Life is motion

[pancreas-guy.livejournal.com]

"Life Is Motion" - Wallace Stevens

In Oklahoma,
Bonnie and Josie,
Dressed in calico,
Danced around a stump.
They cried,
"Ohoyaho,
Ohoo" . . .
Celebrating the marriage
Of flesh and air.

Sylvia Plath

[do-drop.livejournal.com]

Mad Girl's Love Song

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"


(Hi, I just found this site and wow this is cool. You people must have been collecting poems for years) Plath is just the definition of great poet to me.

(no subject)

[atlashrugged.livejournal.com]

That Nothing
Wesley McNair

In the moment
of your giving up,
the lost keys suddenly
meeting your eyes
from the only place
you could have put them.

The forgotten table
and open book and empty
chair waiting for you
all this time
in the light left on.

A shade lifted
by your loved one
waking upstairs,
the sound
you did not know
you listened for.

The mysterious
penmanship of snow
the branches of a tree
have brought you,
standing at your own door.

Nothing ever happens here.
That nothing.

(no subject)

[greentwig.livejournal.com]

Salt
by Eugenio Montale
Translated by Jamie McKendrick


We don't know if tomorrow has green pastures

in mind for us to lie down in beside

the ever-youthful patter of fresh water

or if it means to plant us in some arid

outback ugly valley of the shadow

where dayspring's lost for good, interred beneath

a lifetime of mistakes. We'll maybe wake up

in foreign cities where the sun's a ghost,

a figment of itself and angular

starched consonants braid the tongue at its root

so all sense of who we are is lost to words,

and nothing that we know can be unravelled.

Even then, some vestige of the sea,

its plosive tide, its fretwork crests will surge

inside our syllables, bronze like the chant of bees.

However far we've stumbled from the source

a trace of the sea's voice will lodge in us

as the sunlight somehow still abides in

faded tufts that cling to bricks and kerbstones

on half-cleared slums or bomb-sites left unbuilt.

Then out of nowhere after years of silence

the words we used, our unobstructed accents,

will well up from the dark of childhood,

and once more on our lips we'll taste Greek salt.