Showing posts with label distant. Show all posts
Showing posts with label distant. Show all posts

10/24/18

Camino Real - Richard Shelton

each makes his path
his small path

quickly overgrown
but leading him slowly
to where he is going

which is not
where he is planning to go

and when the last vine
or bamboo is cut
he emerges into a clearing

each into a different
clearing

where some are met
by cannibals some by lovers
some by friends

and some by nothing
except a clearing

a sky with stars at night
and by day an unexpected
view of the next hill

which is reason enough
for the long journey
more than reason enough

10/22/18

The Art of Disappearing - Naomi Shihab Nye

When they say Don't I know you?
say no.

When they invite you to the party
remember what parties are like
before answering.
Someone telling you in a loud voice
they once wrote a poem.
Greasy sausage balls on a paper plate.
Then reply.

If they say We should get together
say why?

It's not that you don't love them anymore.
You're trying to remember something
too important to forget.
Trees. The monastery bell at twilight.
Tell them you have a new project.
It will never be finished.

When someone recognizes you in a grocery store
nod briefly and become a cabbage.

When someone you haven't seen in ten years
appears at the door,
don't start singing him all your new songs.
You will never catch up.

Walk around feeling like a leaf.
Know you could tumble any second.
Then decide what to do with your time.

9/25/18

THE MAN WHO NEVER LOSES HIS BALANCE - Stephen Dunn

He walks the high wire in his sleep.
The tent is blue, it is perpetual
afternoon. He is walking between
the open legs of his mother
and the grave. Always. The audience knows this
is out of their hands. The audience
is fathers whose kites are lost, children
who want to be terrified into joy.
He is so high above them, so capable
(with a single, calculated move)
of making them care for him
that he's sick of the risks
he never really takes.
The tent is blue. Outside is a world
that is blue. Inside him
a blueness that could crack
like china if he ever hit bottom.
Every performance, deep down,
he tries one real plunge
off to the side, where the net ends.
But it never ends.

2/1/16

Abracadabra Acudubillah - Warsan Shire

Everyday since that bad
thing happened, I've been practicing
                   a spell:

how to disappear
from yourself,
within yourself.

I've noticed
each time I leave,
something in me keeps

                   going.
Something in me turns
its back on me—

someone else reflected in the mirror,
someone else answering
to my name.

12/16/15

Love Poem - Richard Brautigan

It’s so nice
to wake up in the morning
all alone
and not have to tell somebody
you love them
when you don’t love them
any more



Picture by Unknown, found on Public Domain (if you own the rights and would like it removed, just contact me!). This is the full poem, not an excerpt.

12/11/15

Lamium - Louise Glück

This is how you live when you have a cold heart.
As I do: in shadows, trailing over cool rock,
under the great maple trees.

The sun hardly touches me.
Sometimes I see it in early spring, rising very far away.
Then leaves grow over it, completely hiding it. I feel it
glinting through the leaves, erratic,
like someone hitting the side of a glass with a metal spoon.

Living things don't all require
light in the same degree. Some of us
make our own light: a silver leaf
like a path no one can use, a shallow
lake of silver in the darkness under the great maples.

But you know this already.
You and the others who think
you live for truth and, by extension, love
all that is cold.