Category: landscape

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Out in the sky the great dark clouds are massing;
   I look far out into the pregnant night,
Where I can hear a solemn booming gun
   And catch the gleaming of a random light,
That tells me that the ship I seek is passing, passing.

My tearful eyes my soul's deep hurt are glassing;
   For I would hail and check that ship of ships.
I stretch my hands imploring, cry aloud,
   My voice falls dead a foot from mine own lips,
And but its ghost doth reach that vessel, passing, passing.

O Earth, O Sky, O Ocean, both surpassing,
   O heart of mine, O soul that dreads the dark!
Is there no hope for me? Is there no way
   That I may sight and check that speeding bark
Which out of sight and sound is passing, passing?

Ships That Pass in the Night , Paul Laurence Dunbar

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The reach of peace, the sky, the pines,
Leave me no more perplexed,
In which a memory divines
That bodies, buried, yet arise
Across the reach of all the skies,
Unburied and unvexed.
As arisen are the grass, the pines.
In upward-grown, delighted lines —
As a swimmer with one wave declines 
And rises with the next.

The Swimmer, Witter Bynner

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“Being John Smith” at Secession, Vienna by Ana Teixeira Pinto. (Mousse)

“Like John Smith, I am unhappy with my own name and thought often about changing it. Also like John Smith, “I have always been desperate for fame” but too embarrassed to chase it. Perhaps Leo Tolstoy was wrong, and we are all unhappy in the same way. Perhaps the desire for fame masks a deeper, entirely valid human need, namely to be seen without the discomfort of rejection. A spotlight can be a shield against loneliness, or at least against those awkward companionless moments at social events. One used to pretend enjoying a cigarette. Now I see a lot of people clutching small dogs. If I had to describe Being John Smith, I would say it’s about the failure to cohere—the awkward moments, the missed connections, the sheer difficulty of alignment. The fractures that are the constant, ungainly companions to our most polished fantasies.”

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So many things had a way of looking finer, when they were not so close.

was there any point in being alive without helping one another?

(CK)

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Swiftly arose and spread around me the peace and knowledge that pass all the argument of the earth,

[…]

And that a kelson of the creation is love,
And limitless are leaves stiff or drooping in the fields,

Song of Myself, V, Walt Whitman

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Your eyes are just
like bees, and I
feel like a flower.
Their brown power makes
a breeze go over
my skin. When your
lashes ride down and
rise like brown bees’
legs, your pronged gaze
makes my eyes gauze.
I wish we were
in some shade and
no swarm of other
eyes to know that
I’m a flower breathing
bare, laid open to
your bees’ warm stare.
I’d let you wade
in me and seize
with your eager brown
bees’ power a sweet
glistening at my core.

May Swenson