Thursday, April 30, 2015

Heart in the Medicine Chest

Heart in the Medicine Chest

To ease a wounded soul,
take fifteen minutes, three times a day.
Rest outdoors, soak in birdsong.
If you can walk, do so on good, clean dirt.
The earth holds you close. Cry.


To lengthen joy,
it’s simple! Use up time. Spend unwisely.
Buy cheap daisies; tie them up with costly ribbons.
Dance wildly: leap mailboxes, bump into lampposts,
vault the stars. Go for broke.

When a friend has a story to tell,
good or bad, this is sacred. Don’t check your watch.
Become a rock in the sweet, slow stream.
Be the concrete that contains the storm.
Be still.

While passion beats those wild drums,
paint cerise spirals, pluck rubies, melt chocolate,
eat artichokes with butter.
Pop the champagne.
Sleep in silk. Sleep in.

When the threadbare curtain between you and death shreds,
take a good look; don't cover your eyes. When, not if,
because, my darling dear,
life promises endings.

Through the puncture in your heart, see all this:
too much, too soon, too hard, too bad.
With sad, slow motion eyes,
be a camera obscura.
Sketch the shadow.

When life is pitch-black,
there’s no mistaking the Light of the World.
Awake. Sigh. Breathe. Offer your grief.
Yes, sing!
Be the last note, alive.

~Claire Germain Nail


Check out Claire's blog here:  http://www.clairegermainnail.com/

And buy her book here: http://www.amazon.com/Claire-Germain-Nail/e/B00JNOCCYG

Wednesday, April 29, 2015

From Cyrano deBergerac

"You…you have... hmm .…..a very large nose!"

"Ah no! That’s too brief, young man!
You might have said…Oh!… a hundred things, to plan
by varying the tone ... for example just suppose…
Aggressive: ‘I, Sir, if I had such a nose,
I’d have it amputated on the spot!’
Friendly: ‘But it must drown itself a lot,
you need a drinking-bowl of a special shape!’
Descriptive: ‘It’s a rock! ... A peak! ... A cape!
What’s that, it’s a cape?….. It’s a peninsular!’
Curious: ‘That oblong bag what’s it serve you for?
A sheath for scissors? Or a writing case?’
Gracious: ‘Do you love the winged race
so much, that you benignly set yourself
to provide their little claws with a shelf!’......
- That’s an idea, sir, of what you might have said,
if you’d an ounce of wit or letters in your head:
but of wit, O most lamentable creature
you’ve never had an atom, and you feature
three letters only, and those three spell: Ass!
And were your wit of sufficient class,
to aim a single foolish pleasantry,
at me, in front of all this noble gallery,
you’d not have been allowed to speak a quarter
of the least beginning of a single one of them, for
though I aim them at myself, so wittily,
I don’t let any man aim them at me!"


I saw Cyrano at Portland Center Stage and got this text from the full text of the 1897 play here

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

Fire

FIRE ~ Judy Brown

What makes a fire burn
is space between the logs,
a breathing space.
Too much of a good thing,
too many logs
packed in too tight
can douse the flames
almost as surely
as a pail of water would.

So building fires
requires attention
to the spaces in between,
as much as to the wood.

When we are able to build
open spaces
in the same way
we have learned
to pile on the logs,
then we can come to see how
it is fuel, and absence of the fuel
together, that make fire possible.

We only need to lay a log
lightly from time to time.

A fire
grows
simply because the space is there,
with openings
in which the flame
that knows just how it wants to burn
can find its way.

 Found here

Love

Love
              By Langston Hughes

   
Love is a wild wonder
And stars that sing
Rocks that burst asunder
And mountains that take wing.
John Henry with his hammer
Makes a little spark.
That little spark is love
Dying in the dark.


Found here

Sunday, April 26, 2015

My Dream

My Dream
by Eunice Akoth

Eunice Akoth is a 6th grader at an all girls school in Kibera, a slum of Nairobi. She recited this poem on stage at the Women in the World Annual Summit in 2015. Watch the whole video, it's amazing.

