David White is a poet I heard of for the first time today. I think this is the perfect poem for the start of a new year.
Everything Is Waiting for You
BY DAVID WHYTE
Your great mistake is to act the drama
as if you were alone. As if life
were a progressive and cunning crime
with no witness to the tiny hidden
transgressions. To feel abandoned is to deny
the intimacy of your surroundings. Surely,
even you, at times, have felt the grand array;
the swelling presence, and the chorus, crowding
out your solo voice. You must note
the way the soap dish enables you,
or the window latch grants you freedom.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity.
The stairs are your mentor of things
to come, the doors have always been there
to frighten you and invite you,
and the tiny speaker in the phone
is your dream-ladder to divinity.
Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation. The kettle is singing
even as it pours you a drink, the cooking pots
have left their arrogant aloofness and
seen the good in you at last. All the birds
and creatures of the world are unutterably
themselves. Everything is waiting for you.
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Poem of the Day
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- Saffron
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Re: Poem of the Day
The line that stands out to me in the David White poem is -
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity
That is the ticket! There is always something new to notice, no matter how many times you look at a thing; maybe the light has changed or your state of mind.
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity
That is the ticket! There is always something new to notice, no matter how many times you look at a thing; maybe the light has changed or your state of mind.
- DWill
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Re: Poem of the Day
Reminds me of Hopkins: "And for all this, nature is never spent/ There lives the dearest freshness deep down things."Saffron wrote:The line that stands out to me in the David White poem is -
Alertness is the hidden discipline of familiarity
That is the ticket! There is always something new to notice, no matter how many times you look at a thing; maybe the light has changed or your state of mind.
This is a Richard Wilbur poem about the verge of a new year, a human year so short it hardly seems to matter.
Year’s End
BY RICHARD WILBUR
Now winter downs the dying of the year,
And night is all a settlement of snow;
From the soft street the rooms of houses show
A gathered light, a shapen atmosphere,
Like frozen-over lakes whose ice is thin
And still allows some stirring down within.
I’ve known the wind by water banks to shake
The late leaves down, which frozen where they fell
And held in ice as dancers in a spell
Fluttered all winter long into a lake;
Graved on the dark in gestures of descent,
They seemed their own most perfect monument.
There was perfection in the death of ferns
Which laid their fragile cheeks against the stone
A million years. Great mammoths overthrown
Composedly have made their long sojourns,
Like palaces of patience, in the gray
And changeless lands of ice. And at Pompeii
The little dog lay curled and did not rise
But slept the deeper as the ashes rose
And found the people incomplete, and froze
The random hands, the loose unready eyes
Of men expecting yet another sun
To do the shapely thing they had not done.
These sudden ends of time must give us pause.
We fray into the future, rarely wrought
Save in the tapestries of afterthought.
More time, more time. Barrages of applause
Come muffled from a buried radio.
The New-year bells are wrangling with the snow.
Re: Poem of the Day
"Put down the weight of your aloneness and ease into the
conversation."
This line struck me because it's the opposite of what I always thought.
I always thought that I am a bother to anyone and I don't want to cause trouble and be a burden but it took a toll in my life and now I'm having difficulty to connecting with people.
conversation."
This line struck me because it's the opposite of what I always thought.
I always thought that I am a bother to anyone and I don't want to cause trouble and be a burden but it took a toll in my life and now I'm having difficulty to connecting with people.
Learn to indulge yourself at times. I bought a set of rockstar wheels to modify my pickup this weekend.
- Saffron
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Re: Poem of the Day
I think many, if not all of us feel we are a burden or what we have to say is not worthy. I have found comfort and courage in hearing others have this feeling.
- Saffron
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Re: Poem of the Day
Como Tú / Like You / Like Me
Richard Blanco, 1968
{for the D.A.C.A DREAMers and all our nation’s immigrants}
. . . my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life . . .
. . . mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida . . .
—Roque Dalton, Como tú
Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.
Like memory, at times I wish I could erase
the music of my name in Spanish, at times
I cherish it, and despise my other syllables
clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak
of myself in two languages at once. Despite
my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,
I read my footprints like my past, erased by
waves of circumstance, my future uncertain
as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,
howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,
I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,
I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,
our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.
Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need
to save ourselves, and our country from itself.
Copyright © 2019 by Richard Blanco. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets, from How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019).
Richard Blanco, 1968
{for the D.A.C.A DREAMers and all our nation’s immigrants}
. . . my veins don’t end in me
but in the unanimous blood
of those who struggle for life . . .
. . . mis venas no terminan en mí
sino en la sange unánime
de los que luchan por la vida . . .
—Roque Dalton, Como tú
Como tú, I question history’s blur in my eyes
each time I face a mirror. Like a mirror, I gaze
into my palm a wrinkled map I still can’t read,
my lifeline an unnamed road I can’t find, can’t
trace back to the fork in my parents’ trek
that cradled me here. Como tú, I woke up to
this dream of a country I didn’t choose, that
didn’t choose me—trapped in the nightmare
of its hateful glares. Como tú, I’m also from
the lakes and farms, waterfalls and prairies
of another country I can’t fully claim either.
Como tú, I am either a mirage living among
these faces and streets that raised me here,
or I’m nothing, a memory forgotten by all
I was taken from and can’t return to again.
Like memory, at times I wish I could erase
the music of my name in Spanish, at times
I cherish it, and despise my other syllables
clashing in English. Como tú, I want to speak
of myself in two languages at once. Despite
my tongues, no word defines me. Like words,
I read my footprints like my past, erased by
waves of circumstance, my future uncertain
as wind. Like the wind, como tú, I carry songs,
howls, whispers, thunder’s growl. Like thunder,
I’m a foreign-borne cloud that’s drifted here,
I’m lightning, and the balm of rain. Como tú,
our blood rains for the dirty thirst of this land.
Like thirst, like hunger, we ache with the need
to save ourselves, and our country from itself.
Copyright © 2019 by Richard Blanco. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on March 9, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets, from How to Love a Country (Beacon Press, 2019).
- Saffron
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Re: Poem of the Day
I needed to find this poem today.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón, 1976
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
Instructions on Not Giving Up
Ada Limón, 1976
More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.
- Saffron
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- I can has reading?
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Re: Poem of the Day
I saw that today is Henry Wadsworth Longfellow birthday (born 1807). A few lines from one of his poems were including in the tiny mention of his birthday. Those lines totally capture how I am feeling right now -
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.
Come, read to me some poem,
Some simple and heartfelt lay,
That shall soothe this restless feeling,
And banish the thoughts of day.