#versethursday — Public Fediverse posts

I like the sort of track that passes
out of English altogether
as through the Bronze Age bowl
of Glen Moidart, its edges cracked
by forces flooding the drove road
with wee lochans. Each excerpts
from sgurrs of Dhomhuill Beag
and Dhomhuill Mór and heaps of Norn
rimmed with mud. The wind whirples
leaf from branch where seven beeches
make a stand.. Beyond a white bull
that bears the head of Constantine,
the Coffin Road branches off
to Eiilean Fhianain, Finan’s Isle
(if road can ever reach an island).
Keep straight, until your tracks
disperse in streams and soggy moss
like final whispered wisps of smouk.
Where you stop, a fald of stane
has folded up its last sheep.
~~ 'The Rough Bounds' by Devin Johnston from 'Bright Thorn'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

For years I lived
as if my life were made of clay
or wood or even stone,
and all I had to do—“all”—
was mold or whittle or chisel
to change its shape. As if my life
were calling out from inside
a larger hunk of raw material,
of potential living. As if
the shape existed, and my work
was to reveal it. For years
I lived like that. Imagine
the absurdity of taking a chisel
to water, or trying
to sculpt it with your hands.
This is what a life is: water.
The work is letting it fill
the spaces it runs to; letting it
flow around or through the rest.
Yes, it glistens as silver
as a blade, and yes, it can drill
through stone, but it’s soft
to the touch. A life does
what water does: It goes.
~~ 'For years I lived' by Maggie Smith from 'A Suite or a Suitcase'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:
with the audience around her, quickened, hot,
her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight
around her body, she takes and flings it out
haughtily, with an imperious gesture,
and watches: it lies raging on the floor,
still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die -
Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet
exultant smile, she looks up finally
and stamps it out with powerful small feet.
~~ 'The Spanish Dancer' by Rainer Maria Rilke

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

Close the door quickly, before the green
eye of the twilight inserts itself,
shattering with spite the picture you’ve
made of tranquillity; lidlessly
stare at the fire and the flowers, at the
curtains adrift in the evening air.

Close the door quickly and shutter the
windows (else evil will enter, will
quietly smile at the pitiful room,
at the hopeful arrangement of
chairs and of books), as if time were thus
foiled—as if walls would not fall and the
books lie unread in the unending twilight.
~~ 'Green Twilight' by Jessamyn West from 'A Century of Poetry in The New Yorker'

#VerseThursday #TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry

At thirty-six
I finally stopped wanting to shower—
a caricature,
convinced I couldn’t do that right,
either.

#VerseThursday

2 years ago, almost to the day, I posted this:

#VerseThursday

Roses are red,
Violets are blue,
Cold toilet seats away from home are ok with me, I can imagine no recent sitters,
How about you?

"He begins
at the crown of my scalp. He parts the two sides like a tree

branch at the V, and I think of all the forks in the road
in all the storybooks about emerald forests, kingdoms.
All the swinging bridges we travailed. Mariners, trains, conductors."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Hairbrush by Cynthia Atkins (2023 Reverie Magazine) https://tinyurl.com/38bhhazd

"Empty mountain: no man is seen.
But voices of men are heard.
Sun's reflection reaches into the woods
And shines upon the green moss."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Deer Enclosure by Wang Wei, translated by Wai-Lim Yip from Hiding the Universe (1972 Grossman Publishers) https://tinyurl.com/y9w53btd
in 19 Ways of Looking at Wang Wei by Eliot Weinberger (1987, 2016 New Directions Publishing) https://tinyurl.com/2p95v5mk

"Our orbit is drunk in its spin, and sobriety comes
only in flashes. No one knows who we are.
We live in that freedom and peril.
Let the imagination be the beast it is
that eats and fattens on us.
But let us not believe a word it says."

#TodaysPoem #VerseThursday #poetry @poetry
In the Air by @ronnabloom (2024 Brick Literary) https://tinyurl.com/5ewvd55z

"Gentle Now, Don't Add to Heartache" by Juliana Spahr is long, and worth the time.

https://poems.com/poem/gentle-now-dont-add-to-heartache/

Found thanks to the excerpt posted Phyllis Cole-Dai's site "The Raft". https://phylliscoledai.substack.com/p/the-daily-boost-798 Phyllis edited the books Poetry of Presence and Poetry of Presence II and I read from her 3-year collection of mindfulness poems every morning. https://www.ayearofbeinghere.com/

#PoetryOfPresence #poetry #poem #TodaysPoem #PoemADay #VerseThursday #nature #Ohio #BeingHere

15/31: OBITS. by tess liem (2018 Coach House Press) https://tinyurl.com/4m7aue67

"when the big lights clunk on
& the grass-stained pitcher
walks the batter to first base

the crowd is quiet &
grief, like a swing,
hits you out of the park."

