Poet's Corner

[Mindful]

Hunter S Thompson said: ‘Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well-preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming, “Wow! What a ride!”.’

 

[Mindful]

"Keep your face always toward the sunshine - and shadows will fall behind you. "

Walt Whitman

Laurent Parcelier (French, born 1962)

 

[Mindful]

 

[lg325]

• Blown Away Dry lightnin' cracks across the skies​

  Those storm clouds gather in her eyes
  Her daddy was a mean old mister
  Mama was an angel in the ground
  The weatherman called for a twister
  She prayed, "Blow it down"
  There's not enough rain in Oklahoma
  To wash the sins out of that house
  There's not enough wind in Oklahoma
  To rip the nails out of the past
  Shatter every window 'til it's all blown away
  Every brick, every board, every slammin' door blown away
  'Til there's nothin' left standin', nothin' left of yesterday
  Every tear-soaked, whiskey memory blown away
  Blown away (blown away)
  She heard those sirens screamin' out
  Her daddy laid there, passed out on the couch
  She locked herself in the cellar
  Listened to the screamin' of the wind
  Some people call it taking shelter
  She called it, "Sweet revenge"
  Shatter every window 'til it's all blown away (blown away)
  Every brick, every board, every slammin' door blown away (blown away)
  'Til there's nothin' left standin', nothin' left of yesterday
  Every tear-soaked, whiskey-memory blown away (blown away)
  Blown away
  There's not enough rain in Oklahoma
  To wash the sins out of that house
  There's not enough wind in Oklahoma
  To rip the nails out of the past (blown away)
  Shatter every window 'til it's all blown away (blown away)
  Every brick, every board, every slammin' door blown away (blown away)
  'Til there's nothin' left standin', nothin' left of yesterday
  Every tear-soaked, whiskey-memory blown away (blown away)
  Blown away
  Blown away
  Blown away
  Blown away
  Blown away
  Songwriters: Christopher Tompkins, Josh Kear. For non-commercial use only.

• ​

 

[Mindful]

The Truly Great​

BY STEPHEN SPENDER

I think continually of those who were truly great.
Who, from the womb, remembered the soul’s history
Through corridors of light, where the hours are suns,
Endless and singing. Whose lovely ambition
Was that their lips, still touched with fire,
Should tell of the Spirit, clothed from head to foot in song.
And who hoarded from the Spring branches
The desires falling across their bodies like blossoms.

What is precious, is never to forget
The essential delight of the blood drawn from ageless springs
Breaking through rocks in worlds before our earth.
Never to deny its pleasure in the morning simple light
Nor its grave evening demand for love.
Never to allow gradually the traffic to smother
With noise and fog, the flowering of the spirit.

Near the snow, near the sun, in the highest fields,
See how these names are fêted by the waving grass
And by the streamers of white cloud
And whispers of wind in the listening sky.
The names of those who in their lives fought for life,
Who wore at their hearts the fire’s centre.
Born of the sun, they travelled a short while toward the sun
And left the vivid air signed with their honour.

 

[Mindful]

You think it will never happen to you, that it cannot happen to you, that you are the only person in the world to whom none of these things will ever happen, and then, one by one, they all begin to happen to you, in the same way they happen to everyone else. ~Paul Auster

 

[Mindful]

Life is difficult. This is a great truth, one of the greatest truths.' It is a great truth because once we truly see this truth, we transcend it. Once we truly know that life is difficult—once we truly understand and accept it—then life is no longer difficult. Because once it is accepted, the fact that life is difficult no longer matters. Most do not fully see this truth that life is difficult. Instead they moan more or less incessantly, noisily or subtly, about the enormity of their problems, their burdens, and their difficulties as if life were generally easy, as if life should be easy. They voice their belief, noisily or subtly, that their difficulties represent a unique kind of affliction that should not be and that has somehow been especially visited upon them, or else upon their families, their tribe, their class, their nation, their race or even their species, and not upon others. I know about this moaning because I have done my share. ~M. Scott Peck

(Book: The Road Less Traveled https://amzn.to/3BCbwKi)

 

[Foul Owl]

Here's a short untitled poem I wrote about depression/suicide. Be honest with your opinions and comments. Never have I shared my writing in a public venue.

Tears of a full moon
High upon a lonely ledge
Across a vast dune
Pulled apart by a heartless wedge
Nothing but an empty pledge

Shaking to the bone
Abandoned in an icy storm
Forever alone
Misty thoughts emerge to form
Mindless madness free to swarm

Anguish in your veins
Stranded in a callous sea
Waves holding black chains
Not sure how it came to be
Never again to be free

Journey to a void
Desolation on the rise
Forever annoyed
Nothing but clouds in the skies
Engage unforgiving cries

Hope lost on a whim
Destiny decided now
Future beyond grim
Unable to explain how
Standing on a rocking bow

 

[Mindful]

"The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
By William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.
And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.
____________________________________

 

[Mindful]

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference. ~Robert Frost.

 

[Mindful]

I loved to sleep with the window open.
Rainy nights were the best of all,
I would open the window and put my head on the pillow and close my eyes and feel the wind on my face and listen to the trees sway and creak.

• Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

 

[Mindful]

"Those who live securely
In your boiled houses
For those whom you find, when you return in the afternoon,
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider if he is a man
Who works in the mud
Who does not know peace
Who fights for half a roll
Who dies for a yes or a no.
Consider if she is a woman
Who has no hair or name
No strength to remember it
Empty gaze and cold lap
Like a winter frog
Do you think this has happened:
I command these words to you
Engrave them into your hearts
When being at home, when going in the street,
When you lie down, when you get up;
Repeat this to your children."

