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IN THE DARK TIMES, WILL THERE ALSO BE SINGING?

from Lady Chatterley's Lover, D.H. Lawrence (via)

“Grief will come to you. Grip and cling all you want, It makes no difference. Catastrophe? It’s just waiting to happen. Loss? You can be certain of it. Flow and swirl of the world. Carried along as if by a dark current. All you can do is keep swimming; All you can do is keep singing.”

from How Beautiful the Beloved, Gregory Orr (via)

Lev St. Valentine (via)

letter to Gustave Flaubert, 27 June 1870, George Sand

from Collected Poems; Horses at Midnight Without a Moon, Jack Gilbert (via)

from On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong (via)

Snow and Dirty Rain, Richard Siken (via)

YES, THERE WILL ALSO BE SINGING. ABOUT THE DARK TIMES.

#in the dark times will there also be singing?#on hope #web weaving #compilations #mine #this is all I have to offer

apoemaday

My Mother

by Frieda Hughes

They are killing her again. She said she did it One year in every ten, But they do it annually, or weekly, Some even do it daily, Carrying her death around in their heads And practising it. She saves them The trouble of their own; They can die through her Without ever making The decision. My buried mother Is up-dug for repeat performances.

Now they want to make a film For anyone lacking the ability To imagine the body, head in oven, Orphaning children. Then It can be rewound So they can watch her die Right from the beginning again.

The peanut eaters, entertained At my mother’s death, will go home, Each carrying their memory of her, Lifeless – a souvenir. Maybe they’ll buy the video.

Watching someone on TV Means all they have to do Is press ‘pause’ If they want to boil a kettle, While my mother holds her breath on screen To finish dying after tea. The filmmakers have collected The body parts, They want me to see. They require dressings to cover the joins And disguise the prosthetics In their remake of my mother. They want to use her poetry As stitching and sutures To give it credibility. They think I should love it – Having her back again, they think I should give them my mother’s words To fill the mouth of their monster, Their Sylvia Suicide Doll, Who will walk and talk And die at will, And die, and die And forever be dying.

#frieda hughes #poem #sylvia plath #as topic

zahraa17

#photography #love language: tea

havingapoemwithyou

Burn Lake 3 by Carrie Fountain

#poem #survival #Carrie Fountain

havingapoemwithyou

Ligament by Charif Shanahan

#poem #hospital #surgery #Charif Shanahan

apoemaday

Postcard

by Margaret Atwood

I’m thinking of you. What else can I say? The palm trees on the reverse are a delusion; so is the pink sand. What we have are the usual fractured coke bottles and the smell of backed-up drains, too sweet, like a mango on the verge of rot, which we have also. The air clear sweat, mosquitos & their tracks; birds, blue & elusive.

Time comes in waves here, a sickness, one day after the other rolling on; I move up, its called awake, then down into the uneasy nights but never forward. The roosters crow for hours before dawn, and a prodded child howls & howls on the pocked road to school. In the hold with the baggage there are two prisoners, their heads shaved by bayonets, & ten crates of queasy chicks. Each spring there’s a race of cripples, from the store to the church. This is the sort of junk I carry with me; and a clipping about democracy from the local paper. Outside the window they’re building the damn hotel, nail by nail, someone’s crumbling dream. A universe that includes you can’t be all bad, but does it? At this distance you’re a mirage, a glossy image fixed in the posture of the last time i saw you. Turn you over, there’s the place for the address. Wish you were here. Love comes in waves like the ocean, a sickness which goes on & on, a hollow cave in the head, filling and pounding, a kicked ear.

