Kenneth Koch (1925 - 2002) : "In Love with You"

                              

                                  I

 

O what a physical effect it has on me

To dive forever into the light blue sea

Of your acquaintance !  Ah, but dearest friends,

Like forms, are finished, as life has ends !  Still,

It is beautiful, when October

Is over, and February is over,

To sit in the starch of my shirt, and to dream of your sweet

Ways !   As if the world were a taxi, you enter it, then

Reply (to no one), "Let's go five or six blocks."

Isn't the blue stream that runs past you a translation from the Russian ?

Aren't my eyes bigger than love ?

Isn't this history, and aren't we a couple of ruins ?

Is Carthage Pompeii ? is the pillow the bed ?  is the sun

What glues our heads together ?  O midnight !  O midnight !

Is love what we are,

Or has happiness come to me in a private car

That's so very small I'm amazed to see it there?

The Poetry Foundation - In Love with You

Clifton Gachagua (b. 1987) : "A Bronze God, or a Letter on Demand"

 

I like to think of your silence as the love letters you will not write me,

as two sax solos from two ages across a stage, learning the languages

of kissing with your eyes closed. I like to think of you as a god

to whom I no longer pray, as a god I aspire to. I like the opening of your joined palms,

which is like an urn where my ashes find a home. The music of your lashes;

the silent way your body wears out mine.

Mostly, I like to think of you at night when a black screen of shining dust shines

from your mines to the edge of my skin, where you are a lamp of flutters.

I remember the spectral lashes-marigold, tamarind, secret thing between your thighs,

of closed kissing eyes. At night, the possibility of you is a heavy

sculpture of heavy bronze at the side of my bed,

a god. And I pray you into life. Into flesh. 

Poem of the Day, posted by The Poetry Foundation on August 24, 2014

Shakespeare : " Sonnet CXXX"

 

Shakespeare's Sonnets

Open Source Sonnets

Huggie Time

 

Anton Chekhov (1860 - 1904) : "The Cherry Orchard"

 

TROFIMOV : ... Mankind is advancing toward the highest truth, the highest happiness attainable on earth, and I am in the front ranks!

LOPAKHIN :    Will you get there?

TROFIMOV :    I'll get there. [ Pause ] I'll either get there or I'll show others the way to get there.

Anton Chekhov, The Major Plays

Translated by Ann Dunnigan

Signet Classic, First Printing May 1964

Signet & Mentor Books 1948, "Good Reading for the Millions"

Ingmar Bergman (1918 - 2007) : "Hour of The Wolf"

 

- I thank you. The limit has at last been reached. The glass is shattered... but what do the splinters reflect? Can you tell me that?

Johan Borg in Bergman's film "Hour of The Wolf", 1968

Stephen Vincent Benét (1898 - 1943)

"Come, draw your steel for the right, 

for the time wears on !

It is only a little way to Jerusalem !"

"I have seen the floating swan

And the lion, bloody with dawn,

I will make pictures of them."

Selected Works of Stephen Vincent Bénét, Volume I : Poetry

From the poem: "For Those Who Are As Right As Any", 1936

New York, Farrar & Rinehart, Inc. 1942