-Chinese Proverb-
Go three days without reading and your speech will become tasteless.

Forever

My father tells me
that when he was a boy
he once crashed a ball
through a neighbor's window.

He does not mean to,
but he lies.

I know that aeons ago
the world was ice and mud
and fish climbed out of the sea
to reptiles on land
to dinosaurs and mammals;

and I know also
that archeologists have found
remains of ancient times
when men lived in caves
and worshipped weather.

Nonetheless I know
that my father,
a grown man,
coming home at night
with work-lines in his face
and love for me hidden behind
the newspaper in his hand,
has always been so
since the world began.

-Eve Merriam-

Sonnet 29

When in disgrace
with Fortune and
men's eyes,
I alone beweep
my outcast state,
And trouble deaf
heaven with my
bootless cries,
And look upon myself
and curse my fate,
Wishing me like to one
more rich in hope,
Featured like him,
like him with friends
possessed,
Desiring this man's art
and that man's scope,
With what I most enjoy
contented least-
Yet in these thoughts
my self almost despising,
Haply I think on thee,
and then my state,
Like to the lark
at break of day arising
From sullen earth,
sings hymns at
heaven's gate;

For thy sweet love
rememb'red such
wealth brings
That then I scorn
to change my state
with kings.

-Shakespeare-

Words

We are spendthrifts with
words,
We squander them,
Toss them like pennies in
the air-
Arrogant words,
Angry words,
Cruel words,
Comradely words,
Shy words tiptoeing from
mouth to ear.

But the slowly wrought
words of love
And the thunderous words
of heartbreak-
These we hoard

-Pauli Murray-

As Much As You Can

And if you cannot make your life
as you want it,
at least try this as much as you can:
do not disgrace it
in the crowding contact with the world,
in the many movements and all the talk.

Do not disgrace it by taking it,
dragging it around often and exposing it
to the daily folly
of relationships and associations,
till it becomes like an alien
burdensome life.

-Cavafy-

The Road Not Taken

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I-
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.

-Robert Frost-

Among School Children

Labor 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?

-William Butler Yeats-

What Happens
To A Dream Deferred?

Does it dry up
like a raisin in the sun?
Or fester like a sore-
And then run?
Does it stink like rotten meat?
Or crust and sugar over-
Like a syrupy sweet?

Maybe it just sags
like a heavy load.

Or does it explode?

-Langston Hughes-

Nothing Gold Can Stay

Nature's first green is gold,
Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower;
But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.

-Robert Frost-

Solitude

I love the stillness of the wood:
I love the music of the rill:
I love to couch in pensive mood
Upon some silent hill.

Scarce heard, beneath yon arching trees,
The silver-crested ripples pass;
And, like a mimic brook, the breeze
Whispers among the grass.

Here from the world I win release,
Nor scorn of men, nor footstep rude,
Break in to mar the holy peace
Of this great solitude.

Here may the silent tears I weep
Lull the vexed spirit into rest,
As infants sob themselves to sleep
Upon a mother's breast.

But when the bitter hour is gone,
And the keen throbbing pangs are still,
Oh, sweetest then to couch alone
Upon some silent hill!

To live in joys that once have been,
To put the cold world out of sight,
And deck life's drear and barren scene
With hues of rainbow-light.

For what to man the gift of breath,
If sorrow be his lot below;
If all the day that ends in death
Be dark with clouds of woe?

Shall the poor transport of an hour
Repay long years of sore distress-
The fragrance of a lonely flower
Make glad the wilderness?

Ye golden hours of Life's young spring,
Of innocence, of love and truth!
Bright, beyond all imagining,
Thou fairy-dream of youth!

I'd give all wealth that years have piled,
The slow result of Life's decay,
To be once more a little child
For one bright summer-day.

-Lewis Crroll-

The Leaden-Eyed

Let not young souls be smothered out before
They do quaint deeds and fully flaunt their pride.
It is the world's one crime its babes grow dull,
Its poor are ox-like, limp and leaden-eyed.
Not that they starve, but starve so dreamlessly,
Not the they sow, but that they seldom reap,
Not that they serve, but have no gods to serve,
Not that they die, but that they die like sheep.

-Vachel Lindsay-

Faint As Leaf Shadow

Faint as leaf shadow does he fade
and do you fade in touching him.
And as you fade, the afternoon
fades with you and is cool and dim.

A wall that rises through no space,
division which is shadow-thin
his eyelids close upon your eyes
quicksilver which bewilders him.

And then you softly say his name
as though his name upon your tongue
a wall could lift against the drift
of shadow that he fades among.

