"Around Us," Marvin Bell

[switchercat.livejournal.com]

We need some pines to assuage the darkness
when it blankets the mind,
we need a silvery stream that banks as smoothly
as a plane’s wing, and a worn bed of
needles to pad the rumble that fills the mind,
and a blur or two of a wild thing
that sees and is not seen. We need these things
between appointments, after work,
and, if we keep them, then someone someday,
lying down after a walk
and supper, with the fire hole wet down,
the whole night sky set at a particular
time, without numbers or hours, will cause
a little sound of thanks — a zipper or a snap —
to close round the moment and the thought
of whatever good we did.

*

Request: poems that make you feel happy, even (especially?) when you might have been feeling sad before you started reading the poem.

Comments

[seasight.livejournal.com]

The Sciences Sing a Lullaby by Albert Goldbarth

Physics says: go to sleep. Of course
you're tired. Every atom in you
has been dancing the shimmy in silver shoes
nonstop from mitosis to now.
Quit tapping your feet. They'll dance
inside themselves without you. Go to sleep.

Geology says: it will be all right. Slow inch
by inch America is giving itself
to the ocean. Go to sleep. Let darkness
lap at your sides. Give darkness an inch.
You aren't alone. All of the continents used to be
one body. You aren't alone. Go to sleep.

Astronomy says: the sun will rise tomorrow,
Zoology says: on rainbow-fish and lithe gazelle,
Psychology says: but first it has to be night, so
Biology says: the body-clocks are stopped all over town and
History says: here are the blankets, layer on layer, down and down.

Postscript - Seamus Heaney

And some time make the time to drive out west
Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore
In September or October, when the wind
And the light are working off each other
So that the ocean on one side is wild
With foam and glitter, and inland among stones
The surface of a slate-grey lake is lit
By the earthed lightning of a flock of swans,
Their feathers roughed and ruffling, white on white,
Their fully grown headstrong-looking heads
Tucked or cresting or busy underwater.
Useless to think you'll park and capture it
More thoroughly. You are neither here nor there
A hurry through which known and strange things pass
As big soft buffetings come at the car sideways
And catch the heart off guard and blow it open.



The Thing Is - Ellen Bass

to love life, to love it even
when you have no stomach for it
and everything you've held dear
crumbles like burnt paper in your hands,
your throat filled with the silt of it.
When grief sits with you, its tropical heat
thickening the air, heavy as water
more fit for gills than lungs;
when grief weights you like your own flesh
only more of it, an obesity of grief,
you think, How can a body withstand this?
Then you hold life like a face
between your palms, a plain face,
no charming smile, no violet eyes,
and you say, yes, I will take you
I will love you, again.



It's This Way - Nâzım Hikmet


I stand in the advancing light,
my hands hungry, the world beautiful.

My eyes can't get enough of the trees—
they're so hopeful, so green.

A sunny road runs through the mulberries,
I'm at the window of the prison infirmary.

I can't smell the medicines—
carnations must be blooming nearby.

It's this way:
being captured is beside the point,
the point is not to surrender.

[evilstorm.livejournal.com]

Oh, that first one! That first one! *bouncing with delight*

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

I adore that poem too <3

[yarrowkat]

Three of Cups
Marty McConnell

At some point it becomes true that all stories
are love stories. all making, love making.
I didn't make this rule. but it binds me
all the same. I wish there were a law
against condescending against love. against
the economy of fear that says your joy
means less joy for me as if love
were pie, or money, or fossil fuel
dug or pumped from the earth, gone
when it's gone. it's just not true. the heart
with its gift for magnificent expansion
is not coal. not fruit set to spoil or the dollar
cringing in its wallet. when you say darling,
the world lights up at its edges. when mouths
find mouths and minds follow or minds find
minds and mouths, hands, hips, toes, follow –
how about you call that sacred. how about you raise
your veined right hand and swear on the blood
that branches there, yes. I take this crush
to be my lawful infatuation. I will bend toward joy
until the bending's its own pleasure. I will memorize
photographs and street maps, I will acquiesce
to the maudlin urgency of pop songs and dance,
and dance – there's a perfection only the impossible kiss
possesses. there are notes you can only hear naked
in the dark of a room to which you will never
return. anything that moves the world toward light
is a blessing. why not take it with both hands,
lift it to your lips like a broth of stars. this
is the substance that holds our little atoms together
into bodies. this sweet paste of longing
is all that binds us to the earth.
and all we know of the gods.

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

"Animal Functionsong," Albert Goldbarth

Make me a place of peace, and leisure
spider, beaver, mountainwasp
Teach me pain's more beautiful gesture
oyster, salmon, eiderduck
Let me survive past Time that bred me
lemur, tapir, coelacanth
Lead me into the cared-for family
lioness, dambear, pelican
But if I pray too huge this morning
buffalo, mountain gorilla, white rhino
Asking one gift too outré
tusk, milk, civet-musk, panther-silk, ambergris
Thieve me a least sweep scrap of fatback
packrat, jackdaw, jay

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

High Country Weather
- James K. Baxter

Alone we are born
And die alone;
Yet see the red-gold cirrus
Over snow-mountain shine.

