For ghosts I love, from Poetry, September 2017.
from The ghost / by Dorothea Lasky
I forgot to mention that the wings were gold and green
And the winds were heavy
They held his body
Afloat in air as if in the ocean
Month: August 2017
DPF / Heaney
For the rain in Texas, which sometimes falls too little and sometimes falls so much too much, from The Spirit Level.
from The Rain Stick / by Seamus Heaney
Upend the rain stick and what happens next
Is a music that you never would have known
To listen for.
DPF / Heaney
For fathers and paper boats, from The Spirit Level.
from The Flight Path / by Seamus Heaney
A dove rose in my breast
Every time my father’s hands came clean
With a paper boat between them, ark in air,
The lines of it as taut as a pegged tent
DPF / Bishop
For somehow, it’s a Bishop kind of day, the kind of day when seals carry hymns to the ocean floor, from The Collected Poems.
from At the Fishhouses / by Elizabeth Bishop
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me. He was interested in music;
like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
DPF / Tate
For gnomes and magical thinking of all kinds, from poetryfoundation.org.
from Shroud of the Gnome / by James Tate
And what amazes me is that none of our modern inventions
surprise or interest him, even a little.
DPF / Shakespeare
For the sonnet and its ability to hold a moment, a memory, and a loved one alive forever in its tiny Pensieve, from poetryfoundation.org.
from Sonnet 18 / by William Shakespeare
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
DPF / Plath
For a favorite, from poets.org.
from Tulips / by Sylvia Plath
The tulips should be behind bars like dangerous animals;
They are opening like the mouth of some great African cat,
And I am aware of my heart: it opens and closes
Its bowl of red blooms out of sheer love of me.
DPF / Ekelöf
For the moon and the sun, from The Star By My Head.
from Sung / by Gunnar Ekelöf, translated by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström
The night tonight is a starry clear one.
The air is clean and cold.
The moon is searching in all things
for its lost inheritance.
DPF / Öijer
For a belated day and what we would say to our younger selves if we could, from The Star By My Head.
from Hold Him There / by Bruno K. Öijer, translated by Malena Mörling and Jonas Ellerström
without thinking
I had phoned my childhood
listened to the dial tone that went through
and when my mom answered
I asked to speak to myself
after a long while
a seven year old boy took the receiver
and his voice pierced my heart
DPF / Smith
For our sun, and for a poet with the same last name as our grandparents had, from poets.org.
from Sci-Fi / by Tracy K. Smith
Eons from even our own moon, we’ll driftIn the haze of space, which will be, onceAnd for all, scrutable and safe.
Daily Poetry Fragments {Semi-Daily} 