Every mighty king was once a crying baby!
Every great tree was once a tiny seed!
Every tall building was once in paper!
And so I dream my dream.


Read more here.

Friday, April 24, 2015

A Ritual to Read to Each Other

A Ritual To Read To Each Other
by William Stafford

If you don't know the kind of person I am
and I don't know the kind of person you are
a pattern that others made may prevail in the world
and following the wrong god home we may miss our star.


For there is many a small betrayal in the mind,
a shrug that lets the fragile sequence break
sending with shouts the horrible errors of childhood
storming out to play through the broken dyke.

And as elephants parade holding each elephant's tail,
but if one wanders the circus won't find the park,
I call it cruel and maybe the root of all cruelty

to know what occurs but not recognize the fact.

And so I appeal to a voice, to something shadowy,
a remote important region in all who talk:
though we could fool each other, we should consider--
lest the parade of our mutual life get lost in the dark.

For it is important that awake people be awake,
or a breaking line may discourage them back to sleep;
the signals we give--yes or no, or maybe--
should be clear: the darkness around us is deep.



Found here.  

Trans-

Trans-

Rita Dove
I work a lot and live far less than I could,
but the moon is beautiful and there are
blue stars . . . . I live the chaste song of my heart.
—Garcia Lorca to Emilia Llanos Medinor,
November 25, 1920
The moon is in doubt
over whether to be
a man or a woman.

There’ve been rumors,
all manner of allegations,
bold claims and public lies:

He’s belligerent. She’s in a funk.
When he fades, the world teeters.
When she burgeons, crime blossoms.

O how the operatic impulse wavers!
Dip deep, my darling, into the blank pool.

Found on Poetry.org here.

Thursday, April 23, 2015

Earth Day

Earth Day

By Jane Yolen
 
 
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me.
Each blade of grass,
Each honey tree,
Each bit of mud,
And stick and stone
Is blood and muscle,
Skin and bone.

And just as I
Need every bit
Of me to make
My body fit,
So Earth needs
Grass and stone and tree
And things that grow here
Naturally.

That’s why we
Celebrate this day.
That’s why across
The world we say:
As long as life,
As dear, as free,
I am the Earth
And the Earth is me. 
 

Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Ark in the Field

Ark in the Field 
By Joyce Peseroff 
 
One morning you open

one eye and listing to the south
it bulks like a barn,

noiseless, derelict

planks horizontal and deeply grooved.
A rudder the size of your front door

pivots as you push. Once

inside you can smell
the fear of every winged,

creeping and four-legged thing:

no water, no straw,
just shadow and bare wood.

Where is the one promised

to wake beside you forever?
Ox-eyed daisies, goldenrod, clover—

why are you breathing

among them, why don't you gather
the outcast beasts or become one...


Found on Poetry Foundation here

The Victory Dance

The Victory Dance

by Robert Candler

To play as if today
Is your only chance.
Some say, “It’s just a game.”
Have they done the Victory Dance?

When hard-earned Victory
Was finally at hand,
Have they felt the glory
Raining down from the stands?

To do or not to do….
No one wants to hear, “We tried.”
Effort and dedication will be rewarded… 
They'll make the 'magic' that's on your side. 

Yes, to fall short is still an option;
But much better to succeed.
Heroes are made and remembered
Only by their deeds.

So, just go out and win.
Give your all to each and every chance.
Persevere and achieve…

And do the Victory Dance.
 
Found here.  

God's Garden

God's Garden

by Robert Frost

God made a beateous garden
With lovely flowers strown,
But one straight, narrow pathway
That was not overgrown.
And to this beauteous garden
He brought mankind to live,
And said: "To you, my children,
These lovely flowers I give.
Prune ye my vines and fig trees,
With care my flowerets tend,
But keep the pathway open
Your home is at the end."

Then came another master,
Who did not love mankind,
And planted on the pathway
Gold flowers for them to find.
And mankind saw the bright flowers,
That, glitt'ring in the sun,
Quite hid the thorns of av'rice
That poison blood and bone;
And far off many wandered,
And when life's night came on,
They still were seeking gold flowers,
Lost, helpless and alone.


