A request for poems about touch.
Mar. 1st, 2012 01:29 am![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
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greatpoetryDo any of you have favorite poems about touch? Specifically about longing to touch or to be held, and not necessarily in a sexual sort of way. Thanks.
This is one of my favorites, by Sonia Sanchez.
----------------------------
"Haiku"
There are things sadder
than you and I. Some people
do not even touch.
-Sonia Sanchez
This is one of my favorites, by Sonia Sanchez.
----------------------------
"Haiku"
There are things sadder
than you and I. Some people
do not even touch.
-Sonia Sanchez
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 12:23 pm (UTC)The Cinnamon Peeler
Michael Ondaatje
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler's wife.
I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
-- your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers...
When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter's wife, the lime burner's daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner's daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.
You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler's wife. Smell me.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 12:23 pm (UTC)http://www.lifesci.ucsb.edu/~haddock/poems/cinnamon.html
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 03:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 01:40 pm (UTC)When A Man Hasn't Been Kissed
Jeffrey McDaniel
When I haven't been kissed in a long time,
I walk behind well-dressed women
on cold, December mornings and shovel
the steamy exhalations pluming from their lips
down my throat with both hands, hoping
a single molecule will cling to my lungs.
When I haven't been kissed in a long time,
I sneak into the ladies room of a fancy restaurant,
dig into the trashcan for a napkin
where a woman checked her lipstick,
then go home, light candles, put on Barry White,
and press the napkin all over my body.
When I haven't been kissed in a long time,
I start thinking leeches are the most romantic
creatures, cause all they want to do is kiss.
If only someone invented a kinder, gentler leech,
I'd paint it bright pink and pretend
Winona Ryder's lips crawled off her face,
up my thigh, and were sucking on my swollen
bicep. When I haven't been kissed
in a long time, I create civil disturbances,
then insult the cops who show up,
till one of them grabs me by the collar
and hurls me up against the squad car,
so I can remember, at least for a moment,
what it's like to be touched.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 07:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 01:44 pm (UTC)Adrienne Rich
You're wondering if I'm lonely:
OK then, yes, I'm lonely
as a plane rides lonely and level
on its radio beam, aiming
across the Rockies
for the blue-strung aisles
of an airfield on the ocean.
You want to ask, am I lonely?
Well, of course, lonely
as a woman driving across country
day after day, leaving behind
mile after mile
little towns she might have stopped
and lived and died in, lonely
If I'm lonely
it must be the loneliness
of waking first, of breathing
dawns' first cold breath on the city
of being the one awake
in a house wrapped in sleep
If I'm lonely
it's with the rowboat ice-fast on the shore
in the last red light of the year
that knows what it is, that knows it's neither
ice nor mud nor winter light
but wood, with a gift for burning
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 03:16 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 01:51 pm (UTC)Aaron Smith
I’ve been meaning to tell
you how the sky is pink
here sometimes like the roof
of a mouth that’s about to chomp
down on the crooked steel teeth
of the city,
I remember the desperate
things we did
and that I stumble
down sidewalks listening
to the buzz of street lamps
at dusk and the crush
of leaves on the pavement,
Without you here I’m viciously lonely
and I can’t remember
the last time I felt holy,
the last time I offered
myself as sanctuary
*
I watched two men
press hard into
each other, their bodies
caught in the club’s
bass drum swell,
and I couldn’t remember
when I knew I’d never
be beautiful, but it must
have been quick
and subtle, the way
the holy ghost can pass
in and out of a room.
I want so desperately
to be finished with desire,
the rushing wind, the still
small voice.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 09:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 01:58 pm (UTC)Aimee Nezhukumatathil
is not how it keeps all of you in,
a miracle quite, a thing. But how
it remembers and remembers even if
the grey pocket in your brain says forget.
Our Health teacher screeched her lecture
of Five Senses. Think of babies: how they die
if they are fed, but not touched! Think
of the first subjects of this experiment.
Think of Ms. Herling’s forehead vein like
a river gone horribly wrong. Clematis whorls
around the mailbox a brilliant purple, the only
movement my mail has seen—the cells of each
inch of vine, mitochondria gnashing
against the sunlight, begging to let loose
their brilliance. Your weight above me is still
so new, but I’ve memorized the curl of your
fingers into my back, the hot center of my palm.
Each dip and swirl of your lips is branded
onto my skin like its very own thumbprint—
without even trying to, my skin separates your
kisses like a centrifuge. They rise to the surface,
I skim them like cream. I pour over.
Can you hear the cow calls so low, so swoll?
