Wedding Poems And Quotes

Like a child who saves their favourite food on the plate for last, I try to save all thoughts of you for the end of the day so I can dream with the taste of you on my tongue.

when we were kids laying around the lawn on our bellies we often talked about how we'd like to die and we all agreed on the same thing; we'd all like to die fucking (although none of us had done any fucking) and now that we are hardly kids any longer we think more about how not to die and although we're ready most of us would prefer to do it alone under the sheets now that most of us have fucked our lives away.

who knows if the moon's a balloon,coming out of a keen city in the sky--filled with pretty people? ( and if you and I should get into it,if they should take me and take you into their balloon, why then we'd go up higher with all the pretty people than houses and steeples and clouds: go sailing away and away sailing into a keen city which nobody's ever visited,where always it's Spring)and everyone's in love and flowers pick themselves

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat...I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

LOVE COULD BE LABLED POISON AND WE’D DRINK IT ANYWAYS.

On Writing: Aphorisms and Ten-Second Essays 1. A beginning ends what an end begins. 2. The despair of the blank page: it is so full. 3. In the head Art’s not democratic. I wait a long time to be a writer good enough even for myself. 4. The best time is stolen time. 5. All work is the avoidance of harder work. 6. When I am trying to write I turn on music so I can hear what is keeping me from hearing. 7. I envy music for being beyond words. But then, every word is beyond music. 8. Why would we write if we’d already heard what we wanted to hear? 9. The poem in the quarterly is sure to fail within two lines: flaccid, rhythmless, hopelessly dutiful. But I read poets from strange languages with freedom and pleasure because I can believe in all that has been lost in translation. Though all works, all acts, all languages are already translation. 10. Writer: how books read each other. 11. Idolaters of the great need to believe that what they love cannot fail them, adorers of camp, kitsch, trash that they cannot fail what they love. 12. If I didn’t spend so much time writing, I’d know a lot more. But I wouldn’t know anything. 13. If you’re Larkin or Bishop, one book a decade is enough. If you’re not? More than enough. 14. Writing is like washing windows in the sun. With every attempt to perfect clarity you make a new smear. 15. There are silences harder to take back than words. 16. Opacity gives way. Transparency is the mystery. 17. I need a much greater vocabulary to talk to you than to talk to myself. 18. Only half of writing is saying what you mean. The other half is preventing people from reading what they expected you to mean. 19. Believe stupid praise, deserve stupid criticism. 20. Writing a book is like doing a huge jigsaw puzzle, unendurably slow at first, almost self-propelled at the end. Actually, it’s more like doing a puzzle from a box in which several puzzles have been mixed. Starting out, you can’t tell whether a piece belongs to the puzzle at hand, or one you’ve already done, or will do in ten years, or will never do. 21. Minds go from intuition to articulation to self-defense, which is what they die of. 22. The dead are still writing. Every morning, somewhere, is a line, a passage, a whole book you are sure wasn’t there yesterday. 23. To feel an end is to discover that there had been a beginning. A parenthesis closes that we hadn’t realized was open). 24. There, all along, was what you wanted to say. But this is not what you wanted, is it, to have said it?

How is it that there was never you until there was and then all was you?

She had more of me then I had of myself. We were both wild birds chasing the stars. We’d lose our way and find new places, close our eyes and fall back towards a constellation of dreams. We wrapped ourselves in a blanket of passion and each night we fell deeper without control, into this strange space called love.

Be there a picnic for the devil, an orgy for the satyr, and a wedding for the bride.

More or Less Love Poems #11: No babe We'd never Swing together but the syncopation would be something wild

Up then, fair phoenix bride, frustrate the sun; Thyself from thine affection Takest warmth enough, and from thine eye All lesser birds will take their jollity. Up, up, fair bride, and call Thy stars from out their several boxes, take Thy rubies, pearls, and diamonds forth, and make Thyself a constellation of them all; And by their blazing signify That a great princess falls, but doth not die. Be thou a new star, that to us portends Ends of much wonder; and be thou those ends.

We’re only instruments of love, flowing through heaps of pain hoping one day we’d hatch a passion of our own.

Let us remember to always rediscover one another because we are forever changing.

Isn't it funny? How the cold numbs everything but grief. If we could light up the room with pain, we'd be such a glorious fire.

I sit in the sky like a sphinx misunderstood; My heart of snow is wed to the whiteness of swans; I hate the movement that displaces the rigid lines, With lips untaught neither tears nor laughter do I know.

What a terrifyingly beautiful thought that you are the beginning of forever. I love you, and life for me has just begun.

We writers are the worst kind of cruel, Because we worship our own stories and poems, And what human can compete with metaphors? Writers stand still and yet vacate our homes Inside our fantasies. We are word-whores, With libidos and egos of balsa wood. We’d have sex with our books, if only we could.

All I need to do is place my pen against paper and your love writes for me.

Love, they said, burns you and builds you. But with you, there’s no ash. Just light.

life is first boredom, then fear. whether or not we use it, it goes, and leaves what something hidden from us chose, and age, and then the only end of age.

Here lies a she sun, and a he moon there; She gives the best light to his sphere; Or each is both, and all, and so They unto one another nothing owe; And yet they do, but are So just and rich in that coin which they pay, That neither would, nor needs forbear, nor stay; Neither desires to be spared nor to spare. They quickly pay their debt, and then Take no acquittances, but pay again; They pay, they give, they lend, and so let fall No such occasion to be liberal. More truth, more courage in these two do shine, Than all thy turtles have and sparrows, Valentine.

I fell in love and then I became love.

A bride, before a "Good-night" could be said, Should vanish from her clothes into her bed, As souls from bodies steal, and are not spied. But now she's laid; what though she be? Yet there are more delays, for where is he? He comes and passeth through sphere after sphere; First her sheets, then her arms, then anywhere. Let not this day, then, but this night be thine; Thy day was but the eve to this, O Valentine.

A Second Childhood.” When all my days are ending And I have no song to sing, I think that I shall not be too old To stare at everything; As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and a swing. Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs On all my sins and me, Because He does not take away The terror from the tree And stones still shine along the road That are and cannot be. Men grow too old for love, my love, Men grow too old for wine, But I shall not grow too old to see Unearthly daylight shine, Changing my chamber’s dust to snow Till I doubt if it be mine. Behold, the crowning mercies melt, The first surprises stay; And in my dross is dropped a gift For which I dare not pray: That a man grow used to grief and joy But not to night and day. Men grow too old for love, my love, Men grow too old for lies; But I shall not grow too old to see Enormous night arise, A cloud that is larger than the world And a monster made of eyes. Nor am I worthy to unloose The latchet of my shoe; Or shake the dust from off my feet Or the staff that bears me through On ground that is too good to last, Too solid to be true. Men grow too old to woo, my love, Men grow too old to wed; But I shall not grow too old to see Hung crazily overhead Incredible rafters when I wake And I find that I am not dead. A thrill of thunder in my hair: Though blackening clouds be plain, Still I am stung and startled By the first drop of the rain: Romance and pride and passion pass And these are what remain. Strange crawling carpets of the grass, Wide windows of the sky; So in this perilous grace of God With all my sins go I: And things grow new though I grow old, Though I grow old and die.

Both sides need to come out of this looking like your little slap-fight at the wedding was some homoerotic frat bro mishap, okay? So, you can hate the heir too the throne all you want, write mean poems about him in your diary, but the minute you see a camera, you act like the sun shines out of his dick, and you make it convincing.

We sat grown quiet at the name of love; We saw the last embers of daylight die, And in the trembling blue-green of the sky A moon, worn as if it had been a shell Washed by time's waters as they rose and fell About the stars and broke in days and years. I had a thought for no one's but your ears: That you were beautiful, and that I strove To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we'd grown As weary-hearted as that hollow moon

Why didn't you write all this time? Did you not remember us in a song? A dance? In the skies littered with stars? Did you not get drunk? Why didn’t you write all this time? Did you not remember us in a film? A book? In idyllic dusks and dawns? Did you not get high? It is good that you didn't. For all is well. I am drunk and dazed. I have already forgotten you and your bewitching ways.

Whenever you keep score in love, you lose.

Take me when I'm wild. Take me when I'm free. Take me for me and I will take you as you want to be.

Remember that time you made the wish? I make a lot of wishes. The time I lied to you about the butterfly. I always wondered what you wished for. What do you think I wished for? I don't know. That I'd come back, that we'd somehow be together in the end. I wished for what I always wish for. I wished for another poem.

Like a Wife The week before my wedding, my friend's dad said: just don't get fat, like other wives do. And so I brined him in a deep salt bath, added thyme and celery. Devoured him whole, in one big bite, so he could see just how hungry a woman can be.

Do You Believe Do you believe that I have loved you since the dawn of time? Do you believe that we were destined to be intertwined?...

The Beat Generation, that was a vision that we had, John Clellon Holmes and I, and Allen Ginsberg in an even wilder way, in the late forties, of a generation of crazy, illuminated hipsters suddenly rising and roaming America, serious, bumming and hitchhiking everywhere, ragged, beatific, beautiful in an ugly graceful new way--a vision gleaned from the way we had heard the word 'beat' spoken on streetcorners on Times Square and in the Village, in other cities in the downtown city night of postwar America--beat, meaning down and out but full of intense conviction--We'd even heard old 1910 Daddy Hipsters of the streets speak the word that way, with a melancholy sneer--It never meant juvenile delinquents, it meant characters of a special spirituality who didn't gang up but were solitary Bartlebies staring out the dead wall window of our civilization--the subterraneans heroes who'd finally turned from the 'freedom' machine of the West and were taking drugs, digging bop, having flashes of insight, experiencing the 'derangement of the senses,' talking strange, being poor and glad, prophesying a new style for American culture, a new style (we thought), a new incantation--The same thing was almost going on in the postwar France of Sartre and Genet and what's more we knew about it--But as to the actual existence of a Beat Generation, chances are it was really just an idea in our minds--We'd stay up 24 hours drinking cup after cup of black coffee, playing record after record of Wardell Gray, Lester Young, Dexter Gordon, Willie Jackson, Lennie Tristano and all the rest, talking madly about that holy new feeling out there in the streets- -We'd write stories about some strange beatific Negro hepcat saint with goatee hitchhiking across Iowa with taped up horn bringing the secret message of blowing to other coasts, other cities, like a veritable Walter the Penniless leading an invisible First Crusade- -We had our mystic heroes and wrote, nay sung novels about them, erected long poems celebrating the new 'angels' of the American underground--In actuality there was only a handful of real hip swinging cats and what there was vanished mightily swiftly during the Korean War when (and after) a sinister new kind of efficiency appeared in America, maybe it was the result of the universalization of Television and nothing else (the Polite Total Police Control of Dragnet's 'peace' officers) but the beat characters after 1950 vanished into jails and madhouses, or were shamed into silent conformity, the generation itself was shortlived and small in number.

A Song I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here. I wish you sat on the sofa and I sat near. The handkerchief could be yours, the tear could be mine, chin-bound. Though it could be, of course, the other way around. I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here. I wish we were in my car and you'd shift the gear. We'd find ourselves elsewhere, on an unknown shore. Or else we'd repair to where we've been before. I wish you were here, dear, I wish you were here. I wish I knew no astronomy when stars appear, when the moon skims the water that sighs and shifts in its slumber. I wish it were still a quarter to dial your number. I wish you were here, dear, in this hemisphere, as I sit on the porch sipping a beer. It's evening, the sun is setting; boys shout and gulls are crying. What's the point of forgetting if it's followed by dying?

Like a pair of old slippers, I feel comfort and warmth as I slip into you. No, that is too crude. Like the match to the wick, I ignite when we touch. My counterpart and life's purpose. Yes, as though I've known you my whole life. Every scar, every failure has become an affirmation of what should be: You. Yes, as though I've loved you my whole life.

What is this love that makes me see beauty, and makes every beautiful thing bring you back to me? What is this love that makes me declare 'I love you' even though I uttered it only a moment ago? What is this love that keeps growing even when my chest is sore and it hurts to love you any more? Tell me: How am I to find what this love is when it was the one to find you, me, this verse, and this universe?

Do You Believe ...on this road of life on this day I take you now husband and wife...

I can sense your love, why leave me in darkness? Beguile me for your amusement, stealing my soul without kisses. You are the sun and I, the moon. Your beauty is reflected in my eyes. When we are apart, I am extinguished in the blackness of these skies.

We are the memory keepers and the trappers of time; stealers of stolen glances and breathless lungs from all that have been taken away. We are the noticers of subtle signs hidden in plain sight by a benevolent universe bigger than we'd ever believe...We are the directionless wanderers and the destinationless travelers and we are the crumpled map that never got packed to join us. We are the cinematic lovers and the translucent curtains saturated in light. The soundtrack to the moments without sounds and the swiftness that two bodies can become one in the stillness of a second. We, says the last string pulled out, the final string that kept it all together, balled up tight, filling us after all this time, We, are the chasers of the light.

Red Fox The red fox crosses the ice intent on none of my business. It's winter and slim pickings. I stand in the bushy cemetery, pretending to watch birds, but really watching the fox who could care less. She pauses on the sheer glare of the pond. She knows I'm there, sniffs me in the wind at her shoulder. If I had a gun or dog or a raw heart, she'd smell it. She didn't get this smart for nothing. She's a lean vixen: I can see the ribs, the sly trickster's eyes, filled with longing and desperation, the skinny feet, adept at lies. Why encourage the notion of virtuous poverty? It's only an excuse for zero charity. Hunger corrupts, and absolute hunger corrupts absolutely, or almost. Of course there are mothers, squeezing their breasts dry, pawning their bodies, shedding teeth for their children, or that's our fond belief. But remember - Hansel and Gretel were dumped in the forest because their parents were starving. Sauve qui peut. To survive we'd all turn thief and rascal, or so says the fox, with her coat of an elegant scoundrel, her white knife of a smile, who knows just where she's going: to steal something that doesn't belong to her - some chicken, or one more chance, or other life.

I don’t know why we fight. It takes much too effort to stay mad at you. To dodge your skin in the hallway and leave the kitchen without bringing you a treat. It takes much too effort to stare at the sink so my eyes don’t smile at you in the mirror. It takes much too effort to look away as we undress and lie apart in the now bigger bed. It takes much too effort to stiffen my body because sleepy limbs forget fights and pride is always lost in dreams. It takes much too effort to awaken every hour to make sure we are islands with a gulf of white sheets separating us. I dread the light peeking through the parted curtains and empathise with your groans — I didn’t get any sleep either. I really don’t know why we fight. It takes much too effort to stay mad at one another when it’s so easy for us to love.