O, cease to heed the glamour
That blinds your foolish eyes,
Look upward to the glitter
Of stars in God's clear skies.
Their ways are pure and harmless
And will not lead astray,
Bid aid your erring footsteps
To keep the narrow way.
And when the sun shines brightly
Tend flowers that God has given
And keep the pathway open
That leads you on to heaven.

One Fine Day In the Middle of the Night

One fine day in the middle of the night,
Two dead boys got up to fight, 
Back to back they faced each other,
Drew their swords and shot each other,

One was blind and the other couldn’t, see
So they chose a dummy for a referee.
A blind man went to see fair play,
A dumb man went to shout “hooray!”

A paralyzed donkey passing by,
Kicked the blind man in the eye,
Knocked him through a nine inch wall,
Into a dry ditch and drowned them all,

A deaf policeman heard the noise,
And came to arrest the two dead boys,
If you don’t believe this story’s true,
Ask the blind man he saw it too!

This goofy folk rhyme has as many variations as there are little boys who love reciting the silliness. Learn more here

Sunday, April 19, 2015

This is Your Home Now

This Your Home Now

Mark Doty, 1953

For years I went to the Peruvian barbers on 18th Street
—comforting, welcome: the full coatrack,
three chairs held by three barbers,

oldest by the window, the middle one
a slight fellow who spoke an oddly feminine Spanish,
the youngest last, red-haired, self-consciously masculine,

and in each of the mirrors their children’s photos,
smutty cartoons, postcards from Machu Picchu.
I was happy in any chair, though I liked best

the touch of the eldest, who’d rest his hand
against my neck in a thoughtless, confident way.
Ten years maybe. One day the powdery blue

steel shutters pulled down over the window and door,
not to be raised again. They’d lost their lease.
I didn’t know how at a loss I’d feel;

this haze around what I’d like to think
the sculptural presence of my skull
requires neither art nor science,

but two haircuts on Seventh, one in Dublin,
nothing right.
                            Then (I hear my friend Marie
laughing over my shoulder, saying In your poems

there’s always a then, and I think,  Is it a poem
without a then?
) dull early winter, back on 18th,
upspiraling red in a cylinder of glass, just below the line

of sidewalk, a new sign, WILLIE’S BARBERSHOP.
Dark hallway, glass door, and there’s (presumably) Willie.
When I tell him I used to go down the street

he says in an inscrutable accent, This your home now,
puts me in a chair, asks me what I want and soon he’s clipping
and singing with the radio’s Latin dance tune.

That’s when I notice Willie’s walls,
though he’s been here all of a week, spangled with images
hung in barber shops since the beginning of time:

lounge singers, near-celebrities, random boxers
—Italian boys, Puerto Rican, caught in the hour
of their beauty, though they’d scowl at the word.

Cheering victors over a trophy won for what?
Frames already dusty, at slight angles,
here, it is clear, forever. Are barbershops

like aspens, each sprung from a common root
ten thousand years old, sons of one father,
holding up fighters and starlets to shield the tenderness

at their hearts? Our guardian Willie defies time,
his chair our ferryboat, and we go down into the trance
of touch and the skull-buzz drone

singing cranial nerves in the direction of peace,
and so I understand that in the back
of this nothing building on 18th Street
                                                   —I’ve found that door

ajar before, in daylight, when it shouldn’t be,
some forgotten bulb left burning in a fathomless shaft
of my uncharted nights—
                                                   the men I have outlived

await their turns, the fevered and wasted, whose mothers
and lovers scattered their ashes and gave away their clothes.
Twenty years and their names tumble into a numb well

—though in truth I have not forgotten one of you,
may I never forget one of you—these layers of men,
arrayed in their no-longer-breathing ranks.

Willie, I have not lived well in my grief for them;
I have lugged this weight from place to place
as though it were mine to account for,

and today I sit in your good chair, in the sixth decade
of my life, and if your back door is a threshold
of the kingdom of the lost, yours is a steady hand

on my shoulder. Go down into the still waters
of this chair and come up refreshed, ready to face the avenue.
Maybe I do believe we will not be left comfortless.

