i love this poem!

[storybookprincess]

suddenly remembered this poem as i was making breakfast this morning & frantically googled “poem remembered to buy eggs?????????” & somehow managed to find it & it utterly knocked the wind out of me just as much as when i first read it

[lovethispoem]

In the Beginning God Said Light by Mary Szybist

and there was light. Now God says, Give them a little theatrical lighting

and they’re happy, and we are. So many of us

dressing each morning, testing endless combinations, becoming in our mirrors

more ourselves, imagining, in an entrance, the ecstatic

weight of human eyes. Now that the sun is sheering

toward us, what is left but to let it close in

for our close-up? Let us really feel how good it feels

to be still in it, making every kind of self that can be

looked at. God, did you make us to be your bright accomplices?

God, here are our shining spines. Let there be no more dreams of being

more than a beginning. Let it be

that to be is to be backlit, and then to be only that light.

[thequotejournals]

I want to talk about what happened without mentioning how much it hurt. There has to be a way. To care for the wounds without reopening them. To name the pain without inviting it back into me.

Lora Mathis, “If There’s A Way Out I’ll Take It” (via thequotejournals)

[lovethispoem]

from “Please Bury Me in This” by Allison Benis White

Now my neighbor through the wall playing piano, I imagine, with her eyes closed.

When she stops playing, she disappears.

I am still waiting for the right words to explain myself to you.

When there was nothing left to smoke, I drew on my lips with a pen until they were black.

Or is this what it means to be empty: to make no sound?

I pressed my mouth to the wall until I’d made a small gray ring.

Or maybe emptiness is a form of listening.

Maybe I am just listening.

[lovethispoem]

Falling Peacock in Rainstorm at Night by Peg Boyers

My tail of colored feathers hangs matted closed behind me

It weighs me down

In this wet darkness I can neither dance nor fly

This darkness weighs me down

No one here to see my splendor

My only company the relentless rain  

Together we fall from the sky toward the darkening wood

The leafy trees below reach out to catch me but cannot    

Between their outstretched limbs I travel like a stone

The swallows sitting safely in their nests sleep the sleep of the oblivious innocent of cellular divisions silent metastasis

Their oblivion weighs me down    

Only the insomniac owl watches     ever alert for the kill

My famous feathery tail-eyes are folded inward blind to possibility

I am falling         falling away— escaping at last this monsoon sickness

sing me a raga        spin me a garland oh earth but do not yet welcome me

Show me the sun.

[lovethispoem]

@ the Crossroads - A Sudden American Poem by Juan Felipe Herrera

      RIP Philando Castile, Alton Sterling, Dallas police

      officers Lorne Ahrens, Michael Krol, Michael J. Smith,       Brent Thompson, and Patrick Zamarripa—and all       their families. And to all those injured.

                                               Let us celebrate the lives of all

As we reflect & pray & meditate on their brutal deaths

Let us celebrate those who marched at night who spoke of peace

& chanted Black Lives Matter

Let us celebrate the officers dressed in Blues ready to protect

Let us know the departed as we did not know them before—their faces,

Bodies, names—what they loved, their words, the stories they often spoke

Before we return to the usual business of our days, let us know their lives intimately

Let us take this moment & impossible as this may sound—let us find

The beauty in their lives in the midst of their sudden & never imagined vanishing

Let us consider the Dallas shooter—what made him

                                                          what happened in Afghanistan

                                          what            flames burned inside

(Who was that man in Baton Rouge with a red shirt selling CDs in the parking lot

Who was that man in Minnesota toppled on the car seat with aperforated arm

& a continent-shaped flood of blood on his white T who was

That man prone & gone by the night pillar of El Centro College in Dallas)

This could be the first step

           in the new evaluation of our society    This could be

               the first step of all of our lives

(Originally read at poets.org)

[lovethispoem]

(via On Mahmoud Darwish's Birthday, a New Translation of 'If I Were a Hunter')

[shinji--moon-deactivated2017123]

GOD: I own you like I own the caves. THE OCEAN: Not a chance. No comparison. GOD: I made you. I could tame you. THE OCEAN: At one time, maybe. But not now. GOD: I will come to you, freeze you, break you. THE OCEAN: I will spread myself like wings. I am a bird with tiny feathers. You have no idea what’s happened to me.