A Rock, A River, A Tree Hosts to species long since departed, Mark the mastodon. The dinosaur, who left dry tokens Of their sojourn here On our planet floor, Any broad alarm of their of their hastening doom Is lost in the gloom of dust and ages. But today, the Rock cries out to us, clearly, forcefully, Come, you may stand upon my Back and face your distant destiny, But seek no haven in my shadow. I will give you no hiding place down here. You, created only a little lower than The angels, have crouched too long in The bruising darkness, Have lain too long Face down in ignorance. Your mouths spelling words Armed for slaughter. The rock cries out today, you may stand on me, But do not hide your face. Across the wall of the world, A river sings a beautiful song, Come rest here by my side. Each of you a bordered country, Delicate and strangely made proud, Yet thrusting perpetually under siege. Your armed struggles for profit Have left collars of waste upon My shore, currents of debris upon my breast. Yet, today I call you to my riverside, If you will study war no more. Come, clad in peace and I will sing the songs The Creator gave to me when I And the tree and stone were one. Before cynicism was a bloody sear across your brow And when you yet knew you still knew nothing. The river sings and sings on. There is a true yearning to respond to The singing river and the wise rock. So say the Asian, the Hispanic, the Jew, The African and Native American, the Sioux, The Catholic, the Muslim, the French, the Greek, The Irish, the Rabbi, the Priest, the Sheikh, The Gay, the Straight, the Preacher, The privileged, the homeless, the teacher. They hear. They all hear The speaking of the tree. Today, the first and last of every tree Speaks to humankind. Come to me, here beside the river. Plant yourself beside me, here beside the river. Each of you, descendant of some passed on Traveller, has been paid for. You, who gave me my first name, You Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, You Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, Then forced on bloody feet, Left me to the employment of other seekers-- Desperate for gain, starving for gold. You, the Turk, the Swede, the German, the Scot... You the Ashanti, the Yoruba, the Kru, Bought, sold, stolen, arriving on a nightmare Praying for a dream. Here, root yourselves beside me. I am the tree planted by the river, Which will not be moved. I, the rock, I the river, I the tree I am yours--your passages have been paid. Lift up your faces, you have a piercing need For this bright morning dawning for you. History, despite its wrenching pain, Cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, Need not be lived again. Lift up your eyes upon The day breaking for you. Give birth again To the dream. Women, children, men, Take it into the palms of your hands. Mold it into the shape of your most Private need. Sculpt it into The image of your most public self. Lift up your hearts. Each new hour holds new chances For new beginnings. Do not be wedded forever To fear, yoked eternally To brutishness. The horizon leans forward, Offering you space to place new steps of change. Here, on the pulse of this fine day You may have the courage To look up and out upon me, The rock, the river, the tree, your country. No less to Midas than the mendicant. No less to you now than the mastodon then. Here on the pulse of this new day You may have the grace to look up and out And into your sister's eyes, Into your brother's face, your country And say simply Very simply With hope Good morning.

I squatted by the water as it flowed over the tumbled rocks, thought how far they must've come to have settled in the concrete channel, the stream clear and melodious, the smell of fresh water. I didn't want to think about my mother anymore. I'd rather think about the way the willows and the cottonwoods and palms broke their way through the concrete, growing right out of the flood control channel, how the river struggled to re-establish itself. A little silt was carried down, settled. A seed dropped into it, sprouted. Little roots shot downward. The next thing you had trees, shrubs, birds. My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean.

Sauve qui peut. To survive we’d all turn thief and rascal, or so says the fox, with her coat of an elegant scoundrel, her white knife of a smile, who knows just where she’s going: to steal something that doesn’t belong to her - some chicken, or one more chance, or other life.

Does God know the number of kisses before we fall in love? Yesterday, I was nobody and I believed myself important. Today, I feel my worth in you. You, with your emerald eyes and ebony hair, even your heartbeat is beautiful. You, who is my greatest joy, all other concerns vanish in your presence. You swallow time and consume space, inspiring all my passion with a single embrace. I love your existence.

Briefly (Vladimir Nabokov) caught the (Superman) fever too, composing a poem, now lost, on the the Man of Steel's wedding night.

When someone asks for the secret to a happy marriage, remember you don't know. This is not a happy ending. This is not a fairy tale. This is the beginning of a life you haven't met.

It was then we found ourselves too many fields away from where we'd meant to be, with regard to desire, to get there ever, even if—though this was not the case—we'd been told the way.

Do your work, I tell myself. And after? Find a patch of lawn and sit down and hug your knees to your chest and let everything you’ve ever been told and everything you’ve ever seen mingle together in a show just for you, your own eye-popping pageant of existence, your own twelve-thousand-line epic poem. The tickle of the grass on your thighs, the sky moving over you, sunless or blue, echoes from a homily or a wedding toast or a letter your grandmother sent. Remember something good, a sunburn you liked the feeling of, a plate of homemade pasta. Do your work, Kelly. Then lean back. Rest from the striving to reduce. Like the padre said, life is a mystery to be lived. Live your mystery.

If you know that youth is dying on the run and my daughter trades dope stories with your son we'd better see what all our fearing and our jeering and our crying and our lying brought about. Take Time Out.

Reminiscing in the drizzle of Portland, I notice the ring that’s landed on your finger, a massive insect of glitter, a chandelier shining at the end of a long tunnel. Thirteen years ago, you hid the hurt in your voice under a blanket and said there’s two kinds of women—those you write poems about and those you don’t. It’s true. I never brought you a bouquet of sonnets, or served you haiku in bed. My idea of courtship was tapping Jane’s Addiction lyrics in Morse code on your window at three A.M., whiskey doing push-ups on my breath. But I worked within the confines of my character, cast as the bad boy in your life, the Magellan of your dark side. We don’t have a past so much as a bunch of electricity and liquor, power never put to good use. What we had together makes it sound like a virus, as if we caught one another like colds, and desire was merely a symptom that could be treated with soup and lots of sex. Gliding beside you now, I feel like the Benjamin Franklin of monogamy, as if I invented it, but I’m still not immune to your waterfall scent, still haven’t developed antibodies for your smile. I don’t know how long regret existed before humans stuck a word on it. I don’t know how many paper towels it would take to wipe up the Pacific Ocean, or why the light of a candle being blown out travels faster than the luminescence of one that’s just been lit, but I do know that all our huffing and puffing into each other’s ears—as if the brain was a trick birthday candle—didn’t make the silence any easier to navigate. I’m sorry all the kisses I scrawled on your neck were written in disappearing ink. Sometimes I thought of you so hard one of your legs would pop out of my ear hole, and when I was sleeping, you’d press your face against the porthole of my submarine. I’m sorry this poem has taken thirteen years to reach you. I wish that just once, instead of skidding off the shoulder blade’s precipice and joyriding over flesh, we’d put our hands away like chocolate to be saved for later, and deciphered the calligraphy of each other’s eyelashes, translated a paragraph from the volumes of what couldn’t be said.

Allow this poem to carry you beyond yourself, transcending your mortal flesh as you wed yourself with the potentially infinite.

Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces.

I've written you sixty-seven love poems. Here’s another one for you. But really, for me. These poems are the candles that I light with the fire you have ignited in me. I place this candle here and another there so even if the stars have argued with the moon and are sulking away in a corner, you can still find your way to me. Sixty-eight poems now. What does the future hold for us? Joy? Disappointment? Gentle caresses? And subtle neglect? I hope the good is more than the bad. Much more. For what is the point of love if by lighting these candles our own flame loses its brightness? I know the good is more than the bad. Much more. I cannot wait to write you sixty-nine.

It's not the concept of marriage I have a problem with. I'd like to get married too. A couple times. It's the actual wedding that pisses me off. The problem is that everyone who gets married seems to think that they are the first person in the entire universe to do it, and that the year leading up to the event revolves entirely around them. You have to throw them showers, bachelorette weekends, buy a bridesmaid dress, and then buy a ticket to some godforsaken town wherever they decide to drag you. If you're really unlucky, they'll ask you to recite a poem at their wedding. That's just what I want to do- monitor my drinking until I'm done with my public service announcement. And what do we get out of it, you ask? A dry piece of chicken and a roll in the hay with their hillbilly cousin. I could get that at home, thanks. Then they have the audacity to go shopping and pick out their own gifts. I want to know who the first person was who said this was okay. After spending all that money on a bachelorette weekend, a shower, and often a flight across the country, they expect you to go to Williams Sonoma or Pottery Barn and do research? Then they send you a thank-you note applauding you for such a thoughtful gift. They're the one who picked it out! I always want to remind the person that absolutely no thought went into typing in a name and having a salad bowl come up.

The book was called But Even So, and the poem had gone like this: “Come now, my child, if we were planning to harm you, do you think we’d be lurking here beside the path in the very darkest part of the forest?

I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently. I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

I didn't want to wait on my knees In a room made quiet by waiting. A room where we'd listen for the rise Of breath, the burble in his throat. I didn't want the orchids or the trays Of food meant to fortify that silence, Or to pray for him to stay or to go then Finally toward that ecstatic light. I didn't want to believe What we believe in those rooms: That we are blessed, letting go, Letting someone, anyone, Drag open the drapes and heave us Back into our blinding, bright lives.

Invitation to Eternity Say, wilt thou go with me, sweet maid, Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me Through the valley-depths of shade, Of bright and dark obscurity; Where the path has lost its way, Where the sun forgets the day, Where there's nor light nor life to see, Sweet maiden, wilt thou go with me? Where stones will turn to flooding streams, Where plains will rise like ocean's waves, Where life will fade like visioned dreams And darkness darken into caves, Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me Through this sad non-identity Where parents live and are forgot, And sisters live and know us not? Say, maiden, wilt thou go with me In this strange death of life to be, To live in death and be the same, Without this life or home or name, At once to be and not to be— That was and is not—yet to see Things pass like shadows, and the sky Above, below, around us lie? The land of shadows wilt thou trace, Nor look nor know each other's face; The present marred with reason gone, And past and present both as one? Say, maiden, can thy life be led To join the living and the dead? Then trace thy footsteps on with me: We are wed to one eternity.

Later, after we’d brought her home, after we’d settled into all the new rhythms of a family of four, Meg and I were skin to skin and she said: I’ve never been more in love with you than in that moment. Really? Really. She jotted some thoughts in a kind of journal. Which she shared. I read them as a love poem. I read them as a testament, a renewal of our vows. I read them as a citation, a remembrance, a proclamation. I read them as a decree. She said: That was everything. She said: That is a man. My love. She said: That is not a Spare.

Tomorrow is a mystery, today is a gift from God. Without the dark we'd never see the stars. -In the Lydian Mode

I wanted to see how deep a hole we’d make in the heart of the water, how far can we get away from the mind of God.

remember me as of ages ago and days gone long, When we’d go off at a tangent along; Thy page- dyed pieces among The rest I have known a poem.

- You’re going to the wedding, apparently. - I’m reading a poem at the wedding [of his to be ex husband]

As for her mother's tears: ridiculous, and yet mothers weep at their daughters' weddings, everyone knows that, though for whose youth one cannot say. [from 'Morning']

manful potency as masterful kissers requires fecundity with voluminous whiskers

There will be conversations for these two, and bright-rimmed goblets and a walled garden with tall pines. The wedding will last for years.

These things matter to me, Daniel, says the man with six days to live. They are sitting on the porch in the last light. These things matter to me, son. The way the hawks huddle their shoulders angrily against hissing snow. Wrens whirring in the bare bones of bushes in winter. The way swallows and swifts veer and whirl and swim and slice and carve and curve and swerve. The way that frozen dew outlines every blade of grass. Salmonberries thimbleberries cloudberries snowberries elderberries salalberries gooseberries. My children learning to read. My wife's voice velvet in my ear at night in the dark under the covers. Her hair in my nose as we slept curled like spoons. The sinuous pace of rivers and minks and cats. Fresh bread with too much butter. My children's hands when they cup my face in their hands. Toys. Exuberance. Mowing the lawn. Tiny wrenches and screwdrivers. Tears of sorrow, which are the salt sea of the heart. Sleep in every form from doze to bone-weary. Pay stubs. Trains. The shivering ache of a saxophone and the yearning of a soprano. Folding laundry hot from the dryer. A spotless kitchen floor. The sound of bagpipes. The way horses smell in spring. Red wines. Furnaces. Stone walls. Sweat. Postcards on which the sender has written so much that he or she can barely squeeze in the signature. Opera on the radio. Bathrobes, back rubs. Potatoes. Mink oil on boots. The bands at wedding receptions. Box-elder bugs. The postman's grin. Linen table napkins. Tent flaps. The green sifting powdery snow of cedar pollen on my porch every year. Raccoons. The way a heron labors through the sky with such a vast elderly dignity. The cheerful ears of dogs. Smoked fish and the smokehouses where fish are smoked. The way barbers sweep up circles of hair after a haircut. Handkerchiefs. Poems read aloud by poets. Cigar-scissors. Book marginalia written with the lightest possible pencil as if the reader is whispering to the writer. People who keep dead languages alive. Fresh-mown lawns. First-basemen's mitts. Dish-racks. My wife's breasts. Lumber. Newspapers folded under arms. Hats. The way my children smelled after their baths when they were little. Sneakers. The way my father's face shone right after he shaved. Pants that fit. Soap half gone. Weeds forcing their way through sidewalks. Worms. The sound of ice shaken in drinks. Nutcrackers. Boxing matches. Diapers. Rain in every form from mist to sluice. The sound of my daughters typing their papers for school. My wife's eyes, as blue and green and gray as the sea. The sea, as blue and green and gray as her eyes. Her eyes. Her.

We scoffed at the kids who weren't like us, the ones who already talked about careers, or bliddy mortgages and pensions. Kids wanting to be old before they were young. Kids wanting to be dead before they'd lived. They were digging their own graves, building the walls of their own damn jails. Us, we hung to our youth. We were footloose, fancy free. We said we'd never grow boring and old. We plundered charity shops for vintage clothes. We bought battered Levis and gorgeous faded velvet stuff from Attica in High Bridge. We wore coloured boots, hemp scarves from Gaia. We read Baudelaire and Byron. We read our poems to each other. We wrote songs and posted them on YouTube. We formed bands. We talked of the amazing journeys we'd take together once school was done. Sometimes we paired off, made couples that lasted for a little while, but the group was us. We hung together. We could say anything to each other. We loved each other.

