Hope Smiles from the threshold of the year to come, Whispering ‘it will be happier’… Alfred Lord Tennyson
I’m putting The Poet by Day on hiatus as of today for the holy season and New Year. I’ll be back on Wednesday, January 8 with the next Wednesday Writing Prompt.
♥ BEST WISHES FOR THE HOLIDAYS AND FOR 2010! ♥
All thanks to writer, crafter, photographer Karen Fayeth (Oh Fair New Mexico), for this:
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“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
Oh lovely chance, what can I do To give my gratefulness to you? You rise between myself and me With a wise persistency; I would have broken body and soul, But by your grace, still I am whole. Many a thing you did to save me, Many a holy gift you gave me, Music and friends and happy love More than my dearest dreaming of; And now in this wide twilight hour With earth and heaven a dark, blue flower, In a humble mood I bless You wisdom– your waywardness. You brought me even here, where I Live on a hill against the sky And look on mountains and the sea And a thin white moon in the pepper tree. Sara Teasdale,The Collected Poems
Note: I am putting The Poet by Day on hiatus starting tomorrow for the holy days. I’ll return on January 8, 2010 with the next Wednesday Writing Prompt.
♥ Wishing you much joy in the year end festivities. ♥
♥ Best wishes for the 2020! ♥
element
if the rust stained bones in my frame
where to ever get a chance again
to glide across the universe
look into Pandora’s jet white eyes
and smell the lighted stars
like people sniff the roses
my soul to keep i’d give away
to plug the holes
and pave new ways
for dusk to kiss the lonely hearts
for dawn to inter the bitter crop
from where my old roots are rotted
i’d be a renegade of love again
with bombs of ear drums
i would fight
to give a spot to everyone
in God’s angelic choir
if the sacred morning dew
can forgive me
for not being wide awake
in baptizing my sinful state
in the worldly river of life
reason being i was up all night
marching behind my sisters and brothers
blinded by the poisoned dark
with intent to guide them out
of their imposed upon madness
or if the maidens of the light
would prefer to bring me back
i would want to be
a lightning bolt
looking to correct
the wicked negatives of the cold hard ground
with the positives in the celestial clouds
to quench the crops of kindness
that are drying out
yet in all honesty
i’d be more than content
to come back as a rainbow colored bubble
making some kid laugh
“POETRY PEACE and REFORM Go Together -Let Us All Strive for PEACE on EARTH for ALL -Let Us Make a Better World -WRITE To Make PEACE PREVAIL.” Anjum Wasim Dar
I Guess
I guess it’s too late
To live in Nashville
and become a star
I guess it’s too late
To sing on the You
Can Be a Star show
Since it officially
ended in 1989.
I guess it’s too late
for that demo tape
To be found like
Lost treasure and fall
into the right hands
I guess it’s too late
To record another
Gospel tune for
my listening
Audience to hear
But it sure would
have been fun to
Be on that TV show
after my demo tape
Was accepted
I guess it’s too late
To live in Nashville
and become a star
She would have been a wild child
Wind-blown without temperance
She would have held her truth
high like a flag, running
Her feet scraped raw
Her words etched into never-ending
Wonder. She would have gulped life
Ever-thirsty Her heart, the drum of Earth
River-blood in her veins
She would never stop
Until she flew wings
Cutting gravity. Each slice pushing
Her higher. Lungs becoming sky
So vast and blue she would not know
Ending, She would have been
Free
Sonja Benskin Mesher, RCA paintings (This is her Facebook page, so you can connect with her there as well as view photographs of her colorful paintings.)
Tantrums, and cries
Capture hearts
So let it be
A bolt from blue
Say “Hi”
Well, you have got “Nothing” to say ….yeah
Then you tell me that
You don’t tell us “Sorry”
Join in our circle of friends
Let’s talk ….yeah
Let sags of your face rise and fall
More and more
Say “Hi”
Well, brace yourself to love
And make it a plan but little sense ….yeah
Smile
More and more
If you get another chance
Tantrums, and cries
Capture hearts
So let it be
A bolt from blue
Say “Hi”
O, that moment of imminent action
When a confluence of worlds intersect
All is possible
Like The Death of Socrates
As he reaches for his hemlock
Iconic cup of forced suicide
What will he do? Recant?
It would change history
But the speechifying continues
Outcome clear
“Don’t!” I shout to the painting
As if there is no known conclusion
Might as well scream at the hero of a horror flick
“Don’t go down the cellar/up the attic/outside to the shed”
And now, in modern times
I find myself screaming at the dumb teenager:
“Charge your phone!”
O that special moment
Time etched on canvas in paint
And the Universe holds its breath
As I hesitate
And then say, “Sure, we might as well get married”
Maybe not as important as Hector
About to be murdered by Achilles
Can he surrender and live to fight
Another day?
And why do I
Focus on marriage?