How We Are Hungry, Dave Eggers (via commovente)

[thepoetrycollection-blog]

Famous Poems Rewritten as Limericks

The Raven

There once was a girl named Lenore And a bird and a bust and a door And a guy with depression And a whole lot of questions And the bird always says “Nevermore.”

Footprints in the Sand There was a man who, at low tide Would walk with the Lord by his side Jesus said “Now look back; You’ll see one set of tracks. That’s when you got a piggy-back ride.”

Response to ‘This Is Just To Say’ This note on the fridge is to say That those ripe plums that you put away Well, I ate them last night They tasted all right Plus I slept with your sister. M’kay?

Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening There once was a horse-riding chap Who took a trip in a cold snap He stopped in the snow But he soon had to go: He was miles away from a nap.

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night There was an old father of Dylan Who was seriously, mortally illin’ “I want,” Dylan said “You to bitch till you’re dead. “I’ll be pissed if you kick it while chillin’.”

I Wandered Lonely As a Cloud There once was a poet named Will Who tramped his way over a hill And was speechless for hours Over some stupid flowers This was years before TV, but still.

[lovethispoem]

[lovethispoem]

Home by Kazim Ali

My father had a steel comb with which he would comb our hair.

After a bath the cold metal soothing against my scalp, his hand cupping my chin.

My mother had a red pullover with a little yellow duck embroidered on it and a pendant made from a gold Victoria coronation coin.

Which later, when we first moved to Buffalo, would be stolen from the house.

The Sunn’i Muslims have a story in which the angels cast a dark mark out of Prophet Mohammad’s heart, thus making him pure, though the Shi’a reject this story, believing in his absolute innocence from birth.

Telling the famous Story of the Blanket in which the Prophet covers himself with a Yemeni blanket for his afternoon rest. Joined under the blanket first by his son-in-law Ali, then each of his grandchildren Hassan and Hussain and finally by his daughter Bibi Fatima.

In Heaven Gabriel asks God about the five under the blanket and God says, those are the five people whom I loved the most out of all creation, and I made everything in the heavens and the earth for their sake.

Gabriel, speaker on God’s behalf, whisperer to Prophets, asks God, can I go down and be the sixth among them.

And God says, go down there and ask them. If they consent you may go under the blanket and be the sixth among them.

Creation for the sake of Gabriel is retroactively granted when the group under the blanket admits him to their company.

Is that me at the edge of the blanket asking to be allowed inside.

Asking the 800 hadith be canceled, all history re-ordered.

In Hyderabad I prayed every part of the day, climbed a thousand steps to the site of Maula Ali’s pilgrimage.

I wanted to be those stairs, the hunger I felt, the river inside.

I learned to pronounce my daily prayers from transliterated English in a book called “Know Your Islam,” dark blue with gold calligraphed writing that made the English appear as if it were Arabic complete with marks above and below the letters.

I didn’t learn the Arabic script until years later and never learned the language itself.

God’s true language: Hebrew. Latin. Arabic. Sanskrit.

As if utterance fit into the requirements of the human mouth.

I learned how to find the new moon by looking for the circular absence of stars.

When Abraham took Isaac up into the thicket his son did not know where he was being led.

When his father bound him and took up the knife he was shocked.

And said, “Father, where is the ram?”

Though from Abraham’s perspective he was asked by God to sacrifice his son and proved his love by taking up the knife.

Thinking to himself perhaps, Oh Ismail, Ismail, do I cut or do I burn.

I learned God’s true language is only silence and breath.

Fourth son of a fourth son, my father was afflicted as a child and as was the custom in those days a new name was selected for him to protect his health.

