I stop writing the poem

to fold the clothes. No matter who lives
or who dies, I’m still a woman.
I’ll always have plenty to do.
I bring the arms of his shirt
together. Nothing can stop
our tenderness. I’ll get back
to the poem. I’ll get back to being
a woman. But for now
there’s a shirt, a giant shirt
in my hands, and somewhere a small girl
standing next to her mother
watching to see how it’s done.

-- Tess Gallagher

Image by Beaux Arts Photographie via Style Me Pretty. Read up on other Friday poems here.

From Song of the Open Road

1

Afoot and light-hearted I take to the open road,
Healthy, free, the world before me,
The long brown path leading wherever I choose.

9

Allons! we must not stop here,
However sweet these laid-up stores, however convenient this dwelling
we cannot remain here,
However shelter'd this port and however calm these waters we must
not anchor here,
However welcome the hospitality that surrounds us we are permitted
to receive it but a little while.

11

Listen! I will be honest with you,
I do not offer the old smooth prizes, but offer rough new prizes,
These are the days that must happen to you:
You shall not heap up what is call'd riches,
You shall scatter with lavish hand all that you earn or achieve...

15

Allons! the road is before us!
Camerado, I give you my hand!
I give you my love more precious than money,
I give you myself before preaching or law;
Will you give me yourself? will you come travel with me?
Shall we stick by each other as long as we live?

-- Walt Whitman

Just a little love note to send you off into Valentine's weekend. If you're interested in reading the whole thing, click here. Photo by Millie Holloman.

The Middle Daughter

via theSteward

If you threw her in the water
she would float upstream.
What if baby Moses had floated upstream,
bobbing toward Lake Victoria in his bullrush boat,
passing the transfixed laundry women,
leaving them behind in a wake of amazement?
What would have become of the children of Israel?
The middle daughter forgets,
there is always history.

Show her white, she sees black.
The problem is her vision.
From infancy she has thrown off
every color we wrapped her in:
first the pink, contemptuous,
and later even the blue, for reasons
we hadn’t the nerve to be thankful for.
She wants to wear red, or nothing.
And you should see her with her red shirt
flapping on her spindle body
like some solo flag,
marching up the river,
leading the salmon to slaughter.
She says they aren’t really dying.
She says something is born of swimming upstream
that finds its way back to the sea
and spreads like a grassfire through the seaweed
across the floor of underwater continents
and finally comes back to the very same river,
not one, but a thousand fish,
a generation of fish.
This middle daughter believes
she will make history.

--Barbara Kingsolver

P.S. Read up on other Friday poems here.
P.P.S. I am a middle daughter :)

Dark August

{via flickr}

So much rain, so much life like the swollen sky
of this black August. My sister, the sun,
broods in her yellow room and won't come out.

Everything goes to hell; the mountains fume
like a kettle, rivers overrun; still,
she will not rise and turn off the rain.

She is in her room, fondling old things,
my poems, turning her album. Even if thunder falls
like a crash of plates from the sky,

she does not come out.
Don't you know I love you but am hopeless
at fixing the rain? But I am learning slowly

to love the dark days, the steaming hills,
the air with gossiping mosquitoes,
and to sip the medicine of bitterness,

so that when you emerge, my sister,
parting the beads of the rain,
with your forehead of flowers and eyes of forgiveness,

all will not be as it was, but it will be true
(you see they will not let me love
as I want), because, my sister, then

I would have learnt to love black days like bright ones,
the black rain, the white hills, when once
I loved only my happiness and you.

--Derek Walcott

Addison's Vision

{Jose Villa}

Addison tells of spending his summer
clearing the farm his family has owned
since the revolutionary war
acres and acres of overgrown fields --
pastures and hayfields, hedgerows, forest growth --
a big enterprise for an ex-farm boy
turned minister in a flowing cassock
not handy for plowing. I've seen him lift
the bread and wine in pale hands above
the bowing heads of his parishioners.

And as he tells about his summer work
I see the chalice turn into a saw,
the handles darkened with his father's sweat,
and before that, his grandfather's, on down
the generations until the sad phrase
delivered in the garden comes to mind:
"sweat of your brow," which now is Addison's,
clearing the land so that we see the light
as it first shone on Adam, pruning turned
into a kind of hands-on ministry.

What did he see once the hedgerows were cleared?
The skies opening, divine light beaming down
on distant vistas of a promised land?
Salvation for God's sweating minister?
But he saw only what was there to see --
rolling green hills such as a child might draw,
cars moving on a distant road like beads
on an abacus, a neighbor hanging wash:
the earth released and grown so luminous
that he was saved simply by seeing it.

--Julia Alvarez

P.S. Even though next week is Wedding Week, I'll be popping in with a few pre-scheduled post... and maybe a few behind-the-scenes details from our preparations! Wish us luck!

Summer

{c/o Elizabeth Messina}

A garden between low walls, bright,
made of dry grass and a light that slowly bakes
the ground below. The light smells of sea.
You breathe that grass. You touch your hair
and shake out the memory of grass.

I have seen ripe
fruit dropping thickly on remembered grass with a soft
thudding. So too the pulsing of the blood
surprises even you. You move your head
as though a miracle of air had happened around you,
and the miracle is you. Your eyes have a savor
like the heat of memory.

You listen.
You listen to the words, but they barely graze you.
Your face has a radiance of thought that shines
around your shoulders, like light from the sea. The silence
in your face touches the heart with a soft
thud, exuding drop by drop,
like fruit that fell here years ago,
an old pain, still.

--Cesare Pavese

(Thanks, Meghan, for reminding me about Poem Fridays! I hope you like this one.)