#margaret atwood #poem #the royal you

aizea

My Mother Drives Me in the Rain, 2000

Elinor Carucci

#photography #mother tongue

firstfullmoon

Natalie Shapero, “Stoop,” in Popular Longing

#poem #natalie shapero

havingapoemwithyou

Dinosaur by Richard Siken

#richard siken #contender for one of the poems of all time #poem #like a dog on a leash

havingapoemwithyou

Dinosaur by Richard Siken

#richard siken #contender for one of the poems of all time #poem #like a dog on a leash

primulaceas

Edward the Confessor by Eileen Myles

I have a confession to make I wish there were some role in society I could fulfill I could be a confessor I have a confession to make I have this way when I step into the bakery on 2nd Ave. of wanting to be the only really nice person in the store so the harried sales woman with several toned hair will like me. I do this in all kinds of stores, coffee shops xerox shops, everywhere I go. And invariably I leave my keys, xeroxing, my coffee from the last place I am being so nice. I try so hard to make a great impression on these neutral strangers right down to the perfect warm smile I get entirely lost and stagger back out onto the street, bereft of something major. It’s really leaning too hard on the everyday.

#poem #eileen myles #mother tongue

havingapoemwithyou

Litany of ordinary violences by Torrin A. Greathouse

#poem #Torrin A. Greathouse #queer stuff

apoemaday

Bashō in Ireland

by Billy Collins

I am like the Japanese poet who longed to be in Kyoto even though he was already in Kyoto.

I am not exactly like him because I am not Japanese and I have no idea what Kyoto is like.

But once, while walking around the Irish town of Ballyvaughan I caught myself longing to be in Ballyvaughan.

The sensation of being homesick for a place that is not my home while being right in the middle of it

was particularly strong when I passed the hotel bar then the fluorescent depth of a launderette,

also when I stood at the crossroads with the road signs pointing in 3 directions and the enormous buses making the turn.

It might have had something to do with the nearby limestone hills and the rain collecting on my collar,

but then again I have longed to be with a number of people while the two of us were sitting in a room

on an ordinary evening without a limestone hill in sight, thousands of miles from Kyoto

and the simple wonders of Ballyvaughan, which reminds me of another Japanese poet

who wrote how much he enjoyed not being able to see his favorite mountain because of all the fog.

#billy collins #poem #ireland #home #the fall of home #home (places you can never return to)

iirulancorrino

Citizen Illegal, José Olivarez

oneawkwardcookie

[image description: screenshot of the poem Mexican American Disambiguation, from José Olivarez’s Citizen Illegal

Mexican American Disambiguation

after Idris Goodwin

my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexican Americans or Chicanos. i am a Chicano from Chicago which means i am a Mexican American with a fancy college degree & a few tattoos. my parents are Mexican who are not to be confused with Mexicans still living in México. those Mexicans call themselves mexicanos. white folks at parties call them pobrecitos. American colleges call them international students & diverse. my mom was white in México & my dad was mestizo & after they crossed the border they became diverse. & minorities. & ethnic. & exotic. but my parents call themselves mexicanos, who, again, should not be confused for mexicanos living in México, those mexicanos might call my family gringos, which is the word my family calls white folks & white folks call my parents interracial. colleges say put them on a brochure. my parents say que significa esa palabra, i point out that all the men in my family marry lighter-skinned women. that’s the Chicano in me. which means it’s the fancy college degrees in me, which is also diverse of me. everything in me is diverse even when i eat American foods like hamburgers, which, to clarify, are American when a white person eats them & diverse when my family eats them. so much of America can be understood like this. my parents were undocumented when they came to this country & by undocumented, i mean sin papeles, & by sin papeles, i mean royally fucked, which should not be confused with the American Dream though the two are cousins. colleges are not looking for undocumented diversity. my dad became a citizen which should not be confused with keys to the house. we were safe from deportation, which should not be confused with walking the plank, though they’re cousins. i call that sociology, but that’s just the Chicano in me, who should not be confused with the diversity in me or the mexicano in me who is constantly fighting with the upwardly mobile in me who is good friends with the Mexican American in me, who the colleges love, but only on brochures, who the government calls NON-WHITE, HISPANIC or WHITE, HISPANIC, who my parents call mijo even when i don’t come home so much.

/end ID]

#poem #Mexico #josé olivarez