Sunday Collection 17

Today’s collection is of poetry. I’m greedy about poetry, I want to eat it, drink it, bathe in it, to pour it over myself. It can be sparkling like champagne, bitter as vinegar, sweet as honey or precious and healing as the perfumed oil at Bethany.

Dorothy Parker was the wittiest and saddest of poets. I’ve always enjoyed the surprise, irony, fun and bitterness of:

One Perfect Rose

A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
All tenderly his messenger he chose;
Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet -
One perfect rose.

I knew the language of the floweret;
“My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
Love long has taken for his amulet
One perfect rose.

Why is it no-one ever sent me yet
One perfect limousine do you suppose?
Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
One perfect rose.

From The Penguin Dorothy Parker

Christine at Abbey of the Arts is away in Ireland at the moment, and selfishly I miss her writing. So while she’s away, enjoy the poem Watermelon by Lynn Ungar, which you will find in this post. And if you enjoyed that, read another Lynn Ungar poem, Passover, here. Both from the book Blessing the Bread, which is out of print although a few prohibitively expensive copies are available.

Rumi speaks to me as few other poets do, and I have already posted his Zero Circle. Here is a video, setting music and images to “Become the Sky”.

My mind keeps re-ordering and grouping together the lines that most struck me from that poem:

Your old life was a frantic running from silence
Escape
Walk out like someone suddenly born into colour.

And to come back down to earth a bit, song lyrics can surely be poetry, even the Gorillaz’, as we see in this post at Baha’i Views. Turn, don’t burn.

Love songs are wonderful poetry. And k.d. lang’s Barefoot takes all the yearning of human love and wraps it up in her wonderful voice:

The ice will haunt you
It lays so deep
Locking up inside you
The dreams that you keep

You will always find thoughtful words at Northwoods Contemplative, and in I Still Can’t Say Goodbye, you will see a link to another beautiful poetic song.

At Milton’s blog there is often wonderful poetry, both his own and others’. Yesterday we had Cry Wolf which I experienced as outstandingly visual.

And Lucy always seems to speak in poetry, even when she is using prose. I was very moved by her recent poem the words will not come.

So many blessed words, I don’t want to stop:

Words plain as pancakes syruped with endearment.
Simple as potatoes, homely as cottage cheese.

Wet as onions, dry as salt.
Slow as honey, fast as seltzer.

my raisin, my sultana, my apricot love
my artichoke, furry one, my pineapple

I love you daily as milk,
I love you nightly as aromatic port.

From The Art of Blessing the Day
by Marge Piercy

I break this toast for the ghost
of bread in Lebanon.
The split stone, the toppled doorway.

Someone’s kettle has been crushed.
Someone’s sister has a gash
above her right eye.

And now our tea has trouble being sweet.
A strawberry softens, turns musty,

overnight each apple grows a bruise.
I tie both shoes on Lebanon’s feet.

From 19 Varieties of Gazelle
by Naomi Shibab Nye

When Jesus meets the woman of Samaria,
he does not begin by speaking to her
from the top of a pedestal,
but from the pit of his own needs - his cry of thirst:
“Give me to drink.”

From Jean Vanier’s prose/poem book The Broken Body

Just this morning I found these words by Hafiz:

God wants to see
more playfulness in your eyes
for that is your greatest witness to Him.

So perhaps a good place to end would be with one of the most playful and lyrical of poets, Maya Angelou, reading her great hymn of hope, determination and defiance, Still I Rise: