Believe Me When I Say

[gerbilsupmyarse.livejournal.com]

water is the skin of the earth
trains are arteries with corpuscles of people
a sigh is an ancestor praying
a woman's body is suspended over the land
tears come from clouds in your head
writing a poem is like fathering a river
waiting is the art of desire
something about a city makes you want to kill
fetuses scribble on the walls of wombs

-Luis J. Rodriguez-

The Mutes

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

Those groans men use
passing a woman on the street
or on the steps of the subway

to tell her she is a female
and their flesh knows it,

are they a sort of tune,
an ugly enough song, sung
by a bird with a slit tongue

but meant for music?

Or are they the muffled roaring
of deafmutes trapped in a building that is
slowly filling with smoke?

Perhaps both.

Such men most often
look as if groan were all they could do,
yet a woman, in spite of herself,

knows it's a tribute:
if she were lacking all grace
they'd pass her in silence:

so it's not only to say she's
a warm hole. It's a word

in grief-language, nothing to do with
primitive, not an ur-language;
language stricken, sickened, cast down

in decrepitude. She wants to
throw the tribute away, dis-
gusted, and can't,

it goes on buzzing in her ear,
it changes the pace of her walk,
the torn posters in echoing corridors

spell it out, it
quakes and gnashes as the train comes in.
Her pulse sullenly

had picked up speed,
but the cars slow down and
jar to a stop while her understanding

keeps on translating:
"Life after life after life goes by

without poetry,
without seemliness,
without love."

From Poems: 1968-1972 by Denise Levertov. Copyright t © 1987 by Denise Levertov. Reprinted by permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

My other favorite piece of poetry

[fantome14.livejournal.com]

This is quite different from the Eliot, except that I think they both share a struggle put their feelings into words in new and interesting ways.

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge & shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs --
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast & with ah! bright wings.

--Gerard Manley Hopkins, "God's Grandeur"