Believe The Bird

A Writer's Commonplace

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Audre Lorde reads Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic As Power (FULL Updated)

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Geoffrey Grigson, in the Times Literary Supplement, reports the following dialogue between the very young Auden and his tutor at Oxford. Tutor: And what are you going to do, Mr. Auden, when you leave the university? Auden: I am going to be a poet. Tutor: Well—in that case you should find it very useful to have read English. Auden: You don’t understand. I am going to be a great poet.

Remembering W.H. Auden, by Hannah Arendt, in The New Yorker, January 12, 1975

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Comprehensive list of synonyms for types of story or play, by Macmillan Dictionary and Thesaurus

From adaptation to yarn, with psychodrama, saga, two-hander, and more between.

[believethebird]

Envy

Let your friend have as much of the world as he can have, what does he have: the wind blows it away and your friend also and you, freeing all from any trace of taint.

~A.R. Ammons (from “Envy,” in The Snow Poems)

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It is difficult to undo our own damage, and to recall to our presence that which we have asked to leave.

Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk

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Praise Them

The birds don't alter space. They reveal it. The sky never fills with any leftover flying. They leave nothing to trace. It is our own astonishment collects in chill air. Be glad. They equal their due moment never begging, and enter ours without parting day. See how three birds in a winter tree make the tree barer. Two fly away, and new rooms open in December. Give up what you guessed about a whirring heart, the little beaks and claws, their constant hunger. We're the nervous ones. If even one of our violent number could be gentle long enough that one of them found it safe inside our finally untroubled and untroubling gaze, who wouldn't hear what singing completes us?

~ Li-Young Lee

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The interior life is often stupid. Its egoism blinds it and deafens it; its imagination spins out ignorant tales, fascinated. It fancies that the western wind blows on the Self, and leaves fall at the feet of the Self for a reason, and people are watching. A mind risks real ignorance for the sometimes paltry prize of an imagination enriched. The trick of reason is to get the imagination to seize the actual world—if only from time to time.

Annie Dillard, An American Childhood

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I don’t want to fall

How do animals tolerate solitude? While we were going to Poznan, Wislawa Szymborska told me about how her hedgehog, all alone, fell in love with a broom. Am I becoming a self-delusive hedgehog? I don’t want to fall for a broom, whatever it’s called. I want to be free from that. Free from solitude? That’s the riddle I keep asking myself. Freedom demands solitude, but solitude becomes bondage. I bang my head against the wall with thinking. ~ Anna Kamienska (A Nest of Quiet: A Notebook)

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Funny

What's it like to be a human the bird asked

I myself don't know it's being held prisoner by your skin while reaching infinity being a captive of your scrap of time while touching eternity being hopelessly uncertain and helplessly hopeful being a needle of frost and a handful of heat breathing in the air and choking wordlessly it's being on fire with a nest made of ashes eating bread while filling up on hunger it's dying without love it's loving through death

That's funny said the bird and flew effortlessly up into the air

~ Anna Kamienska (Astonishments: Selected Poems of Anna Kamienska, ed. and trans. by D. Curzon and G. Drabik)

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I have always loved the gaps, the spaces between things, as much as the things. I love staring, pondering, mulling, puttering. I love the times when someone or something is late—there’s that rich possibility of noticing more, in the meantime . . .  Poetry calls us to pause. There is so much we overlook, while the abundance around us continues to shimmer, on its own.

Naomi Shihab Nye

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Bedtime

We are a meadow where the bees hum, mind and body are almost one

as the fire snaps in the stove and our eyes close,

and mouth to mouth, the covers pulled over our shoulders,

we drowse as horses drowse afield, in accord; though the fall cold

surrounds our warm bed, and though by day we are singular and often lonely.

~ Denise Levertov, from The Sorrow Dance (1967)

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A Dark Summer Day

I want some funny jazz band           to wake me, tell me life’s been dreaming me. I want something like love, but made            all of string or pebbles,            oboe of torn air to tear me to my senses.             Emily’s black birds don’t bate their banjos nor the throbbing             of their quick hearts. The leaves part to reveal        more leaves, and darkness,        darkness and the intense         poised sequence of leaves. I want to take the last of leaves               between my lips and taste                       its weight of stone.

~ Denise Levertov

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i carry your heart

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 who 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 heart (i carry it in my heart)

~ e. e. cummings

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Love Song

Like the hills under dusk you fall away from the light: you deepen, the green light darkens and you are nearly lost: only so much light as  stars keep manifests your face: The total night in myself raves for the light along your lips.

~ A.R. Ammons

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Linda Gregg (1942-2019)

I will never give up longing. I will let my hair stay long. The rain proclaims these trees, the trees tell of the sun. Let birds, let birds. Let leaf be passion. Let jaw, let teeth, let tongue be between us. Let joy. Let entering. Let rage and calm join. Let quail come. Let winter impress you. Let spring. Allow the ocean to wake in you. Let the mare in the field in the summer morning mist make you whinny. Make you come  to the fence and whinny. Let birds. 

~ From “Let Birds,” by Linda Gregg (September 9, 1942 - March 19, 2019)

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Spring in the Lowlands

Shout into leaping wind alone by spring lakes On muddy paths, yellow grass stamp, laugh; no one  to hear.

The water, water, dazzles;                              dark winds pluck its feathers             splash the hissing reeds. Birches lean on the air.

Lean into solitude you whose joy is a kite now dragged in dirt, now breaking the ritual of sky.

~Denise Levertov, from Overland to the Islands (1958)

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i thank you God for most this amazing day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything which is natural which is infinite which is yes