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 02:02 pm (UTC)Annie Guthrie
I can’t sleep. I feel the globe
making a rotation,
and I’m not supposed to be, but I’m awake for it.
I’m at that age when everyone is talking about the kinds of love
they’ve been using to get by.
It’s a very dark late.
The sound of a towel dropping off the rack
into the bath
carries my name with it.
I get up to turn on the dryer
to block out all possibilities of ever
hearing anything else so
fall.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 02:03 pm (UTC)Samuel Beckett
all right all right there’s a land
where forgetting where forgetting weighs
gently upon worlds unnamed
there the head we shush it the head is mute
and one knows no but one knows nothing
the song of dead mouths dies
on the shore it has made its voyage
there is nothing to mourn
my loneliness I know it oh well I know it badly
I have the time is what I tell myself I have time
but what time famished bone the time of the dog
of a sky incessantly paling my grain of sky
of the climbing ray ocellate trembling
of microns of years of darkness
you want me to go from A to B I cannot
I cannot come out I’m in a traceless land
yes yes it’s a fine thing you’ve got there a mighty fine thing
what is that ask me no more questions
spiral dust of instants what is this the same
the calm the love the hate the calm the calm
Translated by Philip Nikolayev
no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 10:07 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-24 03:00 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 02:04 pm (UTC)Deborah Landau
Quit kissing beneath my window.
The day turns shady
as you lean
feeding, feeding.
Night arrives, red-gold
and windless
and still you persist.
I’ve had enough
slobber and gush.
And let me say this:
the problem with passion
isn’t that it doesn’t last
but that it does,
and you’ll find yourself alone in a room,
blistered and husky-voiced, watching
the side of your building turn to flame.
Beware a woman at a window,
something heavy in her hand.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 10:00 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 07:57 pm (UTC)What magic does touch create
that we crave it so. That babies
do not thrive without it. That
the nurse who cuts tough nails
and sands calluses on the elderly
tells me sometimes men weep
as she rubs lotion on their feet.
Yet the touch of a stranger
the bumping or predatory thrust
in the subway is like a slap.
We long for the familiar, the open
palm of love, its tender fingers.
It is our hands that tamed cats
into pets, not our food.
The widow looks in the mirror
thinking, no one will ever touch
me again, never. Not hold me.
Not caress the softness of my
breasts, my inner thighs, the swell
of my belly. Do I still live
if no one knows my body?
We touch each other so many
ways, in curiosity, in anger,
to command attention, to soothe,
to quiet, to rouse, to cure.
Touch is our first language
and often, our last as the breath
ebbs and a hand closes our eyes.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 08:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 08:32 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 11:20 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 11:23 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 11:27 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 11:38 pm (UTC)Besides, now that I think about it, Mary Oliver and Marge Piercy have already done a stellar job of filling the roles of Mary Oliver and Marge Piercy, so I should probably let them keep doing that and not try and take over.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 09:44 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-01 09:11 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 05:25 am (UTC)"The Abandoned Valley"
Jack Gilbert
Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?
"Embrace"
Billy Collins
You know the parlor trick.
Wrap your arms around your own body
and from the back it looks like
someone is embracing you,
her hands grasping your shirt,
her fingernails teasing your neck.
From the front it is another story,
You never looked so alone,
your crossed elbows and screwy grin.
You could be waiting for a tailor
to fit you for a straightjacket,
one that would hold you really tight.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 05:39 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 05:29 am (UTC)Brett Elizabeth Jenkins
It’s said it takes seven years
to grow completely new skin cells.
To think, this year I will grow
into a body you never will
have touched.
no subject
Date: 2012-03-02 05:35 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 06:59 am (UTC)Skin remembers how long the years grow
when skin is not touched, a gray tunnel
of singleness, feather lost from the tail
of a bird, swirling onto a step,
swept away by someone who never saw
it was a feather. Skin ate, walked,
slept by itself, knew how to raise a
see-you-later hand. But skin felt
it was never seen, never known as
a land on the map, nose like a city,
hip like a city, gleaming dome of the mosque
and the hundred corridors of cinnamon and rope.
Skin had hope, that's what skin does.
Heals over the scarred place, makes a road.
Love means you breathe in two countries.
And skin remembers--silk, spiny grass,
deep in the pocket that is skin's secret own.
Even now, when skin is not alone,
it remembers being alone and thanks something larger
that there are travelers, that people go places
larger than themselves.
- Naomi Shihab Nye
no subject
Date: 2012-03-06 10:48 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2018-10-22 06:21 pm (UTC)