Tuesday 31 October 2017

Samhain

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Samhain - Annie Finch
 

(The Celtic Halloween)
 
In the season leaves should love,
since it gives them leave to move
through the wind, towards the ground
they were watching while they hung,
legend says there is a seam
stitching darkness like a name.

Now when dying grasses veil
earth from the sky in one last pale
wave, as autumn dies to bring
winter back, and then the spring,
we who die ourselves can peel
back another kind of veil

that hangs among us like thick smoke.
Tonight at last I feel it shake.
I feel the nights stretching away
thousands long behind the days
till they reach the darkness where
all of me is ancestor.

I move my hand and feel a touch
move with me, and when I brush
my own mind across another,
I am with my mother's mother.
Sure as footsteps in my waiting
self, I find her, and she brings

arms that carry answers for me,
intimate, a waiting bounty.
"Carry me." She leaves this trail
through a shudder of the veil,
and leaves, like amber where she stays,
a gift for her perpetual gaze.


Monday 30 October 2017

Halloween Mask

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The scariest thing of all? Not demons, but human nature.

 
Empire of Dreams  - Charles Simic 
On the first page of my dreambook
It’s always evening
In an occupied country.   
Hour before the curfew.   
A small provincial city.   
The houses all dark.
The storefronts gutted.

I am on a street corner   
Where I shouldn’t be.   
Alone and coatless
I have gone out to look
For a black dog who answers to my whistle.   
I have a kind of Halloween mask
Which I am afraid to put on.

Sunday 29 October 2017

The Haunted Chamber

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'Each heart has its haunted chamber...'

Perhaps the most haunting thing of all - the ghosts we keep in our own hearts.


The Haunted Chamber - Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Each heart has its haunted chamber,
  Where the silent moonlight falls!
On the floor are mysterious footsteps,
  There are whispers along the walls!

And mine at times is haunted
  By phantoms of the Past
As motionless as shadows
  By the silent moonlight cast.

A form sits by the window,
  That is not seen by day,
For as soon as the dawn approaches
  It vanishes away.

It sits there in the moonlight
  Itself as pale and still,
And points with its airy finger
  Across the window-sill.

Without before the window,
  There stands a gloomy pine,
Whose boughs wave upward and downward
  As wave these thoughts of mine.

And underneath its branches
  Is the grave of a little child,
Who died upon life's threshold,
  And never wept nor smiled.

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  That haunt my troubled brain?
That vanish when day approaches,
  And at night return again?

What are ye, O pallid phantoms!
  But the statues without breath,
That stand on the bridge overarching
  The silent river of death?

Saturday 28 October 2017

Bluebeard

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A short and sharp take on the Bluebeard story by Sylvia Plath. 


Bluebeard - Sylvia Plath

I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study;
because he would make love to me
I am sending back the key;
in his eye’s darkroom I can see
my X-rayed heart, dissected body:
I am sending back the key
that let me into bluebeard’s study.

Friday 27 October 2017

Incantation

 Image result for autumn leaves and moon
 
It's almost Halloween... when the 'witchery' of autumn is in plain sight. 

from Incantation - George Parsons Lathrop
When the leaves, by thousands thinned,
A thousand times have whirled in the wind,
And the moon, with hollow cheek,
Staring from her hollow height,
Consolation seems to seek
From the dim, reechoing night;
And the fog-streaks dead and white
Lie like ghosts of lost delight
O’er highest earth and lowest sky;
Then, Autumn, work thy witchery!

Tuesday 17 October 2017

After the Storm

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May Perpetual Light Shine - Patricia Spears Jones

We have encountered storms 
Perfect in their drench and wreck
 
Each of us bears an ornament of grief
A ring, a notebook, a ticket torn, scar
It is how humans know their kind—
 
What is known as love, what can become  
the heart’s food stored away for some future
Famine
 
Love remains a jewel in the hand, guarded
Shared fragments of earth & air   drift & despair.
 
We ponder what patterns matter other than moons and tides:
musical beats—rumba or waltz or cha cha cha
cosmic waves like batons furiously twirling
colors proclaiming sparkle of darkness
as those we love begin to delight
in the stars embracing
 

Monday 16 October 2017

Storm Warnings

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We are currently in the middle of a hurricane in Ireland. (Ireland!)