Surely I regret giving up
Guitar, writing, tarot
Perhaps it’s just feeling Blue
During this Red, Green and Gold holiday
But junctures appear, innocently beckoning
And I so wish there had been
A painting depicting that imminent action
Something I could have studied and thought about
Before opening my mouth
And just maybe
Unlike Socrates and Hector
That moment could have been deflected
A lone laser point harmlessly careening
Into endless space…
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Link HERE for Free Human Rights eCourse designed and delivered by United For Human Rights, Making Human Rights a Fact
FEEL THE BURN
For Peace, Sustainability, Social Justice
Senator Bernie Sanders
The Poet by Day officially endorses Bernie for President.
“Democracy is not a spectator sport.” Bernie Sanders
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
Cassandra by Evelyn Pickering (1855-1919) / public domain UK/US
Apollo, Apollo! God of all ways, but only Death’s to me, Once and again, O thou, Destroyer named, Thou hast destroyed me, thou, my love of old!
Aeschylus’ Agamemnon
Your donation HERE helps to fund the ongoing mission of The Poet by Day in support of poets and writers, freedom of artistic express, and human rights.
Link HERE for Free Human Rights eCourse designed and delivered by United For Human Rights, Making Human Rights a Fact
“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.” Lucille Clifton
Thank you for sharing your love of words. Comments will appear after moderation.
Christian reading in his book, one of 28 illustrations Blake did to accompany Bunyon’s “The Pilgrim’s Progress” courtesy of Interesting Literature / Public Domain
“I think; therefore, I am.” René Descartes
Whence it so happened that Descartes left tracks in
John Bunyan who impressed his mind on the way
to William Blake, decent soul that he was. Long ago
we were said to have souls, that mysterious interior
invisible, unknowable. And then things changed.
It was not God so much as that a new burden of knowing
came to be ours. This knowing no bloodless rule, no abstract thing.
Blake no Age of Reason pontificator: “To Generalize is to be an Idiot;
To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit,” Blake wrote.
And here in this, he particularizes, oh how he particularizes.
Christian physically bound in his reading.
Blake kindles hot the near insanity of the meeting,
As his very soul looks right into the physical.
Christian hunched over, hovering, wild eyed.
A look nearly of terror and unearthly joy woven into
the silent shouting shock of reading alone like this.
That bunch of heavy brown modern bears his back down.
Like a hunchback leering, Christian is peering,
Like a frozen loner where Christian has never gone before.
“It is so new,” he says “I am all alone.”
So alone he can’t sort himself out to see
how surrounded he is by dangerous sharp points behind.
Brown peaks assault him from afar, vulnerable as he all be.
This new man, making progress on this new journey of himself.
He is reading in his book. Reading like taking a deep plunge
into the visionary unknown Blake so admires:
“The man who never in his mind and thoughts travel’d to heaven is no artist.”
And the person who does not get hysterically lost doesn’t start to see.
Wounding, piercing brown ochre colors and open slopes
mark Christian in his place as new man trapped in himself.
Christian’s gasping face besieged by what Dr. Johnson,
early psychologist, once called “the invisible riot of the mind.”
Christian knows too much to voice any of it.
He is all lit up with himself and it. So hauntingly, quintessentially alive,
with a new thing, himself and words to see,
that we would offer him a smoke to ease the strain of his face, if we could,
alleviate his face and quiet his burden with a shared smile.
I am delighted to let you know that Linda Chown’s Narrative Authority and Homeostasis in the Novels of Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite(Routledge Library Editions: Modern Fiction) is now available through Amazon in hardcover and Kindle. Linda tells me a budget-wise paperback edition will be available in six-to-eight months.
This study, originally published in 1990, assesses a shift in the presentation of self-consciousness in two pairs of novels by Doris Lessing and Carmen Martín Gaite: 1) Lessing’s The Summer Before the Dark(1973) and Martín Gaite’s Retahílas (1974) and 2) Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) and Martín Gaite’s The Back Room (1978). Three major structural divisions facilitate examining implications of the novels for 1) feminism 2) literary narrative and 3) the lives of people-at-large. / J.D.
LINDA E. CHOWN grew up in Berkeley, Ca. in the days of action. Civil Rights arrests at Sheraton Palace and Auto Row. BA UC Berkeley Intellectual History; MA Creative Writing SFSU; PHd Comparative Literature University of Washington. Four books of poetry. Many poems published on line at Numero Cinq, Empty Mirror, The Bezine, Dura, Poet Head and others. Many articles on Oliver Sachs, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, and many others. Twenty years in Spain with friends who lived through the worst of Franco. I was in Spain (Granada, Conil and Cádiz) during Franco’s rule, there the day of his death when people took to the streets in celebration. Interviewed nine major Spanish Women Novelists, including Ana María Matute and Carmen Laforet and Carmen Martín Gaite.
I am delighted to let you know that Linda Chown’s 
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