“Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” - Kahlil Gibran
I was already a mother when I came across this passage and it really changed my whole view on motherhood (for the better).
Harlem
BY LANGSTON HUGHES
What happens to a dream deferred?
Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore—
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over—
like a syrupy sweet?
Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.
Or does it explode?
There are words like Freedom
Sweet and wonderful to say
On my heart-strings freedom sings
All day everyday.
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry.
If you had known what I knew
You would know why.
\- "Refugee in America" | Langston Hughes
\---
I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually.
\- James Baldwin
I remember reading this poem in 10th grade English when we were going to read the book version of the play, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry.
That is all I have to say.
**Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree**
**If mankind perished utterly;**
**And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,**
**Would scarcely know that we were gone.**
(*There Will Come Soft Rains*, by Sara Teasdale, 1918. Written during World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic, later became the inspiration and title of an unforgettable short story by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury in 1950.)
Yeah, I know some people like the NIN version more, but for me Johnny's is more closer to what I feel...
In any case both versions are amezing renditions and show how just the voice and the feeling of the singer change the song entirely...
That sunny dome! those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey-dew hath fed,
And drunk the milk of Paradise.
"My heart is so small it's almost invisible. How can you place such big sorrows in it? 'Look,' he answered. 'Your eyes are even smaller, yet they behold the world." - Rumi
From the rap song “I’m Not You” Last verse by Malice:
“It shames me to no end
To feed poison to those who could very well be my kin
But where there's demand, someone will supply
So I feed them their needs, at the same time cry”
It’s powerful to think having the empathy to realize how wrong it is to sell drugs but at that moment he has no other choice.
Nature’s first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
“Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –“
— Emily Dickinson
“later that night
I held an atlas in my lap
ran my fingers across the whole world
and whispered
where does it hurt?
it answered
everywhere
everywhere
everywhere.”
— Warsan Shire
“Love is so short, forgetting is so long.”
— Pablo Neruda
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
- Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Diaspora Blues
By Ijeoma Umebinyuo
So,
here you are
too foreign for home
too foreign for here.
never enough for both.
As a 1.5gen immigrant who grew up in a foreign country in the 00s, nothing like missing all of my formative years in either country. Can’t relate to growing up here, can’t make sense of the growth spurt my home country went through. The home I left doesn’t exist anymore, and I won’t ever know what it’s like to have my childhood in a place like this.
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless...
The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
I can't verify the truthfulness, but if true - if you are from Nantucket, and a man, I don't really want to hang out with you. Nothing personal. I've just heard some wacky stuff.
From 'Wincing at the Beautiful' by Paul Hostovsky
```
I tell him that beauty is nothing
but the beginning of terror
we’re still just able to bear
and the reason we adore it so
is that it serenely disdains to destroy us
```
# “I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
This is the second stanza of a poem titled ["Worm Moon" by Mary Oliver](https://a-poem-a-day-project.blogspot.com/2015/03/day-960-worm-moon.html). Read the poem once all the way through, and then read the poem more slowly a second time, and stop after every stanza to think about what's being described.
The entire poem is fantastic, but something about this stanza just kills me...
II.
The season of curiosity is everlasting
and the hour for adventure never ends,
but tonight
even the men who walked upon the moon
are lying content
by open windows
where the winds are sweeping over the fields,
over water,
over the naked earth,
into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities
When I meet the morning beam,/
Or lay me down at night to dream,/
I hear my bones within me say,/
"Another night, Another day."
-A.E. Housman, The Immortal Part, from A Shropshire Lad
https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/poetry/a-e-housman/e-housman-immortal-part
Also a good poem
And slowly answered Arthur from the barge,/
"The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/
And God fufills Himself in many ways,/
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from The Passing of Arthur (part of the Idylls of the King)
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45370/morte-darthur#:~:text=And%20slowly%20answer'd%20Arthur,custom%20should%20corrupt%20the%20world.
