[Water Lily]

thanks Sven, that means alot.

[wavewatcher]

The ocean said to me once by Charles Bukowski

The ocean said to me once,
"Look!
Yonder on the shore
Is a woman, weeping.
I have watched her.
Go you and tell her this --
Her lover I have laid
In cool green hall.
There is wealth of golden sand
And pillars, coral-red;
Two white fish stand guard at his bier.

"Tell her this
And more --
That the king of the seas
Weeps too, old, helpless man.
The bustling fates
Heap his hands with corpses
Until he stands like a child
With a surplus of toys."

[Water Lily]

The Spirit Medium by William Butler Yeats

Poetry, music, I have loved, and yet
Because of those new dead
That come into my soul and escape
Confusion of the bed,
Or those begotten or unbegotten
Perning in a band,
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.

Or those begotten or unbegotten,
For I would not recall
Some that being unbegotten
Are not individual,
But copy some one action,
Moulding it of dust or sand,
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.

An old ghost's thoughts are lightning,
To follow is to die;
Poetry and music I have banished,
But the stupidity
Of root, shoot, blossom or clay
Makes no demand.
I bend my body to the spade
Or grope with a dirty hand.


 
 

[Sven2]

Villanelle on a Line from Macbeth

Stay, imperfect speaker, tell me more.
I don't want the house, I want its ruins,
cracked panes, grandfather clock, paper-like door.

I want the vines that engulfed exterior walls,
petrified forests of books and manuscripts,
dust-filled afternoons that opened like doors

Onto Hesse's wind-silvered fields, onto myths
surging up out of the earth. I want the man to say,
"Stay, imperfect speaker, tell me more,"

as he did at the end of every long conversation,
saying "imperfect" and meaning "unfinished,"
saying it always as I moved toward the door,

as I say it now, again and over and again,
I want the words to rebuild the house in shambles:
stay, imperfect speaker, tell me more.

I know: if I went back, there would be nothing
or worse: a new house, pristine, immaculate,
even the vine-filled library gone. I left and shut the door.
Imperfect memory, please, stay, tell me more.

--Michael Davis

[Water Lily]

The poem O Death Rock Me Asleep by Anne Boleyn

Death, rock me asleep,
Bring me to quiet rest,
Let pass my weary guiltless ghost
Out of my careful breast.
Toll on, thou passing bell;
Ring out my doleful knell;
Let thy sound my death tell.
Death doth draw nigh;
There is no remedy.

My pains who can express?
Alas, they are so strong;
My dolour will not suffer strength
My life for to prolong.
Toll on, thou passing bell;
Ring out my doleful knell;
Let thy sound my death tell.
Death doth draw nigh;
There is no remedy.

Alone in prison strong
I wait my destiny.
Woe worth this cruel hap that I
Should taste this misery!
Toll on, thou passing bell;
Ring out my doleful knell;
Let thy sound my death tell.
Death doth draw nigh;
There is no remedy.

Farewell, my pleasures past,
Welcome, my present pain!
I feel my torments so increase
That life cannot remain.
Cease now, thou passing bell;
Rung is my doleful knell;
For the sound my death doth tell.
Death doth draw nigh;
There is no remedy.

[Sven2]

Oh, Mz. Lily, look who is the author - what a cruel end was awaiting her, no big wonder the poem is so tragic.

[Sven2]

Never Mind


that guests no longer come unannounced
or that the photo album contains pictures
of much younger people than we remember being

never mind that swallows etch Sanskrit
on the wrinkled sky

it's November
and the present is emptying its wine
into our glasses

never mind that we're not touching now

because our shadows are holding hands
in the dark behind our backs

--Denver Butson

[Sven2]

Human Beauty


If you write a poem about love...
the love is a bird,

the poem is an origami bird.
If you write a poem about death...

the death is a terrible fire,
the poem is an offering of paper cutout flames

you feed to the fire.
We can see, in these, the space between

our gestures and the power they address
—an insufficiency. And yet a kind of beauty,

a distinctly human beauty. When a winter storm
from out of nowhere hit New York one night

in 1892, the crew at a theater was caught
unloading props: a box

of paper snow for the Christmas scene got dropped
and broken open, and that flash of white

confetti was lost
inside what it was a praise of.

--Albert Goldbarth

[Sven2]

Ahihi Bay

—for Beverly

So far this morning has been cool and gray
but as she walks backward into the sea,
adjusting her snorkel and mask, sunlight
appears over Haleakala's cone
to show the water all around her blue.
Teardrop butterfly and unicornfish
wait for her, saddle wrasse and leatherback,
yellow tang and spotted puffer. She sinks
into the surf and drifts above antler
coral and long-spined urchins where a green
sea turtle swam beside her yesterday.
The breeze dies down. From where I stand
on black lava outcroppings she is still,
though I know her arms and legs are moving
in the world of reef triggerfish and fire
dartfish. She rises and falls as the waves
seem to pass through her, turning her almost
imperceptibly toward the horizon.

--Floyd Skloot

P.S. For Wavewatcher, keeping with the ocean theme.

[Water Lily]

 ;)

Oh, Mz. Lily, look who is the author - what a cruel end was awaiting her, no big wonder the poem is so tragic.

;) .Ha ha ha! tragic is an under statement... Maybe some of my long, long interesting family lineage...Ancestory.com...love it...
Hi Sven... I'm staying on track......

