Untitled @allegoricalanimals - Tumblr Blog

On Seatbelts and Sunsets Hanif Abdurraqib

Emily Skaja, from "I Liked Myself Better as an Exquisite Skeleton", pub. The Offing [ID'd]

Ah, world, what lessons you prepare for us, even in the leafless winter, even in the ashy city. I am thinking now of grief, and of getting past it;

I feel my boots trying to leave the ground, I feel my heart pumping hard. I want

to think again of dangerous and noble things. I want to be light and frolicsome. I want to be improbable beautiful and afraid of nothing, as though I had wings.

Mary Oliver, "Starlings in Winter"

lunchboxpoems

KEVIN YOUNG

existentialyearning

Salma Deera, "Salt"

wellntruly

EVERYTHING WE CAN SEE IN THE UNIVERSE GLOWS

A giant ice cube at South Pole Station captures extragalactic neutrinos. Please take me to where you are,

pleaded the pregnant Korean widow to her lost love in a sixteenth-century letter an archaeologist

found folded in a tomb. Telescopes see only light; faces from our dreams, unspoken desires, dead stars

go undetected. Come to me secretly and show yourself she whispered. Hans Spemann plucked a fine hair

from his newborn daughter to tie an embryo egg in half. The microscope zooms in on a freshly formed eyeball

gazing expectantly back. The archaeologist feels ill, presses twice-boiled tea leaves to his forehead,

unfolds and refolds the letter again. The fastest thing in the universe is light; the slowest is forgiving

then forgetting. The seal gnaws a hole in the sea ice, sunlight flashes on a million emerald cod flitting below.

Captured neutrinos flare pale blue; embryos float in drops of glistening saline fluid and await their fate.

Quartz cuvettes filled with seawater and lavender dye slide into a spectrometer, colors the human eye

cannot see fan out inside a box. Please, come in a dream, there is no limit to what I want to know. I wait here.

Jynne Dilling Martin From her poetry collection We Mammals In Hospitable Times (2015), written after her stay in Antarctica

apoemaday

[since feeling is first]

by E.E. Cummings

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

garadinervi

Diane di Prima, (1968, 1971), Revolutionary Letter #48, in Revolutionary Letters, The Pocket Poets Series #27, City Lights Books, San Francisco, CA, 1974, p. 60