What We Might Be, What We Are
- - by X. J. Kennedy

If you were a scoop of vanilla
And I were the cone where you sat,
If you were a slowly pitched baseball
And I were the swing of a bat,
If you were a shiny new fishhook
And I were a bucket of worms,
If we were a pin and a pincushion,
We might be on intimate terms.
If you were a plate of spaghetti
And I were your piping-hot sauce,
We’d not even need to write letters
To put our affection across,
But you’re just a piece of red ribbon
In the beard of a Balinese goat
And I’m a New Jersey mosquito.
I guess we’ll stay slightly remote.

This was part of a web poetry project someone (S. Krutsch?) developed.

Valentine for Ernest Mann

You can't order a poem like you order a taco.
Walk up to the counter, say, "I'll take two"
and expect it to be handed back to you
on a shiny plate.

Still, I like your spirit.
Anyone who says, "Here's my address,
write me a poem," deserves something in reply.
So I'll tell you a secret instead:
poems hide. In the bottoms of our shoes,
they are sleeping. They are the shadows
drifting across our ceilings the moment
before we wake up. What we have to do
is live in a way that lets us find them.

Once I knew a man who gave his wife
two skunks for a valentine.
He couldn't understand why she was crying.
"I thought they had such beautiful eyes."
And he was serious. He was a serious man
who lived in a serious way. Nothing was ugly
just because the world said so. He really
liked those skunks. So, he re-invented them
as valentines and they became beautiful.
At least, to him. And the poems that had been hiding
in the eyes of skunks for centuries
crawled out and curled up at his feet.

Maybe if we re-invent whatever our lives give us
we find poems. Check your garage, the odd sock
in your drawer, the person you almost like, but not quite.
And let me know.

Naomi Shihab Nye was born in St. Louis, Missouri in 1952 to a Palestinian father and an American mother. A good deal of her poetry focuses on her life as an Arab American. She currently lives in San Antonio, Texas.

This was lifted entirely from Poem of the Week after a mention at Americablog.

From Duino Elegies

- - - Rainer Maria Rilke

Every angel is terrifying.
And so I hold myself back and swallow the call-note of my dark sobbing.
Ah, whom can we ever turn to in our need?
Not angels, not humans, and already the knowing animals are aware

that we are not really at home in our interpreted world.
Perhaps there remains for us some tree on a hillside, which every day we can take into our vision;

there remains for us yesterday's street and the loyalty of a habit so much at ease

when it stayed with us that it moved in and never left.
Oh and night: there is night, when a wind full of infinite space gnaws at our faces.
Whom would it not remain for--that longed-after, mildly disillusioning presence,

which the solitary heart so painfully meets.
Is it any less difficult for lovers?
But they keep on using each other to hide their own fate.

Don't you know yet?

Fling the emptiness out of your arms into the spaces we breathe;

perhaps the birds will feel the expanded air with more passionate flying.

...

This is a translation - there are others with different flavors.

Here is a bio - the original sites are impossible with pop-ups.

Writer and poet. He was born in Prague. A crucial fact in Rilke's life was that his mother called him Sophia. She forced him to wear girl's clothes until he was aged five - thus compensating for the earlier loss of a baby daughter.

Rilke's parents separated when he was nine. His father sent him to the military academy. Rilke did not enjoy his stay at academy and he was sent to a business school in Linz. He also worked in his uncle's law firm. Rilke continued his studies at the universities of Prague, Munich, and Berlin.

As a poet he made his debut at the age of nineteen with "Leben und lieder". In 1899. Rilke traveled in Russia visiting among others Tolstoy. During this period he started to write "The Book of Hours: The Book of Monastic Life" which appeared in 1905. He spent some time in Italy, Sweden, and Denmark, and joined an artists colony at Worpswede in 1903.

In 1901 Rilke married the young sculptress, Clara Westhoff. They had a daughter, Ruth, but marriage lasted only one year. During this period Rilke composed in rhymed the second part of "The Book of Hours". After he had separated from Clara, he settled in Paris to write a book about Rodin and to work for his secretary (1905-06). He also wrote "The Tale of the Love and Death of Cornet Christopher Rilke". During his Paris years Rilke developed a new style of lyrical poetry.