Then my biggest concern," he was saying, "are the nightmares I'm going to have about all the morgue poems you're going to write. The murder poems. The I made this poison for you, poor swain poems -" "I have layers," I reminded him. "What if all my poems were about my grandmother?" "You have a grandmother?" "I didn't spring whole from the head of Zeus." "Scary. Pass." "Kittens, then," I said. We had made it to the steps of my lecture hall. "I could write about kittens. Tulips. My future wedding -" "Completely terrifying." I squeezed his elbow. I adored him.

I don’t have time to write about the soul. There are bodies to count. There’s a man wearing his wedding tuxedo to sleep in case I meet God and there’s a brick of light before each bombing.

Wedding Hymn Father, within Thy House today We wait Thy kindly love to see; Since thou hast said in truth that they Who dwell in love are one with Thee, Bless those who for Thy blessing wait, Their love accept and consecrate. Dear Lord of love, whose Heart of Fire, So full of pity for our sin, Was once in that Divine Desire Broken, Thy Bride to woo and win: Look down and bless them from above And keep their hearts alight with love. Blest Spirit, who with life and light Didst quicken chaos to Thy praise, Whose energy, in sin's despite, Still lifts our nature up to grace; Bless those who here in troth consent. Creator, crown Thy Sacrament. Great One in Three, of Whom are named All families in earth and heaven, Hear us, who have Thy promise claimed, And let a wealth of grace be given; Grant them in life and death to be Each knit to each, and both to Thee.

Agapanthus and peonies in June. Scented stock and sweet peas in July. Sunflowers and sweet William in August. By the time September's oriental lilies and ornamental cabbages appeared, she wasn't hiding upstairs in the workroom anymore. She was spending more time in the shop, answering the phone, dealing with the customers. One Sunday she spent the afternoon at an allotment belonging to a friend of Ciara's, picking lamb's ear and dusty miller and veronica for a wedding, and didn't think about Michael once, but she kept remembering a Patrick Kavanagh poem she'd learned at school, the one about how every old man he saw reminded him of his father.

And no matter what closet we were thrown in, up what river we were sold for an embarrassment, or worse, traded for a bottle of gin-- we’d carry on in playful stitches, friends ‘til the end…which came sooner than wished.

These were not the promises you once made Me in a warming tone, these are not what you bade My wretchedness to hope for, but a happy marriage, Longed-for wedding songs, everything The errant breezes have scattered vain. May no woman now believe a man when he makes a promise, May no woman hope the words of her man are true. While their minds are desirous, desperate to obtain something, They are afraid of swearing nothing, There is nothing they won’t promise. (Poem 64, lines 139–46)

Epithalamium Without silence there would be no music. Life paired is doubtless more difficult than solitary existence - just as a boat on the open sea with outstretched sails is trickier to steer than the same boat drowsing at a dock, but schooners after all are meant for wind and motion, not idleness and impassive quiet. A conversation continued through the years includes hours of anxiety, anger, even hatred, but also compassion, deep feeling. Only in marriage do love and time, eternal enemies, join forces. Only love and time, when reconciled, permit us to see other beings in their enigmatic, complex essence, unfolding slowly and certainly, like a new settlement in a valley, or among green hills. In begins from one day only, from joy and pledges, from the holy day of meeting, which is like a moist grain; then come the years of trial and labor, sometimes despair, fierce revelation, happiness and finally a great tree with rich greenery grows over us, casting its vast shadow. Cares vanish in it.

More Important Than Truth (The Sonnet) In the beginning even I was, Bedazzled by the concept of truth. It took me some time to, Step across the lure of truth. That is when I realized that, Every brain creates its own truth. So we'd never achieve harmony, With the heartless pursuit of truth. Understanding the definition of truth, May differ from person to person. But the virtues of basic goodness, Need no divisive interpretation. Always place love first, truth second. Humanity first, intelligence second!

[A translation into English of a poem Elisabeth wrote two weeks after her wedding] Oh, had I but never left the path That would have led me to freedom. Oh, that on the broad avenues Of vanity I had never strayed! I have awakened in a dungeon, With chains on my hands. And my longing ever stronger- And freedom! You, turned from me! I have awakened from a rapture, Which held my spirit captive, And vainly do I curse this exchange, In which I gambled away you -freedom!- away. The Reluctant Empress, Chapter 2

slap-fight at the wedding was some homoerotic frat bro mishap, okay? So, you can hate the heir to the throne all you want, write mean poems about him in your diary, but the minute you see a camera, you act like the sun shines out of his dick, and you make it convincing.

And I knew that in spite of all the roses and kisses and restaurant dinners a man showered on a woman before he married her, what he secretly wanted when the wedding service ended was for her to flatten out underneath his feet like Mrs. Willard's kitchen mat. Hadn't my own mother told me that as soon as she and my father left Reno on their honeymoon—my father had been married before, so he needed a divorce—my father said to her, "Whew, that's a relief, now we can stop pretending and be ourselves?"—and from that day on my mother never had a minute's peace. I also remembered Buddy Willard saying in a sinister, knowing way that after I had children I would feel differently, I wouldn't want to write poems any more. So I began to think maybe it was true that when you were married and had children it was like being brainwashed, and afterward you went about numb as a slave in some private, totalitarian state.

We'd all like to see our poems walking alone in the world. Like children reared to be independent adults. Some parents raise a child conservatively (that is, with no exposure to the darker things awaiting them beyond the door), but you can see how that's a mistake right? There's no way to know how best to prepare a child for the future. No way to know how to write a publishable poem -- I'm not saying safe poems don't get published. Or that sheltered children can't succeed. Just that you write the best poems you can and send them out. Sometimes they return home weeping. Sometimes they make their own way.

We’d like a list of what we lost Think of those who landed in the Atlantic The sharkiest of waters Bonnetheads and thrashers Spinners and blacktips We are made of so much water Bodies of water Bodies walking upright on the mud at the bottom The mud they must call nighttime Oh there was some survival Life After life on the Atlantic—this present grief So old we see through it So thick we can touch it And Jesus said of his wound Go on, touch it I don’t have the reach I’m not qualified I can’t swim or walk or handle a hoe I can’t kill a man Or write it down A list of what we lost The history of the wound The history of the wound That somebody bought them That somebody brought them To the shore of Virginia and then Inland Into the land of cliché I’d rather know their faces Their names My love yes you Whether you pray or not If I knew your name I’d ask you to help me Imagine even a single tooth I’d ask you to write that down But there’s not enough ink I’d like to write a list of what we lost. Think of those who landed in the Atlantic, Think of life after life on the Atlantic— Sweet Jesus. A grief so thick I could touch it. And Jesus said of his wound, Go on, touch it. But I don’t have the reach. I’m not qualified. And you? How’s your reach? Are you qualified? Don’t you know the history of the wound? Here is the history of the wound: Somebody brought them. Somebody bought them. Though I know who caught them, sold them, bought them, I’d rather focus on their faces, their names.

We made the choice, right there in our local coffee shop, that we were going to do things differently. We were going to put the story first, no matter where that led us. We’d open ourselves up to all genres, all forms. We’d publish works that stayed with us in an intangible way, long after that last page is turned.

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. They were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat servicable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamps that met the ocean.

Waiting for Icarus " He said he would be back and we’d drink wine together He said that everything would be better than before He said we were on the edge of a new relation He said he would never again cringe before his father He said that he was going to invent full-time He said he loved me that going into me He said was going into the world and the sky He said all the buckles were very firm He said the wax was the best wax He said Wait for me here on the beach He said Just don’t cry I remember the gulls and the waves I remember the islands going dark on the sea I remember the girls laughing I remember they said he only wanted to get away from me I remember mother saying : Inventors are like poets, a trashy lot I remember she told me those who try out inventions are worse I remember she added : Women who love such are the Worst of all I have been waiting all day, or perhaps longer. I would have liked to try those wings myself. It would have been better than this.

Alec had heard a poem read at weddings: My true love has my heart, and I have his. Never was a fairer bargain made. Love that was permanent in the eyes of all the world, demanding respect, blazoning the certain knowledge Alec had when he woke every morning. Nobody else for me, until the day I die: having everyone else know that.

Atlantis People would whisper about us And our fall from grace As our world fell to ruin And our worst fears were realized, We’d be submerged and forgotten The stuff of speculation. Legend at best, We were a lost city, Singing our siren ballads Of heartbreak and woe From the depths below, We were here! We were here. We were here…

There are good ships and there are wood ships, the ships that sail the sea. But the best ships are friendships, and may they always be. A toast to your coffin. May it be made of hundred-year-old oak. And may we plant the tree together tomorrow. Here’s to Eve, the mother of us all, and here’s to Adam, who was Johnny-on-the-spot when the leaf began to fall. Give a man a match and he’ll be warm for a minute, but set him on fire and he’ll be warm for the rest of his life. Leprechauns, castles, good luck, and laughter. Lullabies, dreams, and love ever after. Poems and songs with pipes and drums. A thousand welcomes when anyone comes . . . That’s the Irish for you!

Because time worked best when there was a movement toward or away. Toward desire, away from death. Away from the Big Bang, toward an infinite expansion that might or might not be God. Toward quitting time, beer-thirty, a quinceañera, a vacation, a wedding, a funeral. Toward the sense of a poem, or love, or away from the chaos of a dream.

Rainer Maria Rilke sacrificed everything For his art he dedicated himself To the Great Work I admired his single-mindedness All through my twenties I argued his case Now I think he was a jerk For skipping his daughter's wedding For fear of losing his focus He believed in the ancient enmity Between daily life and the highest work Or Ruth and the Duino Elegies It is probably a middle-class prejudice Of mine to think that Anna Akhmatova Should have raised her son Lev Instead of dumping him on her husband's mom Motherhood is a bright torture she confessed I was not worthy of it Lev never considered it sufficient For her to stand outside his prison Month after month clutching packages And composing Requiem for the masses

I refuse the definitions of love ⁣ in dictionaries and philosophy,⁣ for today I know love.⁣ I had sought you for years, ⁣ but find that you were always the seeker⁣ and I the sought. ⁣ I suddenly appeared ⁣ reverent before you⁣ to bear witness to your beauty, ⁣ to dance in your silky attention,⁣ but you were always my wild destiny, ⁣ my heart’s pilgrimage—⁣ the meeting place of all my joy⁣ and self-forgetting.⁣ When I first loved you, ⁣ life for me had just begun.⁣ I look forward to so much with you—⁣ our togetherness in a world of wounds, ⁣ our children awaiting birth.⁣ I look forward to so much life with you, ⁣ and yet, I am perfectly content ⁣ with this moment here.⁣ It matters not to me if I die ⁣ before finishing this poem,⁣ for today I know love.⁣ For today,⁣ I am free.

He closed his eyes. This bed was a wedding gift from friends he had not seen in years. He tried to remember their names, but they were gone. In it, or on it, his marriage had begun and, six years later, ended. He recognized a musical creak when he moved his legs, he smelled Julie on the sheets and banked-up pillows, her perfume and the close, soapy essence that characterized her newly washed linen. Here he had taken part in the longest, most revealing, and, later, most desolate conversations of his life. He had had the best sex ever here, and the worst wakeful nights. He had done more reading here than in any other single place - he remembered Anna Karenina and Daniel Deronda in one week of illness. He had never lost his temper so thoroughly anywhere else, nor had been so tender, protective, comforting, nor, since early childhood, been so cared for himself. Here his daughter had been conceived and born. On this side of the bed. Deep in the mattress were the traces of pee from her early-morning visits. She used to climb between then, sleep a little, then wake them with her chatter, her insistence on the day beginning. As they clung to their last fragments of dreams, she demanded the impossible: stories, poems, songs, invented catechisms, physical combat, tickling. Nearly all evidence of her existence, apart from photographs, they had destroyed or given away. All the worst and the best things that had ever happened to him had happened here. This was where he belonged. Beyond all immediate considerations, like the fact that his marriage was more or less finished, there was his right to lie here now in the marriage bed.

Elegy for Smoking" It’s not the drug I miss but all those minutes we used to steal outside the library, under restaurant awnings, out on porches, by the quiet fields. And how kind it used to make us when we’d laugh and throw our heads back and watch the dragon’s breath float from our mouths, all ravenous and doomed. Which is why I quit, of course, like almost everyone, and stay inside these days staring at my phone, chewing toothpicks and figuring the bill, while out the window, the smokers gather in their same old constellations, like memories of ourselves. Or like the remnants of some decimated tribe, come down out of the hills to tell their stories in the lightly-falling rain— to be, for a moment, simply there and nowhere else, their faces glowing each time someone lifts, like a gift, the little flame.

The chickens ate all the crickets. The foxes ate all the chickens. This morning a friend hauled his boat to shore and gave me the most wondrous fish. In its silver scales it seemed dressed for a wedding. The gills were pulsing, just above where shoulders would be, if it had had shoulders. The eyes were still looking around, I don’t know what they were thinking. The chickens ate all the crickets. The foxes ate all the chickens. I ate the fish.

The he-lizard is crying. The she-lizard is crying. The he-lizard and the she-lizard with little white aprons. Have lost without wanting to their wedding ring. Ah, their little leaden wedding ring, ah, their little ring of lead! A large sky without people carries the birds in its balloon. The sun, rotund captain, wears a satin waistcoat. Look how old they are! How old the lizards are! Oh, how they cry and cry, Oh! Oh! How they go on crying!

Nobody ever said I don’t know or I’m afraid, and they acted like the masks they wore were their real faces and that they could sustain themselves forever on their own self-assurance—like they really believed they didn’t need anybody else. What was that John Donne poem we’d read in Weinstein’s class, “No Man Is An Island”? Not here. We were a goddamn social archipelago that called itself a community. Why did I feel like I was the only one who lived in a nightmare?

At our wedding, our college creative writing professor read a poem—John Ciardi’s “Most Like an Arch This Marriage.” It’s a poem about imperfection, about being more together than we can be on our own: “Most like an arch—two weaknesses that lean / into a strength. Two fallings become firm.” Being married isn’t being two columns, standing so straight and tall on their own, they never touch. Being married is leaning and being caught, and catching the one who leans toward you.