Sand Flesh and Sky

Our ropes are the roots
of our life. We fish
low in the earth,
the river beneath runs through our veins,
blue and cold in a riverbed.

When the sun comes up,
the moon moves slowly to the left.


I tie the logs and limbs together,
holding them in place.


The ocean beats them
smooth like rock.
Here my sense of time is flat.


I find in a strip of damp sand
footprints and marks of hands,
and torn pieces of flesh.


Night is a beast.
The tide moves, gushing
back and forth.


Sunlight touches our faces,
turning us, turning us, turning us
in our morning sleep.

         1976

Written by Clarence Major

[wavewatcher]

Beautiful stuff here Sven and Miss Lily! I love checking in each day..like a poem-of-the-day update. And Mr. OceanFlower, thanks for the Ferlinghetti..great stuff!

The Sea Hold by Carl Sandburg
THE SEA is large.
The sea hold on a leg of land in the Chesapeake hugs an early sunset and a last morning star over the oyster beds and the late clam boats of lonely men.
Five white houses on a half-mile strip of land ... five white dice rolled from a tube.

Not so long ago ... the sea was large...
And to-day the sea has lost nothing ... it keeps all.

I am a loon about the sea.
I make so many sea songs, I cry so many sea cries, I forget so many sea songs and sea cries.

I am a loon about the sea.
So are five men I had a fish fry with once in a tar-paper shack trembling in a sand storm.

The sea knows more about them than they know themselves.
They know only how the sea hugs and will not let go.

The sea is large.
The sea must know more than any of us.

[Sven2]

It's great to exchange thoughts on the BB, the rare treat now. I was going to open a new thread - as an answer to the perpetual electoral season and give it "Let's Get Mad About Politics" title, but thought better of it. Why aggravate people and take them away from life as it simply flows - with every sunrise and snowfall, newborn birds and deer, with oldsters watching it pass, sadly.

Anyways - do not turn silent, my friends, and I know some that read, but do not speak here. There would be time for silence, that's for sure. Poetry, music, sweet wine and friendly banter is our shelter.

[Sven2]

Overheard

It's a beautiful day
the small man said from behind me
and I could tell he had a slight limp
from the rasp of his boot against the sidewalk
and I was slow to look at him
because I've learned to close my ears
against the voices of passersby, which is easier than closing
them to my own mind,
and although he said it I did not hear it
until he said it a second or third time
but he did, he said It's a beautiful day and something
in the way he pointed to the sun unfolding
between two oaks overhanging a basketball court
on 10th Street made me, too
catch hold of that light, opening my hands
to the dream of the soon blooming
and never did he say forget the crick in your neck
nor your bloody dreams; he did not say forget
the multiple shades of your mother's heartbreak,
nor the father in your city
kneeling over his bloody child,
nor the five species of bird this second become memory,
no, he said only, It's a beautiful day,
this tiny man
limping past me
with upturned palms
shaking his head
in disbelief.

--Ross Gay

[Sven2]

Blessed

The man whose ancestral home has just burned to the ground
in San Bruno, California, taking with it all his possessions
and family memorabilia, says he is blessed to have found
such good friends and neighbors to take him in, blessed
that his wife and children have survived with him, he says
he is blessed the way a man who has just given up
his spare kidney feels blessed to have helped a stranger,
the way those thirty-three Chilean miners, just up from
their sixty-nine days within the earth's blackened underbelly
say they are blessed to see daylight once again, just as
most of us, even without saying so, are blessed, as I am,
this very moment, to receive a postcard from U.S. Army
Captain Scott M. Pastor, informing me that my son has arrived
safely at Fort Leonard Wood—Whoever would have thought
I'd be grateful, even, for that? Yet who isn't among the blessed,
who can still sleep easily amid the splotched splendors
of the quotidian world—like those 4,500 poor "sufferers"
aboard the Carnival Cruise Line, sentenced to five days
of flown-in Spam and crabmeat and the scent of freshly
rotting vegetables? So much true suffering on this earth,
so many without the balm of other bodies and the
beneficence of breathable air, who have lost the dice-roll
of sperm and egg, or come up with the two of clubs
and three of diamonds on the blackjack table of this life,
down to their final two chips and free drink before
the time comes to face the cashier again. Easily the fall air
of West Virginia enters my lungs, easily the day descends
into the solace of sleep and pillows, the lex loci dilecti
of misdeeds and small miracles. Grace may not be merited,
friends, but nonetheless deserves to be praised, as I praise
it now, on this beautiful, unjust, splendiferous earth—
its blessed and bountiful beneficence bouldering down.

--Michael Blumenthal

[Sven2]

Ghazal

What dream was lost when the fox's cry broke into the dark
calling his mate across the field, and woke me to the dark?

No one speaks the language anymore, those who escaped
blamed hunger or weather when they spoke of the dark.

One summer, we traveled from country to country.
High on the mountain, village men stoked fires in the dark.

Only a thin pane between us and the frozen world—
the cold carries the smell of wood smoke in the dark.

Remember Audrey Hepburn in "Wait Until Dark,"
smashing the lights, making a deadly joke of the dark?

What faith we have in sleep, trusting our bodies will wake
while night fills our vacancies—shadow-strokes in the dark.

"Time hurries by and we're here and we're gone," warns the song.
Someone used to whisper Michelle and hold me in the dark.

--Michelle Gillett