An Olive Grove Facing The Sea @timelessart - Tumblr Blog

literaryvein

L. V., excerpts from the afterword: after Sylvia's "I am, I am, I am."

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Vincent van Gogh, Wheat Fields after the Rain, 1890, oil on canvas Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA

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the girl with a pomegranate (1875)

William-Adolphe Bouguereau

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Maria Oakey Dewing (American; 1845–1927) Garden in May Oil on canvas, 1895 Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.

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Robert Pinchon (France 1886-1943) Le bassin aux nymphéas au jardin des plantes à Rouen oil on canvas 73.1 x 87.6 cm

A Brief For The Defense

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies are not starving someplace, they are starving somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils. But we enjoy our lives because that's what God wants. Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women at the fountain are laughing together between the suffering they have known and the awfulness in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody in the village is very sick. There is laughter every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta, and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay. If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction, we lessen the importance of their deprivation. We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure, but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless furnace of this world. To make injustice the only measure of our attention is to praise the Devil. If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down, we should give thanks that the end had magnitude. We must admit there will be music despite everything. We stand at the prow again of a small ship anchored late at night in the tiny port looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning. To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth all the years of sorrow that are to come.

-- Jack Gilbert

#Jack Gilbert #poem #poetry #A Brief For The Defense

apoemaday

Storage

by Mary Oliver

When I moved from one house to another there were many things I had no room for. What does one do? I rented a storage space. And filled it. Years passed. Occasionally I went there and looked in, but nothing happened, not a single twinge of the heart.

As I grew older the things I cared about grew fewer, but were more important. So one day I undid the lock and called the trash man. He took everything.

I felt like the little donkey when his burden is finally lifted. Things! Burn them, burn them! Make a beautiful fire! More room in your heart for love, for the trees! For the birds who own

nothing–the reason they can fly.

apoemaday

You Who Never Arrived

by Rainer Maria Rilke

You who never arrived in my arms, Beloved, who were lost from the start, I don’t even know what songs would please you. I have given up trying to recognize you in the surging wave of the next moment. All the immense images in me–the far-off, deeply-felt landscape, cities, towers, and bridges, and un- suspected turns in the path, and those powerful lands that were once pulsing with the life of the gods– all rise within me to mean you, who forever elude me. You, Beloved, who are all the gardens I have ever gazed at, longing. An open window in a country house–, and you almost stepped out, pensive, to meet me. Streets that I chanced upon,– you had just walked down them and vanished. And sometimes, in a shop, the mirrors were still dizzy with your presence and, startled, gave back my too-sudden image. Who knows? Perhaps the same bird echoed through both of us yesterday, separate, in the evening…

pwatem

Everyone discusses my art and pretends to understand, as if it were necessary to understand, when it is simply necessary to love. Claude Monet

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I Live My Life in Widening Circles

by Rainer Maria Rilke

I live my life in widening circles that reach out across the world. I may not complete this last one but I give myself to it. I circle around God, around the primordial tower. I’ve been circling for thousands of years and I still don’t know: am I a falcon, a storm, or a great song?

#poem #Rainer Maria Rilke

apoemaday

Five Ways to Kill a Man

by Edwin Brock

There are many cumbersome ways to kill a man. You can make him carry a plank of wood To the top of a hill and nail him to it. To do this Properly you require a crowd of people Wearing sandals, a cock that crows, a cloak To dissect, a sponge, some vinegar and one Man to hammer the nails home. Or you can take a length of steel, Shaped and chased in a traditional way, And attempt to pierce the metal cage he wears. But for this you need white horses, English trees, men with bows and arrows, At least two flags, a prince and a Castle to hold your banquet in. Dispensing with nobility, you may, if the wind Allows, blow gas at him. But then you need A mile of mud sliced through with ditches, Not to mention black boots, bomb craters, More mud, a plague of rats, a dozen songs And some round hats made of steel. In an age of aeroplanes, you may fly Miles above your victim and dispose of him by Pressing one small switch. All you then Require is an ocean to separate you, two Systems of government, a nation’s scientists, Several factories, a psychopath and Land that no one needs for several years. These are, as I began, cumbersome ways To kill a man. Simpler, direct, and much more neat Is to see that he lives somewhere in the middle Of the twentieth century, and leave him there.

apoemaday

I Am Learning to Abandon the World

by Linda Pastan

I am learning to abandon the world before it can abandon me. Already I have given up the moon and snow, closing my shades against the claims of white. And the world has taken my father, my friends. I have given up melodic lines of hills, moving to a flat, tuneless landscape. And every night I give my body up limb by limb, working upwards across bone, towards the heart. But morning comes with small reprieves of coffee and birdsong. A tree outside the window which was simply shadow moments ago takes back its branches twig by leafy twig. And as I take my body back the sun lays its warm muzzle on my lap as if to make amends.