1. Subscriberhakima
    Illumination
    The Razor's Edge
    Joined
    08 Sep '08
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    19665
    13 Jan '19 16:49
    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 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
  2. Standard membermchill
    Cryptic
    Behind the scenes
    Joined
    27 Jun '16
    Moves
    3077
    15 Jan '19 07:49
    @hakima

    “There’s a certain Slant of light,
    on Winter Afternoons
    That oppresses, like the Heft
    Of Cathedral Tunes,

    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us
    We can find no scar,
    But internal difference,
    Where the meanings are

    None may teach it anything
    ’Tis the Seal Despair
    An imperial affliction
    Sent us of the Air

    When it comes, the Landscape listens
    Shadows hold their breath
    When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
    On the look of Death”

    —Emily Dickinson
  3. Joined
    15 Oct '06
    Moves
    10115
    15 Jan '19 22:162 edits
    Hey little bird
    With your beak pressed up against the pet store window
    There is no bird seed for you today
    Only death
  4. Subscriberhakima
    Illumination
    The Razor's Edge
    Joined
    08 Sep '08
    Moves
    19665
    17 Jan '19 16:25
    @mchill said
    @hakima

    “There’s a certain Slant of light,
    on Winter Afternoons
    That oppresses, like the Heft
    Of Cathedral Tunes,

    Heavenly Hurt, it gives us
    We can find no scar,
    But internal difference,
    Where the meanings are

    None may teach it anything
    ’Tis the Seal Despair
    An imperial affliction
    Sent us of the Air

    When it comes, the Landscape listens
    Shadows hold their breath
    When it goes, ’tis like the Distance
    On the look of Death”

    —Emily Dickinson
    Oh Emily!

    Forever—is composed of Nows—
    'Tis not a different time—
    Except for Infiniteness—
    And Latitude of Home—

    From this—experienced Here—
    Remove the Dates—to These—
    Let Months dissolve in further Months—
    And Years—exhale in Years—

    Without Debate—or Pause—
    Or Celebrated Days—
    No different Our Years would be
    From Anno Domini's—
    ~Emily Dickinson
  5. Subscriberhakima
    Illumination
    The Razor's Edge
    Joined
    08 Sep '08
    Moves
    19665
    17 Jan '19 16:27
    @thinkofone said
    Hey little bird
    With your beak pressed up against the pet store window
    There is no bird seed for you today
    Only death
    Poetry isn't always a nice, neat picture...

    Sometimes it's starkly real
  6. Joined
    06 Nov '15
    Moves
    41301
    04 Feb '19 12:55
    No man is an island,
    entire of itself.
    Every man is a piece of the continent,
    a part of the main.
    If a clod be washed away by the sea,
    Europe is the less.
    As well as if a promontory were.
    As well as if a manor of thy friend's
    or of thine own were:
    Any man's death diminishes me,
    because I am involved in mankind.
    And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls;
    it tolls for thee.

