Category: Poetry

“Love” by Czeslaw Milosz

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry1 Comment

Love means to learn to look at yourself
The way one looks at distant things
For you are only one thing among many.
And whoever sees that way heals his heart,
Without knowing it, from various ills.
A bird and a tree say to him: Friend.

Then he wants to use himself and things
So that they stand in the glow of ripeness.
It doesn’t matter whether he knows what he serves:
Who serves best doesn’t always understand.

~ Czeslaw Milosz, New & Collected Poems 1931-2001

 

* Oops, I obviously love this one a lot, as I posted it in April 2014. Not intentionally reposted, but I’m happy I did.

“Music when Soft Voices Die (To –)” by Percy Bysshe Shelley

On By Christina's WordsIn Art, Poetry, Quote2 Comments

Music, when soft voices die,
Vibrates in the memory—
Odours, when sweet violets sicken,
Live within the sense they quicken.

Rose leaves, when the rose is dead,
Are heaped for the belovèd’s bed;
And so thy thoughts, when thou art gone,
Love itself shall slumber on.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

 

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I remembered Shelley’s poem after Susan S. recently shared the following quote as a personal favorite. I couldn’t find the author–other than that very famous Anonymous–but since it paired so well with the Shelley piece, I thought I’d run them together with a grateful wave to Susan. 

THE TIDE

The tide recedes, but leaves behind
bright seashells on the sand.
The sun goes down, but gentle warmth
still lingers on the land.
The music stops, yet echoes on
in sweet, soulful refrains.
For every joy that passes,
something beautiful remains.

Author: Unknown, found on Scrapbook.com

 

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"Ocean beach at low tide against the sun" by Brocken Inaglory via Wiki Commons
“Ocean beach at low tide against the sun” by Brocken Inaglory via Wiki Commons

“Cherries” by Barbara La Morticella

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry7 Comments

Fireweed loves the yard
and the fire that conjured it
into the light.

And the scarlet elderberry
loves the old junkpile
          it leans against.

The morning glory smothers everything
in an embrace: the fence,
the wood workbench,
the rusted steel.

Here’s a summer day that’s so slow
even the light
          moves like honey;

Daisies jump fences
          and then just mill around.

Here’s a cherry tree that’s so rich
when it offers its heart to the birds,

every cherry
          is a year of cherries.

“Cherries” by Barbara LaMorticella

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Barbara very kindly allowed us to feature “Cherries” here on Words for the Year, and even included this little bit of backstory. As I know many of you are William Stafford fans (waves to James R. especially), I thought you would enjoy her note:

I’m happy you like Cherries!   You may be interested in the back story:   I began this poem after I got back from a workshop with William Stafford (his one-week summer workshop was 1/3 of my formal poetry education!) I wasn’t able to finish it for a while (lacking Stafford’s famous ability to write a poem a day by simply saying “welcome, welcome” to everything that comes). But the last line came to me the next summer,  and I thought of Stafford… at 80,  it would be heartening to realize that every cherry is a year of cherries!  I presented it to him the summer after the workshop at what may have been the last poetry reading he gave before he died.

 

 

“Sonnet XLIII” by Edna St. Vincent Millay

On By Christina's WordsIn Music, Poetry2 Comments

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning; but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

– Edna St. Vincent Millay, “Sonnet XLIII”

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“Winter in My Heart” by The Avett Brothers

“Bright Copper Kettles” by Vijay Seshadri

On By Christina's WordsIn Poetry

Dead friends coming back to life, dead family,
speaking languages living and dead, their minds retentive,
their five senses intact, their footprints like a butterfly’s,
mercy shining from their comprehensive faces—
this is one of my favorite things.
I like it so much I sleep all the time.
Moon by day and sun by night find me dispersed
deep in the dreams where they appear.
In fields of goldenrod, in the city of five pyramids,
before the empress with the melting face, under
the towering plane tree, they just show up.
“It’s all right,” they seem to say. “It always was.”
They are diffident and polite.
(Who knew the dead were so polite?)
They don’t want to scare me; their heads don’t spin like weather vanes.
They don’t want to steal my body
and possess the earth and wreak vengeance.
They’re dead, you understand, they don’t exist. And, besides,
why would they care? They’re subatomic, horizontal. Think about it.
One of them shyly offers me a pencil.
The eyes under the eyelids dart faster and faster.
Through the intercom of the house where for so long there was no music,
the right Reverend Al Green is singing,
“I could never see tomorrow.
I was never told about the sorrow.”

Vijay Seshadri, via Poetry (December 2010)

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The poet reads his poem below:

 

Related: 

Seshandri speaks on the Power of Poetry and the written word, via CCTV: