Soul Clap its hands

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

#FlowerReport The potflower on the windowsill says to me In words that are green-edged red leaves : Flower     flower     flower     flower Today for the sake of all the dead     Burst into flower.

Muriel Rukeyser

The Power of Suicide

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

I thought I was going to the poets, but I am going to the         children. I thought I was going to the children, but I am going to the           women. I thought I was going to the women, but I am to        fighters. I thought I was going to the fighters, but I am going to the        men and women who are inventing peace. I thought I was going to the inventors of peace, but I am going         to the poets.  My life is flying to your life.

Muriel Rukeyser

Flying to Hanoi

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

What if you knew you’d be the last to touch someone? If you were taking tickets, for example, at the theatre, tearing them giving back the ragged stubs, you might take care to touch that palm or press your fingertips into the life line’s crease. When a man pulls his wheeled suitcase too slowly through the airport, when the car in front of me doesn’t signal, when the clerk at the pharmacy won’t say thank you, I don’t remember they’re going to die. A friend told me she’d been with her aunt. They’d just had lunch and the waiter, a young gay man with plum black eyes, joked as he served the coffee, kissed her aunt’s powdered cheek when they left. Then they walked half a block and her aunt dropped dead on the sidewalk. How close does the dragon’s spume have to come? How wide does the crack in heaven have to split? What would people look like if we could see them as they are, soaked in honey, stung and swollen, reckless, pinned against time?

Ellen Bass, If You Knew

from The Human Line, Copper Canyon Press, 2006

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

From this I reach what I might call a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we—I mean all human beings—are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself.

Virginia Woolf

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

In a trivial gesture, in a greeting, in the simple glance, directed in flight toward other eyes, a golden, a fragile bridge is constructed. This alone is enough. Although it is only for a moment, it exists, exists. This alone is enough

Circe Maia

[austinkleon]

Maggie Smith, “Good Bones”

Smith’s books here.

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

Bless it. We have so little time C.D. Wright

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

More and more I feel that the people of ill will have used time much more effectively than have the people of good will. We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the hateful words and actions of the bad people but for the appalling silence of the good people.

Martin Luther King, jr.

[mttbll]

I like Wallace Stevens’s comment that the imagination is ‘a violence from within that protects us from a violence without.’ It suggests something of how you have to surrender to your own maneuvers… There’s a line where a piece of writing goes from 'surprising’ the writer to being subject to her control. I think this border has to be crossed in both directions, all the time, for a poem or book to have any vitality… And if narrative remains elusive, I think both writer and reader are forced to work to orient themselves, to stay alert, like a foreigner in a new city at night.

Jana Prikryl (via mttbll)

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

Red sadness never appears sad, it appears as Nijinsky bolting across the stage. . . Mary Ruefle

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

Everyone in me is a bird.    I am beating all my wings.      They wanted to cut you out      but they will not.    They said you were immeasurably empty      but you are not.    They said you were sick unto dying      but they were wrong.    You are singing like a school girl.      You are not torn.        Sweet weight,    in celebration of the woman I am    and of the soul of the woman I am    and of the central creature and its delight      I sing for you. I dare to live.    Hello, spirit. Hello, cup.    Fasten, cover. Cover that does contain.      Hello to the soil of the fields.    Welcome, roots.        Each cell has a life.    There is enough here to please a nation.    It is enough that the populace own these goods.      Any person, any commonwealth would say of it,      “It is good this year that we may plant again      and think forward to a harvest.    A blight had been forecast and has been cast out.”    Many women are singing together of this:      one is in a shoe factory cursing the machine,      one is at the aquarium tending a seal,      one is dull at the wheel of her Ford,      one is at the toll gate collecting,    one is tying the cord of a calf in Arizona,      one is straddling a cello in Russia,    one is shifting pots on the stove in Egypt,    one is painting her bedroom walls moon color,      one is dying but remembering a breakfast,      one is stretching on her mat in Thailand,      one is wiping the ass of her child,    one is staring out the window of a train      in the middle of Wyoming and one is      anywhere and some are everywhere and all      seem to be singing, although some can not      sing a note.        Sweet weight,    in celebration of the woman I am    let me carry a ten-foot scarf,    let me drum for the nineteen-year-olds,    let me carry bowls for the offering    (if that is my part).    Let me study the cardiovascular tissue,    let me examine the angular distance of meteors,      let me suck on the stems of flowers    (if that is my part).    Let me make certain tribal figures    (if that is my part).    For this thing the body needs    let me sing    for the supper,      for the kissing,      for the correct      yes.

Anne Sexton, “In Celebration of my Uterus”

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

we should be careful of each other, we should be kind while there is still time. Phillip Larkin Via @thepoetrysociety & @mkimmijin

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

Daily I am looking for signs of what has lived & what is lost. From a 5th-story window a plastic bag is falling, lightly now, slowly down. I make a god & deal with it. I say, If I catch it in my arms then you will live! The wind takes hold. The street. The neighbor’s yard. The street, the street. Which is more cruel? Believing or not believing? I sit down in the road & rock the bag’s loose & fallen shape while the muscle contracts —it is a serious game I play— like a camera, I shutter—open, close. Among the dead:             You. Not you.             You. Not you. The dead are always             You. Not you.

Aracelis Girmay, excerpt from luam & the flies —umbertide, asmara, new york, october, 2013

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

It is said that silk filature began in China under a mulberry tree in a teacup resting lightly in the slender hand of the empress Hsi-ling Shi A brin unfurls from the frisson tangle and she reaches in begins to reel filament from the soft envelope of the cocoon

Jen Bervin

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

& how could I have known, that by pressing this pen to paper, I was touching us back from extinction? Ocean Vuong

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields; the sun the color of pressed grapes, slashed with burgundy red, the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries.”

Jack Kerouac

[soulclapitshandsandsing]

I wish something slow and gentle and good Would happen to me, a patient and prolonged Kind of happiness coming in the same way evening Comes to a wide-branched sycamore standing In an empty field

Pattiann Rogers