[Sven2]

New Year Resolve


The time has come
To stop allowing the clutter
To clutter my mind
Like dirty snow,
Shove it off and find
Clear time, clear water.

Time for a change,
Let silence in like a cat
Who has sat at my door
Neither wild nor strange
Hoping for food from my store
And shivering on the mat.

Let silence in.
She will rarely speak or mew,
She will sleep on my bed
And all I have ever been
Either false or true
Will live again in my head.

For it is now or not
As old age silts the stream,
To shove away the clutter,
To untie every knot,
To take the time to dream,
To come back to still water.

--May Sarton

[Sven2]

In Tenebris


All within is warm,
   Here without it's very cold,
   Now the year is grown so old
And the dead leaves swarm.

In your heart is light,
   Here without it's very dark,
   When shall I hear the lark?
When see aright?

Oh, for a moment's space!
   Draw the clinging curtains wide
   Whilst I wait and yearn outside
Let the light fall on my face.

--Ford Madox Ford

[Water Lily]

When You are Old   
by W. B. Yeats 


When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;

And bending down beside the glowing bars,
Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of stars.

[Sven2]

Ode to Skimpy Clothes and August in the Deep South

A young woman is walking with her boyfriend, and it's deep
     summer in the South, like being in a sauna
but hotter and stickier, and she's wearing a tank top
     and a cotton skirt so thin I can see her black
underpants, and this is the way I dressed in my early twenties,
     partly from poverty and partly because my body
was so fresh that I couldn't imagine not showing it off—
     marzipan arms, breasts like pink cones of vanilla
soft-serve ice cream, hips more like brioche than flesh,
     and the sound track to those times I can conjure
on my inner radio on a day in August—"Wild Horses,"
     and "All I Want," Joni Mitchell and Mick Jagger
singing a duet for me, but I was in love with Bartok, too,
     and Beethoven's trios, moving through those sultry days
to that celestial music, going to the campus cinema for the air
     conditioning and Wild Strawberries and La Dolce Vita,
skin brown from taking the Chevy pickup to the coast,
     at night putting the fan in the window and reading
thick novels until three or four, and one morning waking at noon
     to a cardinal screaming, the red male hovering,
flying above, my cat with the brown female in her mouth,
     and when I release the bird she falls on the grass as if dead,
but she's in shock, and I hold the cat, who wants her again,
     but then the female comes to, hops across the grass
and flies off with her mate, and seeing that girl's black panties
     under her skirt brings back those days with such a fierce ache
that I might as well be lost in the outskirts of Rome, a little girl
     making up a story of seeing the Virgin and everyone
wanting to believe that God has appeared in the parking lot
     of an abandoned store, the graffiti a message, something
divine in the plastic bags and fast-food boxes rolling in the wind.

--Barbara Hamby

[Water Lily]

Proverbial

By Wendy Videlock


It's always darkest before the leopard's kiss.


Where there's smoke there is emphasis.


A bird in the hand is bound for the stove.


The pen is no mightier than the soul.


Never underestimate the nib of corruption.


Better late than suffer the long introduction.


All work and no play is the way of  the sloth.


If  you can dream it bring the child the moth.


He is not wise that parrots the wise.


All that glitters has been revised.


An idle mind is a sign of  the time.


The less things change the more we doubt design.



Source: Poetry (January 2013).

[Water Lily]

[Sleeping sister of a farther sky]

By Karen Volkman b. 1967

Sleeping sister of a farther sky,
dropped from zenith like a tender tone,
the lucid apex of a scale unknown
whose whitest whisper is an opaque cry

of measureless frequency, the spectral sigh
you breath, bright hydrogen and brighter zone
of fissured carbon, consummated moan
and ceaseless rapture of a brilliant why.

Will nothing wake you from your livid rest?
Essence of ether and astral stone
the stunned polarities your substance weaves

in one bright making, like a dream of leaves
in the tree's mind, summered. Or as a brooding bone
roots constellations in the body's nest.

[Sven2]

Mz.Lily, your poetic choices are wonderful, I admire Jane Kenyon and loved her poem that you posted.  I saw it for the first time, thank you.

[Sven2]

Letter to a Lost Friend


There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened
              between us, like ostyt, which can be used
for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room,
              and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet,
which is to want something so much over months
              and even years that when you get it, you have lost
the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky,
              "It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me."
What is the word for someone who looks into her friend's face
              and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left
the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights
              at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men,
who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young
              and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote
all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke
              in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books
everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné,
              so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia,
I see what she sees — all my books alphabetized and on shelves,
              feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins,
neck crumpled like last week's newspaper, while her friends
              are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies',
and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved
              for even a moment, though I can't help but feel like Pushkin,
a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books
              and saying, "Goodbye, my dear friends," as those volumes
close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding
              the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.

--Barbara Hamby

[Sven2]

The Routine Things Around the House

When Mother died
I thought: now I'll have a death poem.
That was unforgivable
yet I've since forgiven myself
as sons are able to do
who've been loved by their mothers.
I stared into the coffin
knowing how long she'd live,
how many lifetimes there are
in the sweet revisions of memory.
It's hard to know exactly
how we ease ourselves back from sadness,
but I remembered when I was twelve,
1951, before the world
unbuttoned its blouse.
I had asked my mother (I was trembling)
if I could see her breasts
and she took me into her room
without embarrassment or coyness
and I stared at them,
afraid to ask for more.
Now, years later, someone tells me
Cancers who've never had mother love
are doomed and I, a Cancer,
feel blessed again. What luck
to have had a mother
who showed me her breasts
when girls my age were developing
their separate countries,
what luck
she didn't doom me
with too much or too little.
Had I asked to touch,
perhaps to suck them,
what would she have done?
Mother, dead woman
who I think permits me
to love women easily,
this poem
is dedicated to where
we stopped, to the incompleteness
that was sufficient
and to how you buttoned up,
began doing the routine things
around the house.

--Stephen Dunn

[Water Lily]

" Mz.Lily, your poetic choices are wonderful, I admire Jane Kenyon and loved her poem that you posted.  I saw it for the first time, thank you."

Thanks Sven, I have been busy with other things. But, today seems like a good day for poetry.  I need some new poems to read. Any suggestions?
Oh, and by the way I have missed you and being here.       

[Sven2]

Hello, Mz.Lily, happy to be talking to you, glad you find time for poetry. I check this site often, it seems in order if quiet. Well, everyone is doing fine, just the communication relocated somewhere else - into e-mails, FB, I wonder, if one day we'll talk on Twitter. Whatever, we'll find each other anyplace I'd hope.

Lately I am reading Jack Gilbert, all I could get of his.

(Poetry suggestions are in a personal message, check it next time.)

See you here soon.

S.

[Sven2]

The Abandoned Valley

Can you understand being alone so long
you would go out in the middle of the night
and put a bucket into the well
so you could feel something down there
tug at the other end of the rope?

--Jack Gilbert

[Sven2]

In My Craft or Sullen Art

In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms, I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

--Dylan Thomas

[Water Lily]

The Small Hour

No more my little song comes back;
  And now of nights I lay
My head on down, to watch the black
  And wait the unfailing gray.

Oh, sad are winter nights, and slow;
  And sad's a song that's dumb;
And sad it is to lie and know
  Another dawn will come

Dorthy Parker

[Water Lily]

Spellbound   
by Emily Brontë 


The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me
And I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow.
And the storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.