The Road Not Taken .......Robert Frost
 

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

I Do Not Love You Except Because I Love You ~ Pablo Neruda
 

12
January, 1983:

with tremulous cords, with my
own latest highest evolvement of a life of devotion to
beauty, with a comprehending glance into the deep
of an unfilled well. I mounted the circumference of
his disc.


~Art Garfunkel

Happy birthday Rita Mae Brown
 

Sappho’s Reply

Rita Mae Brown

My voice rings down through thousands of years

To coil around your body and give you strength,

You who have wept in direct sunlight,

Who have hungered in invisible chains,

Tremble to the cadence of my legacy:

An army of lovers shall not fail.


-from The Hand That Cradles Rock 1974

In Blackwater Woods. by Mary Oliver


Look, the trees
are turning
their own bodies
into pillars

of light,
are giving off the rich
fragrance of cinnamon
and fulfillment,

the long tapers
of cattails
are bursting and floating away over
the blue shoulders

of the ponds,
and every pond,
no matter what its
name is, is

nameless now.
Every year
everything
I have ever learned

in my lifetime
leads back to this: the fires
and the black river of loss
whose other side

is salvation,
whose meaning
none of us will ever know.
To live in this world

you must be able
to do three things:
to love what is mortal;
to hold it

against your bones knowing
your own life depends on it;
and, when the time comes to let it go,
to let it go.

All time favorite...
 

Light will someday split you open
Even if your life is now a cage,
For a divine seed, the crown of destiny,
Is hidden and sown on an ancient, fertile plain
You hold the title to...
Love will surely bust you wide open
Into an unfettered, blooming new galaxy
Even if your mind is now
A spoiled mule.

A life-giving radiance will come,
The Friend's gratuity will come

O look again within yourself,
For I know you were once the elegant host
To all the marvels in creation.

From a sacred crevice in your body
A bow rises each night
And shoots your soul into God.

Behold the Beautiful Drunk Singing One
From the lunar vantage point of love.

He is conducting the affairs
Of the whole universe
While throwing wild parties
In a tree house - on a limb
In your heart.

-Hafiz

MO
 

MO
 

Forget About Me

by Pablo Neruda

Among the things the sea throws up,
let us hunt for the most petrified,
violet claws of crabs,
little skulls of dead fish,
smooth syllables of wood,
small countries of mother-of-pearl;
let us look for what the sea undid
insistently, carelessly,
what it broke up and abandoned,
and left behind for us.

Petals crimped up,
cotton from the tidewash,
useless sea-jewels,
and sweet bones of birds
still in the poise of flight.

The sea washed up its tidewrack,
the air played with the sea-things;
when there was sun, it embraced them,
and time lives close to the sea,
counting and touching what exists.

I know all the algae,
the white eyes of the sand,
the tiny merchandise
of the tides in autumn,
and I walk with the plump pelican,
building its soaking nests,
sponges that worship the wind,
shelves of undersea shadow,
but nothing more moving
than the vestiges of shipwrecks—
the smooth abandoned beams
gnawed by the waves
and disdained by death.

Let us look for secret things
somewhere in the world,
on the blue shore of silence
or where the storm has passed,
rampaging like a train.
There the faint signs are left,
coins of time and water,
debris, celestial ash
and the irreplaceable rapture
of sharing in the labor
of solitude and the sand.

:rrose:

"Wild nights - Wild nights!" (269) by Emily Dickinson

Wild nights - Wild nights!
Were I with thee
Wild nights should be
Our luxury!

Futile - the winds -
To a Heart in port -
Done with the Compass -
Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden -
Ah - the Sea!
Might I but moor - tonight -
In thee!

If trees fall in a wood and no one hears them,
Do they exist except as a page of lines
That words of rapture or grief are written on?
They are lines too while alive, pointing away
From the primer of damped air and leafmold
That underlie, or would if certain of them
Were not melon or maize, solferino or smoke,
Colors into which a sunset will collapse
On a high branch of broken promises.
Or they nail the late summer’s shingles of noon
Back onto the horizon’s overlap, reflecting
An emptiness visible on leaves that come and go.

