Do You Ever Wish You Could find More Poetry?

I am lucky enough to have a wonderful library of poets to turn to. I have shelves full of anthologies as well as individual collections, but I often wish I had more works of contemporary poets.

There are two websites I often turn to when looking for more information on poets or their works. If you you haven't seen them I recommend you take a look.

Poets.org   &   PoetryFoundation.org

Both sites are chock full of, not only poetry, but also a wealth of information on the authors and their lives. I've learned a lot from both of these sites, and have even been surprised a few times.

Role Models Are Important

Quote of the Day

Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends.

  - J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Sympathy

- Paul Laurence Dunbar

 

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!

    When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;   

When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,   

And the river flows like a stream of glass;

    When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,   

And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—

I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing

    Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;   

For he must fly back to his perch and cling   

When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;

    And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars   

And they pulse again with a keener sting—

I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,

    When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—

When he beats his bars and he would be free;

It is not a carol of joy or glee,

    But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,   

But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—

I know why the caged bird sings!

from: Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Copyright 2004.

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

MOMA Is Online!

Hey! Guess what!  . . .

The Museum of Modern Art Has Released, Online, Every Exhibit Since 1929, Free!

Putting their exhibits online enables many people to experience them who wouldn't otherwise be able. It also allows for repeat visits and, if something catches your eye, a little fangirling (or fanboying).

It's A Garden Party!

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and was then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

If anyone would like to share their own gardening adventures with me 
- large or small, inside or out -
 I would love to see them.

Just leave a link to your post in the comments.

~

Oranges!

Last year our little three and a half foot Orange tree gave us, what was for it, a bumper crop. We picked seven lovely, sweet Oranges. This year the tree has only four. My reading tells me that it is a natural cycle for trees to alternate large and small harvests.

Here you can see another California Poppy sprouting next to an Agave. It isn't ready to bloom yet and I wonder how long into Fall/Winter they will persist. Maybe they'll make it all the way to next Spring.

I found this little Dragonfly nestled in the Bougainvillea when I went out to water early Wednesday morning. You can't tell from the picture, but he was about six inches long and had a wing span a little longer. It was about fifty degrees and he wasn't really feeling like getting up. He stayed there for another couple of hours then left. I guess everyone slows down when the weather cools.

The dragonfly
can't quite land
on that blade of grass.

- Matsuo Basho

Are You Looking to Diversify Your Reading a Bit?

I'd like to thank E. Ce Miller for this great list of poets.

Her post on Bustle, {12 New Must-Read Poetry Collections By Poets Of Color}, offers something for everyone.

I've been trying to diversify my own reading list and intend to work my way through this list.

She provides a review of each book, a cover picture, and a link to buy it. Some of the choices are:

* How Much We Must Have Looked Like Stars To Stars by Alysia Nicole Harris 

* Unbearable Splendor by Sun Yung Shin *

* The Black Maria by Aracelis Girmay *

* Landscape with Headless Mama: Poems by Jennifer Givhan *

* Blackacre: Poems by Monica Youn *

* Olio by Tyehimba Jess *

Click on the {name of the article above} to read her post and start something new. Happy reading. Oh, please come back and share your thoughts on what you read. I'd love to hear them.

Lingering

- Lisa Zaran

after, when you are driving
75 miles one way just to get to her
and her wind-touched hair,
bleached white by the September
sun, the gray sky coughing up clouds,
that is when the doubts surface,
hard as stones.


it is late afternoon by the time you arrive,
the storm has already been through here.

you are not in your own element.

you are a runaway.


but, then she is there, standing right in front
of you, wet with rain, slender as a branch.

you watch as she makes her way over
and your heart gardens, rupturing red.


from: Lily, Volume 1, Issue 8, July 2004.
Copyright 2004.

Quote of the Day

Your greatest responsibility is to use your voice, for there are so many people, too many people, in our world who are never heard - even when they scream. 

- Cleo Wade

The Return

- Philip Levine

All afternoon my father drove the country roads
between Detroit and Lansing.
What he was looking for
I never learned, no doubt because he never knew himself,
though he would grab any unfamiliar side road
and follow where it led past fields of tall sweet corn
in August or in winter those of frozen sheaves.

