I’d Have You Think of Me

Djuna Barnes
1892 –1982

As one who, leaning on the wall, once drew
Thick blossoms down, and hearkened to the hum
Of heavy bees slow rounding the wet plum,
And heard across the fields the patient coo
Of restless birds bewildered with the dew.

As one whose thoughts were mad in painful May,
With melancholy eyes turned toward her love,
And toward the troubled earth whereunder throve
The chilly rye and coming hawthorn spray—
With one lean, pacing hound, for company.

This Much and More

Djuna Barnes
1892 –1982

If my lover were a comet
Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
In his hair.

Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
Beneath the loam,
My fingers they would learn to dig
And I’d plunge home!

The Consolation

Anne Brontë
1820 –1849

Though bleak these woods, and damp the ground
With fallen leaves so thickly strown,
And cold the wind that wanders round
With wild and melancholy moan;

There is a friendly roof I know,
Might shield me from the wintry blast;
There is a fire, whose ruddy glow
Will cheer me for my wanderings past.

And so, though still, where’er I go,
Cold stranger-glances meet my eye;
Though, when my spirit sinks in woe,
Unheeded swells the unbidden sigh;

Though solitude, endured too long,
Bids youthful joys too soon decay,
Makes mirth a stranger to my tongue,
And overclouds my noon of day;

When kindly thoughts that would have way,
Flow back discouraged to my breast;
I know there is, though far away,
A home where heart and soul may rest.

Warm hands are there, that, clasped in mine,
The warmer heart will not belie;
While mirth, and truth, and friendship shine
In smiling lip and earnest eye.

The ice that gathers round my heart
May there be thawed; and sweetly, then,
The joys of youth, that now depart,
Will come to cheer my soul again.

Though far I roam, that thought shall be
My hope, my comfort, everywhere;
While such a home remains to me,
My heart shall never know despair!

On Beauty

Kahlil Gibran
1883 –1931

And a poet said, Speak to us of Beauty.
And he answered:
Where shall you seek beauty, and how shall your find her unless she herself be your way and your guide?
And how shall you speak of her except she be the weaver of your speech?

The aggrieved and the injured say, “Beauty is kind and gentle.
Like a young mother half-shy of her own glory she walks among us.”
And the passionate say, “Nay, beauty is a thing of might and dread.
Like the tempest she shakes the earth beneath us and the sky above us.”

The tired and the weary say, “Beauty is of soft whisperings. She speaks in our spirit.
Her voice yields to our silences like a faint light that quivers in fear of the shadow.”
But the restless say, “We have heard her shouting among the mountains,
And with her cries came the sound of hoofs, and the beating of wings and the roaring of lions.”

At night the watchmen of the city say, “Beauty shall rise with the dawn from the east.”
And at noontide the toilers and the wayfarers say, “We have seen her leaning over the earth from the windows of the sunset.”

In winter say the snow-bound, “She shall come with the spring leaping upon the hills.”
And in the summer heat the reapers say, “We have seen her dancing with the autumn leaves, and we saw a drift of snow in her hair.”
All these things have you said of beauty,
Yet in truth you spoke not of her but of needs unsatisfied,
And beauty is not a need but an ecstasy
It is not a mouth thirsting nor an empty hand stretched forth,
But rather a heart enflamed and a soul enchanted.
It is not in the image you would see nor the song you would hear,
But rather an image you see though you close your eyes and a song you hear though you shut your ears.
It is not the sap within the furrowed bark, nor a wing attached to a claw,
But rather a garden for ever in bloom and a flock of angels for ever in flight.

People of Orphalese, beauty is life when life unveils her holy face.
But you are life and you are the veil.
Beauty is eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.
But you are eternity and you are the mirror.

