Tag: poems
Read My Hand
I had love once in the palm of my hand.
Read the lines there.
– John Wieners, A Poem for Painters
Between Going And Coming
Between going and staying
the day wavers,
in love with its own transparency.
The circular afternoon is now a bay
where the world in stillness rocks.
All is visible and all elusive,
all is near and can’t be touched.
Paper, book, pencil, glass,
rest in the shade of their names.
Time throbbing in my temples repeats
the same unchanging syllable of blood.
The light turns the indifferent wall
into a ghostly theatre of reflections.
I find myself in the middle of an eye,
watching myself in its blank stare.
The moment scatters. Motionless,
I stay and go: I am a pause.
– Octavio Paz
Inheritance
Where did you get those big eyes?
My mother.
And where did you get those lips?
My mother.
And the loneliness?
My mother.
And that broken heart?
My mother.
And the absence, where did you get that?
My father.
– Warsan Shire
Musée des Beaux Arts
About suffering they were never wrong,
The old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer’s horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
– W.H. Auden
Thursday
The not-happening was so sudden
that I stayed there for ever,
without knowing, without their knowing me,
as if I was under a chair,
as if I was lost in the night –
so was that which was not,
and so I have stayed since.
I asked the others after,
the women and the men,
what they were doing with such confidence
and how they had learned their living;
they did not actually answer,
they went on dancing and living,
It is what has not happened to one
that determines the silence,
and I don’t want to go on speaking
because I stayed there waiting;
in that place and on that day
I have no idea what happened
but now I am not the same.
– Pablo Neruda
Chaos And Poetry
I am in the middle of it: chaos and poetry; poetry and love and again, complete chaos. Pain, disorder, occasional clarity; and at the bottom of it all: only love; poetry. Sheer enchantment, fear, humiliation. It all comes with love.
– Anna Akhmatova
memoryhouse 