Sunday, October 23, 2016

Starlings in Winter By Mary Oliver

LOOK!  A jet trail dragonfly!



Starlings in Winter

By Mary Oliver

Chunky and noisy,
but with stars in their black feathers,
they spring from the telephone wire
and instantly

they are acrobats
in the freezing wind.
And now, in the theater of air,
they swing over buildings,

dipping and rising;
they float like one stippled star
that opens,
becomes for a moment fragmented,

then closes again;
and you watch
and you try
but you simply can't imagine

how they do it
with no articulated instruction, no pause,
only the silent confirmation
that they are this notable thing,

this wheel of many parts, that can rise and spin
over and over again,
full of gorgeous life.
Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us,

even in the leafless winter,
even in the ashy city.
I am thinking now
of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots
trying to leave the ground,
I feel my heart
pumping hard, I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things.
I want to be light and frolicsome.
I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing,
as though I had wings.

"Starlings in Winter" by Mary Oliver, from Owls and Other Fantasies: Poems and Essays.

Tuesday, October 18, 2016

WHAT THE CROW SAID By Michael Hannon



Amy Brown Art





WHAT THE CROW SAID
By Michael Hannon

Though friendly to magic
I am not a man disguised as a crow.

I am night eating the sun.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~


Sunday, October 2, 2016

Epilogue by Robert Lowell



Epilogue

Related Poem Content Details

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme— 
why are they no help to me now 
I want to make 
something imagined, not recalled? 
I hear the noise of my own voice: 
The painter’s vision is not a lens, 
it trembles to caress the light. 
But sometimes everything I write   
with the threadbare art of my eye 
seems a snapshot, 
lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, 
heightened from life, 
yet paralyzed by fact. 
All’s misalliance. 
Yet why not say what happened? 
Pray for the grace of accuracy 
Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination 
stealing like the tide across a map 
to his girl solid with yearning. 
We are poor passing facts, 
warned by that to give 
each figure in the photograph 
his living name.

Robert Lowell, “Epilogue” from Day by Day. Copyright © 1977 by Robert Lowell