How does a life flash before one’s eyes
At the end? How is there time for so much time?
You pick up the book and hold it, knowing
Long since the failed romance, the strained
Marriage, the messenger, the mistake,
Knowing it all at once, as if looking through
A lighted dormer on the dark crest of a barn.
You know who is inside, and who has always been
At the other edge of the wood. She is waiting
For no one in particular. It could be you.
If you can discover which tree she has become,
You will know whether it has all been true.

-J.D. McClatchy
Plundered Hearts: New and Selected Poems

Love Yourself
 

Love After Love

Derek Walcott


The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

Federico Garcia Lorca

It's True

Ay, the pain it costs me
to love you as I love you!

For love of you, the air, it hurts,
and my heart,
and my hat, they hurt me.

Who would buy it from me,
this ribbon I am holding,
and this sadness of cotton,
white, for making hankerchiefs with?

Ay, the pain it costs me
to love you as I love you!

Twenty-One Love Poems, # IX, Adrienne Rich
 

Your silence today is a pond where drowned things live
I want to see raised dripping and brought into the sun.
It’s not my own face I see there, but other faces,
even your face at another age.
Whatever’s lost there is needed by both of us—
a watch of old gold, a water-blurred fever chart,
a key. . . . Even the silt and pebbles of the bottom
deserve their glint of recognition. I fear this silence,
this inarticulate life. I'm waiting
for a wind that will gently open this sheeted water
for once, and show me what I can do
for you, who have often made the unnameable
nameable for others, even for me.

Love is Not All (Sonnet XXX), Edna St. Vincent Millay, 1892 - 1950
 

Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain;
Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
Yet many a man is making friends with death
Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.
It well may be that in a difficult hour,
Pinned down by pain and moaning for release,
Or nagged by want past resolution’s power,
I might be driven to sell your love for peace,
Or trade the memory of this night for food.
It well may be. I do not think I would.

From Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman
 

5

I believe in you my soul, the other I am must not abase itself to you,
And you must not be abased to the other.

Loafe with me on the grass, loose the stop from your throat,
Not words, not music or rhyme I want, not custom or lecture, not
even the best,
Only the lull I like, the hum of your valvèd voice.

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn'd over
upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your
tongue to my bare-stript heart,
... and reach'd till you held my feet.

Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that
pass all the argument of the earth,
And I know that the hand of God is the promise of my own,
And I know that the spirit of God is the brother of my own,
And that all the men ever born are also my brothers, and the
women my sisters and lovers,
And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

There are many poems by Maya Angelo that are so inspirational and very poignant.

Still I Rise is one of her very best and one that I like and love, so very much. :rrose:

https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qim...69fcdf097e07-c

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go, my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing, my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate, my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world, my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

here is the deepest secret nobody knows
(here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud
and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows
higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)
and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart

i carry your hear(i carry it in my heart)

Splinter
 

The face in the mirror strange.

Wax lips curling hopeful

not her lips

nor the eyes her eyes.

She is peeling away from the vessel,

slipping out of the skin.

Isn’t it curious

the body below watching the face in the glass?

How she smiles at the stranger

then splinters into shards?

So easy to splinter and fly away.

Now she is a sparrow, small and brown,

scratching at broken pieces,

a spider on the ceiling

ravenous,

many legged,

a goat scrabbling up and up chinks

in the wall.

Broken, ravenous, scrabbling

she collects the shards

and swallows them.

It hardly hurts at all.

Billy Collins | Subway
 

"This is the kind of friend you are-
Without making me realize my soul's anguished history,
You slip into my house at night,
And while I am sleeping,
You silently carry off all my suffering
and sordid past in your beautiful hands,"
— Hafiz of Shiraz
:moonstars:
http://img16.3lian.com/gif2016/q25/78/103.jpg

Like You-Roque Dalton
 

Like You
Roque Dalton, 1935 - 1975
translated by Jack Hirschman

Like you I
love love, life, the sweet smell
of things, the sky-blue
landscape of January days.