Sometimes those frontiers of the twain
may seem no longer to exist,
but why then is the breath disturbed,
and does the silver body twist,

and why the whisper of a name
as though inquiring, Is it true?
Which goes unanswered until sleep
has loosened his fierce hold of you.

-Tennessee Williams-

Covenant

If you are happy, I will give you an apple,
if you are anxious, I will twist your arm,
and if you permit me,
I will be glad to hold you close to my
heart forever and do you no harm.

If I am happy, will you give me an apple?
If I am anxious, you may twist my arm.
And if you would like to,
I would like you to hold me close to your
heart forever and do me no harm.

This is a bargain, only two can make it.
This is a covenant offered with desperate calm,
it being uncertain that lovers can drive out demons
with the gift of an apple or the twist of an arm.

-Tennessee Williams-

On His Queerness

When I was young
and wanted to see the sights,
They told me:
'Cast an eye over the Roman Camp
If you care to,
But plan to spend most of your day
at the Aquarium--
Because, after all, the Aquarium--
Till you've seen the Aquarium
you ain't seen nothing.'

So I cast an eye over
The Roman Camp--
And that Old Roman Camp,
That old, old Roman Camp
Got me
Interested.

So that now, near closing-time,
I find that I still know nothing..
And am not even sorry
that I know nothing--
About fish.

-Christopher Isherwood-

Return

Return often and take me,
beloved sensation, return and take me-
when the memory of the body awakens,
and old desire again runs through the blood;
when the lips and the skin remember,
and the hands feel as if they touch again.

Return often and take me at night,
when the lips and the skin remember...

-Cavafy-

The Young Desire It

In the land below the winds
a boy runs swift with gallows's feet.
He runs through tundra
stripped as bare
as any lover in your arms.
Could I still run I would
compete with the wind's
own shining feet.

-Oswell Blakeston-

The Interior Of The Pocket

It will not be necessary for you to
look very far for the boy.
You will probably find him standing
close to where you last saw him,
his attitude changed only slightly,
his left hand removed from the relatively
austere pocket of the blue jacket and
thrust now into the more companionable
pocket of the gray pants
so that the glazed material is drawn
tight over the rather surprisingly tenderly
sculptured thigh...

The interior of the pocket is dark as
the dark room he longs to sleep in;
It is dark as the obliteration of
something deeper than sense,
but in it the hot white hand of
the boy is closed on itself with a
betrayal of tension his eyes have
refused to betray,
for his eyes have not betrayed him.
They are somewhat softer than blue
and they stay with the afternoon that
fades about him, they takes its color,
they even fade with its color as
pieces of sky or water...
They show what nakedness is when
a thing is truly naked,
and by the very completeness of its
exposure is covered up,
when nothing being not seen
makes nothing seen...

But while you watch him from your
respectful distance,
as if he were an experiment
in a glass, held over a flame,
about to change, to darken in
color or cloud,
a motion occurs under the pocket's
dark cover:
the hot white fingers unclose, they
come unknotted and the extend
slightly sidewise, to offer again
their gesture of reassurance to
that part of him, crestfallen
on which he depends for the
dark room he longs to sleep in,
the way small animals nudge
one another at night,
as though to whisper, We're close!
There is still no danger!

-Tennessee Williams-

Monotony

One monotonous day follows another
identical monotony.
The same things will happen,
they will happen again-
the same moments find us and leave us.

A month passes and ushers in another month.
One can easily guess the coming events;
they are those tedious of yesterday.
And the morrow ends
by not resembling a morrow.

-Cavafy-

Birches

When I see birches bend to left and right
Across the lines of straighter darker trees,
I like to think some boy's been swinging them.
But swinging doesn't bend them down to stay
As ice storms do. Often you must have seem them
Loaded with ice a sunny winter morning
After a rain. They click upon themselves
As the breeze rises, and turn many-colored
As the stir cracks and crazes their enamel.
Soon the sun's warmth makes them shed crystal shells
Shattering and avalanching on the snow crust-
Such heaps of broken glass to sweep away
You'd think the inner dome of heaven had fallen.
They are dragged to the withered bracken by the load,
and they seem not to break; though once they are bowed
So low for long, they never right themselves:
You may see their trunks arching in the woods
Years afterwards, trailing their leaves on the ground
Like girls on hands and knees that throw their hair
Before them over their heads to dry in the sun.