After everything comes tumbling down or you tear it down
and stumble in the shadow-valley trenches of the moon,
there’s a still a decent chance at—a barber shop,

salsa on the radio, the instruments of renewal wielded,
effortlessly, and, who’d have thought, for you.
Willie if he is Willie fusses much longer over my head

than my head merits, which allows me to be grateful
without qualification. Could I be a little satisfied?
There’s a man who loves me. Our dogs. Fifteen,

twenty more good years, if I’m a bit careful.
There’s what I haven’t written. It’s sunny out,
though cold.  After I tip Willie

I’m going down to Jane Street, to a coffee shop I like,
and then I’m going to write this poem. Then


Found here

In Praise of Fractals

In Praise of Fractals ~ by Emily Grosholz

Variations on the Introduction to
The Fractal Geometry of Nature by Benoit Mandelbrot
(New York: W.H. Freeman and Company, 1983)

Euclid’s geometry cannot describe,
Nor Apollonius’, the shape of mountains,
Puddles, clouds, peninsulas or trees.
Clouds are never spheres,
Nor mountains cones, nor Ponderosa pines;
Bark is not smooth; and where the land and sea
So variously lie about each other
And lightly kiss, is no hyperbola.

Compared with Euclid’s elementary forms,
Nature, loosening her hair, exhibits patterns
(Sweetly disarrayed, afloat, uncombed)
Not simply of a higher degree n
But rather of an altogether different
Level of complexity:
The number of the scales of distances
Describing her is almost infinite.

How shall we study the morphology
Of the amorphous? Mandelbrot
Solved the conundrum by inventing fractals,
A lineage of shapes
Fretted by chance, whose regularities
Are all statistical, like Brownian motion,
Whose fine configurations
Turn out to be the same at every scale.

Some fractal sets are curves
(Space-filling curves!) or complex surfaces;
Others are wholly disconnected ‘dusts’;
Others are just too odd to have a name.
Poincar? once observed,
There my be questions that we choose to ask,
But others ask themselves,
Sometimes for centuries, while no one listens.

Questions that ask themselves without repose
May come to rest at last in someone’s mind.
So Mandelbrot in time
Designed his fractal brood to be admired
Not merely for its formal elegance
As mathematical structure,
But power to interpret, curl by curl,
Nature’s coiffure of molecules and mountains.

What gentle revolution of ideas
Disjoins the nineteenth century from ours!
Cantor’s set of nested missing thirds,
Peano’s curve of fractional dimension,
Mandelbrot’s fractals, counter the old rule
Of simple continuity,
Domesticating what short-sightedly
Was once considered monstrous.

Nature embraces monsters as her own,
Encouraging the pensive mathematician
To find anomaly
Inherent in the creatures all around us.
The masters of infinity,
Cantor, Peano, Hausdorff, and Lebesgue,
Discovered sets not in the end transcendent
But immanent, Spinoza’s darling Cause.

Imagination shoots the breeze with Nature,
And what they speak (mathematics) as they flirt
Reveals itself surprisingly effective
In science, a wrought gift
We don’t deserve or seek or understand.
So let us just be grateful,
And hope that it goes on, although our joy
Is always balanced by our bafflement.

This poem makes my heart sing. Read an introduction and get links to her other poems here

Saturday, April 18, 2015

i thank You God for most this amazing

i thank You God for most this amazing

by e.e. cummings

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes

(i who have died am alive again today,
and this is the sun's birthday; this is the birth
day of life and of love and wings: and of the gay
great happening illimitably earth)

how should tasting touching hearing seeing
breathing any—lifted from the no
of all nothing—human merely being
doubt unimaginable You?

