So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,

And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds

"From the Dark Tower"

- Countee Cullen

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder if I have made of my life something particular, and real. 

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened, or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.”

— Mary Oliver

My Secret Identity Is

The room is empty,

And the window is open.

- Charles Simic 

 

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet

 - Gerard Manley Hopkins

I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to withdraw from the tumult of cemeteries.

I want to sleep the dream of that child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

I don't want to hear again that the dead do not lose their blood,

that the putrid mouth goes on asking for water.

I don't want to learn of the tortures of the grass,

nor of the moon with a serpent's mouth

that labors before dawn.

I want to sleep awhile,

awhile, a minute, a century;

but all must know that I have not died;

that there is a stable of gold in my lips;

that I am the small friend of the West wing;

that I am the intense shadows of my tears.

Cover me at dawn with a veil,

because dawn will throw fistfuls of ants at me,

and wet with hard water my shoes

so that the pincers of the scorpion slide.

For I want to sleep the dream of the apples,

to learn a lament that will cleanse me to earth;

for I want to live with that dark child

who wanted to cut his heart on the high seas.

Gacela Of The Dark Death Poem by Federico García Lorca

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,

And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pool singing at night,

And wild plum-trees in tremulous white;

Robins will wear their feathery fire

Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one

Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree

If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,

Would scarcely know that we were gone.

- Sara Teasdale

I know the stars by their names,

Aldebaran, Altair,

And I know the path they take

Up heaven's broad blue stair.

I know the secrets of men

By the look of their eyes,

Their gray thoughts, their strange thoughts

Have made me sad and wise. 

- Sara Teasdale

“Like you, like stars, I am retreating year by year, and these rooms seem enough: midnight to north and south, and the mirror I study from this bed filled, in its upper reaches, with silvered light, vacant. 

bright Absentee

Like a fontanel, Emily, like a door, my face, yours, closing.

- Late Conversation 

Mark Doty

“I am something supernatural not exactly god, ghost, spirit, angel, principle or element – There is no term for it in English.”

 - Anne Carson

always fugitive, always near

always concealed, always disdainful

always leaving, always untouched

always in black, always dreaming

always the bitter flower

always the night, always concealed

always fugitive, always caged

always your face

always the bitter flower

of your lips, always your bed

always near, always fleeing

always waiting, always waiting

always calling to you

always the night deepens

always the night

always fugitive, always near”

I keep following this sort of hidden river of my life, you know, whatever the topic or impulse which comes, I follow it along trustingly. And I don't have any sense of its coming to a kind of crescendo, or of its petering out either. It is just going steadily along. 

- Willam Stafford

Our children are buried under the rubble

Release the hostages!

You are bombing our hospitals

Release the hostages!

You are blowing up our schools

Release the hostages!

There is not enough water or food

or even fuel

Release the hostages!

There is no milk for the newborns

Release the hostages!

or sanitary napkins for women

Release the hostages!

You also have thousands of hostages

in your prisons for years.

Release the hostages!

You are killing us

Release the hostages!

You are killing your hostages

Release the hostages!

Can you hear us?

Release the hostages!

- Mosab Abu Toha

Misery and Splendor

Summoned by conscious recollection, she

would be smiling, they might be in a kitchen talking,

before or after dinner. But they are in this other room,

the window has many small panes, and they are on a couch

embracing. He holds her as tightly   

as he can, she buries herself in his body.

Morning, maybe it is evening, light

is flowing through the room. Outside,

the day is slowly succeeded by night,

succeeded by day. The process wobbles wildly

and accelerates: weeks, months, years. The light in the room

does not change, so it is plain what is happening.

They are trying to become one creature,

and something will not have it. They are tender

with each other, afraid

their brief, sharp cries will reconcile them to the moment

when they fall away again. So they rub against each other,

their mouths dry, then wet, then dry.

They feel themselves at the center of a powerful

and baffled will. They feel

they are an almost animal,

washed up on the shore of a world—

or huddled against the gate of a garden—

to which they can’t admit they can never be admitted.

- Robert Haas

Time says “Let there be” 

every moment and instantly 

there is space and the radiance 

of each bright galaxy. 

And eyes beholding radiance. 

And the gnats’ flickering dance. 

And the seas’ expanse. 

And death, and chance. 

Time makes room 

for going and coming home 

and in time’s womb 

begins all ending. 

Time is being and being 

time, it is all one thing, 

the shining, the seeing, 

the dark abounding.

Hymn to Time - Ursula K. Le Guin

Alone 

after the fireworks 

it's dark

- Masaoka Shiki 

I hear a heavy knocking 

In the midnight river 

Something I've never known 

Is coming home 

- Thomas McGrath

Something old and tyrannical burning there.

(Not like a wood fire which is only

The end of a summer, or a life)

But something of darkness: heat

From the time before there was fire.

And I have come here

To warm that blackness into forms of light,

To set free a captive prince

From the sunken kingdom of the father coal.

A warming company of the cold-blooded–

These carbon serpents of bituminous gardens,

These inflammable tunnels of dead song from the black pit,

This sparkling end of the great beasts, these blazing

Stone flowers diamond fire incandescent fruit.

And out of all that death, now,

At midnight, my love and I are riding

Down the old high roads of inexhaustible light.

A Coal Fire in Winter - Thomas McGrath

by the side of the road

 

 I saw myself

a ring of bone

in the clear stream

of all of it

 

and vowed,

always to be open to it

that all of it

might flow through

 

and then heard

“ring of bone” where

ring is what a

 

bell does

(I Saw Myself) Lew Welch