Category: landscape

… Just so you know there’s no one
for whom all is well. ?Just so you know
the lotus is married to the mud. ?Just so

you know to listen deeply is to love.
Just so you know, everything is an inside job.

What the River Said, Wendy Videlock

the necessity of subordinating conventional ideas of poetic beauty to something even more beautiful and even more necessary: in a word, revolution. (AN)

Imagine you wake up
with a second chance: The blue jay
hawks his pretty wares
and the oak still stands, spreading
glorious shade. If you don’t look back,

the future never happens.
How good to rise in sunlight,
in the prodigal smell of biscuits –
eggs and sausage on the grill.
The whole sky is yours

to write on, blown open
to a blank page. Come on,
shake a leg! You’ll never know
who’s down there, frying those eggs,
if you don’t get up and see.

Dawn Revisited, Rita Dove

You wake amid bursts of darkness

                  you come back from the vast sleep that holds you
                  tighter than my arms, each evening
                  I bare myself and abandon you
                  to the night’s tall grasses.

                  The hours that create us
                  separate us, and I give you up
                  until dawn comes to dissolve absence.

From “Hearts, Books of Love” [“You wake amid bursts of darkness”], Hélène Dorion, Translated from the French by Susanna Lang

it is the hard
edge of things
i am avoiding
the separations
so that i can take my glasses off
and then i cannot tell
which are the leaves
and which the angels
like blake
like that man
who lived with the lepers
not noticing what was sin
and what was grace
visioning visions vision
i take my glasses off
so i can see

i take my glasses off, Lucille Clifton

in the dream of foxes
there is a field
and a procession of women
clean as good children
no hollow in the world
surrounded by dogs
no fur clumped bloody
on the ground
only a lovely line
of honest women stepping
without fear or guilt or shame
safe through the generous fields.

a dream of foxes, Lucille Clifton

One night I wandered alone from my comrades’ huts;
The grasshoppers chirped softly
In the warm misty evening;
Bracken fronds beckoned from the darkness
With exquisite frail green fingers;
The tree gods muttered affectionately about me,
And from the distance came the grumble of a kindly train.

I was so happy to be alone,
So full of love for the great speechless earth,
That I could have laid my cheek in the wet grasses
And caressed with my lips the hard sinewy body
Of Earth, the cherishing mistress of bitter lovers. 

A Moment's Interlude, Richard Aldington