From The Ripe Fig
-by Rumi. "Now that you live in my chest, Anywhere we sit is a mountaintop... What used to be pain is a lovely bench, Where we can rest under the Roses." Thank you, Kelsey. I keep this one close. ![]() My lovely sister Julia found this, and it's haunted me since. Sweetness- by Stephen Dunn Just when it has seemed I couldn’t bear one more friend waking with a tumor, one more maniac with a perfect reason, often a sweetness has come and changed nothing in the world except the way I stumbled through it, for a while lost in the ignorance of loving someone or something, the world shrunk to mouth-size, hand-size, and never seeming small. I acknowledge there is no sweetness that doesn’t leave a stain, no sweetness that’s ever sufficiently sweet .... Tonight a friend called to say his lover was killed in a car he was driving. His voice was low and guttural, he repeated what he needed to repeat, and I repeated the one or two words we have for such grief until we were speaking only in tones. Often a sweetness comes as if on loan, stays just long enough to make sense of what it means to be alive, then returns to its dark source. As for me, I don’t care where it’s been, or what bitter road it’s traveled to come so far, to taste so good. ![]() Counting the Beats- by Robert Graves You, love, and I, (He whispers) you and I, And if no more than only you and I What care you or I ?Counting the beats, Counting the slow heart beats, The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats, Wakeful they lie. Cloudless day, Night, and a cloudless day, Yet the huge storm will burst upon their heads one day From a bitter sky. Where shall we be, (She whispers) where shall we be, When death strikes home, O where then shall we be Who were you and I ? Not there but here, (He whispers) only here, As we are, here, together, now and here, Always you and I. Counting the beats, Counting the slow heart beats, The bleeding to death of time in slow heart beats, Wakeful they lie. -Robert Graves |
Pauline WestPauline West's first novel, EVENING’S LAND, is winner of the Helene Wurlitzer Foundation Award and recipient of the Carol Marie Smith Memorial Scholarship for the NOEPE Center of Literary Arts. Categories
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