Verses

The toadstools are starting to come up circular and dry. Nothing will touch them, Gophers or chipmunks, wasps or swallows. They glow in the twilight like rooted will-o’-the-wisps. Nothing will touch them. As though little roundabouts from the bunched unburiable, Powers, dominions, As though orphans rode herd in the short as though they had heard the call, They will always be with us, transcenders of the world. Someone will try to stick his beak into their otherworldly styrofoam. Someone may try to taste a taste of forever. For some it’s a refuge, for some a shady place to fall down. Grief is a floating barge-boat, who knows where it’s going to moor? ~ Charles Wright

No one loves anyone else; he loves What he finds of himself in the other. Don't fret if others don't love you. They feel Who you are, and you're a stranger. Be who you are, even never loved. Secure in yourself, you will suffer Few sorrows. ~Fernando Pessoa

Here is the road: the light comes and goes then returns again. Be gentle with your fellow travelers as they move through the world of stone and stars whirling with you yet every one alone. The road waits. Do not ask questions but when it invites you to dance at daybreak, say yes. Each step is the journey; a single note the song. "The Road" ~ Arlene Gay Levine

All the food critics hate iceberg lettuce. you'd think romaine was descended from orpheus's laurel wreath, you'd think raw spinach had all the nutritional benefits attributed to it by popeye, not to mention aesthetic subtleties worthy of verlaine and debussy. they'll even salivate over chopped red cabbage just to disparage poor old mr. iceberg lettuce. at any rate, i really enjoy a salad with plenty of chunky iceberg lettuce, the more the merrier, drenched in an italian or roquefort dressing. and the poems i enjoy are those i don't have to pretend that i'm enjoying Exerpt "The Iceberg theory" - Gerald Locklin

To the cold, dark grave they go Silently and sad and slow, From the light of happy skies And the glance of mortal eyes. In their beds the violets spring, And the brook flows murmuring; But at eve the violets die, And the brook in the sand runs dry. ....................... ~ Paul Laurence Dunbar

The living come with grassy tread To read the gravestones on the hill; The graveyard draws the living still, But never anymore the dead. The verses in it say and say: "The ones who living come today To read the stones and go away Tomorrow dead will come to stay." So sure of death the marbles rhyme, Yet can't help marking all the time How no one dead will seem to come. What is it men are shrinking from? It would be easy to be clever And tell the stones: Men hate to die And have stopped dying now forever. I think they would believe the lie. "In a disused graveyard" - Robert Frost

After rain after many days without rain, it stays cool, private and cleansed, under the trees, and the dampness there, married now to gravity, falls branch to branch, leaf to leaf, down to the ground where it will disappear — but not, of course, vanish except to our eyes. The roots of the oaks will have their share, and the white threads of the grasses, and the cushion of moss; a few drops, round as pearls, will enter the mole's tunnel; and soon so many small stones, buried for a thousand years, will feel themselves being touched. "Lingering in happiness" ~ Mary Oliver

They shut the road through the woods Seventy years ago. Weather and rain have undone it again, And now you would never know There was once a road through the woods Before they planted the trees. It is underneath the coppice and heath, And the thin anemones. Only the keeper sees That, where the ring-dove broods, And the badgers roll at ease, There was once a road through the woods. Excerpt: "The Way Through The Woods" ~ Rudyard Kipling

All the birds have flown up and gone; A lonely cloud floats leisurely by. We never tire of looking at each other - Only the mountain and I. Li Po

Without a wish, without a will, I stood upon that silent hill And stared into the sky until My eyes were blind with stars and still I stared into the sky. ~Ralph Hodgson

Then it was dusk in Illinois, the small boy After an afternoon of carting dung Hung on the rail fence, a sapped thing Weary of crying. Dark was growing tall And he began to hear the pond frogs all Calling on his ear with what seemed their joy. Soon their sound was pleasant for a boy Listening in the smoky dusk and the nightfall Of Illinois, and from the fields two small Boys came bearing cornstalk violins And they rubbed the cornstalk bows with resins And the three sat there scraping of their joy. It was now fine music the frogs and the boys Did in the towering Illinois twilight make And into dark in spite of shoulder’s ache The first song of his happiness and the song woke His heart to the darkness and into the sadness of joy “First Song” ~ Galway Kinnell

