#poetry – @fewthistle on Tumblr

A Letter from Home She sends me news of blue jays, frost, Of stars and now the harvest moon That rides above the stricken hills. Lightly, she speaks of cold, of pain, And lists what is already lost. Here where my life seems hard and slow, I read of glowing melons piled Beside the door, and baskets filled With fennel, rosemary and dill, While all she could not gather in Or hid in leaves, grow black and falls. Here where my life seems hard and strange, I read her wild excitement when Stars climb, frost comes, and blue jays sing. The broken year will make no change Upon her wise and whirling heart; - She knows how people always plan To live their lives, and never do. She will not tell me if she cries. I touch the crosses by her name; I fold the pages as I rise, And tip the envelope, from which Drift scraps of borage, woodbine, rue.

Mary Oliver

#poetry #women poets #mary oliver

fewthistle

No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed; Lay that on your heart, My young angry dear; This truth, this hard and precious stone, Lay it on your hot cheek, Let it hide your tear. Hold it like a crystal When you are alone And gaze in the depths of the icy stone. Long, look long and you will be blessed: No one worth possessing Can be quite possessed.

Sara Teasdale

#National Poetry Month #poetry #sara teasdale #women poets

fewthistle

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. Tell me about your despair, yours, and I will tell you mine. Meanwhile the world goes on. Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain are moving across the landscapes, over the prairies and the deep trees, the mountains and the rivers. Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air, are heading home again. Whoever you are, no matter how lonely, the world offers itself to your imagination, calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -- over and over announcing your place in the family of things.

Mary Oliver

#National Poetry Month #mary oliver #poetry

fewthistle

The sunlight on the garden Hardens and grows cold, We cannot cage the minute Within its nets of gold; When all is told We cannot beg for pardon. Our freedom as free lances Advances towards its end; The earth compels, upon it Sonnets and birds descend; And soon, my friend, We shall have no time for dances. The sky was good for flying Defying the church bells And every evil iron Siren and what it tells: The earth compels, We are dying, Egypt, dying And not expecting pardon, Hardened in heart anew, But glad to have sat under Thunder and rain with you, And grateful too For sunlight on the garden.

Louis MacNeice

#poetry #louis macneice

fewthistle reblogged

darkbloomiana

therumpus

I went to dig for falling stars alone in a shadowed field I sifted the dappled dome of air for the cascade promised once in a lifetime I saw only the stillness in-between but realized how sleepless the night is — blinking satellites, tower beacons, endless threading airplane flash and glimmering, impatient faroff worlds. I did see one, maybe it was part of the shower maybe it was falling anyway slashed majestically across the arc of sky in one brushstroke burning itself out I could see why they once thought this was Mercury, setting emptiness on fire as he trailed away taking what he had to tell Mercury, the messenger Why do we think we ask the stars for things?

Perseid meteors, 2015 by Adam McGovern for National Poetry Month: Day 3. (via therumpus)

Source: therumpus.net

#poetry #national poetry month #adam mcgovern

fewthistle reblogged

larmoyante

You will hear thunder and remember me, and think: she wanted storms.

Anna Akhmatova (via larmoyante)

#poetry #anna akhmatova

fewthistle

"February 29” An extra day— Like the painting's fifth cow, who looks out directly, straight toward you, from inside her black and white spots. An extra day— Accidental, surely: the made calendar stumbling over the real as a drunk trips over a threshold too low to see. An extra day— With a second cup of black coffee. A friendly but businesslike phone call. A mailed-back package. Some extra work, but not too much— just one day’s worth, exactly. An extra day— Not unlike the space between a door and its frame when one room is lit and another is not, and one changes into the other as a woman exchanges a scarf. An extra day— Extraordinarily like any other. And still there is some generosity to it, like a letter re-readable after its writer has died. Jane Hirshfield

#poetry #jane hirshfield #leap day

fewthistle

Mary Oliver

#mary oliver #poetry

fewthistle

Heart to Heart It's neither red nor sweet. It doesn't melt or turn over, break or harden, so it can't feel pain, yearning, regret. It doesn't have a tip to spin on, it isn't even shapely— just a thick clutch of muscle, lopsided, mute. Still, I feel it inside its cage sounding a dull tattoo: I want, I want— but I can't open it: there's no key. I can't wear it on my sleeve, or tell you from the bottom of it how I feel. Here, it's all yours, now— but you'll have to take me, too.

