Archive for the 'Poetry' Category
Lenten Prayer
O God,
When you sent your Spirit on the beloved Son,
A dove became a harbinger of suffering.
When he arose from the waters of baptism,
Your Spirit drove him into the wilds.
Now, in these forty days of fasting and preparation,
Remind us, we pray, of Christ’s sojourn in the wilderness.
As we hunger, bring us to your table.
As we [...]
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There is divine beauty in learning,
just as there is human beauty in tolerance.
To learn means to accept the postulate
that life did not begin at my birth.
Others have been here before me,
and I walk in their footsteps.
The books I have read were composed
by generations of fathers and sons,
mothers and daughters,
teachers and disciples.
I am the sum total
of [...]
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Poetry and the Mouth
Poetry and the Mouth:
from the blog of the poet, Annie Finch
Hart Crane by candlelight, Longfellow on a cake, and the scoop on the amazing Patricia Smith
Sitting on the back porch on a very foggy Maine summer night, reading Hart Crane by flickering candlelight to Kazim Ali and his partner, I share with them “Proem: [...]
Filed under: Effort, Poetry, Rhetoric, Sound, Work | Leave a Comment
The World is Too Much With Us
The World is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers:
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours
And are [...]
Filed under: Knotbabble, Poetry | 1 Comment
Let me not to the marriage of true minds (Sonnet CXVI)
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose [...]
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Seamus Heaney: Double Take
Human beings suffer,
they torture one another,
they get hurt and get hard.
No poem or play or song
can fully right a wrong
inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
[...]
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The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,
vacation with pay. Want more
of everything ready-made. Be afraid
to know your neighbors and to die.
And you will have a window in your head.
Not even your future will be a mystery
any more. Your mind will be punched in a card
and shut away in a little drawer.
When [...]
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God speaks
God speaks to each of us as He makes us,
Then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
Go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
And make big shadows I can move in.
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep [...]
Filed under: Faith, Poetry, Soul, human spirit | Leave a Comment
Qualling at the mighty range
of secret truths which yearn for birth, I haste
To contemplate undazzled some one truth,
Its bearings and effects alone–at once,
What was a speck expands into a star,
Asking a life to pass exploring thus,
Till I near craze. I go to prove my soul!
I see my way as birds their trackless way.
I shall arrive! [...]
Filed under: Poetry, human spirit | Leave a Comment
