(no subject)

[dustyasymptotes.livejournal.com]

Hello,
( I come looking for two lost poems )

and here are two others to make it even.

Another Night With Telescope (Leonard Cohen)

Come back to me
brutal empty room
Thin Byzantine face
preside over this new fast
I am broken with easy grace
Let me be neither
father nor child
but one who spins
on an eternal unimportant loom
patterns of wars and grass
which do not last the night
I know the stars
as wild as dust
and wait for no man’s discipline
but as they wheel
from sky to sky they rake
over our lives with pins of light.

What being a Strawberry means (Susan Musgrave)

Someone said
it was an evil shape,
this fat, red
heart that grew
out of the ground,
that slept on a straw mattress
in July sawdust.

Some thought him
Cowardly, never
an exact colour.
Some thought him
Harmful, crooked
as elm-blight.

Some thought him
Carefree, a stale fume
in the sun’s light.

But he was not
any of
those things.

The mass of strawberries
lead lives of quiet desperation.

Nance Van Winckel, "You People"

[execution-sutra.livejournal.com]

People, don't ask me again where my shoes are.
The valley I walked through was frozen to me
as I was to it. My heavy hide, my zinc
talisman - I'm fine, people. Don't stare
at my feet. And don't flash the sign of the cross
in my face. I carry the Blue Cross Card -
card among cards, card of my number
and gold seal. So shall ye know I am of
the system, in the beast's belly and up
to here, people, with your pity.

People, what is wrong with you? I don't care
what the sign on your door says. I will go
to another door. I will knock and rattle
and if you won't, then surely someone, somewhere,
will put a pancake in my hand.

You people of the rhetorical huh? You lords and ladies
of the blooming stump. I bend over you, taste you,
keep an eye on you, dream for you the beginning
of what you may one day dream an end to.

The new century peeled me bone-bare
like a first song inside a warbler - that bird, people,
who knows not to go where the sky's stopped.
Keep this in mind. Do you think
the fox won't find your nest? That
the egg of you will endure forever?

You, you people born of moons with no
mother-planets, you who are back-lit,
who have no fathers in heaven, hear now
the bruise-knuckled knock of me. I am returned.

From your alley. From your car up on blocks.
From the battered, graffitied railcars that uncouple
and move out into the studded green lightning.

Dare you trust any longer the chained-up dog of hell
not to burst free? Or that because your youth's
been ransacked, nothing more will be asked of you?
If a bloody foot's dragged across your coiffed lawn -
do not confuse me with dawn.

Now people, about the shoes: the shoes
have no doubt entered the sea
and are by now walking the ramparts of Atlantis.
I may be a false prophet, but god bless me, at least
I have something to say. I lay myself down
in a pencil of night - no chiseled tip yet,
but the marks already forming in the lead.

Wine Water by Stephanie N. Johnson

[wicked-sassy.livejournal.com]

via Poetry Daily

Wine Water by Stephanie N. Johnson

I shared a bed. Some man came and said
he hadn't slept all his life. I gave him some of my night
hours without

even thinking. Wish someone would have warned me.
Now I dream a man's blue-
shaven visions. I can't tell if I'm a woman

or a man in the dreams, but it doesn't matter.
What happens when they mix:
soil, Sister. That's all we've

become. Man plus Woman equals
Ditch Dirt. And this is supposed to be beautiful,
the strongest tonic.

rain travel

[peccare.livejournal.com]

I wake in the dark and remember
it is the morning when I must start
by myself on the journey
I lie listening to the black hour
before dawn and you are
still asleep beside me while
around us the trees full of night lean
hushed in their dream that bears
us up asleep and awake then I hear
drops falling one by one into
the sightless leaves and I
do not know when they began but
all at once there is no sound but rain
and the stream below us roaring
away into the rushing darkness

- William S. Merwin

This was on www.poems.com today

[alaric3.livejournal.com]

Emma Howell
Tempest

It's storming, pounding out there.
Rain breaks and falls like the mismatched
halves of haloes.
Luminescent drops arc above the wind's dips and joints.
This is the division of virtues through their centers.
Whole waters submit, are split and capped,
sectioned like tangerines into mouth-shaped crescents
and then auctioned into thunder.

The rain marks its weight in deep
forgiving streaks.
The storm is tight around all things
and in rope fingers of light
water cracks into marbled, complex structures,
less like a chandelier, hanging vows above our heads,
than like the mezuzah we kiss when we step outside.
It shelters a scrolled blessing against leaving God
at home.
We break Him into pieces and carry Him along.



thought it especially appropriate for today, what with the crazy weather.

John Keats; Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here and there

[frock.livejournal.com]

Keen, fitful gusts are whisp'ring here and there
Among the bushes half leafless, and dry;
The stars look very cold about the sky,
And I have many miles on foot to fare.
Yet feel I little of the cool bleak air,
Or of the dead leaves rustling drearily,
Or of those silver lamps that burn on high,
Or of the distance from home's pleasant lair:
For I am brimfull of the friendliness
That in a little cottage I have found;
Of fair-hair'd Milton's eloquent distress,
And all his love for gentle Lycid drown'd;
Of lovely Laura in her light green dress,
And faithful Petrarch gloriously crown'd. - -

-John Keats.