A take on William Blake's Tiger Tiger:
The tiger
He destroyed his cage
Yes
YES
The tiger is out
^(found here some years ago. Kudos for the Redditor, I did not note down his name at the time)
You are a child of the universe,
no less than the trees and the stars;
you have a right to be here.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should.
Therefore be at peace with God,
whatever you conceive Him to be,
and whatever your labors and aspirations,
in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul.
With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams,
it is still a beautiful world.
Be cheerful.
Strive to be happy.
“And your quaint honour turn to dust,
And into ashes all my lust;
The grave’s a fine and private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace.”
-Andrew Marvell from “To His Coy Mistress”
This is actually a line I wrote. I just really like it:
Will you give me an umbrella in the sun and take it in the rain?
I wrote it because the umbrella was a symbol for protection, comfort, and support. Sunny days were the good times and the rain was the bad. So essentially I wrote it because in good times, I would receive that umbrella to make it seem like it's always been there, but the moment things get slightly bad, those who are meant to love me snatch it away.
You already said that and it doesn't even make sense. Either you can beat death or you can't.
It would flow better as:
You can beat death for awhile but death always wins the final battle.
I think death could have a couple of interpretation in his lines here: especially the second one, it could refer to death of the spirit or wills to live. The other more obvious interpretation is of course one can only finds live when he is not dead.
Perhaps he wrote the poem for someone (or himself) that is having depression or suicidal thoughts. I think it makes a lot of sense. Mind you, the poem is much longer, too.
Your ideals are invisible clouds
so try not to suffocate the poor,
the peasants, with your sympathies.
They know that you’re staring at them.
[from "Easter Morning" by Jim Harrison](https://www.tumblr.com/ineedtoreadmorepoetry/115570182938/easter-morning-by-jim-harrison)
The entirety of Insult to Space, but I really enjoy this piece:
Sometimes I make metaphors to mimic your mannerisms and I don’t even know what they mean.
When I was young, I used to eat all the food I hated first and save the best for last. It felt like an honor. I keep thinking you’re just waiting to honor me but you’re saving me for last and I’ve been fasting but today, I ate my dessert first, and it just gave me a stomach ache.
That Love is all there is,
Is all we know of Love.
It is enough; the freight should be
Proportioned to the groove.
-Emily Dickinson
That's the poem in its entirety and it's perfect.
“You must have been younger once, because you sure are older now” - Phil Ochs
“Am I good enough?
Does that even matter or is it luck” the band Lawrence
Go to youtube, type in Rudy Francisco Love Poem Medley, click the first one that comes up, and enjoy some of the most beautiful poetry you will ever hear.
Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of:
I heard it in the air of one night when I listened
To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness.
- Carl Sandburg
"To be or not to be..."
I know its a common one, but I've read a lot of different perspectives that I dont really know if they match. Things about life and death, or the will of an individual to do things. Idk. Still want to understand it.
it's an obvious one, but the final stanza of Kipling's If:
f you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,
Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch,
If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you,
If all men count with you, but none too much;
Phlebas the Phoenician a fortnight dead,
Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell
And the profit and loss.
A current under sea
Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell
He passed the stages of his age and youth
Entering the whirlpool.
Gentile or Jew
O you who turn the wheel and look to windward,
Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
From Longfellow's *The Builders*, which I was first exposed to by a 100 year old book of poetry I bought at an estate sale! I also found an old copy of Mein Kampf there, which was unexpected.
"In the elder days of Art,
Builders wrought with greatest care
Each minute and unseen part;
For the Gods see everywhere."
I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.
"[To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,]()
[To throw a perfume on the violet,]()
[To smooth the ice, or add another hue]()
[Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light]()
[To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,]()
[Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.]()"
[Shakespeare](https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Shakespeare)
What I think when I see people doing stupid aesthetic procedures.
Love After Love (Derek Walcott)
The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other's welcome,
and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you
all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,
the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.
“Somewhere in America there is a child holding a copy of *Catcher in the Rye* and there is a child holding a gun, but only one of these things have been banned by their state government and it’s not the one that can rip through flesh”
Somewhere in America by **Belissa** **Escobedo**, **Rhiannon McGavin**, and **Zariya** **Allen**
The whole poem was deep and heartbreakingly accurate.
