Friends, I am a poetry-lover. To me, reading a poem feels like eating a small, but decadent piece of chocolate torte. The words make me feel alive and human and pricked at the soul.
In honor of national poetry month, please allow me to share four of my favorite adult poems on the Tuesdays of May and four great ones for kids on the Thursdays of May.
"Hope"
It hovers in dark corners
before the lights are turned on
it shakes sleep from its eyes
and drops from mushroom gills,
it explodes in the starry heads
of dandelions turned sages,
it sticks to the wings of green angels
that sail from the tops of maples.
It sprouts in each occluded eye
of the many-eyed potato,
it lives in each earthworm segment
surviving cruelty,
it is the motion that runs
from the eyes to the tail of a dog
it is the mouth that inflates the lungs
of the child that has just been born.
It is the singular gift
we cannot destroy in ourselves,
the argument that refutes death,
the genius that invents the future,
all we know of God.
It is the serum that makes us swear
not to betray one another;
it is in this poem, trying to speak.
9 comments:
this is fabulous! Poetry I can understand. But who is the author?
yikes, thank you MT Mom!!
She is Lisel Mueller, who came to the U.S. when she was 15 because her father was forced to flee Hamburg due to the Nazi occupation.
I look forward to these, but April is National Poetry Month - if we're talking about the US. Laura
Wonderful poem. I'm normally a fan only of poems that rhyme, but this one is beautiful. Thank you for sharing it! MD
I'm with you AWOL. My degree is in English Lit and I LOVE poetry.
Blake's my favorite, but Hopkins, Keats, Tennyson, Milton, Yeats, Wordsworth. I spend much of the day, if not reciting prayers in my head, reciting poetry. It's calming.
Bethany,
share a favorite with us, please.
This was lovely, thank you. Especially for moms I think poetry is not something that occurs naturally during "diaper changing days"... It has to be sought out.
I have one site recommendation for poetry fans: www.readwritepoem.org
For children, Robert Louis Stevenson's "A Child's Garden of Verses" is my favorite, also for those with toddlers, the Baby Einstein Book "Pretty Poems and Wonderful Words" is a lift-the-flap book featuring the Stevenson poems. My son loves it!
For Mother's Day:
Dear Birds, Tell This to Mothers
Eli Siegel
Fly, birds, over all grieving mothers.
Tell them, if they know more,
They will grieve less.
Tell them that the children they grieve for
Are as mysterious as the God they pray to;
For God's way is in them.
Tell them that the children who came from their bodies
Have come from so far away,
And from so much;
And that these children
Are going for so much
Of Hell and Heaven, dark and light—
That mothers can be as away from them
As from lost lines in the early poetry of France.
Find the lost lines in
The writing that is your child, mothers
(Dear birds, tell them),
And you will not grieve;
You will stand up
In sweet universality.
You will be God's mothers,
Not just your own.
Thanks ladies for sharing all these poems.
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