I got off the train And said good-bye to the man I’d met. We’d been together for eighteen hours And had a pleasant conversation, Fellowship in the journey, And I was sorry to get off, sorry to leave This chance friend whose name I never learned. I felt my eyes water with tears . . . Every farewell is a death. Yes, every farewell is a death. In the train that we call life We are all chance events in one another’s lives, And we all feel sorry when it’s time to get off. All that is human moves me, because I’m a man. All that is human moves me not because I have an affinity With human ideas or human doctrines But because of my infinite fellowship with humanity itself. The maid who hated to go, Crying with nostalgia For the house where she’d been mistreated . . . All of this, inside my heart, is death and the world’s sadness. All of this lives, because it dies, inside my heart. And my heart is a little larger than the entire universe.

she couldn’t quite see herself in it. When they were done, I read the Shakespeare sonnet that begins “Fear no more the heat o’ the Sun,” partly because it was appropriate to the occasion and one of the most beautiful poems in the language, but also because I hoped it might hide from my loved ones the fact that I myself had nothing to say, that while part of me was here with them on this beloved shore, another part was wandering, as it had been for months, in a barren, uninhabited landscape not unlike the one in my dream. I realized I’d felt like this for a while. Though life had gone on since my mother’s death—Kate had gotten married, I’d finally published another book and gone on tour with it—some sort of internal-pause button had been pushed, allowing another part of me, one I’d specifically kept sequestered to deal with my mother, to fall silent. Since her death, Barbara and I had gone through all her things and settled her affairs, but we’d barely spoken of her.

Beware of Strangers As children, they teach us To beware of strangers, To refrain from approaching them. As we grow older we learn That no one is stranger than those We thought we’d known all our lives. As we grow older we learn That a stranger may carry more empathy, And may understand us more deeply. Even feelings of affection from a stranger May be more sincere. And so I ask: can humanity and the strangeness be synonymous? Could we say: I am a stranger; therefore I am? Can we truly feel alive Without strange things Strange encounters without strangers reminding us that our hearts and minds are still beating? They teach us to avoid strangers, And life teaches us that human awareness can only be borne out Of the dagger of strangeness… That life is tasteless When we don’t mix it with strangers… That familiarity is opposed to life! And thus, I loudly declare: A stranger I was born. A stranger I wish to remain! And I ask that you issue my death certificate The day I become familiar. [Original poem published in Arabic on October 29 at ahewar.org]

So what did Amalfitano's students learn? They learned to recite aloud. They memorized the two or three poems they loved most in order to remember them and recite them at the proper times: funerals, weddings, moments of solitude. They learned that a book was a labyrinth and a desert. That there was nothing more important than ceaseless reading and traveling, perhaps one and the same thing. That when books were read, writers were released from the souls of stones, which is where they went to live after they died, and they moved into the souls of readers as if into a soft prison cell, a cell that later swelled or burst. That all writing systems are frauds. That true poetry resides between the abyss and misfortune and that the grand highway of selfless acts, of the elegance of eyes and the fate of Marcabrú, passes near its abode. That the main lesson of literature was courage, a rare courage like a stone well in the middle of a lake district, like a whirlwind and a mirror. That reading wasn't more comfortable than writing. That by reading one learned to question and remember. That memory was love.

Discovering Rilke's works was an instant connection for me. And as I immersed myself in the unfolding of his life, it felt like this wonderful circle closed perfectly around what embodies a truly great artist – seeing their own life as a faithful composition reflecting their very essence, the same essence you find in their works. Witnessing that existential ethic where thought and action are one is just breathtaking, and so rare to encounter these days. For me, Rilke is the friend we all wish we had, the lover we'd always return to, the aspiration we should all strive for.

Saturday Sonnet by Stewart Stafford The Bard once wrote that love is blind, Desire’s muslin cloth veils the eyes behind, As a hog for truffles nosing in dirt, The human sniffs out a way to flirt, Flippant words become overture, And a dungeon-dweller emerges pure, Love’s great story blossoming anew, Past indiscretions in a penitent’s pew, Hearts as one, a confluence of minds, Time to think of the tie that binds, Sure of footing and glad of heart Wheels turning on a bridal cart, Handsome husband, pretty wife, Set out together in this thing called life. © Stewart Stafford, 2021. All rights reserved.

POEM#1167 ‘COMMITMENT’ Clark kissed his wife on their first wedding anniversary. On their second anniversary he kissed her twice. On their third anniversary he kissed her four times. And on their fourth he kissed her eight times. On their fifth, sixth and seventh anniversaries he kissed her sixteen, thirty-two and sixty-four times, respectively. By their tenth anniversary he was kissing her 512 times and they both developed rashes and were late for their dinner reservation. On their silver wedding anniversary, they perished – Exhausted and thirsty. Only 800,005 kisses into the contracted 16,777,216. Blinded by romance. Killed by mathematics.

A short poem from my new book, The Lost Journal of my Second Trip to Pergatory, Thorny Crowns Of course the gold one was for special occasions, weddings, etc, silver for family reunions, office-casual type affairs. Bronze was a everyday choice; during yard work its burnished surface shone in sunlight. There were various colors and holiday appropriate ones. I could never find the hatboxes they were stored in. But the wooden one was reserved for the long suffering caused by family. Stevie’s funeral, my hospital trips and sister’s rebellion rated real wood. One tip filed extra sharp produced a fine and dramatic line of blood droplets on her brow.

Whether working in the yard or just going about the daily business of life, you are continually adjusting, trimming, touching, shaping, and tinkering with the wealth of things around you. It may be difficult for you to know when to stop. We are all torn between the extremes of taking care of things and leaving them alone, and we question whether many things could ever get along without us. We find ourselves with pruning shears in hand, snipping away at this or that, telling ourselves that we're only being helpful, redefining something else's space, removing that which is unappealing to us. It's not that we really want to change the world. We just want to fix it up slightly. We'd like to lose a few pounds or rid ourselves of some small habit. Maybe we'd like to help a friend improve his situation or repair a few loose ends in the lives of our children. All of this shaping and controlling can have an adverse affect. Unlike someone skilled in the art of bonsai gardening, we may *unintentionally* stunt much natural growth before it occurs. And our meddling may not be appreciated by others. Most things will get along superbly without our editing, fussing, and intervention. We can learn to just let them be. As a poem of long ago puts it, "In the landscape of spring, the flowering branches grow naturally, some are long, some are short.

Vulnerable Love (The Sonnet) Choose me if you feel something, not because it's convenient or glorious. I have neither the interest nor the strength, to go out again and look for someone else. If you choose me, you are stuck with me, through thick and thin, through everything. It won't always be clear and sunny, sometimes it'll be blue, sometimes boring. True love is not something you find, True love is something you nurture together. Once you rediscover yourself in someone, Never turn your back, come hell or high water! Any ape can find escape in romance novels, It takes a human to be the living pillar of love. While every robot seeks emotional maturity, Be the human who cherishes vulnerable love.

I remember our childhood days when life was easy and math problems hard. Mom would help us with our homework and dad was not at home but at work. After our chores, we’d go to the old fort museum with clips in our hair and pure joy in our hearts. You, sister, wore the bangles that you, brother, got as a prize from the Dentist. “Why the bangles?” the Dentist asked, surprised, for boys picked the stickers of cars instead. “They’re for my sisters,” you said. Mom would treat us to a bottle of Coke, a few sips each. Then, we’d buy the sweet smelling bread from the same white van and hand-in-hand, we’d walk to our small flat above the restaurant. I remember our childhood days. Do you remember them too?

breath, life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. seventy three years on this earth is a lot of taking in and giving out, is a life of coming from somewhere and for many a bunch of going nowhere. how do we celebrate a poet who has created music with words for over fifty years, who has showered magic on her people, who has redefined poetry into a black world exactness thereby giving the universe an insight into darkroads? just say she interprets beauty and wants to give life, say she is patient with phoniness and doesn’t mind people calling her gwen or sister. say she sees the genius in our children, is visionary about possibilities, sees as clearly as ray charles and stevie wonder, hears like determined elephants looking for food. say that her touch is fine wood, her memory is like an african roadmap detailing adventure and clarity, yet returning to chicago’s south evans to record the journey. say her voice is majestic and magnetic as she speaks in poetry, rhythms, song and spirited trumpets, say she is dark skinned, melanin rich, small-boned, hurricane-willed, with a mind like a tornado redefining the landscape. life after seven decades plus three years is a lot of breathing. gwendolyn, gwen, sister g has not disappointed our expectations. in the middle of her eldership she brings us vigorous language, memory, illumination. she brings breath. (Quality: Gwendolyn Brooks at 73)

I was a cottage maiden Hardened by sun and air, Contented with my cottage mates, Not mindful I was fair. Why did a great lord find me out, And praise my flaxen hair? Why did a great lord find me out To fill my heart with care? He lured me to his palace home— Woe's me for joy thereof— 10 To lead a shameless shameful life, His plaything and his love. He wore me like a silken knot, He changed me like a glove; So now I moan, an unclean thing, Who might have been a dove. O Lady Kate, my cousin Kate, You grew more fair than I: He saw you at your father's gate, Chose you, and cast me by. 20 He watched your steps along the lane, Your work among the rye; He lifted you from mean estate To sit with him on high. Because you were so good and pure He bound you with his ring: The neighbours call you good and pure, Call me an outcast thing. Even so I sit and howl in dust, You sit in gold and sing: 30 Now which of us has tenderer heart? You had the stronger wing. O cousin Kate, my love was true, Your love was writ in sand: If he had fooled not me but you, If you stood where I stand, He'd not have won me with his love Nor bought me with his land; I would have spit into his face And not have taken his hand. 40 Yet I've a gift you have not got, And seem not like to get: For all your clothes and wedding-ring I've little doubt you fret. My fair-haired son, my shame, my pride, Cling closer, closer yet: Your father would give lands for one To wear his coronet.

I walked through the cemetery holding a bouquet of yellow and red flowers with brown combat boots, feeling grateful and bitter the sun was shining so brightly. I felt an urge to run, as well as a magnet to reach the group of people surrounding you. I wanted to be wearing white. I wanted to be walking down an isle with flowers and for this to be a different ceremony. I wanted to curl up beside the earth that held you, the pink and yellow petals, strings of ground hanging loosely in the wind and be beside you. I was angry you were buried, I resented the earth falling upon you. Each scoop felt heavy and indefinite. I'm not ready to know this is definite. I watched your chest, in a white linen shirt last night wishing for your chest to rise. But when I kissed your forehead it was cold. And when I held your hands it wasn't you. It was a shell. It was a vessel. It was empty. The first time I heard your new music it was by accident and your voice drove me from your home into hysterics. But when I entered your home and it played with your casket it was welcome. I read your letter with your mom and dad out loud beside you, and halfway through "spelunking in your soul" started to play. That was a gift, thank you. Today walking back from the funeral a green and black beetle landed in my hair and crawled onto my finger. I just had a bad moment with a woman in your life and I felt you in the little beetle. I'm writing something to be read at your celebration of life. It's not going to be read by me. I have a wedding in Joshua tree. But I will celebrate you in the desert there. I wanted to read the poem "sex and wine for breakfast" I wrote about you but figured I would go less steamy. I love you.

In case you didn’t know
 I too went home after the ceremony
 And replayed the silent pauses of our failed encounter. I thought of a new clever thing I wish I said
 And you’ll never know it and I won’t know yours. In case you didn’t know
 I imagine weddings within the first hour of meeting you 
I felt your peek, but pretended not to look your way 
I looked you up online and now don’t know where to start That you whispered in my ear and I’ll masturbate
 To the once hot air on my neck. In case you didn’t know
 When I turned the corner, I cried. I thought I heard you, too. Maybe both our loved ones Share the same hospital. In case you didn’t know
 I wore bright colors and made the afternoon men laugh, But tonight I’ll drink to darkness because I have no one. They pay me well, but I only want that other thing— Your poetry, in case I didn’t know.

Torn The internet’s all show, no actual cunnilingus has transpired between us. This has been smoke signals from eye to eye. And just like the telegraph, the telephone gave us a means to the ends of staying ever closer to home, ever farther from the ear we’d dot-dash or whisper into, what a sad story for flesh, marooned. First by the womb, then the word traveled fast and free of lips, now your hips can thrive in my brain without entering my life. I might as well be on the moon. The evolution of communication’s to mythologize togetherness as we drift entropically apart. That’s what the kids call a thesis statement. But god you’re hot, and your crescendo of breath so fully apes the real deal, is it possible we can be islanded and still come to prefer absence to presence, the digital to the palpable? I fear the question answers itself by nodding to the fact that I can write a poem and you read it with no hand having touched metal or paper or words that don’t dissolve as soon as a switch is thrown. Half of my soul says, Get used to it. The other million percent begs, Don’t.

Awake ye muses nine, sing me a strain divine, Unwind the solemn twine, and tie my Valentine! Oh the Earth was made for lovers, for damsel, and hopeless swain, For sighing, and gentle whispering, and unity made of twain. All things do go a courting, in earth, or sea, or air, God hath made nothing single but thee in His world so fair! The bride, and then the bridegroom, the two, and then the one, Adam, and Eve, his consort, the moon, and then the sun; The life doth prove the precept, who obey shall happy be, Who will not serve the sovereign, be hanged on fatal tree. The high do seek the lowly, the great do seek the small, None cannot find who seeketh, on this terrestrial ball; The bee doth court the flower, the flower his suit receives, And they make merry wedding, whose guests are hundred leaves; The wind doth woo the branches, the branches they are won, And the father fond demandeth the maiden for his son. The storm doth walk the seashore humming a mournful tune, The wave with eye so pensive, looketh to see the moon, Their spirits meet together, they make their solemn vows, No more he singeth mournful, her sadness she doth lose. The worm doth woo the mortal, death claims a living bride, Night unto day is married, morn unto eventide; Earth is a merry damsel, and heaven a knight so true, And Earth is quite coquettish, and beseemeth in vain to sue. Now to the application, to the reading of the roll, To bringing thee to justice, and marshalling thy soul: Thou art a human solo, a being cold, and lone, Wilt have no kind companion, thou reap'st what thou hast sown. Hast never silent hours, and minutes all too long, And a deal of sad reflection, and wailing instead of song? There's Sarah, and Eliza, and Emeline so fair, And Harriet, and Susan, and she with curling hair! Thine eyes are sadly blinded, but yet thou mayest see Six true, and comely maidens sitting upon the tree; Approach that tree with caution, then up it boldly climb, And seize the one thou lovest, nor care for space, or time! Then bear her to the greenwood, and build for her a bower, And give her what she asketh, jewel, or bird, or flower — And bring the fife, and trumpet, and beat upon the drum — And bid the world Goodmorrow, and go to glory home!

