When you appeared it was as if
magnets cleared the air.
I had never seen that smile before
or your hair, flying silver. Someone
waving goodbye, she was silver, too.
Of course you didn’t see me.
I called softly so you could choose
not to answer—then called again.
You turned in the light, your eyes
seeking your name.
Happenstance, Rita Dove
Yonamine‘s “It’s expensive to be poor”
Byen travay, byen swe
pa di byen touche
sou latè beni.
Good work, good sweat
doesn’t mean good pay
on this blessed earth,
on this blessed earth.
Lavi Vye Nèg
since feeling is first
who pays any attention
to the syntax of things
will never wholly kiss you;
wholly to be a fool
while Spring is in the world
my blood approves,
and kisses are a better fate
than wisdom
lady i swear by all flowers. Don’t cry
—the best gesture of my brain is less than
your eyelids’ flutter which says
we are for each other: then
laugh, leaning back in my arms
for life’s not a paragraph
And death i think is no parenthesis
E. E. Cummings
All For Us (from the HBO Original Series Euphoria), Labrinth · Zendaya
“Here (only here) is freedom: always here
[…]
(eternity being so sans until
twice i have lived forever in a smile)
“unlove’s the heavenless hell…” By E. E. Cummings
Humanity i love you
because you would rather black the boots of
success than enquire whose soul dangles from his
watch-chain which would be embarrassing for both
parties and because you
unflinchingly applaud all
songs containing the words country home and
mother when sung at the old howard
Humanity i love you because
when you’re hard up you pawn your
intelligence to buy a drink and when
you’re flush pride keeps
you from the pawn shop and
because you are continually committing
nuisances but more
especially in your own house
Humanity i love you because you
are perpetually putting the secret of
life in your pants and forgetting
it’s there and sitting down
on it
and because you are
forever making poems in the lap
of death Humanity
i hate you
–E. E. Cummings
Yes, I move, I live, I wander astray—
[…]
I know the passionate pleasure of motion;
I taste the forests; I touch strange lands.
Running Water, Alfonsina Storni, translated by Muna Lee
“…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