You are made of almost nothing But of enough To be great eyes And diaphanous double vans; To be ceaseless movement, Unending hunger Grappling love. Link between water and air Earth repels you. Light touches you only to shift into iridescence Upon your body of wings. Twice born predator, You split into the heat. Swift beyond calculation or capture You dart into shadow Which consumes you. You rocket into the day. But at last, when wind flattens the grass, For you, the design and purpose stop. And you fall With the other husks of summer. “The Dragonfly” ~ Louise Bogan youtu.be/uiGn-Hdd6W4?si=WnBc_GI2kQTBJbDK

It is only a dream of the grass blowing east against the source of the sun in an hour before the sun's going down whose secret we see in a children's game of ring a round of roses told. Often I am permitted to return to a meadow as if it were a given property of the mind that certain bounds hold against chaos, that is a place of first permission, everlasting omen of what is. Excerpt: "Often I am Permitted to Return to a Meadow" ~ Robert Duncan

The all-night convenience store's empty and no one is behind the counter. You open and shut the glass door a few times causing a bell to go off, but no one appears. You only came to buy a pack of cigarettes, may be a copy of yesterday's newspaper -- finally you take one and leave thirty-five cents in its place. It is freezing, but it is a good thing to step outside again: you can feel less alone in the night, with lights on here and there between the dark buildings and trees. Your own among them, somewhere. There must be thousands of people in this city who are dying to welcome you into their small bolted rooms, to sit you down and tell you what has happened to their lives. And the night smells like snow. Walking home for a moment you almost believe you could start again. And an intense love rushes to your heart, and hope. It's unendurable, unendurable. ~ Franz Wright

The heron stands in water where the swamp Has deepened to the blackness of a pool, Or balances with one leg on a hump Or marsh grass heaped above a muskrat hole. He walks the shallow with an antic grace. The great feet break the ridges of the sand, The long eye notes the minnow's hiding place. His beak is quicker than a human hand. He jerks a frog across his bony lip, Then points his heavy bill above the wood. The wide wings flap but once to lift him up. A single ripple starts from where he stood. "The Heron" ~ Theodore Roetheke

Between the computer, a pencil, and a typewriter half my day passes. One day it will be half a century. I live in strange cities and sometimes talk with strangers about matters strange to me. I listen to music a lot: Bach, Mahler, Chopin, Shostakovich. I see three elements in music: weakness, power, and pain. The fourth has no name. I read poets, living and dead, who teach me tenacity, faith, and pride. I try to understand the great philosophers--but usually catch just scraps of their precious thoughts. I like to take long walks on Paris streets and watch my fellow creatures, quickened by envy, anger, desire; to trace a silver coin passing from hand to hand as it slowly loses its round shape (the emperor's profile is erased). Beside me trees expressing nothing but a green, indifferent perfection. Black birds pace the fields, waiting patiently like Spanish widows. I'm no longer young, but someone else is always older. I like deep sleep, when I cease to exist, and fast bike rides on country roads when poplars and houses dissolve like cumuli on sunny days. Sometimes in museums the paintings speak to me and irony suddenly vanishes. I love gazing at my wife's face. Every Sunday I call my father. Every other week I meet with friends, thus proving my fidelity. My country freed itself from one evil. I wish another liberation would follow. Could I help in this? I don't know. I'm truly not a child of the ocean, as Antonio Machado wrote about himself, but a child of air, mint and cello and not all the ways of the high world cross paths with the life that--so far-- belongs to me. "Self Portrait" ~ Adam Zagajewski

Oh gracious moon, now as the year turns, I remember how, heavy with sorrow, I climbed this hill to gaze on you, And then as now you hung above those trees Illuminating all. But to my eyes Your face seemed clouded, temulous From the tears that rose beneath my lids, So painful was my life: and is, my Dearest moon; its tenor does not change. And yet, memory and numbering the epochs Of my grief is pleasing to me. How welcome In that youthful time -when hope's span is long, And memory short -is the remembrance even of Past sad things whose pain endures. "To the Moon" ~ Giacomo Leopardi