0032 | poetry linkdump number four

[straightforwardly]

Because I've been kind of neglecting this journal, and it's been a while since I've made one of these posts.

It's in the same format as always— the title and author, an excerpt from the poem, and a link to where you can read the whole thing.


"He Mourns For The Change That Has Come Upon Him And His Beloved, And Wishes For The End Of The World" by W. B. Yeats

I would that the Boar without bristles had come from the West
And had rooted the sun and moon and stars out of the sky
And lay in the darkness, grunting, and turning to his rest.

"Beyond the Ash Rains" by Agha Shahid Ali

You took my hand, and we walked through the streets

of an emptied world, vulnerable
to our suddenly bare history in which I was,

but you said won't again be, singled
out for loss in your arms, won't ever again
be exiled, never again, from your arms.

"A Wind Has Blown The Rain Away And Blown" by e.e. cummings

a wind has blown the rain away and blown
the sky away and all the leaves away,
and the trees stand. I think i too have known
autumn too long

"sugar is smoking" by Jason Schneiderman

it's amazing how death
is always around the corner,
or not even so far away
as that, hiding in the little pleasures
that some of us would go
so far as to say
are the only things
keeping us alive

"I Ask My Mother to Sing" by Li-Young Lee

But I love to hear it sung;
how the waterlilies fill with rain until
they overturn, spilling water into water,
then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry.
But neither stops her song.

"How to Regain Your Soul" by William Stafford

Above, air sighs the pines. It was this way
when Rome was clanging, when Troy was being built,
when campfires lighted caves. The white butterflies dance
by the thousands in the still sunshine. Suddenly, anything
could happen to you. Your soul pulls toward the canyon
and then shines back through the white wings to be you
again.

"To the Light of September" by W. S. Merwin

you who are neither
before nor after
you who arrive
with blue plums
that have fallen through the night

"The Ivy Crown" by William Carlos Williams

Antony and Cleopatra
were right;
they have shown
the way. I love you
or I do not live
at all.

"Thanks, Robert Frost" by David Ray

and it brings strange peace that itself passes
into past, easier to bear because
you said it, rather casually, as snow
went on falling in Vermont years ago.