the messenger

Gordon Lightfoot (1938) : If You Could Read My Mind

If you could read my mind, love

What a tale my thoughts could tell

Just like an old time movie

'Bout a ghost from a wishing well

In a castle dark or a fortress strong

With chains upon my feet

You know that ghost is me

And I will never be set free

As long as I'm a ghost that you can't see.



If I could read your mind, love

What a tale your thoughts could tell

Just like a paperback novel

The kind the drugstores sell

Then you reach the part where the heartaches come

The hero would be me

But heroes often fail

And you won't read that book again 

Because the ending's just too hard to take!




I'd walk away like a movie star

Who gets burned in a three way script

Enter number two:

A movie queen to play the scene

Of bringing all the good things out in me



. . .





"If You Could Read My Mind" by Gordon Lightfoot   
written 1969 - recorded 1970

Nevertheless, as much as I, within

my mind, could treasure of the holy kingdom

shall now become the matter of my song.

From "The Divine Comedy"

Paradiso, Canto I

Everyman's Library

The Divine Comedy

Translation Allen Mandelbaum (1926 - 2011)

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882) : from "The Masque of Pandora"

Let us go forth from this mysterious place.

The garden walks are pleasant at this hour;

The nightingales among the sheltering boughs

Of populous and many-nested trees

Shall teach me how to woo thee, and shall tell me

By what resistless charms or incantations

They won their mates.




To a Nightingale
Poems from Sappho to Borges
Edited by Edward Hirsch
George Braziller Inc. 2007



H. W. Longfellow  The Masque of Pandora 
1875

introducing Mr. Copper

<> Photography

Lisa Olstein : "Dear One Absent This Long While"

It has been so wet stones glaze in moss;
everything blooms coldly.

I expect you. I thought one night it was you
at the base of the drive, you at the foot of the stairs,

you in a shiver of light, but each time
leaves in wind revealed themselves,

the retreating shadow of a fox, daybreak.
We expect you, cat and I, bluebirds and I, the stove.

In May we dreamed of wreaths burning on bonfires
over which young men and women leapt.

June efforts quietly.
I've planted vegetables along each garden wall

so even if spring continues to disappoint
we can say at least the lettuce loved the rain.

I have new gloves and a new hoe.
I practice eulogies. He was a hawk

with white feathered legs. She had the quiet ribs
of a salamander crossing the old pony post road.

Yours is the name the leaves chatter
at the edge of the unrabbited woods.



Poem of the Day, posted by The Poetry Foundation on April 20, 2018 

Kahlil Gibran (1883 - 1931) : "Between Night and Morn"

Be silent, my heart, for the space cannot
Hear you; be silent, for the ether is
Laden with cries and moans, and cannot
Carry your songs and hymns.

Be silent, for the phantoms of the night
Will not give heed to the whispering of
Your secrets; nor will the processions
Of darkness halt before your dreams.

. . .