Still the feeling of his rough hand, gently cupping my cheek, dipping the steel comb in water to comb my hair flat.

My hair was kept so short, combed flat when wet. I never knew my hair was wavy until I was nearly twenty-two and never went outside with wet and uncombed hair until I was twenty-eight.

At which point I realized my hair was curly.

My father’s hands have fortune-lines in them cut deeply and dramatic.

The day I left his house for the last time I asked him if I could hold his hand before I left.

There are two different ways of going about this.

If you have known this for years why didn’t you ask for help, he asked me.

Each time I left home, including the last time, my mother would hold a Quran up for me to walk under. Once under, one would turn and kiss the book.

There is no place in the Quran which requires acts of homosexuality to be punishable by lashings and death.

Hadith or scripture. Scripture or rupture.

Should I travel out from under the blanket.

Comfort from a verse which also recurs: “Surely there are signs in this for those of you who would reflect.”

Or the one hundred and four books of God. Of which only four are known—Qur’an, Injeel, Tavrat, Zubuur.

There are a hundred others—Bhagavad-Gita, Lotus Sutra, Song of Myself, the Gospel of Magdalene, Popul Vuh, the book of Black Buffalo Woman—somewhere unrevealed as such.

Dear mother in the sky you could unbuckle the book and erase all the annotations.

What I always remember about my childhood is my mother whispering to me, telling me secrets, ideas, suggestions.

She named me when I moved in her while she was reading a calligraphy of the Imam’s names. My name: translated my whole life for me as Patience.

In India we climbed the steps of the Maula Ali mountain to the top, thirsting for what.

My mother had stayed behind in the house, unable to go on pilgrimage. She had told me the reason why.

Being in a state considered unacceptable for prayers or pilgrimages.

I asked if she would want more children and she told me the name she would give a new son.

I always attribute the fact that they did not, though my eldest sister’s first son was given the same name she whispered to me that afternoon, to my telling of her secret to my sisters when we were climbing the stairs.

It is the one betrayal of her—perhaps meaningless—that I have never forgiven myself.

There are secrets it is still hard to tell, betrayals hard to make.

You hope like anything that though others consider you unclean God will still welcome you.

My name is Kazim. Which means patience. I know how to wait.

[lovethispoem]

Reservation School for Girls by Diane Glancy

I. We hang clothes on the line. His wide trousers and shirt, wind-beat, roar small thunder from one prairie cloud.

The same rapple of flag on its pole.

Half in fear, half in jest, we laugh. He calls us crow women. Our black hair shines in the sun and in the light from school windows.

He drives his car to town, upsets the dust on buckboard hills. We sit on the fence when he is gone. Does he know we speak of thunder in his shirts?

We cannot do well in his school. He reads from west to east, The sun we follow moves the other way.

Crowbar.

Our eyes come loose from words on the page in narrow rooms of the reservation school. He perceives and deciphers at once.

For us written letters will not stay on the page, but fall like crows from the sky and hit against the glass windows of the school.

Our day is night when we sit in rows of the classroom. Leaves in a whirlwind from sumac groves. Flock of crows are black starts on a white night.

II. On the porch of the reservation school the blackbirds walk around our feet, fly into our head. They call our secret name.

Dark corridors linger in our mind We whisper the plains to one another.

We do not talk of what we cannot understand. Black and white fleckered dresses.

Our face like our fathers.

The sun is no enemy to the eye looking west. The brush thin as hair of old ones.

It blinds the eye, makes fire on fields, flashes against windows like silver ribbons on burial robes.

Hot late into the fall, windy, ready for cold to sweep in. The heat seems solid, but totters on the brink of winter.

We laugh to ourselves when he returns to the reservation school for girls. Take his clothes from the line. Set the table with salt and pepper, spoon, knives. Cattails and milk-pods in a jar.

We get lard from the basement, rub a place in the dusty window like a moon in the ancient sky.

III. One hill larger than the others: an old buffalo with heavy head and whiskers nods at the ground, grazes in my dreams, one blade at a time.