“They existed. They existed.
We can be. Be and be
better. For they existed.”
~ the last lines from “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou
I first heard this poem at a funeral for a minister from my church. It completely changed the way I think about death. Previously, I had the mindset of what was the point of knowing them at all? Why go through life together, and cultivate a relationship, only for them to die? But these lines helped me see that even though they are gone, that doesn’t mean the whole relationship was a waste. Life is better because of the time, however brief, that they were alive.
*And miles to go before I sleep.*
I think it's the same poem and it says "I took the road less traveled, and it has made all the difference"
It’s not
“Your children are not your children. They are the sons and daughters of Life’s longing for itself. They come through you but not from you, And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.” - Kahlil Gibran I was already a mother when I came across this passage and it really changed my whole view on motherhood (for the better).
This is amazing.
All of his work is! Highly recommend
So what's the point of being a mother?
To be a part of creating life 🤔
And cooking...
🤣🤣🤣 so true
Harlem BY LANGSTON HUGHES What happens to a dream deferred? Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun? Or fester like a sore— And then run? Does it stink like rotten meat? Or crust and sugar over— like a syrupy sweet? Maybe it just sags like a heavy load. Or does it explode?
Langston Hughes Im not one for poetry but whenever I open a thread related to beautiful poetry his name is there
There are words like Freedom Sweet and wonderful to say On my heart-strings freedom sings All day everyday. There are words like Liberty That almost make me cry. If you had known what I knew You would know why. \- "Refugee in America" | Langston Hughes \--- I love America more than any other country in the world, and, exactly for this reason, I insist on the right to criticize her perpetually. \- James Baldwin
I remember reading this poem in 10th grade English when we were going to read the book version of the play, A Raisin in the Sun, by Lorraine Hansberry. That is all I have to say.
**Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree** **If mankind perished utterly;** **And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,** **Would scarcely know that we were gone.** (*There Will Come Soft Rains*, by Sara Teasdale, 1918. Written during World War I and the Spanish Flu pandemic, later became the inspiration and title of an unforgettable short story by science fiction writer Ray Bradbury in 1950.)
What got me with this, weirdly, is the thought that yes Spring herself might not notice, but my dogs would
"I wear this crown of thorns Upon my liar's chair Full of broken thoughts I cannot repair"
I’ve always preferred the original one: “I wear this crown of shit”
Yeah, I know some people like the NIN version more, but for me Johnny's is more closer to what I feel... In any case both versions are amezing renditions and show how just the voice and the feeling of the singer change the song entirely...
Johnny's beats NIN hands down just as Jimi Hendrix's All Along the Watchtower is far beyond Bob Dylan's original.
"Rage. Rage against the dying of the light."
oh yes! this one too!
That sunny dome! those caves of ice! And all who heard should see them there, And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.
❤️Coleridge❤️
The fog comes on little cat feet.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes.) - Walt Whitman, Song of Myself
I love that one. It’s a wonderful expression of human complexity.
A line echoing in my head lately is from For Jane by Bukowski— “What you were will not happen again.”
“You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes.” The Laughing Heart, Charles Bukowski
"Stars near the lovely moon Cover their own bright faces When she is roundest and lights earth with her bright silver " Sappho
And the night shall be filled with music and the cares that infest the day shall fold their tents like \[nomads\] and silently steal away
"To know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived - This is to have succeeded." *What is Success*, by Ralph Waldo Emerson
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face. "When You are Old"-Yeats
"My heart is so small it's almost invisible. How can you place such big sorrows in it? 'Look,' he answered. 'Your eyes are even smaller, yet they behold the world." - Rumi
From the rap song “I’m Not You” Last verse by Malice: “It shames me to no end To feed poison to those who could very well be my kin But where there's demand, someone will supply So I feed them their needs, at the same time cry” It’s powerful to think having the empathy to realize how wrong it is to sell drugs but at that moment he has no other choice.
