For Mag 283
Ghosts
By Marion
White is not a color
Peonies do not grow here
This vase is ostentatious
I will not shed a tear---
His absence is a presence
as real as my red robe
His spirit whispers secrets
that only we two know---
Monday, August 31, 2015
Sunday, August 30, 2015
An Old Woman’s Painting By Lynn Emanuel
Bees left pollen tracks all over the Morning Glory.....
The Zinnias and I are fading.... but anticipating Autumn
The luminous Beautyberry Bushes are blooming.
The Chocolate Mint is flowering, feeding the butterflies...
____________________________________________
An Old Woman’s Painting
By Lynn Emanuel
Scrape the sun from the wall of the sky.
Cast the great nets of autumn over the houses.
Even the throat of the lily is a dangerous inlet.
Let the world stand wearily on the stoop of the jail
of the world and the light of the mind, that small lamp,
pearl of shine, let the night come to it, as iron filings to a magnet,
mother.
Autumn
By T. E. Hulme
A touch of cold in the Autumn night—
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
I walked abroad,
And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge
Like a red-faced farmer.
I did not stop to speak, but nodded,
And round about were the wistful stars
With white faces like town children.
------------------------------------------------------
Friday, August 28, 2015
Heavenly Mother By Elaine Jarvis
Heavenly Mother
By Elaine Jarvis
God, I need to know,
do you have breasts?
And did you nurse creation
at your bosom?
Did you cradle it in newness---
tiny, fragile, wailing,
and feel the swell
of hopes and dreams
and Awe?
Did you, too, discover far too quickly
that to love someone you also must let go?
All my life, Lord,
I've known you as
HE
and that has been okay
until today.
Today, as I carry
in my heart,
and fear,
and prayer,
the child I also carried in my womb,
I need you to be
my heavenly Mother.
Today
I could not trust a God
who had not also
gazed with empty womb
upon the life she bore into existence
and asked,
"What more shall Love ask me to bear?"
From: "Perhaps A Door - New and Selected a Poems" by Elaine Jarvis
------------------------
The Muse is Amused Today...
How can a shoe be a poem? The same way a cloud or a dragonfly can.
If I could find these shoes (Hot Chocolate Design), I'd make them into a poem. :-)
A ghost in my angel-wing begonia
A wonderful, delightful, delicious novel I'm reading.
Buddha with some dried flowers, Angels & beads.
A quote I wish I'd read when I was a very young person.
The fading zinnias have the softest colors...
PINK!!!
"I often sit here in this old Apple tree listening
and I hear Geese who've lost their mates...
they're not even aware of what's missing---
just that it's missed..."
From the movie 'Northern Borders', 2013
Sunday, August 23, 2015
A Story That Could Be True By William Stafford
A STORY THAT COULD BE TRUE
By William Stafford
If you were exchanged in the cradle and
your real mother died
without ever telling the story
then no one knows your name,
and somewhere in the world
your father is lost and needs you
but you are far away.
He can never find
how true you are, how ready.
When the great wind comes
and the robberies of the rain
you stand on the corner shivering.
The people who go by–
you wonder at their calm.
They miss the whisper that runs
any day in your mind,
“Who are you really, wanderer?”–
and the answer you have to give
no matter how dark and cold
the world around you is:
“Maybe I’m a king.”
books, clinging and clouds...
"If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable." From "Burnt Norton", I
" ...tendril and spray clutch and cling..." (Photo taken minutes ago, before reading this...)
clematis, freshly open
"The black cloud carries the sun away..."
IV
Time and the bell have buried the day,
The black cloud carries the sun away.
Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis
Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray
Clutch and cling?
Chill
Fingers of yew be curled
Down on us? After the kingfisher's wing
Has answered light to light, and is silent, the light is still
At the still point of the turning world.
From "Four Quartets - Burnt Norton" By T. S. Eliot
___________________________________________
Arranging, contemplating and perusing my books last week, I found six copies of Eliot's "Four Quartets" and three copies of Hemingway's "A Moveable Feast". (I used to give away more books than I kept and the Universe always rewarded me with more books. The law of giving and receiving. Yes, it's a Universal and Biblical law.) Now I place them in labeled containers for my children and grandchildren.
Friday, August 21, 2015
More Deborah Digges' Poems
~Prayer Flags in the Wind~
Free of the moon's collusion,
I feel like an abandoned
lover. ~ Deborah Digges
___________________
FOR SYLVIA PLATH
She gave birth here,
which is to own the land
like these cliff trees, so black and hard
and efficient, closed
to anything but fire.