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

{flickr}

i love you much(most beautiful darling)

more than anyone on the earth and i
like you better than everything in the sky

-sunlight and singing welcome your coming

although winter may be everywhere
with such a silence and such a darkness
noone can quite begin to guess

(except my life)the true time of year-

and if what calls itself a world should have
the luck to hear such singing(or glimpse such
sunlight as will leap higher than high
through gayer than gayest someone's heart at your each

nearness)everyone certainly would(my
most beautiful darling)believe in nothing but love

--e.e. cummings

Daybreak

{via flickr}

On the tidal mud, just before sunset,
dozens of starfishes
were creeping. It was
as though the mud were a sky
and enormous, imperfect stars
moved across it as slowly
as the actual stars cross heaven.
All at once they stopped,
and, as if they had simply
increased their receptivity
to gravity, they sank down
into the mud, faded down
into it and lay still, and by the time
pink of sunset broke across them
they were as invisible
as the true stars at daybreak.

--Galway Kinnell

On Turning Ten

{via flickr}

The whole idea of it makes me feel
like I'm coming down with something,
something worse than any stomach ache
or the headaches I get from reading in bad light --
a kind of measles of the spirit,
a mumps of the psyche,
a disfiguring chicken pox of the soul.

You tell me it is too early to be looking back,
but that is because you have forgotten
the perfect simplicity of being one
and the beautiful complexity introduced by two.
But I can lie on my bed and remember every digit.
At four I was an Arabian wizard.
I could make myself invisible
by drinking a glass of milk a certain way.
At seven I was a soldier, at nine a prince.

But now I am mostly at the window
watching the late afternoon light.
Back then it never fell so solemnly
against the side of my tree house,
and my bicycle never leaned against the garage
as it does today,
all the dark blue speed drained out of it.

This is the beginning of sadness, I say to myself,
as I walk through the universe in my sneakers.
It is time to say goodbye to my imaginary friends,
time to turn the first big number.

It seems only yesterday I used to believe
there was nothing under my skin but light.
If you cut me I would shine.
But now when I fall upon the sidewalks of life,
I skin my knees. I bleed.

--Billy Collins

P.S. This one's for Jenna. Once upon a time she wrote about loving a poet whose name she couldn't remember. I guessed Billy Collins and it turns out I was right! Plus, she has a new little bebe of her own.

A Blessing

{via flickr}

Just off the highway to Rochester, Minnesota,
Twilight bounds softly forth on the grass.
And the eyes of those two Indian ponies
Darken with kindness.
They have come gladly out of the willows
To welcome my friend and me.
We step over the barbed wire into the pasture
Where they have been grazing all day, alone.
They ripple tensely, they can hardly contain their happiness
That we have come.
They bow shyly as wet swans. They love each other.
There is no loneliness like theirs.
At home once more,
They begin munching the young tufts of spring in the darkness.
I would like to hold the slenderer one in my arms,
For she has walked over to me
And nuzzled my left hand.
She is black and white,
Her mane falls wild on her forehead,
And the light breeze moves me to caress her long ear
That is as delicate as the skin over a girl's wrist.
Suddenly I realize
That if I stepped out of my body I would break
Into blossom.

--James Wright

Pssst! Now you can check out all of your fave P&P poems in the "Previously" section.

Blackberries for Amelia

Fringing the woods, the stone walls, and the lanes,
Old thickets everywhere have come alive,
Their new leaves reaching out in fans of five
From tangles overarched by this year's canes.

They have their flowers, too, it being June,
And here or there in brambled dark-and-light
Are small, five-petalled blooms of chalky white,
As random-clustered and as loosely strewn

As the far stars, of which we are now told
That ever faster do they bolt away,
And that a night may come in which, some say,
We shall have only blackness to behold.

I have no time for any change so great,
But I shall see the August weather spur
Berries to ripen where the flowers were --
Dark berries, savage-sweet and worth the wait --

And there will come the moment to be quick
And save some from the birds,and I shall need
Two pails, old clothes in which to stain and bleed,
And a grandchild to talk with while we pick.

--Richard Wilbur

Previously:
Hummingbird
Indian Summer at Lands End
Coda

P.S. Do you guys like the Friday poems? I started posting them in April for National Poetry Month, but I can keep going if y'all are enjoying them...

Coda

{via flickr}

perhaps to love is to learn
to walk through this world.
to learn to be silent
like the oak and linden of the fable.
to learn to see.
your glance scattered seeds.
it planted a tree.
i talk
because you shake its leaves.

--Octavio Paz

Indian Summer at Lands End

{flickr}

The season stalls, unseasonably fair,
blue-fair, serene, a stack of golden discs,
each disc a day and the addition slow.
I wish you were here with me to walk the flats,
toward dusk especially when the tide is out
and the bay turns opal, filled with rolling fire
that washes on the mouldering wreck offshore,
our mussel-vineyard, strung with bearded grapes.
Last night I reached for you and shaped you there
lying beside me as we drifted past
the farthest seamarks and the watchdog bells,
and round Long Point throbbing its frosty light,
until we streamed into the open sea.
What did I know of voyaging till now?
Meanwhile I tend my flocks, small golden puffs
impertinent as wrens, with snipped-off tails,
who bounce down from the trees. High overhead,
on the trackless sky, skywriting V and yet
another V, the southbound Canada express
hoots of horizons and distances...

--Stanley Kunitz (from Passing Through, 1995)

Possibly my favorite poem of all time. What do you think?

Hummingbird

{via flickr}

Suppose I say summer,
write the word "hummingbird,"
put it in an envelope,
take it down the hill
to the box. When you open
my letter you will recall
those days and how much,
just how much, I love you.

--Raymond Carver

April is National Poetry Month. Since I am, in fact, a poet (my senior thesis was a collection of original poetry!), I thought I would share one of my favorites every Friday this month. I hope you enjoy!