And my blood boils up
and I laugh through eyes
that have known the buds of tears.

I believe the world is beautiful
and that poetry, like bread, is for everyone.

And that my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life,
love,
little things,
landscape and bread,
the poetry of everyone.

Here is a few excerpts from an essay written by Audre Lorde, which was first published in Chrysalis: A Magazine of Female Culture (no. 3; 1977) and is featured in Audre Lorde's book Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Feminist Theory).


https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon....SR200,200_.jpg



Poetry Is Not A Luxury *

~ Audre Lorde

The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has a direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that we give name to those ideas which are -- until the poem -- nameless and formless, about to be birthed, but already felt. That distillation of experience from which true poetry springs births thought as dream births concept, as feelings births idea, as knowledge births (preceeds) understanding.

As we learn to bear the intimacy of scrutiny and to flourish within it, as we learn to use the products of that scrutiny for power within our living, those fears which rule our lives and form our silences begin to lose their control over us.

For each of us as women, there is a dark place within, where hidden and growing our true spirit rises (…).

These places of possibility within ourselves are dark because they are ancient and hidden; they have survived and grown strong through that darkness.

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives (pp. 36-37).

The other day, I came across an exhibit of poetry, which was very inspiring to me. The poetry exhibit was put together by The Poetry Project. This particular poem was written for the Poetry Project, back in 2008, and when I stood in the alcove of the gallery, where this giant wall poster with the poetry was hanging, I read it to myself and felt heard. Like the poet, not even knowing me or others like me, heard me. His poem felt so validating, in that I have grown into my own beautiful self over time and although it has taken years for me to internalize the notion that I do not need anyone to complete me, I felt like it was a watershed moment, the moment I read the poet's poem. I like it a lot because it feels authentic. It is authentic. I am authentic all on my own, because I am complete on my own. In the words of the poet: "My heart needs no one to feel complete."


Here is the poem I found at the poetry exhibit:

You are mighty, a force unknown.
Your heart needs no one to feel complete.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Rinse.
Repeat.

Author/Poet: James McInerney (2008).

The Genius of the Crowd

there is enough treachery, hatred violence absurdity in the average
human being to supply any given army on any given day

and the best at murder are those who preach against it
and the best at hate are those who preach love
and the best at war finally are those who preach peace

those who preach god, need god
those who preach peace do not have peace
those who preach peace do not have love

beware the preachers
beware the knowers
beware those who are always reading books
beware those who either detest poverty
or are proud of it
beware those quick to praise
for they need praise in return
beware those who are quick to censor
they are afraid of what they do not know
beware those who seek constant crowds for
they are nothing alone
beware the average man the average woman
beware their love, their love is average
seeks average

but there is genius in their hatred
there is enough genius in their hatred to kill you
to kill anybody
not wanting solitude
not understanding solitude
they will attempt to destroy anything
that differs from their own
not being able to create art
they will not understand art
they will consider their failure as creators
only as a failure of the world
not being able to love fully
they will believe your love incomplete
and then they will hate you
and their hatred will be perfect

like a shining diamond
like a knife
like a mountain
like a tiger
like hemlock

their finest art




-Charles Bukowski

Remembering Ruth Bader Ginsburg
 

When Great Trees Fall

By Maya Angelou

When great trees fall,
rocks on distant hills shudder,
lions hunker down
in tall grasses,
and even elephants
lumber after safety.

When great trees fall
in forests,
small things recoil into silence,
their senses
eroded beyond fear.

When great souls die,
the air around us becomes
light, rare, sterile.
We breathe, briefly.
Our eyes, briefly,
see with
a hurtful clarity.
Our memory, suddenly sharpened,
examines,
gnaws on kind words
unsaid,
promised walks
never taken.

