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apoemaday · 19 hours
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Stars
by Louise Glück
I’m awake; I am in the world — I expect no further assurance. No protection, no promise.
Solace of the night sky, the hardly moving face of the clock.
I’m alone — all my riches surround me. I have a bed, a room. I have a bed, a vase of flowers beside it. And a nightlight, a book.
I’m awake; I am safe. The darkness like a shield, the dreams put off, maybe vanished forever.
And the day — the unsatisfying morning that says I am your future, here is your cargo of sorrow:
Do you reject me? Do you mean to send me away because I am not full, in your word, because you see the black shape already implicit?
I will never be banished. I am the light, your personal anguish and humiliation. Do you dare send me away as though you were waiting for something better? There is no better. Only (for a short space) the night sky like a quarantine that sets you apart from your task.
Only (softly, fiercely) the stars shining. Here, in the room, the bedroom. Saying I was brave, I resisted, I set myself on fire.
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apoemaday · 2 days
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Letter to a Lost Friend
by Barbara Hamby
There must be a Russian word to describe what has happened between us, like ostyt, which can be used for a cup of  tea that is too hot, but after you walk to the next room, and return, it is too cool; or perekhotet, which is to want something so much over months and even years that when you get it, you have lost the desire. Pushkin said, when he saw his portrait by Kiprensky, “It is like looking into a mirror, but one that flatters me.” What is the word for someone who looks into her friend’s face and sees once smooth skin gone like a train that has left the station in Petersburg with its wide avenues and nights at the Stray Dog Cafe, sex with the wrong men, who looked so right by candlelight, when everyone was young and smoked hand-rolled cigarettes, painted or wrote all night but nothing good, drank too much vodka, and woke in the painful daylight with skin like fresh cream, books everywhere, Lorca on Gogol, Tolstoy under Madame de Sévigné, so that now, on a train in the taiga of  Siberia, I see what she sees  —  all my books alphabetized and on shelves, feet misshapen, hands ribbed with raised veins, neck crumpled like last week’s newspaper, while her friends are young, their skin pimply and eyes bright as puppies’, and who can blame her, for how lucky we are to be loved for even a moment, though I can’t help but feel like Pushkin, a rough ball of  lead lodged in his gut, looking at his books and saying, “Goodbye, my dear friends,” as those volumes close and turn back into oblong blocks, dust clouding the gold leaf that once shimmered on their spines.          
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apoemaday · 3 days
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In a Bath Teashop
by John Betjeman
“Let us not speak, for the love we bear one another -- Let us hold hands and look.” She, such a very ordinary little woman; He, such a thumping crook; But both, for a moment, little lower than the angels In the teashop’s ingle-nook.
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apoemaday · 4 days
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Still I Rise
by Maya Angelou
You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I’ll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I’ve got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I’ll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries? Does my haughtiness offend you? Don’t you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I’ve got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I’ve got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I’m a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise.             
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apoemaday · 5 days
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I Have Gone Marking
by Pablo Neruda tr. W.S. Merwin
I have gone marking the atlas of your body with crosses of fire. My mouth went across: a spider, trying to hide. In you, behind you, timid, driven by thirst. Stories to tell you on the shore of evening, sad and gentle doll, so that you should not be sad. A swan, a tree, something far away and happy. The season of grapes, the ripe and fruitful season. I who lived in a harbour from which I loved you. The solitude crossed with dream and with silence. Penned up between the sea and sadness. Soundless, delirious, between two motionless gondoliers. Between the lips and the voice something goes dying. Something with the wings of a bird, something of anguish and oblivion. The way nets cannot hold water. My toy doll, only a few drops are left trembling. Even so, something sings in these fugitive words. Something sings, something climbs to my ravenous mouth. Oh to be able to celebrate you with all the words of joy. Sing, burn, flee, like a belfry at the hands of a madman. My sad tenderness, what comes over you all at once? When I have reached the most awesome and the coldest summit my heart closes like a nocturnal flower.
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apoemaday · 6 days
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Eating Poetry
by Mark Strand
Ink runs from the corners of my mouth. There is no happiness like mine. I have been eating poetry.
The librarian does not believe what she sees. Her eyes are sad and she walks with her hands in her dress.
The poems are gone. The light is dim. The dogs are on the basement stairs and coming up.
Their eyeballs roll, their blond legs bum like brush. The poor librarian begins to stamp her feet and weep.
She does not understand. When I get on my knees and lick her hand, she screams.
I am a new man. I snarl at her and bark. I romp with joy in the bookish dark.
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apoemaday · 7 days
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Field of Skulls
by Mary Karr
Stare hard enough at the fabric of night,    and if you're predisposed to dark — let’s say    the window you’ve picked is a black postage stamp you spend hours at, sleepless, drinking gin after the I Love    Lucy reruns have gone off — stare
like your eyes have force, and behind any night’s taut scrim will come the forms    you expect pressing from the other side.    For you: a field of skulls, angled jaws and eye-sockets, a zillion scooped-out crania.    They’re plain once you think to look.