- Cousin Levi | “If This Is A Man” (Snippet)

Born in Turin (Italy) on July 31, 1919
Note: In “If This Is A Man” (1947) Italian writer Primo Levi recounted his harrowing experience at the Auschwitz concentration camp during WWII. The work opens with the poem that we include here and where the author's great goal is summarized: that new generations build a more empathetic and solidarity world in which the evils of the past are not repeated again.

 

[Mindful]

Truly, we live with mysteries too marvelous
to be understood.
How grass can be nourishing in the
mouths of the lambs.
How rivers and stones are forever
in allegiance with gravity
while we ourselves dream of rising.
How two hands touch and the bonds will
never be broken.
How people come, from delight or the
scars of damage,
to the comfort of a poem.
Let me keep my distance, always, from those
who think they have the answers.
Let me keep company always with those who say
“Look!” and laugh in astonishment,
and bow their heads. ~Mary Oliver

 

[Mindful]

Four Philosophers.​

By David Solway.


I would like to throttle Aristotle.
Crack him on the noggin with a bottle.
I’d do it not a little but a lottle.
I would like to throttle Aristotle.
–
I would like to rough up Tom Aquinas
Who is touted by the sages as the finest.
I’d like to poke a sharp quill up his sinus.
O how I’d like to rough up Tom Aquinas.
–
And as for that curmudgeon Schopenhauer,
I’d like to toss him headlong from a tower.
I’ve had enough of his depressive glower
For he was born in a most evil hour.
–
I’d like to bitch slap Bertrand Russell
Though I doubt he’s even worth the tussle.




Barroom Brawl, N.C. Wyeth, 1915

 

[Mindful]

My work is loving the world.

Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird — equal seekers of sweetness. Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.
Are my boots old? Is my coat torn? Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me keep my mind on what matters, which is my work,
which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture. Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,
which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart and these body-clothes, a mouth with which to give shouts of joy to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is that we live forever. ~Mary Oliver

(Book: Thirst: Poems https://amzn.to/3PsGYSY)
(Art: Photograph by Édouard Boubat)

 

[Ropey]

Who

Who writes the script and directs the production?
Is the house in the sky still under construction?
A fiery wheel beyond our control--
or an excited gambler on a lucky roll--
who will help the judge who waits,
just inside of glory's gates?

It

What streams through this tunnel of light
is stars on fire in a funnel of night.
These heavenly fires to which I aspire,
are they beacons to glory?
Or another tall story?
For a story without telling,
is a rose without smelling...

Calls

It's made of mind,
and it's all ours.
For it'll do fine,
as long as it's pure...
So, in the mire,
set your roots.
Call a heavenly fire,
to extend your shoots:
Then the mundane is recanted,
when you blossom where you're planted.

 

[Mindful]

Base words are uttered only by the base
And can for such at once be understood,
But noble platitudes:—ah, there's a case
Where the most careful scrutiny is needed
To tell a voice that's genuinely good
From one that's base but merely has succeeded.

W H Auden.

 

[Mindful]

About Marriage.​

Don't lock me in wedlock, I want
marriage, an
encounter --

I told you about
the green light of
May

(a veil of quiet befallen
the downtown park,
late

Saturday after
noon, long
shadows and cool

air, scent of
new grass
fresh leaves,

blossom on the threshold of
abundance --

and the birds I met there,
birds of passage breaking their journey,
three birds each of a different species:

the azalea-breasted with round poll, dark,
the brindled, merry, mousegliding one,
and the smallest, golden as gorse and wearing
a black Venetian mask

and with them the three deuce hen-birds
feathered in tender, lively brown --

I stood
a half-hour under the enchantment
no-one passed near,
the birds saw me and

let me be
near them.)

It's not irrelevant:
I would be
met

and meet you
so,
in a green

airy space, not
locked in.


Denise Levertov

 

[lg325]

​

On the day, when Conny Kramer died​

We lay dreaming in the grass,
the heads full of crazy ideas.
There he said just for fun,
come let’s go on the trip.
The smoke tasted really bitter,
but Conny told me what he saw,
A sea of light and colors,
we didn’t foresee,
what happened soon afterwards.

On the day, when Conny Kramer died,
also all the bells rang,
on the day when Conny Kramer died,
also his friends all cried for him.
That was a difficult day,
because my world shattered.

He promised often (to quit) , I let it be;
That gave me courage again,
and I told myself,
with love everything will be alright.
But there were trips from the joints,
there was no support on the crooked path,
people began to talk,
but nobody offered Conny help

On the day, when Conny Kramer died,
also all the bells rang,
on the day when Conny Kramer died,
also his friends all cried for him.
That was a difficult day,
because my world shattered.

Near the last time he said,
now I can see Heaven.
I cried to him: oh, to come back!
He could no longer understand.
I had no more tears,
I had lost everything which I have.
Life simply goes on,
I have only
the flowers on his grave.

On the day, when Conny Kramer died,
also all the bells rang,
on the day when Conny Kramer died,
also his friends all cried for him.
That was a difficult day,
because my world shattered.
Author=??????

 

[lg325]

"In the other gardens
And all up the vale,
From the autumn bonfires
See the smoke trail!
Pleasant summer over
And all the summer flowers,
The red fire blazes,
The grey smoke towers.
Sing a song of seasons!
Something bright in all!
Flowers in the summer,
Fires in the fall!" By Robert Louis Stevenson