It didn’t take me very much reading and skimming to discover that Tess had serious problems – much worse than mine. The most important thing in her life happened to her in the very first part of the book. She got taken advantage of, at night, in the woods, because she’d stupidly accepted a drive home with a jerk, and after that it was all downhill, one awful thing after another, turnips, dead babies, getting dumped by the man she loved, and then her tragic death at the end. (I peeked at the last three chapters.) Tess was evidently another of those unlucky pushovers, like the Last Duchess, and like Ophelia – we’d studied Hamlet earlier. These girls were all similar. They were too trusting, they found themselves in the hands of the wrong men, they weren’t up to things, they let themselves drift. They smiled too much. They were too eager to please. Then they got bumped off, one way or another. Nobody gave them any help. Why did we have to study these hapless, annoying, dumb-bunny girls? I wondered. Who chose the books and poems that would be on the curriculum? What use would they be in our future lives? What exactly were we supposed to be learning from them? Maybe Bill was right. Maybe the whole thing was a waste of time

A Flock of Geese" She often wondered about the inexplicable deep sorrow that she feels every time she sees a flock of geese flying in the sky … Do the flying geese remind her that she has wasted her life stuck in the trivialities of daily life? Or perhaps the flying birds remind her that she’s lost her ability to fly? She thinks at times in sadness how she wasted the years of her life like a naïve bride dreaming about the ideal groom... A bride planning the minutest details of her wedding, not realizing, until her wings were clipped, that the wedding, the groom, and the bride are roles and illusions created by society to counter the dangers of all those who wish to fly; those who dream about creating new worlds instead of getting hanged or strangulated in a world created by on their behalf by others … As she hears the honking of another passing flock of geese flying over her head as did the most beautiful years of her life the birds awaken in her that uncontrollable itch to depart to refuse the illusion of settling and stability The illusion of the wedding and the groom The illusion of all the wedding invitees Who spend an entire night dancing, cheering, and celebrating the clipping of her wings… [Original poem published in Arabic on December 14, 2023 at ahewar.org]

Romance of the sleepwalker" Green, as I love you, greenly. Green the wind, and green the branches. The dark ship on the sea and the horse on the mountain. With her waist that’s made of shadow dreaming on the high veranda, green the flesh, and green the tresses, with eyes of frozen silver. Green, as I love you, greenly. Beneath the moon of the gypsies silent things are looking at her things she cannot see. Green, as I love you, greenly. Great stars of white hoarfrost come with the fish of shadow opening the road of morning. The fig tree’s rubbing on the dawn wind with the rasping of its branches, and the mountain cunning cat, bristles with its sour agaves. Who is coming? And from where...? She waits on the high veranda, green the flesh and green the tresses, dreaming of the bitter ocean. - 'Brother, friend, I want to barter your house for my stallion, sell my saddle for your mirror, change my dagger for your blanket. Brother mine, I come here bleeding from the mountain pass of Cabra.’ - ‘If I could, my young friend, then maybe we’d strike a bargain, but I am no longer I, nor is this house, of mine, mine.’ - ‘Brother, friend, I want to die now, in the fitness of my own bed, made of iron, if it can be, with its sheets of finest cambric. Can you see the wound I carry from my throat to my heart?’ - ‘Three hundred red roses your white shirt now carries. Your blood stinks and oozes, all around your scarlet sashes. But I am no longer I, nor is this house of mine, mine.’ - ‘Let me then, at least, climb up there, up towards the high verandas. Let me climb, let me climb there, up towards the green verandas. High verandas of the moonlight, where I hear the sound of waters.’ Now they climb, the two companions, up there to the high veranda, letting fall a trail of blood drops, letting fall a trail of tears. On the morning rooftops, trembled, the small tin lanterns. A thousand tambourines of crystal wounded the light of daybreak. Green, as I love you, greenly. Green the wind, and green the branches. They climbed up, the two companions. In the mouth, the dark breezes left there a strange flavour, of gall, and mint, and sweet basil. - ‘Brother, friend! Where is she, tell me, where is she, your bitter beauty? How often, she waited for you! How often, she would have waited, cool the face, and dark the tresses, on this green veranda!’ Over the cistern’s surface the gypsy girl was rocking. Green the bed is, green the tresses, with eyes of frozen silver. An ice-ray made of moonlight holding her above the water. How intimate the night became, like a little, hidden plaza. Drunken Civil Guards were beating, beating, beating on the door frame. Green, as I love you, greenly. Green the wind, and green the branches. The dark ship on the sea, and the horse on the mountain.

Then the pulse. Then a pause. Then twilight in a box. Dusk underfoot. Then generations. — Then the same war by a different name. Wine splashing in the bucket. The erection, the era. Then exit Reason. Then sadness without reason. Then the removal of the ceiling by hand. — Then pages & pages of numbers. Then the page with the faint green stain. Then the page on which Prince Theodore, gravely wounded, is thrown onto a wagon. Then the page on which Masha weds somebody else. Then the page that turns to the story of somebody else. Then the page scribbled in dactyls. Then the page which begins Exit Angel. Then the page wrapped around a dead fish. Then the page where the serfs reach the ocean. Then a nap. Then the peg. Then the page with the curious helmet. Then the page on which millet is ground. Then the death of Ursula. Then the stone page they raised over her head. Then the page made of grass which goes on. — Exit Beauty. — Then the page someone folded to mark her place. Then the page on which nothing happens. The page after this page. Then the transcript. Knocking within. Interpretation, then harvest. — Exit Want. Then a love story. Then a trip to the ruins. Then & only then the violet agenda. Then hope without reason. Then the construction of an underground passage between us. Srikanth Reddy, "Burial Practice" from Facts for Visitors. Copyright © 2004 by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of The University of California Press. Source: Facts for Visitors (University of California Press, 2004)

A BLESSING FROM MY SIXTEEN YEARS’ SON I have this son who assembled inside me during Hurricane Gloria. In a flash, he appeared, in a tiny blaze. Outside, pines toppled. Phone lines snapped and hissed like cobras. Inside, he was a raw pearl: microscopic, luminous. Look at the muscled obelisk of him now pawing through the icebox for more grapes. Sixteen years and not a bone broken, not a single stitch. By his age, I was marked more ways, and small. He’s a slouching six foot two, with implausible blue eyes, which settle on the pages of Emerson’s “Self Reliance” with profound belligerence. A girl with a navel ring could make his cell phone buzz, or an Afro’d boy leaning on a mop at Taco Bell— creatures strange as dragons or eels. Balanced on a kitchen stool, each gives counsel arcane as any oracle’s. Dante claims school is harshing my mellow. Rodney longs to date a tattooed girl, because he wants a woman willing to do stuff she’ll regret. They’ve come to lead my son into his broadening spiral. Someday soon, the tether will snap. I birthed my own mom into oblivion. The night my son smashed the car fender, then rode home in the rain-streaked cop cruiser, he asked, Did you and Dad screw up so much? He’d let me tuck him in, my grandmother’s wedding quilt from 1912 drawn to his goateed chin. Don’t blame us, I said. You’re your own idiot now. At which he grinned. The cop said the girl in the crimped Chevy took it hard. He’d found my son awkwardly holding her in the canted headlights, where he’d draped his own coat over her shaking shoulders. My fault, he’d confessed right off. Nice kid, said the cop.

It is said that, as he wandered the streets of the City, an ancient jackbird cycled three times above him, then came to rest upon Sam's shoulder, saying: "Are you not Maitreya, Lord of Light, for whom the world has waited, lo, these many years–he whose coming I prophesyed long ago in a poem?" "No, my name is Sam," he replied, "and I am about to depart the world, not enter into it Who are you?" "I am a bird who was once a poet. All morning have I flown, since the yawp of Garuda opened the day. I was flying about the ways of Heaven looking for Lord Rudra, hoping to befoul him with my droppings, when I felt the power of a weird come over the land. I have flown far, and I have seen many things, Lord of Light." "What things have you seen, bird who was a poet?" "I have seen an unlit pyre set at the end of the world, with fogs stirring all about it. I have seen the gods who come late hurrying across the snows and rushing through the upper airs, circling outside the dome. I have seen the players upon the ranga and the nepathya, rehearsing the Masque of Blood, for the wedding of Death and Destruction. I have seen the Lord Vayu raise up his hand and stop the winds that circle through Heaven. I have seen all-colored Mara atop the spire of the highest tower, and I have felt the power of the weird he lays–for I have seen the phantom cats troubled within the wood, then hurrying in this direction. I have seen the tears of a man and of a woman. I have heard the laughter of a goddess. I have seen a bright spear uplifted against the morning, and I have heard an oath spoken. I have seen the Lord of Light at last, of whom I wrote, long ago: Always dying, never dead; Ever ending, never ended; Loathed in darkness, Clothed in light, He comes, to end a world, As morning ends the night. These lines were writ By Morgan, free, Who shall, the day he dies, See this prophecy." The bird ruffled his feathers then and was still. "I am pleased, bird, that you have had a chance to see many things," said Sam, "and that within the fiction of your metaphor you have achieved a certain satisfaction. Unfortunately, poetic truth differs considerably from that which surrounds most of the business of life." "Hail, Lord of Light!" said the bird, and sprang into the air. As he rose, he was pierced through by an arrow shot from a nearby window by one who hated jackbirds. Sam hurried on.

Let’s stop time, Love, to see what those clouds yearn to be, to listen to that butterfly stir the air around us, to hear, at dusk, the stars begin like crickets, tremulous, or feel their light begin to ripple in the lowest ferns; let’s see how skillfully the night covers this field of moons, the way your own look has passed the sentries of my heart– let’s add some message twig to this nest we’d set so far apart we only spoke with words that waited all winter in their cocoons. from “The Pause

A Flock of Geese" She often wondered about the inexplicable deep sorrow that she feels every time she sees a flock of geese flying in the sky … Do the flying geese remind her that she has wasted her life stuck in the trivialities of daily life? Or perhaps the flying birds remind her that she’s lost her ability to fly? She thinks at times in sadness how she wasted the years of her life like a naïve bride dreaming about the ideal groom... A bride planning the minutest details of her wedding, not realizing, until her wings were clipped, that the wedding, the groom, and the bride are roles and illusions created by society to counter the dangers of all those who wish to fly; those who dream about creating new worlds instead of getting hanged or strangulated in a world created on their behalf by others … As she hears the honking of another passing flock of geese flying over her head as did the most beautiful years of her life the birds awaken in her that uncontrollable itch to depart to refuse the illusion of settling and stability The illusion of the wedding and the groom The illusion of all the wedding invitees Who spend an entire night dancing, cheering, and celebrating the clipping of her wings… [Original poem published in Arabic on December 14, 2023 at ahewar.org]” ― Louis Yako

What kind of tattoo are you getting?” “You mean what kind of tattoo are we getting?” She reaches into her purse and hands me a sketch. “This one.” It’s a pair of hands, one masculine and one feminine. Banding each ring finger is Matty’s trademark calligraphy of the word still. The letters wrap around each finger, sketched to look like delicate vine. “You like it?” Bristol asks, her voice soft, uncertain. After the wedding, she requested that I give her my vows, my poem “STILL,” in writing. I know she added it to a box where she keeps our memories—the leather book of Neruda poetry, the tarnished whistle from the carnival, and now the vows I wrote for her. I know “STILL” holds significance, but I never saw this coming.

Time and time again Billy Collins takes a mundane situation and spirals it out into something that is by turns humorous and poignant as in his poem "Imperial Garden", one of my favorites in this new collection: It was at the end of dinner, the two of us in a red booth maintaining our silence, when I decided to compose a message for the fortune cookie you were soon to receive. Avoid mulishness when choosing a position on the great board game of life was my mean-spirited contribution to the treasury of Confucian wisdom. But while we waited for the cookies, the slices of oranges, and the inescapable pot of watery tea, I realized that by mulishness I meant your refusal to let me have my own way every time I wanted it. I watched you looking off to the side— your mass of dark hair, your profile softened by lamplight— and then I made up a fortune for myself. He who acts like a jerk on an island of his own creation will have only the horizon for a friend. I seemed to be getting worse at this, I seemed to be getting worse at this, I thought, as the cookies arrived at the table along with the orange slices and a teapot painted with tigers menacingly peering out from the undergrowth. The restaurant was quiet then. The waiter returned to looking out at the street, a zither whimpered in the background, and we turned to our cookies, cracking the brittle shells, then rolling into little balls the tiny scrolls of our destinies before dropping them, unread, into our cups of tea— a little good-luck thing we’d been doing ever since we met.

I saw a girl who races to help others but doesn’t help herself. And right now you need to help yourself. No one should walk up the aisle feeling inferior or in a different league or trying to be something they’re not. I don’t know exactly who your issues are with, but …” He picks up the phone, clicks a button, and turns the screen to face me. Fuck. It’s my list. The list I wrote in the church. THINGS TO DO BEFORE WEDDING 1. Become expert on Greek philosophy. 2. Memorize Robert Burns poems. 3. Learn long Scrabble words. 4. Remember: am HYPOCHONDRIAC. 5. Beef stroganoff. Get to like. (Hypnosis?) I feel drenched in embarrassment. This is why people shouldn’t share phones. “It’s nothing to do with you,” I mutter, staring at the table. “I know,” he says gently. “I also know that standing up for yourself can be hard. But you have to do it. You have to get it out there. Before the wedding.

make a mess because without the mess we'd never have the feast

We prayed for seven days. But, by the last day, we still needed more days to pray. On the first day we prayed well by the well. We prayed for strength and to be saved from hell. Strength to carry and bear the weight of the bear. The furless bear that was living rent-free within. On the second day we prayed for union and companionship. In that unionship, some told us to alter ourselves to benefit from their gold. Some told us to worship at their alter, and to their forbidden gods. Some gave us bands, while some gave us rose stems. But they all promised us a life full of bliss, and concerts to see bands like Kiss. On the third day we prayed for courage and strength. We thought that we needed to lean on to some friends. We begged to rest our lean bodies on their shoulders. We said that we needed a match in which we could meet our match. We asked for a cover to cover up and shield us; providing a shield from the storms of life. On the fourth day we prayed for assertiveness and self-esteem. But, like a bow without its own direction, we jumped as high as they told us. And gave a bow after each and every performance. We skipped and hopped for everyone despite their lies. In fact, we also skipped all the steps necessary to living full lives. On the fifth day we prayed for security and protection. But some betrayed and beat us because we intimidated their situation. And some became deadbeats to the children that we bore for each. We were left beat, with no fun. Missing the beat to the sound of our own drum. On the sixth day we prayed for solitude; some space from an alliance. But we went on to perform for this and that audience. Some were fair skinned; some were dark skinned. Some were fair to us, while some were cruel too much. But we remained amongst them because we chose to be one with copendence. On the seventh day we prayed for bravery. But our conduct had changed gravely because, for six days, we'd invited others to conduct our song. We'd geared up for them and shot arms at ourselves for so long. Meanwhile they'd raised their arms up, cheering for our self-destruction. And, once we were doomed in their mission, they bounced like a wave; vanishing without a wave.

