When Death Comes by Mary Oliver

[mexcine.livejournal.com]

When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measles-pox; when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth tending as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it's over, I want to say: all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it is over, I don't want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don't want to end up simply having visited this world.

To the Fair Clarinda- Aphra Behn

[lecharmediscret.livejournal.com]

 To the Fair Clarinda, Who Made Love To Me, Imagined More Than Woman.

Fair lovely maid, or if that title be

Too weak, too feminine for nobler thee,

Permit a name that more approaches truth,

And let me call thee, lovely charming youth.

This last will justify my soft complaint,

While that may serve to lessen my constraint;

And without blushes I the youth pursue,

When so much beauteous woman is in view.

Against thy charms we struggle but in vain

With thy deluding form thou giv'st us pain,

While the bright nymph betrays us to the swain.

In pity to our sex sure thou wert sent,

That we might love, and yet be innocent:

For sure no crime with thee we can commit;

Or if we should -- thy form excuses it.

For who, that gathers fairest flowers believes

A snake lies hid beneath the fragrant leaves.

 

Thou beauteous wonder of a different kind,

Soft Cloris with the dear Alexis joined;

When e'er the manly part of thee, would plead

Thou tempts us with the image of the maid,

While we the noblest passions do extend

The love to Hermes, Aphrodite the friend.

.

[thetasteless.livejournal.com]

Welcome
by Stephen Dunn


if you believe nothing is always what's left
after a while, as I did,
If you believe you have this collection
of ungiven gifts, as I do (right here
behind the silence and the averted eyes)
If you believe an afternoon can collapse
into strange privacies-
how in your backyard, for example,
the shyness of flowers can be suddenly
overwhelming, and in the distance
the clear goddamn of thunder
personal, like a voice,
If you believe there's no correct response
to death, as I do; that even in grief
(where I've sat making plans)
there are small corners of joy
If your body sometimes is a light switch
in a house of insomniacs
If you can feel yourself straining
to be yourself every waking minute
If, as I am, you are almost smiling . . .

The World Outside by Denise Levertov

[bravest-unsaid.livejournal.com]

The World Outside

On the kitchen wall a flash
of shadow:
        swift pilgrimage
of pigeons, a spiral
celebration of air, of sky-deserts.
And on tenement windows
a blaze
        of lustered watermelon:
stain of the sun
westering somewhere back of Hoboken.