    - John Donne
  7. Subscriberhakima
    Illumination
    The Razor's Edge
    Joined
    08 Sep '08
    Moves
    19665
    11 Feb '19 03:43
    Then a woman said, Speak to us of Joy and Sorrow.
    And he answered:
    Your joy is your sorrow unmasked.
    And the selfsame well from which your laughter rises was oftentimes filled with your tears.
    And how else can it be?
    The deeper that sorrow carves into your being, the more joy you can contain.
    Is not the cup that holds your wine the very cup that was burned in the potter’s oven?
    And is not the lute that soothes your spirit, the very wood that was hollowed with knives?
    When you are joyous, look deep into your heart and you shall find it is only that which has given you sorrow that is giving you joy.
    When you are sorrowful look again in your heart, and you shall see that in truth you are weeping for that which has been your delight.
    Some of you say, “Joy is greater than sorrow,” and others say, “Nay, sorrow is the greater.”
    But I say unto you, they are inseparable.
    Together they come, and when one sits alone with you at your board, remember that the other is asleep upon your bed.
    Verily you are suspended like scales between your sorrow and your joy.
    Only when you are empty are you at standstill and balanced.
    When the reassure-keeper lifts you to weigh his gold and his silver, needs must your joy or your sorrow rise or fall.
    --Khalil Gibran
  8. Joined
    14 Jan '19
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    0
    13 Feb '19 09:36
    I love you as a sheriff searches for a walnut
    That will solve a murder case unsolved for years
    Because the murderer left it in the snow beside a window
    Through which he saw her head, connecting with
    Her shoulders by a neck, and laid a red
    Roof in her heart. For this we live a thousand years;
    For this we love, and we live because we love, we are not
    Inside a bottle, thank goodness! I love you as a
    Kid searches for a goat; I am crazier than shirttails
    In the wind, when you’re near, a wind that blows from
    The big blue sea, so shiny so deep and so unlike us;
    I think I am bicycling across an Africa of green and white fields
    Always, to be near you, even in my heart
    When I’m awake, which swims, and also I believe that you
    Are trustworthy as the sidewalk which leads me to
    The place where I again think of you, a new
    Harmony of thoughts! I love you as the sunlight leads the prow
    Of a ship which sails
    From Hartford to Miami, and I love you
    Best at dawn, when even before I am awake the sun
    Receives me in the questions which you always pose.

    To you (Kenneth Koch)
  9. Joined
    06 Nov '15
    Moves
    41301
    14 Feb '19 10:23
    Today is special.
    Though, I'm not quite sure why.
    My love for you is equal to the hours in the day, everyday...
    that we share upon this planet.
    The small things that you do. I notice.
    They say you love me too.
    And I'm safe and secure knowing...
    that you're the rock upon which I stand.
    My granite.

    - Wolfe63
  10. Subscriberhakima
    Illumination
    The Razor's Edge
    Joined
    08 Sep '08
    Moves
    19665
    17 Feb '19 17:22
    @wolfe63 said
    Today is special.
    Though, I'm not quite sure why.
    My love for you is equal to the hours in the day, everyday...
    that we share upon this planet.
    The small things that you do. I notice.
    They say you love me too.
    And I'm safe and secure knowing...
    that you're the rock upon which I stand.
    My granite.

    - Wolfe63
    That is beautiful WOLFE63

    Elizabeth Barrett Browning, step aside.
  11. Account suspended
    Joined
    14 Jan '19
    Moves
    2
    21 Feb '19 08:52
    Sometime it is about breakup and get hurt too....

    A clementine
    Of inclement climate
    Grows tart.

    A crocus
    Too stoic to open,
    Won’t.

    Like an oyster
    That cloisters a spoil of pearls,
    Untouched—

    The heart that’s had
    Enough
    Stays shut.

    Source: Poetry (December 2009) from Heart Touching Poems apknite.
  12. Joined
    15 Oct '10
    Moves
    98630
    11 Mar '19 16:32
    Among School Children
    W.B.Yeats
    I
    I walk through the long schoolroom questioning;
    A kind old nun in a white hood replies;
    The children learn to cipher and to sing,
    To study reading-books and history.
    To cut and sew, be neat in everything
    In the best modern way - the children’s eyes
    In momentary wonder stare upon
    A sixty-year old smiling public man.

    II
    I dream of a Ledaean body, bent
    Above a sinking fire, a tale that she
    Told of a harsh reproof, or trivial event
    That changed some childish day to tragedy -
    Told, and it seemed that our two natures blent
    Into a sphere from youthful sympathy,
    Or else, to alter Plato’s parable,
    Into the yolk and white of the one shell.

    III
    And thinking of that fit of grief or rage
    I look upon one child or t’other there
    And wonder if she stood so at that age -
    For even daughters of the swan can share
    Something of every paddler’s heritage -
    And had that color upon cheek or hair,
    And thereupon my heart is driven wild:
    She stands before me as a living child.

