nooooo

[apoemaday]

Death Is Nothing at All

by Henry Scott Holland

Death is nothing at all I have only slipped away into the next room I am I and you are you Whatever we were to each other That we are still Call me by my own familiar name Speak to me in the easy way you always used Put no difference into your tone Wear no forced air of solemnity or sorrow Laugh as we always laughed At the little jokes we always enjoyed together Play, smile, think of me, pray for me Let my name be ever the household word that it always was Let it be spoken without effort Without the ghost of a shadow in it Life means all that it ever was There is absolute unbroken continuity What is death but a negligible accident? Why should I be out of mind Because I am out of sight? I am waiting for you for an interval Somewhere very near Just around the corner All is well. Nothing is past; nothing is lost One brief moment and all will be as it was before How we shall laugh at the trouble of parting when we meet again!

[weltenwellen]

Ilya Kaminsky, "Author's Prayer", Dancing in Odessa

[havingapoemwithyou]

Music in the Morning by Dorianne Laux

[apoemaday]

The Life You Could Be Living (if You Weren’t Living This One)

by Caryn Mirriam-Goldberg

The life you could be living aches in its compression, tires of being a spark, an asteroid, a falling raindrop bouncing when it hits. It’s wound tight between muscle and sinew, lodged in the happy gaps of a synapse. It’s fluid like flowers. It sounds like geese out of sight. It’s marvelous as falling asleep when exhausted, and it foreshadows your dreams like a stray piece of sunlight or an unnoticed icicle.

Pull apart the paper vignettes and subtle understandings. Find a favorite shoe lost decades ago, a line to an old song, and behind that, the melody that once made you lift your arms and twirl in your childhood bedroom after dark.

This life startles you with its foreign tongue of traumas and kisses, its vulnerable eyes staring into yours for mercy as it lies down beside you, tries to say — although it doesn’t know your language — that it’s okay how it turned out, that it’s still here, and despite its wish to be lived, it’s not going anywhere.

[two-bees-poetry]

twenty years across the sea

[aridante]

Richard Siken, Gun Case

[ashstfu]

[beeseverywhen]

I’ve been rereading your story. I think it’s about me in a way that might not be flattering, but that’s okay. We dream and dream of being seen as we really are and then finally someone looks at us and sees us truly and we fail to measure up. Anyway: story received, story included. You looked at me long enough to see something mysterioso under all the gruff and bluster. Thanks. Sometimes you get so close to someone you end up on the other side of them.

Richard Siken from the long and short of it

[1--poems--2]

T'o LOVE SoMeOne long-term is to atTenD A thOUSAND FUnERaLS OF THe PEOPLE THEY USED TO BE.

The people they're too exhausted to be any longer. The people they don't recognise inside themselves anymore. The people they grew out of, the people they never ended up growing into. We so badly want the people we love to get their spark back when it burns out; to become speedily found when they are lost. But it is not our job to hold anyone accountable to the people they used to be. It is our job to travel with them between each version and to honour what emerges along the way. Sometimes it will be an even more luminescent flame. Sometimes it will be a flicker that disappears and temporarily floods the room with a perfect and necessary darkness:

FEIDI PRIEBE

[dog-teeth]

Good Bones by Maggie Smith

[soracities]

happy "everyone forgets that icarus also flew" monday. i want to throw up !

[soracities]

"anything worth doing is worth doing badly"............."not failing as he fell but just coming to the end of his triumph"......goodnight (it's noon)

[apoemaday]

The Reminder

by Jason Tandon

My friend long dead visits me in a dream. "You're married," he says, "you've had a child." "Yes," I say, feeling my face flush with shame. "I grieved for you," I say. "I climbed a rooftop in a slanting rain and spit my curses at God." He smiles, and the rows of his teeth appear like spotless glasses brimming with milk.

[poems-from-around-the-world]

A Meeting - Wendell Berry - USA

In a dream I meet my dead friend. He has, I know, gone long and far, and yet he is the same for the dead are changeless. They grow no older. It is I who have changed, grown strange to what I was. Yet I, the changed one, ask: 'How you been?' He grins and looks at me. 'I been eating peaches off some mighty fine trees.'

[somethoughtseeds]

[despondencytendencies]

I can’t even be alone when I’m alone, the way the field hums all our old songs, the moon pulling everything closer. You’re the ghost in my throat, the lump I swallow and swallow, the name that comes out of my mouth no matter who I meant to call. I meant to call more people back. To love someone other than you and myself and the dog. Now look at the moon, its far hard rim, a coin in the wide dark palm of the sky—it’s the way I remember your body, brilliant and out of my reach. I’ve been lonely for years but never minutes. That’s why I’m so terrible at it, that’s why I keep needing to be rescued. Night here has a pulse, electric and warm, each ear of corn a live wire. It’s the crickets, the thrum of rubbed wings, it’s the way you used to touch me—your limbs all bows, my limbs all strings. Look at the sky, it’s everywhere tonight, relentless and empty of signs. Look at the field, the way there’s no one else in it, the way even now, having left you, I’m still what’s left.

— Ali Shapiro, Leave Me Alone But Take Me With You

[havingapoemwithyou]

if i leave you then maybe i won’t have to miss you so much by Ali Shapiro

[spiceberrie]

anthropology, ali shapiro