unique and unrepeatable literary vision. Lewis felt that critics in his age would dismiss an author as “derivative” and “unoriginal” who “merely” repeats what has been said before, or who does not invent his or her own personal style. But the greatest authors of the medieval period were just this: shapers, composers, and recyclers of old materials. Chaucer, Boccaccio, and Malory borrowed and translated, but also mended, updated, and altered. They wrote traditional poetry in the sense that they felt it their chief task to dress old stories in new garb. In other words, by adopting this medieval conception of the art of composition, Lewis could liberate himself from the need to be “original.

Colors" A long time ago our national IDs had the word “wheat” next to the “skin color” category… Some people’s colors were associated with olives and chocolate… Eye colors were described as honey and pistachio colored… There was also the chestnut-colored hair – all descriptions reminding us that we are gifts from the same source: Mother Nature’s womb! As for the racist West, it insists on reducing humanity and painting it with politicized colors of which only one color matters! As for other colors, they are made to be equivalent to nobodies and nothingness… They insist on turning this world into a snow-covered wasteland Into one blank page and no more… [Original poem published in Arabic on October 31, 2023 at ahewar.org]

With crystal chords I play love's very tune In soft falling rain that allays my wound

But non sequiturs abounded in ELIXIR’s patter for years after its creation, and its syntax was often incomprehensible, and its deployment of idioms was almost always incorrect. Metaphors were lost on it. It could not comprehend analogies. Sensory descriptions, the use of figurative language to describe a particular aspect of human existence, were far beyond its ken. The interpretation of a poem or a passage of descriptive prose would have been too much to ask of it. These skills—the ability to understand and paraphrase Keats’s idea of beauty as truth, or argue against Schopenhauer’s idea that the human being is forever subject to her own base instinct to survive, or explain any one of Nabokov’s

Shoot sparks of green and grey Through time

He has a box of things that are separate and strange I think when he looks this way and that That he is making a play for me I think in so many ways he does it all for me

I spent a long time falling toward your slender, tremulous face— a long time slipping through stars as they shattered, through sticky clouds with no confetti in them.

tonight the backyard is brutal in its twilit emptiness & I have put my lips on the glass of his face again so I won't be lonely & I have dressed to please him because it's too quiet here my hand alive in the cage of his an actual dandelion in the grass beside his sandal the mosquitoes grazing our ankles we should go inside he says as the pitchblack comes on again like arsenic over the glowing lawn

As I saw how powerful and affirming this ancient blessing could be, I decided it was time for Christian women to take back Proverbs 31. Somewhere along the way, we surrendered it to the same people who invented airbrushing and Auto-Tune and Rachel Ray. We abandoned the meaning of the poem by focusing on the specifics, and it became just another impossible standard by which to measure our failures. We turned an anthem into an assignment, a poem into a job description.

The Provider Several crows were lined up along the ridge of a quite ordinary house. 'These ridge poles are a good idea,' said a young one. 'Who dreamed it up?' 'This place of rest is a fortuitous gift from the moon,' said a raven who was mixing with the hoi polloi today. 'The moon is a relative of the roc, a distant cousin of mine. Believe me,' he said, stretching his wings out to their full advantage and pushing the crows at the end off balance, so several leaped into the wind and cried, 'caw' . . . 'it depends on your original stock. I've got a piece of the roc.' The moon rose spectral and drained, a gossamer imprint of her nighttime self, a reminder of crystal fracture, the load of swinging primitive stones, the ancient hairy arms with slingshots. A sudden explosion and the sky was defined with flapping and cawing. 'What was that?' cried the young one who was addicted to awe. 'Who knows?' replied the raven. 'Often the moon demands a sacrifice. As a close relative, it is now my duty to go and eat the meat. For it is said, nothing is wasted; nothing is without purpose.' And the raven rose and flew toward the hunters.

Discussion of translations of poetry usually confuses kind with value. One type of translation is thought to be intrinsically superior to others, be it free translation, close translation, poetry after, imitation, metaphrase, paraphrase, etc. In the critic’s mind, the quality of a translation often depends on how closely it conforms to his own preferred method. This error of descriptive rather than evaluative criticism—where kind determines value—probably occurs more often in regard to poetry in translation than in any other form of literary criticism. But in the end, method is secondary, and determines neither the virtues nor sins of a poem. The translator need only clearly and honestly indicate his method—whatever it is—and then be judged, not on this choice, but on the quality of the new poem. If the new poem is good, the translator as artist will be performing his ancient function of retelling, in his own form, a given content he has overheard from the immediate or the distant past.

The good poem is implicitly philosophical. The not so good poem, conversely, may exquisitely describe a tree or loneliness, but if the description does not suggest an attitude toward nature, or human nature, we are left with a kind of dentist office art — devoted to decoration and the status quo.

There’s a W. H. Auden poem called “Musée des Beaux Arts,” written in December 1938, just after Kristallnacht. In it is a description of a painting by Brueghel, in which the old master depicts Icarus falling from the sky while everyone else, involved in other things or simply not wanting to know, “turns away / quite leisurely from the disaster” and goes about daily tasks. I thought about that poem a lot over the next few days of the fair as I chatted about books, kept my appointments, and ate frankfurters off cardboard-thin crackers. The poem begins, “About suffering they were never wrong, / The Old Masters: how well they understood / Its human position; how it takes place / While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along.

As a result there are many descriptions, mainly hostile, of the furious Marx in action. Bauer’s brother even wrote a poem about him: ‘Dark fellow from Trier in fury raging, / His evil fist is clenched, he roars interminably, / As though ten thousand devils had him by the hair.