Stormy weather always makes me think of this poem.

Storm Warnings - Adrienne Rich


The glass has been falling all the afternoon,
And knowing better than the instrument
What winds are walking overhead, what zone
Of grey unrest is moving across the land,
I leave the book upon a pillowed chair
And walk from window to closed window, watching
Boughs strain against the sky

And think again, as often when the air
Moves inward toward a silent core of waiting,
How with a single purpose time has traveled
By secret currents of the undiscerned
Into this polar realm. Weather abroad
And weather in the heart alike come on
Regardless of prediction.

Between foreseeing and averting change
Lies all the mastery of elements
Which clocks and weatherglasses cannot alter.
Time in the hand is not control of time,
Nor shattered fragments of an instrument
A proof against the wind; the wind will rise,
We can only close the shutters.

I draw the curtains as the sky goes black
And set a match to candles sheathed in glass
Against the keyhole draught, the insistent whine
Of weather through the unsealed aperture.
This is our sole defense against the season;
These are the things we have learned to do
Who live in troubled regions.

Friday 6 October 2017

Night


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It Is Difficult to Speak of the Night  - Jack Gilbert

It is difficult to speak of the night.

It is the other time. Not
an absence of day.
But where there are no flowers
to turn away into.
There is only this dark
and the familiar place of my body.
And the voices calling out
of me for love.
This is not the night of the young:
their simple midnight of fear.
Nor the later place to employ.
This dark is a major nation.
I turn to it at forty
and find the night in flood.
Find the dark deployed in process.
Clotted in parts, in parts
flowing with lights.
The voices still keen of the divorce
we are born into.
But they are farther off,
and do not interest me.
I am forty, and it is different.
Suddenly in mid passage
I come into myself. I leaf
gigantically. An empire yields
unexpectedly: cities, summer forests,
satrapies, horses.
A solitude: an enormity.
Thank god.

Wednesday 4 October 2017

Grief

Image result for small boat on the ocean

For the week that's in it. 


Grief - Raymond Carver

Woke up early this morning and from my bed
looked far across the Strait to see
a small boat moving through the choppy water,
a single running light on. Remembered
my friend who used to shout
his dead wife’s name from hilltops
around Perugia. Who set a plate
for her at his simple table long after
she was gone. And opened the windows
so she could have fresh air. Such display
I found embarrassing. So did his other
friends. I couldn’t see it.
Not until this morning.

Tuesday 3 October 2017

October, Daphne's Month

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'Autumn Goddess' by Moon Dreamer

Posted this one before, but it's so beautiful it merits a reposting. 


October - Linda Pastan

How suddenly
the woods
have turned
again. I feel

like Daphne, standing
with my arms
outstretched
to the season,

overtaken
by color, crowned
with the hammered gold
of leaves.

Monday 2 October 2017

Letter in October

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A Letter in October - Ted Kooser

Dawn comes later and later now, 
and I, who only a month ago 
could sit with coffee every morning 
watching the light walk down the hill 
to the edge of the pond and place 
a doe there, shyly drinking, 

then see the light step out upon 
the water, sowing reflections 
to either side—a garden 
of trees that grew as if by magic— 
now see no more than my face, 
mirrored by darkness, pale and odd, 

startled by time. While I slept, 
night in its thick winter jacket 
bridled the doe with a twist 
of wet leaves and led her away, 
then brought its black horse with harness 
that creaked like a cricket, and turned 

the water garden under. I woke, 
and at the waiting window found 
the curtains open to my open face; 
beyond me, darkness. And I, 
who only wished to keep looking out, 
must now keep looking in. 

Sunday 1 October 2017

Into October


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'the colors of returning...'


Into October - WS Mervin

These must be the colors of returning
the leaves darkened now but staying on
into the bronzed morning among the seed heads
and the dry stems and the umbers of October
the secret season that appears on its own
a recognition without a sound
long after the day when I stood in its light
out on the parched barrens beside a spring
all but hidden in a tangle of eglantine
and picked the bright berries made of that summer