Posts tagged “photo-poetry”

Winter, Spring
by Jim Harrison

Winter is black and beige down here
from drought. Suddenly in March
there’s a good rain and in a couple
of weeks we are enveloped in green.
Green everywhere in the mesquites, oaks,
cottonwoods, the bowers of thick
willow bushes the warblers love
for reasons of food or the branches,
the tiny aphids they eat with relish.

Each year it is a surprise
that the world can turn green again.
It is the grandest surprise in life,
the birds coming back from the south to my open
arms, which they fly past, aiming at the feeders.

Sabbaths IV (1999)
by Wendell Berry

What a consolation it is, after
the explanations and the predictions

of further explanations still
to come, to return unpersuaded
to the woods, entering again
the presence of the blessed trees.
A tree forms itself in answer
to its place and to the light.

Explain it how you will, the only

thing explainable will be
your explanation. There is
in the woods on a summer’s

morning, birdsong all around
from guess where, nowhere
that rigid measure which predicts

only humankind’s demise.

*****

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez.

Some Days, by Billy Collins

td Whittle

Posted on February 3, 2015

Artist: Laurie Simmons, from the Disturbing Innocence group show at FLAG Art Foundation. Curated by Eric Fischl. Oct 25, 2014 - Jan 31, 2015.

Some days I put the people in their places at the table,
bend their legs at the knees,
if they come with that feature,
and fix them into the tiny wooden chairs.

All afternoon they face one another,
the man in the brown suit,
the woman in the blue dress,
perfectly motionless, perfectly behaved.

But other days, I am the one
who is lifted up by the ribs, 
then lowered into the dining room of a dollhouse
to sit with the others at the long table.

Very funny,
but how would you like it
if you never knew from one day to the next 
if you were going to spend it

striding around like a vivid god,
your shoulders in the clouds, 
or sitting down there amidst the wallpaper,
staring straight ahead with your little plastic face?

“Some Days” from Picnic, Lightning, by Billy Collins, © 1998, University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. The image above is of a work by Laurie Simmons, from the Disturbing Innocence group show at FLAG Art Foundation. Curated by Eric Fischl. Oct 25, 2014 - Jan 31, 2015.

The Cats Will Know

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on August 26, 2014

girl under oversized umbrella reading a book

“Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again.”
~ C.S. Lewis

Rain will fall again

on your smooth pavement,

a light rain like

a breath or a step.

The breeze and the dawn

will flourish again

when you return,

as if beneath your step.

Between flowers and sills

the cats will know.

There will be other days,

there will be other voices.

You will smile alone.

The cats will know.

You will hear words

old and spent and useless

like costumes left over

from yesterday’s parties.

You too will make gestures.

You’ll answer with words—

face of springtime,

you too will make gestures.

The cats will know,

face of springtime;

and the light rain

and the hyacinth dawn

that wrench the heart of him

who hopes no more for you—

they are the sad smile

you smile by yourself.

There will be other days,

other voices and renewals.

Face of springtime,

we will suffer at daybreak.

by Cesare Pavese

translated by Geoffrey Brock

Our two souls therefore, which are one

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on July 15, 2014

A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning

by John Donne

As virtuous men pass mildly away,
And whisper to their souls to go,
Whilst some of their sad friends do say
The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,
No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;
‘Twere profanation of our joys
To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,
Men reckon what it did, and meant;
But trepidation of the spheres,
Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love
(Whose soul is sense) cannot admit
Absence, because it doth remove
Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,
That our selves know not what it is,
Inter-assured of the mind,
Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,
Though I must go, endure not yet
A breach, but an expansion,
Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so
As stiff twin compasses are two;
Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show
To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,
Yet when the other far doth roam,
It leans and hearkens after it,
And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,
Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;
Thy firmness makes my circle just,
And makes me end where I begun.

*****

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez.

Frozen

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on March 4, 2014

The street was white again,

all the bushes covered with heavy snow

and the trees glittering, encased with ice.

I lay in the dark, waiting for the night to end.

It seemed the longest night I had ever known,

longer than the night I was born.

I write about you all the time, I said aloud.

Every time I say “I,” it refers to you.

~from Visitors from Abroad by Louise Gluck,

*****

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez.

sometimes it is necessary to reteach a thing its loveliness

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on February 17, 2014

The bud

stands for all things,

even those things that don’t flower,

for everything flowers, from within, of self-blessing;

though sometimes it is necessary

to reteach a thing it’s loveliness,

to put a hand on its brow

of the flower

and retell it in words and in touch

it is lovely

until it flowers again from within, of self-blessing

~from Saint Francis and the Sow by Galway Kinnell

*****

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez.

and hope’s a reptile waiting for the sun

Sandra Peterson Ramirez

Posted on February 5, 2014

Lui et Elle

O Mistress, Mistress,

Reptile Mistress,

Your eye is very dark, very bright,

And it never softens

Although you watch.

~from Lui et Elle by D. H. Lawrence

February

The cold grows colder, even as the days

grow longer, February’s mercury vapor light

buffing but not defrosting the bone-white

ground, crusty and treacherous underfoot.

This is the time of year that’s apt to put

a hammerlock on a healthy appetite,

old anxieties back into the night,

insomnia and nightmares into play;

when things in need of doing go undone

and things that can’t be undone come to call,

muttering recriminations at the door,

and buried ambitions rise up through the floor

and pin your wriggling shoulders to the wall;

and hope’s a reptile waiting for the sun.

~from February by Bill Christophersen

Source: Poetry (February 2002)

*****

Photo by Sandra Peterson Ramirez.

13 Ways: Thunder, for Violet

td Whittle

Posted on September 11, 2013

It’s times like these, I miss that cat. You taught me ‘thunder,’ but not how to make it stop. You come and go (Where do you go all day?) But that cat – that magic cat, who turned off the sky with a flick of her tail, and back on again with a yawn – She came to stay. You would not name her. Now, you say, “That was no magic cat, only a stray — And, anyway, she could not turn off – or on – the sky! She told me that you would say that, and that all people lie. Now, the cat you would not name – she being ‘the blackest thing you ever saw,’ and…

+Read more