We stay in our stiff white-sheeted beds in the dormitory room. Buffalo wander in our dreams.

White night-dresses. Black pods suspended in sumac groves like crows.

In the sweat lodge of sleep we make our vision quest, black as pitch in crevice between crow feathers.

We hang his thunder clothes in sleep, arms reach above our beds like willows blowing slowly by the creek.

Quietly we choke, hold our wounded arms like papooses.

Clothes beat on lines. Sumac groves and whirl of leaves: a shadow of our fathers at council fires.

Red leaves, waxy as hay on fields. We dream of schoolrooms.

Written letters on the wind.

He reads crow-marks on the page but does not know crow.

[lovethispoem]

Water Table by Eliza Griswold

My earliest wish was not to exist, to burst in the backyard without violence, no blood, no fleshy bits, mute button pressed alone behind the rectory where no one would see me.

This wasn’t a plea to be found or mourned for, but to be unborn into the atmosphere. To hang in the humid air, as ponds vent upward from the overheated earth, rise until they freeze and crystallize, then drop into the aquifer.

[poetsorg]

“My musical reference for American languages is the blues…The blues never repeats the line exactly the same, and I feel like if I repeat the line exactly the same it would not hit that interesting note in English, which is to tinker with it a little bit….”

Watch more videos on Poets.org

[eatingpoetry]

The Poems I Have Not Written

I’m so wildly unprolific, the poems I have not written would reach from here to the California coast if you laid them end to end.

And if you stacked them up, the poems I have not written would sway like a silent Tower of Babel, saying nothing

and everything in a thousand different tongues. So moving, so filled with and emptied of suffering, so steeped in the music of a voice

speechless before the truth, the poems I have not written would break the hearts of every woman who’s ever left me,

make them eye their husbands with a sharp contempt and hate themselves for turning their backs on the very source of beauty.

The poems I have not written would compel all other poets to ask of God: “Why do you let me live? I am worthless.

please strike me dead at once, destroy my works and cleanse the earth of all my ghastly imperfections.” Trees would

bow their heads before the poems I have not written. “Take me,” they would say, “and turn me into your pages so that I

might live forever as the ground from which your words arise.” The wind itself, about which I might have written so eloquently,

praising its slick and intersecting rivers of air, its stately calms and furious interrogations, its flutelike lingerings and passionate

reproofs, would divert its course to sweep down and then pass over the poems I have not written, and the life I have not lived, the life

I’ve failed even to imagine, which they so perfectly describe.

By John Brehm.

[lovethispoem]

Last night, by Michael Broder

I dreamt of making sense, parts of speech caught up in sheets and blankets, long strips of fabric wrapped loosely around shoulders, goblets, urns, cups with unmatched saucers.  You were there, and the past seemed important, what was said, what was done, feelings felt but maybe not expressed, signs randomly connected yet vital to what comes next, to a coming season, next year’s trip to Nauset Beach.  I woke up wanting to read a poem by that name, and I found one with a lifeguard’s chair, a broken shell, gulls watching egrets, home an ocean away.

[lovethispoem]

Afterwards by Philip Schultz

Suddenly everything feels afterwards, stoic and inevitable,  my eyes ringed with the grease of rumor and complicity, my hands eager to hold any agreeable infatuation that might otherwise slip away. Suddenly it’s evening and the lights up and down the street appear hopeful, even magnanimous, swollen as they are with ancient grievances and souring schemes. The sky, however, appears unwelcoming, and aloof, eager to surrender its indifference to our suffering. Speaking of suffering, the houses—our sober, recalcitrant houses— are swollen with dreams that have grown opaque with age, hoarding as they do truths untranslatable into auspicious beliefs. Meanwhile, our loneliness, upon which so many laws are based, continues to consume everything. Suddenly, regardless of what the gods say, the present remains uninhabitable, the past unforgiving of the harm it’s seen, while the future remains translucent and unambiguous in its desire to elude us.