You know such fields exist, for criminals roam your very block, and even history lists    monsters like Adolf and Uncle Joe who stalk the earth’s orb, plus minor baby-eaters    unidentified, probably in your very midst. Perhaps    that disgruntled mail clerk from your job
has already scratched your name on a bullet — that’s him    rustling in the azaleas. You caress the thought, for it proves there’s no better spot for you than here, your square-yard of chintz sofa, hearing    the bad news piped steady from your head. The night    is black. You stare and furious stare,
confident there are no gods out there. In this way,    you’re blind to your own eye’s intricate machine    and to the light it sees by, to the luck of birth and all    your remembered loves. If the skulls are there — let’s say they do press toward you against night’s scrim — could they not stare with slack jawed envy at the fine flesh that covers your scalp, the numbered hairs,    at the force your hands hold?
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apoemaday · 8 days
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I Am Not Yours
by Sara Teasdale
I am not yours, not lost in you, Not lost, although I long to be Lost as a candle lit at noon, Lost as a snowflake in the sea. You love me, and I find you still A spirit beautiful and bright, Yet I am I, who long to be Lost as a light is lost in light. Oh plunge me deep in love -- put out My senses, leave me deaf and blind, Swept by the tempest of your love, A taper in a rushing wind.
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apoemaday · 9 days
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Year's End
by Jorge Luis Borges tr. W.S. Merwin
Neither the symbolic detail of a three instead of a two, nor that rough metaphor that hails one term dying and another emerging nor the fulfillment of an astronomical process muddle and undermine the high plateau of this night making us wait for the twelve irreparable strokes of the bell.
The real cause is our murky pervasive suspicion of the enigma of Time, it is our awe at the miracle that, though the chances are infinite and though we are drops in Heraclitus’ river, allows something in us to endure, never moving.
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apoemaday · 10 days
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The Duck
by Ogden Nash
Behold the duck. It does not cluck. A cluck it lacks. It quacks. It is specially fond Of a puddle or pond. When it dines or sups, It bottoms ups.
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apoemaday · 12 days
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The Night Migrations
by Louise Glück
This is the moment when you see again the red berries of the mountain ash and in the dark sky the birds’ night migrations.
It grieves me to think the dead won’t see them -- these things we depend on, they disappear.
What will the soul do for solace then? I tell myself maybe it won’t need these pleasures anymore; maybe just not being is simply enough, hard as that is to imagine.
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apoemaday · 13 days
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Untitled
by Vera Pavlova tr. Steven Seymour
A beast in winter, a plant in spring, an insect in summer, a bird in autumn. The rest of the time I am a woman.
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apoemaday · 14 days
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Kind of Blue
by Lynn Powell
Not Delft or delphinium, not Wedgewood among the knickknacks, not wide-eyed chicory evangelizing in the devil strip — But way on down in the moonless octave below midnight, honey, way down where you can’t tell cerulean from teal. Not Mason jars of moonshine, not waverings of silk, not the long-legged hunger of a heron or the peacock’s iridescent id — But Delilahs of darkness, darling, and the muscle of the mind giving in. Not sullen snow slumped against the garden, not the first instinct of flame, not small, stoic ponds, or the cold derangement of a jealous sea — But bluer than the lips of Lazarus, baby, before Sweet Jesus himself could figure out what else in the world to do but weep.
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apoemaday · 15 days
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The Night, the Porch
by Mark Strand
To stare at nothing is to learn by heart What all of us will be swept into, and baring oneself To the wind is feeling the ungraspable somewhere close by. Trees can sway or be still. Day or night can be what they wish. What we desire, more than a season or weather, is the comfort Of being strangers, at least to ourselves. This is the crux Of the matter, which is why even now we seem to be waiting For something whose appearance would be its vanishing — The sound, say, of a few leaves falling, or just one leaf, Or less. There is no end to what we can learn. The book out there Tells us as much, and was never written with us in mind.
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apoemaday · 16 days
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Flying at Night
by Ted Kooser
Above us, stars. Beneath us, constellations. Five billion miles away, a galaxy dies like a snowflake falling on water. Below us, some farmer, feeling the chill of that distant death, snaps on his yard light, drawing his sheds and barn back into the little system of his care. All night, the cities, like shimmering novas, tug with bright streets at lonely lights like his.
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apoemaday · 17 days
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Poppies
by Mary Oliver
The poppies send up their orange flares; swaying in the wind, their congregations are a levitation
of bright dust, of thin and lacy leaves. There isn’t a place in this world that doesn’t
sooner or later drown in the indigos of darkness, but now, for a while, the roughage
shines like a miracle as it floats above everything with its yellow hair. Of course nothing stops the cold,
black, curved blade from hooking forward — of course loss is the great lesson.
But I also say this: that light is an invitation to happiness, and that happiness,
when it’s done right, is a kind of holiness, palpable and redemptive. Inside the bright fields,
touched by their rough and spongy gold, I am washed and washed in the river of earthly delight —
and what are you going to do — what can you do about it — deep, blue night?
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apoemaday · 18 days
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my dreams, my works, must wait till after hell
by Gwendolyn Brooks
I hold my honey and I store my bread  In little jars and cabinets of my will.  I label clearly, and each latch and lid  I bid, Be firm till I return from hell.  I am very hungry. I am incomplete. And none can tell when I may dine again.  No man can give me any word but Wait,  The puny light. I keep eyes pointed in;  Hoping that, when the devil days of my hurt  Drag out to their last dregs and I resume  On such legs as are left me, in such heart  As I can manage, remember to go home, My taste will not have turned insensitive  To honey and bread old purity could love.
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