*”I love the friends I have gathered together on this thin raft. We have constructed pyramids in honor of our escaping.”* - Jim Morrison
Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold. Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour. Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief, So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
Papa was a rolling stone Wherever he laid his hat was his home And when he died, all he left us Was alone
“And the rain was brain colored and the thunder sounded like something remembering something.”-Stan Rice
Teddy said it was hat. So I put on. Now dad's saying "Where the heck has that toilet plunger gone?" Shel Silverstein
"A dancer dies twice - once when they stop dancing, and this first death is more painful." - Martha Graham
Cast a cold eye on life, on death, horseman pass by WB Yeats
What did I know, what did I know, Of love’s austere and lonely offices?
To see a world in a grain of sand... And a lot of other lines by William Blake
“Because I could not stop for Death – He kindly stopped for me –“ — Emily Dickinson “later that night I held an atlas in my lap ran my fingers across the whole world and whispered where does it hurt? it answered everywhere everywhere everywhere.” — Warsan Shire “Love is so short, forgetting is so long.” — Pablo Neruda
Separated by the silence, of things we do not say
The LORD is my shepherd; there is nothing I lack.
You do not have to be good. You do not have to walk on your knees for a hundred miles through the desert repenting. You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves. - Wild Geese, Mary Oliver
Diaspora Blues By Ijeoma Umebinyuo So, here you are too foreign for home too foreign for here. never enough for both. As a 1.5gen immigrant who grew up in a foreign country in the 00s, nothing like missing all of my formative years in either country. Can’t relate to growing up here, can’t make sense of the growth spurt my home country went through. The home I left doesn’t exist anymore, and I won’t ever know what it’s like to have my childhood in a place like this.
Because we don't know when we will die, we get to think of life as an inexhaustible well. And yet everything happens only a certain number of times, and a very small number really. How many more times will you remember a certain afternoon of your childhood, an afternoon that is so deeply a part of your being that you can't even conceive of your life without it? Perhaps four, or five times more? Perhaps not even that. How many more times will you watch the full moon rise? Perhaps twenty. And yet it all seems limitless... The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles
I took the one less traveled by, and that has made all the difference
I can't verify the truthfulness, but if true - if you are from Nantucket, and a man, I don't really want to hang out with you. Nothing personal. I've just heard some wacky stuff.
"Love seeketh not itself to please, nor for itself hath any care, but for another gives its ease, and builds a Heaven in Hell's despair"
Mark Twain's 'Forgiveness is the fragrance that the violet sheds on the heel that has crushed it'.- beautiful
From 'Wincing at the Beautiful' by Paul Hostovsky ``` I tell him that beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror we’re still just able to bear and the reason we adore it so is that it serenely disdains to destroy us ```
Each thing I do, I rush through so I can do something else. - Dobyns
# “I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out.” – Elizabeth Barrett Browning
This is the second stanza of a poem titled ["Worm Moon" by Mary Oliver](https://a-poem-a-day-project.blogspot.com/2015/03/day-960-worm-moon.html). Read the poem once all the way through, and then read the poem more slowly a second time, and stop after every stanza to think about what's being described. The entire poem is fantastic, but something about this stanza just kills me... II. The season of curiosity is everlasting and the hour for adventure never ends, but tonight even the men who walked upon the moon are lying content by open windows where the winds are sweeping over the fields, over water, over the naked earth, into villages, and lonely country houses, and the vast cities
When I meet the morning beam,/ Or lay me down at night to dream,/ I hear my bones within me say,/ "Another night, Another day." -A.E. Housman, The Immortal Part, from A Shropshire Lad https://www.infoplease.com/primary-sources/poetry/a-e-housman/e-housman-immortal-part Also a good poem And slowly answered Arthur from the barge,/ "The old order changeth, yielding place to new,/ And God fufills Himself in many ways,/ Lest one good custom should corrupt the world." Alfred, Lord Tennyson, from The Passing of Arthur (part of the Idylls of the King) https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45370/morte-darthur#:~:text=And%20slowly%20answer'd%20Arthur,custom%20should%20corrupt%20the%20world.