Nothing Promised

Avia Tadmor

You drag the boat across the tall grass, shake out
the black snakes that made a provisional home under the bow
through the length of winter. The rope undone
for the first time in months, it slews behind you
through dirt, then shallow water, a thin trail
that follows you deeper into the afternoon, submits to the pull
of you, or perhaps the pull of the other shore. So sure you are
in your solitude, and I am startled to sit here, witness it.
How smooth is your sailing away, this measured
but steady drifting under pink, penumbral light. When we first met
you portioned your stories, or they came brash, a light tower’s
unpredictable beam. Resolving to muteness the year your father
could no longer hear you, then woodwork, then a decade
of travel. Tulum. The Mont Blanc where the five-foot two French guide
hauled you out of a crevasse. The Norwegian girl you met at a bar
in Cambodia who followed you back, wanting
to show you the ring on her labia. Her Janis Joplin tattoo. I follow you now
with my late summer eyes. Why do I love watching you like that,
cruising away from me? As if you are teaching me something
about love and distance. Two red-tailed hawks surrender
their shadows to the thicket of spruces. You stare up,
then past your left shoulder. I think, at me. The wind tugs at every
boat in our world. A hushed push and pull, a measure of faith
travels the distance between us. Buoyant as day, thin as light.

We AI do sweet-eat…. Trick-or-Treat? 👻 🎃

https://imgur.com/a/oI2E7KA 🎃

The Dance of the Lambs and the Birds

Ameen Animashaun

Green, and green, and suddenly
a light trapped in a soft shell.
Above the city of Jericho,

the chickens are coming home
to roost. I rewrite history
and keep the apple where no hand

can reach it. Sinai because
your breath is fear. Pisgah
because your touch is hurt.

I am scared of all that I am
capable of. To break a body
is to know it

for what it truly is. You say this
is love, so I surrender my wants
at your feet. To know a body

is to break it wide open, and I have grown
to love everything about nothing.
Out in the wilderness,

the guard dog is eating a thunderstorm
and the night’s skin is an eye
sore. Damn the consequences.

I trace the lone graph of my body
and study its careful intricacies. Then,
like you, I lift the nothingness of me

above my head and tip it over
the blade of rocks. I do not want to bury anything
I do not want to bury

This Trembling Heart

Rashani Lea

i did not wake up one day
and choose to love you
or decide
that my life would now
be focused
in your direction.

this trembling heart
like a magnetized needle
of a compass,
a splayed, obsidian lotus
in a sea of fire
simply returns again
and mysteriously again
to where your soul resides,
to the breathing star dust
and tender flesh
which temporarily hold
the flowering river
of who you are.

Wu said to Wei

Rashani Lea

Wu said to Wei,
“There’s a natural
unfolding
a non-way of sorts
in which love
invisibly happens
through
(not to) us
without effort
or action
yet
with impeccable
precision
as finely focused
as a scalpel’s
incision
as purely
mysterious
as a cocoon’s dying
into a butterfly
or moth,
as deifying
and wondrously wild
as an impecunious mystic
remembering
the silk lining
on her clothen
robe
or winning the lottery
without having
bought a ticket.

love moves
ever-bloomingly
from silence into song
through song back
into silence,
sometimes fiercely
other times tenderly.
It has no preferences
IT simply knows
without knowing
the way moonlight
touches,
like a single tear
from shiva’s eye
it sees
the rudraksha beads
that wait
to be touched
by the devotee’s
loving fingers.”

“And,”
Wei reminded Wu,
“Once struck,
the singing bowl
simply sings
effortlessly
and unstoppably.
The vibration
of particles may cease
but since energy
like love
can not be created
or destroyed
it simply changes
into a different form.”

“So too,”
whispered the wind,
“the delicate scent
of ylang ylang
permeates the entire garden
and one small candle
can fill a darkened room,
‘doing nothing’
yet transmuting everything.”

Through love
we “do” without doing
there is nothing to do
and nothing not to do.
Not ‘doing’ something
and not ‘not doing’ anything,
love co-arises.

We can never know it
we can only BE it.

There’s an innocent
spontaneity, ancient
as a song line
in Gonwanaland,
moving inexorably
like ground water
beneath a barren desert.

Indisplaceable
like ether
the rapturous
spirals of love
hold
and permeate
all objects
and all beings.

Love is the greatest
euthanasia
for the conceptual mind.
In its mystery
we are destined to find
more than we ever imagined
and less than we ever feared.

The Unbroken

Rashani Rea

There is a brokenness
out of which comes the unbroken,
a shatteredness
out of which blooms the unshatterable.
There is a sorrow
beyond all grief which leads to joy
and a fragility
out of whose depths emerges strength.

There is a hollow space
too vast for words
through which we pass with each loss,
out of whose darkness
we are sanctioned into being.

There is a cry deeper than all sound
whose serrated edges cut the heart
as we break open to the place inside
which is unbreakable and whole,
while learning to sing.