greenstorm | Poetry dump from instagram

7.

Why love what you will lose?
There is nothing else to lose.

Louise Gluck

Do not stop
at the wall
looming
before you.
Make a door.
Make a door
wide enough
not only for you
but for others.
KEEP MOVING.

Maggie Smith

Loving You

Loving you is like eating bread dipped in salt,
like waking feverish at night
and putting my mouth to the water faucet,
like opening a heavy unlabeled parcel
eagerly, happily, cautiously.
Loving you is like flying over the sea
for the first time, like feeling dusk settle
softly over Istanbul.
Loving you is like saying "I'm alive."

Nazim Hikmet

Living

The fire in leaf and grass
so green it seems
each summer the last summer.

The wind blowing, the leaves
shivering in the sun,
each day the last day.

A red salamander
so cold and so
easy to catch, dreamily

moves his delicate feet
and long tail. I hold
my hand open for him to go.

Each minute the last minute.

Denise Levertov

Funny

What's it like to be a human
the bird asked

I myself don't know
it's being held prisoner by your skin
while reaching infinity
being a captive of your scrap of time
while touching eternity
being hopelessly uncertain
and helplessly hopeful
being a needle of frost
and a handful of heat
breathing in the air
and choking wordlessly
it's being on fire
with a nest made of ashes
eating bread
while filling up on hunger
it's dying without love
it's loving through death

That's funny said the bird
and flew effortlessly up into the air.

Anna Kamienska, translated from the Polish by Stanislav Baranczak & Clare Cavanagh

Out of the wounds, the moon will rise

Now that the sun has set and the rain has abated,
And every porch light
in the neighbourhood is lit,
Maybe we can invent something; I'd like a new
Way of experiencing the world, a way of taking
Into myself the single light shining at the center
Of all things without losing the dense, eccentric
Planets orbiting around it.
What you'd like is a more
Attentive lover, I suppose--. Too bad that slow,
Wet scorch of orange blossoms floating towards
The storm drain is not a vein of stars . . . we could
Make a wish on one of them; not that we would
Wish for anything but the impossible.

Joy Hopler

Late Spring, the blankets gone

Just sheets.
One on top,
one underneath.
Between them you understand
there's heat in you
you've never used.
Outside, everything's still.
You hope your nakedness
is overheard.
So you move.
A clean, white noise.
Sometime later a door opens,
a woman
presses her ass and back
like a perfect apostrophe
against you.

Sleep comes easy,
and later in the sunlight
and paradise of half sleep,
she's still there.
The top sheet is loose
from its corners
and tucked
around both of you.
You cannot sleep, or wake.
You feel warm as snow
that has fallen
upon itself all night.

Stephen Dunn

Haiku (written from Peking)

let me wear the day
well so when it reaches you
you will enjoy it.

Sonia Sanchez

Helplessness

Oh, heart,
why can't you learn
that there is nothing to do in the world except live in it?

Why can't you take its deep gifts--
the birds and the cars in the rain;
lost keys and the broken-hearted?

Kerry Hardie

Rain

Woke up this morning with
a terrific urge to lie in bed all day
and read. Fought against it for a minute.

Then looked out the window at the rain.
And gave over. Put myself entirely
in the keep of this rainy morning.

Would I live my life over again?
Make the same unforgivable mistakes?
Yes, given half a chance. Yes.

Raymond Carver

We don't give enough glory to exodus.
In any new life season, you can't make
a big entrance without a really glorious exit.

Want love? Leave rooms where you're not called beloved.
Want purpose? Abandon what feels meaningless.
Want inspiration? Forsake that which doesn't feed you.

For millennia, every green thing in the natural
world has taught us this. There is no radiance
without first a rupture.

J Sullivan

The Day Of Our Divorce Hearing

you treated me to lunch, a spaghetti place.
We had never been so kind to each other.
When you said I'm still a slob we laughed.
After lunch we stood in the parking lot.
You said, You have the last word
but I said, No, I'm tired of being
the one who sums things up.
You get the last word.
But you couldn't think of one.
So off you went to our silver car,
I to our red one.
It's three years later.
And even that's just a story now.
Lately I don't feel as if I lived with you.
But I remember our kindness that day,
When it no longer mattered.

Ruth Lepson

And Suddenly It's Evening

Each of us is alone on the heart of the earth
pierced by a ray of sun:
and suddenly it's evening.

Salvatore Quasimodo translated by Jack Bevan

Knocks on the door.
Who?
I sweep the dust of my loneliness
under the rug.
I arrange a smile
and open.

Maram al-Massri

Kintsugi

Anyone who loves someone else
already has a broken heart.
It's the law: if you want that light
to flood your body, you must
expose the scars through which
it pours, for they are the source
of your beauty and your strength.
Think of the Japanese who fill
thecracks in a ceramic bowl
with pure gold, not only flaunting
those so-called flaws, but also
making each one a priceless vein
through which light now moves.

James Crews

The Lover

every time
the same way
wondering when
this when that.
if you were
a plum tree. if you
were a peach
tree.

Joel Oppenheimer

If you aren't busy I think I'm on fire

I worry that someone is right about the end of the world.
If we performed an elaborate ritual
to prevent it, who could say we didn't succeed? The deer live
on to cause another traffic jam, white tails flaring
in the sun. There is no way to disprove
you are infinite. I walk into a yellow house and a calendar
says 1973, the ceilings drag wires from room
to empty room. If we ordered the total annihilation of other people,
would we still need other people? Sunlight coming down
like a yellow tambourine of leaves.

Wendy Xu

The Farmer

Each day I go into the fields to see what is growing
and what remains to be done.
It is always the same thing, nothing
is growing, everything needs to be done.
Plow, harrow, disc, water, pray
till my bones ache and hands rub
blood-raw with honest labor--
all that grows is the slow
intransigent intensity of need.
I have sown my seed on soil
guaranteed by poverty to fail.
But I don't complain--except
to passerby who ask me why
I work such barren earth.
They would not understand me
if I stooped to lift a rock
and hold it like a child, or laughed,
or told them it is their poverty
I labor to relieve. For them,
I complain. A farmer of dreams
knows how to pretend. A farmer of dreams
knows what it means to be patient.
Each day I go into the fields.

W. D. Erhart