Featured Poem(s)

Valentine’s Day, 2009

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each other’s cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each other’s keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow.

– KHALIL GIBRAN, ON MARRIAGE

December 20th, 2008: I woke up yesterday morning trying to remember the words to this Langston Hughes’ poem.  I used to teach it in my ESL classroom in New York City because it has simple language, beautiful metaphor and powerful imagery.

DREAMS

Hold fast to dreams.
For if dreams die,
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams.
For when dreams go,
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

The word barren always confused them.

Hughes also wrote one of my favorite poems of all time.  I used to carry it around with me on “poem in your pocket day”, a terrific new york city yearly tradition.

Poem

by Langston Hughes

I loved my friend.

He went away from me.

There’s nothing more to say.

The poem ends

Soft as it began-

I loved my friend.

 

 

September 26th, 2008: This is by one of my favorite new finds, an Israeli poet named Yehuda Amichai…

Temporary Poem of My Time

Hebrew writing and Arabic writing go from east to west,
Latin writing, from west to east.
Languages are like cats:
You must not stroke their hair the wrong way.
The clouds come from the sea, the hot wind from the desert,
The trees bend in the wind,
And stones fly from all four winds,
Into all four winds. They throw stones,
Throw this land, one at the other,
But the land always falls back to the land.
They throw the land, want to get rid of it.
Its stones, its soil, but you can’t get rid of it.

They throw stones, throw stones at me
In 1936, 1938, 1948, 1988,
Semites throw at Semites and anti-Semites at anti-Semites,
Evil men throw and just men throw,
Sinners throw and tempters throw,
Geologists throw and theologists throw,
Archaelogists throw and archhooligans throw,
Kidneys throw stones and gall bladders throw,
Head stones and forehead stones and the heart of a stone,
Stones shaped like a screaming mouth
And stones fitting your eyes
Like a pair of glasses,
The past throws stones at the future,
And all of them fall on the present.
Weeping stones and laughing gravel stones,
Even God in the Bible threw stones,
Even the Urim and Tumim were thrown
And got stuck in the beastplate of justice,
And Herod threw stones and what came out was a Temple.

Oh, the poem of stone sadness
Oh, the poem thrown on the stones
Oh, the poem of thrown stones.
Is there in this land
A stone that was never thrown
And never built and never overturned
And never uncovered and never discovered
And never screamed from a wall and never discarded by the builders
And never closed on top of a grave and never lay under lovers
And never turned into a cornerstone?

Please do not throw any more stones,
You are moving the land,
The holy, whole, open land,
You are moving it to the sea
And the sea doesn’t want it
The sea says, not in me.

Please throw little stones,
Throw snail fossils, throw gravel,
Justice or injustice from the quarries of Migdal Tsedek,
Throw soft stones, throw sweet clods,
Throw limestone, throw clay,
Throw sand of the seashore,
Throw dust of the desert, throw rust,
Throw soil, throw wind,
Throw air, throw nothing
Until your hands are weary
And the war is weary
And even peace will be weary and will be.

Translated from the Hebrew by Barbara and Benjamin Harshav, in A Life of Poetry: 1948 – 1994, New York, HarperCollins, 1994, with thanks to the publishers.

Some poems I have read over and over again for years, savoring their words and rhythm, coming back to them a thousand times and experiencing them each time anew. The ninth elegy by Rainer Maria Rilke is one such poem, and it begins like this….
Why, if this interval of being can be spent serenely
in the form of a laurel, slightly darker than all
other green, with tiny waves on the edges
of every leaf (like the smile of a breeze)–: why then
have to be human– and, escaping from fate,
keep longing for fate?. . .

Oh not because happiness exists,
that too-hasty profit snatched from approaching loss.
Not out of curiosity, not as practice for the heart, which
would exist in the laurel too. . . . .

But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us.  Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing.  Just once; no more.  And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.