Breath of Poetry

"Perfect love has a breath of poetry which can exalt the relations of the least-instructed human beings." –George Eliot

[breathofpoetry]

by Diana Ó Hehir

[vedrai-deactivated20130928]

Come away, O human child! To the waters and the wild With a faery, hand in hand, For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

William Butler Yeats (via earthlymuse)

[shazia-r]

Hummingbird by Raymond Carver

[portermoto-deactivated20180125]

Honey At The Table - by Mary Oliver It fills you with the soft essence of vanished flowers, it becomes a trickle sharp as a hair that you follow from the honey pot over the table and out the door and over the ground, and all the while it thickens, grows deeper and wilder, edged with pine boughs and wet boulders, pawprints of bobcat and bear, until deep in the forest you shuffle up some tree, you rip the bark, you float into and swallow the dripping combs, bits of the tree, crushed bees - - - a taste composed of everything lost, in which everything lost is found.

‘Honey at the Table’ by Mary Oliver

http://www.best-poems.net/mary_oliver/poem-13023.html

(via

portermoto

)

[metaphorformetaphor]

I love my own lost self, my faulty stuff, my silver wound, and my eternal loss.

—Pablo Neruda, from “Sonata and Destructions” in Neruda and Vallejo:Selected poems. Beacon Press, 1993

[glimpseofthegarden]

Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge (1910)

en Gammelion (Gregory J. Markopoulos, 1968)

[caveofhypnos-blog]

I will bring you flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses. I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.

Pablo Neruda, “Every Day You Play” (via aworldofexperiences)

[lifeinpoetry]

Give me night itself, a waist of silk and immediate port, a myriad corner continuing; in your wrist and foot such arrival, and you are so near; lid and dark lash, you are such ankle; I can hardly say what elbow there is in the course of your river; nor what dark birds fly opposite of our sleeping together. Therefore I keep my hand moving over your, all the while knowing my hand may not move from glory to glory without it first moving shore to shore, your rib to hip bone, where, paused, my hand thinks with its wrist, the blood keeping count… Moving, my hand transverses you infinitely. Yet, once only, and once again, your width little less than an arm thrown across the recorder bird’s dark note, going, gone.

Li-Young Lee, from The Winged Seed: A Remembrance

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

I’ve been prepared for almost anything; except absence, except silence.

Margaret Atwood, from Cat’s Eye

[litverve]

We all arrive by different streets, by unequal languages, at Silence.

Pablo Neruda, from “Still Another Day: XVII/Men”

[breathofpoetry]

what is this saying then in a simpler way

I’m sorry Anon, I don’t know which poem you are referring to. If you write back and give me a little more information, I will be happy to share my thoughts.

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

To love the world is to take into your arms no answer. It is to give your children to silence, to the beautiful instructions of millennia uttered once only, then ringing far and clear and perfectly inaudible as the stars.

To love the world that cannot answer takes losing, It takes us all our lives.

Betty Adcock, closing lines to “Colloquy,” The Rag-Picker’s Guide to Poetry: Poems, Poets, Process, ed. Eleanor Wilner and Maurice Manning, (University of Michigan Press, 2013)

[oofpoetry]

What can I say that I have not said before? So I’ll say it again. The leaf has a song in it. Stone is the face of patience. Inside the river there is an unfinishable story and you are somewhere in it and it will never end until all ends. Take your busy heart to the art museum and the chamber of commerce but take it also to the forest. The song you heard singing in the leaf when you were a child is singing still. I am of years lived, so far, seventy-four, and the leaf is singing still.

Mary Oliver, “What Can I Say”

[metaphorformetaphor]

You gather things to you like an old road. You are peopled with echoes and nostalgic voices. I awoke and at times the birds fled and migrated that had been sleeping in your soul.

— Pablo Neruda, from “Your Breast Is Enough,” Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, translated by W.S. Merwin (Jonathan Cape, 2004)

[violentwavesofemotion-deactivat]

Living in and out of the past, inexplicably so many things have died in me. In and out like a tide, each tear holds a tiny hologram. Even this early I am full of years. Here are the little gravestones where memory stands in the wild grass, watching the future arrive in a line of big black cars. All days lost days, in and out of themselves between dreaming and dreaming again and half- remembering.

Carol Ann Duffy, from All Days Lost Days

[larmoyante]

I’d cut my soul into a million different pieces just to form a constellation to light your way home. I’d write love poems to the parts of yourself you can’t stand. I’d stand in the shadows of your heart and tell you I’m not afraid of your dark.

Andrea Gibson, Slip Your Mind

[observando]

I am that last, that final thing, the body in a white sheet listening,

Li-Young Lee