(now the ears of my ears awake and
now the eyes of my eyes are opened)


Read it and hear Garrison Keillor recite it here

Lemon

Lemon ~ U2

A man builds a city with banks and cathedrals
A man melts the sands so he can see the world outside
You're gonna meet her there
A man makes a car
She's your destination
And builds a road to run them on
You gotta get to her
A man dreams of leaving
She's imagination
But he always stays behind


Watch the video of this song and another with a bit more accessible poetry here

Friday, April 17, 2015

Speak Up

Speak Up
by Janet Wong

*You're Korean, aren't you?
Yes.
*Why don't you speak
*Korean?
Just don't, I guess.
*Say something Korean.
I don't speak it.
I can't.
*Cmon. Say something.
Halmoni. Grandmother.
Haraboji. Grandfather.
Imo. Aunt.
*Say some other stuff.
*Sounds funny.
*Sounds strange.
Hey, let's listen to you
for a change.
*Listen to me?
Say some foreign words.
*But I'm American,
*can't you see?
Your family came from
somewhere else.
Sometime.
*But I was born here.
So was I. 



Found here

Saturday, April 4, 2015

Why This Night

Why This Night
Or Maybe This Year, We’ll Read a Poem
by Esther Cohen

Why oh why
Is this evening
So long so similar
So often uninspired, disappointing
So hard to conceive?
Why does the word liberation
Sound too much like Liver Nation
Not enough like freedom?
Why can’t we
In the spirit of what
It might mean
To truly celebrate
Overcoming our tribal
Predispositions, telling stories
That make us bigger
Not smaller, reliving
Not the usual what he did
To me, or she, but
Imagining instead
What we might do
Could do, if we were able
Even for one night
To forgive whatever
Happened before
However big, however small,
If we could repeat
The word forgive five times
Or ten, maybe then
We could tell a good story.

What I never liked
About Passover (the holiday
Most of us celebrate) the whole we they part
Good guys and bad. Self righteous holy victim
Story they did this to us and now look.
I took the other side. It wasn’t the usual
I’m an underdog too. More
Personal than that. When I went
To Egypt the first time
In the 70’s I fell in love
With the place Oh My God
Is Egypt beautiful funny warm
Fragrant deeply aesthetic which
Is not to say
The impossible problems
Poverty prejudice religion
Frequent triumvirate did not
Play a part. Egypt was a place
I wanted to live, like Israel
Morocco all those Greek islands
Lemon countries, where deep smiles
Are part of the landscape and people love
With their arms wide open.

I thought about Passover
When I landed in the Cairo airport
So beautiful you could actually feel the colors
Pink yellow gold white and I wanted to write
A different Passover story, not
Of the we are all in this together
Variety more we aren’t ever sure
What truly happened, unless we are
Scientists and even science
Is a guess.

For Passover this year
I’d like to invite
people I love
some I like well enough
some who are in the ok category
To imagine a word
And a world that is open and true,
Where we all imagine, in the course of the meal
That it is possible to forgive
Whatever happened to us:
Betrayal, lies, even annihilation. Some
Of life so terrible it’s hard to believe
What people can do to one another
All in the name of one god or another
Difference makes us all crazy
How could he Why did she
Different values religions races identities.
Close family friend for 30 years
Didn’t invite us to his wedding My husband’s
Relatives killed by Turks. Hurt is not
An abstraction an idea. There is always a why,
A reason. The unsatisfactory explanation. Weakness
Insanity priorities even personality
This Passover maybe not next year
Maybe I’ll feel differently than I do now
This Passover maybe we can liberate ourselves
From holding onto what happened
We don’t have to subscribe
To Be Here Now but we can try
Letting go of all that happened
That shouldn’t have that gets in the way
Of how pink Egypt is how much
We loved one another before
Life intervened. This Passover
We will pass over injustice
Not because it’s ok
But because we want to try a holiday experiment
Maybe just this year, we want
To see if we can liberate ourselves
By saying these words:
Forgive
Forgive
Forgive

The Horses

The Horses
by Edwin Muir

 
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenant with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north,
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radios dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
‘They’ll molder away and be like other loam.’
We make our oxen drag our rusty plows,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers’ land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers’ time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield.
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companionship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half a dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world,
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden.
Since then they have pulled our plows and borne our loads
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life is changed; their coming our beginning.





https://middleschoolpoetry180.wordpress.com/2013/05/02/190-the-horses-edwin-muir/

Friday, April 3, 2015

The Broken Vase

The Broken Vase
by René François Armand Sully-Prudhomme, translated by Robert Archambeau

The vase where this verbena’s dying
Was cracked by a lady’s fan’s soft blow.
It must have been the merest grazing:
We heard no sound. The fissure grew.

