Repetitions

THEY are crying salt tears
Over the beautiful beloved body
Of Inez Milholland,
Because they are glad she lived,
Because she loved open-armed,
Throwing love for a cheap thing
Belonging to everybody—
Cheap as sunlight,
And morning air.

-Carl Sandburg (from Cornhuskers)

An Excerpt

With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this
Calling

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
Through the unknown, unremembered gate
When the last of earth left to discover
Is that which was the beginning;
At the source of the longest river
The voice of the hidden waterfall
And the children in the apple-tree
Not known, because not looked for
But heard, half-heard, in the stillness
Between two waves of the sea.
Quick now, here, now, always—
A condition of complete simplicity
(Costing not less than everything)
And all shall be well and
All manner of thing shall be well
When the tongues of flame are in-folded
Into the crowned knot of fire
And the fire and the rose are one.

-T. S. Eliot (from Little Gidding)

read the whole poem here- http://www.tristan.icom43.net/quartets/gidding.html

Writing

My words are stillborn
coming out fast and sticking to my tounge
like a longjumper who stumbles as
he leaps and falls-
face down in the sand.
But every so often a breath
bears incandescence, light
impervious to the smoke
that billows from my throat.

Every Grain Of Sand

In the time of my confession, in the hour of my deepest need
When the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every newborn seed.
There’s a dying voice within me reaching out somewhere
Toiling in the danger and in the morals of despair.

Don’t have the inclination to look back on any mistake.
Like Cain, I now behold this chain of events that I must break.
In the fury of the moment I can see the Master’s hand.
In every leaf that trembles, in every grain of sand.

Oh, the flowers of indulgence and the weeds of yesteryear.
Like criminals, they have choked the breath of conscience and good cheer.
But the sun beat down upon the steps of time to light the way
To ease the pain of idleness and the memory of decay.

I gaze into the doorway of temptation’s angry flame
And every time I pass that way I always hear my name.
Then onward in my journey I come to understand
That every hair is numbered, like every grain of sand.

I have gone from rags to riches in the sorrow of the night
In the violence of a summer’s dream, in the chill of a wintry night
In the bitter dance of loneliness fading into space
In the broken mirror of innocence on each forgotten face.

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there’s someone there, other times it’s only me.
I am hanging in the balance of a perfect finished plan
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand.

-Bob Dylan

John Steinbeck’s Dedication From East Of Eden

Dear Pat,
You came upon me carving some kind of little figure out of wood and you said, “Why don’t you make something for me?”
I asked you what you wanted, and you said, “A box.”
“What for?”
“To put things in.”
“What kind of things?”
“Whatever you have,” you said.
Well, here’s your box. Nearly everything I have is in it, and it is not full. Pain and excitement are in it, and feeling good or bad and evil thoughts and good thoughts- the pleasure of design and some despair and the indescribable joy of creation.
And on top of these are all the gratitude and love I have for you.
And still the box is not full.

JOHN

Lines Written In A Deli

Easy metaphores come
in bulk, in cases of 24
like coca-cola,
but I seek the lone white blossom
in a field of red and yellow.

I am but a greasy counter top,
wanting to be clean, to become
something again-
a forgotten smile
suddenly remembered,
an authortiative love
at once both lost and found.
Hear my God my cry, my self-silenced
imagination,
my empty-bottle-self
smashed on a sidewalk.

The washed up punk-rock
singer is my cousin;
the lonesome child,
a guitar in his hands
a wanting in his soul- he
is both my brother and my son.

Forgiveness is innocence realized-
to be made more truly a child
than ever you were.
It is a story
passed down from ages past,
when justice had no foil and
hate no antagonist. And
now you smile

Absolution laughs.

There is hope for me yet.
There is hope for me yet.

An Excerpt

i cannot make
your past disappear

only rabbits, my love,
only rabbits

depleted memory banks
have grounded our emotional economy

we have been forced
to create a new currency

one that will truly allow us
to love our neighbors
for reasons beyond giult and pity

i have offered myself
to the inkwell of the wordsmith
that i might be shaped
into new terms of being

-Saul Williams (from Said the Shotgun to the Head)

Introduction to Poetry

I ask them to take a poem
and hold it up to the light
like a color slide

or press an ear against its hive.

I say drop a mouse into a poem
and watch him probe his way out,

or walk inside the poem’s room
and feel the walls for a light switch.

I want them to waterski
across the surface of a poem
waving at the author’s name on the shore.

But all they want to do
is tie the poem to a chair with rope
and torture a confession out of it.

They begin beating it with a hose
to find out what it really means.

-Billy Collins (from The Apple That Astonished Paris)

From Crime And Punishment

He moved away at last, not
remembering where he was; but when he got into the middle of the
square an emotion suddenly came over him, overwhelming him body and
mind.
He suddenly recalled Sonia’s words, “Go to the cross roads, bow down
to the people, kiss the earth, for you have sinned against it too, and
say aloud to the whole world, ‘I am a murderer.’” He trembled,
remembering that. And the hopeless misery and anxiety of all that
time, especially of the last hours, had weighed so heavily upon him
that he positively clutched at the chance of this new unmixed,
complete sensation. It came over him like a fit; it was like a
single spark kindled in his soul and spreading fire through him.
Everything in him softened at once and the tears started into his
eyes. He fell to the earth on the spot….
He knelt down in the middle of the square, bowed down to the
earth, and kissed that filthy earth with bliss and rapture. He got
up and bowed down a second time.

-Dostoyevsky

The Need to Simplify

The hardest thing for me to do is to write. There seem to be so many claims on my time that it becomes almost impossible to stop to think, let alone put words dow