You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
“…the meaning
might incite a stroke – best
press against it, close
the clawhole, stand
in stupor, petrified. The dream
be damned, the deeps defied.
The hand’s to keep
the scream inside.”
Man in the Street, Heather McHugh
The Final Game, Carlos Rafael Rivera, The Queen’s Gambit (Music from the Netflix Limited Series)
“When you’re small, … you survive by being patient, and clever.”
Ann Leckie, The Long Game (The Far Reaches collection)
“…walks
aimlessly, happy just to be alive”
McHugh, Lines.
“The kin of charity is whore,
the root of charity is dear.”
McHugh, Etymological Dirge
More of Heather McHugh, with audio. “… poetry is was he thought but did not say” (What he thought)
“Slowly I would get to pen and paper,
Make my poems for others unseen and unborn.
In the day I would be reminded of those men and women,
Brave, setting up signals across vast distances,
Considering a nameless way of living, of almost unimagined values.
[…]We would try to imagine them, try to find each other,
To construct peace, to make love, to reconcile
Waking with sleeping, ourselves with each other,
Ourselves with ourselves. We would try by any means
To reach the limits of ourselves, to reach beyond ourselves,
To let go the means, to wake.
Muriel Rukeyser, Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)
Luna Palazzolo-Daboul, forever writing poems in the lap of death
“… is everywhere
forming invisible haloes around everything”
Alicia Ostriker.
“… shine as it will, The world will love its darkness still.”
Richard Crashaw
“Dark like an armpit, bloody like a heart”
Joyce Mansour. Translated by Emilie Moorhouse
“… dampen with the sumptuous scents
of time, of brevities . . . and I have sung of
festive tendencies turned upside down.
But can’t you do something about death,
Lord, about limits, about all that ends?
César Vallejo. Translated from the Spanish by Yvette Siegert.
“… the absence
I won’t imagine—the dark keeps going
without time so it can’t hold words”
Jennifer Kronovet
“somewhere deeper, past language, it was marked.”
“a dignity hard won: a dignity in need of constant vigilance and protection.’ (ZS)
“not places at all but abstractions” (JD)
quiet improvisation, New Blue Sun.
“Art is the Tree of Life”, William Blake’s Laocoön.
“they are things that I do
in the dark
reaching for you
[…]are you ready?
June Jordan, These Poems