Your beer-flavored kisses came deeply, even at the bar, and you only kissed me deeper once we’d emptied our lust for one another throughout your pastel apartment.

I find it curious that the Bible allowed so many authors in a collection so important to setting the trajectory of a people. In my Protestant tradition, we acknowledge sixty-six books of the Bible. Within those sixty-six writings, who would dare to venture counting the number of fingerprints on those pages? In the collection known as the Psalms alone, a whole gang of psalmists are identified as contributors. That’s to say nothing of letters like Hebrews, where no author is identified. And let’s not get started on books where biblical scholars aren’t so convinced that the author named in the book actually owned the hand moving the quill. I won’t lie to you: I feel like God chose an awfully sloppy process if the goal was for us to receive each and every single word as though it were spoken by the mouth of the same God. God could’ve given it all to Moses on Sinai that first time and provided a little more uniformity to all of this. But that is not what happened. Instead, we are left with a collection of various writings: wisdom literature, poems, songs, letters, teachings, sermons—and even some stories that seem a lot like what we’d now consider folktales. We even have some writings put in there twice. Either God is a sloppy editor, or the voice of the people was preserved in the text on purpose. If God is a sloppy editor, then the Bible is of marginal value. If the voice of the people is preserved in this text, then the Bible is an invitation to seek God in our history, present, and future.

for Falasteen the boy i adored at sixteen gifted me his keffiyeh feeling guilty for living when others were killed simply for existing i haven’t seen him in sixteen years but think of him often these days his grandmother’s purse still carrying keys to their home believing they’d return in weeks can it even be called a key if what it unlocked is no longer there? we’d sneak onto mall rooftops & pretend shooting only happened with stars! 'we have a duty of memory,' he said, 'so they’ll kill us all until only the soil is witness' how could i reply? i sat in my liquid silence today there are nurseries of martyrs they bomb babies for they fear enemies hiding between pacifiers & tiny wrists bomb hospitals because enemies hide in ICU bedpans bomb schools because enemies hide in children’s bags bomb the oldest mosques & churches because enemies hide in rosary beads & votive candles they bomb journalists because enemies are hiding under their PRESS vests & helmets bomb poets because enemies hide in pages of peace poems the elderly are bombed because enemies hide under their canes the disabled are bombed because they harbour enemies in their artificial limbs they raze & burn all the ancient trees because enemies make bombs from olives they bomb water treatment plants because enemies are now water & so it goes: justification provided exoneration granted business as usual & the boy I adored has green-grey eyes the colour of fig leaves we don’t speak but i wish to tell him 'i’m sorry the world is a blade i’m sorry home is blood & bones i’m sorry music is sirens & wails i’m sorry night is infinite' but the boy I adored has grey-green eyes the colour of forgotten ash

Fully Vaccinated (The Sonnet) I am alive, well and fully vaccinated, Despite pledging allegiance to no authority. Listening to experts is not complacency, It's just an act of common sense humanity. You trust bus-drivers to get you to work, You trust pilots to fly you to places. Then why are you afraid to trust scientists, Without science we'd still be living like savages. State doesn't need to put microchip in your body, Future tech isn't needed to rule prehistoric veggies. Your dependency on social media is sufficient, To observe, manipulate and exploit your life stories. Be cautious of your online footprint, not inoculation. Be accountable and get your shot trampling all hesitation.

Sonnet of Public Service Every reformer is a public servant, But not every public servant is a reformer, For public service isn't taught as life itself, But as just another job little more secure. If only education focused on life and love, Instead of constantly peddling competition, Perhaps we'd have a world little less bitter, And we'd have ascension, not abomination. But there's no use in brooding over history, What's needed is to realize love as our core. Education and all be manifestations of love, If not, it is just another snobbish endeavor. May service be the goal, role and whole of life, Instead of being and raising educated lowlife.

True love is not something you find, true love is something you nurture together.

As children, we played cowboys and Indians through the fields and forests, looking for foes as though being set upon was the worst we’d face. As children we found horseshoes, dusty hidden treasures buried in dirt, and we’d take them home and hang them on our walls alongside our Farrah and football posters. Innately we knew that someday we’d grow out of this, so mornings and afternoons we’d carry on, content, a real word in our small vocabulary.

hI parted from my father, The man I most adore, But God decreed that later We'd meet again, once more. A year we were asunder, But once our rift was done, His greeting that he gave me Was "Fare thee well, my son.

What is home: It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted. It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled. It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum. It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes. It is the cafe where I watched football matches and played- Mg child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?

What is home: It is the shade of trees on my way to school before they were uprooted. It is my grandparents’ black-and-white wedding photo before the walls crumbled. It is my uncle’s prayer rug, where dozens of ants slept on wintry nights, before it was looted and put in a museum. It is the oven my mother used to bake bread and roast chicken before a bomb reduced our house to ashes. It is the cafe where I watched football matches and played- My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?

Even more remarkable is the gnostic poem called the Thunder, Perfect Mind. This text contains a revelation spoken by a feminine power: I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one. I am the whore, and the holy one. I am the wife and the virgin. I am (the mother) and the daughter.… I am she whose wedding is great, and I have not taken a husband.… I am knowledge, and ignorance.… I am shameless; I am ashamed. I am strength, and I am fear.… I am foolish, and I am wise.… I am godless, and I am one whose God is great.

Once, we were a mighty nation Our people came from strong foundation Until cursed with darker days A dragon red came from skies blue Came and stole the things we once knew Making us humble, unknown But we were told one day of old That we’d give our throne of ancient gold To a prince and dragon slayer’s son For us to regain the ancient throne He will fight and bleed for our mountain home This dragon prince of Bowen’s line He will kill the drake that broke us He will remove the Witch who cursed us And become our King some glad day So now we wait ever patiently We wait for the one promised to make us free We wait for this prince to come

CONTENTS Preface CHAPTER I PAGE V How Diana gave Birth to Arabia (Herodias) Of the sufferings of Mankind, and how Diana sent Aradia on earth to relieve them by teaching resistance and Sorcery—Poem addressed to Mankind—How to invoke Diana or Aradia, CHAPTER II The Sabbat—Treguenda or Witch-Meeting . 8 How to consecrate the supper—Conjuration of the meal and of Salt—Invocation to Cain—Conjuration of Diana and to Aradia, CHAPTER III How Diana made the Stars and the Rain i8 CHAPTER IV The Charm of the Stones consecrated to Diana—The Incantation of Perforated Stones—The Spell or Conjuration of the Round Stone . 21 PAGE CHAPTER V The Conjuration of the Lemon and Pins—Incantation TO Diana 29 CHAPTER VI A Spell to Win Love 35 CHAPTER VII To Find or Buy anything, or to have Good Fortune thereby 38 CHAPTER VIII To HAVE A Good Vintage and very Good Wine BY THE Aid of Diana 44 CHAPTER IX Tana and Endamone, or Diana and Endymion 51 CHAPTER X Madonna Diana 61 A Legend of Cettardo, and how Diana appeared with ten Bridesmaids to give away a Bride—Incantation to Diana for a Wedding. CHAPTER XI The House of the Wind 65 Showing how Diana rescued a Lady from Death at the Honse of the Wind in Volterra. PAGE CHAPTER XII Tana or Diana, the Moon-Goddess ... 72 CHAPTER XIII Diana and the Children 78 CHAPTER XIV The Goblin Messengers of Diana and Mercury 86 CHAPTER XV Laverna 89 APPENDIX loi ARADIA OR THE GOSPEL OF THE WITCHES CHAPTER

That is my least favorite Stony Cross wedding custom,” Beatrix said ruefully, brushing at the remaining few crumbs that clung to her arms. “On the other hand, it’s probably made more than a few birds happy.” “Speaking of birds, dear…” Amelia waited until the maid had gone to draw a bath. “That brings to mind the line from Samuel Coleridge’s poem about spring, ‘The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing--’” Beatrix gave her a quizzical glance. “Why do you mention that? It’s autumn, not spring.” “Yes, but that particular poem mentions birds pairing. I thought you might have some questions for me on that topic.” “About birds? Thank you, but I know far more about birds than you.” Amelia sighed, giving up the attempt to be delicate. “Forget the blasted birds. It’s your wedding night--do you want to ask me anything?” “Oh. Thank you, but Christopher has already, er…provided the information.” Amelia’s brows lifted. “Has he?” “Yes. Although he used a different euphemism than birds or bees.” “Did he? What did he reference, then?” “Squirrels,” Beatrix said. And she turned aside to hide a grin at her sister’s expression.

Whom first we love, you know, we seldom wed.

105 Our death is an eternal wedding-feast; what is the secret of this? He is God, One. The sun became dispersed through the windows; the windows became shut, and the numbers departed. Those numbers which existed in the grapes are naughted in the juice which flows from the grapes. Whosoever is living by the light of God, the death of this spirit is replenishment to him. Speak not evil, speak not good regarding those who have passed away from good and evil. Fix your eye on God, and speak not of what you have not seen, that He may implant another eye in your eye. That eye is the eye of the eye, nothing unseen or secret escapes from it. When its gaze is by the Light of God, to such a light what can be hidden? Though all lights are the Light of God, call not all of those the eternal Light. Eternal light is that which is the Light of God, transient light is the attribute of flesh and body. The light in this mortal eye is a fire, save for that eye which God anoints with surmeh {collyrium}. His fire became light for the sake of Abraham; the eye of reason became in quality like the eye of an ass. O God, the bird of the eye which has seen Your bounty flies in Your air. The Pole, he who is the sky of the skies, is on the lookout in search of You; Either grant him vision to see You, or do not dismiss him on account of this fault. Make tearful the eye of your soul every moment, guard it against the snare of human stature and cheek. Eye asleep and yourself wakeful—such a sleep is perfection and rectitude; But the eye asleep that finds no interpretation (of dreams)—expel it from sleep, despite envy. Else it will labour and be boiling in the fire of love of the One, even to the grave.

Poem of the Song About Hope" I. Give me lilies, lilies, And roses too. But if you have no lilies Or roses to give me, At least have the desire To give me lilies And roses too. The desire’s enough, Your desire, if you have it, To give me lilies And roses too, And I’ll have lilies — The best lilies — And the best roses Without receiving anything Except the gift Of your desire To give me lilies And roses too. II. The dress you’re wearing Is a memory For my heart. Someone else wore it long ago — I never saw her, But I remember. Everything in life Works by memory. Some woman moves us With a gesture that recalls our mother. Some girl makes us happy By talking like our sister. A child tears us from distraction Because we loved a woman like her When we were young, and never spoke to her. Everything’s like that, more or less. The heart moves in jolts. Living means not meeting up with yourself. At the end of it all, if I’m tired, I’ll sleep. But I’d like to meet you and for us to speak. I’m sure we’d get along well, you and I. But if we don’t meet, I’ll keep the moment In which I thought we might. I keep everything — All the letters I’m written, All the letters I’m not written, Good Lord, people keep everything whether they want to or not, And your little blue dress, my God, if I could use it To draw you to me! Well, anything can happen... You’re so young — so youthful, Ricardo Reis would say — And my vision of you explodes literarily, And I lie back on the sand and laugh like an elemental inferior Damn it, feeling’s exhausting, and life’s warm when the sun is high. Good night in Australia!

Soon after joining the agency, Marks set out to lessen the danger. His first step was to get rid of the codes that the agency had been using to communicate with its people in the field. They had come from MI6, which, for the first two years of SOE’s existence, had controlled its wireless circuits and provided its sets and coding. Marks was dismayed by the simplicity of the codes, which were based on classic English poems by Shakespeare and others that were “so familiar that an educated German was quite capable of recognizing them and guessing the cipher.” To replace them, he wrote poems of his own, ranging from ribald verses to tender love poems. He gave one of the latter, entitled “The Life That I Have,” to a twenty-one-year-old agent named Violette Szabo, who, after being parachuted into France in 1942, was eventually captured, tortured, and killed by the Gestapo. It read: The life that I have Is all that I have And the life that I have Is yours. The love that I have Of the life that I have Is yours and yours and yours. A sleep I shall have A rest I shall have Yet death will be but a pause For the peace of my years In the long green grass Will be yours and yours and yours. Since then, the poem has developed a life of its own. It has been used in a movie about Szabo’s life, found in poetry anthologies, reprinted on a 9/11 victims’ website, and recited by Chelsea Clinton and Marc Mezvinsky at their wedding in 2010. “Every code,” Marks would later say, “has a human face.

Instead, the world was listening to the new President’s undimmed fury. I remembered the late Maya Angelou reading one of her poems at Bill’s first inauguration. “Do not be wedded forever to fear, yoked eternally to brutishness,” she urged us. What would she say if she could hear this speech? Then it was done, and he was our President. “That was some weird shit,” George W. reportedly said with characteristic Texas bluntness. I couldn’t have agreed more.

The Disruption Machine What the gospel of innovation gets wrong. by Jill Lepore In the last years of the nineteen-eighties, I worked not at startups but at what might be called finish-downs. Tech companies that were dying would hire temps—college students and new graduates—to do what little was left of the work of the employees they’d laid off. This was in Cambridge, near M.I.T. I’d type users’ manuals, save them onto 5.25-inch floppy disks, and send them to a line printer that yammered like a set of prank-shop chatter teeth, but, by the time the last perforated page coiled out of it, the equipment whose functions those manuals explained had been discontinued. We’d work a month here, a week there. There wasn’t much to do. Mainly, we sat at our desks and wrote wishy-washy poems on keyboards manufactured by Digital Equipment Corporation, left one another sly messages on pink While You Were Out sticky notes, swapped paperback novels—Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, that kind of thing—and, during lunch hour, had assignations in empty, unlocked offices. At Polaroid, I once found a Bantam Books edition of “Steppenwolf” in a clogged sink in an employees’ bathroom, floating like a raft. “In his heart he was not a man, but a wolf of the steppes,” it said on the bloated cover. The rest was unreadable.

