When my eyes are weeds,
And my lips are petals, spinning
Down the wind that has beginning
Where the crumpled beeches start
In a fringe of salty reeds;
When my arms are elder-bushes,
And the rangy lilac pushes
Upward, upward through my heart; Read more about August
Written by Lady Mary Mortley Montagu in July, in an arbour
Methinks she goes to meet a lover. Read more about A Hymn to the Moon
May 24, 1980 must have been Joseph Brodsky's birthday. Looks like he was born three years before I was. We are of a generation. He has endured what I doubtless could not, and yet I too live in gratitude. Read more about May 24
Kirsten Vanderscheuren was one of the admins of Casual Writers' Critique here in Madison. We met on Saturday afternoons. I knew her for less than two years, and only for a few Saturday afternoons. Being a devotee of Live from the Met in HD, I had to skip the last two of these, and looked forward to the April meeting when I was planning to read the last of the short story I had been working on here. Kirsten will never get to read it, and I will not be able to follow the adventures of her talking animals and their rebellion. A bout of pneumonia with lethal side effects took her from us. Read more about I Am From
I do not read the papers in the morning, but I do check the NYT and WaPo headline sites. I was looking for a poem for March and, looking out on the still-frozen barricades of snow, and feeling this March wind on my face like a fusillade of shattered crystal, I chose this poem of death read with "cold, sharp eyes." Read more about Every Morning
If there ever was a day to post this poem, this is the day. It is the coldest day of the 2019 Polar Vortex. Twenty-seven below zero this morning in Madison, Wisconsin, and that's without wind chill. Bemidji, where a little brother lives, is even colder.
The Cremation of Sam McGee Read more about The Cremation of Sam McGee
Read more about A Poem for Boxing Day>I had seen her before in the spring and summer
The homeless lady sitting on the church steps
She would ask for help from people going into the church
She mostly was given spare change and occasionally a dollar or two
No matter how small the amount given, she would give a genuine smile and say thank you
I shall not sing a May song.
A May song should be gay.
I'll wait until November
And sing a song of gray.I'll wait until November
That is the time for me.
I'll go out in the frosty dark
And sing most terribly.And all the little people
Will stare at me and say,
"That is the Crazy Woman
Who would not sing in May."
Ay, thou art welcome, heaven's delicious breath!
When woods begin to wear the crimson leaf,
And suns grow meek, and the meek suns grow brief
And the year smiles as it draws near its death.
Wind of the sunny south! oh, still delay
In the gay woods and in the golden air,
Like to a good old age released from care,
Journeying, in long serenity, away.
In such a bright, late quiet, would that I
Might wear out life like thee, 'mid bowers and brooks
And dearer yet, the sunshine of kind looks,
And music of kind voices ever nigh; Read more about October