    IV
    Her present image floats into the mind -
    Did Quattrocentro finger fashion it
    Hallow of cheek as though it drank the wind
    And took a mess of shadows for its meat?
    And I thought never of Ledaean kind
    Had pretty plumage once - enough of that,
    Better to smile on all that smile, and show
    There is a comfortable kind of old scarecrow.

    V
    What youthful mother, a shape upon her lap
    Honey of generation had betrayed,
    And that must sleep, shriek, struggle to escape
    As recollection of the drug decide,
    Would think her son, did she but see that shape
    With sixty or more winters on its head
    A compensation for the pang of his birth,
    Or the uncertainty of his setting forth?

    VI
    Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
    Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
    Solider Aristotle played the taws
    Upon the bottom of a king of kings;
    World-famous golden-thighed Pythagoras
    Fingered upon a fiddle-stick or strings
    What a star sang and careless Muses heard:
    Old clothes upon old sticks to scare a bird.

    VII
    Both nuns and mothers worship images,
    But those the candles light are not as those
    that animate a mother’s reveries,
    But keep a marble or a bronze repose.
    And yet they too break hearts - O Presences
    That passion, piety or affection knows,
    And that all heavenly glory symbolise -
    O self-born mockers of man’s enterprise;

    VIII

    Labour is blossoming or dancing where
    The body is not bruised to pleasure soul,
    Nor beauty born out of its own despair,
    Nor blear-eyed wisdom out of midnight oil.
    O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer,
    Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole?
    O body swayed to music, O brightening glance,
    How can we know the dancer from the dance?
  13. Joined
    03 Apr '19
    Moves
    0
    03 Apr '19 12:40
    A Black, E white, I red, U green, O blue : vowels,
    I shall tell, one day, of your mysterious origins:
    A, black velvety jacket of brilliant flies
    Which buzz around cruel smells,

    Gulfs of shadow; E, whiteness of vapours and of tents,
    Lances of proud glaciers, white kings, shivers of cow-parsley;
    I, purples, spat blood, smile of beautiful lips
    In anger or in the raptures of penitence;

    U, waves, divine shudderings of viridian seas,
    The peace of pastures dotted with animals, the peace of the furrows
    Which alchemy prints on broad studious foreheads;

    O, sublime Trumpet full of strange piercing sounds,
    Silences crossed by Worlds and by Angels:
    O the Omega, the violet ray of Her Eyes!

    A. Rimbaud
  14. Subscriberhakima
    Illumination
    The Razor's Edge
    Joined
    08 Sep '08
    Moves
    19665
    06 Apr '19 01:10
    Always be drunk.
    That's it!
    The great imperative!
    In order not to feel
    Time's horrid fardel
    bruise your shoulders,
    grinding you into the earth,
    Get drunk and stay that way.
    On what?
    On wine, poetry, virtue, whatever.
    But get drunk.
    And if you sometimes happen to wake up
    on the porches of a palace,
    in the green grass of a ditch,
    in the dismal loneliness of your own room,
    your drunkenness gone or disappearing,
    ask the wind,
    the wave,
    the star,
    the bird,
    the clock,
    ask everything that flees,
    everything that groans
    or rolls
    or sings,
    everything that speaks,
    ask what time it is;
    and the wind,
    the wave,
    the star,
    the bird,
    the clock
    will answer you:
    "Time to get drunk!
    Don't be martyred slaves of Time,
    Get drunk!
    Stay drunk!
    On wine, virtue, poetry, whatever!"

    --Charles Baudelaire
  15. Subscriberhakima
    Illumination
    The Razor's Edge
    Joined
    08 Sep '08
    Moves
    19665
    06 Apr '19 21:33
    YOU say there is no love, my love,
    Unless it lasts for aye!
    Oh, folly, there are interludes
    Better than the play.

    You say lest it endure, sweet love,
    It is not love for aye?
    Oh, blind! Eternity can be
    All in one little day.

    —Grace Fallow Norton
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