Johannes Secundus

[transemacabre.livejournal.com]

Seek not in borrowed hues your cheeks to dress;
Naked is Love, and loveth nakedness.

-- Johannes Secundus.

Terror by Robert Penn Warren

[ashcanprobably.livejournal.com]

Terror
by Robert Penn Warren


'I Volontari Americani Presso Eserciti Stranieri Non Perdono La Cittadinanza.' Il Messagero, Roma, Sabato, 27 Gennaio, 1940.


Not picnics or pageants or the improbable
Powers of air whose tongues exclaim dominion
And gull the great man to follow his terrible
Star, suffice; not the window-box, or the bird on
The ledge, which mean so much to the invalid,
Nor the joy you leaned after, as by the tracks the grass
In the emptiness after the lighted Pullmans fled,
Suffices; nor faces, which like distraction, pass

Under the street-lamps, teasing to faith or pleasure,
Suffice you, born to no adequate definition of terror.
For yours, like a puppy, is darling and inept,
Though his cold nose brush your hand while you laugh at his clowning;
Or the kitten you sleep with, though once or twice while you slept
It tried to suck your breath, and you dreamed of drowning,
( Read more... )

Why I Am Not a Buddhist - Molly Peacock

[distraught.livejournal.com]

I love desire, the state of want and thought
of how to get; building a kingdom in a soul
requires desire. I love the things I've sought-
you in your beltless bathrobe, tongues of cash that loll
from my billfold- and love what I want: clothes,
houses, redemption. Can a new mauve suit
equal God? Oh no, desire is ranked. To lose
a loved pen is not like losing faith. Acute
desire for nut gateau is driven out by death,
but the cake on its plate has meaning,
even when love is endangered and nothing matters.
For my mother, health; for my sister, bereft,
wholeness. But why is desire suffering?
Because want leaves a world in tatters?
How else but in tatters should a world be?
A columned porch set high above a lake.
Here, take my money. A loved face in agony,
the spirit gone. Here, use my rags of love.

(no subject)

[kangaroo.livejournal.com]

Part of Plenty
Bernard Spencer, pub. 1937

When she carries food to the table and stoops down
- Doing this out of love - and lays soup with its good
Tickling smell, or fry winking from the fire
And I look up, perhaps from a book I am reading
Or other work : there is an importance of beauty
Which can't be accounted for by there and then,
And attacks me, but not separately from the welcome
Of the food, or the grace of her arms.

When she puts a sheaf of tulips in a jug
And pours in water and presses to one side
The upright stems and leaves that you hear creak,
Or loosens them, or holds them up to show me,
So that I see the tangle of their necks and cups
With the curls of her hair, and the body they are held
Against, and the stalk of the small waist rising
And flowing in the shape of breasts;

Whether in the bringing of the flowers or the food
She offers plenty, and is part of plenty,
And whether I see her stooping, or leaning with the flowers,
What she does is ages old, and she is not simply,
No, but lovely in that way.

Claribel Alegria

[moonglows.livejournal.com]

Sorrow

I wish I could believe
that I will see you again
that our love
will bloom again.
Perhaps you are an atom of light
perhaps your ashes barely exist
perhaps you will return
and I will be ash
an atom of light
or far away.
Our love
will never happen again.

(no subject)

[ballpointsword.livejournal.com]

http://www.fishousepoems.org


...just a suggestion.