(no subject)

[silverflurry.livejournal.com]

The Letter
Amy Lowell

Little cramped words scrawling all over
the paper
Like draggled fly's legs,
What can you tell of the flaring moon
Through the oak leaves?
Or of my uncertain window and the
bare floor

Spattered with moonlight?
Your silly quirks and twists have nothing
in them
Of blossoming hawthorns,
And this paper is dull, crisp, smooth,
virgin of loveliness
Beneath my hand.

I am tired, Beloved, of chafing my heart
against
The want of you;
Of squeezing it into little inkdrops,
And posting it.
And I scald alone, here, under the fire
Of the great moon.

(no subject)

[ofsatyagraha.livejournal.com]

METAPHOR TO ACTION

Whether it is a speaker, taut on a platform, 
who battles a crowd with the hammers of his words, 
whether it is the crash of lips on lips 
after absence and wanting: we must close 
the circuits of ideas, now generate, 
that leap in the body's action or the mind's repose. 
Over us is a striking on the walls of the sky, 
here are the dynamos, steel-black, harboring flame, 
here is the man night-walking who derives 
tomorrow's manifestoes from this midnight's meeting; 
here we require the proof in solidarity, 
iron on iron, body on body, and the large single beating. 
And behind us in time are the men who second us 
as we continue. And near us is our love: 
no forced contempt, no refusal in dogma, the close 
of the circuit in a fierce dazzle of purity. 
And over us is night a field of pansies unfolding, 
charging with heat its softness in a symbol 
to weld and prepare for action our minds' intensity.
- Muriel Rukeyser