Upon the upland road
Ride easy, stranger:
Surrender to the sky
Your heart of anger.

[with-rainfall.livejournal.com]

THE SUNLIGHT ON THE GARDEN - Louis Macneice

The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage this minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying.

And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.

[elvenpiratelady.livejournal.com]

The Peace of Wild Things - Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.


Wild Geese - Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
For a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting --
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

i'm a little late to this, but i didn't think you'd complain about a little extra poetry...

"Danse Russe"
If when my wife is sleeping
and the baby and Kathleen
are sleeping
and the sun is a flame-white disc
in silken mists
above shining trees,--
if I in my north room
dance naked, grotesquely
before my mirror
waving my shirt round my head
and singing softly to myself:
"I am lonely, lonely.
I was born to be lonely,
I am best so!"
If I admire my arms, my face,
my shoulders, flanks, buttocks
against the yellow drawn shades,--

Who shall say I am not
the happy genius of my household?
--William Carlos Williams


"People"
No people are uninteresting.
Their fate is like the chronicle of planets.

Nothing in them is not particular,
and planet is dissimilar from planet.

And if a man lived in obscurity
making his friends in that obscurity
obscurity is not uninteresting.

To each his world is private,
and in that world one excellent minute.

And in that world one tragic minute.
These are private.

In any man who dies there dies with him
his first snow and kiss and fight.
It goes with him.

There are left books and bridges
and painted canvas and machinery.
Whose fate is to survive.

But what has gone is also not nothing:
by the rule of the game something has gone.
Not people die but worlds die in them.

Whom we knew as faulty, the earth's creatures.
Of whom, essentially, what did we know?

Brother of a brother? Friend of friends?
Lover of lover?

We who knew our fathers
in everything, in nothing.

They perish. They cannot be brought back.
The secret worlds are not regenerated.

And every time again and again
I make my lament against destruction.
--Yevgeny Yevtushenko, translated from the original Russian by Lauren Owens



"home means that"
home means that
when the certainly
roof leaks it
's our (home

means if any moon
or possibly
sun shines they are
our also my

darling)but should some im
probably
unworld crash
to 1

nonillion(& so)nothings
each(let's
kiss)means

home
--e.e. cummings


Barn's burnt down.
Now I can see the moon.
--Masahide



"since feeling is first"
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;

wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world

my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don't cry
--the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids' flutter which says

we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life's not a paragraph

And death i think is no parenthesis
--e.e. cummings

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

pity this busy monster, manunkind,

not. Progress is a comfortable disease:
your victim (death and life safely beyond)

plays with the bigness of his littleness
--- electrons deify one razorblade
into a mountainrange; lenses extend
unwish through curving wherewhen till unwish
returns on its unself.
A world of made
is not a world of born --- pity poor flesh

and trees, poor stars and stones, but never this
fine specimen of hypermagical

ultraomnipotence. We doctors know

a hopeless case if --- listen: there's a hell
of a good universe next door; let's go
--e.e. cummings

"the boys i mean are not refined"
the boys i mean are not refined
they go with girls who buck and bite
they do not give a fuck for luck
they hump them thirteen times a night

one hangs a hat upon her tit
one carves a cross on her behind
they do not give a shit for wit
the boys i mean are not refined

they come with girls who bite and buck
who cannot read and cannot write
who laugh like they would fall apart
and masturbate with dynamite

the boys i mean are not refined
they cannot chat of that and this
they do not give a fart for art
they kill like you would take a piss

they speak whatever's on their mind
they do whatever's in their pants
the boys i mean are not refined
they shake the mountains when they dance
--e.e. cummings


"Poetry Nation"
In the capital square, there is a picture of Jack Spicer,
puking his guts out, his last words--My vocabulary
did this to me!--incribed in the marble base.

In nightclubs, supermodels stomp their heels
and dream of their small, dark hearts
being enlarged with compassion implants,
as the poetess gets all the attention.

Guys in trendy rock bands mope like damp rats
whenever a poet storms in the room.

Everyone wants to be a poet, even the coroner
scribbling on his note pad at the crime scene:
a drowned man is judged only by his piers.

Carjackers pause in mid-heist to consider the moon.
Hallmark is burnt to a crisp. Bill Knott's silhouette
appears on every other thirteen dollar bill.

Homeless people stand in line for Pablo Neruda.
In hospitals, they feed cancer patients Carolyn Forche.
In churches, there are giant wooden replicas
of Emily Dickinson nailed to a cross.

Instead of NBC and CBS, there is W.S. Merwin,
the Walt Whitman channel, and Sappho at Nite.

The Constitution was written by Tristan Tzara.
All men are created equal under Dada.
The drug czar makes sure everyone gets enough.