Rilke kept silence as a poet for twelve years before writing "Duino Elegies" and "Sonnets to Orpheus". In 1913 Rilke was forced to return to Germany because of the First World War. After 1919 he lived in Switzerland, occupied by his work and roses in his little garden. For time to time he went to Paris for a few months or to Italy. He had suffered from leukemia and spent much time at the Val-Mont sanatorium, but he died of an infection he contracted when he pricked himself on a rose thorn. - by Jelena.

One Art
by Elizabeth Bishop

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster.

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three loved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.


--Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

From Her To Eternity
- for Solveig Dommartin
by Collin Kelley in Blue Fifth Review (Winter 2007)


For seven days I wish you undead.
As long as your name doesn't appear
in the news, the only evidence is this:
a three-line note to tell your final hours,
last words, how you left this world.

Here’s another beautiful woman dead
in the city of lights, another ghost
to haunt familiar streets, when I cross
Place de la Concord or myself
in St. Sulpice where Jacob wrestles
with the angel or himself. You did both,
until January stilled your heart.

For seven days the silent east
gives me hope, as search engines
yield no results, and I perfect chants,
resist candles, hide matches,
but your face glows in the dark,
head bowed, lips parted, a red siren
swaying to a discordant Nick Cave beat.

Although we are connected by wires
and words fly through air between
hot boxes, your death comes slowly,
as if you've burned out the circuitry,
refused to be reduced to binary string,
not after those years traveling the earth
in radiant flesh.

Selfishly, I wish I could dance with you
one last time in your waltz around
the globe, until we are both out of breath,
your laughter and curls wild with life.
Swoon. I’ll catch you.

Born to German/French parents in 1961, Solveig Dommartin made her screen debut as lonely trapeze artist Marion in Wim Wenders’ Wings of Desire. She would go on to co-write and star in Wenders’ “ultimate road movie,” Until the End of the World, and reprise her role as Marion in Faraway, So Close! In just three films, she left an indelible mark on cinema with her instinctive acting and natural beauty. From the moment she swung into frame in Wings of Desire, mastering the acrobatics in just eight weeks and doing her own high-flying stunts, she captured global attention and gave an emotional heart to a still divided Berlin. When the Chinese government refused Wenders’ entry to shoot parts of Until the End of the World, Dommartin snuck into the country with a miniature camera and filmed a memorable sequence. Her wild hair, her infectious laugh, a face that expertly displayed joy and sorrow, a fearless dedication to craft – these were her gifts to us. Solveig Dommartin died of heart failure in Paris on January 11, 2007.

Democracy


Democracy will not come
Today, this year
Nor ever
Through compromise and fear.

I have as much right
As the other fellow has
To stand
On my two feet
And own the land.

I tire so of hearing people say,
Let things take their course.
Tomorrow is another day.
I do not need my freedom when I'm dead.
I cannot live on tomorrow's bread.

Freedom
Is a strong seed
Planted
In a great need.

I live here, too.
I want freedom
Just as you.

Langston Hughes

NEWS
Wichita, Kansas - July 1945

Vivian dashes in from thunder,
newspaper soaring over her head.
She stands in the kitchen, dripping,
laughing. She kisses me.
Her fingers are inky, her face printed
with news.

REST
Ardennes - January 1945

The hardest thing
was sleep - that cold.
Cold enough to crack stone
You couldn't lie down
in it - or even sit.
Even the springs of the rifles
slow.

MORNING
Ardennes - January 1945

You wouldn't believe how beautiful
it was. In the night the fog would freeze
and in the morning everything
was soft with it - ghosts of trees.
We advanced into open fields
the colour of apple blossom,
delicate with blue shadows.
Against that snow we stood out
like deer.
And then
the shelling would start.



WINTER WHITE
Ardennes - January 1945

Midafternoon in some nameless town
a door bangs, a woman comes running,
arms full of folded white. One sheet
flies out behind her like a banner, and
they understand. She's giving them linens,
winter camouflage. With no language,
he thanks her, and she presses to him,
weeping. When she runs he lifts
his hands and finds
a table cloth. Not lace, but that stiff stuff,
cutwork. He cuts it
with his bayonet.
Pulls it over his head. Inside,
he smells the starch, the ghost of iron.

-- Erin Noteboom

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