If we owned ourselves we'd overturn this earth there would be no reason to destroy everything we are but it's easier and safer to stay small.

•    Be an intentional blessing to someone. Devote yourself to caring for others. Even when your own needs begin to dominate your attention, set aside time daily to tune in to others. Pray for their specific needs and speak blessings to those you encounter each day. Make them glad they met you.     •    Seek joy. Each morning ask yourself, “Where will the joy be today?” and then look for it. Look high and low—in misty sunbeams, your favorite poem, the kind eyes of your caretaker, dew-touched spiderwebs, fluffy white clouds scuttling by, even extra butterflies summoned by heaven just to make you smile.     •    Prepare love notes. When energy permits, write, videotape, or audiotape little messages of encouragement to children, grandchildren, and friends for special occasions in their future. Reminders of your love when you won’t be there to tell them yourself. Enlist the help of a friend or family member to present your messages at the right time, labeled, “For my granddaughter on her wedding day,” “For my beloved friend’s sixty-fifth birthday,” or “For my dear son and daughter-in-law on their golden anniversary.”     •    Pass on your faith. Purchase a supply of Bibles and in the front flap of each one, write a personal dedication to the child or grandchild, friend, or neighbor you intend to give it to. Choose a specific book of the Bible (the Gospels are a great place to start) and read several chapters daily, writing comments in the margin of how this verse impacted your life or what that verse means to you. Include personal notes or prayers for the recipient related to highlighted scriptures. Your words will become a precious keepsake of faith for generations to come. (*Helpful hint: A Bible with this idea in mind might make a thoughtful gift for a loved one standing at the threshold of eternity. Not only will it immerse the person in the comforting balm of scripture, but it will give him or her a very worthwhile project that will long benefit those he or she loves.)     •    Make love your legacy. Emily Dickinson said, “Unable are the loved to die. For love is immortality.” Ask yourself, “What will people remember most about me?” Meditate on John 15:12: “Love each other as I have loved you” (NIV). Tape it beside your bed so it’s the last thing you see at night and the first thing you see in the morning.     •    “Remember that God loves you and will see you through it.

We sometimes went on long hikes, to the woods around Czernovitz, a day's outing. Everyone carried a knapsack on the back, wore shoes with heavy soles and white, knee-high cotton socks. The girls wore a "dirndl" which consisted of a white blouse, a flowered skirt and a little apron, adorned with lace. It was the way the Tyrolians dressed, an old Austrian custom. Sometimes, we would sit in a meadow and one or another would read aloud. Paul Antschel, who later changed his name to Celan, loved to read to the group poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, in German, of course. Sometimes we'd read aloud H. Heine poems and sometimes we'd sing.

White Dawn, That Tak'st The Heaven With Sweet Surprise White dawn, that tak'st the heaven with sweet surprise of amorous artifice, art thou the bearer of my perfect hour divine, untrod, from some forgotten window of Paradise by mighty winds of God blown down the world, before my haunted eyes at length to flower? Nay, virgin dawn, yet art thou all too known, too crowded light to take my boundless hour of flaming peace: thou common dayspring cease; and be there only night, the only night, more than all other lone: be the sole secret world one rose unfurl'd, and nought disturb its blossom'd peace intense, that fills the living deep beyond all dreams of sense enmesh'd in errorous multiplicity: — let be nought but her coming there: what else were fair? It asks no golden web, no censer-fire to tell the dense incarnate mystery where one delight is wed with one desire. No leaves bestrow that passage to the rose of all fulfill'd delight; no silver trumpets blow majestic rite, but silence that is sigh'd from faery lands, or wraps the feet of Beauty where she treads dim fields of fading stars, be round our meeting heads, and seeking hands: draw near, ye heavens, and be our chamber-bars; and thou, maternal heart of holy night, close watch, what hush'd and sacramental tide a soul goes forth wide-eyed, to meet the archangel-sword of loneliest delight

Elysian Way by Stewart Stafford An eviction deadline decree, A woodpecker broadcast, Winter, the incoming actor, About to enter a clean stage. The powder blue sky framed, Fall's aurum, russet and ochre, Dripping opalescent raindrops, A red wedding's spangled confetti. Leaves shushed and shimmered, In moving vertical waves of surf, Trees shrugged slowly to begin, The organic haircut of the ages. Leaves plunged, spun and floated, Fallen comrades littered the grass, Half-assed, surprise resurrections, As swirling spectral mini vortexes. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved

Seventh of Ten Elegies for Fire and Oxycodone Larry Levis living down in the flat part of Virginia draws his life In a Late Style of Fire his obituary doesn't say it but drugs killed him one way or another of course they don't print those sorts of things in papers didn't used to in poems neither where he wrote about jacking off sending meth for god to try he was teaching then at the same college we'd find you or you'd find yourself getting kicked out of for growing weed I wonder what Levis knew about Rome its firemen the most American things you ever heard of that never heard of America - When that great aunt died we included After a long battle with breast cancer in the draft of her obituary the paper took out breast too sexy for the news when you died nobody included how in the paper for the sake of decorum as if they were pulling something off as if people around here saw an obit for a 25-year-old no listed cause of death thought anything other than overdose or suicide the only folks fooled are those from the future the ones combing death records to find out how we lived the trouble with decorum the future won't know who did this to us who and how bad

only sport known to have inspired an indignant left-wing poem. It was written by one Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn in 1915. The golf links lie so near the mill That almost every day The laboring children can look out And see the men at play. Just show me an indignant left-wing poem about softball or bungee jumping. And our local mill has been converted to a shopping mall, so the kids are still there. Golf is also the only sport God is known to play. God and Saint Peter are out on Sunday morning. On the first hole God drives into a water hazard. The waters part and God chips onto the green. On the second hole God takes a tremendous whack and the ball lands ten feet from the pin. There’s an earthquake, one side of the green rises up, and the ball rolls into the cup. On the third hole God lands in a sand trap. He creates life. Single-cell organisms develop into fish and then amphibians. Amphibians crawl out of the ocean and evolve into reptiles, birds, and furry little mammals. One of those furry little mammals runs into the sand trap, grabs God’s ball in its mouth, scurries over, and drops it in the hole. Saint Peter looks at God and says, “You wanna play golf or you wanna fuck around?” And golf courses are beautiful. Many people think mature men have no appreciation for beauty except in immature women. This isn’t true, and, anyway, we’d rather be playing golf. A golf course is a perfect example of Republican male aesthetics—no fussy little flowers, no stupid ornamental shrubs, no exorbitant demands for alimony, just acre upon acre of lush green grass that somebody else has to mow. Truth, beauty, and even poetry are to be found in golf. Every man, when he steps up to the tee, feels, as Keats has it … Like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific—and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise— Silent, upon a peak in Darien. That is, the men were silent. Cortez was saying, “I can get on in two, easy. A three-wood drive, a five-iron from the fairway, then a two-putt max. But if I hook it, shit, I’m in the drink.” EAT THE RICH

THE TRUTH In summer there was something in the selfhood of the wasps that wanted to get inside the screened-in porch. It sent them buzzing against the wire mesh, probing under the eaves, crawling into the cracks between the boards. Each day we’d find new bodies on the sill: little failures, like struck matches: shrunken in death, the yellow color of cider or old varnish. The blue self of the sky looked down on the self of the wooden house where the wasps were perishing. The wind swept them to the ground. The wasps seemed to be extensions of one big thing making the same effort again and again. I can remember that feeling of being driven by some longing I could not understand to look for the passage through, —trying again and again to get inside. I must have left a lot of dead former selves scattered around behind me while I kept pushing my blunt head at a space that prevented my entering —and by that preventing delivered me to where I live now, still outside; still flying around in the land of the unfinished.

We are gathered here today in the sight of God—oh shit, that part doesn’t really apply.” He consults his envelope again, then asks the crowd. “Does anyone have a pencil?” Again, he catches Felicity’s eye, and she gives him a gesture that clearly says move on. “Right. So. Not God. Sort of God—I don’t think he’d have anything against this, to be honest. But we’re here.” He looks up again from his notes, and seems to see Monty and Percy for the first time. His shoulders relax, and his face breaks into a smile so big his eyes crinkle, like there are no two people on earth he loves more. “To join these two in matrimony. And we don’t give a damn if it’s holy or not.” “Please don’t be crass at my wedding,” Monty says. His dark hair is studded with splashes of color from the wildflower garland. A single stem of yarrow has come free and is dangling down over his ear. “In lieu of scripture,” George says, as though he wasn’t interrupted, “Monty has requested I read an erotic poem.” The assembly laughs and Monty goes fantastically red. He glares at George, mouth puckered mostly to keep himself from smiling. Percy has to turn away to conceal his laughter.

He gripped the pages and told me they were all for me, about me, because of me. But when he was at the podium and I was in the first row, he never looked at me. When he read a poem about eating a peach on an overturned rowboat, the peach I'd brought, the rowboat where we'd sat together, he said it was for his mother, who loved peaches.

Some nights she comes to act as courier, midwife to our own skills. Emily, come like a UFO to implant her genius in us. Our Queen Mab, condemned to be the only woman mentioned in the lyric omnibuses of her epoch; easy scapegoat of men’s centuries, she stood in for all women. So now, of course, she comes to blow off steam in the privacy of the green room. All those living years she walked from yard to yard, gardens flourished in opium poppies; went out at night to see the owls and wed her genius. She applied her passion like a hot iron sword. And no one can take off her clothes, ever—she comes and her language takes them off of us, not piece by piece, not fumbling buttons, but all at once in a single shot, her tiny poems like grenades that fit in the hand. And we here bask in the debris, stripped down to our private parts, the snow white of the bone, the authentic corpse in heat. The absolute original.

our lietenants knew those splotches in the rafters / were splotches of gangrene and gore / and opportunity was “rife” rather than “ripe.” / The rank and file had fallen silent / since we’d held out the idea of heaver or the hereafter.

Pity" Amir sat on the same old wooden chair Roua still remembers vividly the furniture store where she bought that chair - less than a month after their wedding… The furniture store closed its doors a long time ago, Along with the doors of their stormy pre-marital love story perhaps in due to boredom or the shocks of the years… She would cut his hair, a habit that began when they were poor and Amir couldn’t afford a barber … Years went by and many things changed, But Roua kept cutting his hair on the same wooden chair almost once a month… He sat in his underwear She looked at his saggy skin that was getting looser and his belly getting slightly bigger with each haircut… She began wandering in her mind and wondering whether she ever loved him, or was it an overwhelming infatuation that turned into pity over the years without ever passing through the corridors of love? Her emotions kept swinging between love or pity with each snip … She was frightened to admit it was pity, for the price was almost her entire life… Yet she couldn’t sincerely determine it was love, for she hasn’t felt any love towards him for quite a time… Suddenly, she caught Amir looking at her as if he could read her mind… A tear involuntarily rolled down her eye as she continued cutting his hair… [Original poem published in Arabic on August 3, 2023 at ahewar.org]

Twenty-One Love Poems [Poem III] - 1929-2012 Since we’re not young, weeks have to do time for years of missing each other. Yet only this odd warp in time tells me we’re not young. Did I ever walk the morning streets at twenty, my limbs streaming with a purer joy? did I lean from any window over the city listening for the future as I listen here with nerves tuned for your ring? And you, you move toward me with the same tempo. Your eyes are everlasting, the green spark of the blue-eyed grass of early summer, the green-blue wild cress washed by the spring. At twenty, yes: we thought we’d live forever. At forty-five, I want to know even our limits. I touch you knowing we weren’t born tomorrow, and somehow, each of us will help the other live, and somewhere, each of us must help the other die.

You are going to the fields strewn with corpses, How can I not feel a pang inside? Though I would swear to follow you, I am afraid that green will turn yellow

At the wedding ceremony the two sisters came to curry favor and the white dove pecked their eyes out. Two hollow spots were left like soup spoons. Cinderella and the prince lived, they say, happily ever after, like two dolls in a museum case never bothered by diapers or dust, never arguing over the timing of an egg, never telling the same story twice, never getting a middle-aged spread, their darling smiles pasted on for eternity. Regular Bobbsey Twins. That story.

I wonder where we'd be if the masses knew just what a poem could do

There were the artifacts. The signed Lichtenstein that was presented as a wedding gift. The watercolor by Henry Miller for when I was born. Robert Lowell’s notes on her poems. Philip Roth and Saul Bellow were guests at the house and praised her work.

Garden of the Dragons (The ’Halla, Vol. # 3) Chapter Ten Excerpt (original editing) ... Hachiman, surveys he the woe, Wipes his brow, hate does flow. A ruined life, heh, a loss of face, He must have her now, to his disgrace (Wed to Kari now, locked in time and place). Battle over, moon still shines, Lilies float soft in quiet time. Scented visions and memories sear remains, Of this terrible night of what was feigned. Visuals lithe, of sword and blade, Disguise the carnage and the pain. Petals soft, they hide our gaze, And cover the ground and its grave. Flowers and moon in water light, T'winkills the calm of a zen-burst night. Now to life, the poem to seek repose, And bury beneath those riddles she holds. Nectars sweet, precious flowers, A fragranted grave that allures and empowers. Heart~beat, heart~beat, tells the way, Of things long remembered and a far lost day. How many memories, Kari knew, That stain with age, being so few. Samurai remembers - feels it as a man, Clutches he his fist; wind in hand. . . . ". . .I have searched for you a very long time." "Do not waste breath, kill. It is our way here." "Not before I have my say, Corpse-eater." "No wonder you took so long to find me." "I have had a lot of time for thought," quietly he, "- T'is a shame we could not agree." "No more room for that," forcefully he snapped, "You dishonored me twice and now, I will take one back." "- Not enough? Hachi," said cordially she, "If you are going to - cut the artery, please." Tilt she her neck, exposed but her vein, Samurai frowned, decidedly vain. Looked he at his hands - "They're already too bloody for today." "Hummph. Such trite man'ers are atrocious. For yourself you are much too engaged." ("Yet, a moment and it is done," thought he, "But to gain it thus, a hollow travesty. I must face her in all her strength, The bladed Valkyrie, the one called great"). "I could kill you now, but I'd rather not, This room is too unbecoming for the proper job." "Charmed that you still think so highly of me." "- Only then of your haunted beauty, I shall be free." Feeling that weight, slowly dropped he his blade, Time enough - rituals to cleanse and to pray. Tossed his sword, pined her down - Smooshed her face to the floor, Pinching it to a frown. "Oh no, my little angel, you have it all wrong! I mean only to kill you when you are strong. Do not fear, I won't let anyone harm you in strife, In the meantime, try not to flirt with your life. Stay healthy - then we shall settle our love, unrequite." A biting grin creased Samurai's scarved face, "Let us fix it properly, according to my r'ace." "Bushido," mouthed Kari, her voice empty as the word. "And there will be no running away this time - Rest assured." Slowly withdrew he and left the room, "Bastard," spit Kari, caustic of his doom. The girl breathing vexiously, then calmly in the dark, The door closed, silent, the light dribbling out. Sounds below, drip mute in time, Reality presses, she makes her fate thind. And Skuld drinking, contemplates she her sibylline, It was her hour now, the night of the wolverine.