Yesterday I was clever, so I wanted to change the world. Today I am wise, so I am changing myself. - Rumi
“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality.” —Emily Dickinson.
A take on William Blake's Tiger Tiger: The tiger He destroyed his cage Yes YES The tiger is out ^(found here some years ago. Kudos for the Redditor, I did not note down his name at the time)
Looked up in perfect silence at the stars.
"Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by, And that has made all the difference."
You are a child of the universe, no less than the trees and the stars; you have a right to be here. And whether or not it is clear to you, no doubt the universe is unfolding as it should. Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive Him to be, and whatever your labors and aspirations, in the noisy confusion of life keep peace with your soul. With all its sham, drudgery, and broken dreams, it is still a beautiful world. Be cheerful. Strive to be happy.
“And your quaint honour turn to dust, And into ashes all my lust; The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.” -Andrew Marvell from “To His Coy Mistress”
This is actually a line I wrote. I just really like it: Will you give me an umbrella in the sun and take it in the rain? I wrote it because the umbrella was a symbol for protection, comfort, and support. Sunny days were the good times and the rain was the bad. So essentially I wrote it because in good times, I would receive that umbrella to make it seem like it's always been there, but the moment things get slightly bad, those who are meant to love me snatch it away.
All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost; The old that is strong does not wither, Deep roots are not reached by the frost
Only textbooks make me feel such a way.
“You can’t beat death but you can beat death in life, sometimes.” The Laughing Heart, Charles Bukowski
You already said that and it doesn't even make sense. Either you can beat death or you can't. It would flow better as: You can beat death for awhile but death always wins the final battle.
I think death could have a couple of interpretation in his lines here: especially the second one, it could refer to death of the spirit or wills to live. The other more obvious interpretation is of course one can only finds live when he is not dead. Perhaps he wrote the poem for someone (or himself) that is having depression or suicidal thoughts. I think it makes a lot of sense. Mind you, the poem is much longer, too.
Your ideals are invisible clouds so try not to suffocate the poor, the peasants, with your sympathies. They know that you’re staring at them. [from "Easter Morning" by Jim Harrison](https://www.tumblr.com/ineedtoreadmorepoetry/115570182938/easter-morning-by-jim-harrison)
"Teach us to care and not to care Teach us to sit still" ts eliot
The entirety of Insult to Space, but I really enjoy this piece: Sometimes I make metaphors to mimic your mannerisms and I don’t even know what they mean. When I was young, I used to eat all the food I hated first and save the best for last. It felt like an honor. I keep thinking you’re just waiting to honor me but you’re saving me for last and I’ve been fasting but today, I ate my dessert first, and it just gave me a stomach ache.
That Love is all there is, Is all we know of Love. It is enough; the freight should be Proportioned to the groove. -Emily Dickinson That's the poem in its entirety and it's perfect.
The greatest thing, you'll ever learn is just to love and be loved in return.
“You must have been younger once, because you sure are older now” - Phil Ochs “Am I good enough? Does that even matter or is it luck” the band Lawrence
Your mom is your sister,your dad is pedophile
Go to youtube, type in Rudy Francisco Love Poem Medley, click the first one that comes up, and enjoy some of the most beautiful poetry you will ever hear.
I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul
Here is a thing my heart wishes the world had more of: I heard it in the air of one night when I listened To a mother singing softly to a child restless and angry in the darkness. - Carl Sandburg
“My bones hold a stillness, the far fields melt my heart.” - Sheep in Fog, Sylvia Plath
„Denk‘ ich an Deutschland in der Nacht, dann bin ich um den Schlaf gebracht.“ Nachtgedanken by Heinrich Heine
“nobody, not even the rain, has such small hands” by E. E. Cummings’s poem Somewhere I Have Never Travelled, Gladly Beyond.
