Milosz:

...

Perhaps we should have represented him otherwise
Than in the form of a dove. As fire, yes, but that is beyond us.
For even when it consumes logs on a hearth
We search in it for eyes and hands. Let him then be green,
All blades of calamus, running on footbridges
Over meadows, with a thump of his bare feet. Or in the air
Blowing a birchbark trumpet so strongly that farther down
There tumbles from its blast a crowd of petty officials,
Their uniforms unbuttoned and their women's combs
Flying like chips when the ax strikes.




from "Sentences," Selected Poems, ed. Hass.

Agostinho Neto:

two years away



Greetings--you say in yesterday's letter
when shall we see each other
soon or later
tell me love?

In the silence
are the talks we did not have
the kisses not exchanged
and the words we do not say
in censored letters

Against the dilemma of today
of being submissive or persecuted
are our days of sacrifice
and audacity
for the right
to live thinking to live acting
freely humanly

Between dreams and desire
when shall we see each other
late or early
tell me love!
more justly even grows
the longing to be
with our peoples
today always and ever more
free free free


PIDE Prison in Oporto, Angola, February 1957
from Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing, ed. Jack Mapanje

Neruda:

From so many rough hands
descended the tool,
the wineglass,
even the famous curve
of the hip that then pursued
the whole woman with its design!

The hand that forms
the wineglass of the form,
it conveys the pregnancy of the barrel
and the lunar line of the bell.

I ask some mighty hands
to help me
change the profile of the planets:
triangular stars
the traveler needs:
constellations like cold dice
of square clarity:
those hands that extract
secret rivers for Antofagasta
until the water rectifies
its avarice lost in the desert.

I want all the hands of men
to knead mountains
of bread and to gather
all the fish from the sea,
all the olives
from the olive tree,
all the love not yet wakened
and to leave a gift
in each of the hands
of the day.

Starbucks

In the buff-bright sunlight
He is talking about his technologically-incompetent
wife, telling all
To the lipsticked girl in the well-cut blazer and her
open-mouthed Prada bag, while
She tells him about her crazy Jeff and their beautiful
brand-new condo

At the public confessional
They talk in tones of stainless-steel
all is well, oh, more than well
He she it they and I have a little of what you want:
exchange cards quickly, for
Breaktime’s over, business is waiting,
and so is, somewhere, Jeff

Rachel Wetzsteon:

i.

Deepen,
leaves, not with what
has made us sorry but
with what was profound about that
sorrow.

ii.

Make me
spontaneous,
gathering winds, but don’t
blow so giddily I teeter
too much.

iii.

Songs I
listened to all
summer long, accept my
thanks: to regress is not to move
backward.

iv.

Splash of
patchouli on
my wrist, remind me that
in this cauldron there is a world
elsewhere.

v.

Smile! Those
days of humid
agony have earned you
the right to a hundred purple
sunsets.

vi.

Come, fall,
I can feel you
stirring, I can hardly
wait for the things that will happen
come fall.


in memorium

G. K. Chesterton:

The sun rises every morning. I do not rise every morning; but the variation is due not to my activity, but to my inaction. Now, to put the matter in a popular phrase, it might be true that the sun rises regularly because he never gets tired of rising. His routine might be due, not to a lifelessness, but to a rush of life. The thing I mean can be seen, for instance, in children, when they find some game or joke that they specially enjoy. A child kicks his legs rhythmically through excess, not absence, of life. Because children have abounding vitality, because they are in spirit fierce and free, therefore they want things repeated and unchanged. They always say, "Do it again"; and the grown-up person does it again until he is nearly dead. For grown-up people are not strong enough to exult in monotony. But perhaps God is strong enough to exult in monotony. It is possible that God says every morning, "Do it again" to the sun; and every evening, "Do it again" to the moon. It may not be automatic necessity that makes all daisies alike; it may be that God makes every daisy separately, but has never got tired of making them. It may be that He has the eternal appetite of infancy; for we have sinned and grown old, and our Father is younger than we. The repetition in Nature may not be a mere recurrence; it may be a theatrical encore.


--from Orthodoxy.

Milosz again, and a reminder:

To find my home in one sentence, concise, as if hammered in metal. Not to enchant anybody. Not to earn a lasting name in posterity. An unnamed need for order, for rhythm, for form, which three words are opposed to chaos and nothingness.


(Berkeley--Paris--Cambridge, 1981-1983).


A sharp reminder from a friend today that I need to first consider myself a writer, a writer learning-to-be-a-writer, and make any other work the work that exists to fund my writing: a welcome reminder.