The little wound spread while we slept,
Pried deep in the crystal, bit by bit.
A long, slow marching line, it crept
From spreading base to curving lip.

The water oozed out drop by drop,
Bled from the line we’d not seen etched.
The flowers drained out all their sap.
The vase is broken: do not touch.

The quick, sleek hand of one we love
Can tap us with a fan’s soft blow,
And we will break, as surely riven
As that cracked vase. And no one knows.

The world sees just the hard, curved surface
Of a vase a lady’s fan once grazed,
That slowly drips and bleeds with sadness.
Do not touch the broken vase. 


Be sure to check the link for the original in French as well as audio in both French and English.


http://www.onbeing.org/program/fragility-and-evolution-our-humanity/feature/le-vase-brise-broken-vase/1560

Thursday, April 2, 2015

If

If
by e. e. cummings

 
If freckles were lovely, and day was night,
And measles were nice and a lie warn’t a lie,
Life would be delight,—
But things couldn’t go right
For in such a sad plight
I wouldn’t be I.

If earth was heaven and now was hence,
And past was present, and false was true,
There might be some sense
But I’d be in suspense
For on such a pretense
You wouldn’t be you.

If fear was plucky, and globes were square,
And dirt was cleanly and tears were glee
Things would seem fair,—
Yet they’d all despair,
For if here was there
We wouldn’t be we.


http://hellopoetry.com/poem/1597/if/

Swallows

Swallows
by Leonora Speyer

 
They dip their wings in the sunset,
They dash against the air
As if to break themselves upon its stillness:
In every movement, too swift to count,
Is a revelry of indecision,
A furtive delight in trees they do not desire
And in grasses that shall not know their weight.
They hover and lean toward the meadow
With little edged cries;
And then,
As if frightened at the earth’s nearness,
They seek the high austerity of evening sky
And swirl into its depth.


http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poem/swallows

Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Every Day You Play...

by Pablo Neruda
 
Every day you play with the light of the universe.
Subtle visitor, you arrive in the flower and the water,
You are more than this white head that I hold tightly
as a bunch of flowers, every day, between my hands.

You are like nobody since I love you.
Let me spread you out among yellow garlands.
Who writes your name in letters of smoke among the stars of the south?
Oh let me remember you as you were before you existed.

Suddenly the wind howls and bangs at my shut window.
The sky is a net crammed with shadowy fish.
Here all the winds let go sooner or later, all of them.
The rain takes off her clothes.

The birds go by, fleeing.
The wind.  The wind.
I alone can contend against the power of men.
The storm whirls dark leaves
and turns loose all the boats that were moored last night to the sky.

You are here.  Oh, you do not run away.
You will answer me to the last cry.
Curl round me as though you were frightened.
Even so, a strange shadow once ran through your eyes.

Now, now too, little one, you bring me honeysuckle,
and even your breasts smell of it.
While the sad wind goes slaughtering butterflies
I love you, and my happiness bites the plum of your mouth.

How you must have suffered getting accustomed to me,
my savage, solitary soul, my name that sends them all running.
So many times we have seen the morning star burn, kissing our eyes,
and over our heads the grey light unwinds in turning fans.

My words rained over you, stroking you.
A long time I have loved the sunned mother-of-pearl of your body.
Until I even believe that you own the universe.
I will bring you happy flowers from the mountains, bluebells, dark hazels, and rustic baskets of kisses.
I want to do with you what spring does with the cherry trees.


http://hellopoetry.com/poem/9920/every-day-you-play/

National Poetry Month 2015!!

Today is the first day of National Poetry Month! So I start us off with my favorite poem for this event... Daffadowndilly  :)


 


Daffadowndilly

by A.A. Milne

She wore her yellow sun-bonnet,
She wore her greenest gown;
She turned to the south wind
And curtsied up and down.
She turned to the sunlight
And shook her yellow head,
And whispered to her neighbour:
"Winter is dead."



Found here on All Poetry dot com