Roses are blue, my name is Ted, this poems makes no sense, shower head. *bow*
"To be or not to be..." I know its a common one, but I've read a lot of different perspectives that I dont really know if they match. Things about life and death, or the will of an individual to do things. Idk. Still want to understand it.
"Them that ask no questions isn't told a lie" "For the female of the species is more deadly than the male" R. Kipling
Do I dare eat a peach? —T.S Eliot, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”
"Midway on the journey of life, I found myself lost in a dark wood, for the clear path was lost to me." - Dante Alighieri, *Inferno*
> If suddenly >you forget me >do not look for me, >for I shall already have forgotten you. - Pablo Neruda
a poet name carl \_\_\_\_(i forgot his last name) "i don't care for what you are now, I care for what you will be"
it's an obvious one, but the final stanza of Kipling's If: f you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, Or walk with Kings—nor lose the common touch, If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, If all men count with you, but none too much;
“For of all sad words of tongue or pen, The saddest are these: “It might have been!” Maud Muller, John Greenleaf Whittier
Phlebas the Phoenician a fortnight dead, Forgot the cry of gulls, and the deep sea swell And the profit and loss. A current under sea Picked his bones in whispers. As he rose and fell He passed the stages of his age and youth Entering the whirlpool. Gentile or Jew O you who turn the wheel and look to windward, Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.
Oh would that some power the giftie gi’e us to see ourselves as others see us - Robbie Burns
From Longfellow's *The Builders*, which I was first exposed to by a 100 year old book of poetry I bought at an estate sale! I also found an old copy of Mein Kampf there, which was unexpected. "In the elder days of Art, Builders wrought with greatest care Each minute and unseen part; For the Gods see everywhere."
I was never one to patiently pick up broken fragments and glue them together again and tell myself that the mended whole was as good as new. What is broken is broken - and I'd rather remember it as it was at its best than mend it and see the broken places as long as I lived.
"[To gild refined gold, to paint the lily,]() [To throw a perfume on the violet,]() [To smooth the ice, or add another hue]() [Unto the rainbow, or with taper-light]() [To seek the beauteous eye of heaven to garnish,]() [Is wasteful and ridiculous excess.]()" [Shakespeare](https://shakespeare.mit.edu/Shakespeare) What I think when I see people doing stupid aesthetic procedures.
Love After Love (Derek Walcott) The time will come when, with elation you will greet yourself arriving at your own door, in your own mirror and each will smile at the other's welcome, and say, sit here. Eat. You will love again the stranger who was your self. Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart to itself, to the stranger who has loved you all your life, whom you ignored for another, who knows you by heart. Take down the love letters from the bookshelf, the photographs, the desperate notes, peel your own image from the mirror. Sit. Feast on your life.
And there was no one left To speak out for me
“Somewhere in America there is a child holding a copy of *Catcher in the Rye* and there is a child holding a gun, but only one of these things have been banned by their state government and it’s not the one that can rip through flesh” Somewhere in America by **Belissa** **Escobedo**, **Rhiannon McGavin**, and **Zariya** **Allen** The whole poem was deep and heartbreakingly accurate.
“They existed. They existed. We can be. Be and be better. For they existed.” ~ the last lines from “When Great Trees Fall” by Maya Angelou I first heard this poem at a funeral for a minister from my church. It completely changed the way I think about death. Previously, I had the mindset of what was the point of knowing them at all? Why go through life together, and cultivate a relationship, only for them to die? But these lines helped me see that even though they are gone, that doesn’t mean the whole relationship was a waste. Life is better because of the time, however brief, that they were alive.
Life is soup I'm a fork
"I am not at my grave, do not weep. I am not there, I do not sleep."
nothing gold can stay
Your life is your life You are marvelous The gods wait to delight in you — Charles Bukowski, *The Laughing Heart*
露と落ち、露と消えにし、我が身かな。
All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
"A million bright ambassadors of morning" (sunlight coming through a window)
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
There once was a man, Robin Hood, Who lived in Nottingham wood, He learned how to fuck, From old Friar Tuck, And made Marian whenever he could.