But I was going to say when Truth broke in
With all her matter-of-fact about the ice-storm
I should prefer to have some boy bend them
As he went out and in to fetch the cows-
Some boy too far from town to learn baseball,
Whose only play was what he found himself,
Summer or winter, and could play alone.
One by one he subdued his father's trees
By riding them down over and over again
Until he took the stiffness out of them,
And not one but hung limp, not one was left
For him to conquer. He learned all there was
To learn about not launching out too soon
And so not carrying the tree away
Clear to the ground. He always kept his poise
To the top branches, climbing carefully
With the same pains you use to fill a cup
Up to the brim, and even above the brim.
Then he flung outward, feet first, with a swish,
Kicking his way down through the air to the ground.

So was I once myself a swinger of birches.
And so I dream of going back to be.
It's when I'm weary of considerations,
And life is too much like a pathless wood
Where your face burns and tickles with the cobwebs
Broken across it, and one eye is weeping
From a twig's having lashed across it open.

I'd like to get away from earth awhile
And then come back to it and begin over.
May no fate willfully misunderstand me
And half grant what I wish and snatch me away
Not to return. Earth's the right place for love:

I don't where it's likely to go better.
I'd like to go by climbing a birch tree,
And climb black branches up a snow-white trunk
Toward heaven, till the tree could bear no more,
But dipped its top and set me down again.
That would be good both going and coming back.
One could do worse than be a swinger of birches.

-Robert Frost-

Voices

Ideal and dearly beloved voices
of those who are dead,
or of those who are lost to us
like the dead.

Sometimes they speak to us
in our dreams;
sometimes in thought
the mind hears them.

And for a moment
with their echo
other echoes return
from the first poetry
of ours lives-
like music that extinguishes
the far-off night.

-Cavafy-

A Passing Glimpse

I often see flowers from a passing car
That are gone before I can tell what they are.

I want to get out of the train and go back
To see what they were beside the track.

I name all the flowers I am sure they weren't:
Not fireweed loving where woods have burnt-

Not blue bells gracing a tunnel mouth-
Not lupine living on sand and drought.

Was something brushed across my mind
That no one on earth will ever find?

Heaven gives its glimpses only to those
Not in position to look too close.

-Robert Frost-

At The Roadside Stand

when the boy smiled at me so freshly
the sea parted and opened at my feet
I could barely hear his grandfather
talking about garden vegetables
and kept looking at the bristles
on the boys neck
and at his body and at his hands
they were pale as wax
he wore a cheep blue ring
and later when the grandfather got
mixed up in his change
the boy counted it piece by piece
scooping it up and lightly brushing
my palm with his fingers
then carried my bag to the car.
his parting smile was ingenuous:
'behind what seems my eagerness,
I am there', it said, 'waiting.'
and what did I do about that!
I shied as I always do (in haste)
and I groaned as I got in the car
for the fool that I was
and I thought of the girl in a few years
who would be under those hands
naturally, his life cutting its groove
and as I drove away
I thought of all the time
between going to waste
imagining the boy and I filling
it in hot embrace
not even watching where I was
but like a drunk driving.

-John Gill-

He Swears

Every so often he swears
to start a finer life.
But when the night comes
with its own counsels,
its compromises, and it promises;
but when the night comes
with its own vigor
of the body, craving and seeking,
he returns, forlorn,
to the same fatal joy.

-Cavafy-

Warrior X

Smiling the boy fell into bed,
the warm and golden war.

-Oswell Blakeston-

Do Not Go Gentle Into That Good Night

Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at the close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in its flight,
And learn to late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

-Dylan Thomas-

My Little One

My little one whose tongue is dumb,
whose fingers cannot hold to things,
who is so mercilessly young
he leaps upon the instant things.

I hold you not. Indeed, who could?
He runs into the burning wood.
Follow, follow, if you can!
He will come out grown to a man

and not remember whom he kissed,
who caught him by the slender wrist
and bound him by a tender yoke
which, understanding not, he broke.

-Tennessee Williams-

Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow,
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.

-Shakespeare-
Macbeth

Two Lives And A Fact

He the Most Real in my world
I the Most Real in his,
our world together not quite real
where neither has the strength
to say any more than
how it is with him
and hopes that means enough,
resting our heads upon
each other's head.

-Burton Weiss-

Now, my co-mates and brothers in exile,
Hath not old custom made this life more sweet
Than that of painted pomp? Are not these woods
More free from peril than the envious court?
Here feel we not the penalty of Adam,
The seasons' difference; as the icy fang
And churlish chiding of the winter's wind,
Which when it bites and blows upon my body,
Even till I shrink with cold, I smile and say
'This is no flattery; these are counsellors
That feelingly persuade me what I am.'
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.
I would not change it.