Often he'd leave the Terraplane beside the highway
to enter the stunned silence of mid-September,
his eyes cast down for a sign, the only music
his own breath or the wind tracking slowly through
the stalks or riding above the barren ground.
Later
he'd come home, his dress shoes coated with dust or mud,
his long black overcoat stained or tattered
at the hem, sit wordless in his favorite chair,
his necktie loosened, and stare at nothing.
At first
my brothers and I tried conversation, questions
only he could answer: Why had he gone to war?
Where did he learn Arabic? Where was his father?
I remember none of this.
I read it all later,
years later as an old man, a grandfather myself,
in a journal he left my mother with little drawings
of ruined barns and telephone poles, receding
toward a future he never lived, aphorisms
from Montaigne, Juvenal, Voltaire, and perhaps a few
of his own: "He who looks for answers finds questions.
"
Three times he wrote, "I was meant to be someone else,"
and went on to describe the perfumes of the damp fields.

"It all starts with seeds," and a pencil drawing
of young apple trees he saw somewhere or else dreamed.


I inherited the book when I was almost seventy
and with it the need to return to who we were.

In the Detroit airport I rented a Taurus;
the woman at the counter was bored or crazy:
Did I want company? she asked; she knew every road
from here to Chicago.
She had a slight accent,
Dutch or German, long black hair, and one frozen eye.

I considered but decided to go alone,
determined to find what he had never found.

Slowly the autumn morning warmed, flocks of starlings
rose above the vacant fields and blotted out the sun.

I drove on until I found the grove of apple trees
heavy with fruit, and left the car, the motor running,
beside a sagging fence, and entered his life
on my own for maybe the first time.
A crow welcomed
me home, the sun rode above, austere and silent,
the early afternoon was cloudless, perfect.

When the crow dragged itself off to another world,
the shade deepened slowly in pools that darkened around
the trees; for a moment everything in sight stopped.

The wind hummed in my good ear, not words exactly,
not nonsense either, nor what I spoke to myself,
just the language creation once wakened to.

I took off my hat, a mistake in the presence
of my father's God, wiped my brow with what I had,
the back of my hand, and marveled at what was here:
nothing at all except the stubbornness of things.

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

September

- Hilaire Belloc



Lo! a ripe sheaf of many golden days
Gleaned by the year in autumn's harvest ways,
With here and there, blood-tinted as an ember,
Some crimson poppy of a late delight
Atoning in its splendor for the flight
Of summer blooms and joys­
This is September.

It's A Garden Party! - What Season Is It Now?

This feature, originally known as Saturday Farmer's Market, was created by Heather at Capricious Reader, and was then hosted by Chris at Stuff as Dreams are Made on.

If anyone would like to share their own gardening adventures with me 
- large or small, inside or out -
 I would love to see them.

Just leave a link to your post in the comments.

~

The Cape Honeysuckle is filling in is newly vacated bed nicely. I plan to let it do it's own thing with only minimal interference from me. Right on cue the beautiful deep salmon blooms are covering the the bush and signaling September and Autumn.

However . . .

The Bougainvillea is not ready to give up on Summer yet. It actually got a late start this year, but seems intent on making up for lost time by hanging on through the Fall.

And as if that is not enough . . .

Yes. This picture was taken in the morning so the flowers are not open yet, but those are California Poppies you are seeing next to the fallen leaves. It's a new, young plant and they are all over the yard. I don't know how to break it to the poor little guys that it isn't Spring.

So, at this time I have three seasons of flowers blooming.

The Crepe Myrtle has also never actually finished blooming this year. Usually it blooms all at once, then drops all the petals. This year it has bloomed a little all summer and dropped some petals all summer. But this time of year when it should start dropping leaves it is still half full of flowers.

I guess it's safe to say that my garden is confused this year. I just hope that doesn't set it up for too much damage this Winter and next Summer.

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.

Kilt Monday!

'Cause let's face it,

Mondays can be so rough, hard, difficult.