Obit.

#TheSealeyChallenge #SealeyChallenge #31Books31Days #31BooksInAugust #todayspoem #poetry #VerseThursday @poetry

8/31: A BALTIC FRIDAY EARLY IN GREY by Adele Graf (2017 above/ground press) https://tinyurl.com/39ndzn7e

"their amazing were killed to met the possible
any there after family and passed
became again front even any there Latvian
wouldn't he home
what inside prison that the visitors see
in its to it deep mind
a Baltic Friday early in grey"

#TheSealeyChallenge #SealeyChallenge #31Books31Days #31BooksInAugust #todayspoem #poetry #VerseThursday @poetry

"But the clouds here, I haven’t
yet mentioned the clouds here:
they sing these very personal songs
about wronging and being
wronged. They smoke a lot
of cigarettes. You can hear it.
And I sing along though I have
no voice. I sing with my eyes."

#TodaysPoem #poetry #VerseThursday @poetry
At Laundromats Here There Are No Dryers by Stuart Ross (2017 The Rusty Toque) https://tinyurl.com/36zz9ywc

"my mother says, look how we are astonished
            by the jails, I say, by the floors holding our reflections
knowing enough medicine, enough 
            to call the burning world back to love"

#TodaysPoem #VerseThursday #poetry @poetry
from “The World After Rain” by Canisia Lubrin (2023 Academy of American Poets Poem-a-Day) https://tinyurl.com/mvybf7wc

"I who can blink
to break the spell of daylight

and what a sliding screen between worlds
is a blink"

#TodaysPoem #VerseThursday #poetry @poetry
A Rushed Account of the Dew by Alice Oswald from Falling Awake (2016 Jonathan Cape) https://tinyurl.com/46hydytw

"Blocks filled with stories,
with people,
a community.

A past,
a present,
a future.

Here."

#TodaysPoem #poetry #VerseThursday @poetry
from Denison Avenue by Christina Wong and Daniel Innes (2023 ECW Press) https://tinyurl.com/bdfmed8t

"This morning before daybreak a thunderstorm

In the last hours before her death
her enemies came. A raccoon, that storm,
the FedEx truck manned by a gentle woman
who'd recently lost her own dog."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Stella by Michael Ondaatje from A Year of Last Things (2024 McClelland & Stewart) https://tinyurl.com/2xcx9z9n

Got a #VerseThursday of two poems I quite like, (Note: the poems are not screen reader friendly but the one that's the link to the slowdown has it performed. click that)

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/149976/obligations-2 - a Choose Your Own Adventure Poem

https://www.slowdownshow.org/episode/2023/10/27/986-eggshells - this is about shades of gray and black It's amazing to hear it read aloud

"Please let me be a blaze. I will destroy,

I mean create again this place."

#TodaysPoem #VerseThursday #poetry @poetry
Disembodied At The Botanical Gardens by Robin Richardson (2017 The Ex-Puritan Magazine) https://tinyurl.com/nhjvdapc

"Beyond the loggia, I watch

rain not fall, I watch fall not rain, often—
I am the expectation of gravitas,

a tub gelato, a deep spoon. Sometimes
I calligraphy the refrigerator."

#TodaysPoem #poetry @poetry #VerseThursday
Constellation Cannoli by Tara Mesalik MacMahon (2020 Duende Literary) https://tinyurl.com/y4m8a5js

Only a title and two lines, so far.

“nōn serviam”

my citizenship
is hush money

#VerseThursday

"A swift flow erodes one side,
while a silty ladle adds to the other.
Repeating this motion over and over,
an oxbow lake is born and a new biome
rises."

#TodaysPoem #poetry #NationalPoetryMonth #VerseThursday @poetry
A Tribute to Fractals by Leslie Thomas (2023 Consilience Journal) https://tinyurl.com/36v67nkt

"The golf links lie so near the mill
that almost every day
the laboring children can look out
and watch the men at play."

Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn
(02/04/1876 – 04/04/1959)
US writer
#VerseThursday

outside the inservile thunder rolls
when I - I -
find a verse again.

It flits on a breeze of psyche,
sweet and calm and unaccustomed
and welcome in its rarity.

#VerseThursday

"when alone,
spelunkingly in
quire for wings to
fly with, to dive dive
dive with, to trysohardto
define"

#TodaysPoem #poetry #NationalPoetryMonth #VerseThursday @poetry
Spelunk by Edie Reaney Chunn (2023 untethered magazine) https://tinyurl.com/yknp229b