Great souls die and
our reality, bound to
them, takes leave of us.
Our souls,
dependent upon their
nurture,
now shrink, wizened.
Our minds, formed
and informed by their
radiance,
fall away.
We are not so much maddened
as reduced to the unutterable ignorance
of dark, cold
caves.

And when great souls die,
after a period peace blooms,
slowly and always
irregularly. Spaces fill
with a kind of
soothing electric vibration.
Our senses, restored, never
to be the same, whisper to us.
They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.

Favorite poem
 

https://youtu.be/HJfbrJs4VqI

The Glove and the Lions








This is truly one of my favorites.

Your favorite poems
 

The Hill We Climb | Amanda Gorman
 

https://musicuntold.com/wp-content/u...daa-Gorman.jpg

Link to full text of her inaugural poem & news article:

https://www.mercurynews.com/2021/01/...amanda-gorman/

I just love this poem. It makes me think of my Rico, who did nearly the same thing with me, telling me over a quiet dinner together about his stage 4 Kidney cancer and the ensuing moments following his personal admission to me. Those moments we shared that summer evening over dinner are indelible in my heart of hearts. :stillheart:

Thanks for sharing Maria Howe's poem (The Last Time).

PS/ I like your signature line quote, too.

True Love

True love. Is it normal
is it serious, is it practical?
What does the world get from two people
who exist in a world of their own?

Placed on the same pedestal for no good reason,
drawn randomly from millions but convinced
it had to happen this way - in reward for what?
For nothing.
The light descends from nowhere.
Why on these two and not on others?
Doesn't this outrage justice? Yes it does.
Doesn't it disrupt our painstakingly erected principles,
and cast the moral from the peak? Yes on both accounts.

Look at the happy couple.
Couldn't they at least try to hide it,
fake a little depression for their friends' sake?
Listen to them laughing - its an insult.
The language they use - deceptively clear.
And their little celebrations, rituals,
the elaborate mutual routines -
it's obviously a plot behind the human race's back!

It's hard even to guess how far things might go
if people start to follow their example.
What could religion and poetry count on?
What would be remembered? What renounced?
Who'd want to stay within bounds?

True love. Is it really necessary?
Tact and common sense tell us to pass over it in silence,
like a scandal in Life's highest circles.
Perfectly good children are born without its help.
It couldn't populate the planet in a million years,
it comes along so rarely.

Let the people who never find true love
keep saying that there's no such thing.

Their faith will make it easier for them to live and die.

~ Wislawa Szymborska-Wlodek
(Kraków, Poland: July 2, 1923 - February 1, 2012)

An endearing trait
 

An Endearing Trait

The scatterbrain,
is a little like,
the patter of rain.

Neither here,
nor there,
but everywhere.

- Lang Leav
:rainsing:

Bequest
 

Bequest.

You left me , sweet , two legacies,-
A legacy of love
A heavenly Father would content,
Had He the offer of;

You left me boundaries of pain
Capacious as the sea ,
Between eternity and time ,
Your consciousness and me.

Emily Dickinson

Favorite Poems
 

It was a noble Roman,
In Rome's imperial day,
Who heard a coward croaker
Before he castle say,-
"They're safe in such a fortress:
There is no way to shake it!"
"On! on!" exclaimed the hero;
"I'll find a way, or make it!"

Is fame your asperation?
Her path is steep and high;
In vain he seeks her temple,
Content to gaze and sigh.
The shining throne is waiting,
But he alone can take it
Who says, with Roman firmness,
"I'll find a way , or make it!"

Is learning your ambition?
There is no royal road;
Alike the peer and peasant
Must climb to her abode;
Who feels the thirst for knowledge,
In Helicon may slake it,
If he hs still the Roman will
"To find a way, or make it!;

Are riches worth the getting?
They must be bravely sought;
With wishing and with fretting
The boon can not be bought;
To all the prize is open,
But only he can take it,
Who says, with Roman courage,
"I'll find a way, or make it!"