A Little Federico Lorca, A Little Naomi Nye

Dragonflies swarm me every time I go outside lately, fighting each other to have their picture taken. This green one posed the longest, so he won. I share a couple of poems I love below.

Peace, Blessings, Love and Poetry to You All----Marion, fighting the blues.....

Excerpt From: "Morning"
by Federico Garcia Lorca



"...The morning is bright
Smoke rises from hearths
and lifts the fog in its arms.

Listen to the ballads
water sings under the poplars:
they are wingless birds
lost in the grass!


Trees that sing
dry out and fall;
tranquil mountains
age into plains.
But the song of water
is a thing eternal.

It is light made song
of romantic illusions
It is soft yet firm,
full of sky and gentle.

It is mist and rose
of eternal morning.
Moon-honey that flows
from buried stars....."



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You Know Who You Are
By Naomi Shihab Nye

Why do your poems comfort me, I ask myself.
Because they are upright, like straight-backed chairs.
I can sit in them and study the world as if it too
were simple and upright.


Because sometimes I live in a hurricane of words
and not one of them can save me.
Your poems come in like a raft, logs tied together,
they float.
I want to tell you about the afternoon
I floated on your poems
all the way from Durango Street to Broadway.


Fathers were paddling on the river with their small sons.
Three Mexican boys chased each other outside the library.
Everyone seemed to have some task, some occupation,
while I wandered uselessly in the streets I claim to love.

Suddenly I felt the precise body of your poems beneath me,
like a raft, I felt words as something portable again,
a cup, a newspaper, a pin.
Everything happening had a light around it,
not the light of Catholic miracles,
the blunt light of a Saturday afternoon.
Light in a world that rushes forward with us or without us.
I wanted to stop and gather up the blocks behind me
in this light, but it doesn't work.
You keep walking, lifting one foot, then the other,
saying, "This is what I need to remember"
and then hoping you can.