It's like what Robert Frost said in that poem about the road less traveled. It may not get you to where you were headed, but it will get you somewhere, and that place may be even better than where you thought you were going.

I’m tired. The conductor has given me a pass. Maybe she saw into me, that I’m headed to a hotel room alone, to a wedding alone, that I stop myself from speaking more often than not. It’s hard to say that I used to love someone, that now I might love someone else, because I’m a coward.

That beautiful Shirazi Turk, took control and my heart stole, I'll give Samarkand & Bukhara, for her Hindu beauty mole. O wine-bearer bring me wine, such wine not found in Heavens By running brooks, in flowery fields, spend your days and stroll. Alas, these sweet gypsy clowns, these agitators of our town Took the patience of my heart, like looting Turks take their toll. Such unfinished love as ours, the Beloved has no need, For the Perfect Beauty, frills and adornments play no role. I came to know Joseph's goodness, that daily would increase Even the chaste Mistress succumbed to the love she would extol. Whether profane or even cursed, I'll reply only in praise Sweetness of tongue and the lips, even bitterness would enthrall. Heed the advice of the wise, make your most endeared goal, The fortunate blessed youth, listen to the old wise soul. Tell tales of song and wine, seek not secrets of the world, None has found and no-one will, knowledge leaves this riddle whole. You composed poems and sang, Hafiz, you spent your days well Venus wedded to your songs, in the firmaments' inverted bowl.

Two Valentines are actually described in the early church, but they likely refer to the same man — a priest in Rome during the reign of Emperor Claudius II. According to tradition, Valentine, having been imprisoned and beaten, was beheaded on February 14, about 270, along the Flaminian Way. Sound romantic to you? How then did his martyrdom become a day for lovers and flowers, candy and little poems reading Roses are red… ? According to legends handed down, Valentine undercut an edict of Emperor Claudius. Wanting to more easily recruit soldiers for his army, Claudius had tried to weaken family ties by forbidding marriage. Valentine, ignoring the order, secretly married young couples in the underground church. These activities, when uncovered, led to his arrest. Furthermore, Valentine had a romantic interest of his own. While in prison he became friends with the jailer’s daughter, and being deprived of books he amused himself by cutting shapes in paper and writing notes to her. His last note arrived on the morning of his death and ended with the words “Your Valentine.” In 496 February 14 was named in his honor. By this time Christianity had long been legalized in the empire, and many pagan celebrations were being “christianized.” One of them, a Roman festival named Lupercalia, was a celebration of love and fertility in which young men put names of girls in a box, drew them out, and celebrated lovemaking. This holiday was replaced by St. Valentine’s Day with its more innocent customs of sending notes and sharing expressions of affection. Does any real truth lie behind the stories of St. Valentine? Probably. He likely conducted underground weddings and sent notes to the jailer’s daughter. He might have even signed them “Your Valentine.” And he probably died for his faith in Christ.

its sting is what makes it beautiful.

of the seven and one half quintillion grains of sand — only you could seed my pearl

do we love, or am i but a blue tangerine?

You already are here and somewhere else: At someone’s wake hearing wedding bells. Your name’s on the sash of a beauty queen While your epal face on a tarpaulin...

If the world were flat, like a flying carpet, our sorrow would have a beginning and an end. If the world were square, we'd lie low in a corner whenever the war plays hide and seek. If the world were round, our dreams would take turns on the Ferris wheel, and we'd all be equal.

I do wonder sometimes, I do wonder what it is about the human mind that goes to pain and degradation. I do wonder what it is. We talk about original sin. We talk about ignorance. We talk about people not having had a chance. We talk about poverty--a bunch of things--but there is something not quite right about the human species, because, given half a chance, we'd be eating one another.

The Sheva Brachot, the seven marriage blessings, are being recited now, but my mind is spinning and I think not of the words praising God who created the groom who rejoices in his bride. Instead, I think of the Sharon Olds poem 'I Go Back to May 1937' - hardly good wedding material - about her parents' disastrous marriage. I want to go up to them and say Stop, don't do it - she's the wrong woman, he's the wrong man, you are going to do things you cannot imagine you would ever do I still want to go up to her, my bridled, bridal self, and plead with her one last time: Please. You are barely twenty-three, so much younger than you realize. Please. You know so little of the world. You know so little of yourself.

is not poetry a secret language — a sigh answering a sigh?

Sestina" For a week now our bodies have whispered together, telling each other secrets you and I would keep. Their language, harder and more tender than this, wakes us suddenly in the half dawn, tangled dragons on their map. They have a plan. We are stranded travelers who plan to ditch our bags and walk. The hill wind whispers danger and rain. We are going different ways. That tangled thornbush is where the road forks. The secrets we told on the station bench to keep awake were lies. I suspect from your choice of language that you are not speaking your native language. You will not know about the city plan tattooed behind my knee. But the skin wakes up in humming networks, audibly whispers over the dead wind. Everybody’s secrets jam the wires. Syllables get tangled with bus tickets and matchbooks. You tangled my hair in your fingers and language split like a black fig. I suck the secrets off your skin. This isn’t in the plan, the subcutaneous transmitter whispers. Be circumspect. What sort of person wakes up twice in a wrecked car? And we wake in wary seconds of each other, tangled damply together. Your cock whispers inside my thigh that there is language without memory. Your fingers plan wet symphonies in my garrulous secret places. There is nothing secret in people crying at weddings and singing at wakes; and when you pack a duffel bag and plan on the gratuitous, you will still tangle purpose and habit, more baggage, more language. It is not accidental what they whisper. Our bodies whispered under the sheet. Their secret language will not elude us when we wake into the tangled light without a plan.

They’re gassing geese outside of JFK. Tehran will likely fill up soon with blood. The Times is getting smaller day by day. We’ve learned to back away from all we say And, more or less, agree with what we should. Whole flocks are being gassed near JFK. So much of what we’re asked is to obey— A reflex we’d abandon if we could. The Times reported 19 dead today. They’re going to make the opposition pay. (If you’re sympathetic, knock on wood.) The geese were terrorizing JFK. Remember how they taught you once to pray? Eyes closed, on your knees, to any god? Sometimes, small minds seem to take the day. Election fraud. A migratory plague. Less and less surprises us as odd. We dislike what they did at JFK. Our time is brief. We dwindle by the day.

Almost every child will complain about their parents sometimes. It is natural, because when people stay together for a long time, they will start to have argument. But ignore about the unhappy time, our parents love us all the time. No matter what happen to us, they will stand by our sides. We should be grateful to them and try to understand them. 카톡►ppt33◄ 〓 라인►pxp32◄ 홈피는 친추로 연락주세요 팔팔정판매,팔팔정팝니다,팔팔정구입방법,팔팔정구매방법,팔팔정판매사이트,팔팔정약효, 비아그라복용법,시알리스복용법,레비트라복용법 The fire of the liquid, which makes you, when you wake up, when you wake up, when you're stoned, when you're stoned, when you turn heaven and earth upside down, when you turn black and white, when the world turns right and wrong, when it turns human history upside down, when it turns four arts of the Chinese scholar, when it turns red and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white, when it turns black and white and white, when it turns black and white and white, when it turns Crazy poem immortal, Make Public Cao Cao, write hongmen banquet, Wet Qingming Apricot rain, thin Begonia Li Qingzhao, Jingyanggang, help Wu Song three Fists Kill Tigers, Xunyang Tower, Vertical Song Jiang Poem Rebellion, you Ah, you, how many Heroes Jin Yong's Linghu Chong put down how many village men singing and dancing with you, beauty with you, urge poetry, Zhuang Literati Bold, some people borrow you crazy, some people borrow you to seize power, sometimes you are just a prop, to set off the atmosphere at the negotiating table, sometimes you are more like a hidden weapon, knocking out the opponents who drink too much. You, you, have entered both the luxurious houses of Zhu men and the humble cottages, both overflowing the golden bottles of the Royal Family and filling the coarse bowls of the peasant family. You are needed for sorrow, and you are needed for joy, on your wedding night, when you meet a friend from another country, when your name is inscribed on the gold list, the migrating and exiled prisoners, the down-and-out Literati, the high-flying officials of the imperial court, are all your confidants, your companions, and even the condemned prisoners who are about to go on their way, they all want you to say goodbye to them because of you, how many great events have been delayed, because of you, how many unjust cases have been made, because of you, how many anecdotes have been kept alive, because of you, how many famous works have been produced, but also because of you, how many people's liver cancer has been created, and the soul has gone to heaven, it is true, there are successes and failures as well as you, life also has you, death also has you, you drown sorrow more sorrow, poor also has you, rich also has you, thousands of families also can not leave you.

The glacierscape called it up, the silent, shining tulle, the dreaming hats and cubes, the theorems and corollaries, that girl who had thought a wedding promise was binding as a law of physics.

हम लोरी को ग़म में लिपटे, सुखाते थे छतों पर। टूटी हुई चप्पल से, सजाते थे अपना घर। ताकि नज़र न लग जाए। We used to wrap lullabies in sorrow, And dry them out on the rooftops. With broken slipper, We’d decorate our home — So that no evil eye could fall upon it.

There was a final day my siblings and I all spent under the same roof, and I didn't even realize it. Perhaps we would have celebrated it better. We could have taken pictures together to preserve the memory. Maybe we could have hugged each other. Some sort of touch at least. Alas, we did not. There were wedding preparations to be done and clothes to be packed and new homes to be moved into. Our goodbyes must have gotten lost in the hustle and bustle of it all, but maybe this was the best way it could have happened. Imagine if we had slowed down that day. Imagine we had acknowledged the gravity of that situation, that this was our last day together and life was changing, and we were walking into the unknown. Imagine we came to the realization that the person we saw every single day, we would now see every few weeks or months or years. Who can move on from a realization like that?

My mother once wrote a poem about rivers. They were women, she wrote. Starting out small girls, tiny streams decorated with wildflowers. Then they were torrents, gouging paths through sheer granite, flinging themselves off cliffs, fearless and irresistible. Later, they grew fat and serviceable, broad slow curves carrying commerce and sewage, but in their unconscious depths catfish gorged, grew the size of barges, and in the hundred-year storms, they rose up, forgetting the promises they made, the wedding vows, and drowned everything for miles around. Finally, they gave out, birth-emptied, malarial, into a fan of swamp that met the sea.

In the night, the bed was as long as the hours, the hours were as long as the road or the future, the past was not our destiny, the foreboding or foretelling was left on the shelves to the longplaying records we’d switch on for the warmth of the scratches that pocked the music like rain, as the needle wandered all that black circumference—

What about tomorrow? Tomorrow’s Saturday, isn’t it?” “I’m pretty sure I have some school stuff.” Already, I was thinking too much. I was thinking that Saturday was loaded in a way Friday wasn’t—we had Saturday classes, so Friday was still a school night, but Saturday was pure weekend. If I went out with Dave on a Saturday night, I was pretty sure we’d be going on a date. “How’s Sunday?” he said. “Sunday I’m off.” What I needed to do was just be calm. I needed to come up with the next words to say, to concentrate only on the immediate task in front of me and not give in to the sense that this moment was a monstrous pulsating flower, a purple and green geometrical blossom like you might see in a kaleidoscope. “Sunday is okay,” I said. “I’ll meet you here.” “In the parking lot?” “It’s kind of hard to find my dorm,” I said. “And they’re weird about letting guys inside.” “Gotcha. What about seven o’clock. Is seven good?” I nodded. “These are gonna be the best mashed potatoes of your life. Poems have been written about these mashed potatoes.” By you? I wanted to teasingly ask him. But I couldn’t because my anxiety was exploding, the flower was swirling outward infinitely.

In another realm, perhaps, We’d find our way, You’d be mine, and I’d be yours. We’d stroll along shores kissed by moonlight’s embrace, You’d be my North Star, guiding me through the night, And I’d be the echo of your whispered dreams. In that alternate reality, You’d have chosen me above all else, No room for doubt or hesitation, Our love would surpass the limits of time. Yet, in this lifetime, I’ll bear the weight of this ache, Though with each passing year, Gratitude slowly finds its place. For I cherish the thought, The privilege of once being yours.

Let the poplars raise their chalices for a sky-shattering toast, like thousands of wedding guests drinking in jubilation at a feast. But in the room of the banished poet Fear and the Muse stand watch by turn, and the night is coming on, which has no hope of dawn.

It is not nothing that it’s the loveliest night of the year I hear a melody from my balcony —elsewhere life is exploding becoming stars but all that is lost on me I am here trying not to name this How can I not say that for me there is not enough of you I invent you numerous times a day practice not saying the words as you laugh lawlessly and hold me in your solid livingness yet each time I fall forever like a leaf It’s become so hard I blurted the words in a goodbye to your dog It’s the loveliest night of the year as I practice unspeaking how to not say there was whatever that came before and then a life of possibility

You are the “Yes” to my heart’s deepest longing, the beautiful dream that awoke me from sleep. You are the end to all of my searching, my missing half—in you I’m complete.

We sat grown quiet at the name of love;    We saw the last embers of daylight die,    And in the trembling blue-green of the sky    A moon, worn as if it had been a shell    Washed by time’s waters as they rose and fell    About the stars and broke in days and years. I had a thought for no one’s but your ears:    That you were beautiful, and that I strove    To love you in the old high way of love; That it had all seemed happy, and yet we’d grown    As weary-hearted as that hollow moon. — Excerpt from Adam’s Curse