-Shakespeare-
As You Like It

Lament For The Moths

A plague has stricken the moths,
the moths are dying,
their bodies are flakes of bronze on
the carpets lying.
Enemies of the delicate everywhere
have breathed a pestilent mist into
the air.

Lament for the velvety moths, for
the moths were lovely.
Often their tender thoughts, for
they thought of me,
eased the neurotic ills that
haunt the day.
Now an invisible evil takes
them away.

I move through the shadowy room,
I cannot be still,
I must find where the treacherous
killer is concealed.
Feverishly I search and still
they fall as fragile as ashes
broken against a wall.

Now that the plague has taken
the moths away,
who will be cooler than
curtains against the day,
who will come early and softly
to ease my lot
as I move through the shadowy
rooms with a troubled
heart?

-Tennessee Williams-

The longest day
must have its close.
The gloomiest night
will wear on to a morning.
An eternal inexorable
lapse of moments
Is ever hurrying the day of evil
to an eternal night
And the night of the just
to an eternal day.

-Harriet Beecher Stowe-

All force strives forward
to work far and wide
To live and grow
and ever to expand;
Yet we are checked and
thwarted on each side
By the world's flux and
swept along like sand:
In this internal storm
and outward tide
We hear a promise,
hard to understand:
From the compulsion
that all creatures binds,
Who overcomes himself,
his freedom finds.

-Goethe-

To be, or not to be- that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them. To die- to sleep-
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heartache, and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to. 'Tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die- to sleep.
To sleep- perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub!
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause. There's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th' oppressor's wrong, the proud man's humiliation
The pangs of despis'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th' unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would these fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death-
The undiscover'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns- puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

-Shakespeare-
Hamlet

Candles

The days of our future
stand before us
like a row of little
lighted candles-
golden, warm, and
lively little candles.

The days gone by
remain behind us,
a mournful line
of burnt-out candles;
the nearest ones
are still smoking,
cold candles,
melted and bent.

I do not want to look
at them; their form
saddens me,
and it saddens me
to recall their first light.
I look ahead at
my lighted candles.

I do not want to turn
back, lest I see
and shudder-
how quickly the
somber line lengthens,
how quickly the
burnt-out candles multiply.

-Cavafy-

Wherever there are boys
who don’t appreciate their youth,
and men who do,
there will be drama.

-Unknown-

And then the day came,
when the risk to remain
tight in a bud
was more painful
than the risk it took to Blossom.

-Anais Nin-

Addition

I do not question whether
I am happy or not.
But one thing I always keep
gladly in mind;
that in the great addition
their addition that I abhor
that has so many numbers,
I am not one of the many units there.
I was not counted in the total sum.
And this joy suffices me.

-Cavafy-

A dreamer is one
who can
only find his
way by
moonlight,
and his
punishment is
that he sees
the dawn before
the rest of the
world.

-Oscar Wilde-

An Old Man

In the inner room of the noisy cafe
an old man sits bent over a table;
a newspaper before him, no companion beside him.

And in the scorn of his miserable old age,
he meditates how little he enjoyed the years
when he had strength, the art of the word, and good looks.

He knows he has aged much; he is aware of it, he sees it,
and yet the time when he was young seems like
yesterday. How short a time, how short a time.

And he ponders how Wisdom had deceived him;
and he always trusted her - what folly! -
the liar who would say, "Tomorrow. You have ample time."

He recalls impulses he curbed; and how much
joy he sacrificed. Every lost chance
now mocks his senseless prudence.

...But with so much thinking and remembering
the old man reels. And he dozes off
bent over the table of the cafe.

-Cavafy-

The Girl Who Died

"Look!" she cried.
"I am not perfect
but still your sister.
Love me!"
But the mob beat her
and kicked her
and shaved her head;
until she saw exactly
how wrong she was.

-Alice Walker-

Desires

Like beautiful bodies of the dead
who had not grown old
and they shut them, with tears,
in a magnificent mausoleum,
with roses at the head
and jasmine at the feet-
that is how desires look
that have passed
without fulfillment;
without one of them
having achieved
a night of sensual delight,
or a moonlit morn.

-Cavafy-

Pete At The Zoo

I wonder if the elephant
Is lonely in his stall
When all the boys and girls
are gone
And there'sno shout at all,
And there's no one to
stamp before,
No one to note his might.
Does he hunch up,
as I do,
Against the dark of night?

-Gwendolyn Brooks-