Edna St. Vincent Millay

[firecat]

Available in Collected Sonnets by Edna St. Vincent Millay

VII

I, too, beneath your moon, almighty Sex,
Go forth at nightfall crying like a cat,
Leaving the ivory tower I laboured at
For birds to foul and boys and girls to vex
With tittering chalk; and you, and the long necks
Of neighbors sitting where their mothers sat
Are well aware of shadowy this and that
In me, that's neither noble nor complex.

Such as I am, however, I have brought
To what it is, this tower; it is my own.
Though it is reared To Beauty, it is wrought
From what I had to build with: honest bone
Is there, and anguish; pride; and burning thought;
And lust is there, and nights not spent alone.

# 919 - Emily Dickinson

[desolateangel83.livejournal.com]

If I can stop one Heart from breaking
I shall not live in vain
If I can ease one Life the Aching
Or cool one Pain

Or help one fainting Robin
Unto his Nest again
I shall not live in Vain.

disciple

[youfuckingbitch.livejournal.com]

my father: younger, handsome, downright square,
eyes like brown buttons fastening his face
over his soul, mouth not too straight to swear,
to say, man, sonny stitt's ass trashed the place,

hymning his saxophonist small-g god,
enlisted arms push-up strong, lips curled less
and less around cigarettes (in an odd
reversal of what the army did best:

march men to foul habits) and more around
his mouthpiece, in search of pure embouchure:
not square: hell-bent on welling a full sound
from his horn: a liquid literature

with biblical phrasing, an interlude
of stimulants unchemical to blood

- evie shockley

Once By The Pacific

[tom-sizemore.livejournal.com]

The shattered water made a misty din.
Great waves looked over others coming in,
And thought of doing something to the shore
That water never did to land before.
The clouds were low and hairy in the skies,
Like locks blown forward in the gleam of eyes.
You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God's last Put out the Light was spoken.



--Robert Frost

(no subject)

[butterflydamage.livejournal.com]

Sylvia

Across a space peopled with stars I am
laughing while my sides ache for existence
it turns out is profound though the profound
because of time it turns out is an illusion
and all of this is infinitely improbable
given the space, for which I gratefully lie
in three feet of snow making a shallow grave
I would have called an angel otherwise and
think of my own rapturous escape from
living only as dust and dirt, little sister.


Gerald Stern

(no subject)

[parasitus.livejournal.com]

( ode to an aged poet )

(no subject)

[wiredkitten.livejournal.com]

Black Petal

I never claimed night fathered me.
That was my dead brother talking in his sleep.
I keep him under my pillow, a dear wish
that colors my laughing and crying.

I never said the wind, remembering nothing,
leaves so many rooms unaccounted for,
continual farewell must ransom
the unmistakable fragrance
our human days afford.

It was my brother, little candle in the pulpit,
reading out loud to all of earth
from the book of night.

He died too young to learn his name.
Now he answers to Vacant Boat,
Burning Wing, My Black Petal.

Ask him who his mother is. He'll declare the birds
have eaten the path home, but each of us
joins night's ongoing story
wherever night overtakes him,
the heart astonished to find belonging
and thanks answering thanks.

Ask if he's hungry or thirsty,
he'll say he's the bread come to pass
and draw you a map
to the twelve secret hips of honey.

Does someone want to know the way to spring?
He'll remind you
the flower was never meant to survive
the fruit's triumph.

He says an apple's most secret cargo
is the enduring odor of a human childhood,
our mother's linen pressed and stored, our father's voice
walking through the rooms.

He says he's forgiven our sister
for playing dead and making him cry
those afternoons we were left alone in the house.

And when clocks frighten me with their long hair,
and when I spy the wind's numerous hands
in the orchard unfastening
first the petals from the buds,
then the perfume from the flesh,

my dead brother ministers to me. His voice
weighs nothing
but the far years between
stars in their massive dying,

and I grow quiet hearing
how many of both of our tomorrows
lie waiting inside it to be born.

-- Li-Young Lee

(no subject)

[wiredkitten.livejournal.com]

Night Talk 5
by Cho Byung-Hwa, translated 1988 Kevin O'Rourke.

What you and I
are enduring
is not really today;
it is tomorrow.

And what you and I
are enduring
is not really living;
it is life.

A continent of reproduction and deluge
skirts the black mountain
beneath unroofed stars.

What you and I
are wetting our throats with
is not really wine;
it is poverty.

And what is that thing
from across the thorns
that draws us,
you and I?

And what is that thing
when nothing covers our sleep
that warms us,
you and I?

Ah, what you and I are enduring
is not really today;
it is tomorrow.

And what you and I are enduring
is not really life;
it is love.

(no subject)

[thehorrorshow.livejournal.com]

"When love beckons to you, follow him,
though his ways are hard and steep.
And when his wings enfold you
yield to him,
though the sword hidden among his pinions may wound you.
And when he speaks to you believe in him,
though his voice may shatter your dreams
as the north wind lays waste the garden.
For even as love crowns you
so shall he crucify you.
Even as he is for your growth
so is he for your pruning.
Even as he ascends to your height
and caresses your tenderest branches
that quiver in the sun,
So shall he descend to your roots
and shake them in their clinging to the earth...

But if in your fear you would seek only love's peace
and love's pleasure,
Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness
and pass out of love's threshing-floor,
into the seasonless world where you shall laugh,
but not all of your laughter,
and weep,
but not all of your tears."

Kahlil Gibran.

(no subject)

[mizraim.livejournal.com]

The Frontier

The man on the radio mourns
That another endless American winter
Daybreak is beginning to fall
On Idaho, on the mountains.

How many scrawny children
Lie dead and half-hidden among frozen ruts
In my body, along my dark roads.
Lean cayotes pass among clouds
On mountain trails, and smile,
And pass on in the snow.

A girl stands in a doorway.
Her arms are bare to the elbows,
Her face gray, she stares coldly
At the daybreak.
When the howl goes up, her eyes
Flare white, like a mare's.

- James Wright