Lucille Clifton for President!
Charlie Parker is the national bird.
Howl is recited before pro football games.
You can pay for groceries with words.
--Jeffrey McDaniel

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"Here am I"
We all wanted that high school sweetheart
We wanted to be young in the fifties with meatloafs and sock hops
and lawns so perfect they looked like Clark Gable was kissing them

We wanted to be thirteen and alive and meet a girl that was thirteen and alive
and walk with her pass the grandstands
to sit and hold hands with to sit and kiss with to sit and sit with
but that never happened

We wanted to be poor but not too poor
connecting this country like Kerouac and thumbs
winking at small town waitresses
pulling them into back seats and trailer park homes
where the two of you would find passion expanding
between the locking of your bones
and morning would come to find you out on the road
with your pockets empty but for your hands
but your hands they'd be overflowing with your soul
but that's not what happened

We once climbed into beds like the day was a hard mountain
and the sheets were a valley where dinosaurs still lived
and how we would explore them with a flashlight
catching them between pages and pictures
of triceratops and brontosauruses
but even he was opened up with the smoke of the houses
on the corners we once climbed through
the streets and footballs with which we once threw
the school desks upon which we once drew
the windows that sat open through which we once flew
before the outside world
of parking spaces and dead friends came flooding on in
and we forgot what we wanted
and became what we become:
waitresses and bartenders
city employees and temp positions
grown children and dead adults
we are junkies and one kiss poems
and we cry the stars

We write our scars onto dumpsters and electric boxes
because the only thing we can hear is our hearts
and the only ones listening are the streets
to the blood that breathes through the letters we leave
we try to rise up out of these burning buildings
but instead get buried somewhere beneath
because I know my life my life is a high school kid's notebook
that kid that goes back and forth between school and home
stacking the letters and the pictures
into sentences that save him
stacked too close for anyone outside of his own imagination to read
because it's through the ink that his heart beats
that his heart breathes

And we all just wanted to just write these notes:
check if you like me check if you don't
check if you'll date me check if you won't
because we all wanted the love songs to be true
and we all loved dinosaurs once
and we all wanted the stars
to hold our hands to lick the teeth to fuck us
but they end up fucking us

So let your smile twist
like my heart dancing precariously on the edge of my finger tips
staining them that same high school kid
licking his thoughts using his sharpie tip
writing:
I WUZ HERE
I wuz here motherfuckers
and ain't none of yall can write that in the spot that I just wrote it in
I am here motherfucker
and we all here motherfucker
and we all motherfuckers motherfucker
because every breath I give brings me a second closer
to the day that my mother may die
and every breath I take takes me a second further
from the moment she caught my father's eye
because every word I carry is another stone to put into place
in the foundation I'm building to ease the days
and help erase something I never saw:
what all of us wanted and what none of us got
what we all had and have and what we all forgot
that we all became something
and it may not be what we once thought it'd be when we were kids
but something is still something
and like some cats say
something's better then nothing
feet are smarter than an engine
dreams are stronger than thighs
and questions are the only answers we need
to know that we're still as alive as the time when I held the mind of a child
asking why is 2 + 3 equal to 5?
Where do people go when they die?
What made the beauty of the moon? the beauty of the sea?
Did that beauty make you did that beauty make me?
Will it make me something?
Will I be something
Am I something?
And the answer comes:

I already am
I always was
and you still have time to be
--Anis Mojgani

[two-grey-rooms.livejournal.com]

"So Much Happiness"
It is difficult to know what to do with so much happiness.
With sadness there is something to rub against,
a wound to tend with lotion and cloth.
When the world falls in around you, you have pieces to pick up,
something to hold in your hands, like ticket stubs or change.

But happiness floats.
It doesn't need you to hold it down.
It doesn't need anything.
Happiness lands on the roof of the next house, singing,
and disappears when it wants to.
You are happy either way.
Even the fact that you once lived in a peaceful tree house
and now live over a quarry of noise and dust
cannot make you unhappy.
Everything has a life of its own,
it too could wake up filled with possibilities
of coffee cake and ripe peaches,
and love even the floor which needs to be swept,
the soiled linens and scratched records...

Since there is no place large enough
to contain so much happiness,
you shrug, you raise your hands, and it flows out of you
into everything you touch. You are not responsible.
You take no credit, as the night sky takes no credit
for the moon, but continues to hold it, and share it,
and in that way, be known.
--Naomi Shihab Nye


"Allegiances"
It is time for all the heroes to go home
if they have any, time for all of us common ones
to locate ourselves by the real things
we live by.

Far to the north, or indeed in any direction,
strange mountains and creatures have always lurked--
elves, goblins, trolls, and spiders:--we
encounter them in dread and wonder,

But once we have tasted far streams, touched the gold,
found some limit beyond the waterfall,
a season changes, and we come back, changed
but safe, quiet, grateful.

Suppose an insane wind holds all the hills
while strange beliefs whine at the traveler's ears,
we ordinary beings can cling to the earth and love
where we are, sturdy for common things.
--William Stafford


...okay, so maybe a lot of extra poetry :P