🍂Collection of Poetry, Letters or Other Written Works🍁
Posted 2024-03-22 14:11:30
driving over the hills from work. There are the dark parts on the road when you pass through clumps of wood and the bright spots where you have a view of the ocean, but that doesn't make the road an allegory. I should call Marie and apologize for being so boring at dinner last night, but can I really promise not to be that way again? And anyway, I'd rather watch the trees, tossing in what certainly looks like sexual arousal. Otherwise it's spring, and everything looks frail; the sky is baby blue, and the just-unfurling leaves are full of infant chlorophyll, the very tint of inexperience. Last summer's song is making a comeback on the radio, and on the highway overpass, the only metaphysical vandal in America has written MEMORY LOVES TIME in big black spraypaint letters, which makes us wonder if Time loves Memory back. Last night I dreamed of X again. She's like a stain on my subconscious sheets. Years ago she penetrated me but though I scrubbed and scrubbed and scrubbed, I never got her out, but now I'm glad. What I thought was an end turned out to be a middle. What I thought was a brick wall turned out to be a tunnel. What I thought was an injustice turned out to be a color of the sky. Outside the youth center, between the liquor store and the police station, a little dogwood tree is losing its mind; overflowing with blossomfoam, like a sudsy mug of beer; like a bride ripping off her clothes, dropping snow white petals to the ground in clouds, so Nature's wastefulness seems quietly obscene. It's been doing that all week: making beauty, and throwing it away, and making more. -Tony Hoagland |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-22 14:11:48
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze. And I, what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost. -D.H. Lawrence |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-22 14:12:48
spring when the world is mud- luscious the little lame balloonman whistles far and wee and eddieandbill come running from marbles and piracies and it's spring when the world is puddle-wonderful the queer old balloonman whistles far and wee and bettyandisbel come dancing from hop-scotch and jump-rope and it's spring and the goat-footed balloonMan whistles far and wee -E.E. Cummings |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-23 08:10:31
And the new budding flowers did spring, When all alone went Amyntas and I To hear the sweet nightingale sing; I sate, and he laid him down by me; But scarcely his breath he could draw; For when with a fear, he began to draw near, He was dash'd with A ha ha ha ha! He blush'd to himself, and lay still for a while, And his modesty curb'd his desire; But straight I convinc'd all his fear with a smile, Which added new flames to his fire. O Silvia, said he, you are cruel, To keep your poor lover in awe; Then once more he press'd with his hand to my breast, But was dash'd with A ha ha ha ha! I knew 'twas his passion that caus'd all his fear; And therefore I pitied his case: I whisper'd him softly, there's nobody near, And laid my cheek close to his face: But as he grew bolder and bolder, A shepherd came by us and saw; And just as our bliss we began with a kiss, He laugh'd out with A ha ha ha ha! -John Dryden |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-23 08:11:05
And lady-smocks all silver-white And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue Do paint the meadows with delight, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo: Oh word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! When shepherds pipe on oaten straws, And merry larks are plowmen's clocks, When turtles tread, and rooks, and daws, And maidens bleach their summer smocks, The cuckoo then, on every tree, Mocks married men; for thus sings he, Cuckoo; Cuckoo, cuckoo: Oh word of fear, Unpleasing to a married ear! -William Shakespeare |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-23 08:11:50
so uplifted by a warm intermittent breeze that it made you want to throw open all the windows in the house and unlatch the door to the canary's cage, indeed, rip the little door from its jamb, a day when the cool brick paths and the garden bursting with peonies seemed so etched in sunlight that you felt like taking a hammer to the glass paperweight on the living room end table, releasing the inhabitants from their snow-covered cottage so they could walk out, holding hands and squinting into this larger dome of blue and white, well, today is just that kind of day. -Billy Collins |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-23 08:13:08
Wild puffing of emerald trees, and flame-filled bushes, Thorn-blossom lifting in wreaths of smoke between Where the wood fumes up and the watery, flickering rushes. I am amazed at this spring, this conflagration Of green fires lit on the soil of the earth, this blaze Of growing, and sparks that puff in wild gyration, Faces of people streaming across my gaze. And I, what fountain of fire am I among This leaping combustion of spring? My spirit is tossed About like a shadow buffeted in the throng Of flames, a shadow that's gone astray, and is lost. -D.H. Lawrence |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-23 08:13:26 (edited)
to sulk. You pass beds of spiky voodoo lilies and trip over the roots of a sweet gum tree, in search of medieval plants whose leaves, when they drop off turn into birds if they fall on land, and colored carp if they plop into water. Suddenly the archetypal human desire for peace with every other species wells up in you. The lion and the lamb cuddling up. The snake and the snail, kissing. Even the prick of the thistle, queen of the weeds, revives your secret belief in perpetual spring, your faith that for every hurt there is a leaf to cure it. -Amy Gerstler |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-23 08:13:59
takes on a used-up, feather-duster look within a week. The ivy's spring reconnaissance campaign sends red feelers out and up and down to find the sun. Ivy from last summer clogs the pool, brewing a loamy, wormy, tea-leaf mulch soft to the touch and rank with interface of rut and rot. The month after the month they say is cruel is and is not. -Johnathan Galassi |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |
Posted 2024-03-23 08:14:23
Metropolitan poetry here and there, In the park sit pauper and rentier, The screaming children, the motor-car Fugitive about us, running away, Between the worker and the millionaire Number provides all distances, It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now, Many great dears are taken away, What will become of you and me (This is the school in which we learn ...) Besides the photo and the memory? (... that time is the fire in which we burn.) (This is the school in which we learn ...) What is the self amid this blaze? What am I now that I was then Which I shall suffer and act again, The theodicy I wrote in my high school days Restored all life from infancy, The children shouting are bright as they run (This is the school in which they learn ...) Ravished entirely in their passing play! (... that time is the fire in which they burn.) Avid its rush, that reeling blaze! Where is my father and Eleanor? Not where are they now, dead seven years, But what they were then? No more? No more? From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day, Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume Not where they are now (where are they now?) But what they were then, both beautiful; Each minute bursts in the burning room, The great globe reels in the solar fire, Spinning the trivial and unique away. (How all things flash! How all things flare!) What am I now that I was then? May memory restore again and again The smallest color of the smallest day: Time is the school in which we learn, Time is the fire in which we burn. -Delmore Schwartz |
Sunflower🌻 #133501 |