She had two children, worked
between feedings, and kept two gardens,
one simply for flowers.
They must still root somewhere
on these hillsides the way seeds can be carried for years
by the thermals on the muddied
wings of insects, in the wool blown
free of the thickets,
in the hooves of cattle,
in the feces of migrating birds.
Now Devon greens in April,
even the chimneys, the reddish-blue clay
and stone, the timber
of the houses, while over the grass the clouds
outrun their shadows to the sea,
as if the earth turns too quickly, let go
from the hand of the air,
as if the sod must feel its way
closer to the rock
against such wind that blinds
enough to see these pastures given, hedge
by higher hedge, to sunlight.
which is to own the land
like these cliff trees, so black and hard
and efficient, closed
to anything but fire.
She had two children, worked
between feedings, and kept two gardens,
one simply for flowers.
They must still root somewhere
on these hillsides the way seeds can be carried for years
by the thermals on the muddied
wings of insects, in the wool blown
free of the thickets,
in the hooves of cattle,
in the feces of migrating birds.
Now Devon greens in April,
even the chimneys, the reddish-blue clay
and stone, the timber
of the houses, while over the grass the clouds
outrun their shadows to the sea,
as if the earth turns too quickly, let go
from the hand of the air,
as if the sod must feel its way
closer to the rock
against such wind that blinds
enough to see these pastures given, hedge
by higher hedge, to sunlight.
Deborah Digges
______________________
Painting By Number
Deborah Digges
There was the farmer
who would not come to the front door,
his face already jaundiced, luminous,
as if death were light inside him.
He’d bring a picture as payment
saying it was his hobby now that he was
dying to paint what he’d never seen.
________________________
There is no way of telling people that they are all
walking around shining like the sun. ~Thomas Merton
~Prayer Flags Laughing in the Wind~
Wednesday, August 19, 2015
eating the dragon's heart by Deborah Digges
eating the dragon's heart
by Deborah Digges
What god left for me here a dragon's heart. Resembling
a pomegranate,
In a gold box. The parchment read Fresh kill.
Eat raw or braise in oil.
I lifted it from royal foil onto my best blue willow, blood
of the ages
seeping out across the bluest bridge.
The first bite sap-like tasted of smoke-filled rooms---
women wearing smocks unloading kilns, stone sheets
of charcoal
crushed in bowls, sprinkled with dew
drawn just that morning from high grasses. The second bite,
sour as a lemon
eaten whole, the rind and all, the root
of Queen Anne's lace and goldenrod.
Still through the burning I began to understand what the
crows were saying,
speaking in tongues, their news fraught with
ill-fated warnings.
Never they choired, be tempted to suck lifeless sweet buds
hung of seeds.
It is a trap. Nor smear onto this page the juice that stains
like afterbirth
your fingers, lest you're condemned to winery again,
lest you fall through the ice of time.
Sunk to my knees in sludge I waded bogs collecting feathers
to be used as quills.
Then swore the pledge, kissing goodbye the last bite of my
lover's lips.
Swallowed it whole in my green sequined dress.
Why do we offer you a dragon's heart and not a pomegranate?
To ask, one has no right to call herself a poet.
Saturday, August 15, 2015
Explicating the Twilight - Jack Gilbert
"...purple is black blooming." ~Jack Gilbert
Explicating the Twilight
Jack Gilbert
The rat makes her way up
the mulberry tree, the branches
getting thin and risky up close
to the fruit, and she slows.
The berry she is after is so ripe,
there is almost no red. Prospero
thinks of Christopher Smart saying
purple is black blooming. She lifts
her mouth to the berry, stretching.
The throat is an elegant gray.
A thousand shades, Christopher wrote
among the crazy people. A thousand
colors from white to silver.
Thursday, August 13, 2015
The Weed by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
My neighbor's weeds, visiting over the fence.
THE WEED
A weed is but an unloved flower!
Go dig, and prune, and guide, and wait,
Until it learns its high estate,
And glorifies some bower.
A weed is but an unloved flower!
All sin is virtue unevolved,
Release the angel from the clod--
Go love thy brother up to God.
Behold each problem solved.
All sin is virtue unevolved.
Poems of Progress and New Thought Pastels by Ella Wheeler Wilcox.
London: Gay & Hancock, 1911.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)