<p>SBmom: Kinda makes one wish taketh were still a verb usage.</p>
<p>How about a different sort of love poem? This is probably Robert Hayden’s best known poem:</p>
<p>Those Winter Sundays</p>
<p>Sundays too my father got up early
and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,
then with cracked hands that ached
from labor in the weekday weather made
banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.</p>
<p>I’d wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.
When the rooms were warm, he’d call,
and slowly I would rise and dress,
fearing the chronic angers of that house,</p>
<p>Speaking indifferently to him,
who had driven out the cold
and polished my good shoes as well.
What did I know, what did I know
of love’s austere and lonely offices?</p>
<p>Oh, sac–I remember that one! And now that I’m a middle-aged parent of (often, seemingly) unappreciative children, and now that my parents are old and dying–well, I certainly feel Those Winter Sundays more keenly than I did at 20. </p>
<p>Here’s a short and sweet one:</p>
<p>This heart is not
a summer field
and yet. . .
how dense love’s foliage
has grown.</p>
<p>Izumi Shikibu</p>
<p>Tribute to Kafka for Someone Taken
Alan Dugan</p>
<p>The party is going strong.
The doorbell rings. Its
for someone named me.
Im coming. I take
a last drink, a last
puff on a cigarette,
a last kiss at a girl,
and step into the hall,
bang,
shutting out the laughter. “Is
your name you?” “Yes.”
“Well come along then.”
See here. See here. See here."</p>
<p>I love this love poem by Alice Walker:</p>
<p>New Face </p>
<p>I have learned not to worry about love;
but to honor its coming
with all my heart.
To examine the dark mysteries
of the blood
with headless heed and
swirl,
to know the rush of feelings
swift and flowing
as water.
The source appears to be
some inexhaustible
spring
within our twin and triple
selves;
the new face I turn up
to you
no one else on earth
has ever
seen</p>
<p>Bumping this thread because I like it . . .</p>
<p>This road–
no one goes down it,
autumn evening.</p>
<p>i like my body when it is with your
body. It is so quite a new thing.
Muscles better and nerves more.
i like your body. i like what it does,
i like its hows. i like to feel the spine
of your body and its bones, and the trembling
-firm-smooth ness and which i will
again and again and again
kiss, i like kissing this and that of you,
i like, slowly stroking the, shocking fuzz
of your electric fur, and what-is-it comes
over parting flesh . . . And eyes big love-crumbs,</p>
<p>and possibly I like the thrill</p>
<p>of under me you quite so new</p>
<ul>
<li>e. e. cummings</li>
</ul>
<p>Camelia–</p>
<p>Very nice.</p>
<p>Does he have anything for old, not-so-firm bodies? :D</p>
<p>Fall theme–a couple snippets from
Robert Frost’s After Apple Picking</p>
<p>My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still.
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now. . .</p>
<p>. . .For I have had too much
Of apple-picking; I am overtired
Of the great harvest I myself desired. </p>
<p>Another short one
(unknown author)</p>
<p>Broken umbrella
Better than
No umbrella</p>
<p>in time of daffodils(who know
the goal of living is to grow)
forgetting why,remember how</p>
<p>in time of lilacs who proclaim
the aim of waking is to dream,
remember so(forgetting seem)</p>
<p>in time of roses(who amaze
our now and here with paradise)
forgetting if,remember yes</p>
<p>in time of all sweet things beyond
whatever mind may comprehend,
remember seek(forgetting find)</p>
<p>and in a mystery to be
(when time from time shall set us free)
forgetting me,remember me</p>
<ul>
<li>e. e. cummings</li>
</ul>
<p>camelia, beautiful choices!</p>
<p>SBmom, I loved the Anne Sexton poem you posted on the first page, especially this part (emphasis mine):
I can’t comment further without getting embarrassingly sentimental, but… it’s incredibly well put.</p>
<p>I agree; how true that line is!</p>
<p>O Taste and See, Denise Levertov</p>
<p>The world is
not with us enough
O taste and see
the subway Bible poster said,
meaning The Lord, meaning
if anything all that lives
to the imagination’s tongue,
grief, mercy, language,
tangerine, weather, to
breathe them, bite,
savor, chew, swallow, transform
into our flesh our
deaths, crossing the street, plum, quince,
living in the orchard and being
hungry, and plucking
the fruit.</p>
<p>Just read this and liked it!!</p>
<p>For a plain man
by MARIANNE BURTON</p>
<p>For a plain man you have fancy writing.
It announces itself on envelopes
in a fanfare of loops and curlicues.
Your letters clasp hands to dance galliards,
throw each other through the air, swooping
down lower than is strictly legible,
deeper than any teacher would have ticked.</p>
<p>You must have practised it under the desk
of the village school that wrote you off,
with short blunt pencils and scraps of paper
salvaged and stored in the empty inkwells,
working up rococo scripts whimsical
enough to summarise the man you prayed
you would become, just to spite them.</p>
<p>None of it comforts you of course. Not
your florid penmanship, nor the fact that
you are now important. The child still sits
under an alphabet frieze in cheap clothes,
tight lipped, trying to coil pot hooks into Os
of wonder and praise. You can’t get back
to tell him it worked out. None of us can.</p>
<p>You have wonderful taste, SBmom.</p>
<p>why thank you JHS</p>
<p>ITHACA
CP Cafavy, 1911</p>
<p>As you set out for Ithaca,
hope your road is a long one:
Full of adventure, full of discovery.
Lestrygonians, Cyclops,
angry Poseidon-- do not fear them.
You will never find such things on your path,
As long as you keep your thoughts raised high,
As long as rare excitement stirs your spirit and your body.
Lestrygonians, Cyclops, angry Poseidon–
these you will never encounter
unless you bring them along inside your soul,
unless your soul sets them up in front of you.</p>
<p>Hope your road is a long one.
May there be many summer mornings
When with what pleasure, what joy,
you enter new ports and see them for the first time.
May you stop at Phoenician markets,
to buy fine things, mother-of-pearl
and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfumes of every kind.
As many sensual perfumes as you can.
And may you visit many Egyptian cities,
To learn and go on learning from their scholars.</p>
<p>Keep Ithaca always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you’re destined for,
But don’t hasten the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years
so you’re old by the time you reach the islands,
Wealthy with all you’ve gained on the way,
not expecting Ithaca to give you riches.</p>
<p>Ithaca has given you the beautiful voyage.
Without her, you would never have set out.
She has nothing more to give you.</p>
<p>And if you find her poor, Ithaca has not deceived you.
Wise as you have become, so full of experience,
you must already have understood what these Ithacas mean.</p>
<p>Ah. In other words, just keep dancing like a whirling dervish across the tops of the waves and when you run out of ocean you will have landed where you meant to go?</p>