#poetry #national poetry day #Rita Dove

fewthistle

When Death Comes When death comes like the hungry bear in autumn; when death comes and takes all the bright coins from his purse to buy me, and snaps the purse shut; when death comes like the measle-pox when death comes like an iceberg between the shoulder blades, I want to step through the door full of curiosity, wondering: what is it going to be like, that cottage of darkness? And therefore I look upon everything as a brotherhood and a sisterhood, and I look upon time as no more than an idea, and I consider eternity as another possibility, and I think of each life as a flower, as common as a field daisy, and as singular, and each name a comfortable music in the mouth, tending, as all music does, toward silence, and each body a lion of courage, and something precious to the earth. When it’s over, I want to say all my life I was a bride married to amazement. I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms. When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument. I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Mary Oliver

#poetry #mary oliver

fewthistle

Mornings at Blackwater For years, every morning, I drank from Blackwater Pond. It was flavored with oak leaves and also, no doubt, the feet of ducks. And always it assuaged me from the dry bowl of the very far past. What I want to say is that the past is the past, and the present is what your life is, and you are capable of choosing what that will be, darling citizen. So come to the pond, or the river of your imagination, or the harbor of your longing, and put your lips to the world. And live your life.

Mary Oliver

(Happy 80th Birthday, Mary Oliver and thank you)

#poetry #mary oliver

fewthistle

For my ways are strange ways and new ways and old ways, And deep ways and steep ways and high ways and low; I'm at home and at ease on a track that I know not, And restless and lost on a road that I know.

Henry Lawson

#quotes #poetry #henry lawson

fewthistle

love is the voice under all silences, the hope which has no opposite in fear; the strength so strong mere force is feebleness: the truth more first than sun more last than star.

e.e. cummings

#quotes #poetry #aprilpoetrymonth #ee cummings #love

fewthistle

The Whistler All of a sudden she began to whistle. By all of a sudden I mean that for more than thirty years she had not whistled. It was so thrilling. At first I wondered, who was in the house, what stranger? I was upstairs reading, and she was downstairs. As from the throat of a wild cheerful bird, not caught but visiting, the sounds warbled and slid and doubled back and larked and soared. Finally I said, Is that you? Is that you whistling? Yes, she said. I used to whistle, a long time ago. Now I see I can still whistle. And cadence after cadence she strolled through the house, whistling. I know her so well, I think. I thought. Elbow and ankle.. Mood and desire. Anguish and frolic. Anger too. And the devotions. And for all that, do we even begin to know each other? Who is this I’ve been living with for thirty years? This clear, dark, lovely whistler?

Mary Oliver

#poetry #mary oliver

fewthistle

Sorrow like a ceaseless rain Beats upon my heart. People twist and scream in pain,— Dawn will find them still again; This has neither wax nor wane, Neither stop nor start. People dress and go to town; I sit in my chair. All my thoughts are slow and brown: Standing up or sitting down Little matters, or what gown Or what shoes I wear.

Edna St. Vincent Millay

#millay #Edna St. Vincent Millay #poetry

fewthistle

...How many nights must it take one such as me to learn that we aren't, after all, made from that bird that flies out of its ashes, that for us as we go up in flames, our one work is to open ourselves, to be the flames?

Galway Kinnell, from "Another Night in Ruins"

#quotes #poetry #galway kinnell #RIP

fewthistle

The owl who comes through the dark to sit in the black boughs of the apple tree and stare down the hook of his beak, dead silent, and his eyes, like two moons in the distance, soft and shining under their heavy lashes- like the most beautiful life- is thinking of nothing as he watches and waits to see what might appear, briskly, out of the seamless, deep winter- out of the teeming world below- and if I wish the owl luck, and I do, what am I wishing for that other soft life, climbing through the snow? What we must do, I suppose is to hope the world keeps its balance: what we are to do, however, with our hearts waiting and watching-truly I do not know.

Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume 2

#poems #poetry #mary oliver